Nathan looked across the fort and up at the Rodman gun they’d used to kill the crabs. “Nineteenth-century tech and it still worked. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”
“I think we broke it,” Gianna said.
She was right. The cannon would never fire again. Missing patches of restoration paint revealed new, deep cracks in the cast iron. The metal band along the rear had separated from the barrel.
“It gave its life so others could live,” Nathan said. “After a century and a half of waiting.”
He rose and climbed to an embrasure overlooking the east beach. The moat remained crab-free. Out past the shore, Larsson and the Zodiac filled with lures were clearing the edge of the key.
“We won the battle, but lost the war,” he said. “Larsson is heading out to sea with the lures. What we just survived is about to happen all across south Florida.”
Chapter 31
When he was young, swimming underwater had been Marc Metcalf’s peaceful place.
From his rookie dive decades ago, the sense of pressure and isolation that gave many the creeps about being below the surface imbued him with serenity. All noise was muted, all motions fluid, and being weightless instilled wonder. Was he subconsciously returning to the womb, as some had told him? He preferred to not entertain that explanation.
But now, diving was a reminder that he wasn’t that young man anymore. The sense of relief at taking the weight off his hips and knees when he began to float. The extra concentration it took to breathe through lungs that didn’t have the capacity of youth. The ocean’s cold that now penetrated deeper than when he’d had the protection of more fat and muscle. The fear that today would be the day the elements took an extra toll on his weakened heart.
He tugged the cable after him as he swam down from his cabin cruiser. He focused on the rhythm of his breathing to quell the fear about what lay ahead. He had nowhere near the confidence he’d shown Kathy that they were going to pull this off.
The sea grew darker and he clicked on the lights on his wrists. Ahead loomed the outline of PT 904 on the sea floor. Or at least half of it. He’d found the bow section. When the crab tore the ship in half, he guessed the current had swept this section away from the heavier, faster sinking stern, which likely lay elsewhere alongside the remains of PT 906.
The boat seemed more reef than ship after so many years underwater. Barnacles and coral nobs coated the hull. Strands of seaweed swayed in the current as if waving a greeting to PT 904’s only remaining crewmember. She lay on her port side, buried several feet deep in the sand, but the object of Marc’s quest appeared unharmed. A twenty-foot-long starboard torpedo tube. The covers were still in place, so the torpedo had to still be inside, right where he’d loaded it a lifetime ago.
He swam down and floated beside the tube. He drew his knife and scraped the boat’s deck with the blade, chipping away the encrustation to reveal the painted wood beneath. Marc rolled off his glove and laid his fingertips against the ship.
So long ago, my girl, he thought.
He and the others had been kids playing spies on a big power boat. Immortal and unbreakable. Now his body constantly reminded him that he was neither, and the wreckage reminded him that of the crew only he remained. In the years since then, he’d added nothing of consequence to the world, nothing worthy of the memories of the men who died here while he was condemned to live.
I’m gonna fix that now.
He pulled his glove back on. Using the knife hilt, he hammered at the clamps that held the torpedo cover in place. He snapped one, then the other. He cut away the canvas covers at the ends of the tube and pulled it open.
Protected from the open sea and any larger organisms, the torpedo looked almost good as new. A light film of bright green algae covered the surface, but the torpedo was free of any larger marine life. To the rear, the twin screw propellers and the directional fins around them shined.
He wrapped the canvas straps around the torpedo, then kicked free the clamps that held it in place. He scraped his knife against the cable to send the pull signal back to Kathy topside.
The cable tightened. Marc guided the torpedo up from the mounts and then pushed it clear of the wreck. The cable continued to retract and the torpedo began its slow ascent to the daylight it hadn’t seen in five decades.
Marc turned to look at the wreck below him. Tommy and Bud had died right there, yanked out of those forward gun positions. Matty had been chopped in two on that bow. The sea and all within it had long ago claimed their flesh and bones. But maybe there would be something personal from each he could gather, something to return to their families to remind them of the men’s sacrifice.
