“No, more by my historian’s fascination with the past.”
“There are straight historic parks to work at, like Ford’s Theater or Bull Run.”
Nathan’s eyes lit up. “Every park has history, every park is part of our history, one and the same. For me, Fort Jefferson’s attraction is the richness of its undiscovered past. The place just faded away, like its life story had been silted over. My goal is to spend my off hours here writing the fort’s definitive biography.”
“Good news, there aren’t many distractions. Bad news, there also aren’t any research resources. You heard my ‘no internet’ warning to the visitors. That’s true for us as well.”
“No worries.” He slapped his backpack. “I’ve downloaded thousands of documents, cataloged thousands more, all waiting to be tapped on my hard drive.”
“Then as long as our generator keeps making electricity, you’ll be fine. Go to the far apartment and unpack. Reuben is packing this morning, and he leaves on the ferry today. You have until three p.m. to absorb all his knowledge. Tomorrow, the history spiel I gave today will be all yours.”
“Awesome! I was so excited, I had hardtack for breakfast.”
“You had what?’
“Hardtack. A positively miserable cracker you have to break with a hammer and soak in water before you can eat it.”
“And you ate in because…?”
“That’s what Civil War soldiers ate. I like to immerse myself in the history of a place, do things the people of the time would have. This morning, I ate like a soldier in Fort Jefferson.”
“And how was it?”
Nathan sprouted a big grin. “Absolutely awful. Which was perfect!”
“Don’t expect me to join you in that ritual tomorrow morning.”
“No worries. So, how is it you ended up at Fort Jefferson?”
“My background is in biology. The island is surrounded by a marine sanctuary including a nurse shark breeding area. I’d spent my first decade with the Park Service in mountains and forests, it was time to see the ocean.”
“And how’s it working for you?”
“Exactly what I was looking for after the stress of bigger parks. This is probably the most peaceful, quiet park in the system. Nothing out of the ordinary ever happens out here.”
Chapter 4
When the ferry departed that afternoon, all the day trippers had checked back in. Many looked like roasted chickens, especially the bald man in the Hawaiian shirt, who had resorted to making a paper hat out of NPS brochures. The family of salt-encrusted campers also boarded, burdened with all their gear. They’d only stayed overnight, but the Shannons had packed in every modern convenience they could. Kind of missing the point of camping as far as Kathy was concerned.
Reuben hadn’t missed his ride back to civilization, and he and Kathy had shared a heartfelt goodbye before the ferry pulled up the gangplank.
Only after the ferry had sailed away did Kathy realize something had slipped through the cracks. Distracted by Reuben’s departure, she hadn’t realized one set of campers scheduled to depart hadn’t. Two teenagers who’d just graduated high school. They had been dropped off by personal boat but were scheduled to return by ferry. If any group would be irresponsible enough to miss the only ride home, that would be the one.
She headed over to the campsites. The official designation gave the location more credit than it deserved as it was just an open, sandy area, though a few rusting barbeques and a stand of bushes stuck out of the sand in defiance of nature. The circus tent that the Shannon family had erected was gone. She didn’t see any other tents. She recalled that the kids had set up on the other side. She walked over to their location.
Their tan tent was still there, collapsed on the ground and partially covered by windswept sand. She picked one corner up and shook it clean. A great split rent the nylon down the middle. The tent was one of the cheapest models, practically disposable. She wondered if it had even lasted the night with two active teens inside of it.
She started a search out along Bush Key. The incoming tide sent waves lapping up over the sand. Further up above the high tide line, it looked like there were two sets of footprints, but the way they stepped on each other, it was hard to tell.
She reached the end of the key. The footprints stopped here. But that didn’t mean anything. The teens, if these were their footprints, could have walked back along the beach that had been exposed at low tide. Or these could have been prints from the Shannon family, or day trippers.
If the missing had been a family, or a group of adults, Kathy might have had a different, more ominous, take on the situation. But being careless teens made different, less dire scenarios plausible. Maybe through some act of stupidity they’d ripped a hole in the tent, so they just left it here, rather than lug it home. Maybe the wind uncovered the ruined tent they’d buried, instead of partially covering one they’d never returned to. Perhaps their friends with the boat had picked them back up, and the ferry reservation had been a back-up plan.
