Текст книги "Deep Six"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Clive Cussler
Deep Six

Dedication

To Tubby’s Bar & Grill in Alhambra,

Rand’s Roundup on Wilshire Boulevard,

The Black Knight in Costa Mesa,

and Shanners’ Bar in Denver.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

Prelude
The San Marino

July 15,1966

The Pacific Ocean

The girl shaded the sun from her brown eyes and stared at a large petrel gliding above the ship’s after cargo boom. She admired the bird’s soaring grace for a few minutes, then, growing bored, she rose to a sitting position, revealing evenly spaced red bars across her tanned back, etched there by the slats of an ancient steamer chair.

She looked around for signs of the deck crew, but they were nowhere in sight, so she shyly shifted her breasts to a more comfortable position inside the scoop-necked bra of her bikini.

Her body was hot and sweaty from the humid tropical air. She moved her hand across her firm stomach and felt the sweat rising through the skin. She sat back in the chair again, soothed and relaxed, the throbbing beat of the old freighter’s engines and the heavy warmth of the sun coaxing her into drowsiness.

The fear that churned inside her when she came on board had faded. She no longer lay awake to the pounding of her heart, or searched the crew’s faces for expressions of suspicion, or waited for the captain to grimly inform her that she was under ship’s arrest. She was slowly closing her mind to her crime and beginning to think about the future. She was relieved to find that guilt was a fleeting emotion after all.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the white jacket of the Oriental mess boy as he stepped from a companionway. He approached apprehensively, his eyes staring down at the deck, as if he was embarrassed to look at her nearly nude figure.

“Excuse me, Miss Wallace,” he said. “Captain Masters respectfully requests you please dine with him and his officers tonight – if you are feeling better, that is.”

Estelle Wallace was thankful her deepening tan covered her blush. She had feigned illness since embarking in San Francisco and had taken all her meals alone in her stateroom to avoid any conversation with the ship’s officers. She decided she couldn’t remain a recluse forever. The time had come to practice living a lie. “Tell Captain Masters I feel much better. I’ll be delighted to dine with him.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that,” the mess boy said with a broad smile that revealed a large gap in the middle of his upper teeth. “I’ll see the cook fixes you something special.”

He turned and shuffled away with a gait that seemed to Estelle a trifle too obsequious, even for an Asian.

Secure in her decision, she idly stared up at the three-deck-high midship superstructure of the San Marino.The sky was remarkably blue above the black smoke curling from the single stack, contrasting starkly with the flaking white paint on the bulkheads.

“A stout ship,” the captain had boasted when he led her to a stateroom. He reassuringly ticked off her history and statistics, as if Estelle were a frightened passenger on her first canoe ride down the rapids.

Built during 1943 to the standard Liberty ship design, the San Marinohad carried military supplies across the Atlantic to England, making the round-trip crossing sixteen times. On one occasion, when she had strayed from the convoy she was struck by a torpedo, hut she refused to sink and made it under her own power to Liverpool.

Since the war she had tramped the oceans of the world under the registry of Panama – one of thirty ships owned by the Manx Steamship Company of New York, plying in and out of backwater ports. Measuring 441 feet in length overall, with a raked stem and cruiser stern, she plodded through the Pacific swells at eleven knots. With only a few more profitable years left in her, the San Marinowould eventually end up as scrap.

Rust streaked her steel skin. She looked as sordid as a Bowery hooker, but in the eyes of Estelle Wallace she was virgin and beautiful.

Already Estelle’s past was blurring. With each revolution of the worn engines, the gap widened between Estelle’s drab life of self-denial and an eagerly sought fantasy.

The first step of Arta Casilighio’s metamorphosis into Estelle Wallace was when she discovered a lost passport wedged under the seat of a Wilshire Boulevard bus during the Los Angeles evening rush hour. Without really knowing why, Arta slipped it into her purse and took it home.

Days later, she had still not returned the document to the bus driver or mailed it to the rightful owner. She studied the pages with their foreign stamps for hours at a time. She was intrigued by the face in the photo. Although more stylishly made up, it bore a startling resemblance to her own. Both women were about the same age – less than eight months separated their birthdays. The brown shade of their eyes matched, and except for a difference in hairstyles and a few shades of tint, they might have passed for sisters.

She began to make herself up to look like Estelle Wallace, an alter ego that could escape, mentally at least, to the exotic places of the world that were denied timid, mousy Arta Casilighio.

