The Deep Six

by Striker, Randy

  So we had worked our way across Florida Bay, up into the Ten Thousand Islands wilderness on the mainland west coast, and then back across open ocean to the Dry Tortugas, and then here, to the Marquesas, working our way along to Key West and the end of the trip. The autumn days were hot and calm; perfect days for slow love and cold beer and talk; golden autumn days.

  Golden.

  Lee sat on the gunnel of the Boston Whaler, her long legs draping over into the clear water. And when her eyes softened, I leaned and kissed her, tasting the salt on her lips, feeling the warmth of her mix with the warm seawind that wafted across Fullmoon Cay to the reef over which our little boat was anchored.

  “And what about your supper, Captain?” She smiled at me impishly. I was close enough to her face to see the little bronze flecks in her blue eyes.

  “I’ve got my sling. I’ll go down and shoot a snapper—later.”

  “Later?” She smiled and kissed me.

  “Later.”

  Naked, she stretched back on the mahogany seat of the Whaler, her eyes closed, her arms folded behind her head.

  “You’re cold from diving.”

  “Hum . . . so I see.”

  A bottle of coconut oil sat on the little console, warm from its day in the sun. “This might help.” I began to massage it into her skin, enjoying the scent of it, and the vision of this lovely blond woman.

  “You seem to be concentrating on limited areas, Captain.”

  “Certain parts of you look colder than others.”

  She opened one eye, squinting at me. “And parts of you look anything but cold.”

  I put down the coconut oil and leaned over her, kissing her body, caressing her outstretched legs, feeling her breasts full against me, and then—and then she pushed me away, giggling vampishly. “Your turn to suffer, MacMorgan!”

  “What?”

  Oh, she made me suffer. With the coconut oil. And her hands. And her lips. And had she made me suffer a minute more, I would have attacked her then and there. But she didn’t. Instead, she grabbed one of the yellow Dacor scuba tanks and her mask and, with a short laugh, jumped into the clear water. And I soon followed.

  Beside the reef was a pocket of sand. Iridescent blue-and-green parrot fish scurried away at our approach, and the woman lay back in the sand, motioning for me. And then, three fathoms down, we made slow love. Beneath clear water, experimenting with the new weightlessness and the variations it allowed, we coupled in a stream of bubbles, drifting with the sea. Barracuda looked on, stern as maidenly aunts, and yellow-eyed groupers peered at us strangely from their rocky hideaways. I was filled with my passion for Lee and my love of the sea, but I also felt a sweet-sad ache, because I knew that she would be leaving me upon our return to Key West, and that I would probably never see her again.

  Afterward, Lee climbed back on the little Whaler to bask in the sun and I took my sling down to the reef alone. I wore no tank. Even after three tours of duty in Nam as a Navy SEAL, I still preferred just mask and fins. No regulator to worry about. No metal fittings to konk you on the back of the head. When I am in the water I love the freedom of unhampered motion. Besides, spearfishing with a tank is one of the most pathetically unfair “sports” imaginable. The poor fish doesn’t have a chance. I dove down to the top of the reef, then worked my way along a shelf of coral in about twenty feet of water. Small snapper and yellowtail moved away from me in perfect, orderly sheets, as if one mind controlled them all. I knew exactly what I wanted for supper, and I moved away from the reef to find it, propelling myself along the bottom with long, smooth leg strokes. A big cuda followed me, drifting alongside effortlessly. He was a five-footer, easy, and mossy-colored with age. I didn’t mind. If he wanted the fish I shot, he was welcome to it. I would just get another.

  I was after a nice hogfish, and I finally saw one beneath a sea fan in a clearing of coral sand. At first he was pallid gray in color, but at my approach he flushed a bright nervous crimson, the black spot at the base of the posterior ray vivid. It was a beautiful fish, about a six-pounder, and I took him cleanly with a shot through the head. He fluttered briefly on the free shaft, then fell still—and that’s when I realized something other than the barracuda had been following me.

