The Ocean Dark

by Christopher Golden

  They’d found six of the plastic crates all together out of ten that the Antoinette had been expecting to pick up from the Mariposa. What had happened to the other four, Gabe had no idea, but now that they had found these six, he had no intention of spending more time searching this damned island for them.

  With the scattered guns consolidated into a single case, he would only return with five, and his employers would want to know what had happened. Gabe would tell them the other crates must be with the Mariposa’s crew, wherever those men had gone. No one would debate the story. They’d just be happy to have recovered anything. And maybe, if he could pull off the crazy plan he’d committed himself to, he would still be able to hold on to his job after all the arrest and court proceedings were through. Gabe told himself that if he showed Viscaya loyalty, the company would be loyal in return.

  He only half believed it, but he didn’t see any other choices.

  There were eight of them. They could have taken four of the five cases, but the damn things were so heavy they would have been stopping every hundred yards to rest, and he did not like that idea at all. Gabe Rio wanted a little hustle out of his crew, so he made them work in teams. They took three crates on the first run, intending to come back for the other two. While two people walked alongside, the other six carried the weapons cases, two to a case. Each team would be spelled for a little while by whichever two weren’t currently carrying anything, and in that way they made decent time.

  The trees and brush forced them to alter course more than once, but in just under an hour, they reached the cove where their lifeboats were moored.

  In the hours since they had first landed here, the tide had receded enough so that the lifeboats were stranded on the sand. Gabe didn’t give it a second thought—it would be simple enough for them to slide the boats down the wet sand and into the surf.

  But the tide had stranded other things on the beach as well. The sand fell away steeply just twenty feet from the high tide line, revealing a wide swath of sea shells and doomed jellyfish. Amongst them were smooth, time-worn shards of bone, and a dozen or more skulls. Like the few in the grotto, they were old things, but no less human. No less dead.

  “Jesus!” Boggs shouted, dropping his end of a case.

  Kevonne stared, gape-mouthed. “What the fuck is this shit?”

  Tori reached out and took Gabe’s hand.

  That was when Bone started to cry.

  ~36~

  Tupper had already done his rounds for this shift as duty engineer, and until the Captain, the Chief, and the others came back from the island, he had nothing to do belowdecks. The duty engineer was always on call, just in case anything should go wrong. And, sure, he ought to do his rounds more frequently. Instead, he had retreated to the farthest, most hidden corner of the engineering section, in the shadows behind the boilers.

  Not that he was hiding. Tupper didn’t hide from anything or anyone. Never had, and never would. No, he came back here whenever he needed some solitude, or room to think, or to have a private place to get a little high. The rules didn’t allow smoking down here, and the Captain would not have been pleased to discover Tupper puffing on a fat joint in the boiler room. Fortunately, none of the other engineers cared as long as he occasionally shared. Even the Chief would only have been pissed if he wasn’t invited, but Chief Boggs was ashore at the moment, so Tupper had the smoke all to himself.

  God, he needed it.

  After this, he’d head to the galley and fix himself an iced coffee. Josh didn’t like anyone messing up his workspace, but fuck him. Dude was FBI. Nobody cared what he liked and didn’t like. Josh ought to count himself lucky just to be alive.

  Tupper signed, took a long drag on the joint, held the sweet smoke in his lungs for a few seconds, then blew it out slowly. He closed his eyes and rested the back of his head against the starboard hull.

  FBI on board, rendezvous ship full of dead guys, guns missing, a third of the damn crew gone ashore to find them. Tupper considered himself a simple enough guy—beer and grass, pussy, sunshine, decent music, and cheeseburgers were all he required. Simple guy, simple life. But his life had just turned into a colossal clusterfuck.

  “Shiiiiiit,” he whispered.

  Sweat trickled down his forehead and he let it run. With the boilers chugging, it was like a steam room full of clanking pipes. Hot as hell. But he liked being belowdecks, down deep enough that he was cradled by the ocean. The back of his head felt cool, in spite of the boiler room’s heat.

