Loch tzu-1

by Paul Zindel

  “It’s very deep,” Dr. Sam confirmed. “Deep under us.”

  Cavenger looked like a ghost in the strobe light. “It’s coming up! Give the alert!”

  Randolph went on the PA. “Sighting! All crew in place!”

  The harpoon team readied the equipment on the bow. A half dozen other crew members with rifles took their positions topside. Emilio got the alert out over the ship’s radio. A dozen armed men moved to their stations around the perimeter of the PT.

  “It’s the big one,” Cavenger said, checking the signal.

  “Yes, it’s big,” Dr. Sam confirmed.

  “How deep?” Emilio asked.

  “Rising from eight hundred feet,” Dr. Sam called as the seconds ticked by. “Eight hundred, seven hundred, six hundred fifty …”

  BLIP, BLIP, BLIP.

  “Five hundred feet and closing …”

  BLIP …

  Cavenger reached his hands out around the edges of the master screen in front of him like a warlock peering into a cauldron. “We’ve got this one.”

  “We won’t be able to net it out here,” Dr. Sam said.

  “No,” Cavenger said without looking up. “But we are going to blow its head off. We get the carcass of the first one, then we can worry about netting the others.”

  Dr. Sam shifted in his seat.

  The sonar signal disappeared at three hundred fifty feet.

  “What’s going on?” Cavenger shouted, turning away from the screens to look at Dr. Sam. “What happened to our signal?”

  “Nothing,” Dr. Sam said.

  Cavenger jumped up to check the graphic recorders. “Get that signal back,” he ordered.

  “Our sonar is operational,” Dr. Sam said, confused. “The creature’s disappeared.”

  “A beast that size doesn’t just disappear,” Cavenger roared.

  There was a mild impact to the boat, enough to throw the frail Cavenger off balance. Emilio grabbed him before he fell.

  “What was that?” Cavenger asked.

  “We’ve hit something,” Haskell said nervously. He shifted the motor’s gears. “We’ve got power, but it’s not engaging the prop.”

  “Tell everyone to hold their positions,” Cavenger ordered Randolph. He got on the radio as Cavenger went to Haskell. “What is going on!” he yelled.

  “There must be something wrong with the propeller shaft,” Haskell said.

  “I think he’s right,” Emilio agreed.

  “We’re dead in the water, is that what you’re telling me?” Cavenger began to rant.

  “We must have hit one of those logs.” Captain Haskell’s voice cracked in the face of Cavenger’s fury. “Probably a sheared cotter pin. We can fix it, but someone’s going to have to go down.”

  Cavenger turned on Randolph. “You’re the dive engineer. Go fix it!”

  “Mr. Cavenger,” Randolph said respectfully, “we had something on the sonar. One of the creatures is somewhere around here.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Cavenger said. “Sam said it disappeared, didn’t you, Sam?”

  “It’s not on the sonar,” Dr. Sam replied.

  “Then it’s gone, is that correct?” Cavenger pressed. “Or don’t you know what the hell you’re talking about?”

  “It’s gone,” Dr. Sam said uneasily.

  “Fine,” Cavenger told Dr. Sam. “And since you’re the great oceanographer, you can buddy Randolph on the dive.”

  12

  THE DEN OF THE PLESIOSAURS

  Loch and Zaidee looked to the east corridor of the lake once the search fleet had passed. Finally, they saw a lone boat cutting through the water toward them. As it neared, they saw Sarah waving to them from behind the wheel of an old fishing skiff.

  “See,” Loch told Zaidee, “she comes through.”

  “I still don’t trust her,” Zaidee said through her teeth. “Besides, it’s just a dumpy old fishing boat.”

  “I think you should stay at the camp,” Loch said.

  “No way.” Zaidee made a face.

  “Zaidee,” Loch said, “it really would be safer.”

  “Look,” Zaidee said. “You can depend on me. I’m not going to let you risk your life with some daddy’s little girl with no guts. She won’t be there for you when you need her. She doesn’t even like fish.”

  “You’ll have nightmares.”