Then again, maybe she’d been too distracted by Reuben’s send off to notice that they’d gotten on the ferry after all.
There was a lot of circumstantial evidence that could point either way. She’d hate to risk having the Park Service look foolish by issuing an alert about two teens who were home safe in bed.
An old cabin cruiser rode at anchor off the point. The twenty-eight-footer had registered on arrival with Reuben and been there three days. A boat that small had a cabin the size of a dining room and little standing head room. A bit cramped for long-term living space for her taste.
If a boat had motored up and picked up those kids, whoever was on that cabin cruiser would have likely seen it.
Kathy decided to take the Park Service skiff out to the boat and see what light its captain might shine on this mystery.
Chapter 5
In the past, Fort Jefferson had hosted the finest ships in the United States Navy. Under the Park Service, the floating contingent had been reduced to one twelve-foot metal jon boat pushed by an aging nine-horsepower outboard. Strictly usable for circumnavigating the key, only the foolhardy would use it to traverse the seventy miles back to Key West.
Kathy nosed the skiff through a light chop and toward the cabin cruiser. The closer she got, the more the pleasure boat showed its age. Glaze and pitting marred the cabin windows and the bridge windscreen above. Paint peeled from the hull, and barnacles and seaweed clung to the boat’s stained waterline. Sunlight had baked the once rich wooden deck to a parched gray. A winch worthy of a fishing trawler was mounted at the rear of the cockpit, and the extra weight made the boat list to starboard. The Park Service registration paperwork described the boat as a 1968 Owens 28, the owner as Marc Metcalf.
As she closed on the cruiser, Kathy throttled back the engine. Marc’s head popped up from the cabin. The wizened little man had to be over eighty years old. The breeze ruffled his bush of frazzled gray hair. Several days of silver stubble covered cheeks tanned to leather from years of tropical sun. His purple T-shirt was on inside out, and Kathy thought possibly backward. He stood, closed the wooden door to the cabin, and slid a lock into a latch.
Marc closing up the cabin as she approached was not a good sign. Kathy cut the engine to idle as she came up on the stern. The skiff slowed to a stop. Faded letters spelled out the name Solitude. A rusting ladder hung beside the name. She straightened her campaign hat.
“Mr. Metcalf? I’m Ranger Kathy West. Maybe you can help me out?”
Marc sat down in the rear of the cockpit and leaned on the tiller. “Most likely.” His voice had the reedy, crackling quality old age engendered.
Not being invited aboard was Bad Sign Number Two. She unsnapped her pistol’s holster.
“You’ve been here three days, right?” she said.
“You betcha, and registered through three more. My fees are all paid up.”
“I was wondering if you’d seen any boats come ashore near the campg
round or Bush Key last night or this morning.”
“Nope, but I was dead asleep all night. Someone damage the reef?”
“Oh, no. Just might have picked up some campers.”
Marc leaned over the transom. His blue eyes narrowed. “Someone’s missing? Maybe more than one someone?”
Alarm bells rang in Kathy’s head. That was a big leap for someone to make given the question she’d asked. “Did you see anything strange out here?”
“Lots of strange things happening out here.” Marc pointed to the water. “And under there. Folks ain’t ready to hear about none of it.”
Kathy didn’t like this guy’s tin-foil-hat vibe. She rested her palm on the butt of her pistol. “Maybe I’m ready. Mind if I come on board to talk about it instead of shouting over my engine’s noise?”
“That might be best,” Marc said.
Kathy goosed the throttle and nudged the skiff alongside the cruiser. She killed the engine and tossed Marc the bow line. He tied it off to a cleat and she climbed onboard up the rear ladder. The cockpit was bare save for two square blue cushions. Stress cracks spider-webbed most of the paint.
“So what can you share with me?” Kathy said.
Marc’s eyes flitted around the boat, then out across the sea, as if checking that they were still alone. “These are dangerous waters.”