  Tupper took another long drag, relishing the smoke. At last the tension in his shoulders had started to subside.

  At first, the knocking sounded far away, just one more clank and thump from the pipes and the chugging boilers. Slowly, though, a creased formed in his forehead. What was that noise? He knew the workings of the Antoinette’s innards better than anyone except the Chief, but he didn’t recognize this sound.

  His eyes opened. Something going wrong with the boilers, maybe? He was duty engineer, which made it his responsibility.

  Tupper listened hard, the burning ember dimming at the end of the joint. His senses were pleasantly dulled and he felt sleepy, but he shook it off as best he could. The knocking came again, and he turned to look along the wall to his left. A pipe down there, maybe? He squinted in the gloom, slowly accepting that he would have to get up and check it out. Now was definitely not the time to piss off Captain Rio.

  With a sigh, he put a hand against the hull and started to rise.

  Something thumped the hull from the outside.

  Tupper yanked his hand back as though burned. He stared at the hull, and jumped when the sound came again--a knock against the metal that resounded in the boiler room. It quickened--half a dozen blows striking the hull in as many seconds. Then it stopped, leaving only low echoes in the midst of the clanking and the heat. Tupper cocked his head, staring, waiting for it to come again, wondering what the hell had been hammering on the hull out there, underwater. Sharks or dolphins, maybe? Fucking blind or stupid sharks, if they were, trying to attack the hull of a freighter.

  He pinched the end of the joint, licked his thumb and forefinger and did it again to make sure it was out. Then he slipped the roach into his pocket and started slowly out of the boiler room.

  Two more quick thumps rang against the hull and he quickened his pace, their echoes following him out.

  ~37~

  A little after two o’clock, Angie finally made her way up the metal stairs to the wheelhouse. She’d been up these stairs dozens of times, and often thought about how much the tower of living spaces that sat on the back of the Antoinette reminded her of white-washed Miami apartment buildings. The stairs only added to the illusion.

  She climbed the last few steps carrying two cups of coffee, careful to keep her balance. On the metal landing she paused to take a deep breath and rebuild the smile she’d manufactured on her way up. No matter how many times she plastered it on, that smile kept cracking and falling away. Right now, she needed it more than ever.

  Forcing herself not to falter—in expression or in balance—she reached out with the tip of her shoe and kicked at the base of the wheelhouse door. This ought to have been the most mundane of tasks, going to visit Rogan in the wheelhouse, bringing her boyfriend—or whatever they was supposed to be to each other—a cup of coffee. But her skin prickled with the anxiety of deception.

  Suck it up, Ange, she thought. This is how you stay out of jail.

  The Caribbean sun had been beating down on the Antoinette all day and there’d been little wind, and almost no chop on the water. Now an oddly cool breeze gusted past her, chilling the beads of sweat on the back of her neck, and she shivered.

  Through the windows, she watched Rogan stride toward her. He turned to say something to Suarez, who stood by the wheel and the instruments, watching the radar like a hawk. Angie could only remember a couple of times when she had visited the bridge and not seen Suarez there, but today his normally laid-back demeanor h
ad been replaced by a tightly-coiled tension that unsettled her.

  Watching for other boats, she thought. Waiting for the FBI.

  Despite her deal with Josh, she couldn’t help silently urging Gabe and Tori and the others to hurry. How hard could it be to get the guns and get the hell back to the ship?

  Rogan pulled the door open, grinning, and stepped aside to let her in. “If those are iced coffees, you’ve just fulfilled my two greatest wishes at the same time.”

  For a precious few seconds, Angie didn’t have to fake her smile. She handed him the iced coffee, loaded with sugar the way he liked it, and slid her hand behind his neck, pulling him down to kiss her. But as soon as the kiss broke off, she remembered his earlier condescension, and why she’d come, and her smile turned false again.

  “What took you so long?” he asked, glancing at the clock.

  “Fucking Anton didn’t show up to relieve me until about twenty minutes ago. He ‘overslept,’” she said. “I almost chucked his ass overboard. My eyes are burning and I’m dead on my feet, but he overslept? Fucker.”

