The Alpha Deception (30 page)

Blaine restrained him with a grasp on his forearm. “Just point me in the right direction. I’ll get the equipment somewhere else.”

The man shook his head, half to say no and half to show his disbelief. “You wanna die that much, mister, I got a shotgun right here under the counter. Put you out of your misery real fast.”

“I’d rather let the Dragon Fish do it. That would make my vacation.”

The man regarded him strangely. “You’re different from the others. I don’t know how, but you’re different.” He tried to hold his stare into Blaine’s black eyes but looked quickly away. “You just might be a match for the Dragon Fish, but don’t expect me to help you find him. Know someone who can, though. Name of Captain Bob. You’ll find him in Alice Town, at the End of the World bar.”

“The name’s symbolic, I assume.”

“You go looking for that island, mister, and it might be more than a symbol.”

Blaine and Natalya took the hourly seaplane from South Bimini over to Alice Town and walked the brief stretch from the airfield to the End of the World bar in the center of town. They did not hesitate before entering but perhaps should have: the End of the World, even at this early morning hour, was two-thirds full with patrons, all of them locals. Many regarded the strangers with hostility as they made their way across the floor in the bartender’s direction.

“We’re looking for Captain Bob,” Blaine told him.

“What’d you want him for?”

“Got a job for him.”

“Captain Bob’s kind of retired.”

“Like to charter his boat.”

“It’s drydocked.”

“Just like its owner,” came a voice from the rear of the bar. Blaine turned and saw a flabby black man with a graying Afro pouring a water glass full of bourbon. “Wet docked would be a better way of putting it in my case, though.” His golfball-sized eyes, the whites creased with brownish-red streaks, turned toward the bartender. “Let the kids come over here. Maybe they’ll buy me a drink.”

McCracken slid a twenty-dollar bill across the bar. “Give me another bottle of whatever he’s drinking.”

“Cost you two of those.”

“Steep,” Blaine returned and reached into his pocket.

“You’re paying for the atmosphere.”

McCracken grasped the bottle by the neck and moved toward the old man’s booth, with Natalya right behind. Too much booze had made Captain Bob’s age indistinguishable.

“If you wanna join me, you’ll have to get your own glasses,” he greeted.

“No thanks,” said Blaine, sliding into a chair.

“What about the lady?”

“Too early in the day for me,” Natalya told him.

“Yeah,” said Captain Bob in what seemed to be the local accent, “me too. Too early in the day but too late in life to worry about it much. Suppose I know why you’re here.”

“Somebody tell you to expect us?” Blaine wondered.

“Didn’t have to. People like you come around regular enough. They heard of me somehow and, like you, they buy me a bottle. Then, like you’re going to, they leave disappointed.”

“We haven’t asked you anything yet,” said Natalya.

“Don’t have to. Questions is always the same. Usually they pulls out a map and offers me a fee to point out what they’re looking for. If I likes ’em, I just says no. If I doesn’t, I sends ’em in the wrong direction. Either way they makes out ahead ’cause they stays alive. ’Course that’s not the way they sees it. They comes here to get rich, they figures, and I’m keeping ’em from it.”

“We’ve come to charter your boat,” Natalya told him.

“For a guided tour of the surrounding islands,” Blaine added.

Captain Bob looked surprised. “Well, that’s a new one. Usually I doesn’t come included in the deal. People is usually too smart to bother asking me. They figures with everything I know, I doesn’t need partners.”

“We’re not here to make our fortunes, Captain,” Blaine told him with as much conviction as he could muster.

Captain Bob studied him briefly. “No, I doesn’t suppose you are. You isn’t like the rest, not as demanding but a hell of a lot more desperate. What you’s after’s got little to do with yourselves, I’d wager.”

“It’s got to do with us all right and with you too and with the whole goddamn world.”

“There’s something out there we’ve got to bring back,” Natalya added. “Millions of lives are at stake.”

“You’s a pretty good actress, little lady.”

“The part’s real.”

“I’ve got a map here,” Blaine said, fishing through his jacket pocket. “Just point us in the right direction. You’ll be paid well for the effort.”

