Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  She stepped out into the hallway. As she pulled shut her door, she heard the door to Cabin 4, Dan’s room, open behind her. Sam gasped and turned around.

  “You’ve got to be Summer Westin.” An African-American woman, dressed in a red T-shirt and navy cotton shorts, stood in the open doorway. Tiny black braids flowed from her strong square face to an elaborate knot at the back of her head.

  Sam closed her open mouth. She’d always wanted hair like that: hair that made a statement; not a limp, pale mane like hers. Who the heck was this? Had the captain given Dan’s cabin away? “Uh,” Sam stuttered. “Who—”

  “I’m J.J.” The woman extended a hand. “From NPF. I’m here to take Dr. Kazaki’s place. Summer, right?”

  “Call me Sam.” She held out her hand uncertainly.

  “And you can call me Dr. Bradley.” The woman held her gaze for a long moment, then her eyes crinkled and she laughed. “Couldn’t resist. I just got my Ph.D. last summer. No, seriously, you can call me J.J.”

  “Okay, J.J.”

  “It stands for Juanita Jane.” J.J. dramatically rolled her brown eyes. “I know, I know. It’s two versions of the same name. My mama was not what you’d call intellectual. More the poetic type. She liked the sound of Juanita Jane. And she loved me.”

  “Good for you.” It was the only thing Sam could think of to say. J.J. still held her hand. Sam wondered how to free it gracefully. “When—”

  “I got in late last night, right before the boat moved out. I thought about knocking on your door, but it was late and I couldn’t hear any movement inside.”

  “That was you.” Sam breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Come on in.” J.J. pulled her across the threshold, propelling her toward the lower bunk. “Sit down.”

  Sam tripped over a BCD and tumbled onto the lower bunk mattress. The floor was strewn with clothes and dive gear, a wetsuit, reference books. Sam righted herself, then peered at the woman between curtains of clothing that hung down from the bunk above.

  “I was so sorry to hear about Dr. Kazaki. That must have been awful. Tell me about him.”

  Sam pushed the dangling sleeve of a windbreaker aside and leaned forward. “You didn’t know him?”

  J.J. folded her arms across her chest. “He was a prof at the U. of Delaware, wasn’t he? NPF likes to use subcontractors. They wanted another independent to replace him, but they couldn’t find one on such short notice. I normally work in D.C. at NPF headquarters, but I just concluded a survey around Cocos Island off Costa Rica, so they sent me to finish up here. They say they’re missing four reports. Is that right, four spots remaining on the survey list?”

  “We missed one on the south side of Isabela on the day Dan . . .” Sam had to end the sentence there. “I did one of the areas yesterday by myself—Ola Rock.” It felt good to say that. “I can give you that report.”

  J.J. stared at her. “You went by yourself, after what happened to Kazaki? You got balls, girl.”

  Sam shrugged. “I was not completely alone; I was with Eduardo Duarte. He’s the conservationist guide that Dan made the deal with.”

  “Yes, I called him in town and made sure he knew that the deal was still on.”

  Sam was startled. Eduardo hadn’t mentioned it at the café, but then, with Santos there, it was probably wise of him not to.

  J.J. continued, “I dive alone when I have to, but it can be eerie, can’t it? Say, you know what happened to Dan’s computer?”

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  That stopped the flood of words. For a second. “I know he died in a diving accident,” J.J. said.

  Sam swallowed. “You heard it was an accident?”

  “You think it was something else?” J.J. crossed her arms and waited.

  J.J.’s appearance was a godsend; finally Sam had someone she could talk to. She told J.J. about the carbon monoxide and the hotel incident and then about the slashes on Dan’s body and equipment. She concluded, “I never thought NPF was at all controversial; all you do is conduct studies and publish the data.”

  J.J. solemnly gazed at her. “And then that data gets used by various organizations to make decisions on all sorts of issues. That’s why we usually try to fly under the radar when we operate outside of the States. Kazaki knew that.”

  “But I was hired by Key Corporation to make NPF’s findings public on Out There. Isn’t that”—she struggled for the right word—“counterproductive?”

  J.J. gave her a curious look. “What’s the use of collecting data if nobody knows about it? We always try to find a third party to broadcast the results, especially if they’re time sensitive for some reason. What’s Out There?”

