Higher Cause

by John Hunt

  Just then, Petur trudged through a door. Like Jeff, he was wearing one of those blue hospital gowns that hung open in the back. Coming in with him was Moira. She was short and cute, and positioned just enough behind Petur to have a perfect view of his incompletely hidden bottom. The smile on her face suggested that this was intentional.

  “Jeff, is that man regaling you with his perspective on medical economics?”

  “You bet, Petur!” Jeff called back. “By the way, you look mighty fine in that outfit.” He whistled a long catcall. “And, you lucky man, you got a shower!”

  “Don’t count on the shower helping too much. My skin still feels like it’s covered with soap. But at least I don’t stink like a cat box anymore. You know, Thomas,” Petur turned to the doctor, “we do everything so high tech on this island. Why can’t we get something better than these silly gowns? I mean, there has to be something more functional than this!”

  Standall looked over and grinned. “There are. It took my Moira ten extra minutes to find those two old ones. She picked them out just for you.” He stood and stretched his back, cracking his knuckles of his gloved hands. “You do look sexy in that garb though. This should make the island news in the morning. ‘Petur Bjarnasson Exposes Himself to the World.’ Stop the presses! Top story, with pictures. It’ll displace the OTEC bombing, I’m sure.”

  Petur shook his head and walked over to look at Jeff’s arm. It was a mass of red muscle and yellow tissue. The bleeding had almost completely stopped, but that only allowed Petur more visibility into the depth of the wound.

  “That looks terrible.”

  “Missed the bone, entirely. And the nerves. And the artery. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Baddori.”

  “I feel lucky.”

  “Jeff, you need to learn to be more careful. Sophia is going to kill me. She’s been very eager for your return. God knows why.”

  “I think perhaps she shouldn’t see me until I am thoroughly bathed. You’ve had a chance to get clean, but I have been bleeding, preventing me from enjoying that same luxury. I understand I smell unpleasant.”

  Standall had done what he could with the wound in Jeff’s arm. There was still a bloody hole in front and back.

  The doctor said, “That’s about it, I suppose.”

  Jeff looked down at his frayed shoulder. “Are you kidding, doc? How ’bout some stitches?”

  “Nope. If you brought that to me right away, maybe, just maybe I would have sewn it closed. Bullet wounds are usually sterile initially. But if I were to close this one, the risk of infection would be very high. No, it is best to let it heal naturally. You will have one heck of a scar when it’s done, though.”

  Petur shook his head as he looked at the older scars on Jeff’s chest. Under his right arm, the skin on his chest was a mass of distorted and hairless pink scar tissue, deformed by the bone grafts inserted to replace his missing ribs. Several other scars covered his back — clear evidence of a life spent dealing with less than the crème de la crème of humanity.

  Jeff smiled. “For some reason, I don’t think anyone is going to notice one more scar on me.”

  “Okay, you had best go and shower now. We’ll dress this better after you get that ammonia off of you.” Standall hastily slapped two pieces of a sticky material resembling cellophane to each hole in the arm. “This stuff will come off when you get out of the shower. And make the shower quick. I should be at home sleeping by now.”

  Jeff did shower, and for quite some time. Petur was right about that soapy feeling. No amount of water could rinse it off. After drying off and throwing on some underwear, he went back to the room where Standall kept his supplies. Petur and the doctor had been talking. Standall bandaged the wound expertly. He placed damp saline-soaked gauze directly on the wound, then applied a bulky and fluffy gauze dressing all around the upper arm and shoulder. Jeff felt like his upper left arm had been stolen from the Michelin Man.

  “The damp gauze is going to dry slowly. When it has, you can peel it off the wound, then reapply new gauze just as I have done. Not too wet; just a little damp.”

  “Peel it off the wound, huh? Sounds like that might be a little unpleasant. Should I expect a little pain?”

  Standall smiled and patted Jeff’s good shoulder before turning and walking out of the room. As he left, he said, “Nothing a hero like you couldn’t handle.”

