White Water td-106

by Warren Murphy

  They looked at him.

  "And if that isn't a fleur-de-lis on his face, I'll eat the next shark I see."

  "Glutton," sniffed Chiun.

  THERE WERE three strange things about the body when it was taken off the cutter at the Coast Guard station at Scituate.

  First it was completely nude, and as blue as a human body could get. The blue was from exposure.

  The corpse's face was the white of chalk, and spread over the dead man's features was a livid blue fleur-de-lis put on with what looked like clown greasepaint. The nose was completely blue, as were the lips. The upper and lower spears of the design touched hairline and chin, respectively. The wings curved over the cheekbones in perfect symmetry.

  Clenched between the man's teeth was something thin and black. With a pair of pliers, Lieutenant Heckman extracted the thing. It turned out to be the tail of a small gray fish without a head.

  "This is damn weird," she was saying.

  "Nothing weird about a guy trying to stay alive as long as he can," Remo remarked.

  Sandy looked at him dubiously.

  "He was adrift in the water. Naturally he'd eat whatever he could catch to keep himself alive," said Remo.

  "Nice theory. But unless he had stainless-steel teeth, it won't float. A knife cut off this fish's head."

  "Open up his stomach, and I'll bet you find the fish head," Remo said.

  "At least he did not stoop to shark," Chiun said aridly.

  When they turned the body over to look for wounds, they discovered the third weird thing. It was definitely the weirdest of the three weird things.

  There was a gray fish tail projecting from the bluish crack of the dead man's rear end.

  "I have seen some pretty odd things, but I have never seen that," Sandy muttered.

  "Maybe the fish tried to eat him and got stuck," said Remo in a voice that suggested he wasn't exactly embracing the theory.

  "That's a turbot, if I know my fish. They aren't flesh eaters, and I don't see how, left to his own devices, one could cram his head into a human rectum."

  "What other way could it have happened?"

  "Two. The guy was queer for fish or someone jammed it up in there."

  "Why would anyone do that?" asked Remo.

  "Your guess," said Sandy, "is as good as mine."

  "My guess is the fish tried to eat him and got stuck."

  The Master of Sinanju reached out with delicate fingers and took the fish by the tail. He pulled. With an ugly sucking sound, the fish came loose. So did a cloud of gases that mixed the stink of blocked bowels and decomposition.

  Everyone retreated several yards, Chiun still holding the fish. He lifted it so everyone could see. It was a small, putrid, gray fish with bulging eyes and nothing appetizing about it.

  "Whatever it is," Remo said, "it's no prize."

  "Halibut," said Chiun.

  "Turbot," amended Sandy.

  "If you say so," said Remo, holding his nose.

  Everyone saw the fish's throat had been cut, making a pinkish smile under its gaping mouth. Chiun then tossed it so it landed on the body with a light smack.

  "Someone cut this fish's throat and stuck it in," Sandy said slowly. "Probably the same someone who cut off the other turbot's head and stuck it in his mouth. This is not good."

  "Not for the fish anyway," said Remo.

  "Not good for anyone. This is a message. The question is from who and to whom?"

  Remo looked at her skeptically.

  "Look, the turbot is the symbol of Canada's victory over Spain and other high-seas poachers. This dead guy has callused claws for hands. That tells me he's a fisherman."

  "So what's the design on his face mean?" asked Remo.

  "Beats the living pooh out of me."

  "It is the symbol of Frankish kings," said Chiun. He gestured across the room to the bluish corpse.

  "Come again?" asked Sandy.

  "The French. This man is French."

  "The French don't fish these waters. They're mostly in the Gulf of St. Lawrence."

  "Nevertheless, this man wears the mark of the French."

  "Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe the French have marked him," suggested Remo.

  Sandy Heckman shook her sun-bleached head. "Wouldn't be the French. French-Canadian more than likely. Though Quebec hasn't much of a deepwater fleet."

  "Maybe we should kick this upstairs to our boss."

  "Do it quick. I've still got to locate the Santo Fado."

  AT FOLCROFT SANITARIUM, Harold Smith listened patiently and digested every morsel of information. At the end of Remo's recitation, he frowned so deeply Remo thought he heard his dry skin crackle. It was probably only line noise.