  “Wee Beastie needs me!” Zaidee stamped her foot.

  Sarah threw the boat into neutral as she neared the dock. She let the momentum and wind glide the boat in. Loch grabbed the front tie rope while Zaidee jumped aboard.

  “The boat’s not very fast,” Sarah apologized, “but at least it’s bigger than your boat.”

  Loch recognized the skiff as he boarded and pushed off. “It was in the first day’s search.”

  “Right. They dropped it out when they got the PT,” Sarah said. “I had to take this or a twenty-seven-foot Seasprite with a leak.”

  Loch swung around into the open cabin and took over the wheel. He shifted into reverse. The dual propellers churned the water behind them, drawing the boat backward and away from the dock. At the edge of the black water, he shifted into forward and brought the boat around and headed across the lake.

  “Where are we going?” Sarah asked.

  “The logging camp.”

  “Why?”

  Loch knew he had to warn them. “I found the caretaker’s head last night,” he said. “You don’t want to know about that, but something’s spilling the logs out of the pond there.”

  “You found Jesse Sanderson’s head?” Zaidee said, her eyes wide. “Oh, puke.”

  “I’ll give you the grisly details later. How fast does this baby go?” Loch asked.

  “You saw me,” Sarah said.

  Loch threw the throttle full open. The motor roared, settling the rear of the skiff deeper into the water. It threw out an enormous wake and lifted the bow above the horizon line.

  “It’s doing ten, maybe twelve knots,” Loch called over the noise. “That’s not too bad.”

  “Glad you like it,” Sarah said. She moved closer to him, putting her arm around his waist.

  Zaidee gagged. “Oh, that’s cute.”

  “How would you know what’s cute?” Sarah asked.

  Zaidee stuck her tongue out and sat on the side bench. She started checking out the equipment on board. There was a coil of old rope, rusted trolling gear, and a half dozen tar-covered life vests in a center storage chest. She rummaged through the life vests, picked out the cleanest one, and put it on, tying the strings in front into neat bows. She moved forward to get a better look at the electronic equipment. There was a gaping hole in the center where the sonar equipment had been pulled out, but an old tuner protruded from the right of the control panel.

  “At least they left the radio,” Zaidee said.

  Loch stayed on a course straight across the lake. He wanted to spend as little time as possible traveling in the deepest water, and at ten knots he figured no creature would have the time or the inclination to take a bead on them. If there was one thing he really believed about the beasts, it was that they wouldn’t attack unless they thought someone was going to harm them.

  “Careful in the shallows,” Sarah said as the boat approached the north shore.

  “Right,” Loch said, circling wide to the left, then straightening the skiff out to run parallel along the deep-water line.

  The three of them looked in awe at the huge wall of thick, tall pines that rose from the rocks of the north shore. The late-morning sun wasn’t high enough yet in the sky to light the mammoth trees of the north bank. Farther up the shallows disappeared altogether, blending into a great blackness of water. From here the massive scars the logging mill had inflicted on the mountains could be glimpsed on the highest ridges.

  Sarah pointed, shouting above the din of the motor: “There’s the mill.”

  Zaidee was on her feet now, watching the approach to the boathouse with its long wooden dock. The mill itself w
as a long rectangle of corrugated tin, with an entire wall of windows overlooking the lake. It was cantilevered on jutting supports that thrust the building high out over the water. An elevated sluice emerged from one end of the building like the tracks of a roller coaster.

  Zaidee felt a chill. “Jeez, it looks spooky.”

  “If Wee Beastie’s anywhere, it’s around here,” Loch said.

  At the base of the mill was the holding pond, its surface covered with enormous, moldering logs left over from when the mill had closed.

  Loch took the boat in closer, checking the levee between the log pond and the lake. “That’s where all the logs have been drifting out from,” Loch said, pointing to a break in the levee. He shifted the boat into neutral, letting it glide toward the dock. Sarah took the wheel as Loch ran out on the bow and jumped onto the dock with the front tie rope. A second later Sarah jumped onto the dock and secured the rear tie.

  “You stay with the boat,” Loch told Zaidee.