  Attracted by the death vibration—or the earlier love vibrations—a huge open-water mako shark came slashing across the reef, its massive pointed head swinging back and forth as it vectored in on me and the dying hogfish.

  Sharks and I are not exactly strangers. You won’t meet a SEAL who hasn’t had some kind of encounter with one. SEAL—sea, air and land commandos, the toughest of the tough and the roughest of the rough. And we just spend too much time in the water, day and night, to miss. For me, it was a night swim long, long ago on a training mission in the Pacific, one of those freak occurrences: a big dusky shark that wasn’t supposed to be in those waters, and sure as hell wasn’t supposed to attack. He left me with 148 stitches in my side and a new nickname. It was some scar. But strangely, Lee Johnson had come to be fascinated by it, paying it special, tender attention in our lovemaking. At any rate, I didn’t want or need any more scars. I already had more than my share.

  That mako was a beautiful creature: bright blue and then cobalt; a massive ten or eleven feet in length and probably weighing half a ton. The smaller species of shark don’t bother me. They really don’t. You learn to live with them. Besides, their instincts tell them to eat fish, not people. Believe me, if sharks ever got a taste for human flesh, there wouldn’t be a saltwater beach on earth that was safe. But this mako was big enough to break all the rules.

  The reef that had been alive with fish was suddenly still. They knew. This was more than just another big shark—this was a big shark feeding. He came toward me, his head slicing back and forth like a radar antenna. From the leg sheath, I drew my Randall attack-survival knife—the goodluck charm that had saved my life and had taken others more than once. But against this fish, it would be no more lethal than a bee sting. I drew it only as a prod. If it decided on me as supper, I could only try to jab its pointed snout and hope to scare it away.

  I had been down a long time and was almost out of air. But I couldn’t afford to try to surface. Sharks like dangling arms and legs. I thought about Lee back on the little Whaler, and I prayed that she wouldn’t choose this moment to dive in and cool off. I watched the mako drawing closer and closer. He looked like a two-man mini-sub with fins and dead yellow eyes. I clung to a chunk of staghorn coral, and when he passed me the first time, I felt my legs drawing up behind me, swept along in his powerful wake. He had been close enough to take me in a bite.

  But this mako, big as he was, had no interest in breaking the rules this day. He circled me once more, and still I hung motionless. Then, in one lightning swoop, he opened his brutish jumble of teeth, took up the hogfish, shook the spear free, then bolted back toward the reef, his head still jerking, his tiny brain still fixed on feeding. I didn’t give him a moment to reconsider.

  I surfaced on the side of the Whaler away from the reef and jumped into the boat with one kick of my Dacor TX-1000 Competition Class fins. Lee was in tears, still naked, but trembling.

  “God, Dusky, I saw him coming . . . I kept screaming at you, but you never . . .”

  She fell against me, crying.

  As I started the Whaler and powered us back to my cruiser, Lee, wrapped in a blanket, leaned against me. I made jokes; I got her laughing. And I waited for the fear to catch up with me. That’s the way it happens when you’ve had a close call—the fear doesn’t come until later.

  But it never arrived. Why? I wondered. And then I thought I knew: compared with the murders of my family and my best friend by the pirates, the drug runners—the ruthless ones who will forever operate in the Florida Keys—death in the grips of a creature so magnificent as that mako seemed rather pure and compelling.

  My sleek charterboat was beautiful in that strange afternoon light. It is painted a deep night blue, with the words Sniper
/>   Key West, Florida

  painted in small white script on the transom. It looked black against the soft blue of calm sea and against the backdrop of the island’s sweeping white beach. We puttered up and I tethered the Whaler off on a long line, tossed out a small stern anchor, and then climbed aboard to receive the second shock of the day. We were not alone on the boat.

  A gnomelike man stood on the deck. Gifford Remus. Old as he was, he looked at me with the same submissive uneasiness as always; the face of a little kid in the audience of some idolized big brother. And what he held in his gnarled hands brought all the saffron omens of sunset into sharp focus.

  He smiled a wondrous smile, eyes wide, then held out a six-foot length of old Spanish chain.

  It was made of pure gold.

