Billingsgate Shoal (31 page)

"Well tell him then; just don't let him bother
me. Now take this down, and Mary's number too."

We purred out of the marina by the south route.
Plymouth lay forty-five miles to the south, a straight shot. As we
passed Marblehead I had an urge to zip into the harbor there. But
why? If Schilling were active, we'd never recognize the boat he was
using. The only hope we had was to see if by chance we couldn't run
across his track in the two places I'd seen him before. In short, we
had to forget Salem, Marblehead, Lynn, Swampscott, Boston, Winthrop,
Scituate, Cohasset—all the harbors between Gloucester and Plymouth.
And I knew the odds of laying eyes on him were remote indeed. If I
were him I'd lay low as a hibernating woodchuck for a couple of
months. But leaving the
Rose
in a place where the police were sure to look, that led me to the
conclusion that Schilling . wasn't ready to hang up his jersey yet.
And there had been a load of firearms in the barn; it was probably
moved the night my strange friend and I paid a visit there. Where was
that shipment now? Probably on its way overseas on some freighter or
fishing vessel. If it was the last shipment perhaps Schilling would
reappear and claim the
Rose
.
No, maybe not. That depended on how well he'd covered his tracks.

Jim sat in the cabin instead of up on the flying
bridge. It was too cold now for that. He eased the twin throttle
knobs forward and the
Whimsea
lifted herself up out of the water a bit and began to plane. We
clipped right along. I stood in the cockpit and watched the wake fan
out behind us. The white and turquoise water mixed with the bluish
exhaust smoke and rolled away behind us. The engines rumbled and spat
and gurgled under my feet.

"Whatcha thinkin?"

I went forward and joined him at the helm. I squinted
at a long brownish-red freighter in the distance.

"I'm thinking that James Schilling and I are
going to meet face-to-face before very long," I answered. "We've
scraped sides twice. I think the next meeting will be definitive."

"Just so I'm not involved in it. If you seek him
out, you do so alone."

"Don't. worry. The police and the Coast Guard
know where we'll be going; I saw to that. All I want to do right now
is slide around the southern end of the Bay and keep my eyes open."

We poured coffee and sat and chatted as he kept the
boat headed straight on. We had the VHF on and tuned to channel 16,
the distress frequency. Nothing interesting was happening. I switched
a couple of times to the commercial bands used by cargo boats and
fishermen, and got nothing but the usual technical lingo about course
changes, gross weights, ETAs, cruise plans, and the like.

We kept the VHF on for a while. Behind the voices and
the static was a constant drone that resembled an aircraft engine, or
the rocket ships in the old Flash Gordon movies:
"mmmmmmrrrrm·rmmm—vessel taking water—rrrmmmmmmm—snap!
Yeah we have her sighted 'bout sixty meters off Spectacle Island
snap!—mmmmmmmmmmmrrrr. . ."

And so on, and on. It got a bit monotonous. We
switched to the more lively CB scanner.

"fffftttt! . . .eeeoow! . . fffft! . .
.my port engine's down, come back. . ."

"Jimmy' Hey Jimmy?"

"fffft! Yeah. . . said my mother-lovin'
port diesel's down. No go—over."

"You check out that fuel pump? Come
back—"

"Don't think that's it—fffft!——Maybe
it's the effin' injectors or else I gotta clogged—fffft."'

"You gonna stay out, Jimmy?"

"Look I'll limp home on the starboard
engine. You comin' out or what, come back?"

"Soon's I get some bread to top her up.
I'm hockin' my old lady's socks right now to get
fuel.
. .where are you, come back?"

"I got—sszzzznapp! mmmmmmrmnmm. .
.you there? OK, heading due north with Little Gurney Light off my
port quarter 'bout three miles—you know where those deep troughs
start? Over——"

"Yeah, gottcha, good buddy. But look,
you get an RDF fix or loran fix and let me know exactly. You
shouldn't be effin' around out there with one side down——"

"Yeah. I got—ffft.—so when I call
you back you'll have it. I'm gone."