He nosed down and swam to the stern of the wreck. The cabin was black as a cavern in front of him. Sea life had taken residence all along the bulkheads and anemones and clownfish did little dances along the rim. He swam in a few feet and pointed the wrist lights into the forward berth.
They lit the menacing snout of a full-grown bull shark.
Chapter 32
The shark’s mouth opened to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Marc’s heart jumped to triple-speed. Bull sharks were the worst combination of aggressive and unpredictable. He yelped an explosion of bubbles past his regulator and backpedaled away.
He couldn’t move fast enough. The shark lunged from the darkness. Marc spun left and the shark’s stout body scraped across his chest as it rushed by. Its rough hide shredded his aging wetsuit and dug into Marc’s skin beneath. Its tail smacked him on the sidestroke and spun him in a circle.
The shark rocketed into the sea and turned for another attack. Marc backed away and too late realized he’d swum back into the wreck. He looked out through the open hull like Jonah from the mouth of the whale. The shark headed straight for him.
Marc realized his knife was useless. He frantically checked the wreck for a weapon. The shark closed to yards away.
Marc spied an old combat helmet half-buried in the sand. He yanked it out and faced the shark.
At mere feet away, the shark’s jaws snapped open. Marc whipped the coral-encrusted helmet up and shoved it straight ahead. The shark’s jaws clamped down on the steel. The furious fish snapped its head back and forth to dislodge the helmet. Marc let it go but a row of teeth ripped across his hand like a chainsaw blade and severed his ring and pinky fingers. Pain blasted up his arm and lanced his skull.
The shark backed off, jerking left and right to try to dislodge the crushed helmet wedged in its jaws.
Red wisps of blood leaked from the finger stubs on Marc’s right hand. All he could imagine was the blood drawing more sharks. He gripped his wounds with his left hand to stem the bleeding. Then he beat the sea with his swim fins and headed for the surface.
Below him, the bull shark circled the wreck doing a series of frustrated snaps of its head, each unable to spit out the helmet.
With an adrenaline-fueled surge of energy, Marc swam for his life. His heart slammed in his chest and sharp needles of pain accompanied each beat. He caught up with the rising torpedo and hooked his arm through one of the cargo straps. The strengthening stabs to his heart and the exhaustion of receding panic took its toll. He collapsed and let the rising torpedo bring him the rest of the way home.
***
Kathy slowed the winch as the torpedo came close enough for her to make out the details. It was much larger than she’d expected. Marc clung to one of the straps, and he wasn’t moving.
She bumped the winch speed back up. The torpedo broke the surface with Marc almost draped across it. He spit his regulator from his mouth and flashed her a look of pained relief through his facemask. Deep red blood ran from his right hand and down the torpedo’s mossy green side.
She stopped the winch and swung the torpedo closer to the side of the boat. Marc crawled across it to the ladder at the rear. He climbed on board using only one hand. His bleeding right was missing two fingers. His wetsuit top had been shredded and blood seepe
d from deep scratches along his chest.
Kathy gasped. “What happened?”
“Shark.” Marc wheezed out a long breath. “I’m okay.”
Marc’s face was bone-white and the last thing he seemed was okay. She pulled him up and into the cockpit. As soon as she unstrapped the scuba tank from his back, he collapsed to the deck, his back against the stern.
“There’s a first-aid kit in the forward cabin,” he said through clenched teeth.
Kathy scrambled to find the kit. When she returned, the old man had shed the top half of his wetsuit and both gloves. His left hand clamped his right, but blood still dripped onto the deck. The chest wound was superficial. But the missing fingers gave her pause. She knelt beside him.
“Let me check that out,” she whispered.
He extended his right hand. The two fingers had been severed at the second joint. She disinfected the wound with alcohol and bound the fingers with a roll of gauze. By the time she finished, just two fingers and a thumb stuck out of a tight, white ball. The good news was that the white wasn’t turning red. She’d at least slowed the bleeding from a rush to a seep, and she’d take that small victory.