  After Standall’s departure, Jeff turned to Petur, who was sitting on a padded round vinyl stool nearby. “You look like you survived your ordeal. Any damage?”

  Petur smiled, “My back teeth feel like shattered glass and keep cutting my tongue. And I have a sore throat from sucking in all that ammonia. Otherwise, I’m intact. Standall said we were both lucky we didn’t get our lungs completely burned by the ammonia. People can die from that stuff.”

  “Is there a dentist on the island to fix those teeth?”

  “Of course. We’ve got one or two of everything, you know.” Petur turned serious. “What do we do now? Shall I close down the island — not let anyone leave?”

  Jeff shook his head. “No need. Those two guys aren’t coming back to Paradise 1. They knew you could shut this island down tight within thirty seconds of a bomb going off. No, they are bugging out of here as fast as they can. They’re probably eighty kilometers away already. Gonna meet that submarine. Or maybe a surface vessel.”

  “Who are they? Do you have any clue?”

  “Well, they’re Arabs — or Semites of some kind: Iraqi, Saudi.… maybe even Palestinian, but I doubt it.”

  “You got a good look at them? I didn’t see anything but shadows.”

  “Yes. I got a close-up view of the taller fellow, and the engineers had a face-to-face with the stocky fireplug-looking guy. Brave men, those two. The tall one jumped off the OTEC, with a bullet wound in his side. More than fifty meters into the water, just to escape little ol’ me. Crazy fool.”

  Petur asked his question again. “So what do we do now? How do we prevent this from happening again?”

  “First of all, we get rid of the two men from tonight.”

  “How do we accomplish that?”

  “We don’t. Our Navy friends will take care of it.”

  Petur cleared his throat. “By the way, I was wondering how you got those planes here.”

  Shrugging, Jeff said, “Isaac arranged it for me somehow. I had told him my theory about the sub, and next thing I know, he tells me that two P-3s are going to be in the area just about the time we arrive. Mighty convenient.”

  Now it was Petur’s turn to shake his head. “That man never ceases to amaze me. He has more tricks up his sleeve than anyone I know.”

  Jeff was curious. “How did you meet up with Isaac, anyhow?”

  “Well,” Petur began, “Years ago, I read an article that Isaac had written for some obscure magazine. It had been reprinted in Reader’s Digest, which is where I saw it. Basically, he presented his concerns about the economic system — the same concerns I had come to appreciate independently. But his idea was to work through the current political system, educate people, whereas I had come to believe that the system was probably too strong to be uprooted by grassroots efforts. I wrote him with my proposal. He agreed. We met in person. And we have been in this together ever since.”

  “Rather fortuitous, it would seem. What does he do again?”

  “Nothing now. He has retired into the life of a professor emeritus — which, I suppose, means he gets an adequate pension and is still entitled to use the university swimming pool.”

  “How often is he here on the Island?” asked Jeff.

  “About half of his time, I would guess. He loves it here. And he likes to keep his finger on the pulse of the place, that’s for certain. Back in the States, he is still working for educational and political change. I think it is worth trying, but we both like having the Island as another route.”

  Jeff was quiet for a moment, then rotated his shoulder around a bit to test it. He winced as the pain of the w
ound reignited. He got off the table, and motioned Petur toward the door leading out of the dispensary.

  “Let’s go see how our Navy friends are doing finding our attackers.”

  As the two men opened the door leading to the dark outside, they could hear the loud reverberation of one of the P-3s as it warmed its engines in preparation for flight.

  Commander Grover was irritated. Though they searched for three hours, the crew found nothing at all. They were seeking an older diesel submarine, which should make a helluva racket if it were slinking along on the surface and should make enough noise even if it were running deep, on batteries. If it were moving, they should hear it somewhere.

  They also used active sonar to locate the sub, as it might be quietly floating without engines. But they only had so many buoys, and they had to use them sparingly. Thus, they could have missed their target. With all the pinging in the water and the P-3 flying in a search pattern throughout the area, any submerged intruders certainly knew they were being hunted.

