by Arno Joubert
He disconnected the call and rolled over onto his side. He began to sob. He missed her so much.
She was gentle and kind and soft and beautiful. Some of his friends were afraid of her, said she was some sort of a witch, but he had known her better than that. She called it the Gaia philosophy. She believed in being one with nature and protecting Mother Earth, and yes, she would have some weird ceremonies up in the mountain, but she wasn’t evil.
She was a good person.
Sometimes too good, he thought. She trusted people too easily. Believed everyone’s bullshit stories. She said that the boys at school used to take advantage of her—told her they loved her, got laid, and moved on. Jake used to have many friends. But they started bragging about sleeping with Alida. He decked three of them. After that, he had only Alida.
And he didn’t care that none of them had come to visit him since Alida’s death. They were probably celebrating it. But he knew he had lost his soul mate. No one on earth could ever come close to her intellect and wit. He wondered if he should simply end it all, as Ingrid Jonker had. Pop some pills and walk into the ocean. Then he shook his head and sat up determinedly. No, he would be better than that. He would leave life soon enough to join Alida, but not until he found out the truth.
How was Alida killed? And probably more important—
Why?
Alexa and Neil hung around at sixteen feet for another ten minutes, allowing the compressed gases they had been breathing in the deeper water to naturally diffuse out of their bloodstreams and tissues. They knew they would need to do another dive in order to extract the bodies, and they wanted to minimize the side effects of breathing compressed oxygen.
Neil glanced at his dive watch and made the OK sign. He pointed his thumb toward the surface. Alexa wanted to get out as soon as possible; the shadowy shapes were still circling far down in the depths below. It had been the creepiest dive she had ever done.
She nodded and started inflating her Buoyancy Control jacket. Suddenly, she heard the patrol boat on the surface gun the motor and roar away above their heads, leaving a plume of white foam in its wake. The explosion followed, ramming her with a wall of water and almost ripping her mask off her face.
Neil grabbed her arm, his eyes darting. He pointed toward the surface, but Alexa shook her head. No way, buster. She pointed to her cylinder gauge then grabbed his. They had been submerged for less than thirty minutes; they had ample air left to wait things out. Neil pushed her away and gestured that she should stay put. A burst of bubbles escaped her mouth as she growled, but her angry pleas reverberated in her own ears. Shit. What had happened to the cool, calm, and calculated Neil? He was the one who used to keep her out of harm’s way, who stopped her from blundering into danger like a damned fool. She heard her teeth grind, but she followed him. She couldn’t risk losing him ever again.
As they breached the surface, a cold blast of air stung their faces. The fine spray from the rotor blades blinded her; she popped her regulator back in her mouth to keep from choking on the salty mist. She shielded her mask with a hand. A small chopper hovered six feet above them. Someone hung out of the cockpit on the passenger side, and she saw his arm move as he lobbed something at them. Shit, not again.
She pulled Neil down with her as she dove, but he responded a second too late. The blast hit them in the back at a depth of five feet, Neil taking the brunt of the impact. It sounded like someone started tuning an electric guitar underwater, but the tone remained at a screeching pitch, unwavering. She breathed deeply, calming herself, and mercifully the sound subsided to a barely tolerable high D, dipped to a low C, then back up again.
She held Neil by the arm. His body was limp, a large rag doll that slowly rotated onto its back as soon as she released him. Bubbles streamed from his regulator. It was a good sign; he was still breathing. She pulled him toward herself, mounting him and gripping his torso between her legs. She equalized both of them at twelve feet, examining his face as she did so. His eyes were closed and his mask had started filling with blood. Shit, this could be serious. She tried to recall the safety drills they had performed for emergency situations. It had been more than two years ago since Boucher, her dive instructor, had drilled the process into her. Loss of consciousness: Ascend at less than a foot per second while slowly forcing air out of the victim’s lungs with your legs. Bring the diver to the surface. Head trauma: Same drill. Listen, recruit, bring the injured diver to the surface. Shit.