  “You don’t know about Out There? Key’s ‘news’”—Sam crooked her fingers in air quotes—“website? I’m one of their reporters.”

  “I spend a lot of time underwater,” J.J. explained. “And usually in Third World countries. I’m not exactly part of the wired set.” Then she crooked an eyebrow. “You mean you’ve already been posting reports on the Internet?”

  Sam nodded grimly. “Daily. I write about geography and land animals as Wilderness Westin; and I’ve been writing about diving under the name of Zing.”

  “Zing? Sounds like a breath mint.”

  “I guessed mouthwash. I’ll show you.” Sam dragged J.J. across the hall to her room, booted up her laptop, connected to Out There’s website, and brought up Zing’s latest post about trouble in paradise.

  J.J. studied the screen with her arms crossed. “Guess that snake’s already out of the bag.”

  “And everyone’s out hunting it with machetes. The only bright spot is that the locals don’t seem to realize that I’m Zing.”

  J.J. sighed. “We’ve just got two more dives, so three more days and we’re outa here, right?”

  “Easy for you to say.” Sam told her about the fiscalia and her passport.

  “Whoa.” J.J. rubbed at a frown line on her forehead. “Let’s hope that’s just a formality.”

  “Yeah, let’s hope.” No way was she going to tell J.J. about her earring. The woman might run screaming for the nearest plane, and then she’d be all alone again.

  “You might want to lighten up on the criticism until we’re out of here,” J.J. suggested.

  “Too late.” Sam clicked back through Zing’s posts, showed J.J. the gory shark video and the photo of the longlined albatross, told her about the chat session and about how Zing had suggested that Dan’s death might be tied to the overfishing issues. “Out There is thrilled with the controversy. There have been hundreds of thousands of hits on the website. If they didn’t know about problems down here before, the Chinese will certainly be aware of the situation now.”

  J.J. rolled her eyes. “Well, alrighty, then. Mission accomplished. Just don’t use my photo or mention my name or my connection with NPF. Deal?” She stuck out her hand again.

  “Deal.” Sam shook the extended hand. “But I never used Dan’s name, either.”

  They looked at each other. Sam knew her expression was as grim as J.J.’s.

  “We will stick together like glue, right, Sam? Nobody’s going to pick us off one at a time. Eduardo’s taking us to Flores Reef this morning.”

  Back into the dangerous depths. But at least she wouldn’t have to do it alone this time.

  “I was told Dan had a notebook computer?” J.J. asked.

  “The police took it.” Abruptly remembering the paper-thin walls, Sam leaned close and murmured, “But I managed to copy most of his files first. They’re on a flash drive. And I snagged his handheld, too.”

  She dug them out and handed them over. J.J. turned toward the door. “Only Eduardo knows who I am. As far as anyone else on this boat is concerned, we’re just friends diving together, right? I came to support you in this trying time.”

  Sam touched J.J.’s forearm. “I’m glad you’re here, Dr. Bradley.”

  J.J. pulled open the door. Her nostrils flared. “Is that bacon I
smell? Let’s get breakfast, girlfriend.”

  Sam introduced J.J. around the tour group as her friend from the States. The tourists seemed more surprised to see Sam back on board than to meet a new passenger, and she realized that they didn’t know about her passport.

  “I can’t go home yet,” she told them. “I have a job to finish.”

  * * * * *

  Sam watched with envy as the tour group departed after breakfast to hike on Tower Island, aka Genovesa. Clouds of birds swirled over the island. On the shore were some small furry rust-colored blobs with shapes similar to the harbor seals back home.

  “Galápagos fur seals,” Eduardo verified. “They are making a comeback.”

  He ferried J.J. and Sam in their scuba gear a short distance to a U-shaped inlet. There was a buoy in the middle of the bay, to which Eduardo tied the panga. The wind blew from the mouth of the inlet, chopping the surface water into foot-high pyramids as waves rebounded from the shores on all sides to bang against one another in the center of the bay. Sam was glad that she was not in her kayak, where she would be slapped from all sides.