  2

  I was so startled by his presence that my first reaction was anger.

  “What the hell are you doing on this boat without my permission?”

  The smile never even left his face. He kept looking at that chain of gold, fondling it as if it were a living thing. I doubt if he even heard me.

  Gifford Remus—a comic and familiar figure on the streets of Key West. In age, he was anywhere from forty-five to sixty. He was a spindly little guy with a round head and a thatch of thin brown hair that you rarely saw beneath the soiled fishing cap he always wore. In town, he rode one of those old standard bicycles with thick tires, the chrome worn to patches on the handlebars. He was a scavenger. He picked up bottles and aluminum cans from alongside the road, stacking them neatly in the milk-crate basket that was bolted to the rear fender of the bike. He liked chrome doodads: horns and bells and colorful spinners that whirred in the wind as he pedaled down Duval Street in Old Town, smiling at the tourists and waving at the long-haired street bums who, I’m sure, felt their egos slightly elevated to see an individual more ragged-looking than themselves.

  Gifford Remus. A simpleminded but likable man. He was smart enough—but strange. He seemed to exist in his own little world.

  I had first seen him when I was barely a teenager. An orphan, I had been taken under the wing of a fine Italian family who made their living on the trapeze. Because I was so big, they had trained me early to be a catcher, and I loved it. I loved working high above the center ring, and I loved the circus, and I loved coming to Key West because my favorite writer—who had already become a legend on the island and around the world—would sometimes come to watch. Papa was fascinated by the big cats, and he seemed to enjoy watching us work the traps, too. I took to him, and he seemed to take to me. He gave me my first beer, and later, on what turned out to be one of his last visits to Key West, I watched him fork over a ten-dollar bill to a young islander who had asked only for spare change.

  That islander was Gifford Remus.

  When I finally gave up the SEALs, married, and started running a charterboat, Giff would occasionally approach me for a handout—that dull, toothless grin of his always in evidence, the strange little-boy eyes always blinking with thanks. Because I always gave. I remembered Papa, and I remembered what he had said that night.

  “Let me tell you something, old-timer,” he said. “There are only two things any of us really have to contribute to this world that’s worth a damn. One thing’s our honesty, and the other thing’s our generosity. I’m not just talking about money. Real generosity goes far beyond money. But for an odd character like that guy, it takes the form of ten bucks.”

  Giff was an odd character, all right. He occasionally worked part-time jobs. But at heart he was a scavenger. And he scavenged more than just bottles and aluminum. With the little money he had, he kept an old wreck of a diesel inboard which he used to follow the big-time treasure hunters around. They hated him—but then, most treasure-hunter types hate just about everybody and everything except for themselves. Giff would anchor his old boat near their dig site and, when they were done for the day, dive down and look for the little scraps of coin or artifact they might have overlooked.

  But there’s no way anyone could have overlooked that chain.

  “Giff! Hey—Giff!”

  He stood on the deck as if he had been struck dumb. His old face was leather-brown from the sun, and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a week. But his green eyes sparkled, as if the glint of the gold he held lasered straight through to his brain.

  “Looka this, Dusky! Look here at what I . . .” He seemed to notice the presence of the woman for the first time, and he stopped in midsentence. Lee looked at me, both amused and perplexed.

  “Lee, maybe you want to go below and change into something dry. It’s my turn to cook tonight—right? I’ll be down in a minute.”

  She pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders and hurried through the forward salon and down into the cabin.

  I looked at Gifford Remus and his gold chain again, wiped my face with my hands, and gave him a seat in the port fighting chair.

  “You want a beer, Giff?”

  “Naw, Dusky. You know I don’t drink.”

  I didn’t know. I felt an odd sort of affection for him. I retrieved a cold Hatuey—that fine Cuban beer—from the salon locker, pulled on a T-shirt, and then sat beside him in the starboard chair. The beer was icy, and it sluiced the salt from my tongue. It was a pretty sunset: brilliant orange sphere melting into an oily sheen on the far turquoise horizon. Fish stirred in the shallows on Gull Keys, and pelicans soared in low formations, skimming the water.

