Secret sea;

by Robb White

  Pete alone knew exactly where the Santa Ybel lay. He was sure of that. Narvez knew approximately but, if Pete interpreted the things Weber had done so far, Narvez had not told Weber, and Weber had not actually read the log of the Santa Ybel

  Pete put himself in the foreigner's place. What would he do if he wanted to find the Santa Ybel?

  The answer was simple: Follow the Indra.

  Then what?

  Weber had already searched the Indra and had

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  not found the log of the Santa YbeL Pete was sure that, after he had knocked Mike out with the pistol barrel, Weber had continued his search until he had satisfied himself that the log was not aboard.

  If that was right, Pete decided, then Weber would just be cutting his own throat to get tough. If, by a lucky fluke, Weber found the Indra again, the only thing he could do would be follow her. It would be useless for Weber to attack the Indra, Therefore, Pete figured, he and Mike were safe from any more physical violence until after they reached the Santa YheL

  That "after" worried Pete. Once he gave away the position of the treasure ship, he and Mike could stand by for anything. Pete did not for a moment try to kid himself into thinking that Weber would hesitate to do anything to get that gold. The man had committed cold-blooded murder in the past.

  So the answer was again simple: Weber must never find the Indra anchored above the Santa YheL

  That answer made Pete change his plans. Originally, before he had begun to realize how deadly a threat Weber was, he had planned simply to sail down to where the Santa Ybel was, anchor there, and dive for treasure whenever the weather was calm enough. And, when the weather was too rough for diving, just lie at anchor.

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  Pete threw all that out. With Weber in the same ocean, every minute that he stayed anchored above the Santa Ybel was going to be dangerous. Instead he would have to pick his days with the greatest care, sail to the spot as fast as he could, dive for a little while, and then get well away from the Santa Ybel. That way, Pete figured, narrowed the time of danger, made less the interval when Weber could find him.

  Then Pete grinned. He had lost Weber once already. Every minute, every mile the Indra sailed in the gray world, widened the area Weber had to search. From Miami, going south, it had been fairly easy for Weber to find him. It didn't take a mental giant to figure that a sailboat, making six knots, would have to be somewhere between Florida and the Bahamas and, as time passed, between the Keys and the Andros. But soon—in an hour—Pete would be turning west into the ninety-mile-wide Straits of Florida. If he could get through them without being discovered, Weber would have to search the entire Gulf of Mexico to find him.

  As the Indra was carried up to the top of a huge wave, he looked around. He couldn't see a half mile in any direction. The wall of cloud was pressing in close and was lying right down on the wild sea. The wind was full of mist and spray, and the sunlight was shut out so well that, at high noon, it seemed to be twilight.

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  "Boy," Pete said, ''you couldn't find the continent of North America in this soup."

  And by nightfall he would be plunging into the immense emptiness of the Gulf of Mexico.

  "Good-by, Weber," Pete said. 'It was nice knowing you."

  Mike came topside and took the wheel when Pete at last turned her west. The motion of the ship eased a little as she began to run, and they took off everything but the storm jib, which they boomed out. The storm was so great that they continued to make three knots under the jib alone.

  Pete, down in the cabin, continued cleaning up the mess Weber and his men had made of things. Mike had done a lot but had left the diving gear for Pete. He hung the stuff back on the bulkheads, lashed down the helmets and corselets more securely, flemished down the life line, and coiled the hoses. In his own cabin and Mike's he got things shipshape again and, by the time he was through, he began to feel hungry.

  In the galley Pete made himself a sandwich and then, in some doubt, made one for Mike. Eating his as he went up the ladder, he held out the other one to Mike.

  "Thanks," Mike said, and began gobbling.

  "What was that you were going to tell me about the man with an oyster on a string, Mike?"

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  Mike grinned, his mouth full. *Torget it, Mac. It didn't work."

  "It almost did. Think I'll turn in for a little while." Pete looked at his watch. "Eight bells. How about staying with her until eleven or twelve, Mike?"

