The Keeper

by George C. Chesbro

  “Coast Guard?” Roy shouted as he pulled on his pants.

  “Unlikely! Not this far-!”

  Jade’s voice was drowned out by the mechanical chatter of machine gun fire as the helicopter made a second pass over them. Large-caliber bullets tore through rigging and Mylar and thudded into the deck with a sound like the tattoo of a snare drum. Jade snatched the rifle that was mounted on a rack over the rear bulkhead, checked to make sure that it was loaded. She darted through the galley, then cautiously climbed the steps leading to the deck and peered out of the hatchway. She immediately ducked back down as the machine gun clattered and bullets flew through the air, splintering the teak bulkhead where her head had been a moment before. As the helicopter passed over, its backwash whipping Jade’s hair, she braced in the hatchway and opened fire.

  “See if you can find more ammunition!” Jade shouted over her shoulder. “Look in the drawer under the chart table!”

  As Jade again ducked away from a burst of fire that tore through the cabin roof, Roy searched for and found a box of shells. He quickly picked up their life vests from the second bunk in the cabin, slipped one on and took the second forward to Jade along with the extra ammunition.

  “Here are some more shells! And put this vest on!”

  Jade took the box of ammunition, but shook her head when Roy held out the orange life vest. “No need to worry about drowning, Roy! It’s shark city out there!”

  “That’s really great news, lady! Put it on anyway! The color will help the sharks find us quicker!”

  Jade hesitated, and then slipped on the life vest. “That’s good thinking, my dear. These waters are full of sharks, and those big-toothed suckers are going to want to know what all this commotion is about. We wouldn’t want them to miss us in the confusion.”

  “You know, in all the years I lived in the city, I never did get around to visiting the aquarium. This is my big chance to see sharks up close and personal, right?”

  “Actually, you probably won’t see the one that hits you. He’ll come at you from below.”

  “Do we have a plan?”

  “Shoot out a rotor,” Jade replied as she resumed her firing position in the hatchway and raised the rifle to her shoulder. She watched as the dun-colored, Apache helicopter turned and started back toward them. “By the way, this is probably as good a time as any to tell you I have a suspicion I may be in love with you.”

  “Take as much time as you need to reach a decision, then get back to me on it.”

  Jade managed to squeeze off two rounds before the gunner in the helicopter opened fire, and she fell back against Roy as a fusillade of bullets raked the length of the boat from stern to bow. Water was pouring into the cabin, and was already up to their ankles. Jade started back up the steps, but Roy grabbed her arm and turned her around to face him.

  “I don’t regret being here with you, Jade,” Roy said softly, gazing into her eyes. “It may sound stupid, but I wanted you to know that before it’s too late.”

  “That’s a wonderful thing to say,” Jade replied, kissing him. “Come on. Let’s get out of here while we still can.”

  The bow of the boat had sunk to a point where most of the hatchway was under water. Holding the rifle and box of shells over her head in order to keep them dry, Jade floated on her back out through the hatchway. Roy followed, kicking and clumsily paddling with his hands at his sides. Using the rigging and lifelines that remained above water, they pulled themselves around to the starboard side of the boat and headed toward the stern, which now jutted up into the sky. As the helicopter banked sharply and headed back toward them, Jade again floated on her back as she put the rifle to her shoulder and aimed at the rapidly approaching craft.

  “What’s the use, Jade?” Roy asked as he reached out and grabbed a strap on Jade’s vest to steady her in the water as she aimed at the rotors of the helicopter. “Even if you shoot them down, we’ve got no place to go, and no way to get there if we did.”

  “Satisfaction,” Jade replied tersely. “Maybe I’ll get lucky. I’ll be damned if I’ll die while I’ve still got bullets left in this rifle.”

  Roy abruptly pulled Jade toward him, then lunged in the water and covered her body with his as the helicopter zoomed directly over their heads. But this time there was no hail of bullets. Roy felt something cold and wet slap against the back of his neck; he put his hand there, and it came away red. He looked up and saw that the sea around them had become tainted crimson, and was splattered with chunks of gore. “What the hell-?!”

