The frogmen

by White, Robb, 1909-1990

  It had been so easy that Amos had just smiled at him.

  Tanaka eased the throttle back a little more and then leaned down and said, "We may get a real break. There's a squall coming in fast. I'm trying to make it so we'll be alongside the lava when the rain starts."

  "Won't this change of speed make them suspicious?" Amos asked.

  "They'd be suspicious if I didn't slow down," Tanaka told him. "They're very fussy about speed in the channel. Must have some equipment on shore they don't want broken up by wake waves."

  "That's lucky for us."

  "This squall may be real luck. If it rains hard enough, I'll take a chance on stopping entirely when we get alongside the lava."

  Amos glanced back at Max and Reeder to see if they had heard. John and Max nodded, and Reeder grinned.

  They looked strange in the gray rubber wet suits, only their faces showing inside the round holes of the helmets. Each of them had a two-tank pack, fins, gloves, and a miscellany of gear strung from a weight belt.

  They had spent part of the night building a tunnel through the copra sacks so that they could crawl to the rail without being seen, and had decided to go over with Max first, then John, Reeder, and Amos.

  Their supplies had been packed in copra sacks, with copra stuffed in to make them look the same as all the rest and were now stowed along the gunwale, ready to be pushed over at the signal.

  "Looks good," Tanaka said, leaning down into the engine room. "It's raining all across the lagoon now, and it should be really pouring when we get abeam of the lava. Are you ready, Amos?"

  "As I'll ever be," Amos said, motioning for Max to move up and get into position.

  "Just a few more minutes," Tanaka said. "I'll give you the word."

  Amos looked at the huge man ahead of him. "When you go over, Max, bite down on that mouthpiece."

  "Chomp, chomp," Max said.

  It seemed to be getting darker in the room.

  "You set, John?" Amos asked.

  John just nodded, adjusting the straps of the canvas gear bag hanging from his weight belt.

  "Reeder?"

  "Natch," Reeder said, leaning awkwardly against the wall to ease the weight of the gear.

  Amos heard the sudden, sharp sound of the rain as it struck the boat and saw the water soaking into Tanaka's trousers, turning the white to gray.

  As the squall swept over them, the light outside turned soft and dark, almost like twilight, and Amos heard Tanaka say, "Oh, greatl"

  The diesel changed its tone as Tanaka took it out of gear, and in a few seconds the boat lost way and began to roll awkwardly, not moving ahead at all.

  "We're dead in the water," Tanaka said, leaning down, his face streaming rain. "Gear's going over."

  Amos could see one of the crew rolling their supplies over the side. "Let's go," he said.

  Max moved into the tunnel under the copra sacks first, and then John. Amos motioned for Reeder to

  At the end of the tunnel Amos found that it was raining so hard he couldn't see twenty feet ahead, and the concealment made him feel better.

  With the boat dead in the water, they would come down where the supplies sank, and there'd be no problem with propeller turbulence.

  Max had already gone over, but John was still at

  the rail, fiddling with the gear bag. Reeder crouched in the scupper, waiting for him to go.

  "Dive, John!" Amos said.

  But John just grinned and pulled a black rubber-covered box out of the canvas bag. He held it up in the rain, waving it slowly back and forth.

  "CommanderI" John called. "Be sure to come back and pick us up. This is the coding board."

  John pushed himself outward and fell into the water, the rubber case in his hands.

  Tanaka's face turned a queer, muddy gray as the rain streamed down it.

  Reeder and Amos went over the side almost together, but Reeder went in much too close to the curved hull of the boat and, when the turbulence of his dive cleared, Amos looked around to see if he had hurt himself.

  It was dark in the water, but Reeder looked okay. He recovered from the jump and started swimming downward.

  As Amos headed down after him, all he could think about was the Irish pennant trailing from the bow. When he got back aboard, he would haul in that frayed length of rope.

  The water was dark, and getting darker the deeper Amos went. When he stopped breathing to listen, he could hear the dry-frying sound of rain on the surface.

  The wall of lava beside him looked only a little grayer than the water itself.

  The bottom began to appear—a rough area of gray-black boulders and coral, the colors dim. Now he could make out Max and John, who were hovering just above the coral.

  For a second Amos felt a slap of panic, but then he saw the gray sacks with their supplies lying among the rocks and coral.

  At a depth of twenty feet, Amos joined Max and John, all of them keeping clear of the sharp-edged coral.

  The boat was still not moving, for he could see no swirl of water at the stern. He couldn't find Reeder either, and that irritated him. The man must have come down at an angle, and if he didn't have sense enough to stay in one place, they could lose a lot of time looking for him.

  Amos turned and looked at the lava wall. The appearance of it was shocking, and as he stared at it in disbelief, he remembered his argument with Tanaka about that wall.

  Amos had not liked the plan. He couldn't see why it was necessary to put them into the channel in the afternoon, leaving them there clinging to the wall all that day, all that night, and all the next day, and not picking them up until the following night.

  Tanaka had not budged. His argument was that the copra boats could not move in the lagoon at night. There was no way, Tanaka claimed, that he could pick them up at night and get back into the channel the next day.