  “I don’t want to,” Zaidee complained.

  “Just until Sarah and I check something out,” Loch said. He reached over and smoothed Zaidee’s hair, which, thanks to the wind, was standing up like the bristles of a brush. She looked at him pleadingly. “But you can depend on me. You need me. …”

  “We’ll be right back,” Loch told her. “I promise.”

  Zaidee watched her brother and Sarah head down the dock toward the boathouse. “Five minutes!” she called after him. “Please find Wee Beastie!” Then she remembered the skiff’s radio. She’d play with that awhile.

  “It’s a nice little boathouse,” Sarah said, looking up at the picture window on the second floor. “It’s like the dwarfs’ cottage in ‘Snow White,’ she added. “My mom made Dad buy a new place in Switzerland. She hangs out there full-time now. It’s got the same kind of boathouse, but with six boat slips underneath and a couple of heavy-duty racing boats. You’ve got to come over.”

  “Sometime when your father’s not there,” Loch said, checking the water on both sides of the dock.

  “Exactly,” Sarah said.

  Closer, they saw the door to the boathouse had been left open. It swung gently in the breeze.

  “Hello! Anybody here?” Loch called out. He knew Jesse wouldn’t be showing up, but maybe he had some kind of family or friends.

  Walking inside the boathouse, Loch and Sarah saw a small outboard and a canoe bobbing in their slips. “Anybody here?” Loch called again, his voice reverberating between the water and the second floor.

  “Nobody’s here,” Sarah said.

  They started up the steps to the living quarters. At the top of the stairs they heard a TV playing. Loch knocked on the door. There was no answer.

  “This place is deserted,” Loch said, reaching out turning the doorknob. The door was unlocked and they went in.

  “Who’d go out on the lake and leave their TV on?” Sarah asked. “Unless you think the caretaker got it right here, of course.”

  “No,” Loch said.

  Sarah sat in the armchair in front of the TV. She grabbed the remote and started flipping through the channels. Loch went to the picture window to check on Zaidee. He had a clear view of her with a pair of earphones on her head in the boat at the end of the dock. She saw him and gave a big wave.

  It was then that Loch noticed the motion of the water in front of the boathouse. It was as if a wave were forming, a slow surging of water heading into the open boat slips below. Loch shut the TV off.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Sarah asked.

  Loch put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh,” he whispered. “Something’s here.”

  The small boathouse began to vibrate, and the blood drained from Sarah’s face. She had felt that motion before on the catamaran with Erdon. …

  In black-rubber dive suits and scuba gear, Dr. Sam and Randolph climbed down the stern ladder to the rear swim platform of the yacht. Randolph steadied himself and motioned a crew member to pass down a speargun armed with an explosive head. He asked Dr. Sam to hold the speargun while he finished adjusting his equipment.

  “Make sure Emilio signals us if anything comes back on the sonar,” Randolph called up to the deck.

  Cavenger’s head peered down at him from the top railing. “You’re wasting time. Get in the water and fix the damn thing!”

  Randolph put his mask and mouthpiece in place and rolled off the platform into the water. When he surfaced, Dr. Sam carefully placed the speargun in his hands. He waited until Randolph was good and clear, then put his own mask and mouthpiece in place. He turned on the dive lamp mounted on his back, then followed Randolph into the murky water.

  Below the surface, Dr. Sam kicked his flippers to trail Randolph down the side of the hull. The powerful arc light bounced off the chalk-white paint of the ship’s hull, giving them a visibility of nearly twenty feet. Clusters of peat particles rushed at his mask, and the aerator in his mouth turned his breathing into a pronounced wheezing. He felt unsure, all systems of his body on alert as if he were diving in shark waters.

  Randolph reached the propeller first. Dr. Sam swam to his side, grasping the propeller-shaft cowling so he could hold the light steady. The edges of the prop were chipped, but this was nothing that would have stopped the ship. Randolph put the safety binding on the speargun, leaving both hands free. He moved his fingers to the base of the prop and signaled Dr. Sam to bring the light around. He set a grip plier onto a thick rod that looked like a large hairpin. The rod slid right out.