  “The bastards!” Jade shouted, rolling out from under Roy and tossing aside the rifle. She shoved Roy in the direction of the steeply raked stern. “Get back up on the boat! Fast!”

  Roy pulled himself through the water, grabbed a lifeline and pulled himself up on the sharply angled deck. Then he quickly reached back, grabbed Jade’s outstretched hand and hauled her up alongside him. The helicopter had moved away a few hundred yards and was hovering, waiting.

  “Chum,” Roy said, suppressing a shudder. “Shark bait. They must have overheard my remark about never visiting an aquarium.”

  Jade nodded grimly. “Boats sink, but corpses will float—especially when they’re wearing life vests. They can’t be sure we didn’t send out a distress signal, and they don’t want us found with heavy caliber machine gun bullets in our bodies.”

  “Those clever rascals seem to have thought of everything,” Roy said absently, watching in horrified fascination as a host of black fins suddenly appeared in the water around them and began circling the boat. “I guess I may get to see the one that hits me after all.”

  Together they inched backward up the deck of the sinking boat until finally they were only inches from the stern.

  “Roy,” Jade said, clasping his hand and squeezing hard as she stared into his face, “I’m so sorry. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me.”

  Roy kissed her hand, and then pressed it to his cheek. “We’ve already had this conversation below, Jade. I think I would rather be in Philadelphia right now, but not without you. So it’s all right. Now you say that it’s all right that I’m here with you. It’s important to me.”

  Jade reached up with her other hand and caressed Roy’s cheek, closed her eyes. “It’s all right. And I’ve decided that I do love you.”

  “I’d say you made up your mind not a moment too soon,” Roy replied, squinting as he looked past Jade’s head off into the distance at what appeared to be two dark spots that had suddenly appeared just over the horizon. “I hope you’re not just saying that to make me feel better.”

  Jade laughed softly. “I’m happy if it makes you feel better, but that’s not why I said it.”

  “Good,” Roy said in an absent tone as he squinted even harder. The dark spots had grown considerably larger in a matter of only seconds; whatever the spots might be, they were approaching them at high speed. “Guess what?”

  “What, sweetie,” Jade answered dreamily as she rested her head on Roy’s shoulder.

  “I can’t be certain, but I think the cavalry might be on the way.”

  Jade jerked her head off Roy’s shoulder and twisted around to look in the direction where he was pointing. The dark spots had resolved themselves into two white helicopters with red stripes emblazoned on their sides; both craft were armed with rocket launchers. “All right!” Jade shouted, punching the air with her fist.

  Roy inched himself up further until his back was against the steel railing at the stern of the sailboat. Grabbing a lifeline with one hand, he gripped Jade’s hand with the other and pulled her up after him. Now there were less than two feet separating them from the red-tinted sea and the black fins circling in it.

  Roy murmured, “I must say they’re cutting things a bit close.”

  The helicopter that had attacked them veered off sharply to the left in an attempted evasive maneuver, but it was too late. Suddenly flame erupted from the muzzle of the rocket launcher on the closer of the two white jet
helicopters. A missile painted a plume of white exhaust against the sky as it streaked from the white helicopter and disappeared into the fuselage of the other, which instantly blew apart in an explosion of blue and red flame, black smoke and scattering debris. Then the two jet helicopters altered their course and headed for the sailboat, which was now almost completely submerged.

  Jade abruptly stripped off her life vest and handed it to a startled Roy. “Hang on to this.” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Jade-?!”

  But Jade had already knifed below the bloody, gore-strewn surface of the sea. She pulled sharply with her arms and shot straight down, kicking and continuing to pull hard in order to dive even deeper, away from the surface where the threat from the blood-crazed sharks was greatest. She passed her left hand along the roof of the submerged cabin until she felt the lip of the open hatchway.