  Sometime in the far distant past the volcanoes that made up the backbone of the largest of the atoll's islands had exploded and sent a wide river of melted, boiling rocks flowing down to the sea. This collision of boiling rock with cold sea water had formed an absolutely tortured surface of stone.

  The fiercely bubbling rock looked as though it had been frozen there, leaving an incredibly twisted

  and corrugated wall, pocked and pitted, and now overgrown with vegetables and barnacles, limpets and sea anemones, their dangerous, pale-white tentacles waving. Kelp dripped down the tortured surfaces, also waving, and hideous things crawled or walked or slithered around.

  To try to cling to this wall all night long would be insane. Bubbles of the molten rock, bursting when they had struck the water, had left broken rims of stone as sharp as broken bottles. The gentlest of open-sea wave action would, literally, cut them to shreds before the night ended.

  This flowing river of rock had hardened into a solid mass jutting out from the jungle-covered shore. The surface above the water was absolutely bare, affording them no hiding place, and to both left and right of the lava, on the beach side, there were people. On the seaward side the photographs had shown a small village; on the lagoon side there was some sort of military installation: small, blocky buildings set in a row.

  There was no place where they could get out of the water and be concealed from people on shore, but Tanaka had said that he had seen what looked like a small indentation cut into the end of the lava— a place where the waves couldn't hit them.

  Amos suspected that this place did not exist. There might be small indentations in the solid wall. There might even be sizable hollows where bubbles of rock had been broken and the years of wave action had formed shallow caves, but there

  would be no protected cove where they could rest in safety.

  There was no use making any search for mines until they found some place along the wall that offered them a little shelter.

  Assuming that Reeder had enoudi sense to come to the wall and look for them there, Amos decided that Max was the one he could see the easiest, so he motioned him to stay wi
th the supplies. Then he motioned for John to search the wall toward the lagoon, and set off along the wall, swimming seaward.

  The light was growing brighter now, suffusing the water with a greenish mist, and Amos saw ahead of him what looked like a ledge of lava jutting out into the water.

  Swimming closer to it, he noticed that something—an earthquake or some great tidal wave—had broken an enormous slab of lava away from the main flow and had left it, shattered by waves, scattered all over the sea floor.

  Amos swam under the ledge and looked around in the large scooped-out area. Since the bottom of the ledge was at least five feet under the water, the place was useless to them except in case a boat, really searching for them, came in close to the wall. They could come in under here, Amos diought, and be completely concealed from anything on the surface.

  He was about to swim on when he discovered that what he had at first thought was only a large

  patch of barnacles at the back of the indentation was actually a smaller and apparently deeper opening.

  Swimming in under the ledge, Amos went down to investigate and found an opening about four feet in diameter and almost round. He couldn't see, in the dim light, how deep it went into the lava, but it appeared to be quite deep.

  As Amos started to move into the opening, more out of curiosity than anything else, he saw the mean, doglike head of a large moray eel swaying slowly just inside the hole.

  Discouraged, Amos was backing away from the eel when he noticed that, beyond the moray and deep in the hole, there was a dim glow of light.

  He was hanging in the water, wondering how to get that eel out of there, when he heard a sharp CLICK.

  It was not exactly a sound, more a feeling in his ears; a hard, sharp, metallic blow against his eardrums.

  What happened then Amos could not explain, for he had never experienced anything like it. One second he was hanging there, studying a moray, and the next, the water turned into iron, crushing him from every direction. It felt as though his whole body was being compressed.

  At the same time, the sea became violent, throwing him around as though he were in some enormous churn.

  Amos ended up on the bottom, on his back, his mouthpiece torn from his teeth, his whole tank pack

  shifted around to his side, his mask full of sand and water.

  The commotion died as Amos blindly found the regulator and started breathing again. Still blind, he emptied and washed out the mask, put it on, and cleared it.

  The water was filled with drifting sand and shreds of kelp and seaweed.

  Shocked and scared, Amos swam out from under the ledge and looked back toward where Max was supposed to be.

  The water was too murky to see more than five feet.

  As he swam back along the wall, Amos began to think again.

  Evidently there had been some sort of explosion in the water. Maybe a high-explosive shell had landed near them, or a bomb had been dropped by an airplane, or a mine had exploded somewhere out in the channel.

  Amos decided that it must have been a mine. Why would anyone fire just one round into the ocean? Or drop a bomb on nothing?

  He stopped swimming and looked at his watch. Even at the speed Tanaka had been going, the boat would be through the channel by now and well into the lagoon; at least as far as the first wharves. It was unreasonable to assume that the Japanese would mine the water right alongside their own wharves.

  Then he saw movement in the murk, and Max and John appeared, both of them swimming hard.

  For a moment they all acted like kids, swimming around, touching each other, making wild gestures, eye-smiling, frowning to show their puzzlement.

  At last Amos held up four fingers and jabbed a finger at each of them.

  Neither Max nor John had seen Reeder.

  Amos shrugged and pointed in the direction of the ledge.

  The debris in the water was slowly settling to the bottom, and the light was growing brighter as they went in under the ledge. Amos showed them the hole, pointing out the moray, which seemed unaffected by the mine blast.