One evening after closing hours at the bank where she worked, she found her eyes locked on the stacks of newly printed currency delivered that afternoon from the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown Los Angeles. She had become so used to handling large sums of money during her four-year tenure that she was immune to the mere sight – a lassitude that afflicts all tellers sooner or later. Yet inexplicably, this time the piles of green-printed tender beguiled her. Subconsciously she began to picture it as belonging to her.

Arta went home that weekend and locked herself in her apartment to fortify her resolve and plan the crime she intended to commit, practicing every gesture, every motion until they came smoothly to her without hesitation. All Sunday night she lay awake until the alarm went off, bathed in cold sweat, but determined to see the act through.

The cash shipment arrived every Monday by armored car and usually totaled from six to eight hundred thousand dollars. It was then re-counted and held until distribution on Wednesday to the bank’s branch offices, scattered throughout the Los Angeles basin. She had decided the time to make her move was on Monday evening, while she was putting her money drawer in the vault.

In the morning, after she showered and made up her face, Arta donned a pair of panty hose. She wound a roll of two-sided sticky tape around her legs from mid-calf to the top of her thighs, leaving the protective outer layer of the tape in place. This odd bit of handiwork was covered with a long skirt that came almost to her ankles, hiding the tape with inches to spare.

Next she took neatly trimmed packets of bond paper and slipped them into a large pouch-style purse. Each displayed a crisp new five-dollar bill on the outer sides and was bound with genuine blue and white Federal Reserve Bank wrappers. To the casual eye they would appear authentic.

Arta stood in front of a full-length mirror and repeated over and over, “Arta Casilighio no longer exists. You are now Estelle Wallace.” The deception seemed to work. She felt her muscles relax, and her breathing became slower, shallower. Then she took a deep breath, threw back her shoulders and left for work.

In her anxiety to appear normal she inadvertently arrived at the bank ten minutes early, an astounding event to all who knew her well, but this was Monday morning and no one took notice. Once she settled behind her teller’s counter every minute seemed an hour, every hour a lifetime. She felt strangely detached from the familiar surroundings, and yet any thought of forgetting the hazardous scheme was quickly suppressed. Mercifully, fear and panic remained dormant.

When six o’clock finally rolled around, and one of the assistant vice presidents closed and locked the massive front doors, she quickly balanced her cash box and slipped quietly off to the ladies’ room, where in the privacy of a stall she unwound the tape’s outer layer from around her legs and flushed it down the toilet. She then took the bogus money packets and fixed them to the tape, stamping her feet to make certain none would drop off as she walked.

Satisfied everything was ready, she came out and dawdled in the lobby until the other tellers had placed their cash drawers in the vault and left. Two minutes alone inside that great steel cubicle was all she needed and two minutes alone was what she got.

Swiftly she pulled up the skirt and with precise movements exchanged the phony packets for those containing genuine bills. When she stepped out of the vault and smiled a good evening to the assistant vice president as he nodded her out a side door, she couldn’t believe she’d actually gotten away with it.

Seconds after entering her apartment, she shed the skirt, stripped the money packets from her legs and counted them. The tally came to $51,000.

Not nearly enough.

Disappointment burned within her. She would need at least twice that sum to escape the country and maintain a minimal level of comfort while increasing the lion’s share through investments.

The ease of the operation had made her heady. Did she dare make another foray into the vault? she wondered. The Federal Reserve Bank money was already counted and wouldn’t be distributed to the branch banks until Wednesday. Tomorrow was Tuesday. She still had another chance to strike again before the loss was discovered.

Why not?

The thought of ripping off the same bank twice in two days excited her. Perhaps Arta Casilighio lacked the guts for it, but Estelle Wallace required no coaxing at all.

That evening she bought a large old-fashioned suitcase at a secondhand store and made a false bottom in it. She packed the money along with her clothes and took a cab to the Los Angeles International Airport, where she stored the suitcase overnight in a locker and purchased a ticket to San Francisco on an early-evening Tuesday flight. Wrapping her unused Monday night ticket in a newspaper, she dropped it in a trash receptacle. With nothing remaining to be done, she went home and slept like a rock.

The second robbery went as smoothly as the first.

Three hours after leaving the Beverly-Wilshire Bank for the last time, she was re-counting the money in a San Francisco hotel. The combined total came to $ 128,000. Not a staggering prize by inflationary standards, but more than ample for her needs.