  "Something is very wrong here," he said in his astringent, lemony voice.

  "So what do you want us to do about it?"

  "I will have identification of the body expedited on this end. I want the search for that submarine to go forward. There is something very wrong in the North Atlantic. And we must get to the bottom of it."

  "In a manner of speaking," Remo said dryly.

  "I am attempting to locate it by satellite. Remain in close touch at all times."

  Hanging up, Remo turned to Sandy Heckman and said, "We gotta sweep for that submarine. Orders from on high."

  "Okay, let's go," she said, grabbing her helmet. "Maybe we'll find that missing trawler while we're at it."

  When they left the operations building, they found the white Falcon jet had taken off without them.

  "There goes my damn rescue," Sandy fumed.

  Remo looked at her. "What rescue? The guy's dead."

  "We don't know that's him. And if it is, there's still his boat to be found." Her eyes fell on an idle Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter. She started for it at a dead run.

  "Pilot, we need a lift to the Cayuga."

  "She's at sea."

  "That'll save us some travel time," Sandy said, climbing aboard. "Hope you can handle a deck landing."

  "It'll be my first."

  "Mine, too," she said grimly as Remo and Chiun climbed aboard and the Jayhawk's main rotor started to scream.

  Chapter 16

  The Jayhawk pilot did an excellent job of dropping the bright orange rescue helicopter onto the pitching helipad. The Coast Guard cutter Cayuga came to a dead stop to accommodate it but immediately got underway again, so the chopper pilot had to take off from a moving deck. After a couple of false stabs, he got out and hung his head over the cutter's rail until his stomach was completely empty.

  When he finally took off, it was without a hitch.

  On deck the Master of Sinanju continued to enumerate his grievances. "Yono," he lamented, his hazel eyes bleak as the surrounding seas.

  "What's yono?" asked Remo out of boredom rather than real interest.

  "Salmon."

  "Never cared for it much."

  "It is better than skate."

  "Anything tastes better than skate ...."

  "I was promised salmon of all kinds. The sockeye. Coho. Chinook. And pink and golden."

  "All salmon tastes pretty much the same to me."

  Chiun squeezed his eyes with a mixture of pain and yearning. "Orange roughy. I was promised orange roughy."

  "Never heard of orange roughy. Is it anything like red herring?"

  "I have never heard of red herring. I will see that red herring goes into the next contract."

  Remo smiled. "You do that, Little Father."

  "Orange roughy. Red snapper. Yellowtail flounder. Bluefin tuna. Gray sole. Black crappie."

  "Don't forget purple smoothie."

  "Yes, purple smoothie. And redfish and sablefish and bluegill and amberjack and striped bass and rainbow trout. And exotic mahimahi," continued Chiun in a plaintive voice.

  "Isn't that porpoise?" asked Remo.

  "Dolphin-fish," corrected Lieutenant Sandy Heckman. She had just emerged from belowdecks. A vivid orange Mustang survival suit encased her blue flight suit
, its multiple pockets full of flares and other mariner's emergency equipment. A side arm slapped her thigh. "We're approaching the longitude and latitude of your phantom submarine."

  "Can you find the sub if it's submerged?"

  "Maybe. But if it comes to a fight, we're not exactly equipped for antisubmarine warfare."

  "You leave the fighting to us," said Remo.

  Sandy eyed them skeptically. "What are you two going to do-blow bubbles at them?"

  "We'll think of something. Won't we, Little Father?"

  "I will think of something," Chiun said sternly. "You will do the thing I think of."

  "Just remember what's important, me, or getting that sub."

  Chiun steepled his long-nailed fingers before his chest and made his eyes menacing. "Drowning the submersible vessel is very important. If you follow my instructions to the letter, possibly you will not drown, too."

  Twenty minutes later the helmsman called from the pilothouse, "Contact!"

  Rushing to the pilothouse, they found the helmsman monitoring the sonar scope.

  "What do you make of this?" he asked Sandy.

  She stared at the greenish scope. It showed a green grid with a bird's-eye view of the cutter's outline in its center. Ahead off the port bow was a tiny but very distinct green blip.

