Secret sea; (16 page)

"He may know it," Mike said, his voice belligerent, "but we don't know it. We've already turned his damper down twice. Next time we'll fix his clock so it really won't run."

"I'd rather not have a next time," Pete said, going over and rigging the radio compass loop.

Mike, on the wheel, looked up at the sails glimmering in the starlit darkness. "He hit me with a pistol," Mike said slowly. "I haven't forgotten that."

Pete listened to the signals from two shore stations and drew a thin-lined X on the chart. Then he walked a pair of dividers southward. He turned oflf the compass, stowed the loop, and shoved the chart back in the case. "Mike, me boy, our ETA is five bells in the morning watch."

"Listen, Skipper," Mike said with mock plain-tiveness, "I'm just a poor civilian. I didn't go out and win no war with one hand tied behind my back."

"I mean that at six-thirty in the morning two

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islands should appear. One of them is almost barren—just a rock-and-sand job—and the other is a little number with bending palms, et cetera. Keep an eye out for 'em."

"Is that where the Santa Ybel is?" "Close by."

"So by tomorrow night we'll have the old In-dra loaded with gold," Mike said jubilantly.

"Hold hard, sailor," Pete said. "By tomorrow night you'll have so many blisters on your hands you'll think they're hamburgers. And I hope there aren't any mosquitoes on that island." "Blisters? What do you mean, blisters?" "You know, little round things. Juicy. Because we're taking the masts out."

"Oh, for the love of my uncle Ned—what for?"

"Radar," Pete said. "We're going to make the smallest possible area for that thing to see. There's a lot of metal high up on those masts. They're coming out."

"Aw, Pete, for heaven's sake!" Mike grumbled. "You're an old maid. Why don't we just scoop up that gold and get out of here? You mess around with masts and things, and it just gives Weber that much more time to find us."

"Mike, that stuff can't just be ^scooped' up. It's going to take us days, maybe weeks, maybe months to get it," Pete said slowly. "We've got

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to find the ship first. She's only something over two hundred feet long. Two hundred feet in a million miles isn't very much."

"I thought you knew where she was. Up there in that brain of yours. That's what you said," Mike accused him.

"I know where the Santa Ybel is, all right," Pete said patiently. **What I don't know is where we are."

"What about that radio thing you're always fooling with? Doesn't that tell you where you are?"

Pete nodded. "But I've already plotted the possible positions we can get from the stations we can hear down here. The nearest fix puts us close to the Santa Ybel . . . but we've still got to find her. She's been there for four hundred years, Mike. Ever see a barnacle?"

"On my uncle's neck," Mike said.

"In four hundred years the barnacles and coral will be thick on her. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty feet maybe. We've got to cut or blast through that. Then maybe we've got to cut a hole in her if I can't get down through the hatches. And finally, when we do find the gold, we've got to get it out and up, which, if that one piece is as big as the wheel of an oxcart, will be quite an operation all by itself."

"H'mmm," Mike said. "Hadn't thought of all that."

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"So, in the morning we do a little tooth pulling and a little painting," Pete said.

Pete's ETA was right on the nose. As the sun came up, the two islands were dead ahead of them. As Pete circled the barren one, Mike stood beside the wheel looking out over the sparkling sea.

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"Where is she, Captain?" Mike asked in a low voice.

"Out there," Pete pointed.

"Looks mighty empty."

"Let's worry about that later." Pete turned the hidra and sailed for the other island, which looked green and shining in the early morning light.

As they sailed slowly up toward it, the foresail down and only the number two jib and main on her, there appeared to be no harbor at all, just a steep green bank plunging into the sea. But as they came closer, they saw that a narrow reef circled out from the island like the blade of a scimitar and enclosed a beautiful little bay. Bright green mangroves grew on the reef, so that the bay was hard to see even when close up on the island.

"If there's a passage through that reef and there's water enough behind it we've got just what the doctor ordered," Pete said. "How about getting the lead line and seeing what we've got for bottom, Mike?"

"How much do we draw?" Mike asked, getting the lead line out of the lazaret.

"Eight feet."

"How much do you want under her?"

"Not much. We've got a lot of solid lead fin down there."

Pete turned the bidra and she ghosted along

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the reef. The water, in the lee of the island, was glass smooth and as clear as crystal. Mike, standing in the bow, could see fish, lobsters, crabs, and mollusks moving around on the bottom thirty feet down.

Near the northern end of the reef there was a narrow slit. Mike shaded his eyes and studied it and then called back to Pete, **She's mighty narrow. Skipper, but she looks deep."

"We'll try it. Take the jib off, will you?" Pete put the Indra into the wind, swung the main boom over the gallows frame, and dropped her down. Then he took the sails off and started the engine.

Going ahead at dead slow, Pete standing on the wheelbox, Mike in the bow with the lead, the Indra moved toward the slit in the reef.

"No bottom at seven," Mike yelled as he checked the run of the line and began retrieving it. On the next heave he got bottom and called out, "By the deep six," as the seven-fathom red rag stopped in his hand.

The channel through the reef had a dog-leg curve in it and apparently smack in the middle was a huge castle of brain coral.