The next step was relatively simple. She checked through the newspapers for ship departures and found the San Marino,a cargo freighter bound for Auckland, New Zealand, at six-thirty the following morning.

An hour before sailing time, she mounted the gangplank. The captain claimed he seldom took passengers, but kindly consented to take her on board for a mutually agreed fare – which Estelle suspected went into his wallet instead of the steamship company’s coffers.

Estelle stepped across the threshold of the officers’ dining saloon and paused uncertainly for a moment, facing the appraising stares of six men sitting in the room.

Her coppery-tinted hair fell past her shoulders and nearly matched her tan. She wore a long, sleek pink T-shirt dress that clung in all the right places. A white bone bracelet was her only accessory. To the officers rising to their feet the simple elegance of her appearance created a sensation.

Captain Irwin Masters, a tall man with graying hair, came over and took her arm. “Miss Wallace,” he said, smiling warmly. “It’s good to see you looking fit.”

“I think the worst is over,” she said.

“I don’t mind admitting, I was beginning to worry. Not leaving your cabin for five days made me fear the worst. With no doctor on board, we would have been in a fix if you needed medical treatment.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

He looked at her in mild surprise. “Thank me, for what?”

“For your concern.” She gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s been a long time since anyone worried about me.”

He nodded and winked. “That’s what ship captains are for.” Then he turned to the other officers. “Gentlemen, may I present Miss Estelle Wallace, who is gracing us with her lovely presence until we dock in Auckland.”

The introductions were made. She was amused by the fact that most of the men were numbered. The first officer, the second officer – even a fourth. They all shook her hand as if it were made of delicate china – all except the engineering officer, a short ox-shouldered man with a Slavic accent. He stiffly bent over and kissed the tips of her fingers.

The first officer motioned at the mess boy, who was standing behind a small mahogany bar. “Miss Wallace, what’s your pleasure?”

“Would it be possible to have a daiquiri? I’m in the mood for something sweet.”

“Absolutely,” the first officer replied. “The San Marinomay not be a luxurious cruise liner, but we do run the finest cocktail bar in this latitude of the Pacific.”

“Be honest,” the captain admonished good-naturedly. “You neglected to mention we’re probably the onlyship in this latitude.”

“A mere detail.” The first officer shrugged. “Lee, one of your famous daiquiris for the young lady.”

Estelle watched with interest as the mess boy expertly squeezed the lime and poured the ingredients. Every movement came with a flourish. The frothy drink tasted good, and she had to fight a desire to down it all at once.

“Lee,” she said, “you’re a marvel.”

“He is that,” said Masters. “We were lucky to sign him on.”

Estelle took another sip of her drink. “You seem to have a number of Orientals in your crew.”

“Replacements,” Masters explained. “Ten of the crew jumped ship after we docked in San Francisco. Fortunately, Lee and nine of his fellow Koreans arrived from the maritime hiring hall before sailing time.”

“All damned queer, if you ask me,” the second officer grunted.

Masters shrugged. “Crew members jumping ship in port has been going on since Cro-Magnon man built the first raft. Nothing queer about it.”

The second officer shook his head doubtfully. “One or two maybe, but not ten! The San Marinois a tight ship, and the captain here is a fair skipper. There was no reason for a mass exodus.”

“The way of the sea.” Masters sighed. “The Koreans are clean, hardworking seamen. I wouldn’t trade them for half the cargo in our holds.”

“That’s a pretty stiff price,” muttered the engineering officer.

“Is it improper,” Estelle ventured, “to ask what cargo you’re carrying?”

“Not at all,” the very young fourth officer offered eagerly. “In San Francisco our holds were loaded with—”

“Titanium ingots,” Captain Masters cut in.

“Eight million dollars’ worth,” added the first officer, eyeing the fourth sternly.

“Once again, please,” Estelle said, handing her empty glass to the mess boy. She turned back to Masters. “I’ve heard of titanium, but I have no idea what it’s used for.”

“When properly processed in pure form, titanium becomes stronger and lighter than steel, an asset that puts it in great demand by builders of jet aircraft engines. It’s also widely used in the manufacture of paints, rayon and plastics. I suspect you even have traces of it in your cosmetics.”

The cook, an anemic-looking Oriental with a sparkling white apron leaned through a side door and nodded at Lee, who in turn tapped a glass with a mixing spoon.