“You mean for ships or for people?”
“For everything.”
“Around the fort is pretty safe. Sharks are rare, except the harmless nurse sharks. Man-of-war jellyfish season has passed. A little sharp coral scraping some feet is the worst I see.”
“You ain’t looking as hard as I am.”
Marc rose, and with shaking hands, opened up the cabin hatches. He stepped down inside and motioned for Kathy to follow him. She peered inside.
The interior looked more like the bridge of a submarine. Electronics filled the cabin. Sonar screens, hydrophones, and a lot of other equipment she couldn’t identify. A nautical chart of the Florida Keys covered the forward bulkhead. Pins with various colored flags dotted the map. Marc took a seat on an upside-down plastic milk crate in front of a sonar display.
“That’s a hell of a fish finder you have there, Mr. Metcalf.”
“Call me Marc, and this ain’t no fish finder. It’s mostly last-generation Navy cast-offs, but that don’t mean it ain’t good.”
“If you aren’t looking for fish, what are you looking for?”
“Crabs. Giant crabs.”
“The Keys don’t have any large crab species.”
“I didn’t say large. I said giant. Bigger than this boat giant.”
Kathy realized she may have just gotten on the ship to Crazy Island. “Really?”
“Been stories of them passed down for hundreds of years. I’m searching for them, or for where they live, making the most detailed maps there are of the waters around the Keys. I gotta convince people to stop ’em before they kill again. But from what you’re saying, they may have already started.”
“I didn’t say anyone had been killed. And there’s a big gulf between a giant crab legend and reality.”
“I’ve done crossed that gulf, Ranger. I know what I know. The question is, are you ready to know it?”
Chapter 6
Kathy sat on the top step between the cockpit and the cabin. She judged Marc as more sun-fried brain than delusional-dangerous. No harm in letting him continue his tale. “Tell me what you know.”
“If you can stand a personal question, when was you born?”
“1990.”
“Let me tell you a story that’s before your time,” Marc said. “Hell, it’s before your parents’ time.
“It was the spring of 1961. I was an Arkansas kid, just eighteen, no college draft deferment in my pocket. So I joined the Coast Guard, thought at least I’d get stationed on a beach somewheres. I was an idiot.
“Now south of here, Fidel Castro was working overtime to turn Cuba into a new protectorate of the Soviet Union, and that didn’t sit well with no one. So the CIA hatches a plan they call Operation Zapata, what folks now call the Bay of Pigs Invasion.”
“I’ve read a little about that. Cuban exiles tried to overthrow Castro?”
“About 1,500 of them, with some light tanks, supported by World War II-era bombers and a hodgepodge of naval vessels. All run by the CIA with the President’s approval and the President’s promise of total denial if the whole show went up in flames.”
“Which it did.”
“Gloriously,” Marc said.
“Kind of seems stupid from the start, trying to take over a country with 1,500 soldiers.”
“Yes indeedy. And that’s because the human invasion was only half the CIA’s plan. The other half was a non-human invasion by giant crabs.”
Kathy stared at him. “You know that sounds like a bad science fiction story.”
“Mine ain’t fiction. It’s factual. I fought ’em.”
“What?”
“As part of the run-up to the Bay of Pigs, my Coast Guard unit gets re-assigned. The brass outfits us with old Navy PT boats from World War II. Big wooden launches with twin .50 machine guns in two turrets and upgraded to two new torpedoes along each side. Mine was PT 904. The boats might be old, but they are fitted with the latest fish. Mark 45 torpedoes, brand new and wire-guided. We have ’em before any ships in the Navy did. They train us to maintain everything but the warheads. Only later I found out these fish were nuclear-capable, designed to sink Russian submarines.”
“You were on a boat carrying six nuclear warheads?”
“We never heard nothing about being nuclear. We assumed they had conventional warheads. But things were pretty wild back then, sky’s the limit thinking. World War II boats carrying low-yield Cold War nukes? Crazy enough to have happened.
