White Shark (5 page)

When they reached the forward deck area,
the pilot disengaged the motor and let the submersible hover.
 
"There's what sank her," he said,
focusing the lights on an enormous hole in the deck.
 
"She imploded."

The deck plates were bent inward, their
edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.

As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat
running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the
men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die.
 
He could imagine the roar of rushing water,
the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the
agony.
 
"Christ..." he said.

The pilot put the motor in gear, and the
submersible inched forward.
 
Its lights
reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a...

"Hey!
"
Webber
shouted.

"What?"

"There's something in there.
 
Something big.
 
It looks
...
I don't
know..."

The pilot maneuvered the submersible above
the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the artificial
arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes.
 
He angled the lights into a single
five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole.
 
"I'll be damned..."

"It looks like a box," Webber
said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a
perfect rectangle.
 
"A
chest."

"Yeah, or a
coffin."
 
The pilot paused, reconsidering.
 
"No.
 
Too big for a coffin."

For a long moment, neither of them
spoke.
 
They just stared at the box —
wondering, imagining.

At last, Webber said, "We ought to
bring it up."

"Yeah."
 
The bastard's
gotta be eight feet long.
 
I bet it
weighs a ton.
 
I can't lift it with this
boat."

"How about both
boats together?"

"No, we can't lift a thousand pounds
apiece, and I'm just guessing.
 
It could
be a lot more than that.
 
We
couldn't..."
 
He stopped.
 
"Just a sec.
 
I think they've got five miles of cable in
the hold of that ship up there.
 
If they
can weight an end of it and send it down, and if we can get a sling around the
box, maybe... there's a chance..."
 
He pushed a button and spoke into his microphone.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

It took the two submersibles nearly an
hour to retrieve the weighted cable sent down from the mother ship and to
secure the box in a wire sling.
 
By the
time they gave the ship the order to begin lifting, they were pushing the
limits of their air supply.
 
And so, as
soon as they made sure that the box was free of the submarine's hull and was
rising steadily, they shed ballast and began their own ascent.

Webber felt exhausted and elated and
challenged, impatient to get to the surface, open the box and see what was
inside.

"You know something weird?" he
said as he watched the depth gauge record their meter-by-meter progress up
toward daylight.

"This whole thing's weird," the
pilot said.
 
"You
thinking of something in particular?"

"That wreckage.
 
All of it was
covered by silt.
 
Everything had a gray
film on it... except the box.
 
It was
clean.
 
That's probably why I saw
it.
 
It stood out."

The pilot shrugged.
 
"Does silt stick to bronze?
 
Beats me."

7

"I don't
believe
this!
"
Webber said.
 
"Metallurgists,
archaeologists, chemists... who gives a shit?
 
All that counts is what's inside!
 
What are they thinking of?"

"Yeah, well, you know
bureaucrats," the pilot said, trying to be sympathetic.
 
"They sit around with their thumb up
their ass all day, and now, suddenly, they got something to do,
they
gotta justify their existence."

They were standing on the stern of the
ship as it steamed westward toward
Massachusetts
.
 
The box was secured on a cradle on the
fantail, and Webber had spent hours mounting lights on the ship's
superstructure to create a suitable atmosphere of mystery, for when the box was
opened.
 
He had chosen sunset,
photographers' ‘magic hour,’ when shadows were long and the light soft, rich
and dramatic.

And then, not half an hour before he was
to begin shooting, the ship's captain had handed him a fax marked
"Urgent" from the
Geographic:
 
he was to leave the box untouched and
unopened until the ship reached port, so that a cadre of scientists and
historians could meet the ship and examine the box and open it in the presence
of a writer, an editor and a camera team from the
National Geographic Explorer
television series.

Webber was devastated.
 
He knew what would happen:
 
his lighting setup would be destroyed:
 
he'd be shunted aside, given a backseat to
the TV team, ordered around by the experts.
 
He'd have no chance to shot enough film to have ample "outs" —
pictures the Geographic wouldn't want and which he could sell to other
magazines.
 
The quality of his work would
suffer, and so would his pocketbook.

Yet there was nothing he could do about
it, and worse, it was his own fault.
 
He
should have stifled his excitement and waited to inform the magazine about the
discovery of the box.

Now he shouted, "Shit!" into the
evening air.

"C'mon," the pilot said,
"forget it.
 
Let's go down to the
wardroom; I got a friend there named Jack Daniel's who's dyin' to meet
you."

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Webber and the pilot sat
in
 
the
wardroom and
finished the Jack Daniel's.
 
The more the
pilot groused about bureaucrats, the more convinced Webber became that he was
being shafted.
 
