by Michael Howe
The two men watched the scene for a second in silence then turned and resumed looking out over the Bellinghausen Sea, which at the moment looked as dead as any body of water can possibly look.
“Pete,” said Ives finally, “I’m very concerned about how this expedition is being handled.”
“Yes, Jim?”
“From the very start I’ve had my doubts about the captain and crew—Covington strikes me as a bungler, and the crew, as far as I can tell, is almost entirely made up of poorly educated foreigners
“Don’t get me wrong! Some of the best minds at Universal are foreigners, but these people . . . Then, all of a sudden, a pack of armed navy types appear in the middle of the night and wander around cross-examining people. I—we, all the passengers—are very concerned. Is there a bomb aboard? Or terrorists? I know what Covington has said, but I have no confidence in the man. What’s the real story?”
Evans took a moment to formulate his answer. He had to be careful what he said. He started to open his mouth then realized they were surrounded—two video camera-men, a sound girl and a reporter had appeared from nowhere. They must have also tired of learning more about the penguin’s life cycle. “It’s a very delicate situation, Jim, but let me assure you I’m doing my very best to keep on top of it.”
“Does the government have reason to believe there’s a bomb aboard Aurora Australis or not, Congressman?” demanded the reporter, breathlessly. “These military people won’t tell us anything.”
“I’m afraid I can’t say any more about it at this time,” said Evans as he took Ives by the arm and started to walk away. “I’m sorry I can’t do more to relieve your concerns at the moment, Jim, but would you join me for a drink after we get back to the ship? We have a number of things we might fruitfully discuss. I, for one, feel strongly that Washington isn’t directing enough resources to Connecticut, specifically to cutting-edge organizations like yours that can make a real contribution to solving the nation’s many problems.”
As he pitched himself, Pete struggled to hide his own growing discomfort. He was uncomfortable enough just being aboard the ship, and now the low-level contagion of unease about the navy’s presence that was spreading slowly and insidiously through the passengers was making his edginess all the sharper.
By the time Mike and Jerry had completed suiting up, the ship was lying at an unfortunate angle across both current and waves, the seas were beginning to break over the landing, and the wind was starting to howl again. “I’ll tell you, Captain,” said Jerry before stuffing his mouthpiece in, “I’ve never envied those guys who dive into holes in the ice, but at least the water’s calm for them. This is a mess!”
“Lets move our butts, then. We don’t have that much time.” With that, Mike led the way to the mid-sized HBI that was tied to the stage with its engines running and two men seated in it.
“Hit it, Chief,” said Mike when the HBI was alongside Aurora’s bow. Each diver grabbed a bundle of two lines, one of which led down from a boat boom rigged out from one of the ship’s bows and the other from a boat boom rigged out from the other bow. Clutching the lines, they rolled over the HBI’s side into the heaving mess. After the briefest of surface checks, they disappeared into the rolling gray waters.
Once they were all the way under the ship, where the surface waves were barely noticeable, the current—and the need for the two lines—became much more obvious.
No matter how different they may look above the waterline, there is a basic sameness to ships when viewed from below. They are, in general, a reddish black mass that hangs over you and, even if not moving in the slightest, gives the impression of preparing to crush you any second. They are also essentially smooth, except for a few easy-to-identify features such as water intakes and outlets and domes for the depth sounder transducers. In Aurora’s case, thanks to just having come out of overhaul, the bottom was also squeaky clean. The search should have been a piece of cake.
Under more civilized circumstances Mike would have inspected by swimming from bow to stern, along the keel, then moved outboard about twenty feet and reversed direction. After two or three trips fore and aft on each side, the inspection would have been completed in an hour. Unless, of course, they found something. With the current running as it was, they had to do it the hard way—using the lines, and their legs, to move back and forth sideways across the ship from waterline to waterline, then dropping back and repeating the process.
“I’m already getting cold,” griped Andrews, primarily to himself.
“We’re going to have to pick up our pace if we want to live to see the end of this dive,” said Chambers sympathetically.
At that point, Kim’s electronically distorted but still recognizable voice came over the voice communicators: “Lead diver, this is Kim. The weather’s really making up fast, so the captain’s recalling the boats. He says he’s going to have to start turning the shafts in about five minutes. Do you want the HBI to pick you up on the port side, where it’s a little calmer?”
Damn, thought Mike, the temptation of Christ! He was freezing, Jerry was freezing; it was all they could do to keep their arms and legs moving, and they hadn’t found a damn thing. There was nothing he would have liked better than to surface and get warm, but the inspection had to be completed. Especially the stern area, where it was easiest to hide things. “Kim, tell Captain Covington to go ahead and turn his shafts and recover the passengers. We’re going to keep going until we get too close to the screws for comfort. Then we’ll surface on the port side and come back down again for a few minutes after all the passengers are aboard.”
“That’s not very safe, sir.”
“No, it’s not, but it has to be done.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll tell the captain and we’ll be waiting for you on the port side. Amidships.”
“Roger.”
The two divers had rearranged their lines and prepared to pull themselves to starboard, into the current, when something big and dark flashed past the corner of Mike’s eye. “What was that?”