Back to the VHF:

"—Coast Guard Station in Boston with
the latest weather—at two o'clock the temperature is fifty-six
degrees and steady, winds south southwest four to six knots, gusting
to nine. . .
barometric pressure twenty-nine
point seven and falling...seas two to five feet. . .visibility eight
miles and closing. Light fog and drizzle—"

The number of vessels increased dramatically as
we passed Boston about eight miles offshore. Especially predominant
were larger vessels: freighters and tankers, large trawlers, and a
few big yachts. We all intermingled and crossed paths at big
distances and continued on our separate ways with remarkable ease. I
glassed all the boats continually, especially the medium-length
trawlers and smaller powerboats. If I were running guns and had
abandoned my boat, I'd want a fast powerboat, like a sport-fisherman.
But peering through binoculars at the boats that dotted the sea was a
bit futile.

Shortly after three-thirty we were entering the
breakwater at Plymouth. We slid around in the big harbor for an hour
while I glassed everything in sight from
Whimsea's
cabin, looking for anything interesting or unusual. We went over to
the smaller harbor of Duxbury with the same negative results. Then we
cruised around the north side of the big bay across from North
Plymouth. I showed Jim the Cowyard, Gray's Beach, and where I'd seen
the
Rose
. We went in
real close to the big cordage pier where the draggers were tied up.
The boats floated on the still brown water. A man on the wharf came
out of a warehouse underneath a big corrugated steel door. He was
wheeling a dolly with steel wheels on it. The cart was piled high
with cartons and the steel wheels made a racket on the concrete. That
was all that was happening.

"Big deal," said Jim.

"Yeah I know."

Then we heard the faint clacking of a solenoid and
another big steel door began rolling upward in the brick building. A
lift truck whispered out, holding crates aloft on its pincers. A man
in a yellow helmet was driving it. The crates said Ocean Spray on the
sides.

"This is so exciting I can't stand it."

"Let's swing by close, then go into town and get
some bait."

We crawled right up to the big pier and watched the
few figures moving back and forth along it, We were close enough for
me to glimpse a grisly relic strung up alongside the Cyclone fence
that marked the terminus of the big dock. I hadn't noticed it on my
previous visit; It was a codfish head, cut off right behind the
gills, suspended on the fence with a stevedore's hook. It was as big
as a bushel basket. Flies swarmed over it.

"Will you look at that. Must've been a
five-footer," said Jim. "Why do you suppose they've done
that with it?"

He shrugged and spun the wheel lazily in his big
hands. He eased the sticks forward and the engine whined.

"Dunno. Trophy maybe. Or else it's a warning to
stay out of the yards when the gate's shut."

It was a grim reminder, and I thought of Angel's face
staring at me from the oven rack. We picked up speed and soon landed
at the main marina, where I bought Jim an early supper (apparently
the entire trip, not just the fuel, was to be courtesy of Yours
Truly) and we fueled the
Whimsea's
tanks and bought an ample supply of quahogs. These would be affixed
to heavy hooks and dragged slowly (or simply rested) on the mollusk
beds around the James Longstreet, a tempting treat for tautogs and
other fish. While we waited for dusk prepared the bait, shucking it
from the shells and cutting it into convenient-sized nuggets. We
sucked down some of the St. Pauli Girl beer we'd brought along and
listened to the radio. I was hunkered down in the cockpit out of the
breeze so I removed my shirt, soaking up the last precious bit of
sun,-even though it was thoroughly filtered by clouds. Jim pored over
the charts of Cape Cod Bay.

Dusk came, and we left Plymouth Harbor.

We rolled out past the big break water again. A line
of herring gulls stood on it, beaks to the breeze, most with one foot
tucked up in their tummy feathers. They said
skirl,
skirl, skirl . . .

