Operation Malacca (16 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The parting tatters of rain drummed briefly on the eaves of the bungalow and died slowly away. Keilty, standing motionless at the window, watched quietly, his expression stonily fixed, as the gray rain receded to reveal first the spread of dull green lawn and then the beach. Beyond the beach, the open Gulf showed the last traces of mist being swept down into its colorless maw. Margaritta slept quietly on the couch behind him, feet drawn up and tucked against the back, the white blanket with which he had covered her contrasting dimly in the dull light with her hair.

Keilty continued to stand at the window, waiting for the sun to disperse the afternoon rain clouds. He watched a gull wheeling against the sky, his eyes tracking its flight as it shuttled between the waves and the clouds, but his mind did not register the image.

Quietly, he opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the patio. With the end of the rain, the light had improved. The white cover on his sloop attracted his eye and he started across the lawn towards the pier. The cool grass, covered with fine rain drops, felt good to his bare feet and he walked slowly until he reached the wooden deck. He unlashed the canvas cover and pulled it carefully onto the deck so as not to dump the water that had settled in its folds into the boat. After hanging it over the railing to dry, he stepped aboard, and skirting the cabin, went forward to loosen the bowline and check the forestays.

The jib was folded away in the sail locker and he fetched it out, cleated it to the forestay and slowly pulled it up to the mast. The stern line followed and he pushed the tiller over until the jib caught the first vestiges of the returning sea breeze and began to fill. The boat made headway, the rudder bit, and she began to move slowly towards the entrance in the coral reef.

Keilty brought the sloop up into the wind and she began to pick up speed as the breeze freshened. The boat cleared the low coral shelves at the entrance and quickened to the stronger breezes and dancing waves. Keilty lashed the tiller and raised the mainsail with strong, steady pulls. The sail cracked sharply, filled, and the sloop heeled and dug in.

With the tiller bar under his arm again, he stretched out, catlike, on the thwart and scrabbled in the locker for a cigarette. The sloop slipped on under the leaden sky as the island receded behind. From time to time, Keilty cupped the cigarette in his hand to protect it from the spray and watched the billowing shape of the mainsail. Finally, he felt a sharp pain from the cigarette ash and flicked the butt over the side.

The rain squall had freshened the air as it passed on, taking the humid heat of the still afternoon with it. The flashes of spray that were flung at him from the bow were curiously refreshing. Quietly, he sat quite still and thought for a long time.

He thought about Charlie – from the time they had first become associated until the dive to the submarine a week ago. He thought about their relationship. Curiously enough, there had never been any other relationship than that of friendship. But now, it had gone far beyond even that, not in a personal sense, but in a more encompassing arrangement.

They had both become spokesmen for each other's kind and neither of them liked it. But Charlie had been forced into the position because of his relatively intimate contact with human beings. Keilty, because of Charlie.

Charlie had seen too much, discovered too much about the human race. He could clearly see that man would soon begin to displace him as intelligent life in the sea. The process might take thousands of years, but it would be inevitable. Already, there were three inhabited bases on the continental shelves: one off the United States, the San Clemente Base, and one off the Soviet Union in the Sea of Okhotsk, and a third undersea base, the French station under the Mediterranean. Sealab VI was already in progress at 12,000 feet in the Atlantic. And Charlie could read the handwriting on the wall. Just two days ago he had cataloged his reasoning by pointing out to Keilty that there was more oil, more fresh water and food, and more mineral deposits on the world's continental shelves than had been discovered so far on the continents themselves. He remembered Charlie's question

. . . 'What do we do when man goes after this wealth? Will careful reasoning appeal to him while his civilization dies of thirst, hunger, and lack of power?'

He had had no answer then and had none now. Keilty did not know what Charlie could do about it, but he knew that man must not face this type of intelligence as an enemy, in the enemy's domain.