  For once she was relieved to slip under the surface, where the rise and fall of water immediately lessened to a gentle rocking motion. At sixty feet down, there was virtually no water movement. Yellow-tailed snappers, king angelfish, creolefish, and dozens of species Sam couldn’t identify flitted in and out among orange cup corals, yellow anemones, and spiky white-tipped sea urchins. J.J., using Dan’s handheld computer, immediately went to work counting.

  Sam shot a few minutes of video, then switched to still mode and captured a few of the most colorful scenes. To her eyes, this location looked healthy. As she swam over a patch of sand, rows of garden eels retracted into their holes. Cup corals, curly pale green seaweed, and pink encrusting sponges spread like vibrant flower beds over the reef, attended by swirling clouds of rainbow-colored fish. This scene was such a relief after the butchered sharks and the longlined albatross. There were the usual hovering barracudas, but now she was used to their flat black predatory gaze and they didn’t seem so ominous. Lying on the bottom was a small whitetip reef shark. Sam kept a wary eye on it, but it seemed to be napping. In the distance, she saw the kite-like shapes of eagle rays and clouds of silvery jacks.

  This was probably how all Galápagos reefs looked decades ago. When J.J.’s gaze met hers, Sam made a clapping motion, applauding the beautiful sight. If only Dan could have seen this and known that all was not yet lost. J.J. nodded and continued her counts. Sam focused on taking a wide-angle photo of a cloud of tiny blue fish hovering around a massive violet-tipped anemone, and then a close-up of a delicate basket star, a pumpkin-colored creature with so many curlicue arms it seemed impossible that it didn’t get tangled up in its own appendages. The eagle rays swam closer, their triangle shapes spaced like jets flying in formation. She switched to video and captured a few seconds of the squadron’s sleek motion.

  This was what Sam had hoped for from scuba diving. When she glanced at her computer, she saw that nearly thirty minutes had passed, along with half her air supply. She wanted to grow gills and stay forever.

  A shadow crossed overhead. She looked up, expecting to see a boat’s hull. Against the glittering surface she saw a snorkeler spread-eagled. The woman’s long red hair floated in the water, and she wore a black-and-white dive skin, similar to the one that Zing wore in her photo on Out There. Sam had the weird sensation that her cyber-ego had assumed solid form to join her for this exploration.

  Other dark shapes bobbed at the surface, bouncing in the waves not far away. A snorkeling tour. Their boat was probably tethered to the same buoy as Eduardo’s panga. What bad luck for the tourists, or maybe bad planning on the part of the tour guide; she certainly wouldn’t enjoy snorkeling under such rough conditions.

  Where was J.J.? Sam sat upright in the water, turned the camera back on in video mode, and slowly twirled, looking for her dive buddy. It was amazing how, when suspended in liquid, movement in any direction was easy. Mermaid magic. She spotted J.J. quite a distance away, nearly cloaked by a school of king angelfish as she carefully inspected the reef surface.

  The reverberation of a boat engine overhead broke the spell. The female snorkeler still lay on the surface, but the hull of a speedboat was cutting through the water, closing fast on her. Sam rolled over on her back, afraid that she was about to see the snorkeler run over by the boat. She pulled up the camera to get the incident on film. But at the last minute, the boat swerved, coming to rest beside the snorkeler, pushing a wave in her direction. The woman’s face mask left the water and her feet dropped as she looked up toward the boat. The wave washed over her and she kicked in place for a moment. Must be talking to the boaters.

  Then the woman’s mask dropped back to the surface of the water and she was floating spread-eagled again, next to the boat. The boat engine revved, the woman’s body bounced, and two projectiles streaked out beneath her. Tiny silver fish? Sam couldn’t make sense of the image.

  The speedboat roared away. A red cloud blossomed around the snorkeler, who was thrashing now in the water, her face no longer pressed against the surface. A wave bounced the snorkeler, and Sam heard faint noises that sounded like distant screams.

  Oh sweet Jesus! She streaked for the surface. She came up under the snorkeler and pushed the woman over on her back. The snorkeler’s dark eyes were panicked, she was making unintelligible noises, and no wonder. She was having problems staying afloat as she pressed both hands to her right leg, where blood poured out of a bullet hole in her calf. She flailed, reached out a bloody hand for Sam’s shoulder, and then went under.