“Like I says, it ain’t the money. If it was, I could be a rich man without puttin’ up with the bullshit that walks through the door here. And I can’t just point you in the right direction ’cause the reef formations tear the bottom of your boat out ‘less you know by heart where they lie.”

“Our first choice is to have you come with us,” Blaine reminded him.

“And I can’t do that neither. Ain’t been back that way for a couple years now when the last of the island folk pulled up stakes. Won’t find any of ’em left in these parts. They just up and vanished. I’s the last one left, far as I know. Don’t know enough to move along. Guess a man oughtta die where he got himself born, ’cept I was born on the …”

“The island?” Natalya finished for him.

“Raised there, anyway,” Captain Bob told her. “Ain’t much to the island ‘sides the lighthouse. My daddy first and then me manned it, sweeping that big light to warn ships away from the reef and the shallows. Them waters been a graveyard for ships longer than any of us can possibly imagine. Goes all the way back to Spanish galleons with enough gold pieces still in their hull to buy Miami. Plenty of people tried salvagin’ them and died for the effort even before …” Captain Bob’s voice tailed off, then picked up again. “Worst times started with the quake. That’s what stirred the Dragon Fish awake most in these parts figure.”

“Quake?”

“Sea quake, friend. Awful bad one too, shifted the undersea formations all over the goddamn place. Things that’d been unreachable for centuries suddenly rose. Vast treasures the eyes of man was never meant to see again. Floods of people started streaming into the waters, challenging the reefs, once again. Most never made it. Them that did, well, the Dragon Fish took care of them while they was tied up at night, sometimes during the day, too. Thing come up from the depths with the hunger of centuries. Fishermen was the first to disappear, my two sons among them. I used to sit in my boat at night with a harpoon hoping the Dragon Fish would surface. Never thought I could kill it but I had to try. But it never appeared. So I gave up and moved off the island.” Captain Bob paused. “Become sort of a pact throughout the Biminis that the island just don’t exist, plain and simple, but once in awhile people like you come round knowin’ that it does.”

Blaine assimilated Captain Bob’s story. “This sea quake, would it have occurred about five years ago?”

“Yup, that would be about right, though the years ain’t meant much to me for too long now.”

McCracken turned to Natalya. “Professor Clive said seismic changes in the Earth’s crust forced the Atragon crystals up from where nature had stored them for centuries. That sea quake fits perfectly into the scenario. They’re out there, all right.”

“If there are any left,” Natalya said. “Vasquez could have been a very busy man.”

“Sure, but the well hasn’t run dry yet, because as of five months ago the fat man was looking for fresh buyers. That’s how Fass came upon his.” Blaine paused. “Question is, how did the fat man mine all that stuff underwater without anyone being aware of it, including the captain here? That Dragon Fish might have needed all of two swallows to get Vasquez down. Maybe that’s what saved him.”

Natalya’s face was somber. “You know all this fits perfectly with the legends of the Lost Continent, don’t you? The waters of Paradise Point right here in the Biminis are lined with precise rock formations that many feel are the remains of its road systems.”

“The only thing lost right now is my patience.” Blaine swung back to Captain Bob. “You’re right, Captain, we can’t make it to this island alone. But you could take us there.”

He shook his head. “Lots of people asked me to over the years. Offered me more money than you ever seen to do it too. What makes you any different?”

“Because if you take me there, I’ll kill the Dragon Fish for you.”

“You’re the first man I ever seen might be able to do it,” Captain Bob said then. “I suppose I been waitin’ for ya. Never did want to die scared of a place I lived most my life. Always figured I’d be going back one last time… .”

Four hours later they set off from the Alice Town harbor where Captain Bob’s cruiser was docked. It was a thirty-three footer that had once belonged to a rich couple from the Florida Keys. They’d beached it one summer evening, and Captain Bob got it off the insurance company for a song and rebuilt it himself. That had been ten years back and the cruiser didn’t get out to sea much anymore. He lived aboard it, though, and empty or half-empty bourbon bottles were the only decorations he’d added.

The captain had plenty of scuba equipment and tanks but they needed refilling, which Blaine accomplished in town while the old man and Natalya got the cruiser sea-ready. Captain Bob repeatedly refused to accept money for the charter, nor did he ask for any further elaboration on what it was they were looking for. He seemed quite content to simply head his cruiser out from the harbor and settle it gracefully into the sea. Blaine and Natalya could sense in Captain Bob a resigned acceptance of fate. He seemed to have regained a measure of health.

