Circle of Bones: a Caribbean Thriller

by Christine Kling

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  She flipped the switch that started the bilge blowers. She hated boats with gasoline engines. Unlike diesel, the fumes from gas could turn a boat into a bomb, so you always had to make sure that no fumes had settled into the bilge. She turned the ignition keys. Both engines growled to life. She climbed out of the padded seat and saw Dig perched on the edge of the stern bench seat. He was staring down at his arm in the sling. His face looked pale and the tendons in his neck were taut.

  “The engines need to warm up,” she said.

  He lifted the gun aiming it at her midsection.

  “For real,” she said, raising her hands in the air. “You don’t want engine trouble when we’re heading through the cut in the reef. Anyway, it looks like you’re hurt. I’ll take care of the lines.”

  He didn’t answer her. She could see he was gritting his teeth.

  The bow line on the Fish n’ Chicks was long enough to reach across the deck of the racing machine, and she tied it to a forward cleat on her sailboat. She couldn’t stand the idea of letting any boat get carried onto the rocks — even a powerboat.

  As she untied the last line, she saw Pinky’s eyes flutter. The black racer began to drift away from the sailboat. She looked up as Dig slid into the padded passenger seat and twisted his body sideways. He hadn’t noticed Pinky. He swung the gun from her to the driver’s seat, pointing. She sat down, put the engines in gear, and headed for the harbor entrance.

  “I’ve never driven one of these before,” she shouted when they’d made it through the narrow cut and the boat started to rock and roll. The motion was very different from a sailboat.

  “I drove it myself from Trois Rivières to the Saintes. It’s not that complicated. Shove those things forward.” He pointed the gun at the throttles.

  She pushed them forward until they were doing about ten knots, rising and falling into the troughs between the waves.

  “Faster,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I’ll lose control.” She had to shout over the roar of the engines.

  “Stop stalling, Riley.”

  She increased the speed a little more, but they were still doing less than half of what the boat could do. The boat would start to pound if she speeded it up.

  “You’re hurt,” she said. “The pounding won’t do you any good.”

  “More,” he yelled.

  Maybe she could take him in the wrong direction. Did Dig know where the Iles de la Petite Terre were located?

  “Turn on the charts.” He pointed the gun at the dark screen of the GPS chart plotter. “The guy who rented me the boat showed me how to use that.”

  So much for trying to take them off course.

  As the chart plotter was going through its warm up sequence, she turned to look at his face. She saw that the lines on either side of his mouth were etched deeper now, and there were strands of gray hair around his temples.

  “What happened to you, Diggory?” Her voice was barely loud enough to be heard over the engines.

  He reared his head back then spoke into the wind. “Some idiot shot me.”

  “That’s not what I meant. How did you get to be like this?”

  He looked at her. “Like what?”

  “A monster.”

  He leaned back and barked a single laugh at the sky. “Monster?” he shouted. “If that’s what I am, then that’s what your father was too, Riley.”

  I don’t doubt that, she thought. But I have found your favorite topic: you.

  “Your father molded me who and what I am. We’re just men. Men who were born to rule other men.”

  “Amoral men, you mean.”

  “And women. You’ve played your part in this, Riley.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Riley, the good soldier. The dutiful Marine. That’s still how you see yourself, isn’t it?”

  She turned away from him and looked across the tops of the waves that marched to the horizon. The sun was shining, the sea breeze smelled clean and pure, but she felt the menace in the air. It was how you felt when you were diving a lush coral reef and from the corner of your eye, you saw the dark shadow of a cruising shark.

  “You’re talking about Lima, aren’t you?”

  “Ah, well done. You always were good. Even when it was against regulations.”

  “Everything about our affair was against regulations, Diggory.” She spoke more for herself than him.

  “Ha! Touché. More than you know.”

  She turned around and those dazzling blue eyes were so close, watching her with amusement. She didn’t look away this time. “Dig, I’m sick of playing these games. Tell me.”