“Dinner ready to be served,” he said in his heavily accented English, while flashing his gap-toothed smile.

It was a fabulous meal, one Estelle promised herself never to forget. To be surrounded by six handsomely uniformed and attentive men was all that her female vanity could endure in one evening.

After a demitasse, Captain Masters excused himself and headed for the bridge. One by one, the other officers drifted off to their duties, and Estelle took a tour of the deck with the engineering officer. He entertained her with tales of sea superstitions, eerie monsters of the deep and funny tidbits of scuttlebutt about the crew that made her laugh.

At last they reached the door of her stateroom, and he gallantly kissed her hand again. She accepted when he asked her to join him for breakfast in the morning.

She entered the tiny cabin, clicked the lock on the door and switched on the overhead light. Then she closed the curtain tightly over the single porthole, pulled the suitcase from under the bed and opened it.

The top tray contained her cosmetics and carelessly jumbled underthings, and she removed it. Next came several neatly folded blouses and skirts. These she also removed and set aside to later steam out the wrinkles in the shower. Gently inserting a nail file around the edges of the false bottom of the suitcase, she pried it up. Then she sat back and sighed with relief. The money was still there, stacked and bound in the Federal Reserve Bank wrappers. She had hardly spent any of it.

She stood up and slipped her dress over her head– daringly, she wore nothing beneath – and collapsed across the bed, hands behind her head.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the shocked expressions on her supervisors’ faces when they discovered the money and reliable little Arta Casilighio missing at the same time. She had fooled them all!

She felt a strange, almost sexual, thrill at knowing the FBI would post her on their list of most wanted criminals. The investigators would question all her friends and neighbors, search all her old haunts, check a thousand and one banks for sudden large deposits of consecutively numbered bills – but they would come up dry. Arta, alias Estelle, was not where they’d expect her to be.

She opened her eyes and stared at the now familiar walls of her stateroom. Oddly the room began to slip away from her. Objects were focusing and unfocusing into a blurry montage. Her bladder signaled a trip to the bathroom, but her body refused to obey any command to move. Every muscle seemed frozen. Then the door opened and Lee the mess boy entered with another Oriental crewman.

Lee wasn’t smiling.

This can’t be happening, she told herself. The mess boy wouldn’t dareintrude on her privacy while she was lying naked on the bed. It had to be a crazy dream brought on by the lavish food and drink, a nightmare stoked by the fires of indigestion.

She felt detached from her body, as if she were watching the eerie scene from one corner of the stateroom. Lee gently carried her through the doorway, down the passageway and onto the deck.

Several of the Korean crewmen were there, their oval faces illuminated by bright overhead floodlights. They were hoisting large bundles and dropping them over the ship’s railing. Abruptly, one of the bundles stared at her. It was the ashen face of the young fourth officer, eyes wide in a mixture of disbelief and terror. Then he too disappeared over the side.

Lee was leaning over her, doing something to her feet. She could feel nothing, only a lethargic numbness. He appeared to be attaching a length of rusty chain to her ankles.

Why would he do that? she wondered vaguely. She watched indifferently as she was lifted into the air. Then she was released and floated through the darkness.

Something struck her a great blow, knocking the breath from her lungs. A cool, yielding force closed over her. A relentless pressure enveloped her body and dragged her downward, squeezing her internal organs in a giant vise.

Her eardrums exploded, and in that instant of tearing pain, total clarity flooded her mind and she knew it was no dream. Her mouth opened to emit a hysterical scream.

No sound came. The increasing water density soon crushed her chest cavity. Her lifeless body drifted into the waiting arms of the abyss ten thousand feet below.

Part I
The Pilottown

1

July 25,1989

Cook Inlet, Alaska

Black clouds rolled menacingly over the sea from Kodiak Island and turned the deep blue-green surface to lead. The orange glow of the sun was snuffed out like a candle flame. Unlike most storms that swept in from the Gulf of Alaska creating fifty– or hundred-mile-an-hour winds, this one bred a mild breeze. The rain began to fall, sparingly at first, then building to a deluge that beat the water white.

On the bridge wing of the Coast Guard cutter Catawba,Lieutenant Commander Amos Dover peered through a pair of binoculars, eyes straining to penetrate the downpour. It was like staring into a shimmering stage curtain. Visibility died at four hundred meters. The rain felt cold against his face and colder yet as it trickled past the upturned collar of his foul-weather jacket and down his neck. Finally he spat a waterlogged cigarette over the railing and stepped into the dry warmth of the wheelhouse.