  Rogan laughed, kissed her again, and took a sip of his coffee. Even Suarez glanced up from his vigil over the instruments to smile at her frustration.

  “I’m funny to you guys, now?” Angie said, nostrils flaring. “You’re goin’ over the railing right after Anton.”

  That made Suarez break out in an actual grin. He must have been tired to let his guard down like that. Rogan knew better than to push her buttons any further, though. He only took another sip of coffee, ice clinking in his cup.

  “I’m glad you came up to see me, love,” Rogan said, “but maybe you ought to try to get a little sleep while Anton’s on guard duty.”

  Angie almost pouted. If she wanted to manipulate Rogan, that would be the way to go. But he knew her well enough to know the pout wasn’t really part of her repertoire, and she didn’t want him to start wondering what she really wanted.

  “In a little bit,” she said, raising her cup. “After our coffee. What about you? How long until someone spells you guys?”

  Rogan glanced at Suarez, but the white-haired old Cuban didn’t even glance up from the radar this time.

  “Miguel’s taking three hours, then me, then Suarez,” Rogan said.

  Angie frowned. “You don’t think they’ll be back by then? What the hell is taking so long?”

  “They found ‘em,” Rogan said. “Now it’s a matter of getting ‘em back to—“

  Suarez cut him off. “It takes as long as it takes, Angela. We stick until Captain Rio says otherwise.”

  The old man had an edge in his voice and a hard glint in his eyes that Angie had never seen there before, and for a second she feared that Suarez had somehow sensed she was hiding something. But then he went back to staring at the radar screen, jaw set, leaning forward in his seat, and she understood. Suarez had stoic down to a science, but their current dilemma had him rattled.

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” she said. “I just wish things could go a little faster. I want to get out of here before Josh’s friends show up.”

  Suarez glanced up at her with a look that let her know he regretted snapping at her, just a little. “Don’t worry. We’ll be long gone.”

  “Absolutely,” Rogan agreed, a little too emphatically. He touched her face and kissed her forehead. Once upon a time she’d have been charmed by the gestures. Today she wanted to punch him.

  “Good,” Angie said, walking toward Suarez, sipping her iced coffee.

  Suarez sat in one of the two chairs in front of the wheel and the instrument array. Angie didn’t have the first clue how to pilot the ship, but she had a feeling she could have figured it out if necessary. The wheel was literally nothing more than that—a metal steering wheel that stuck out of a black control box. Crazy to think that something so simple could guide the entire ship. It was more complicated than that, of course. But in truth, with the collision avoidance system built into the Antoinette’s computer guidance programming, plus radar, and people like Angie herself doing their jobs down in the engine room, a monkey could get the ship moving.

  She leaned on the back of the empty chair and gazed out the windshield at the sea. It was barely mid-afternoon, but already the water had begun to darken. The sunlight hit it at a different angle as the day grew long.

  Rogan stood beside her, slipped an arm around her, and sipped his coffee.

  “I’m with you, angel. I hope they hurry.”

  But Angie had stopped listening. Stopped breathing. A low hiss of static came from the radio, a row of green and yellow lights flickering across its face. And right on top of it, out in the open, sat Josh’s lifeline, the Personal Locator Beacon. It remained in its rubber holster, and she suspected that nobody had tried taking it out yet, just in case Josh had been telling the truth about it being rigged to go off automatically The black and yellow plastic made it look like a nouveau walkie-talkie or a bulky cell phone.

  Rogan took her free hand, squeezed her fingers, trying to lend her comfort.

  Angie looked up at him, stood on her toes and kissed his freckled nose, smiling as she began to breathe again.

  Exhausted as she was, she had no intention of leaving the wheelhouse just yet. All she had to do was bide her time, and she’d get the chance to set off the beacon. And if the opportunity didn’t arise, she’d have to create one.

  The door banged open, and all three of them turned to see Tupper standing in the doorway.

  “Dude, what the hell are you doing up here? Last I checked, you’re the duty engineer at the moment,” Angie said.