  They had had several false signals — large pleasure boats mostly. It had taken only moments for Sensors 1 and 2, coupled with the crew’s eyes, to identify them.

  The other plane would be coming out to join the hunt soon. At this moment, they were going through their preflight routine while reviewing updated tasking from CINCPAC. More sea could be covered in less time with two planes on the lookout. Grover hoped that they could find it, or else morale might fall significantly. The men needed some success — that was certain.

  “TACCO, Sensor 1.” A voice crackled through his headphones.

  “Go.”

  “I just got real weak contact on Buoy 12. Passive only. Bearing 220 degrees. On the surface. This could be something.”

  “It’ll be a blue whale,” chimed in Epps. The copilot was getting pessimistic too.

  “TACCO, Flight, I’ll start heading that way.” Grover was more hopeful. The acoustic operators had warned, each time they found vessels that turned out to be sailboats, that the vessels seemed suspiciously small and the signal was probably too weak to be a sub. This time they seemed more confident. Grover was confident too.

  They marked on top Buoy 12 and took up a course of 220. “Sensor 3, TC, keep a good watch ahead with FLIR.”

  Flying at 180 knots, Grover knew that after five minutes on this heading they would cover fifteen nautical miles. Acoustic contact from a surfaced vessel would mean it was no more than that distance from the buoy holding contact. In the dark of the night, he should be seeing lights from any surface vessel. He could see nothing.

  “TACCO, Sensor 3, contact immediately below us, on the surface. Contact is approximately ninety meters in length. No identification available.”

  “Roger. Sensor 3, TACCO, confirm, is he displaying running lights?”

  “TACCO, Sensor 3. He is not lit at all.”

  “Flight, TC, can you see anything?”

  “TC, Flight, not a thing. We’ll drop down and go in for a closer look.”

  “Chief, extinguish all external lights.” Over the ICS Grover ordered the crew to extinguish all interior lights not needed for the mission. In order to get a closer view, he then banked the plane to the left, making a rapid turn while dropping in altitude to maintain his speed. A moment later, they were three hundred feet off the deck and starting to pick up some salt spray on the windshield. They were rushing toward their target at a speed of nearly three hundred knots. Grover would normally have flown the plane much slower, but he had no desire to be an easy target for some joker on a sub or a darkened ship with a surface-to-air missile launcher at the ready. Both pilots, the flight engineer, and several crewmen in the back of the plane all had eyes pealed for whatever was on the surface. However, the best view would be from the infrared camera Sensor 3 was using.

  The darkness of the overcast night worked against them, however. They passed immediately above the target once again, but were able to discern nothing. There was no light visible on the dark sea.

  “Flight, TC, let’s drop a couple of buoys. I’ll send you the drop points. That will be a lot safer and more effective than having to fly over this area again.”

  “Sensor 1, TC, monitor the new buoys and let me know immediately if we get any information about what this vessel might be or if they start to submerge. We may be sticking around here for a while. If they dive, we take them out.”

  “Sensor 1, roger.”

  Epps looked over at his PPC and asked, “What if it’s not our target?”

  Grover pondered for a moment. The other P-3 would simply have to cover more area. “Frank may just have to be the man, then. But this contact, totally dark, is either a dead ship or our target.”

  As Grover turned the plane to fly over the surface contact to drop a buoy on the opposite side, the cockpit was suddenly bathed in blinding white light.

  “What the hell!” screamed Epps. All three members of the flight crew immediately lost their night vision, and had it not been for the autopilot flying the selected course from the flight director while maintaining level flight, there would have been no one safely flying the plane. All three were simultaneously considering that this was preliminary to an explosion that would mean they had just flown their last earthly flight.

  “TACCO, Sensor 3, I just had my entire infrared screen wiped out.”

  “Sensor 3, roger.”

  “Flight, TC, I heard some major shouting from up there. What gives?”

  Clearly the back of the “bus” had not been as impacted by the blinding light as the flight station: calm questions came from behind the blackout curtain aft of the cockpit, but the men just forward of it were pumped with adrenaline.