  “Let me see what you have there, Giff.” He grinned crazily and handed me the chain. It was gold, all right. The weight of it surprised me. Draped vertically, it was almost as long as I am—and I’m six-two and a shade. It was made of handwrought links, each of them beautifully formed with spirals and smooth etching. The condition of it surprised me—it was such a lovely, unblemished yellow in color that it looked as if it might have just come from the jewelry store.

  Giff seemed to be reading my thoughts. “It’s gold, Dusky. Gold don’t tarnish underwater. Had a few sandworms growin’ around it, but I done knocked ’em off. Ain’t it pretty?”

  It was pretty indeed. I wondered about the Spaniard who had owned it—because it was certainly Spanish. For more than two hundred years they sailed along the Florida Straits to ravage the lands of Mexico and South America, enslaving and killing the Indians there as if they were little better than beasts of burden. What had he been like? Rich, certainly. A Spanish nobleman, perhaps. One of the aloof ones who loved gold and the Christian God: one of the many early ones who saw nothing wrong in building his fortune through the sweat and suffering of native Americans.

  But on that last trip, he and his fellow Spaniards had been the ones to suffer. I took a cold sip of beer and studied the flat bronze sea which spread out before me. It was so peaceful, so deceptively deadly. I knew how it must have been. A shifting wind, and a massive sea churned to bile green with waves two stories high. Rain and relentless wind—and then the unseen reef. The reef from which Lee and I had just come? Perhaps. I pictured the terrified long-gone Spaniard praying for mercy after the galleon struck the reef, his words lost in the roar of sea and storm. But there had been no mercy. And now there was only ballast stone and, perhaps, a line of cannon somewhere beneath us in the coral sands to tell his story.

  And this gold chain.

  “Looks like you struck it rich, Giff.”

  The strange little man nodded with excitement. “Ain’t it somethin’, Dusky? An’ I found it on my own, I did. I wasn’t working no one else’s site this time. You ever hear of the Gaspar fleet?”

  I nodded my head. Treasure stories are a dime a dozen in Key West. In ten years, I had probably been approached a hundred times by men who wanted me to go hunt treasure with them. It was always a sure thing, and they always knew exactly where the galleon had gone down, and they always just needed a few more dollars to get them over the hump. And, in one way or another, the bulk of them ended up in ruin. Because of that, I rarely even took the time to listen to their offers. I just tu
rned them down flat. But I had heard of the Gaspar fleet—who in Key West hadn’t? It was said that the person who found the treasure section of the sunken Gaspar would be rich enough to buy anything—his own country, if he wanted. But I had never cared enough to learn the details, so I let Gifford Remus talk.

  “Been studyin’ about it all my life, Dusky. Put durn near every penny I had into researchin’ it and keepin’ up that old boat o’ mine. I knew I’d find her; just knew this day would come.” He chortled crazily. “For more than three hundred years folks has been lookin’—but it was me who found her.”

  I finished my beer and looked with sudden reappraisal at the man I had known only as a comic figure, a Key West scavenger. Was it possible that I—and everyone else—had mistaken his purity of purpose as just strangeness? Apparently. But could he have converted four decades of selling bottles and begging and hoarding a few odd gold coins into information that led him to the final resting spot of the Gaspar?

  It didn’t seem reasonable. But then nothing about treasure hunting is reasonable. Treasure hunting starts out as a hobby and becomes a disease. I had watched it ruin men, ruin their families, take the lives of their loved ones—yet still they pressed on. Febris auris. Gold fever. The bulk of them invest their lives and, if they’re very, very lucky, get a few trinkets in return. And the little they find is enough to goad them on and on. I had met hundreds of treasure hunters, yet had never liked one of them. The two or three of them who were successful you had to admire for their intellect and their perseverance. But the bulk of them were like starstruck kids—completely engulfed in their own lives and their own dreams. And utterly ruthless. They cared only for themselves and the treasure which they were sure awaited them.

  I didn’t like seeing this new side of Gifford Remus.