Deep Shadow (31 page)

When I turned my head, the swamp gloom was illuminated, and I could see that two of the monitor lizards had returned. The animals were perched on the high bank among cattails, tongues flicking, probing air molecules for a scent of prey or the warning scent of predators. Their eyes no longer glowed. Through the monocular, their reptilian eyes appeared as opaque as the eyes of a snake that was shedding its skin.

In reality, I was not looking through the monocular. I was seeing an amplified electronic image on a phosphor screen. The device collected a broad spectrum of light, intensified it, then reassembled real-time images that produced the illusion that it was high noon as if viewed through a Heineken bottle, not a windy, starry February night.

Underwater, the monocular would be even more effective once I activated the built-in infrared light. The infrared was invisible to anyone or anything not equipped with night vision, and the unit was waterproof to a hundred feet.

As I swam toward the marker buoy, I gave some thought to the Nile monitor lizards that were still watching me from shore. The monitor is a foul-tempered pet and a prolific breeder that has, over the years, caused too many impulse buyers to dump their purchases along the sides of the road rather than risk their cats or dogs being killed and eaten. Monitors are superb swimmers, they can scramble up trees, they nest in unseen burrows and they will eat just about anything that moves—or doesn’t move fast enough.

The Nile monitor is a relentless diurnal predator that hunts in packs when necessary—and there is no shortage of prey in the suburbs of the Sunshine State. On its native continent, monitors are hunted for food by crocs and by humans. In Florida, though, where filet of lizard tail isn’t on the menu, the animal has been allowed to ascend to the position of an alpha predator. That’s why it has multiplied so rapidly throughout the state.

The lizards didn’t cause me any uneasiness, though. They were the size of bulldogs, although twice as heavy. Even if there had been a dozen of them, I doubted if they would have risked attacking a full-grown man. Had I been in Indonesia, though, not the pasturelands of Florida, my reaction would have been much different.

I had spent time in Indonesia and so I knew from experience.

On the islands surrounding Pulau Komodo, there lives a close relative of the animals that were now watching me. There, as in Florida, the monitors have no natural predators, so they have evolved to a massive size—“island gigantism,” the phenomenon is called. They grow to eleven feet long, three hundred pounds, and their attacks on man are well documented. The animal’s tail is as lethal as its bite.

Their hunting technique is also well documented. Indonesian monitors use their tails to knock their prey to the ground, then inflict one or more tearing bites. Then they wait patiently. When the wounded victim is immobile—it doesn’t have to be dead—the monitor begins to feed.

For more than a century, biologists believed that carrion-borne bacteria in the lizard’s mouth is what caused paralysis in victims, man and animal alike. It is now known, however, that the monitor lizards of Komodo are indeed venomous. At least one very fine Australian scientist is now assembling evidence that most, if not all, monitors are equipped with poison glands.

They are an ancient species articulately equipped for survival.

I had seen monitors on islands near Sumatra that were the size of rottweilers, not lapdogs, that, with their viper tongues, wind-scented primates as quickly as carrion. One time, on the island of Gili Motang, on the Suva Sea, an Australian friend and I had found the claw and tail prints of a big monitor on a beach beneath coconut palms not far from the lagoon where we had anchored our boat.

The two of us spent the afternoon tracking the animal through dense Indonesian rain forest. A couple hours before sunset, my friend and I were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so we returned to the lagoon and our little ridged hull inflatable.

We hadn’t lost the monitor lizard, it turned out. She was in the shadows waiting on us. It was one of the big females, probably a couple hundred pounds. She was ten feet tall, standing on her hind legs in a thicket of traveler’s palms as if begging for a treat.

It was a rare encounter. Her tongue had probed the air experimentally like a snake, tasting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. She’d been shadowing us the whole time, we guessed later, anticipating our moves. Why she didn’t press her attack as we backed away toward our boat and then escaped by sea, we didn’t know.