Marc rooted in the kit with his good hand and retrieved an unmarked prescription bottle. He popped the top and downed two pills. He caught Kathy staring at him.
“Painkillers,” he said. “You’re gonna be out alone on the sea, you gotta be prepared for emergencies.”
“I think this qualifies.”
“Trust me that I need ’em.”
Kathy looked over the side at the torpedo. “Is it in good shape?”
“Good as the last day I saw it. I need to pull it open and double-check some things.” With his good hand, he pulled himself up into a seat.
“Whoa!” Kathy said. “You need to go below and lay down.”
“No time for that nonsense.” The color had begun to return to his face. “I got a torpedo to work on. You need to get us to Crab Central. Head south-southeast until we round Bush Key. Then we’ll use that map of yours to plot the last leg of the trip.”
Marc pulled a screwdriver from a locker in the cockpit. He winched the torpedo up even with the boat’s transom, then leaned over and began to scrape the drying algae from the body. He winced with every stroke.
“Let me give you a hand,” Kathy offered.
“Dammit, no! I’ll do this. You weigh anchor and get the damn boat where we need to go. Or I’ll just do everything and you can go below.”
She hadn’t seen even a flicker of anger in Marc. Maybe being mutilated by the shark had given him more of a brush with mortality than he wanted to admit, or visiting the wreck reminded him about the friends he’d lost on PT 904. He needed a solo win working on the torpedo to get his confidence back.
She walked to the bow and began to reel in the anchor line. She looked over her shoulder, through the glazed windscreen, at Marc in the stern. He leaned over the torpedo, loosening an access panel with the screwdriver.
The only things that stood between the world and an onslaught of giant crabs were her, a wounded old man, an obsolete torpedo, and a boat that was already old when the Beach Boys had hit songs.
Those odds weren’t good.
***
Marc’s hand shook as he loosened the screw on the access panel. He paused and took a deep breath. His right hand felt like it was on fire. It would have been nice if the pills he’d taken had been painkillers. But it was better that they had been his nitroglycerin. Given a choice between being alive with a beating heart and being in pain with severed fingers, alive was much better.
But he feared that soon he wouldn’t even have that. He’d had years of what he’d called heart episodes. What had happened underwater had been more than an episode. The water pressure, the panic, the exertion. A trifecta of triggers, all at once. He could feel the damage, the weakened, irregular pulsing in his chest.
Now he raced two clocks, the clock ticking up to a mass escape of crabs, and his personal clock that was ticking down. He had to coax the second clock to keep ticking a little longer.
The screwdriver tip slipped out of the screw head. The tool flew from his hand. He slapped it tight against the torpedo with his bad hand just before it fell into the sea. Pain set his arm ablaze. He clenched his teeth against a scream.
Dread tightened in his gut. He may have found the location of the crabs’ den too late.
Chapter 33
An hour later, Kathy left the wheel to check on Marc’s progress, physically as well as on the torpedo. He looked better, but he still winced every time his injured hand touched something.
“The torpedo still works?” she asked.
Marc pressed the screwdriver against two exposed wires inside one of the access panels. The torpedo’s twin propellers kicked into a furious spin.
“The main battery stayed watertight. I got it recharged. It won’t have the range to knock out Russian subs, but it’ll get far enough to keep us out of the blast range. But the 26-volt system is shot to hell, so rigging up any steering is out of the question, even if I had a controller.”
“So how do we get the thing to hit the crab den?”
Marc gave her a wink. “We do it the old fashioned way. Point and shoot. We line up the boat and send the fish a-swimming.”
“That’ll work?”
“We won two world wars doing it that way.”
“And the warhead?”
“I checked. Strictly conventional, designed to crush a sub from concussion. Perfect to collapse underground tunnels and seal them crabs back inside. We’re gonna be perfectly safe.”