“Radar!” he called out gruffly.

“Contact six hundred fifty meters dead ahead and closing,” the radar operator replied without lifting his eyes from the tiny images on the scope.

Dover unbuttoned his jacket and wiped the moisture from his neck with a handkerchief. Trouble was the last thing he expected during moderate weather.

Seldom did one of the fishing fleet or private pleasure craft go missing in midsummer. Winter was the season when the gulf turned nasty and unforgiving. Chilled Arctic air meeting warmer air rising from the Alaska Current detonated incredible winds and towering seas that crushed hulls and iced deck structures until a boat grew top-heavy, rolled over and sank like a brick.

A distress call had been received by a vessel calling herself the Amie Marie.One quick SOS followed by a Loran position and the words “… think all dying.”

Repeated calls requesting further information were sent out, but the radio on board the Amie Marieremained silent.

An air search was out of the question until the weather cleared. Every ship within a hundred miles changed course and steamed full speed in response to the emergency signals. Because of her greater speed, Dover reckoned the Catawbawould be the first to reach the stricken vessel. Her big diesels had already pushed her past a coastal freighter and a halibut long-liner gulf boat, leaving them rocking in her wake.

Dover was a great bear of a man who had paid his dues in sea rescue. He’d spent twelve years in northern waters, stubbornly throwing his shoulder against every sadistic whim the Arctic had thrown him. He was tough and wind-worn, slow and shambling in his physical movements, but he possessed a calculatorlike mind that never failed to awe his crew. In less time than it had taken to program the ship’s computers, he had figured the wind factor and current drift, arriving at a position where he knew the ship, wreckage or any survivors should be found – and he’d hit it right on the nose.

The hum of the engines below his feet seemed to lake on a feverish pitch. Like an unleashed hound, the Catawbaseemed to pick up the scent of her quarry. Anticipation gripped all hands. Ignoring the rain, they lined the decks and bridge wings.

“Four hundred meters,” the radar operator sang out.

Then a seaman clutching the bow staff began pointing vigorously into the rain.

Dover leaned out the wheelhouse door and shouted through a bullhorn. “Is she afloat?”

“Buoyant as a rubber duck in a bathtub,” the seaman bellowed back through cupped hands.

Dover nodded to the lieutenant on watch. “Slow engines.”

“Engines one third,” the watch lieutenant acknowledged as he moved a series of levers on the ship’s automated console.

The Amie Marieslowly emerged through the precipitation. They expected to find her half awash, in a sinking condition. But she sat proud in the water, drifting in the light swells without a hint of distress. There was a silence about her that seemed unnatural, almost ghostly. Her decks were deserted, and Dover’s hail over the bullhorn went unanswered.

“A crabber by the look of her,” Dover muttered to no one in particular. “Steel hull, about a hundred and ten feet. Probably out of a shipyard in New Orleans.”

The radio operator leaned out of the communications room and motioned to Dover. “From the Board of Register, sir. The Amie Marie’sowner and skipper is Carl Keating. Home port is Kodiak.”

Again Dover hailed the strangely quiet crab boat, this time addressing Keating by name. There was still no response.

The Catawbaslowly circled and hove to a hundred meters away, then stopped her engines and drifted alongside.

The steel-cage crab pots were neatly stacked on the deserted deck, and a wisp of exhaust smoke puffed from the funnel, suggesting that her diesel engines were idling in neutral. No human movement could be detected through the ports or the windows of the wheelhouse.

The boarding party consisted of two officers, Ensign Pat Murphy and Lieutenant Marty Lawrence. Without the usual small talk they donned their exposure suits, which would protect them from the frigid waters if they accidentally fell into the sea. They had lost count of the times they had conducted routine examinations of foreign fishing vessels that strayed inside the Alaskan 200-mile fishing limit, yet there was nothing routine about this investigation. No flesh-and-blood crew lined the rails to greet them. They climbed into a small rubber Zodiac propelled by an outboard motor and cast off.

Darkness was only a few hours away. The rain had eased to a drizzle but the wind had increased, and the sea was rising. An eerie quiet gripped the Catawba.No one spoke; it was as though they were afraid to, at least until the spell produced by the unknown was broken.

