Arch Patton

by James Strauss

  Don opened the door and stepped into the cabin, seeming to fill half of it.

  “Hey,” he boomed, a question mark in his voice and on his face.

  “We need to talk,” I said, in some exasperation.

  “Hmmm,” he replied, and then sat on the unmade bed. Maialen sat beside him, one hand placed protectively on his thigh.

  I cleared my throat and began. “Borman is a problem. I don’t know what to do about him. We’re close to Russia. I need to get to Provideniya and do some stuff there. I need to stay aboard until that’s done. Only about a day or two. Can you help?”

  I finished and waited, having told Botany Bay more than I intended, but having no other choice. He laughed, ruefully.

  “A couple of days? Ha! Have you been paying attention to our course? The weather’s blowing. We’re running down a following sea. We can’t make headway up that peninsula. We’re headed down for the Pribilofs. We’ll be at least four, maybe five days, out from the peninsula.”

  I sighed. There just seemed to be no good news at all, as the circumstances surrounding the mission continued to spin out of control and conspire against it.

  “Alright,” I said, in defeated acceptance. “How do I stay aboard this thing until we get to Russia?”

  Don guffawed deeply in his chest.

  “You’ll stay aboard. No place to dump you. No airport on the Pribilofs. Besides, Benito likes you. Really. The Filipinos believe she likes your scars and other parts.”

  I colored instantly and noted the faint smile flicker across the Basque’s face.

  “Captain can’t fire you. He can throw you in the brig, but only the cruise director can fire you,” Don went on, “so there you have it. All you have to do is sleep with Benito and your future is made.”

  I almost choked. The expression “it’s a rotten job, but somebody’s got to do it” came to my mind with a bad aftertaste. A sickly expression crossed my face.

  Don continued, “Oh, don’t cough up any hair balls. There’s more to it. You’re the ‘de facto’ ship’s doctor, the only anthropologist we have, and then there’s the diving part. Your many jobs are secure.”

  Don folded his arms, although the ship’s increasing movement made it difficult for him to sit without holding on to something.

  “I don’t think there’s going to be much diving done in these conditions,” I responded, unable to think of anything else to say, and hoping that Don would not ask any more probing questions.

  Then I almost fell off the end of the bunk. The ship had skewed wildly, as a wave passed beneath. I grabbed for the bulkhead.

  “How big a sea does it take to make this ship move like that?” I blurted into the sudden silence.

  “Maybe sixty feet,” Don responded, but he did not smile when he said it.

  He moved to the cabin porthole and looked out. “Borman will be looking for a bit of succor out here. We can’t take this kind of beating for long.”

  I joined him at the porthole. “The ship isn’t tough enough for simple swells, even huge ones?” I asked, in shock.

  Don turned away. “Oh yeah. No problem there. But the passengers get upset and sick. It’s bad for business. He’ll find us some calmer water.”

  I stood up and headed for the cabin door. “Thanks,” I murmured, as I passed the Basque. She reacted, almost imperceptibly, as I went by. Don responded, as well.

  “Think nothing of it. Thanks to you, for the carvings, and getting me out of the trouble you got me into. And, especially, for the vivid image in my mind of you and Benito.”

  I went out to the corridor which had become a twisting tube of gravity defying leaps and bounds. There was nobody out at all. I made it to my cabin. I was supposed to dress for dinner. I rummaged through the gear in Don’s bag finding no sports coat or wool slacks. Only my evening shoes were in the bag. My sports coat was hanging on the bathroom door. I examined it. The entire outfit was perfectly pressed. Filipe had struck again.

  I held tightly to the bunk and the bulkhead as the Lindy was tossed about in the seas. Realizing that I did not want dinner, I laid down on the bunk. There were straps hooked into the bulkhead wall. I now understood what they were for. Pulling the nylon cords up from under the mattress, I hooked them one by one across my body.

  “A nap,” I whispered, “my life for a nap.”

  I faded instantly into a deep sleep, lulled by the magical swaying of the great beast under me.