  Sam let go of her camera and grabbed the woman’s hand, spat out her regulator, and pumped extra air into her BCD so she could float without kicking. The snorkeler surfaced again, sputtering and coughing, and shouting in a foreign language.

  “Calm down,” Sam said loudly. “I’ve got you.”

  The woman clawed at Sam’s arm and would have pushed her under if her BCD hadn’t been inflated. With some difficulty, Sam managed to turn the other woman around and hug her from behind. “I’ve got you,” she murmured again into the woman’s ear. “You’re going to be okay. You’re safe now.”

  She certainly hoped that was true. She couldn’t help envisioning what the two of them, flailing legs surrounded by a haze of blood, would look like from below to the reef shark or the barracuda she’d seen just a few minutes ago.

  “Hey! Help!” Sam shouted in the direction of the buoy, where a small cabin cruiser was tied next to their inflatable panga. A wave slapped against her right ear and then moved over her head.

  The boats seemed impossibly distant. She couldn’t see anyone moving. The other dark neoprene shapes in the water were oblivious. Had they all been shot?

  Sam kicked, towing the woman’s body toward the boats. J.J. surfaced on the other side of the woman and spat out her regulator, then clamped her hands over the woman’s leg wound. She kicked from behind as Sam towed the victim. “What the hell happened?”

  “She was right above me. A boat swerved in, then blam, blam!” Damn, it was hard to swim on the surface in an inflated BCD and heavy scuba tank.

  The waves continually broke over them from all sides. Sam’s camera dangled in the water from its safety strap, banging against her back and side as she kicked though the water. Swimming was a little easier with J.J. pushing as Sam pulled. The poor woman seemed resigned to whatever would happen next. Or maybe she was already in shock. As they neared the boats, a few of the surrounding snorkelers raised their heads, and then started swimming toward them. A radio blasted hip-hop music from the cabin cruiser.

  “Hey!” J.J. shouted.

  “Help!” Sam yelled as loudly as she could. They were only a couple of feet away from the cabin cruiser when Eduardo and the other boat pilot emerged from the cabin. The cruiser pilot wore a blue baseball cap with kyle emblazoned across the front.

  “Shit!” Kyle yelped. “What happened?
” The men grabbed the snorkeler by the arms and hauled her over the side of the boat, then they all vanished into the cockpit of the cabin cruiser.

  Sam and J.J. removed their fins and struggled up the boat ladder, J.J. going first and taking Sam’s camera as she handed it up. The woman lay on the floor of the boat as Eduardo pressed a folded towel on top of her leg wound. She moaned and asked questions in her language, which Sam now recognized as Norwegian. This was the same tourist she’d met in the Hotel Aurora.

  Eduardo looked at the stranger and shook his head to indicate he couldn’t understand. “Español? English?”

  The woman choked out a few heavily accented words in English. “Why? They shoot—why?”

  Sam and J.J. unbuckled their BCDs and let the vests and tanks slide to the rear bench of the boat, then turned back to watch the first aid effort. The towel under Eduardo’s hands dripped blood into the floor of the boat.

  Sam knelt beside the woman. Unfortunately, this was not the first time she’d encountered a bullet wound in the middle of nowhere. She grabbed two clean towels from Kyle, folded them, placed one beneath the woman’s leg, then slid Eduardo’s hands aside and pressed the new towel down hard on the top wound. The woman groaned.

  J.J. sat down on the bench on the other side. To Kyle, she said, “Got some straps of some kind? Or a belt?”

  The guy nodded and ducked into his boat cabin again.

  “Why?” the woman moaned.

  Kyle returned with two yellow nylon straps grimy with mildew and rust stains, but they would do the job. J.J. took one and pulled it tight above the bullet wound, sticking a finger between the strap and the woman’s leg to make sure the tourniquet would not completely shut off circulation. Then she took the other and wrapped it around the towel pads, pressing them tightly against the bullet hole.

  “Hey!” a snorkeler shouted from the back of the boat. A swim fin waved in the air.

  “You need to get the snorkelers out of the water right away,” Sam told Eduardo.

  Eduardo looked at his bloody hands, flashed on her meaning, and then both he and Kyle moved to the stern, tossing snorkel equipment into the bottom of the boat and quickly hauling tourists up the ladder.