“Looked like a seal to me, Captain. A damn big one.”
The shape reappeared and rocketed toward them, although its course was somewhat erratic. “You’re right, Boats, that’s the biggest I’ve ever seen.” The beast continued on at them. Then, about ten feet away, it turned on its side, reaching out and snapping at them as it did. “Damn big teeth,” remarked Mike.
“You notice the spots on its sides?”
“Yes. Leopard seal, you think?”
“Look at that fin. Looks like something bit it off. Screws up his swimming.”
“And his hunting, probably.”
“Don’t they say crippled predators are most likely to attack people?”
“But this is a seal, Boats,” said Mike as a trickle of icy water snuck in between his mask and his hood. “If it were an orca or a mako, I’d have been more concerned.”
As he spoke, Mike glanced at Jerry. Was the chief getting a little jumpy? Might well be. The mission was beginning to get to all of them—no sleep, not knowing what they were looking for and not even knowing if there was anything to look for. Just endless circles.
They worked their way across the bottom, keeping an eye on the visitor, which was itself swimming in erratic circles around them. Without warning the seven-hundred-pound beast suddenly swerved in to within five feet, reached out and snapped again.
With mounting concern the two divers continued to kick and pull and scan the bottom of the ship. There was a rumble all around them followed almost immediately by an almost painful pounding sensation that filled the water. At the same time the current became even more confused. “Captain Covington’s begun to twist,” remarked Mike as the propellers began to turn in opposite directions, one going forward, one in reverse. As they did, they created a boiling mass of water under the ship’s stern and added an element to the current that threatened to carry them into the spinning, twelve-foot meat grinders that normally propelled the ship.
>
Two or three feet above Mike’s head, Marcello Cagayan crawled slowly through Aurora’s bilges, attempting to avoid drinking from the foot or so of water that had accumulated along either side of the keel. As he twisted and squirmed, he flashed his light beside and ahead of him, looking for anything that didn’t belong there.
The portion of the bilges which he was searching, the thirty or forty feet that ran from the huge diesels to the reduction gears, was jammed with at least a dozen large pipes. It was an area in which work had been done during the overhaul, when several motors had been removed and some of the surrounding deck plating had been torn up to provide access. Accordingly, it was one of the first areas Ted and Jerry had searched using their mini-cam—a device similar to that used by doctors when they want to see inside you.
The results of the mini-cam survey had been inconclusive, so Marcello Cagayan was specially selected, because of his small size, to search the area in person. And there was a portion, fifteen or twenty feet long, that was so jammed that not even the tiny Filipino could get through.
Determined to play the role to perfection, Marcello continued to squirm and squeeze his way forward until his shoulders were totally jammed. He could feel the steel all around him vibrating as the engines pounded and the shafts turned. He flashed the light ahead of him on the mass of piping. From where he lay he couldn’t even see, much less count, all of them. A dozen, at least. He backed off a little, jammed the light between two pipes and reached down into the water. There they were—the two at the bottom, down near the hull itself. The pipes that didn’t belong there.
It had to be them. They were exactly where he’d been told they would be. They’d been added during the overhaul and were filled with long, shaped charges of plastic explosive, wrapped in two layers of gas-proof plastic and then inserted into steel piping which had been intentionally weakened along one side. When detonated, the charges were calculated to cut a long gash in the ship’s bottom. A gash that would be next to impossible to reach to repair, especially if a wave of burning diesel oil were flowing aft from the ruptured fuel tank.
Satisfied that he had seen everything it was possible to see, Cagayan squirmed backward, out of the space and up into the engine room. After reporting to the second engineer that he had found nothing, he walked aft to the reduction gears. There he dropped down into the bilges again and started to squirm forward, alert for anything that didn’t belong.
Arthur Covington stood at the remote steering and engine controls on the port wing of his bridge and looked down at the small flotilla of HBIs returning from shore jammed with tourists. “On the forecastle,” he said into the mouthpiece of his headphones as the wind blew through his thinning, gray hair, “how’s the anchor chain tending?”
“Forward, Captain,” reported the man posted in the bow. “Everything looks good.”
“Very well.”
Covington was very unhappy with what he was doing. Loading passengers from HBIs while the ship was held across the wind with screws turning was not standard procedure, although he and other captains did it from time to time. The weather was simply so unpredictable, he reassured himself. There’d been occasions when he’d landed parties in a dead calm and picked them up three hours later in conditions just like this. And as for the naval persons, they shouldn’t be swimming near the screws. But then, they were paid to do that sort of thing, so he couldn’t worry too much about them. He turned and looked a little farther astern than he had been. God damn it! “Kim,” he snapped into the mouthpiece, “tell the boatswain to instruct boat number seven to keep farther away from the stern.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“This is the bow, Captain. The anchor chain is beginning to droop.”
“Roger,” replied Covington as he increased the number of revolutions on the port shaft, which was backing.
