Andre Norton - Sea Siege

by Sea Siege(lit)

  Sea Siege

  by Andre Norton

  PART ONE

  Project Sea Serpent

  I

  ONE DUPEE-BEACHED

  "perfect opportunity—chance of a lifetime!" Griffith Gunston exploded to the empty reaches of the wide blue sky. "I don't think!" he added forcibly.

  He was standing defiantly, his hands on his hips, breasting the trade wind. It was blowing steadily, push­ing the booming surf against reef and rock, sounding an organ's deep notes, bending the bushes and trees with the flail of its invisible current. Griff knew that down on the beach one could hear another song, the tuneful whisper of sand on the move, as restless under the push of the wind as he now was under the lash of his personal frustration.

  There were few real heights on San Isadore. It was an island born of the sea, not of volcanic eruption. But the coral block building, once part of the old saltworks, which his father had turned into a combined laboratory and home, was on the cliffs. And from this vantage point of headland Griff could now survey not only the sleepy indifference of dying Carterstown but look across the wide sweep of Frigate Bay to the waves smashing on the barrier reef—that division which separated the shal­lows he had explored, during his exile of the past few weeks, from the depths into which a skin diver dared not venture.

  Below him, the Island Queen, swung at her moorings, her spars bare to the pull of the wind. And beyond her the rich aquamarine of the water was split by a wedge of silver flying fish. It was a world of color—the sea. But, on the other hand, the island hues were muted, ghostly. Here was none of the gaudy luxuriance of the tropics that one might find elsewhere in the West In­dies.

  San Isadore was truly a sea island—encased, encrusted in salt. Gray-white crystals gathered not only in the beds of the old saltworks but about the trunks of the trees, at the roots of shrubs, and lay in crusts on the thin soil. The vegetation was largely silver-gray, some leaves glint­ing metallically in the sun. Among the plants were the pointed, brittle fingers of cacti and the menace of skel­eton thorn trees, with only the darker sheen of lignum vitae and sea lavender to break the salty sweep. Men had their gardens on San Isadore, but they were planted and reaped in defiance of nature, not with her coopera­tion.

  Griff strode into the full drive of the wind. He wanted to fight something. His impatience, repressed for days, had come to a head with his father this morning—dis­astrously. He had advanced his plea to be allowed to return to the States, advanced it, as he thought, with reasonable restraint. And what had happened? Griff's fists clenched until his nails bit into the palms of his hands.

  He wasn't ten years old and he was not going to be treated as if he were. To be spoken to like that with Hughes sitting there on the other side of the table! The perfect assistant, Hughes, Dr. Ramsey Gunston's shadow and alter ego. The calm good sense of all the answers Griff's father had marshaled had only added to the hu­miliation and disappointment of that scene—every one of Griff's own points demolished without any real un­derstanding of how he felt, what he wanted to do!

  Run away little boy and play—find some way to amuse yourself—that was about the sum and substance of Dr. Gunston's reply. But Griff wanted his own life—to fol­low the plans he had been making for years. Did his father believe that he had existed in a sort of vacuum, growing no older, doing no thinking for himself for the past five years? True, his father did not know him well —how could he? Ramsey Gunston had been out in the East Indies chasing fish all over the place, writing scien­tific papers that might be in an obtuse code as far as his son was concerned. What did Griff care about the dis­ease of fish— Fish! He couldn't be less interested!

  His father had turned up again just after Griff had graduated from Emmsly, swept him off to this West Indies salt pot, as if his son had no right to a life of his own at all, and settled in for another season of prying into stinking messes of seaweed, of analyzing scum.

  Oh, he supposed it was important—at least some of the magazines and papers back home had said that it was —this study of the Red Plague, of the strange new death in southern waters that had appeared without warning a season ago and was making great inroads in the profits of the fishing industry, sending the dead bodies of fish floating ashore by the millions along the lower coast of the United States and among the West Indies. Dad's job was backed by both the American and the British governments. He'd been brought halfway around the world to do it. But there wasn't one small piece of it his son could help with. And Dr. Gunston had the perfect Hughes always at his elbow, making Griff's first fumbling but honest attempts to help seem so childish that the younger Gunston soon stopped trying.

  So—why should he be chained here, on an island even tourists did not visit, so far off the shipping lanes that the Island Queen was their only link with civiliza­tion when she made her biweekly trip to Santa Maria. And what was Santa Maria, in spite of its government house and port for freighters, but a dirty flyspeck on some out-of-date charts? Let him go home and try out for the Academy. For a moment Griff saw not the blue sea—but the blue sky. Jets—those were the future—not fish! He didn't know one fish from another and had no desire to be formally introduced either.

  But there Griff was belittling his own curiosity, a curiosity that he had no intention of admitting to either of the two men now at work in the building behind him. His diving adventures along the reef during the past few weeks, his companionship with Christopher Waite, the mate of the Queen, had taught him more than he realized about the finned and shelled inhabitants of the bay—including some lore that might have sur­prised Dr. Gunston. But Griff took a perverse and child­ish delight in keeping to himself the results of his own underwater explorations. After all, both Dad and Hughes must have forgotten more than he would ever know. Why babble about such kindergarten stuff to them?