She glanced up. The chopper was still there, its hazy outline visible against the grey skies. Shit. She had no choice; she had to get him to the surface.
Alexa whipped her head back as she heard the dull roar of a powerful outboard. The patrol boat’s hull sped through the glassy reflection above her, bouncing in and out of the water as it tore its way toward them. The insect-like chopper’s blurry image rose higher before it disappeared. She let out a stream of bubbles and then inflated Neil’s BC to its maximum. Screw emergency protocol.
They broke the surface like a cork exploding from a bottle, Alexa still riding Neil. She started paddling toward the boat, waving and shouting like a mad woman, “Neil’s been injured. Help!”
The patrol boat gurgled to their side, and Alexa swam on her back to the rear of the vessel, dragging Neil between her legs. Eben de Vos pulled the tanks and their jackets up to the deck, and Bruce and Moolman helped heave Neil aboard.
Bruce immediately pulled Neil’s mask from his face, and a thin stream of blood trickled from his nose. “He’s breathing on his own,” Bruce said, supporting Neil’s head on his thigh and securing the chin with his hand as he wiped the blood away. “What the hell happened?”
Alexa kneeled beside Neil. “They were tossing grenades at us.”
Bruce tried to pull the regulator from Neil’s mouth, but Neil had bitten down hard, the muscles in his jaw knotted shut. Bruce slapped his cheeks a couple of times. “Neil, wake up.”
His eyes fluttered.
“Wake up, boy!” Bruce shouted and slapped him again, hard.
His eyes shot open, darting around in their sockets. Bruce helped Neil sit up, and he spat out the regulator, wiping a thin strand of mucus away from his chin. “Ow. Shit, that hurts,” he said, rubbing the back of his head, his face contorted in pain.
Alexa closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. “You scared me,” she said and punched his arm.
“Ow,” he said again, turning to her.
She laughed and hugged him. “C’mon, you’ve got the toughest nut in the business, it couldn’t have hurt that much.”
Neil stood up groggily, holding on to Alexa for support. “Who were they?”
Bruce shrugged, looking at the rest of the group. Moolman and de Vos did the same. “We don’t know.”
Alexa picked up their gear and slipped her BC back on. “We need to get down there again. There’s a container full of bodies.”
Bruce nodded grimly. “I suspected as much. The feet usually detach from the body with the onset of decay. If the feet were wearing sneakers with rubber soles, they would float to the surface.”
Eben de Vos moved closer, concern etched on his weary face. “How many?”
“More than forty. Closer to fifty.”
Moolman sucked in a sharp breath, and Bruce’s eyes narrowed into slits. Eben looked at her without any visible reaction. “You sure?”
“We’re sure,” Neil said as he stood up and started gathering his gear. “Let’s get some backup; I’m going down again.”
“But you’re injured,” Alexa said.
Neil shrugged. “Like you said, I have a tough nut.” He turned to Alexa with a challenging stare. “And I’ll be damned if I don’t figure out how those kids got down there.”
Alexa nodded. No use arguing with a concussed, hard-assed US Marine. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Oorah.
She turned to Barnes. “Do you have any underwater welding equipment?”
The skipper nodded then scampered to the side of
the vessel and clipped open a storage compartment. “You’re in luck, I brought some extraction equipment.” He looked up and shrugged. “You know, we didn’t know what we would find.”
Alexa heaved the equipment bag onto the deck then dumped it overboard. “OK, let’s get going. Dad, could you call for some backup? I don’t want to be surprised again.”
Bruce nodded and punched a number into his phone.
“Gentlemen,” she said and gave a two-finger salute as Neil splashed into the water. “Prepare yourselves. This is going to be nasty.”
Alexa hesitated among the body bags that had been stacked side by side on the harbor wall, then stepped carefully over them and turned to look for Neil. He was sitting with his back against a metal oil drum. Bruce crouched next to him, his hand on Neil’s knee, speaking to him earnestly, probably consoling him, Alexa thought. Neil shook his head then leaned his head back against the drum, closing his eyes. She turned back.