  “You’ve already figured it out, Riley. You simply can’t admit it.”

  “That’s not true,” she said, but she felt the twisting blackness in her growing.

  “Of course, it’s true. It was you. You remember. That morning, you came by my apartment. We had sex and you were all moony-eyed. What the fuck were you thinking? That what we had was true love?”

  “You said it was,” she said. And I believed you.

  The corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile and he gave that half-cough, half-laugh again. “I wanted to get laid.”

  The boat rose up on a large swell then dropped with a jarring slam into the trough.

  “There were others you could have chosen for that. It was my father you wanted to fuck with. Killing Michael wasn’t enough for you.”

  She felt the sourness trying to crawl up her throat. She’d never been seasick in her life, but this time, she wasn’t sure she could swallow it down.

  Dig laughed. “I can’t argue with that. It was time to add you to the list of Yorick paybacks. I gave you that package to deliver to Hutchinson at the Marine House. I knew you could get it through security. I told you it was a radio. It wasn’t, of course.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “You keep telling yourself that, but inside, you know this is the truth, Riley.” He leaned his head back against his seat and looked up at the sky again, as though he were struggling to remember one of hundreds of similar missions. “We had a problem with the Peruvians concerning a free trade agreement and certain mining rights. We believed that the Peruvians would see things our way if they feared a reemergence of Shining Path and felt indebted to the Americans for their sacrifice. And I was finished with you — in fact, you were becoming a liability. I couldn’t resist the delicious irony of taking out Yorick’s daughter among the Marines. I had everything worked out until you had to screw it all up by delivering the package, then leaving the Marine House. I wasn’t rid of you after all.”

  She remembered again standing in the little bodega, buying a bottle of wine for that night after her shift. Then she felt the concussion as the old man placed her change in her palm, and she was running toward the smoke. Later, when they’d told her the blast had originated in Hutch’s room, she kept pushing back at the blackness.

  But she couldn’t push it back any longer. Riley throttled back, pulled herself up out of the seat, hung her body over the rail, and vomited until her body was wracked with dry heaves.

  “So I watched you,” Dig continued as if nothing had happened. As if he couldn’t hear her retching. “Granted, from a distance. You kept your mouth shut. It was remarkable, really. I knew a part of you suspected, but I suppose another part refused to believe that you could have been responsible for all that death and destruction.”

  Her mind hung like a broken record, repeating over and over, Oh Danny, sweet funny Danny. I’m so sorry.

  “You’ve been a loose end for many years now, and I’ve never been certain you wouldn’t find Jesus and decide to confess.”

  No, she hadn’t known. Had she? In her nightmares when the flames burned around her and she carried Danny on her shoulder again, she’d felt the guilt. And told herself it was survivor’s guilt.

  She was spent, empty. Still hanging over the side, she stared down into the white
foam sliding by the black hull. She could kick with her legs and slide over the side into the dark cool water. Deny him this pleasure. Put out the flames for good.

  A long silver object streaked out from under the hull, startling her, and then it disappeared out into the dark water. She heard a splash in the distance. Then another silver torpedo shape raced by right under her face, a long jagged scar visible on her back. In a few seconds, the dolphin returned and swam alongside in the shadow of the boat, swinging her course from side to side with effortless pumps of her flukes, keeping perfect pace with the big black powerboat.

  Riley was aware that Diggory was still speaking, but she couldn’t hear him any longer. She reached her arm toward the water, her fingertips inches from the surface. She remembered Cole and his crazy talk of luck and dolphins. And again, she felt that vibration of connecting to another being. Was it a shark that had inflicted the wound that stretched from the dolphin’s head to past the dorsal fin?

  The sleek animal twisted her body round so that she was swimming on her side, her dark eye staring up, her mouth curving up into that natural smile. Then she rolled back over and when her fin broke through the surface, Riley’s fingers touched the rough white scar. In the next instant, with one mighty thrust of her flukes, she was gone.