  He wanted to get away. If he didn't, he had a vague fear that he might fall under the same spell that doomed Carterstown, that inertia that had sapped the energy of the islanders since the closing of the saltworks. They fished; they planted a few grains of corn, melon seeds, some garden truck in those tiny potholes of real soil to be found at such intervals that a small garden patch might cover several acres; they caught conch and dried them to sell in Santa Maria for the only cash they ever saw. But no one worked regularly or cared much about the future.

  Griff, some of his hot resentment cooled by the press of the wind against his sun-browned body, considered languidly his own plans for the day. He could take out the underwater camera and try for some shots along the reef. He could strike inland to the plate-shallow salt lake and study the flamingos. He could try to find the bat cave Le Marr said was back in the desert strip. Or, he could again tackle the books he had flung aside last night with a petulance more suitable to someone half his age. He ought to sweat out that course sometime, in case he could ever take the Air Force Academy exam—if Dr. Gunston would even consider allowing him to try it!

  Once more that stab of irritation. Lord, he didn't like fish, he never would! Moodily he stared down at the Island Queen without really seeing her at all.

  There was a stir of life on her deck. A figure wearing only ragged dungarees pattered barefooted on the snowy-clean boards. That would be Rob Fletcher, his white-blond hair identifying him even at this distance. The is­landers were an oddly mixed lot. Some "red-legs," rebel-convicts of the eighteenth century political wars, Scot­tish clansmen after '45, or the Monmouth rebels, had been sent here by their planter-masters to start the first of the salt beds. Then the pirates of the cays had added men from time to time, marooned freebooters or ship­wrecked buccaneers. There were Negro slaves and a few Indians—and now the islanders were a mixture of races, colors, heritages—Saxon nam
es wedded to black skins, blue eyes beneath thick fuzz, startling blond locks now and then. And among them was a very small core of families who had not altogether slipped back to the semi-savage existence of the rest, a core that produced from time to time an island leader or a man able to bet­ter his condition and try for some degree of civilized living.

  Angus Murdock, the captain of the Queen; Fletcher; and Chris Waite, his mate; Dobrey Le Marr; Braxton Wells who managed the one store in Carterstown—you could count their number on the fingers of one hand. But they were there, distinct from their fellows, with a measure of energy, a degree of curiosity and of solid belief in themselves, and some ambition for the future.

  Griff made his decision about the day's employment. He'd join the crew of the Queen, give them a hand as he had so often done before. Chris had just come above deck, his darker bulk looming over that of his slighter companion. The date of their scheduled trip to Santa Maria was still two days away, but there was something in that sudden appearance of Chris that suggested ac­tion, and Griff hurried down the winding cliff path.

  He followed the rutted path, which could not be termed a road, between the tumble-down ruins of Car­terstown. From one house in five he caught the sound of life. The rest were left now to the lizards and the spiders. As he trotted into the main street, he almost ran into Angus Murdock.

  "Slow you down." White teeth showed in a wide friendly grin, and a rich slur of voice somehow soothed the sting left from the curt interview in the lab house.

  Griff grinned back happily. "Care to sign on a new hand today, Cap'n?"

  "You aimin' to go worryin' them fish 'long the reef?" was Murdock's counterquestion. His well-muscled shoulders moved easily under his loose and very clean white shirt. The officer's cap, its captain's insignia care­fully rubbed into winking brightness, was cocked over one eye in a way that gave his square-jawed face a rather rakish cast. Murdock traced his lineage back to another captain, one whose reputation at the time had been far from savory but over which modern romance cast a softening glow. There are few modern sea-rovers who can state with truth that their great-great-great-great­grandfathers were highly successful pirates.

  "Not unless you do—" Griff returned, matching his stride to the other's rolling gait. "Is something up?"

  "Up? What you mean, mon?" Murdock was at the dinghy, preparing to launch out to the Queen. "We ain't sailin' today—"

  But an impatient hail from the ship interrupted him. Chris was waving from the deck, his arm a whirlwind of summoning, and Murdock, with Griff, pushed off, to swing through the water at an oar speed much greater than usual. It was clear that something had happened, something actually drastic enough to excite the usually placid Waite.

  "They's found the S'Jawn, Cap'n!" Chris blew out his news in a mighty blast almost before his superior of­ficer clambered over the rail.

  Murdock, paused, pushing back his cap. Then, with a frown cutting a deep line between his brows, he con­fronted Waite as if he were accusing the islander of be­ing personally responsible for bad news.

  "Where they find her?"

  "Driftin'—" Chris waved an arm to indicate the vast expanse beyond the reef. "She was driftin'—without no mon 'board her. Jus' like the Neptune an' Flyin' Fish!"

  "On the wireless you heard dis?" Murdock asked.

  "Aye, Cap'n. They say it from San' Maria. She was found this mornin' by the Dutch freighter. No mon 'board her—driftin'—"

  Rob Fletcher had a single comment, which he made with the sullen persistence of one who had said the same thing before and did not expect to be attended to any more this time than he had been the last.