  "It's not a sub. Too small," Sandy decided.

  "It's metallic. Maybe it's a one-man sub."

  They watched it for several minutes. The object was tracking an undeviating course.

  "If it's a one-man sub, it's off a mother ship," Sandy said firmly. "We'll follow it and see where it goes."

  The cutter stayed in its easterly heading, cleaving through the waves with only a slight bumping when they struck larger swells.

  Abruptly the object changed course, and Sandy snapped out orders.

  "Starboard. One degree!"

  The helmsman spun the wheel expertly, and the cutter dug in as it moved to stay with the mystery contact.

  "It's either a small sub or a torpedo," Remo suggested.

  Sandy shook her head. "Torpedoes don't change course, not that I know of."

  "This thing just did," Remo muttered.

  Chiun drifted away, evidently bored. Remo found his thoughts wandering. The smell of the open sea was causing him to flash back to the previous night. He was trained to feel fear when fear was a useful survival tool. After a crisis was over, he discarded fear like a used Kleenex. But the memories of the previous night kept coming back.

  He joined the Master of Sinanju at the rail. "I almost bought it out here," he told Chiun.

  Chiun eyed a solitary petrel that was eyeing him back. "You did not."

  "Been a long time since I came that close."

  "Purge your mind of all such considerations. The past is the past."

  "I gotta find Freya."

  "And you will. If she does not find you."

  Not long after that, the sonar scope began pinging excitedly, and Remo and Chiun returned to the pilothouse.

  "What's happening now?" asked Remo.

  "Our contact just ran into a schooled-up pod of fish," Sandy told them.

  "What kind?"

  "Hard to say. Maybe whiting."

  "Whiting is not quality fish," Chiun said disdainfully. "Its bones do not digest well."

  "You're not supposed to eat the bones," Sandy said absently.

  "If you cook fish right," Remo told her, "you can eat the bones, too."

  "And the heads," added Chiun.

  "Must be whiting," Sandy remarked, her eyes intent on the scope. "It's about the most plentiful kind you could catch out here these days."

  "Maybe it's turbot," said Remo.

  "That's weird," Sandy suddenly stated. "The contact is changing course, and the fish are moving with it."

  "Looks like they're running from it," the helmsman said.

  "No, it's following them. They're not scattering before it."

  "Then it's gotta be a fish," said Remo.

  Sandy frowned deeply. "No, that's a metallic blip. We can tell these things."

  "So why is it following those fish?"

  "That," muttered Sandy, "is the question of the hour."

  They watched the cluster of sonar blips as the cutter Cayuga thundered along.

  "We're approaching the Nose," the helmsman warned.

  "The part of the Grand Banks that Canada doesn't lay claim to," Sandy explained. "We're not exactly welcome in these parts, but it's still international waters, so we're out of our jurisdiction."

  "The Canadians are our allies. What could they do?"

  "Complain to our superior officers and get us cashiered out of the guard." Sandy frowned. "What do you think, helmsman?"

  "Can't hurt to follow this thing a few knots more."

  "Why do you not seek to catch it?" asked Chiun.

  "Be interesting to try, but there's no way. If we could drop a net in front of it, at this speed it would pop right through."

  "Remo can catch it," Chiun offered.

  Sandy Heckman laughed, and up in the dead gray sky the petrel joined in raucously. Their voices had about the same tone.

  "With what-an undersea butterfly net?" she scoffed.

  "We have our ways," Remo said defensively.

  "Remo, I command you to catch this mysterious fish that is not a fish," Chiun said sternly, pointing at the water.

  "Aw, c'mon, Chiun. Don't bust my chops."

  "Remo, you are commanded. Obey."

  Remo sighed and said to Sandy, "Get ahead of it. I'll see what I can do."

  "We have diving gear aboard," she offered.

  Remo shook his head. "I don't need it."

  "You can't go down without scuba gear."

  "I do it all the time." Then, remembering the previous night, he added, "But I'll take a wet suit."

  Sandy looked to the helmsman, who said, "Orders are to assist in any way possible."