He had discovered the
box, he had photographed it inside the submarine, he should be the one to take
the first, the best — the only — pictures of what was inside.

At eight-forty-five, the pilot pronounced
himself stewed to the gills, and he staggered off to his bunk.

At eight-fifty, Webber decided on a
plan.
 
He went to bed and set his alarm
clock for midnight.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

"That's Montauk Point," the
captain said, indicating the outer circle on the radar screen, "and
there's
Block Island
.
 
If we had
a calm
,
I'd anchor off Woods Hole and wait for daylight."
 
He looked at the clock mounted on the
bulkhead.
 
"It's one-fifteen now;
we'll be able to see pretty good in four hours.
 
But with this easterly blowing like a banshee, I'm gonna take her into
the shelter of Block and then go up the coast at first light.
 
No sense getting everybody sick and maybe
smashing up some gear."

"Right," Webber said, nauseated
by the pool of acid coffee that sloshed in his stomach as the ship nosed into a
trough and then rose askew onto the crest of a combing wave.
 
Pushed by a following sea, the ship was
corkscrewing through the night.
 
"Guess I'll go back and try to get some sleep."

"Put a wastebasket by your
bunk," the captain suggested.
 
"Nothing worse than trying to sleep in a bed of puke."

Webber had gone to the bridge to see how
many lookouts were on duty and had found only two, the captain and a mate, both
in the wheelhouse, both facing forward.
 
The stern was empty and unobserved.

Back in his cabin, he put a finger down
his throat and forced himself to vomit into the toilet.
 
He waited five minutes, tried to vomit again,
but brought up nothing but bile.
 
He
brushed his
teeth,
and, feeling clearheaded and more
stable, he slung a Nikon with an attached flash over his shoulder, picked up
and tested a flashlight and walked aft, out onto the stern.

The wind was blowing twenty-five or thirty
knots, but there was no rain, and the ship was moving with the wind at fifteen
knots, which cut its bluster:
 
walking across
the flat, wide stern was no worse than trudging into a fresh breeze.

Two five-hundred-watt lamps flooded the
afterdeck with light.
 
The submersibles
squatted on their cradles like mutant beetles assigned to guard the gleaming
greenish-yellow box that lay between them.

Webber stayed in the shadows as he crossed
the hundred feet of afterdeck.
 
He
crouched behind the portside submersible, checked to be sure no one was
watching from the wings of the bridge,
then
shone his
flashlight on the side of the box.

He had no idea how heavy the lid of the
box was — hundreds of pounds, certainly more than he could hope to lift
alone.
 
If he had to, he could use the lifting
rig from one of the submersibles, a big steel hook shackled to a
block-and-tackle arrangement and powered by an electric winch.
 
But perhaps the lid was spring-loaded;
perhaps there was a release latch or button.

He emerged from the shelter of the submersible
cradle, crossed the deck and knelt beside the box.
 
Facing aft to shade the flashlight beam with
his back, he followed the lip of the lid form one end to the other.
 
On the far side, only a few feet from the
edge of the fantail, with the ship's wake boiling as it rose and fell beneath
him, he saw a design etched in the bronze:
 
a tiny swastika.
 
Beneath it was a
button.

He pressed the button, heard a click, then
a hiss, and the lid of the box began to rise.

He knelt, stunned, for a moment as he watched
the
lid move
up tantalizingly slowly, rising at no
more than an inch a second.

When it was about half open, he got to his
feet, turned on his camera, raised it to his eye, focused it, and waited for
the beep signaling that the flash was ready to fire.

The light was dim; the lid shadowed the
interior of the box, the view through the lens was shimmery and amorphous.
 
The box was full of liquid.

He thought... was that a face?
 
No, not... but it was something, and face
like
.

There was a sudden thrashing in the
liquid, and flashes of what looked like steel.

For a fraction of a second, Webber felt
pain, then a rush of warmth, then a feeling of being dragged underwater.
 
And then, as he died, the bizarre sensation
that he was being eaten.

8

It needed to feed, and it fed until it
could feed no more.
 
It drank, sucking
ravenously, inefficiently, until its viscera refused to accept any more of the
warm, salty fluid.

Once nourished, it was still disoriented
and confused.
 
There was motion and
instability and, when it rose from its box, an alarming lack.
 
Its gills fluttered, gasping for sustenance,
but found none until it submerged again.

Nerve impulses fired randomly in its
brain, crossing barren synapses, unable to sort responses.
 
It was programmed with answers, but, in its
frenzy, it was unable to find them.

It sensed that sustenance was nearby, and
so, in desperation, it emerged again from the safety of its box and sensed its
surroundings.