Days later, an Indonesian naturalist, who was as knowledgeable as she was beautiful, suggested it was because some Komodo monitors are nocturnal hunters, either by predilection or genetic coding, so the animal was waiting for nightfall to attack.

If the naturalist was right, sunlight had saved us, not our quick feet.

King’s voice interrupted my thoughts, chiding me from the shoreline. “Hurry back, now—you hear, Jock-a-mo! Bring your new boyfriend something real pretty, okay? Perry’s waiting!”

Because I suspected he would do it, I had my hands up, shielding my eyes, when he tried to blind me with one of my own flashlights. A second later, a chunk of rock the size of a baseball landed in the water nearby. By the time I’d made it to my marker buoy, the man had lobbed three more rocks at me. I’m not often tempted to reply with a middle finger, but I was tempted now.

Instead, I turned away from the rocks and the blinding light and used night vision to have a last look toward the swamp The third monitor lizard had returned to the bank—a presence I found reassuring instead of disturbing. If three small lizards were in attendance, it suggested that a very large gator or croc was nowhere in the area.

I tested my regulator, then checked my new watch, a Graham Chronofighter. My pals at the marina had given it to me as a present—Tomlinson’s idea, as I knew. It had a big round face that was luminous with orange numerals. The watch read
7:22 p.m
.

I twisted the bezel, marking the time of my descent, and then I deflated my BC. I submerged, feetfirst, using the buoy line to feel my way downward.

The water was clear again. Details of my fins and my hands were bright through the monocular. Soon, when I could distinguish the bottom, I turned and began to kick slowly downward, hearing the crackle of fast-twitch muscle fiber as fish spooked ahead of me. Sand appeared a luminous blue and fossilized oysters were black—a dinosaur-era tableau that created a nagging worry in the back of my brain. I wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with those three monitor lizards, flicking their tongues, wind-profiling me, before I had submerged.

It took a minute to formulate the details, but it finally came to me. The results were unsettling: Nile monitor lizards are diurnal, unlike their monster-sized cousins in Indonesia. They hunt at sunrise and they hunt at sunset, but they spend their days and nights underground.

What were the three lizards doing outside their dens watching me long after sunset? Why were Nile monitors hunting at night?

NEAR THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KARST TUNNEL, AS I
reached for the mammoth tusk to steady myself, I stopped and listened, aware that something large had entered the water somewhere above me.

It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud, but the object had weight. The awareness came to me as a feeling, not a linear observation. Water, displaced by mass, exerts an expanding wave of pressure. I sensed the subtle force before the vibration registered in my ears.

My first thought was that Perry had forced King into the lake to help me with the jet dredge.

But, no . . . it wasn’t King. I had heard only the percussion of entry, no amateurish thrashing and splashing. It wasn’t King and it certainly wasn’t Perry.

It was something else—something not human, I felt sure. An inanimate object possibly. It could have been a boulder or a chunk of tree trunk. I pictured King throwing something big into the water, another attempt to irritate me. In him, humor took the form of harassment when violence wasn’t an option.

Maybe so, but he hadn’t thrown a chunk of wood. Wood floats. Whatever had breached the surface now continued to move. I could hear it, descending rapidly down the lake’s incline. It made a scraping, clanking noise that was impossible to identify.

I wedged the extra gear close to the marker buoy’s line, grabbed my underwater spotlight and looked up, paying attention. If it wasn’t a joke, I needed to know what was coming toward me.

Through my naked eye, the lake’s surface was a lucid obsidian disk. It was vaguely luminous and star speckled. Through the green eye of the monocular, though, stars glittered brightly against an emerald sky. I could see the silhouette of the marker buoy above and the silver thread of rope that anchored it.

I had done a full turn before I finally saw what was making the noise. It was large and dark and symmetrical. It appeared to be descending at an angle, following the slope of the lake bottom, coming fast in my direction.

I closed my right eye and touched my fingers to the outer ring of the monocular, trying to focus on the object as it drew closer. It wasn’t easy to track, because the thing was gaining speed as it descended. Automatically, I began sculling backward in retreat—an instinctive response that was silly. I was running away, even though I didn’t know what was coming at me.