There were five rows of small bodies laid out next to each other, ten bodies per row, their recovered skeletal remains packed neatly into white plastic bags and wrapped tight. Alexa shivered and rubbed her arms. Why she and Neil had packed them that way she didn’t know, five feet apart horizontally, two feet vertically, perfectly lined up.
They hadn’t discussed it, they just did it. Man’s irrepressible need to create order out of chaos, to rationalize the incomprehensible. See, neat little rows, they look better that way.
She pursed her lips then tried to swallow away the lump in her throat. She had only seen so many bodies once before—attending a rescue mission in Haiti after an earthquake had shaken the island.
There had been mass graves. But this was different. These were all kids. Young girls, aged between twelve and seventeen. Four baby boys, couldn’t have been older than a couple of months. One of them could have been hers.
Alexa and Neil had meticulously removed the tiny bodies, doing their best to keep the limbs intact as they wrapped them up and brought them to the surface. The skeletal remains were falling apart, loosely held together by decomposing pieces of skin and flesh. She stepped over a row of bodies then trudged toward where Neil was sitting.
He looked up and smiled when Alexa greeted him softly. She knew that smile, the one that only touched his lips, not his eyes. It had been gruesome work; they were both in a state of shock. “How you feeling?”
Neil chuckled, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “Numb.”
“Need a blanket?”
He looked at her with blank eyes. “Why’s everyone asking me that?”
She guessed he wasn’t cold. She rammed her hands down her pockets, shivering uncontrollably. She had to clamp her mouth shut to keep her teeth from chattering. The sharks had been the worst. They had become arrogant, attacking the pair of divers each time they had surfaced with a body. Neil later resorted to swimming with the blowtorch while Alexa brought the bodies up, waving it at the sharks when they came too close. She sighed and slumped down next to Neil, pulling her knees up to her chin, taking his hand in hers and resting her chin on it.
Neil put his arm around her shoulder but said nothing.
They heard hasty footsteps, and the chief inspector appeared, jogging up the crumbling concrete stairwell of the harbor wall, clutching on to the rusted handrail for balance. He looked around uncertainly, saw them, and walked briskly toward them, wringing his hands. “This place is cursed,” Moolman said, glancing sidelong at the bags. He made a face as if he had eaten something rotten before turning back to face them.
They kept quiet. She glanced up at Eben de Vos, who was standing on the wooden quay. He stood with his hands by his sides, his shoulders slumped forward. He probably thought that as mayor of Slander's Peak he needed to be there for moral support. Alexa thought differently. “What was his daughter’s name?” she asked Moolman.
“Alida.”
Alexa nodded.
“She was only eighteen.”
“What happened?”
“She was murdered up at Mueller’s Dam. She was found with her stomach cut open and her internal organs removed.”
“Some ritual?” Neil asked.
Moolman frowned at Neil, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said with an almost imperceptible lift of his shoulders. “I don’t know anything for sure anymore; everything’s going to shit.”
“You think these events are related?” Neil asked.
Moolman turned to them, wisps of condensation drifting from his mouth as he spoke. “In my line of work, there usually aren’t coincidences.”
Alexa nodded, watching a tall, wiry man having an animated discussion with a teenager on the harbor wall. He slipped something from his pocket then handed it to the boy. He waved the boy away then walked toward them. He was clutching a flask beneath his arm and a stack of polystyrene cups in the other hand. He strode up to Eben and offered him a cup, then he poured a steamy brown liquid into it. Eben accepted it with a curt nod then continued to gaze out over the ocean, sipping his drink.
“Who’s he?” Alexa asked.
“Henry Theron, proprietor of the Howling Moon Pub.”
The man approached them and offered a cup to Alexa. He was all gangly arms and legs with an elongated head on a thin neck. He reminded her of a grasshopper. “Coffee?” he asked with an amiable smile.
Alexa took the cup he offered.
“I spiked it with some brandy,” he said, and the sides of his eyes crinkled into crow’s feet as he smiled. “For the nerves.”