"Stop her," Mike called. Then he aimed the lead at the coral and heaved. The lead splashed and sank in a trail of bubbles and Mike let them clear until he could see the lead lying gray on the

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white coral head. "Now come ahead dead slow," he called. "There's a coral head we either get over or we don't."

The Indra came ahead so slowly that she seemed not to be moving at all. Mike kept the lead line taut as the bow moved inch by inch over the coral head. At last when the lead line was straight up and down, Mike sang out, "And a half, one. Come ahead."

The hidra moved ahead, the deep fin keel clearing the coral head by less than a foot. Pete turned her down the dog-leg, and she slid smoothly into the bay.

Mike kept singing out the soundings, but the bay had an almost uniform depth of ten feet almost to the sandy beach.

"Stand by the anchor," Pete called. "Let her go."

Mike watched the QED anchor fall in front of the bubbles, then turn lazily over as Pete reversed the engine. The flukes dug into the white sand, the chain came taut.

Pete cut the engine, and suddenly everything seemed lonely and silent. Mike came aft and stood in the cockpit looking in silence at the little island, with the coconut palms ringing the beach all curving in the same direction.

"First thing—we go ashore and see if anyone is around," Pete said.

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"Let's swim," Mike said. "That water looks good, doesn't it?"

It really does," Pete said. He got up on the companion cover and looked around. "Don't jump in right now," he said quietly as Mike put a leg over the life line. "Why not?" "See that little ripple?" Mike looked where he was pointing and jerked

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his leg back over the Hfe Une. **Holy mackerel!"

A shark curved slowly in toward the hidra and coasted down the starboard side. Mike peered down at it goggle-eyed as it turned a little on one side and looked up at him with its cold, vicious httle eye.

"Guess we'll have to use the boat," Mike said. "And I wanted to go swimming."

"We'll swim," Pete said. "J^st wait a minute."

Pete came up from the cabin with a little yellow packet the size of a cake of soap but wrapped in waterproof plastic. "Where'd he go?" he asked.

Mike pointed to the fin slicing calmly along twenty feet away.

Pete removed the wrapping and broke off a piece of the stuff that looked like soap. He threw it at the shark, and the fish circled away from it and then came back to investigate it as it floated on the water.

From the floating stuff a solid circle of black dye began to form in the water, spreading farther and farther. The shark, swimming lazily, suddenly turned, the fin sizzling through the water, and went toward the beach. As though suddenly blind, he almost grounded on the sand before he turned and whipped across the lagoon. The water boiled down the narrow channel as the shark escaped into the open ocean.

Mike stooped down slowly and picked up the

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yellow wrapping. " 'U.S.N.,' " he read on it. " 'Shark Repellent.' "

"Shark chaser," Pete said. "Works."

"Drove that one crazy all right. What's it made out of?"

"You'd be surprised," Pete said. "It's made out of what comes out of dead sharks—copper acetate. The Navy never would have discovered a good chaser if it hadn't been for an old Florida shark fisherman. He just happened to mention that if he left a dead shark on his hooks other sharks wouldn't come near it after it had been dead for a day or so. That put the Navy on the track, and for a long time the Navy played around with dead sharks until they found what was in the corpses which drove away live sharks. Must have been a little smelly."

"Does it always work?" Mike asked.

"I guess that's a little like a parachute. If it doesn't work, you can always take it back and get a new one—if you happen to be alive."

Mike looked around the lagoon. "No mo' sharks." With a run he cleared the life line, sailed out, and landed in the water flat on his belly. Pete heard him grunt when he hit.

"Just like a swan," Pete said as Mike came up still gasping for breath.

"Don't get smart," Mike said angrily. "You try it."

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Pete cleared the life line too. But then he couldn't find the water. It was so crystal-clear that he couldn't see the surface at all—just the white sand bottom. He was thinking that he had another foot or so to fall when he hit flat on his face, his eyes wide open. It knocked him dizzy for a minute, and when he looked around, Mike was treading water and laughing. "Just like a log," Mike said.

They swam ashore together, and on the beach Pete said, "You go around that way, I'll go this. Look out for old fires, footprints, shacks, and stuff."

In fifteen minutes Pete looked up to see Mike coming toward him. "Not a sign of anything but pelicans," Mike said. "I don't believe a human being has ever been on this island."

"I haven't seen anything either. But let's take one trip over the top."

They came out on the beach without having seen any trace of people. The Indra lay white and calm on the clear water, wind rattled softly in the coconut palms.

"Let's get to work," Pete said, wading out into the water. "You stay ashore and I'll heave you a line. We'll warp the Indra in as close as we can, careen her, and rig some sort of tackle to pull out the masts.

It was hard, hot work, and by nightfall Pete

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and Mike both had Wisters on their hands from the long hauHng on the ropes. But both masts were out of the Indra and concealed up among the trees, the sails stowed below.

"Looks sort of naked," Mike said, looking out at the ship.

"Looks like a pooch somebody just threw a bucket of cold water on. I feel sort of sorry for her. But she wouldn't show on a radar now unless it was set up on the reef. Not with the island behind her that way."

"So tomorrow we go get some gold, huh?"

Pete shook his head. "Tomorrow we paint. You can use either green paint, gray paint, brown paint, or black paint, or all four. But by tomorrow night we want the Indra to be the biggest mess of paint you ever saw. We want to paint lines and curves and patches and blobs."