When we got to the
James
Longstreet
the sun had been down forty
minutes. It was growing dark fast. The old wreck looked more ominous
than I'd ever seen it. Its bridge looked like a giant hunk of brown
Swiss cheese. The hull was partially collapsed in the middle, where a
lot of the steel reinforcing rods were visible, entwined in the
concrete hull. The fly-boys from Otis were pretty good shots, I
guessed. They'd nailed the old Liberty Ship right in the belly. In
fact the midsection of the old hull was so full of holes and cave-ins
that occasionally you could see clear through it to the dark bluish
purple of the water on the other side. We crept in close; I DeGroot
had his eyes glued to the fathometer fastened above the helm. It was
a black box with a dial in the center, marked in feet and meters. A
blip showed on the dial at zero feet, which was where the sound
signal was emitted from
Whimsea
via a metal sounder in her hull. Another blip was appearing on the
dial opposite the sixteen-foot mark.
Whimsea
rolled and lurched forward; the wreck loomed bigger and bigger.
Suddenly the blip jumped back and forth, and settled up toward its
mate at the zero end of the dial.

"Shit!" said Jim as he reversed and
throttled up. But it was too late. There was a thump and a shudder,
and then a slow heavy scraping sound.
Whimsea
stopped. It was falling tide; if we didn't get moving soon, we'd be
there for the duration. Jim and I ran a flashlight all around the
inside of the hull. Nothing. That was good at least. We had been
going slow enough and reacted soon enough so that the boat was sill
in one piece.

"What was it?"

"Dunno. But it was dumb to come in here. Why the
hell do I listen to you? I suppose this place is full of shoals and
rocks that aren't marked. Maybe they're big hunks of the
James
Longstreet
, who knows? Of course it's not
supposed to matter because we're not supposed to be here. And if the
CG has to haul us off, we're going to look mighty silly and get fined
to boot."

He gunned the engine once more, making the needle on
the tachometer approach the red line. There was a grinding shudder as
the propwash worked the boat loose. We shot backward and Jim cut the
twin engines back.

"I'm not going back in there. It's a labyrinth
of obstacles around that hulk."

So I talked him into letting me use the life raft. We
inflated it with the compressed air bottle and soon I was in it,
bobbing and rowing along to the old Liberty Ship. I got there
quickly; the little rubber boat flipped right along over the nasty
stuff that projected up from the sandy bottom. It wasn't hard to
figure out how the
Penelope
tore a gash in her steel skin. Up close, the topsides of the ship
loomed over me like a three-story apartment building. I paddled along
toward the series of big holes in her beam. I looked back at the
Whimsea
. Jim hadn't
set the hook, but was purring along in a semi-stall two hundred yards
off the
Longstreet's
port quarter. The boat's shape was faint, and growing fainter in the
darkness and light fog. I could see her running lights clearly, that
was about all.

I reached out and touched the
Longstreet
.
I felt the rough concrete with my hand, and grabbed a projecting
steel reinforcing rod and pulled the rubber raft along to the first
big hole. The seawater poured through this, and I glided into the
bowels of the ship. It was like being in an old wrecked cathedral.
The superstructure of the bridge towered above me, black and ragged
against the dark purple sky. All the portholes were devoid of glass,
which had no doubt been blown out long ago by the concussion of. the
bombs. It was like a giant corpse with all its eyes poked out.
Generally, it wasn't inviting, and the cold and the dark, and the
sound of sloshing water, did not improve it either.

I took the waterproof spotlight and swept it around.
There were plenty of nooks and crannies to hide anything your heart
desired inside the old hulk of the
Longstreet
.
There were bent railings, blown-away doors, exposed corridors, old
hatchways, smashed and twisted bulkheads, Ventilating ducts,
stanchions, wells, supporting members—it was a maze of pulverized
concrete and twisted, rusty steel. I shined a flashbeam all around
me. I saw nothing out of place though. No crates, plastic-wrapped
bundles, or anything else that caught my eye. I heard two quick
beeps. Jim was telling me he wanted to split. I rowed out through the
big hole and started back to the
Whimsea
,
which was now almost totally invisible. The chop had picked up, and
the tiny raft pitched around uncomfortably. I heard another boat and
saw a set of running lights sweep past out behind the
Whimsea
.