But, he realized, HBIs and turning propellers were the least of his worries. His ship might very well be in danger, and he bore the ultimate responsibility for her well-being. And the passengers were beginning to get restive. Three had been in that morning, demanding that he “do something.” Although no new evidence had appeared, the passing of time seemed to be increasing their fear of bombs and terrorists. Perhaps he was being too stubborn. Perhaps he should have turned north to Ushuaia as soon as Chambers and his gang had dropped down from the sky.
No, damn it! He needed more. Just leaving the pier was dangerous.
He remembered that Chrissie Clark had volunteered to perform again after dinner tonight. He liked her singing, he liked the mellow glow she generated. Her performance would undoubtedly take some of the edge off the customers’ nerves. And his own.
Oblivious to the action on the surface, where the HBIs were hurrying from shore to the landing platform and back, pounding over the increasing chop and trailing foamy white wakes as they went, Mike and Jerry continued their increasingly dreary sweep of Aurora’s bottom. Kicking and pulling, they forced themselves from side to side, growing increasingly cold and tired as they did. Both were also beginning to develop headaches from the powerful harmonic waves generated by the ship’s screws churning in different directions. One shoving massive volumes of water forward, the other forcing only slightly less in the opposite direction.
Suddenly, while Mike was examining a large cooling water intake, he felt something slam against him. He turned to discover that it was Jerry. “You okay, Chief?”
“That goddamned seal just bit off most of my right fin.”
Only half believing, Mike twisted to look at the fin. It was almost totally gone! The beast had missed Jerry’s toes by less than an inch.
“That’s it, Chief,” said Mike. “If we don’t knock off, we’re going to be two dead sailors in no time.”
“I may already be dead, Boss. I won’t know until I warm up a little.”
“Kim, this is lead diver. We’re going to come up and warm up and wait for the captain to finish twisting. Stand by to pick us up about three-quarters of the way aft on the port side. And be advised that a very hostile leopard seal is swimming around here. It’s not only challenged us, but has even taken a bite of Chief Andrews’s fin.”
“Roger, lead diver. There have been one or two reports in the past of this sort of behavior.”
Despite their frigid condition and strong desire to get out of the water, the two divers executed their ascent slowly and carefully, back-to-back, alert for the passenger-filled HBIs racing around. Not to mention the leopard seal, which continued to circle them with what Mike had to assume was a look of hunger and frustration on its doglike face.
13
The Bellingshausen Sea
Forty minutes after the HBI crew had dragged them out of the water, Mike and Jerry were sitting in the cargo bay, out of the wind, drinking hot coffee and watching as the last of the passengers reboarded the ship and the deck force started to recover the HBIs.
“Captain Covington says he’s stopping the shafts,” reported Kim after listening intently to a walkie-talkie.
“Thank you, Kim. You have those bang sticks ready?”
“Right here, Captain,” said the girl, handing him a yard-long aluminum pole with a ten-gauge shotgun shell and contact trigger at one end and a handle and lanyard at the other. “To take it off safe, pull out that pin just ahead of the handle.”
“Roger. Chief, ready? Now we get to the juicy part.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” replied the chief boatswain’s mate as he stood and groaned, accepting his bang stick. While he felt no personal animosity toward the seal, neither did he wish to lose a foot, or anything else, to the beast.
After rigging new air supplies, Mike and Jerry grabbed their guy lines, jumped over the side and drifted down and aft. Although both were still chilled, they were no longer totally frozen. That, combined with the absence of the turning screws’ head-pounding harmonics, allowed them to work much faster than they had on their first dive.
Predictably, now that they were prepared for the seal,
there was no sign of it.
“Boss, this is Alex,” said the communicator a few minutes after they’d reentered the icy, clear waters of the Bellinghausen Sea. “I’ve just learned from a contact at the FBI that the third engineer of this ship, a man named Jacob Rounding, had a daughter killed by police about twenty years ago in a political demonstration.”
“What was she doing?”
“Not much as far as I can tell. Waving a sign and shouting. In all, half a dozen were killed or wounded.”
“Anything else on his record?”
“Not a thing we can find. Something of a loner and may have had a drinking problem in the past, but his last couple ships were unhappy to see him leave.”
“Why’d it take so long for this to come up?” asked Mike, drifting off to one side despite his efforts to remain stationary.
“Apparently Rounding never married the mother and abandoned them both, and the girl used her mother’s maiden name. The mother never cooperated much with the media, and since some of the other families did, they got all the press and she just fell between the cracks.”
“Shit! I can imagine that might be more than enough to give a guy a grudge. I want you and Ray to find this Rounding and talk to him, right away. A grudge, assuming he has one, doesn’t prove anything, but it’s as good as any other lead we’ve gotten.”
“Roger.”
“You get all that, Chief?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Let’s try to finish this up quickly without overlooking anything.”
“I thought that was our objective all along.”
“Do you know where Mr. Rounding, the third engineer, is?”
Jacob Rounding, walking with his customary stoop down a passageway toward the Auxiliary Machinery Room, heard the words from around a corner and didn’t recognize the voice. He paused, his heart beating.
“No, sir,” replied the voice of an engineman he did know. “He may be in the Auxiliary Room, through there.”