They watched as Murphy and Lawrence tied their tiny craft to the crab boat, hoisted themselves to the deck and disappeared through a doorway into the main cabin.

Several minutes dragged by. Occasionally one of the searchers would appear on the deck only to vanish again down a hatchway. The only sound in the Catawba’swheelhouse came from the static over the ship’s open radiophone loudspeaker, turned up to high volume and tuned to an emergency frequency.

Suddenly, with such unexpected abruptness that even Dover twitched in surprise, Murphy’s voice loudly reverberated inside the wheelhouse.

“Catawba, this is Amie Marie.”

“Go ahead, Amie Marie,”Dover answered into a microphone.

“They’re all dead.”

The words were so cold, so terse, nobody absorbed them at first.

“Repeat.”

“No sign of a pulse in any of them. Even the cat bought it.”

What the boarding party found was a ship of the dead. Skipper Keating’s body rested on the deck, his head leaning against a bulkhead beneath the radio. Scattered throughout the boat in the galley, the mess-room and the sleeping quarters were the corpses of the Amie Marie’screw. Their facial expressions were frozen in twisted agony and their limbs contorted in grotesque positions, as though they had violently thrashed away their final moments of life. Their skin had turned an odd black color, and they had gushed blood from every orifice. The ship’s Siamese cat lay beside a thick wool blanket it had shredded in its death throes.

Dover’s face reflected puzzlement rather than shock at Murphy’s description. “Can you determine a cause?” he asked.

“Not even a good guess,” Murphy came back. “No indication of struggle. No marks on the bodies, yet they bled like slaughtered pigs. Looks like whatever killed them struck everyone at the same time.”

“Stand by.”

Dover turned and surveyed the faces around him until he spotted the ship’s surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Isaac Thayer.

Doc Thayer was the most popular man aboard the ship. An old-timer in the Coast Guard service, he had long ago given up the plush offices and high income of shore medicine for the rigors of sea rescue.

“What do you make of it, Doc?” Dover asked.

Thayer shrugged and smiled. “Looks as though I better make a house call.”

Dover paced the bridge impatiently while Doc Thayer entered a second Zodiac and motored across the gap dividing the two vessels. Dover ordered the helmsman to position the Catawbato take the crab boat in tow. He was concentrating on the maneuver and didn’t notice the radio operator standing at his elbow.

“A signal just in, sir, from a bush pilot airlifting supplies to a team of scientists on Augustine Island.”

“Not now,” Dover said brusquely.

“It’s urgent, Captain,” the radio operator persisted.

“Okay, read the guts of it.”

“ ‘Scientific party all dead.’ Then something unintelligible and what sounds like ‘Save me.’ “

Dover stared at him blankly. “That’s all?”

“Yes, sir. I tried to raise him again, but there was no reply.”

Dover didn’t have to study a chart to know Augustine was an uninhabited volcanic island only thirty miles northeast of his present position. A sudden, sickening realization coursed through his mind. He snatched the microphone and shouted into the mouthpiece.

“Murphy! You there?”

Nothing.

“Murphy… Lawrence… do you read me?”

Again no answer.

He looked through the bridge window and saw Doc Thayer climb over the rail of the Amie Marie.Dover could move fast for a man of his mountainous proportions. He snatched a bullhorn and ran outside.

“Doc! Come back, get off that boat!” his amplified voice boomed over the water.

He was too late. Thayer had already ducked into a hatchway and was gone.

The men on the bridge stared at their captain, incomprehension written in their eyes. His facial muscles tensed and there was a look of desperation about him as he rushed back into the wheelhouse and clutched the microphone.

“Doc, this is Dover, can you hear me?”

Two minutes passed, two endless minutes while Dover tried to raise his men on the Amie Marie.Even the earsplitting scream of the Catawba’ssiren failed to draw a response.

At last Thayer’s voice came over the bridge with a strange icy calm.

“I regret to report that Ensign Murphy and Lieutenant Lawrence are dead. I can find no life signs. Whatever the cause it will strike me before I can escape. You must quarantine this boat. Do you understand, Amos?”

Dover found it impossible to grasp that he was suddenly about to lose his old friend. “Do not understand, but will comply.”

“Good. I’ll describe the symptoms as they come. Beginning to feel light-headed already. Pulse increasing to one fifty. May have contracted the cause by skin absorption. Pulse one seventy.”