  As something rough and heavy brushed against her left thigh, she twisted around, grabbed the top of the hatchway and pulled herself down into the midnight darkness of the cabin. Her warrior was still with her, calming her, compressing her terror into a tiny space in the back of her mind where it would not cause her heart to beat any faster than it was and consume more precious oxygen. The thought of being torn apart by sharks and dying alone in this underwater grave had been a searing image in her mind from the moment she had decided what she was going to do, but she knew this attempt had to be made or her other, nightmare present in the world of air and light above her would be waiting for her when she returned.

  The water was freezing, and her muscles were beginning to cramp as she groped around her in the icy, underwater darkness. Finally, with her lungs bursting and just when she thought she would have to abandon her search if she was to have any hope of getting back to the surface, her right hand touched something smooth that she recognized as the slicker she had wrapped around the briefcase containing the Beowulf Society’s records. She gripped the line tied around the briefcase, then turned and headed back toward the dark blue rectangle that was the hatchway. She came out through the opening, twisted around, planted her feet on the roof of the cabin and pushed hard, knifing upward through the water toward the surface above her.

  The air exploded from her lungs as her head broke the surface. She found herself fifteen feet away from Roy and the barely exposed stern of the sailboat. Black shapes were all around her, one so close that she could hear the faint hissing of its fin slicing through the water as it headed toward her. Almost immediately two shots came from the helicopter hovering above, and the shark in front of her abruptly veered off and began to thrash wildly, pumping blood into the water. Then the other sharks fell on the wounded one, and Jade found herself in the middle of a circle of frothing pink. Gripping the briefcase tightly under one arm, she pulled with the other and kicked, struggling to get to Roy, who was perched precariously on the last four inches of stern still above water. With one hand Roy gripped the bosun’s chair that had been lowered from the hovering helicopter while he reached out for Jade with the other.

  “Come on, Jade!” Roy shouted, his face twisted in anguish.

  There were more rifle shots, more black shapes thrashing in the bloody water as the sharks continued their cannibalistic feeding frenzy.

  And then Roy’s powerful hand gripped Jade’s, and she was yanked out of the water onto the narrow crescent island of fiberglass that was the last two inches of the sailboat’s stern.

  “Roy, go!” Jade shouted over the thwop-thwop of the whirring rotors above her as she pushed the briefcase into his stomach. “Hurry up!”

  “No!” Roy shouted back, grabbing a handful of Jade’s soaked sweatshirt and pulling her toward the bosun’s chair. “You go first! You’re wasting time! Hurry up and get into that thing!”

  “Roy-!”

  “Jade, please. For the past three days you’ve had to take care of me like a baby! Now I need to do this and see you to safety first! Please, woman! Go on up!”

  Jade glanced into Roy’s iron-colored eyes, saw both the need and determination there. She grabbed the briefcase from him, then quickly ducked under the chair’s harness and sat down. Immediately the chair began to rise on its winch, but at what seemed to Jade an agonizingly slow pace. As the chair ascended, Jade stared down, transfixed, at the scene below her. Roy had balanced himself on the sinking stern by bending over and clutching the steel railing, but the water now covered his feet to his ankles. Dark shapes roiled all around him, like black bubbles in a boiling cauldron of death.

  When Jade reached the lip of the helicopter’s open cargo bay she immediately rolled out of the chair, at the same time sliding the slicker-wrapped briefcase across the ribbed-steel floor to the opposite, closed side of the bay. Then she rolled over on her back to find herself looking up at a Coast Guard marksman who was standing above her and firing down. Just behind him were two Coast Guard officers, one of whom she knew.

  “Hurry!” she pleaded. “Oh God, please hurry! Send it back down!”

  The marksman in the doorway reversed gears on the motorized winch mounted on the ceiling, and the bosun’s chair began to descend. Then he put his rifle to his shoulder and fired off three more shots in rapid succession.