  "Dupee—"

  Murdock rounded on him, and the frown became even deeper. "A dupee? A ghost thing from the sea, eh? That's what you say, mon? Me, I don't believe in no ghost dupee thing without I see it with these two eyes—"

  Rob shrugged. "So you don't believe, Cap'n? Then tell me true—what takes the mons from those ships an' leave them sailin' without no mon on board? Tell me that? No storm, no fire, no thing bad, jus' ship sailin' without no mon on her—that dupee work, that is!

  "No mon knows what things be in the deep sea." He expanded his argument. "There's this red death what be killin' off the fish, ain't there? And Buzzy Defere, he saw that debble thing a-swimmin' off the reef in the moonshine—"

  "All right," Murdock countered. "So there be things in the sea what be strange. But they're no ghosts— They're things a mon can see—like barracuda or shark. I don' believe in dupees—no ghost thing is gonna climb on the Queen an' push us off!"

  It seemed to Griff that Rob did not look at all con­vinced. But he had a question of his own.

  "What do you think does happen, Cap'n?"

  Murdock was staring at the distant reef, to the deeper blue of the wave-ruffled water beyond.

  "I think—subs!"

  All the rumors of the past months, the tall tales that had passed from island to island, that had been men­tioned on broadcasts from the States, were summed up in that one word—for not only had the red scum come to plague the sea but also this other lurking menace.

  Several years before, similar tales had come from the far islands of the Pacific. There, too, small craft had cleared port with full crews and passengers for short runs between one landfall and the next—only to be en­tirely lost in a calm sea or to be found drifting days or weeks later, deserted by any living thing, with no evi­dence of any disaster such as fire or storm. And there had been rumors then of a new type of shark prowling the lanes, a sub that struck, killed, and struck again for no gain anyone could fathom.

  Because the tension between the Eastern bloc of na­tions and the West had been building, so that they were on the brink of a holocaust, which both sides knew might put an end not only to the actively warring nations but to perhaps the whole world, the story of an underseas scout, a lurking, unnamed enemy, had been readily ac­cepted and believed. And only because the mysterious attacks had suddenly ceased had real conflict been averted then.

  Now within the circle of the Caribbean and the Gulf, the same game was being played once more. Three small island ships, the Neptune, the Flying Fish, and now the St. John, had been plundered of life and left to drift after the familiar pattern. And the affair of the St. John struck close to home with the men of San Isadore. She was a small vessel with the usual crew of three—twin to the Island Queen—and her home port was Santa Maria.

  "Cap'n Luis, an' Sim, an' Marco." Chris was reciting the roll of the missing.

  "An' Florrie, Sim's woman," Rob added. "She be 'long this time—do cookin'. Dupee done caught hisself big mouthful!"

  "Them Reds." Murdock's voice lost much of its warmth. "They's gonna find out that they's got some real mons on their tail this time! We ain't gonna be gobbled up like the hound fish gobble up their dinner 'long the reef. We gits us some teeth like a shark an' then we goes 'til we can use them right!"

  There was a menace in that last, though Griff won­dered how Murdock proposed to face up to a modern sub, probably atomically powered and armed, with only three diver's knives, a shark gun, and the automatic that was the captain's own prized possession, those being the total sum of all armament he had ever seen aboard the Queen.

  "They's give out a warnin' "—Chris's slower drawl was a cushion to the captain's heat—"do any ship see some­thing, they say it by the wireless. Government boat, it be all ready steam out an' help—"

  Rob shook his head. His long face was all solemn dis­agreement. "No government boat ain't gonna find no dupee. Get Papa-loi make a gris-gris charm— That's the only thing send dupee back where he belong. I speak Le Marr—he make gris-gris for the Queen—"

  Murdock shrugged. "Gris-gris—an' guns! We git them both. Then we see who bigger—this thing in the sea or we."

  "Ahhhh—" The hail echoed over the waters of the bay, and the four on the deck of the Queen turned to look at the dilapidated boat that was approaching un­der oar power from around the point. I
ts two man crew was putting on a better burst of speed than Griff had yet seen any of the islanders produce, and their excitement was manifest. Had the mysterious jungle "tele­graph" that operated on San Isadore spread the news of the St. John's discovery this soon—or was it something else?

  "Mosely Peeks." Chris identified one of the oarsmen without much concern, Mosely being on the bottom rung of the island's social ladder and of little conse­quence to the more solid citizens now represented in the gathering on the Queen. "Whyfor that mon make all this noise?"

  "Got him a conch pearl an' think he be rich for all days," suggested Rob. "He talk, talk pearl all the time since Josie find that one last month."

  Murdock walked to the rail. "Mosely!" His hail held the ring of command. "Whyfor you yell your throat sore that way? What big thing you have to say, mon?"

  "Dupee—!" The word echoed over the water, rising above the boom of the surf. "Done found dupee lyin' out there!"

  Rob spat disgustedly into the water. "Done got sun in the head," was his verdict. "Dupee don't go 'round let­tin' hisself be foun'—"

  "Sub!" Griff and Murdock snapped the word out al­most together. And when the captain swung down in­to the dinghy, Griff was only seconds behind, his heart beating fast. Could a sub actually be in these waters after all?