  Seconds later, she shot out of the water off the bow and arced up in a high leap streaming water.

  “Shit,” Dig said. “Did you see that? Get back up here and drive. You almost hit a dolphin.”

  Riley pushed her belly up off the rail, and she slid back into her seat. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “I didn’t kill them,” she said.

  “You delivered the bomb.”

  She shook her head. “It was you, Dig. I was just a tool you used. You killed them.”

  The corner of his mouth turned up again. She wanted to smash her fist into that mouth. But more than that. She had to stop him.

  “You’re not some kind of better breed of human being. Far from it. And lost as my father was, he was never like you. He hurt over the things he’d done. Not you. You’re a malignancy. A bad seed. Something went wrong inside you, and you can’t even recognize that you’re a freak.”

  “Shut up, you stupid cunt.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “Now you sound like Spyder. You’re no different than him. I bet he never knew his father, either.”

  He hit her again. She’d known he would, but she was willing to take a beating to buy even a few seconds more time. She wiped the blood from her mouth.

  “Just keep your mouth shut and drive the boat,” he shouted.

  She jammed the throttles forward. The boat leapt onto a plane and began bouncing from wave top to wave top. Get ready, Cole. It’s time to stop this lunatic.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

  Off Îles de la Petite Terre

  March 31, 2008

  7:50 a.m.

  Cole treaded water as Theo swung the crane around and out over the water, then lowered the ROV Enigma over the side. The underwater vehicle’s three-foot square boxy frame and buoyancy tanks were made of PVC pipe painted bright yellow. Enigma was propelled and steered by a series of four blue bilge pumps that turned small red propellors. The forward-facing lights at the two top corners looked more like bug-eyes than headlamps. The thing looked like a giant toy made out of Legos.

  Neither man knew whether Theo’s design would survive at the depths they would now attempt, but he had built her for just this kind of work. All the wires for the lights, video camera, manipulator arm and propulsion system were bundled together in a thick, snake-like tether that was one hundred and fifty feet in length. That had better be long enough, Cole thought as he caught the lower end of the ROV’s frame, and steered it away from Shadow Chaser’s steel hull. He opened the snap shackle that connected Enigma to the crane.

  “Clear!” he shouted and the crane’s electric motor whirred as the line retracted and the arm swung back aboard.

  Once he had secured the crane, Theo appeared at the rail with the joystick box that controlled Enigma. “Ready to test?” he said.

  “Roger that.”

  The four little propellers began to spin all at once, and the ROV surged forward through the water. Cole had to pump his fins to keep up. “Forward thrust, check,” he called out. The headlamps flashed. “Lights, check.” A metal arm rose from the water and the pincer claw snapped shut. “Nutcracker, check.”

  Theo said, “Swim around front and smile for the camera.”

  Cole lowered his face mask, put the scuba regulator in his mouth and swam around to the front of the vehicle. He released some air from his buoyancy compensator so he could float a few feet below the surface in front of the video camera mounted on the Enigma’s frame. He waved, then kicked for the surface.

  “Very photogenic, Dr. Thatcher.” Theo was holding up his tablet PC to show the video feed when Cole surfaced.

  Cole pulled the regulator out of his mouth. “Just like Lloyd Bridges. I get to star in my own episode of Sea Hunt.” He removed his face mask, spit in it and washed the saliva around to prevent the glass from fogging. “Listen, Theo, if Priest shows up while I’m below, blink Enigma’s lights twice. I’ll know he’s there and waiting for me. If you think you or Riley are in immediate danger, flash three times, and I’ll know to get to the surface as fast as I can.”

  “What about decompressing?”

  “Let me worry about that.” Cole situated his mask back on his face. “And let me know what’s going on topsides. You watch my hands on the video screen. I’ll use sign language to communicate.” During their trials of the Enigma back in North Carolina, they had both learned to sign the alphabet along with a few basic words.