Kathy didn’t feel even imperfectly safe. Messing with a salvaged torpedo carrying a fifty-year-old bomb in the nose seemed like courting disaster.
Kathy returned to the wheel. Fort Jefferson passed by the port side, a mile or two away. Kathy tried the radio, but as it had been the whole trip, all she heard was static and squeal. Larsson’s jammer could work as far away as Key West for all she knew.
A brass telescope stuck out from a pouch by the steering wheel. Of course the eccentric old man would have an unconventional telescope instead of conventional binoculars. With her hip against the wheel, she trained the telescope on the fort and twisted the building into focus.
The heavy main doors were closed, but they sported some big gashes. A dead crab lay upside down, half out of the moat. There might have been two, it was hard to tell. Chunks of missing brick left bright red gouges in the walls, like fresh, painful wounds. The battle the fort had been built to withstand had finally come and gone, and the fort had survived. Her fear was about what happened to Nathan inside. Larsson’s pseudo-soldiers might be able to handle themselves in a fight against the crabs. The little historian? She wasn’t so sure.
She lowered the telescope and checked the rear of the cockpit. The old man leaned across the transom performing a one-handed wiring job on the torpedo. Drops of his blood had spotted the deck. She wondered how she’d ever thought this plan could work.
“Marc! Chart check time. We’re due south of the fort.”
Marc looked up at her and squinted against the sun. Then he looked toward the fort. His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped.
“What the hell are you doing! Turn to starboard!”
Kathy looked at the placid water all around them. A few ripples danced on the surface just ahead. “What’s wrong?”
Marc sprang to his feet and rushed to the wheel. He brushed Kathy aside and spun the wheel to the right.
The boat heeled starboard and the props growled at the change in direction. Then from below came the crash and crack of snapping wood. The boat shuddered as a reef scraped hard against the hull.
“Dammit to hell,” Marc shouted. “Don’t you know there’s a reef out here?”
He dropped the engines to idle and scrambled down into the cabin. He pulled an access panel up from the floor. Water rushed in the bilge underneath.
“Pumps! On the console, turn on the pumps!�
��
Kathy scanned the controls. Two switches labeled BIL PUMP STAR and BIL PUMP PORT were under the water temperature gauge. She flicked both on.
Electric motors hummed to life under the deck. Air and water coughed out of an exhaust port on the boat’s side. A moment later, Marc came back topside.
“They’re barely keeping up, especially with the weight of the torpedo across the stern. Were you trying to sink us?”
“How was I supposed to know there’s a reef out here? We’re far from the key.”
“It’s your damn park, your protected ocean. Besides, you couldn’t read the water and see it was shallow ahead?”
She remembered the ripples in the water just before the crash. “Maybe. I’m no sailor. I don’t understand half the things going on out here.”
Marc was about to deliver another admonishment but cut himself short. He exhaled hard and some of the fury drained from his face. A few brighter blood spots stippled the drying scabs on his chest.
“Well, you’re right there. I ain’t sailed with a crew in fifty years, and never had one that wasn’t rated at sea. I shoulda warned you about the reef. I was all caught up in wiring the fish.”
He rolled the engines back to full speed and turned the boat due east. “Okay, let’s see your map now.”
Kathy took out the map she’d stolen from the old CIA base and spread it out on the little chart table beside the ship’s wheel. She reached over and held the wheel while Marc used a ruler, a pencil and the compass to find the boat’s position relative to the fort and the ripples of the retreating shoal. He marked that spot and drew a line from it to the location of the crabs’ den.
“Zero-four-seven degrees,” he said. “That’s our course, correcting for the currents.” He turned the wheel and rolled the boat out on a forty-seven-degree compass heading.
Kathy glanced down into the cabin. Water bubbled up from the bilge and onto the lower deck. “Marc, the pumps aren’t keeping up.”
Marc peered over from the wheel. “Damn, it’s the speed, the extra pressure against the hull. We’re gonna need to slow down.”
Claws Page 11