  "I slept most of the morning. I'll keep her until later if you want."

  "We'd better steady down on four," Pete said. "We've got a long time yet."

  "Okay. Call you at eight bells."

  "Don't forget that oyster if it gets any rougher," Pete said, going down the ladder.

  It was pitch-black dark and the buzzer was going like an angry hive of hornets. Pete struggled up out of his bunk and as the buzzer continued to ring without stopping he began to get mad at Mike. "Okay. Okay!" he yelled above the noise of the laboring ship.

  As Pete ran out through the main cabin, he saw light flickering from topside and for an instant thought that the ship was on fire. But then he remembered how wet everything was up there. As he went up the ladder three steps at a time, he wondered if Weber had, by some freak of chance, found them again.

  The whole topside of the Indra was lit up with a cold, flickering, wavery light. In it he could see

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  Mike almost cowering at the wheel, his eyes wide open with fear.

  Pete stopped in the companionway and glanced up at the tops of the masts. Then he began to laugh.

  Mike straightened up and looked at him.

  Pete went on laughing, as he braced himself in the hatch to keep from being thrown back down the ladder.

  "Thought you were a sailor," Pete taunted him.

  Mike's eyes narrowed. Very deliberately he put a becket on the wheel, got down ofiF the wheel-box, and, with what dignity he could manage on the writhing ship, walked over to confront Pete.

  "What are you laughing about, clown?" Mike asked, and his jaw began to stick out.

  Pete just laughed.

  "Do you want a swat in the teeth, clothhead?" Mike demanded.

  "Take it easy, son," Pete said, still chuckling. "But you looked pretty funny squatting back there."

  "Funny?" Mike spat the word out. "What's so funny?"

  "You," Pete said.

  Mike turned and stalked back to the wheel. As he got back on the box and took the becket off, he said, "Here I am sailing around with a clown."

  Then the light blazed up bright again, stream-

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  ing in cold fire up and down the steel shrouds and dancing along the masts and the wire rope edges of the sails.

  "Cut the comedy," Mike said, and there was a faint tone of pleading in his voice. "What is that stutf, mate?"

  Pete came over and sat down beside him. "St. Elmo's fire. It's good stuff, Mike. The old sailors used to think that it was St. Erasmus coming down to look out for them because you very rarely see it except in storms."

  "Doesn't burn?"

  "No. It streams down from those two bright spots like fans on the mastheads."

  Mike laughed—a little. "Scared the pants off me. I was just sitting here, and all of a sudden those two spots jumped down on top of the masts and began to spit and fizzle like a cat fight. Then all that stuff began to run up and down. Listen to it crackling."

  "I remember once when I was in a destroyer," Pete said. "We were sneaking up on one of the Jap-held islands—had a bunch of UDTs to put overside—and it was blowing about like this "

  "Who are UDTs when they're home?" Mike asked.

  "Underwater demolition teams—very tough people. Anyway, everything was going fine and we were getting in right on top of the beach

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  when—whammy—all of a sudden St. Elmo's fire lit up the whole ship. We looked like a Christmas tree out there
, and in about three seconds the Japoons opened up with everything they had. Felt like those clay ducks in a shooting gallery. And, since we didn't want the Japs to know a U.S. ship was even in that ocean, we couldn't fire a shot. All we could do was back gracefully out of there, still lit up like the Fourth of July."

  "What'd you do?"

  "Waited until the stuff went away and went back. But it was a nervous bunch of boys on the way back. All hands kept looking up at the masts expecting that stuff to break out again."

  "What happened then?"

  "Why, son," Pete said, getting up, "we won the war."

  "Yeah?" Mike said. "Don't you know who won the war, Mac?"

  "No, who did?"

  "The United States Marine Band," Mike said.

  "That's right, I'd forgotten. . . . Well, good night. Give me a buzz if anything happens—that is, anything important."

  "Listen . . ." Mike said, half rising from his seat.

  Pete laughed and went down the ladder.