  “Cotter pin’s sheared,” Randolph said, his voice distorted, bubbling through the water to Dr. Sam’s ears.

  Dr. Sam nodded that he understood, took a new pin from his waist kit, and handed it to Randolph. It slid in easily, and Randolph used the pliers to bend the ends of the pin and lock it into place.

  “That’s it,” Randolph said.

  Suddenly, both men became aware of a movement to the port side of the ship’s underbelly. At first Dr. Sam thought it was some type of parallax effect from the arc light reflecting off their air tanks.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Dr. Sam said, giving a thumbs-up signal.

  Randolph signaled him to wait. He unclipped the speargun and swam in the direction of the movement. There was another movement, this one to the starboard, followed by a glimpse of a small black body hurtling itself into the light field, then disappearing.

  Dr. Sam signaled Randolph again that he was going up. He had started away from the center beam when he heard a high-pitched cry like that of a small land animal or seabird. Randolph began backing toward Dr. Sam, as two more small creatures darted in and out at the edge of the light beam. The only frame of reference Dr. Sam had for such animal behavior was on the few occasions he had swum with very young seals and penguins.

  “Come on,” Dr. Sam said.

  “Wait,” Randolph insisted.

  Another of the little creatures came fast by Randolph, then scooted quickly to disappear out into the blackness again. Randolph got a good look at it this time and knew it was smaller than the creature that had been with the kids when he and his men had chased them in the grid. It was younger, maybe only days old. His mind began to spin with the possibilities of how Cavenger would reward him if he could bring the carcass of one up to The Revelation.

  “By God, I’ll go up without you,” Dr. Sam threatened, reaching out to Randolph’s shoulder to turn him.

  “No,” Randolph said.

  If there was one thought creeping into Dr. Sam’s head, it was the realization that there was a family of plesiosaurs in the lake, maybe as many as eight or ten, including the young ones.

  The creatures’ cries grew more piercing, excited now. Randolph shook off Dr. Sam’s hand and raised his speargun.

  “No,” Dr. Sam yelled, the air of his shout bursting out to block the view beyond his mask. When the bubbles cleared he saw a few of the creatures flying at them, each on a slightly different trajectory like atomic particles in a cloud chamber.

&nb
sp; Randolph let loose the spear.

  The spear sped forward beyond the light before it struck something. The explosion from its tip was small, a slight shock wave of sound and light.

  Dr. Sam thought about hitting Randolph, about putting his arm around his neck and physically dragging him up to the surface.

  The cries stopped.

  Randolph smiled at Dr. Sam. Then he signaled that he was swimming forward under the hull to retrieve the specimen. Randolph got only a few yards before the cries returned, this time in a rush that was earsplitting. There was only a moment to be aware of the painful, angry sounds, before five of the small creatures flew straight at Randolph. They hurtled themselves at him like missiles, their cartilage-rimmed mouths opening to reveal the gums of their jaws and their oversized, needlelike teeth. Like a school of piranha they struck Randolph’s body, first tearing away dozens of small pieces of his rubber suit and then, finally, his flesh.

  Dr. Sam started to swim toward Randolph to drag him away from the creatures. But the wounds were too deep now. Blood streamed out into the water as if from punctures in a large, struggling doll. Finally, as the creatures pulled their attacker down, deeper, away from the light, one of Randolph’s arms was bitten free of his body.

  The last Dr. Sam saw of Randolph was the halo of creatures surrounding his head like a scarlet wreath as they plunged him into darkness.

  13

  IN THE CUTTING ROOM

  The vibrations from beneath the boathouse grew stronger. Sarah froze in the armchair, looking to Loch to see what their next move would be. They heard Zaidee calling to them from the end of the dock.

  From the picture window Loch saw her still wearing the radio earphones in the boat. She was waving at him. “Hey! Something’s happened on The Revelation! I can hear what they’re radioing,” she shouted.

  Loch wanted to cry out to Zaidee, to warn her-but he didn’t dare make a sound. Somehow he felt the creatures would know she meant them no harm.