Alexa sipped the strong broth. It burned her throat and heated her belly. “It’s good, thanks,” she said, meaning it. “Was that your boy?” she asked.
He cast Alexa an uncomprehending glance then smiled. “Nah. That’s Freddie, our waiter. We’re out of damn milk again. We should buy a cow; it would be cheaper.”
Alexa nodded.
The other men accepted their cups, and they sat or stood in silence, sipping. The man stood around uncomfortably for a few seconds then nodded apologetically and loped away.
“How are you feeling?” Moolman asked Neil, concern in his eyes. “You’re awfully quiet.”
Neil looked straight ahead. “Headache. Slight concussion, nothing much to say. Any idea who the guys in the chopper were?”
Moolman shook his head. “We visited the private airfields in the area. No sighting of any unmarked Robinsons.” He held the cup to his lips pensively. “And of course all the official airfields wouldn’t let an unmarked craft land.”
Alexa drained her cup then said, “A Robinson can travel more than two hundred nautical miles, so halve that distance to get here and back, and that should be the potential search area.”
Moolman whistled. “That’s huge.”
”They need to be close to an airfield to get low-lead aviation fuel,” Bruce said.
Moolman nodded. “I’ll get my deputy to check it out.”
Eben de Vos trudged toward them, a resolute look on his face, big blasts of moist air billowing from his mouth when he spoke. “Fancy a sherry?”
“Why not?” Moolman answered, looking at his watch. “I guess there’s nothing better to do until forensics arrives.”
Neil stood up and put his arm around Alexa’s waist. “Let’s go get smashed.”
The pub was bright and warm, a large, wraparound window providing a clear view of the harbor and the surroundings. A log fire crackled in a fireplace with a black chimney that went up to the roof. It smelled of smoke and sea and roast meat cooking in the kitchen. Jack Hammer softly thrummed the blues from hidden speakers, and the tones of murmured conversation quieted momentarily as they walked to a booth at the back.
Neil slid in next to Alexa, and everybody shifted into the semicircular, padded bench until Alexa was firmly wedged in the middle. Theron ambled closer on his stilt-like frame and took their drink orders—sherries and beers all round.
“Any news on your girl?” Neil asked Eben.
Eben looked up from his bu
cket-like hands with a grim expression. “No, nothing. The inspector over here believes that the drownings and her murder are somehow related,” he said, pulling the beanie off of his dark mop of curly hair and stuffing the knitted cap into an oversized jacket pocket. “If Interpol could send someone to get to the bottom of this sometime soon, I guess we’ll find out what happened to my Alida.”
Neil didn’t react to the doleful call to action. The man was hurting, but he wasn’t the only one. He didn’t have to extract fifty goddamn bodies from the effluvial depths of a metal tomb eighty feet below the ocean surface. Neil ground his teeth but kept quiet.
“Tell us about her,” Alexa said, obviously trying to lighten the tone.
Eben de Vos scratched at the table with a dirty nail. He looked up. “She was beautiful,” he said then lowered his eyes to the table. “Inside and out.”
Did the big man just sob? Neil berated himself. All people were selfish, according to Karl Marx. He felt a pang of guilt as he looked at the man.
Theron delivered their drinks, splashing some beer onto the table without bothering to clean it up. Eben held up a big paw toward the proprietor. “Wait.” He threw the sherry into the back of his gullet and then drained the beer with two big swallows. He clanked the glass down on the table. “Another round.” He looked at the rest of the group. “Anyone else?”
They shook their heads.
He held a hand to his mouth, burped, breathed in deeply, and let it out slowly. “I guess she was an introvert. She gets that from her mother. She liked to keep to herself.”
“Was she popular at school?” Neil asked.
Eben shook his head. “Like I said, she was an introvert; she didn’t mix easily.”
“But she had a boyfriend?”
Eben’s eyes hardened. “Yes, Dr. Petzer’s kid. I forgot his name.”
“Jake,” Moolman chimed in.
“Yes, the man’s new in town. They moved here a couple of months ago. His father’s the medical doctor up at the mining operation.”