  When I awoke, I tried to jump from the bunk but was held in place by the nylon bands. I could not even bring my hands up to cover my ears. The anchor’s noise eventually played itself out. At the end of the roaring came a distinct loud ping that had not occurred before.

  My brow furrowed as I carefully unlatched myself. There would be no more napping that day. I checked my watch. It was evening. Hours had passed. And the ship was no longer tossing and twisting. All was calm.

  I decided to head for the fantail and sip coffee at the Lido Bar. I was trying not to think of Marlys, from whom I had heard nothing since her bizarre statements on Little Diomede. I was failing badly.

  Don flew through the door before I got to it. “This is your big chance,” he said, breathlessly.

  “Russia?” I asked, right back, with hope in my expression.

  “No, not Russia. I told you about that. We’re anchored in the Pass of the Isle of the Tsar of Russia, between two small islands. We’re safe from the big waves until they abate. Well, we were anchored, anyway.” He looked at me intently, when he finished.

  “We’re anchored?” I repeated, dutifully.

  “Yes, were anchored. Hence, your big chance. The anchor snapped off and we’ve lost it.”

  I eyed him, not getting it but recalling the mysterious ping.

  “You idiot!” Don hurled my way. “The anchor and chain are worth about seventy thousand dollars on a ship this size.”

  I still did not get what he was talking about.

  Don continued, “Borman has personally asked, through Benito, who talked to me, if you would go down and retrieve the damn thing. You’re big chance.”

  I blanched.

  “Are you out of your whacked out Botany Bay driven mind?” I barked at him, in shock. “Out there? In that? Down to whatever the hell is below? In this weather? No way. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever!”

  But Don was not put off. He merely stroked his chin.

  “I was afraid you might say that. If you go you’ll save Borman’s butt. He’s not really the captain you know. This will be his last voyage substituting if he has to report that he’s lost the anchor. Besides, Marlys told me that you would have the courage to go.”

  I reclined on the bunk.

  “Don,” I spelled it out slowly, “I am not the diver that my résumé says I am. I haven’t put on a tank in years. I’ve never commercially dived, nor have I ever gone down in water this cold. A dive in this water, even just to look around, would be damned dangerous.”

  Don changed his tactic.

  “Marlys—” he began, but I interrupted.

  “I don’t want to hear any more mumbo-jumbo from or about Yemaya!”

  But all Don did was gloat. I got off the bunk and paced back and forth through my small space several times. Then I stopped and frowned.

  “That Teutonic Nazi of a phony captain didn’t ask Benito to ask you to ask me, did he?”

  Don looked at me with the same grin on his face.

  “He’s ordering me to go down, isn’t he?”

  Don displayed more teeth. I groaned deeply and noisily. Then I moved to grab my sweater and an extra pair of socks out of my bag. The dry suit would be cold. Lifesaving, but ultra-cold. I’d need the insulation of wool.

  Don applauded as he watched me prepare. “You’re not going because he ordered you, are you?” he inquired.

  I continued
my preparations, getting a jar of Vaseline out of my ditty bag. I would use the mineral grease on the regulator, and for my hands and face. “You don’t do well with authority, I seemed to have noticed.”

  I just looked at him, resigned.

  “No, you’re going for Marlys, but you’ll never admit it. Dutch is right. Yemaya has a target painted on that scarred chest of yours. Like that cartoonist, Gary Larson drew that time. ‘Bummer of a Birthmark, Hal!’”

  I headed for the gear locker without a backward look, trying not to think of the image of a bullseye tattooed on my chest.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Down to the Bottom of the Bering Sea

  I moved down the corridor with a purpose. Don stopped at his cabin door. I turned back to him with a snap.

  “Where are you going?” I demanded, the things I had unloaded from my ditty bag almost scattering.

  “What do you mean?” Don said, in surprise.

  I looked him up and down. “Get your coat and gloves. I’ve got to go down there with Dutch. I need somebody on the dive boat who I can trust, and that’s you.” I stuck him hard in the chest with my extended index finger. He jumped back under my forceful touch.

  “Me? I’m not a diver,” he stated, but his voice was weak. I turned and headed for the dive locker.

