Hatteras Blue (22 page)

His eyes followed the line to the afterdeck. The boat was crowded with crates, diving gear, tanks of gas for the torch. A small wooden box nestled beneath a seat, lashed carefully with shock cords. In case the torch was not enough.

Caffey said, "What's the matter, Bern?"

Galloway saw that she was sitting quietly on the transom, rubbing sunscreen into her arms and glancing from time to time at Keyes.

"Oh, nothing. Tiller, you want me to do anything?"

"I guess you could start on the flying bridge. I didn't get to that yesterday. Too busy buying out Morehead City. Saw's in the tool locker. And we need to hook up the new sounder."

"Right." She tucked the sunscreen into her shoulder bag and picked her way forward over the cluttered deck to the ladder. Her new red cotton slacks flapped in the wind like signal flags. Galloway looked after her, unsure what to make of her mood. The morning before she'd surprised him by apologizing for her temper. She no longer wanted to leave. In fact, she insisted on coming with them. But that didn't mean things were the same. Something had changed about her—something he couldn't quite place. She spoke less, for one thing, and he had not seen her smile once yesterday, though she'd worked hard at restowing the gear that had come adrift in the storm.

She puzzled him, but she didn't worry him. What worried him was the fourth member of his crew. Shadrach Aydlett sat impassively on one of the aluminum lockers, his elbows on his knees, his scarred hands dangling. He said nothing and did not look at the low land passing down their port side, or at the sun, which was laying a flashing path as if gilding the road to their common goal. He stared at his hands.

Galloway and Keyes had woken him the morning before. Galloway, staring down at the compass, remembered how, sitting on the bunk opposite, he'd shaken the big man gently, then extended a cup of coffee. Aydlett had sat up, blinking, then turned his eyes to it.

"That mine?"

'Tep."

"Thanks."

"How you feeling this morning, Shad? Your eyes better?"

'Yeah, that burnin' all gone. Feel like a million now." He sipped at the coffee, then looked up in surprise. "Irish?"

"We got something to tell you," said Tiller. "Something bad, Shad."

"What it is?"

He held out the newspaper.

The big man had sat motionless, staring at the print. His lips moved. Then they stopped.

He looked at Keyes. Then he looked at Galloway.

At last he said, "Which one of you lit the fire?"

"Look, Shad, you were there. You saw us leave. Neither of us did it."

'You could have come back later—-Jesus! Why'm I talkin' to you?" He jumped to his feet. The cup rolled to the deck, shattering and spilling. "I'm going to—"

"Sit down!" roared Galloway. "Listen to me, Shad! Cliff had that old kerosene lamp lit. He lit it for us when we came. After we left he must have gone to put it out and knocked it over by accident."

The waterman rocked forward, his fists doubled. His face was a foot from Galloway's. "Bull crap! How I know that?"

"Because I said so!"

Keyes stood up. "Knock it off, you two. Shad, I'm sorry about this too. I only met your dad once, but he impressed me. Now here's what I think. I think you ought to go on home and help your brother—"

"Like hell! You want me to leave? Now you know where your wreck is? No way, my man. Shad Aydlett is going to do what his daddy set him to: stay right here. And get our cut at the end, me and my brother's."

"Don't you even want to call?" said Galloway.

"Abe knows where I am. With you."

"Damn it, Shad, you can go to Frisco. We're going to spend all day here repairing. We'll wait for you. Only thing we ask is, don't let the cops know where we are."

"Why not?"

The blond man said, "Because they'd take us into custody, and question us, and that would waste weeks.

Everything we're doing out here would be in the papers. I have a feeling that if we're going to do this job, we've got to do it right now."

"You must think I'm one stupid nigger. I'm supposed to bite on this? Grin, and leave, then soon as Shad gets around the corner you cast off. Horse shit! My daddy told me before I left, Tou watch your ass close now, Shadrach. Don't trust them two at all,' he said. 'Neither of 'em; that Galloway boy's gone to the bad, anymore he's crooked as they come. They'll as soon kill you as look at you.' Only it was him that got killed."

"I told you I didn't kill Cliff. Hell, I loved him, Shad. He was to me more like my dad than—"

"Shut up. listen to me now, I'm givin' you fair warning. You is safe till I got our share of whatever you is after, Tiller. Then I am going to hunt you down and kill you."

The three men stood in the narrow, close-smelling cabin, wordless at last; it had all been said.

So that was where they'd left it. Yesterday Aydlett too had worked hard, but with a brooding introspection that Tiller had never seen before in him. And their progress had been limited by the fact that they had to shop in pairs; neither Keyes nor Aydlett would go out of sight of the boat without Galloway along. Even in the crowded harbor, even as they worked together, Galloway had felt the distrust grow ever more pervasive, till now it seemed to fill the boat.

The bow passed the Beaufort Inlet sea buoy. They were in the open Atlantic. Galloway glanced at the chart and fed spokes to the wheel till 160 met the lubber's line on the compass. Out to Cape Lookout, then a left around it for the long run out to sea.

Now he began to think about Keyes.

What was he to think about a man who lied, it seemed, about everything? First there'd been the historian story. That hadn't lasted long. Then this routine about his father escaping a sinking U-boat Believable, beautifully embroidered with detail, but again, totally untrue. Galloway had proved that to his own satisfaction.

Should he even believe that Keyes was after gold? Or was that just another of the man's disposable truths, nestled one within the other like the successive skins of an onion?

Was there any gold off Hatteras at all?

And if there wasn't, what was Keyes really after?

And what about the thing that had started this entire imbroglio? The three skeletons in the raft?