  “According to my computer, it’s 9:47,” Theo said. “Remember, you’ve got the steel mesh cargo net and the air bag if you want to send anything topsides.”

  Cole checked his gauges, readjusted his backpack for comfort and took hold of his regulator.

  “And Cap, remember, you’ve got no back-up. You be careful down there.”

  Cole attempted a grin for his friend. “Roger that. See ya in a few.” He gave Theo a thumbs up, and popped the regulator into his mouth.

  As he descended, Cole kept checking back over his shoulder to make sure the Enigma was right behind him. The little ROV was pretty fast once Theo got the ballast tanks flooded right, so she descended at the correct angle. Then her forward thrust drove her downward much faster than a slow sink. Cole shivered as he swam into a new thermal patch where the water was a good ten degrees cooler than the surface. He listened to his breathing — inhale hiss, exhale bubble. In the background, he both heard and felt his own heart pounding. He concentrated on calming his breathing in order to preserve his air. He’d made hundreds of dives in his life, but he hadn’t felt nervous like this since he was a kid.

  After the night of strong winds and rain, the visibility was not great. At forty-five feet down now, he could begin to make out the dark blue shadow on the sea floor. The sunlight was starting to dim and the Enigma’s head lamps made him feel as though he was swimming in a bright bubble of color while the sea around him turned a dusky shade of blue. The occasional fish darted off in surprise as he swam into its territory, but the most abundant life was evident in the thousands of tiny brine shrimp and microscopic creatures that made the sea water look like a thick biological soup.

  Cole reached for his own light that hung by a tether from his backpack. He switched it on as he continued to pump his fins and pop his ears. At first, the concentrated beam reflected back off the matter floating in the water, but then he saw far off in the column of light, a distinct dark shape. It was the rudder, sticking up into the water in such a way that he had a hard time believing what he was looking at. Then he saw the hull stretching out and down ahead of the rudder. He squinted. Surcouf was resting on her starboard side, the whole wreck pointing downward into the trench.

  A long and thin line, not quite horizontal, caught his attention forward. As he swam d
eeper, it began to look like a crooked, arthritic finger pointing toward the surface. When he made out the larger shape attached to it, Cole recognized it as one of the pair of thirty-seven millimeter canons Surcouf carried aft of the conning tower and atop the seaplane hangar — the long barrel now covered with marine growth.

  My God, she’s enormous. He could not see where the dark hull ended in the gloom in either direction. As he swam closer, he saw the film of coral and barnacle growth on the lifelines surrounding the hangar deck, but there was less growth than he had imagined. It had to be the depth. Even in these clear Caribbean waters, one didn’t find the lush coral down here where so little sunlight penetrated. It was amazing how intact she was. He reached out and grabbed the lifeline and a small cloud of matter mushroomed around his gloved hand.

  Cole looked over his shoulder at the bright headlamps of the ROV. He couldn’t see the video camera, but he knew it was there and Theo was watching him. He gave another thumbs up. He’d made it. He was touching Surcouf — the first human to do so in sixty-seven years. Just ahead of him was the round shape of the opening for the seaplane hanger. On top of it was the deck with the pair of deck canons and above that, the conning tower. All of it was tilted at such an extreme angle nose downward, it looked as though she were ready to slide down into the trench at any moment.

  He kicked his fins and swam alongside the hull heading forward and descending deeper. The wreck rested on a sandy slope that fell away into blue black water. There was no grass or coral on the sea floor, but from under the wreck small schools of fish flashed past him in their panic at having a visitor after all these years.

  The forward gun turret had been ripped open. The gun barrels that once protruded there were now long gone, and the upper deck revealed a huge gaping hole. Cole wondered if it had been the sub’s own ammunition that had caused the damage. Forward of the hole the deck ran intact for several more feet before the entire forward section of the submarine had been ripped open. The bow section now hung by what looked like a combination of steel cables and thin pieces of twisted metal. The incline increased so rapidly there, the bottom fell away and the forward piece hung unsupported over the crevasse.