“Anyway, we trained in the Louisiana bayous, then in March we sail out to the Keys. Now no one tells us the mission, but I mean, Cuba’s only a hundred damn miles away, so it ain’t hard to figure out. Eventually command spills the beans. Our job was going to be to sink any Cuban vessels that respond to the invasion. The regular Navy was a bit too large of a presence to allow what they called ‘plausible deniability,’ and our little boats can sneak in and out.
“So it’s the last week in March and my boat and PT 906 are riding at anchor one night off Loggerhead Key. Now we’re still kinda the Coast Guard so we have ammo for the twin .50s up front. We’re carrying four Mark 45 torpedoes but we haven’t had no practice with ’em yet. Orders are to rise at dawn the next day for training southeast of Key West. So Tommy Greaves, Bud Sterling, Matty Kite, and me are racked out on 904, same as the fellas on the other boat.
“It’s 0200 or so and the sea is pancake flat. I’m sleeping like a newborn when this crash and screams from the other boat wake me up so fast I slam my skull into the bulkhead. We all end up on deck and I hit the bow spotlight.”
“The other PT is stern high, damn near vertical, new props all shiny in the light. Then it sinks. Now I’ve seen plenty of ships sink. There’s a slow-motion aspect, a grace to it. This PT ain’t got no grace. The thing sinks beneath the waves like it’s being pulled under. Snap, yank, gone. Then there’s nothing. Not a sound, not a bubble. No survivors.
“We’re cursing and confused because we got no clue what just happened. So Tommy and Bud head for the .50s. Matty goes to the bow to raise anchor. I twist the switch and fire up the engines. The PT roars to life, and I mean roar. Sweet Jesus that boat was loud.
“Matty’s pulling up the anchor line like he’s inspired by the Devil and Tommy and Bud are slapping the .50s into action when there’s this surge in the water off the bow. I’ve still got the area lit like center ring at the circus. Then something breaks surface on both sides of the bow. I can’t tell what it is, can’t see nothing really, like whatever it is it’s invisible. But the waves rock the boat and the spotlight arcs across the thing. The reflection off the wet surface is the outline of two giant crab claws. Six fe
et long, easy.
“I shout for Matty to cut the anchor line and I slam the boat into reverse. Tommy and Bud open fire at point-blank range, each aiming at the claw on their side of the boat.
“Now a .50 is a big round. I mean, it’ll tear an arm clean off, punch a hole through a hull. But these bullets just bounce off those damn claws.
“Now here the props dig in, the bow rises, and the boat starts backward. Then in full illumination, spotlight dead center, I see the most awful thing. One claw opens, sweeps in, and cuts Matty in two at the waist. His upper half drops into the sea. His legs stand for what seem like forever until they fall over.
“Tommy and Bud both scream, but out of fury, not some girly scream, you know. They keep pouring on the .50s until the barrels glow and the magazines go empty. The claws drop back into the sea.
“The boat picks up speed and I swing the bow around to starboard because I have no intention on backing up all the way to Key West. Problem is, Matty pulled in the anchor line, but never uncleated it. I’m doing ten knots-plus when the line playing out over the bow goes taut. The anchor wedges into some coral or something and the force rips the cleat right off the bow, along with a nice chunk of the deck. That yanks us back to a dead stop.
“Tommy and Bud are scrambling to find the spare magazines, because we weren’t even contemplating combat, let alone giant crabs. Then the claws come back up, one on either side amidships. They reach in and yank both fellas right out of the turrets like dolls, and throw them into the sea.
“I’ll admit that right then I’m not thinking. It’s all panic mode with three buddies dead, a PT boat sunk, and a giant crab on the attack. I throw the boat into full speed ahead, hoping maybe I could run the damn thing over.”
“The boat never gets the chance. Both claws blast out of the water portside. One grabs the bow, the other amidships. Then a giant crab pulls itself out of the sea. 904 was seventy-two feet long and this thing took up half her side. It crawls up onto the deck, nearly transparent, but undeniably there in the spotlight’s glare. The thing stinks like a rotting carcass.
Claws Page 2