Captain Bob had already confirmed that the island with no name was approximately 175 miles east of Alice Town. With the cruiser’s top speed at thirty miles per hour, a six-hour voyage was in store at the very least, which, Captain Bob was careful to point out, would leave them precious little daylight. Night was the Dragon Fish’s time and nobody in their right mind would tempt the waters then. But he said it knowing they would anyway and he was glad of that. If he could just see the vile creature that had stolen his sons away destroyed, he would be ready to leave this world.

The island came into view through binoculars about five hours into their voyage. Soon, Captain Bob positioned Blaine and Natalya at opposite sides of the cruiser’s forwardmost point to watch for reefs his bourbon-soaked mind had forgotten about. The formations were treacherous, but the captain squeezed by them, with the hull occasionally scratching against one. In some places the reefs seemed to have gathered like sharks. Blaine had done plenty of diving through the years, including a stretch at the Great Barrier Reef, but he had never seen anything like this. The reefs seemed strategically placed to deter precisely the kind of journey they were making. There was a man-made quality about them.

Gradually the island with no name sharpened in view. It was surprisingly small, no more than a half mile across. It was decorated with lavish green flora and dominated by the center steeple of the lighthouse Captain Bob had manned for years, which poked up above the trees at the edge of the shoreline. The beach was smooth yellow sand. As they drew still closer, Blaine could make out the remains of shacks abandoned years before. The whole scene had the feeling of a graveyard, albeit a lush one.

“We’ll anchor here,” Captain Bob announced three hundred yards from shore. “Beneath us lie the corpses of a thousand ships. Riches and treasures beyond imagining.” He bit his up. “And this is where the Dragon Fish took my sons.”

“What about the center of the quake?” Blaine asked him softly.

“Right abouts where we are now. I remembers ’cause of the whirlpool. Never forget that sight. A tunnel whipping through the sea, sucking down anything which was anywhere near it.”

“And the depth?”

“Hundred feet at the deepest point.”

“I’m going down,” Blaine told Natalya and started to climb into his wet suit.

Natalya reached for hers. “I can’t let you have all the fun.”

Blaine smiled at her, not bothering to argue. Together, he and Natalya donned their scuba equipment, starting with the life vests a simple tug on a string would inflate. There was also a tubular sprocket fitted for an extension out of the tanks to draw air with a simple press of a plunger. Next came the weight belt and finally the bulky tank which on land was nearly impossible to tote. Captain Bob helped Blaine pull his over his shoulders and then moved on to Natalya while McCracken worked the straps tight beneath his groin, making sure the tank was centered properly. He and Natalya then rubbed water on the insides of their masks to prevent them from fogging up, adjusted the straps to the proper tightness, and checked both their main and auxiliary regulators.

“You’s got one hour of air each,” Captain Bob reminded them. “If I gets no sign of you after that, nothin’ saying I won’t pull up anchor and leave.”

“Fair enough,” said Blaine, pulling on his flippers.

“Hope you finds what you’s looking for, friend.”

“If it’s here, we’ll find it.”

With that, Blaine and Natalya grabbed hold of their spearguns and tossed themselves over backwards into the black depth below.

Chapter 28

THE SIGHTS BENEATH THEM
were breathtaking. Through the crystal-clear water they could see a paradise of sea creatures and plants springing from the nearby reefs. The fish seemed almost friendly, coming forward as if to be petted.

McCracken had always loved diving. The feeling of being underwater soothed him. It was a world where time seemed to stand still or at least pass more slowly.

The depths darkened as Blaine and Natalya kicked with their flippers and angled their bodies to swim lower. They were using the standard set of hand signals, never expecting to be far enough away from each other to actually require them and hoping not to need their spearguns and the underwater knives sheathed on their calves.

Down further now… .

Captain Bob had told them that the depth of these waters was between ninety and a hundred feet. The angle of the sun was strong enough now to provide them plenty of light. But each had a powerful underwater flashlight attached to their weight belt.