For a moment, I believed my first guess was right: I thought it was a chunk of rock pushed into the water by King because it was like watching something tumble downhill. The thing wobbled and bounced and kicked up sand, snaking its way toward me like a drunken skier on a vertical slope.

In my right hand, I had the big underwater light. I didn’t think I would need it because of the night vision system, but I used the spotlight now, swimming on my back so I could maintain visual contact. As the thing rumbled closer, I kicked harder—but then it abruptly slowed, then stopped. I watched it wobble and spin, and then it fell onto its side, kicking up another explosion of sand.

I stopped swimming and righted myself. I painted the object with light until I was sure of what I was seeing. I was breathing hard, I realized. Arlis Futch’s warning had spooked me, which now caused me to feel stupid. I had overreacted to a threat that didn’t exist.

I swam over and took a closer look. Near the mammoth tusk, where I had left my extra gear, lay the steel wheel from the shredded truck tire. It was thirty pounds of metal, minus the rubber.

King had done it, of course. He had pried the thing free of the tire, then rolled it into the lake to scare me. I had been wrong about the rock, but my instincts had been right about King.

Some people feed on the destruction of others. They are emotional scavengers, and their feeding assumes aspects of frenzy even when it ensures their own doom. But King would never find out that he had succeeded in scaring me. The man had sealed his fate when he’d sabotaged my attempt to help Tomlinson and Will.

I switched off the spotlight and secured it to a D ring on my BC. Because I’d had to use the light, I gave my eyes a minute to adjust before using the monocular again.

As I waited, I found myself glancing over one shoulder, then the other, studying the vacuous emptiness of an underwater lake basin at night. King’s joke had jolted my system with adrenaline. Now I felt a lingering buzz of paranoia.

Was something out there? Something that could see me without being seen? It is an ancient fear, the wellspring of all monsters and religions.

My intuition whispered,
Yes
,
something’s out there.
It was a feeling I had, a premonition of danger. Perry had seen something big in the water, his reaction was proof. The strange undertone in Arlis’s voice when he’d warned me was additional proof and even more compelling.

Intellectually, though, I knew that premonitions are nonsense. Intuition and lottery numbers are memorable only if they pay off, but both are fast forgotten when they fail to produce.

I don’t buy either one.

I went back to work.

 

 

I couldn’t find the opening
to the karst vent. It made no sense. What the hell had happened during the last two hours? The mammoth tusk was where I had left it, close to the vertical crater, and the line to the marker buoy was still hanging straight. Nearby, the bottom looked unchanged, but the opening to the tunnel had vanished.

I considered switching off the night vision monocular and using the spotlight again. But visibility wasn’t the problem, I decided. More likely, I was disoriented—everything on the water, and underwater looks different at night—so I gave myself a couple of minutes to get my bearings.

I positioned myself at the edge of the drop-off. I faced the remains of the limestone ledge and reconstructed the bottom in my memory.

Finally, I figured out what had happened. Sand and shell from the top of the crater had funneled down and covered the entrance.

I swam to the approximate area and began digging with my hands. For every scoop of sand I removed, it was replaced by double the amount. I found a sliver of oyster shell and began probing until I found an area where I could bury my arm up to the shoulder without hitting rock. If it wasn’t the exact location of the tunnel entrance, it had to be close, so I marked the spot with another inflatable buoy.

For several more minutes I attempted to dig but finally gave up.

Now I really did need the sand dredge, which meant I would have to depend on King once again—if Perry could talk the man into getting into the water.

Before moving on, I decided to try to signal Tomlinson and Will. I had been reluctant for a simple reason: I feared they were no longer alive to answer.

Using one of my smaller flashlights, I leaned over the spare tank and banged out
Shave-and-a-haircut . . . two bits.
I did it several times, then switched off my night vision and settled myself in silence, listening.