  “C’mon and haul out the keys for the clinic. We need some supplies.”

  The clinic was locked, as usual. Don opened the door and then stood back so I could enter. I examined some small brass doors I’d seen, welded to the bulkhead, on our last visit. One of the doors was painted with “narcotics” on the outside in small black letters.

  “Key,” I held out my hand. Don’s hand with the keys in it retreated back to his chest.

  “You can’t just go in there and take what you want. All that stuff is counted and controlled.”

  I continued to hold out my hand until Don relented, which did not take long. I pulled out ampules of morphine. “10 milligrams” was stenciled on the side of each clear glass container. I sloshed the yellowish liquid around. I popped four ampules into my pocket then pulled out some syringes. They went into my pocket, too.

  “Just in case,” was all I volunteered. I tossed the keys back to him as I headed out. “Write a note, then lock up,” I threw over my shoulder.

  Dutch was already suited up when I got to the locker. “What do you have on underneath?” I asked, examining the remaining dry suit for fit. It was too big but it would do.

  “Pants, shirt and two sweaters,” he said.

  I approved.

  “Where are the Navy Dive Tables?” I asked and then proceeded with my pre-dive check.

  “Dive tables? We don’t have any,” Dutch answered.

  I just stopped and looked at him.

  “Dive computer?” I said, my voice rising.

  “Nope,” he replied, flatly.

  “Damn,” I sighed.

  “We don’t ever go deep,” Dutch said, “we only dive in the tropics. We go maybe twenty feet down on the reefs.”

  I suited up without further comment. I checked my tank to make sure that the gauge said 3000, and then hunted around for a pony bottle.

  “No bailout bottles either?”

  Dutch frowned down at me. “What’s a bailout bottle?”

  I had expected the question. A bailout bottle was a very small bottle of compressed air with its own little regulator. If worse came to worse, you could get to the surface on just the pony bottle alone. No modern diver dived without one anymore. This was not going to be anything, more or less, than a risky venture out into a deadly cold sea. I decided that we would go out, dive down, find nothing, and then get the hell out of the water. Screw Borman and the anchor.

  Two Filipinos came into the locker. They began to haul our tanks and B.C.’s down to the waiting Zodiac. Dutch started to follow, but I stopped him by putting my arm across the door.

  “Dutch, this is the kind of dive that guys get killed doing. Pay attention. You do everything, and I mean everything, I tell you, we may live through this.”

  He looked back at me with bloodshot eyes. His breath smelled of booze.

  “Okay Indy,” he exhaled.

  I turned my head away at the 80-proof stench.

  “Your job is to watch me and come to my assistance if I need help. That’s it. No looking for anchors, exploring, or any other nonsense. Just me. You watch my ass. And don’t call me Indy.” I pulled my arm back. “You know how to buddy breathe?” He shook his head, as I sighed again. Deeply. “Final question. How deep is the water?” Dutch knew that one.

  “Sixty-one feet,” he answered, proudly.

  “Some good news,” I said to his back as he went through the hatch. Two atmospheres. A bit less. We could safely stay on the bottom for almost an hour without worrying about the bends. Half an hour to be on the safe side. The Filipinos had taken extra tanks, but we would not be using them. I headed for the Filipino mess. When I got there I scrounged around and found a plate of freshly caught fish. It was cooked in the usual Filipino manner. Ungutted and uncleaned. I prized some flesh off, made six large sandwiches with a loaf of French bread, and half a jar of mayonnaise. I wrapped it all in reams of aluminum foil. The biggest defense against cold weather fatigue was fuel, as Benito had aptly demonstrated earlier.

  Returning to the dive locker, I put the sandwiches and the gear from my ditty bag into a small canvas sack. I’d used the Vaseline and the socks but also took my Stryker flint. It was so powerful that you could ignite bare wood with its sparks, if necessary. I found a big dive knife with a screw-top hollow handle. I hunted around, unable to find matches. I did locate a used Bic lighter on the floor, so I placed that inside. I screwed the handle back on hard.