  Tupper didn’t spare her so much as a scowl. He looked genuinely spooked, even skittish, and large sweat stains had formed under his arms and at the neck of his t-shirt. For a second, Angie thought he’d seen the Feds closing in, but that was ridiculous. Suarez would have seen them coming on the radar.

  “Mr. Rogan,” Tupper said, “can you come down to the engine room?”

  Rogan and Suarez glanced at one another.

  “You came all the way up here to ask that?” Suarez said. “You could’ve called from belowdecks, saved yourself a trip, and not left your post unattended.”

  If Suarez expected some kind of explanation or apology, he didn’t get it.

  “There’s something you need to hear,” Tupper said.

  A flicker of alarm crossed Rogan’s face. “Something wrong with the engines?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Just…humor me, man.”

  Again, the second and third mates exchanged a look. Then Suarez shrugged. “Go ahead. Miguel will be up in a little while.”

  Rogan drained the rest of his iced coffee and tossed the cup in a trash bin. He smiled at Angie as if to say, damn, Tupper’s gone over the edge, and then he nodded toward the engineer.

  “All right, Tup. Lead the way.”

  They exited the wheelhouse, leaving Angie and Suarez alone. She knew she ought to go. Without Rogan there, she had no reason to stay. But she might never get a better chance at the beacon. All she needed was for Suarez to be distracted for a few seconds. Immediately, she thought of several ways she could distract him, but most of them involved seduction, nudity, or sex to one degree or another, and she had too much self-respect to resort to something that would make her feel like a whore.

  Think of something else, she told herself.

  But nothing was coming to her.

  ~38~

  Josh had torn the net off of the ping pong table and now lay stretched out on top of it. With the doors closed, the temperature in the rec room had gotten more than a little uncomfortable as the day wore on. Elevated by the ping pong table, he was perfectly situated to catch every breeze that came through the open windows. He had shut the lights off and gotten a cold soda out of the machine, and he lay with the can pressed against his throbbing face, keeping his breathing steady, trying to let himself slip into a meditative state so that the passage of time wouldn’t drive him nuts.

  It
wasn’t working very well.

  Angie had seemed frightened by the prospect of going to prison, but he had little confidence in the woman. When it came time to betray her captain, her crewmates, and the guy she’d been screwing, would she have the guts to do it? Josh wasn’t sure. If he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure of much these days. Despite his better judgment, he had let himself fall for Tori, all the while knowing that in order to do his job he would have to betray her. He would do whatever he could, short of becoming a criminal himself, to help her, but he knew that would mean nothing. She must hate him now, and that certainty tore him up inside. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling ashamed.

  Meanwhile, all he could do was hope that Angie cared more about saving her own ass than she did about Rogan. All she had to do was trigger the PLB. Not break him out, not even bring the beacon to him. If she could find it, she could signal Voss and have the FBI, Coast Guard, and ICE here in a couple of hours at most.

  But that was a big “if.” And if she got caught, or the Rio brothers even suspected she was trying to help him, Angie would end up in the rec room with him.

  “Shit.”

  Josh rolled onto his side and swung his legs off the ping pong table. With deep regret, he set down the soda can. It had started to lose some of its chill anyway, but still his battered face throbbed painfully the instant he took the cold metal away. A couple of hours ago, it had been so swollen that it almost felt like the skin would split. In comparison, the pain didn’t seem quite so bad now.

  He cracked the Mountain Dew can and took a long drink, gulping down half the can in seconds, then rested it on the table again. Quietly, he walked to the corner of the room and pressed his face to the louvered shutters, trying to get a glimpse of whoever had been posted as his latest guard.

  At first he thought the door had been left unattended, but then he heard a low sigh and readjusted his position so that he had a slitted view of the walkway in front of the door. Anton Pinsky lay stretched out, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, five days’ stubble instead of a beard, and a tall plastic bottle of water by his head. Anton was a little guy, no more than five foot six, with eyes that always seemed to hint he’d rather be elsewhere.