  Jade crawled back to the lip of the cargo bay and looked down just in time to see Roy, who was now waist-deep in the churning, gore-streaked water, lunge for the chair and grab the wide leather strap that was its seat with both hands. Immediately the marksman above her reached over his head and reversed gears once again. Jade gasped as a shark lunged out of the water for Roy, but then she covered her face with her hands and began to sob with relief when she saw the shark’s jaws pass just under Roy’s feet as he was lifted into the air.

  Jade sucked in a deep breath, and then removed her hands from her eyes and looked up into the smiling face and pale blue eyes of Captain Richard Marley. “You’re a long way from home,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  “So are you,” the burly Coast Guard commander replied as he took Jade’s hand and helped her to her feet.

  Jade threw her arms around Marley’s neck and hugged him. “Richard, you can’t believe how happy I am to see you!”

  “Oh, I think I have an inkling,” the man replied dryly as he patted Jade’s back reassuringly. “We’d have been here sooner if you hadn’t slipped my man before heading for the airport the other day. Damn good thing for you and your friend that you were seen putting luggage into your car. Welcome aboard.”

  The cable hoist clicked to a stop as the bosun’s chair reached the lip of the cargo bay. The marksman and the second officer reached down and gripped Roy’s wrists as Jade crouched between the two men and grabbed the back of Roy’s life jacket to help pull him into the cargo bay.

  Roy stood for a few moments as if stunned, staring into Jade’s face, and then sat down hard. “Holy shit,” he said softly, putting a hand to his chest. “I can’t believe I haven’t had a heart attack.”

  Jade leaned over and kissed Roy on the mouth. “My hero,” she sighed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  i

  “You know,” Roy said, wiping his mouth with a napkin, “this shark steak is a little greasy, but it’s good. I’d love to think that this guy on my plate is the same one that tried to nip me.”

  Jade regarded the meat on Roy’s plate for a few moments, then looked up at Roy and nodded somberly. “He looks very familiar to me. I think it is the same one.”

  “Outstanding,” Roy replied with a grin as he put another piece in his mouth.

  Jade looked out the picture window next to their table across the forest of sailboat masts in the coast marina where they were dining. Finally she turned to Richard Marley, who was sitting to her right. “You knew about the Beowulf Society, didn’t you?”

  Marley ran a hand back through his thick, curly hair. “Strongly suspected would be a more accurate way of putting it. I didn’t know the actual name of the group, or the names of any of the people involved. The existence of the group and i
ts activities were probably no big secret in some military circles, but not in mine. The membership list was closely held, but that was about all that could really be called secret. News, or rumors, of groups like Beowulf travels in semi-closed societies like the military. There were probably a rather large number of senior officers hoping they’d be tapped for membership after they retired. That’s why they cooperated.”

  “But not Coast Guard officers?”

  Marley shook his head. “I’ll be very surprised if the names of any Coast Guard personnel surface. I believe I mentioned to you that the Coast Guard tends to be excluded from certain affairs involving our brother services.”

  “That could change now.”

  “Quite the contrary. They may see me as a Coast Guard rat, but I’ll tell you that there are a lot of senior officers in the Army, Air Force, and Navy, men who didn’t cooperate but who still might have been tapped, who are breathing large sighs of relief that they didn’t retire six months or a year ago and get involved with Beowulf just in time to be disgraced, lose their pensions, and be sent to prison. I don’t think that anybody on active duty, not even the ones who played ball, had any real idea of the extent of the corruption in that old boys’ network, and I doubt any of them knew Beowulf was a C.I.A. asset.”

  “My ex-boss did. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, he’s Naval Intelligence, so that could be expected. But ninety-nine percent of the membership probably didn’t know. Anyone who heard rumors about the group probably assumed, like me, that it was just one more secret society of retired military officers who were maybe a little more active than most in lobbying for what they perceived as military interests. I doubt anyone outside the loop dreamed they were using active duty personnel to test equipment they’d siphoned off from stockpiles to sell for profit; you were the one who turned me on to that. In the end it was all about greed, not patriotism, and things got out of hand. And, of course, the Company was using the bunch of them to further its own interests, which are always about power.”