  Pete relieved Mike at the wheel at midnight. The storm was reaching its peak, and by three o'clock in the morning it was too rough to handle

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  any longer. Regretfully Pete put enough canvas on the mainmast to heave her to nicely and then just sat there. He hated to lose ground, to have to let the ship be driven backward a mile or so every hour, but the wind and sea were too violent to keep on running. The danger of a jibe was too great even under the short canvas and, in the confused sea, the danger of a wave crashing down from astern and breaking the Indrah back grew with the storm.

  The Indra was a good ship and hove to like a duck. While the storm screamed and roared around her, she seemed to ignore it as she rose and fell with the waves. Pete stayed in the cockpit in case a freak wave should threaten to broach her and listened to the voices you can hear in a real gale at sea. He listened to the voices singing like a great choir of people far away, a choir with each section of voices singing a different tune. To pass the time and keep himself awake, he also studied the waves which came rushing up out of the blackness to become gray-black walls towering all the way into the sky. Each one seemed to be trying desperately to crash down upon the Indra, but she ignored them as their white crests began to become visible and then, from the black sky, came roaring down. Every seventh wave, Pete thought, seemed to be bigger than the other six. Number one and number six waves were the smallest.

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  Around seven in the morning Pete went forward and tightened up the lashings on the dinghy and the fourteen-foot tender, and at eight he buzzed for Mike and asked him to get up some chow.

  By eleven the back of the storm was broken, and they got under way again. Pete took the wheel after lunch, and Mike turned in.

  By five o'clock in the afternoon the radio compass gave Pete a position almost clear of the Florida Keys. When Mike came on deck, Pete said, "We're almost in the Gulf. I'm going to take my first real breath when we get in it."

  '*Do you think old Narrow Face is still looking for us?"

  "Fm sure of it. And I want him to have a lot more area to search than the Straits."

  "Wish rd seen him coming out of the galley," Mike said. "Fd have let him have it with that marlinespike right between his little peepers."

  "I wouldn't care if I never saw him again," Pete declared.

  Mike settled down in the cockpit. "Wind's shifting," he said, turning his cheek from side to side. "She'll go around 180 and then die."

  Pete nodded. "I hope this sky stays down until dark, though. One more night's run and he'll never find us."

  But the sky didn't. Slowly the clouds receded, the wind seemed to push them back, and the small

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  circle in which the Indra seemed to have been sailing steadily widened.

  Mike took the wheel and Pete went over to the chart board. He was marking in the afternoon DR position when he heard Mike say in a low voice, "Look."

  Pete turned slowly around and looked aft.

  About a mile away, just emerging from the wall of cloud and sea, was the black sloop, its sails ghostly white.

  Pete felt his knees turning to water, and he leaned back against the chart board. On the sloop, standing in the bow, was the figure of a tall, thin man.

  Pete slowly lowered his eyes and looked at Mike. The boy was looking up at him, his eyes steady.

  "How did he do it?" Mike asked slowly.

  Pete shook his head. "I don't know. But he did it."

  Mike turned slowly and looked back at the sloop. "What do we do now?"

  Pete walked slowly over and sat down beside Mike. "How did he do it?" Pete said, his voice almost a whisper. "In all the thousands of square miles he had to search, how did he find us? In the storm, in visibility less than five hundred yards, how did he get right on our stern?"

  Suddenly Pete yanked open the compartment where the long binoculars were kept. He un-

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  consciously and from long training in the Navy wrapped the neck strap around his wrist before he brought the glasses up.

  Then, for a long time, Pete stood going over every inch of the black sloop with the glasses. At last he lowered them.

  "That's how he did it," he said.

  "How?" Mike asked.

  "Radar," Pete said.

  H^^^^^H

  Phantom

  JVadar?" Mike asked. "You mean that stuff can see right through a fog?"

  Pete sat down, his back to the black sloop. He put his elbows on his knees and held his face in his hands. "Yeah."

  "Then he's just been following us wherever we went?"

  Pete nodded. "I thought I was being so smart,"

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  he said bitterly. "And he's been sitting there looking at us on the scope."