  "It's your lungs," Sandy said.

  The Cayuga spurted ahead, got ahead of the underwater contact, then came to a slow, easy stop.

  Stepping out of his Italian loafers, Remo donned a night black neoprene wet suit, drawing in a deep charge of oxygen as he stood on the afterdeck. He disdained the gloves and flippers.

  He waited until everyone was looking the other way. Only Chiun was watching him. Then, from a standing start he back-flipped into the water. He made no discernible splash.

  The water closed in on him, and the first cold clutch of fear took hold of his mind. Remo pushed the thought back.

  His face tingled from the shock of the cold, then it went numb. He diverted warmth to his hands and feet, where he really needed it.

  Remo let himself sink, eyes adjusting to the lessening light. Seawater filtered out the red-orange end of the spectrum. The blues and indigos soon shaded to a uniform gray.

  The first thing Remo looked for was a submarine. The water was completely free of subs. Remo was not surprised.

  But the school of small fish showed with increasing clearness. They formed an ellipse of well-spaced ranks over the ocean floor. In the filtered daylight, Remo was surprised by one thing. Other than the school, there were no fish in sight. This far out, that was unusual.

  The school, its multitudinous eyes gleaming like perfectly matched silvery coins, swam toward him. Remo was impressed by the whiting's orderly lines. They might have belonged to some fishy army, they were so disciplined.

  He spotted the thing following them at an even speed and distance.

  Seen head-on, it looked as dull as a big blunt bullet. It was not a fish. What it was wasn't exactly clear.

  Setting himself, Remo achieved neutral buoyancy by releasing air from his lungs while he waited for the blunt nose to come to him.

  The whiting-if that's what they were-grew agitated when they came upon Remo. Still, they held their course, their tiny fins waving rhythmically.

  Remo let the leading fish pass over and around him. They seemed to take his presence in stride.
>
  It was a torpedo, Remo saw as the pressure of its approach touched his benumbed face. Remo scooted out of the way slightly and, as it passed, trailing a bubbly wake, he snap-kicked at its tail.

  The torpedo shuddered and veered, churning water. Abruptly its steady mechanical whir sputtered out. It slowed. Tail first, it began to sink.

  Reaching out, Remo wrapped his arms around it and, as the pod of whiting broke in every direction, clearly startled, Remo pushed to the surface.

  The torpedo was heavy, but it responded to his upward thrusts. Feet kicking furiously, Remo followed it, pushing at intervals to keep it moving along. Finally he got it to the surface.

  Treading water, one arm wrapped around the middle, Remo called up to the cutter deck. "Hey! Lower a net!"

  Sandy Heckman's startled face showed at the rail.

  "Where did you come from?"

  "I dived."

  "I didn't hear you. We thought you'd ducked below-decks."

  "How about that net? My toes are turning blue."

  A net was lowered. It was studded with orange flotation balls, and after Remo got it wrapped around the torpedo, he climbed a stainless-steel hull ladder while the crew hauled up the long object.

  On deck Remo said, "It's a torpedo. I disabled it."

  "With what?" Sandy wondered aloud, looking the thing over.

  "A side kick."

  "You kicked it out of commission?"

  Remo grinned stiffly. His face was still numb. "You should see me stun a shark with a flick of my finger."

  Sandy Heckman seemed unimpressed.

  They uncovered the torpedo on the afterdeck and looked it over with cautious respect.

  "I don't see a detonator," the helmsman was saying.

  "It's a torpedo. No question about that," said Sandy.

  "The fish were swimming ahead of it like it was their mother," Remo advised.

  "I don't see any manufacturer's mark or serial numbers."

  "Maybe they were burned off," said Remo.

  Sandy looked up. "Burned off?"

  "Yeah. You know, when thieves steal a gun or a car, they burn off the serial numbers with acid so it can't be traced."

  "Nice theory. But this doesn't look like an explosive torpedo. The nose is as smooth as an egg."

  "Could be a proximity fuse. They don't need to strike a target to blow it up," the helmsman offered.

  Sandy stood up and adjusted her gun belt grimly.

  "Well, it's ours now. We'll let the experts figure it out."