The wind had freshened perceptibly as the breeze, flowing in to fill the low-pressure area left by the departing storm, quickened. The wind had veered two points to the northeast, and Keilty pushed the tiller over and let the sails trim up. He now had a following wind blowing from the port quarter and the sloop dived into the seas like an angry shark. He concentrated his attention on handling the lively boat. The waves were running only two to three feet at crest, but with the wind behind, the sloop pitched strongly as the wind drew on the luff of the main and jib, and the yaw was almost nonexistent in the steady seas. He trimmed the jib a little tighter and felt the answering thrust as the sloop leaped ahead. Satisfied, he studied the curve of the jib, calculating the flow of the true wind through the Venturi-like gap between the jib and the main. Satisfied that the tremendous air pressure on the sails was correctly balancing the side thrust on the keel and that he was losing little motion to leeward, he settled back to enjoy the challenge to the elements that every sailor in human history has felt.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the shape of a dolphin coming up to breathe; then it was gone. Thoughtfully he watched for a second appearance, but none came.

`So it's begun,' he said half aloud to himself, and felt a sudden chill reach through him.

He was being watched, as was every ship or boat in the area. In three short days, patrols, usually two dolphins to an area, were watching every movement of everything that floated in the Keys.

Keilty glanced up at the blue sky, burned almost coppery by the swift return of the sun.

Above him hung only slow-moving remnants of clouds left by the squall, but low on the western horizon to starboard, the black line of squall clouds marched implacably on into the Gulf of Mexico. The appearance of the single dolphin had ruined the peace of mind the sloop had induced and he angrily gauged the waves and wind and threw the boat over on a starboard tack. With a clatter, the boom swung round over his head and the jib cracked sharply as it filled again. A long beat north by east, close-hauled, would put him a mile east and north of the island and he could come about again and drop down into the entrance. Bitterly he leaned back to wait out the long hour.

Forty-five minutes later, he could make out the surf breaking on the coral reef and the deep green, almost black of the island vegetation. Reaching off to the north was a long tongue

of land, and when he came abreast of the tip, he brought the sloop around until it was moving along the reef half a mile out, towards the entrance.

He tried again, as he had many times in the last week since regaining consciousness in the Vigilant's sick bay, to remember what had happened after the submarine had blown up. He remembered everything quite clearly up to the time he had set his last charge, but after that, it was all a blank.

He remembered the intense cold and the pain in his chest, and he thought he could remember snatches of incidents, particularly the concussion of the exploding charges.

He was also quite certain that he remembered being pulled slowly through the water and feeling the rain beating down on his face. He was sure of this because he remembered being angry that he could not turn his head away.

But beyond that, he remembered only regaining consciousness in a darkened sick bay on the cruiser and the panic of disorientation before the doctor got to him. Then followed the two-day trip back to Singapore with the ship lurching in the heavy seas of the monsoon that had finally struck. He had watched, from a stretcher on the bridge, as Jack'

s flag-draped burial bag slid into the waves, and then had managed to walk the distance back to sick bay to report to the strangely disorientated dolphin.

Charlie had lain quietly in his tank all during the return voyage. And only the long flight across the Pacific had roused him to any semblance of his former character. Keilty would have sworn that he was tremendously preoccupied; and he was right. He himself wheeled Charlie's tank to the pen and helped him into the water. Charlie swam slowly up and down the pool for a few minutes before heading out to the reef. That was the last Keilty had seen of him.

The tide was running with him and the sloop cleared the narrow entrance to the reef and sailed into the lagoon. As he came around the shoulder of the island, Keilty could see a helicopter hovering for a landing. Keilty brought the sloop around for an approach and dropped the mainsail. As the sloop neared the deck, he let go the jib and coasted slowly in. A shore patrolman reached over with the boat hook and pulled the boat in and snubbed the bowline tight.

Rawingson waited quietly as he climbed over the rail and onto the dock. The two men walked slowly back to the terrace and into the bungalow. Keilty crossed the room and sank down

on the couch, while Rawingson moved around the bar to fix two stiff drinks. He came back and handed one to Keilty and remained standing. Finally he asked, 'Are you feeling all right?'