He stood with his legs braced against the rise and fall of the boat, watching the compass and the sea ahead. Occasionally he lent the wheel a spoke, or borrowed one back. Behind and above him he heard the others, Caffey coiling line, Aydlett clearing his throat hoarsely, Hirsch's saw blade snoring as she hacked at the stumps of the tuna tower. But only part of his mind steered and listened. The rest was engaged in a desperate search for insight. He was trying to imagine what landing in the raft in wartime must have been like; trying to reconcile old Cliff Aydlett's account, incomplete though it obviously was, with what was possible; and from this, like a chess player deducing his opponent's game, trying to decide what lay behind it.

They had come ashore from the central dark, through night and fog. Born from the sea foam, but of Mars rather than Aphrodite. Torn from it like a fragment of night the raft had come ashore, to ground on the Banks, that fragile yet resilient barrier between sea and land. Had they thought that beach the mainland, where they might disappear in a heterogeneous, mobile population? Instead they'd landed on Hatteras. On the barren dunes that had fought back the sea for twenty thousand years, and amid an armed, untrusting people.

But why had they come ashore? Keyes's explanation had been that they were survivors. But there hadn't been any. Therefore the U-boat must have landed them earlier, just before its encounter with Lyle Galloway II and the
Russell
Had the three on the raft come with hostile intent? He couldn't imagine that, not in 1945. Were they spies? Again, it was the end of the war.

The blond man had mentioned a mutiny in his last fiction. Perhaps he was weaving his fabrications of partial fact. Could they have been mutineers, put off in a raft near shore instead of being shot?

No, because why then would they have a chart, and moreover, one showing the intended track of the craft they were leaving? And pistols? And cash, and even ration coupons?

Each conjecture arrived at a contradiction. Something mysterious had happened that night almost half a century ago. Clifton Aydlett might have known. The old man might have had the bit of data that would make sense of the whole shadowy picture. But he'd never told anyone. And now he never would.

Galloway felt the last grain of fact slip through his fingers, leaving him with an empty fist All right, he thougjht, narrowing his eyes to the sun. The only thing he could do was what he did when he entered a strange inlet and could not quite see the conformation of the channel ahead. He'd wait. Deliberately postpone his decision till he was closer, till he could see more clearly. If you waited and watched long enough there always came a moment when the heat haze and the motion of the boat ceased, or neutralized each other, allowing you for a fleeting instant a flicker-glimpse of the truth.

When it came, he would have to be ready.

"Buoy ahead to port, Tiller."

"Thanks, Jack. That should be R eight. We'll keep this course for a while. Okay, who's ready for the first trick on the helm?"

After leaving Cape Lookout behind they ran east through the morning and afternoon, taking fixes with the old lo-ran hourly, then more often. At last Galloway sent Caffey to the roof of the wheelhouse with binoculars.

That was when things went sour. Hour on hour passed, the boy searching restlessly, four more pairs of eyes reading the sea from the cockpit as
Victory
idled around in vast circles. At six Galloway began to wonder if the storm had taken their mark. He turned on the new sounder and began mapping bottom again. But nothing showed. Another hour passed. Keyes hung near the chart table, becoming increasingly unpleasant. At one point he all but accused Galloway of stalling on him. "I thought you had it pinpointed," he began.

"Are you crazy? Have you ever tried to find something on the bottom of the ocean before? I have. It ain't easy."

"We found it before. And you wrote down the coordinates. All we have to do is go there. I think—"

"We were lucky as hell that first time. That's all. Damn it, what do you want, man? If this thing was easy to find everybody and his brother would be out here tearing it apart for scrap."

"He's right," said Aydlett from behind the two men.

That silenced Keyes for a time, but tempers were ugly all around. At last, when it was too dark to continue, Galloway sent Keyes and Hirsch forward to drop the anchor. The new line was still on wooden drums, and they snarled it. Their argument was audible all the way back to the cockpit. Caffey went forward to help. When the danforth was down he came back along the gunwale, favoring his side just a little. "Set like concrete," he said.

"Can't do any better than that." Galloway grinned at him. As the others came aft he raised his voice. "I know the weather's good, but we'd better keep a watch. Since I don't intend to burn an anchor light."

"Good idea," said Keyes.

"We'll grab some dinner, then I'll take it till midnight. Jack till two, Dick till four, Shad till dawn."

"What about me?" said Hirsch.

"You can have ten to midnight if you really want it." "You want us all up at dawn?" Caffey asked then.

Galloway nodded. The boy rolled his eyes and groaned. "I should have stayed in my sickbed."

"Get my violin. Go on, lay below and see what you can find us to eat."

When the meal was over and the rest had turned in he perched himself on a cylinder of oxygen and looked out across the dark. It had fallen clear and cool, and above him the faded band of the Milky Way glowed dully behind the stars. Two low lights glittered on the horizon, masthead and range of a passing ship. Bound north, he thought. She's giving Diamond Shoals a wide berth. As well she might. He reached for one of the boxes. We'll have some moon around eleven, he thought. It'll be pretty out here then for Bernie.

Uncapping the botde, he raised it in a toast to Polaris before he took a long swallow.

"Till?"

The shadow was slim and moved with a certain caution. "Hey," said Galloway. "Siddown, Jack. Glad you came back up. Want a drink?"

"No thanks. You shouldn't drink when you might be diving."

"I know ... say, I'm really glad you're aboard. I didn't get a chance to say that yesterday."

"I'm not so sure I ought to."

"What's that mean?"

Caffey hesitated. They had both been speaking in murmurs; his next words fell to a whisper. "I mean—well, seems like a lot of stuff is going on I don't understand. Everybody's so tense. What's with you and Shad, anyway? I've never seen him like this."

Galloway explained briefly about Cliff Aydlett.

"Wow. I didn't hear about that. You think Keyes—?"

"No, I was with him the whole time. I think it really was an accident."

"Keyes scares me too. Till, what are we out here after, anyway?" "He says there's gold in the wreck."