  Max swam in too close to the eel and Amos pulled at his leg. Max turned, frowning, and then moved in again.

  Amos wondered as he pulled at him again if Max knew how dangerous these things were. They weren't as bad as sharks or barracuda, but a moray this size could give you a rough time, mainly because when they bit you they hung on, thrashing around until they tore a chunk out of you.

  Max pulled away from Amos, scowling at him, and approached the eel again.

  Amos was horrified to see him shove his hand straight into the moray's face.

  The eel lunged and, in a beautiful, smooth movement, Max withdrew his hand, the eel following. With his other hand he caught the moray just behind the head.

  The moray coiled around Max's arm and head,

  the mottled, slimy-looking body, at least six feet long and very powerful, constricting wherever it got a grip.

  A coil of the body slid down his face, wiping the regulator out of his mouth, and slipped around his throat, the muscles rippling in cords as it seemed to pulse strength into them.

  With his free hand, Max put the regulator back into his mouth. Then he pushed the moray's head straight away from him until, at arm's length, the eel uncoiled and fell away, the body moving in slow spasms.

  Max turned it loose, and the eel drifted down, coiling slowly, and draped itself over a large chunk of grayish brain coral.

  Amos gave him a salute and swam back to the hole. Now he was sure he could see a dim patch of light at the other end.

  He motioned to Max and John that he was going in and handed John the free end of his life line. Then he moved on, propelling himself only with his fins, feeling his way with gloved hands.

  It was spooky in there. Tendrils of sea growth streamed across his face mask, seeming to clutch him. There were soft, pulpy things under his hands.

  As Amos came closer to the light, he grew more cautious. He was not more than ten feet below the surface, and he did not want to come swimming out into some open pool where he would be visible to anyone on the bank.

  He went ahead very slowly, colors glowing all

  around him now, and he could see beautiful little reef fish and sea spiders.

  The tunnel ended, and Amos, staying inside it, saw what seemed to be a large pool of water, so big he could barely make out the rock boundary on the far side.

  Looking up at the mirrorlike surface, he was surprised and puzzled by an area of it that was being broken regularly by something falling into the water.

  It was not rain; the light was that of full sunlight now, and yet he could hear the same small, dry sound that rain made.

  As Amos turned from side to side he noticed that a column of brilliant light plunged into the pool at about the center and spread out in all directions. Nowhere else in the pool was the light as strong.

  The shaft of light came into the pool at the place where the mirror was being broken, and Amos began to wonder whether there was something over the pool with a hole in it. A hole through which rain water was still dripping although the squall had passed.

  He moved slowly out of the tunnel and, staying close to the rock wall, eased himself up to the surface.

  For a moment the water on his face mask blurred everything, but when it cleared he saw a marvelous thing.

  He was in an enormous cave hollowed out inside

  the lava. In some places the roof of the cave was ten feet above him, in others only a few inches.

  The dripping was rain water falling from the edges of a small, round hole in the roof of the cave —a hole that had probably been made by the explosion of gases in molten lava a million years ago.

  Only the area around the hole was brightly lit by sunlight. The rest of the cave was dim, but he could see a small, shelving, pebbly beach on the far side, and above this beach the rock ceiling was at least ten feet high.

  Amos signaled on the life line for John to follow him,
and when he felt the line grow slack he drew it in, coiling it.

  John's eyes looked almost wild as he stared around under the water before surfacing.

  Amos reached for the life line at John's belt and signaled for Max, who emerged from the tunnel like some huge torpedo.

  They swam together underwater across the pool toward the beach. Amos guided them away from the strong column of light below the hole.

  As they swam, John pointed at a lobster sitting among some rocks hardly five feet below them.

  Crawling onto the wet gravel of the beach, they pushed the masks up and dropped the regulators.

  "Man," Max said softly. "This is beautiful."

  "What about at high tide?" John asked. "Maybe it fills up with water."

  Amos looked slowly around, noticing now a whitish band of salt, about three feet above the water level,

  running all the way around the walls of the cave. "Maybe that's the high-tide mark," he said. "If it is, we're in business."

  Max said, "I've lived in worse places than this. We can spend the night here. Sleep on the beach like people. Let's get the stuff."

  "We'd better find Reeder first," Amos said. "That dummy!"

  John's voice was low and shocked. "Hey," he said, "you don't suppose he ran into a mine?"

  "How?" Amos demanded. "He's not that stupid."

  "Something blew a mine," John said. "They might be camouflaged, or under the sand. He might not even have seen the thing."

  "We'd better go look for him," Amos said.

  "They could be magnetics," John said. "Reeder had enough gear on his belt to arm a magnetic."

  "He jumped in too close to the boat," Amos said. "I thought he'd hurt himself, but he seemed okay when I checked him. But now that I think back, he wasn't swimming." Amos looked over at John and Max. "Maybe he couldn't, so he just sank straight to the bottom. Maybe he was looking for us. Maybe he could only crawl. . . and hit one."

  "Then what's to look for?" John asked quietly.

  Amos shrugged and pulled his mask down. "We'll start at the gear, where we came down, and fan out. If you see a mine, stay away from it."