Keilty lay back with his hands beneath his head and for long moments stared at the ceiling, ignoring the question; then he said quietly, 'Jack died because of this nonsense.

And Charlie disappeared. God knows where he's gone or why . .

His voice trailed off.

`Then I take it you still have no word from him?' One look at Keilty's expression and Rawingson said hurriedly, 'No, ignore that. It was a stupid question.'

Both men were thinking back over the events of the last three weeks, of the deadly brink of war that had been approached so closely. Rawingson did not know if it could have been averted without the dolphin's help or not, and he did not care. All that mattered was that the bombs had been destroyed before the millions of lives that were so vulnerable had been wiped out. He was thinking too, of the long discussions of the last week at the Pentagon, of the President's orders to develop a unit in the Navy that would use dolphins in much the same way as the K-9 corps uses dogs. He recalled too his fruitless arguments that dolphins could not, would not allow themselves to be used in this way. He had seen the strained, but polite smiles as he tried to explain the degree of intelligence inherent in the dolphin; the intense curiosity that Charlie displayed, coupled with his reluctance to enter into human affairs. His arguments that Charlie had done what he had done because of his friendship and regard for Keilty – for no other reason. He had tried time and time again to explain that Charlie knew little about human politics and cared less, that this demarche between the Western alliance and Communism was completely not understandable to him. All his arguments had fallen on deaf ears. To them, the issue was black and white.

He had left Washington with a promotion, orders, and a burning desire to return to the Keys for a rest. Keilty had replied to his cable immediately, and now he stood in the bungalow's living room, the sound of Margaritta's singing coming faintly to the house, and Keilty's haunted face before him.

He carefully searched, that face, noting the pale gauntness, the staring eyes, red-rimmed from lack of sleep. The skin on his massive chest, while freshly sun-burned, betrayed the ordeal of the dive and the submarine's destruction, Charlie's disappearance, and Jack's death in the way it was shrunken tight over the startling rib cage.

The immense bruise that still covered half his back and sloped over one shoulder indicated the fierce reaction of his body to the diving 'lung'. And he recalled the first day after the recovery of the two men and the dolphin, when the ship's surgeon had fought to save their lives. He had succeeded with the dolphin and Keilty, but Jack had suffered a stroke and his body defenses were too drained by the long ordeal. He had died without even recovering consciousness.

To break his mind away from that useless line of thought, he asked to hear the tape.

Keilty got up and went over to his desk and switched on the tape recorder. There was a moment of silence: then Charlie's voice, stiff and somehow formal, even coming through the transphonemator, filled the room. Rawingson listened quietly, pity flooding through him for Keilty as the dolphin's quiet voice talked on.

`My friend Mort. I am sorry that I must return at night to make this tape. I would like to see you again. I have a good bit of serious thinking to do about the events of the past few weeks. I feel that I am now strong enough to and in fact need to rejoin my family-herd in the open sea. Unfortunately, I cannot take you with me, nor would I if it were possible. I have much to think about and many questions to resolve.

'My old teacher, the herd guardian, will listen to me and possibly suggest a course of action. As has become clear to me, a decision must be made as to whether or not a close cooperation between our peoples is desirable. If it is not, I do not know what can be done, but something must and shall. Your own history indicates the inadvisability of attempting to keep two groups apart to avoid conflict. I hope this will never be, as strongly as I hope that we never become enemies, your race and mine. Remember, you once suggested that we were either a very advanced, or a very degenerate race. This is one of the questions I must resolve.

'I have felt something curious in knowing that Jack is dead and that I will never argue or swim with him again . . . is this what you mean by sorrow? Is this an emotion, what I feel now?

'I will come back . . . when, I am not sure. Until then, I leave you this tape recording.

Rawingson and Keilty both continued to stare at the empty reel, long after the tape had run out.