  “Insanity,” I cried, and then went down the stairs and into the open corridor until I faced the open hatch to the sea.

  The Zodiac was nosed into the steel hull. Filipe held it fast with a bow rope, but it bucked and weaved about anyway. Don stood at the stern, his hand on the tiller of a big running outboard. Dutch sat among the gear, smoking a cigarette. I made the leap and settled down next to him. Then I looked around, while Don shot us out from the side of the ship.

  Passengers lined the deck to watch the operation. I saw Marlys peering down. I looked up her dress. She had on white panties. It was just a glimpse. I looked away, embarrassed a bit. I looked at the Island. It was the water that stunned me, however. It had to be moving at least fifteen knots. As fast as a sprinter could run. The ship was under power, holding itself exactly against the current. No wonder the anchor chain had snapped.

  Unless it had some other reason to, I thought.

  “What’s the island?” I asked Dutch, over the whine of the outboard.

  “The Isle of the Tsar of Russia,” he explained, between puffs of a cigarette. We were moving up ahead of the ship, as I had instructed Don. A second island was visible, less than a mile from the first.

  “And that one?” I pointed at the other island.

  Dutch laughed, “That one’s also the Isle of the Tsar of Russia.”

  I screwed up my face.

  “Like Darryl in The Bob Newhart Show?” I shot back.

  Dutch looked at me quizzically, the allusion lost on him. I presumed that he had never seen the TV show, which had had two brothers with same first name.

  I stood and directed to Don to a spot in the water. He throttled back, and we came to a sliding halt, but I could observe that the current was carrying us fast back toward the ship, now a half-mile away.

  Dutch and I suited up, each helping the other with tanks and weight belts. My belt held twenty-two pounds, which I knew to be about right. But I didn’t really care that much, as I wasn’t planning on doing anything but going down and then coming back up on the other side of the ship. Declaring the dive a failure was, after all, the unspoken missio
n.

  We put our fins on, tested our regulators, adjusted our masks, and got ready to go fall backward over the rubber gunnel-tube. Don then tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Where’s the pickup?” he asked.

  I pointed behind the ship in the distance.

  “Go about a mile astern of the ship, then pull up,” I instructed. “It’s damn close to the island but it should be about where we surface. I opened my canvas sack and took out the dive knife with its scabbard. I attached it to my left thigh with the straps. I gave the sack back to Don.

  “Guard that with your life.” I smiled as I said the words. In the bottom of the Zodiac was a hefty coil of rope, with a CO2 inflatable canister to operate the float. Our immediate mission was to run the line through the last link of the anchor, tie the ends to the canister, and then pop the CO2 cartridge. The ship’s cables, chains, and winches would do the rest. I attached the coil to my shoulder with a strip of Velcro. I handed the canister to Dutch. His face looked white, almost alabaster.

  “You have dived the Bering Sea, have you not?” I asked. He shook his head. “Great, just great,” I exploded aloud.

  I sat down next to him, depressed and with a bit of fear. We reset our masks, re-inserted the regulators into our mouths, and gave each other a standard thumbs-up signal.

  I’d rinsed my mask over the side before I’d tried it on to adjust the strap, so I knew the water was cold. The wet suit headpiece was essential, as were the wetsuit gloves. But all of it made things difficult to manipulate or touch.

  Underwater, I oriented and hung head up at about ten feet. Dutch appeared before me no more than six feet away. I checked everything of mine, giving him another thumbs-up. He gave it back. I pointed directly down. We were going to go down to the bottom, stay there, and let the extreme current carry us right under the ship.

  Down I went, my weight belt providing plenty of negative buoyancy. The bottom was a shock. I had noted something odd, even at the surface. But at the bottom, which registered at sixty-on feet on my gauge, the seabed was white. White sand. Glaring white sand with waves. The current was stirring the sand and driving it over the tops of small and endless rivulets, like waves of powdery air over the tops of miniature sand dunes. It was stunningly beautiful. It was also totally unexpected. I had presumed that the bottom would consist of rock. Dark harsh and jumbled rock, to be precise. It was anything but. We sailed over the sand, side by side.