  Pete slowly straightened up and looked aft. As he did, the jib of the black sloop luffed and slowly the boat lost speed and the clouds began to close in upon her again. At first wisps of clouds drifted around her and then, as her outline grew wavery and her white sails grew gray, the black sloop vanished again into the cloud.

  "Can he see us now?" Mike asked.

  "Perfectly," Pete said. "We're a pretty little green line."

  "How does that stuff work?"

  "It isn't stuff, it's a thing," Pete said. "I don't know much about it except that it's a cathode-ray tube and a radio receiver and transmitter. The transmitter sends out a radio pulse which lasts about a millionth of a second. If the pulse doesn't hit anything, nothing shows on the tube, but if it does hit something, it bounces back. Since radio waves travel at the same speed as that of light—I think it's 186,000 miles per second or minute or something—the radar has a gimmick that can measure how long it took the pulse to get there and how long it took the reflection to-get back, so you can read right off the cathode-ray tube the distance the thing is away from you. That's where *radar' came from—*radio detecting and ranging.' Of course the thing sends out millions of those pulses, not just one, but it

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  doesn't send out another one until the reflection comes back or just peters out."

  "Can he see us all the time then? Can he see us moving around and steering and all?"

  "No, it's not that good. All he sees is a wavery green line on a dark round glass thing—the business end of the cathode-ray tube—they call it a pip.

  "Can it go right through mountains and houses and things?"

  "Oh no. It can't go through anything but air. But it goes right through fog or rain or darkness."

  "H'mmm," Mike said. "We could really use a good-sized mountain right back there, couldn't we?"

  Pete turned and looked back at the now blank wall of cloud. As he looked and saw nothing, a feeling of helplessness gripped him; a feeling of being trapped. Weber, with a faster, more easily handled boat, could always outsail him except in very heavy weather. And as long as the Indra was within twenty or thirty miles of the sloop, Weber could see it with the radar. Pete suddenly remembere
d once, in a laboratory, watching some rats in a glass cage.

  He began to beat on his forehead with his right fist. Could he jam the radar the way the British jammed the Nazi Wiirzburg system? No. He had no transmitter. Could he run back to the Keys and count on their obscuring the Indra on

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  the scope? No. They weren't high enough. Could he, somehow, destroy the radar set on the sloop? Down in the cabin Pete had an M-1 carbine. But the sloop would have to come within three hundred yards before he could hope to hit the radar antenna on the mast. And even if he could hit it, it would be easy to fix. And Pete didn't want to start the shooting.

  There was nothing he could do. In a little dark room somewhere on the black sloop the cathode-ray tube glowed faintly—glowed like the eye of evil—and the Indra, d. green line, was always on it.

  "Why don't we just call it a day?" Mike asked. "If that bird brain can follow us with the gadget everywhere we go, he's got us licked. Just as soon as we get to the Santa Ybel all he's got to do is come alongside and swarm on us. You got anything that'll shoot?"

  "Only a carbine," Pete said.

  "One of those toy guns?"

  "Not exactly, but it's no cannon."

  "Well, let's go back to Miami and go into the cupcake business. You don't need that gold wheel anyway; you got plenty of dough."

  Pete looked at him somberly. "You know something, Mike? I've got a brother about your age. You know what he can do?"

  Mike looked curiously at Pete. "No, what can he do, Mac?"

  "He can wiggle his right thumb. And—that's 143

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  all he can do. He's lying up in a hospital paralyzed from the neck down."

  Mike frowned. "You mean just a kid my age?"

  "Yeah. And I haven't got any money, Mike. I've got a little in my pocket. I owe a whale of a lot and I've got to keep Johnny in the hospital. If we don't get that stuff out of the Sajzta Ybel, it'll be the end of Johnny—and me."

  Mike turned slowly and, in a low voice, began to curse the thin man. He raised his fist and shook it at the blank wall of cloud. Then he stopped and looked at Pete. "Are those pulses or whatever you called 'em coming right out of those clouds, right now?"