  “TC, Flight, it appears the surface contact took a dim view of our flying over them at 300 feet and decided to light things up in retaliation for our scaring them. We just got hit with their carbon arc searchlight. Several million candle power, I’d say. If we were back in the old P-3A days, we could thank them in kind.”

  “I’ll send up the off-duty third pilot and FE to give you a break.”

  “Thanks. We’ll be a while getting back our night vision but we can at least have the autopilot get us where we need to be.”

  “Nav, Flight, see if you can contact that ship on guard frequency and find out what the hell they’re up to.”

  An aye-aye crackled through Grover’s headset, indicating that the navigator, who also manned the radio, would comply.

  “Epps, stay sharp. It’s not a sub, but that doesn’t mean she’s friendly.”

  Two minutes later, the navigator was in their ears again. “Flight, she is the Aniko Maru. A freighter out of Japan, coming in from Tahiti to Paradise 1. They heard a rumor about the submarine and decided to keep a low profile until things settled. That is why she was sitting dead in the water with no running lights.”

  “Crap!” Epps exclaimed.

  “Understood, Nav. Double check that story with Paradise 1, will you? Make sure the Aniko Maru is expected. Thanks.” Grover turned to his copilot, switching his headset to their private channel. “Sorry, Mike. I thought this might be the real thing.”

  They were now climbing to a safe altitude over the Aniko Maru in order to monitor more sonobuoys. A sonobuoy’s one-watt transmitter made for poor reception if the pilots didn’t maintain an altitude that allowed for line-of-sight transmission. Thus, as they were climbing they could start to pick up their previous pattern buoys as well.

  “TC, Sensor 1, we’re picking up nothing with the two buoys that doesn’t seem to be coming directly from the Aniko Maru.”

  Grover said to no one in particular, “At first I hoped this would be the real thing, then I was scared to death it was the real thing, and now all I’m thinking is that I’m tired and can’t see a damned thing. I wonder what it would take to get the Navy to start letting us carry booze on these flights.”

  29. The Bounty Is Near

  PETUR SAT SLUMPED on his couch, still recovering from his ordeal in the OTEC. H
is throat hurt more now, and every time he swallowed was a new experience in torture. He had recently gone to his kitchen to bring back a plastic cup into which he could spit. Turning slightly on the couch, he waved to the man who was knocking on the sliding glass door of his porch.

  “Come in, Joseph,” Petur croaked.

  Joseph Onbacher struggled for a moment to open the heavy sliding door. He had rested a hefty box against his thigh while he wrestled with the latch. With effort the salty runners finally gave in, and the gentle sea breeze caressed the inside of the house.

  “Don’t get up,” Joseph cut off Petur as he began to lift himself from the couch. “You need to rest.” He put the cardboard box on the floor.

  “I’m doing okay. I don’t sound so great. But the doctor assures me that I’ll be as good as new someday.”

  “How long in the future is ‘someday’?” Joseph quizzed him as he worked his way toward Petur’s kitchen.

  “You know, he didn’t say. Doc Standall is rather nefarious in his ability to avoid giving precise times to recovery. When I heal, I will be well.” He glanced at the box on the floor. “What have you got there?”

  Joseph had poured himself a glass of papaya juice and sipped at it as he walked back into the living room. He sat in the padded navy blue loveseat that faced towards Petur’s perch. Ignoring the question, he noted, “You don’t look very well at all, Petur. What happened to your skin?”

  Petur looked down at his bare arms and grunted a sort of partial laugh. His skin was peeling off in sheets, leaving the small hairs on his arms behind. It was only the most superficial layer that was shedding, so it was not even as bad as a severe sunburn. But unlike a sunburn, there was not an inch of his skin that was not peeling.

  “Apparently ammonia causes some of the skin to slough off. I itch like you can’t imagine. And I feel like I have leprosy. But it is better than feeling soapy all the time.” He looked around at the blue couch. “This couch looks like Mr. Dandruff himself has been living on it. I’m going to have to wash my mattress with a fire hose to eliminate all the little dust mites which are bound to feast on what has flaked off.”