Cradle

1

They were there on the beach at sunrise. Sometime during the night seven whales had run aground at Deer Key, five miles east of Key West. The powerful leviathans of the deep, ten to fifteen feet long, looked helpless as they lay floundering on the sand. Another half dozen members of this misguided pod of false killer whales were swimming in circles in the shallow lagoon just off the beach, obviously lost and confused.

By seven o’clock on the clear March morning, whale experts from Key West had arrived and were already beginning to coordinate what would later become a concerted effort by local fishermen and boating enthusiasts to push the beached animals back into the lagoon. Once the whales were off the beach, the next task would be to coax the entire pod into the Gulf of Mexico. There was little or no chance that the animals would survive unless they could be returned to open water.

Carol Dawson was the first reporter to arrive. She parked her sporty new Korean station wagon on the shoulder of the road, just off the beach, and jumped out to analyze the situation. The beach and lagoon at Deer Key formed a cove that was shaped like a half moon. An imaginary cord connecting the two points of land at the ends of the cove would extend almost half a mile across the water. Outside the cord was the Gulf of Mexico. The seven whales had penetrated the cove in the center and were beached at the point farthest from the open sea. They were about thirty feet apart and maybe twenty-five feet up on the sand. The rest of the whales were trapped in the shallows no more than a hundred feet offshore.

Carol walked around to the back of her station wagon. Before pulling out a large photographic case, she stopped to adjust the strings on her pants. (She had dressed quickly this morning when awakened in her Key West hotel room by the call from Miami. Her exercise sweat suit was hardly her usual working attire. The sweats hid the assets of a shapely, finely tuned body that looked more like twenty than thirty.) Inside the case was a collection of cameras, both still and video. She selected three of the cameras, popped a couple of M & Ms from an old package into her mouth, and approached the beach. As she walked across the sand toward the people and the beached whales, Carol stopped occasionally to photograph the scene.

Carol first approached a man wearing a uniform from the South Florida Marine Research Center. He was facing the ocean and talking to two Naval officers from the Marine Patrol section of the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West. A dozen or so local volunteers were in close orbit around the speakers, keeping their distance but listening intently to the discussion. Carol walked up to the man from the research center and took him by the arm.

“Good morning, Jeff,” she said.

He turned to look at her. After a moment a vague smile of recognition crossed his face.

“Carol Dawson, Miami Herald,” she said quickly. “We met one night at MOI. I was with Dale Michaels.”

“Sure, I remember you,” he said. “How could I forget a gorgeous face like yours?” After a moment he continued, “But what are you doing here? As far as I know, nobody in the world knew these whales were here until an hour ago. And Miami is over a hundred miles away.”

Carol laughed, her eyes politely acknowledging and thanking Jeff for the compliment. She still didn’t like it but had grudgingly grown to accept the fact that people, men especially, remembered her for her looks.

“I was already in Key West on another story, Dale called me this morning as soon as he heard about the whales. Can I interrupt you for just a minute and get some expert comments? For the record, of course.”

As she was speaking, Carol reached down and picked up a video camera, one of the newest models, a 1993 SONY about the size of a small notebook, and began interviewing Dr. Jeff Marsden, “the leading authority on whales in the Florida Keys.” The interview was standard stuff, of course, and Carol could have herself supplied all the answers. But Ms. Dawson was a good reporter and knew the value of an expert in situations like this.

Dr. Marsden explained that marine biologists still did not understand the reasons for whale beachings, although their increased frequency in the late eighties and early nineties had provided ample opportunities for research. According to him, most experts blamed the beachings on infestations of parasites in the individual whales leading each of the unfortunate pods. The prevailing theory suggests that these parasites confuse the intricate navigation systems telling the whales where to go. In other words, the lead whale somehow thinks his migration path is onto the beach and across the land; the others follow because of the rigorous hierarchy in the pod.

“I’ve heard some people say, Dr. Marsden, that the increase in whale beachings is due to us and our pollution. Would you care to comment on the accusation that our wastes as well as our acoustic and electronic pollution have undermined the sensitive biosystems that the whales use to navigate?”

Carol used the zoom on her tiny video camera to record the furrowing of Jeff Marsden’s brow. He was clearly not expecting such a leading question from her this early in the morning.

After thinking for a moment, he answered. “There have been several attempts to explain why there are so many more beachings now than were recorded in the past. Most researchers come to the inescapable conclusion that something in the whales’ environment has changed in the last half-century. It is not too farfetched to imagine that we may well have been responsible for the changes.”

Carol knew she had the right quotes for a perfect short piece for television. She then quickly and professionally wrapped up the interview, thanked Dr. Marsden, and walked over to the onlookers. In a minute she had plenty of volunteers to take her out into the lagoon so that she could take some close-up photographs of the confused whales. Within five minutes not only had Carol finished several discs of still photographs, but she also had rigged up her video camera with a stabilizing tripod on one of the little boats and done a video clip of herself explaining the beachings.

Before leaving the beach at Deer Key, Carol Dawson opened up the back of her station wagon. It served her well as a portable photo laboratory. She first rewound and checked the video tape that she had taken, listening particularly to hear if the splashing of the whales could be heard behind her while she was in the boat. Then she popped the discs from the still cameras into readers to see if she liked all the photographs. They were good. She smiled to herself, closed the back of the station wagon, and drove back to Key West.

2

Carol finished the redundant transfer of the videotape through the modem to Joey Hernandez in Miami and then called another number. She was sitting in one of the private cubicles inside the large new communications room at the Key West Marriott. The screen in front of Carol indicated that the connection for her new number had been made, but there was not yet any picture. She heard a woman’s voice say, “Good morning, Dr. Michaels’ office.”

“Good morning, Bernice, it’s Carol. I’m on video.”

The monitor cleared up in a second and a pleasant middle-aged woman appeared. “Oh, hi, Carol. I’ll tell Dale you’re on the line.”

Carol smiled as she watched Bernice swivel her chair and roll over to a panel of buttons on her left. Bernice was almost surrounded by her desk. In front of her were a couple of keyboards connected to two large screens, a variety of disc drives, and what looked like a phone embedded in another monitor. Apparently there had been no room for the communications panel right next to the phone, so Bernice had to roll three to four feet in her chair to signal to Dr. Dale Michaels that he had a call, that it was on video, that it was Carol, and that it was coming from Key West. Dr. Dale, as he was known by everyone except Carol, liked to have plenty of information before he answered the phone.

Both to Bernice’s left and right were perpendicular extensions to the desk, upon which were arrayed stacks of floppy discs of different sizes (the stacks were labeled “read” or “file” or “outgoing correspondence”), interleaved with groups of magazines and manila folders containing hard copy printout from the computers. Bernice pushed a button on the panel but nothing happened. She looked apologetically at Carol on the screen above the phone.

“I’m sorry, Carol.” Bernice was a little flustered. “Maybe I didn’t do it right. Dr. Dale had a new system installed this week again and I’m not certain…”

One of the two large monitors flashed a message. “Oh good,” Bernice continued, now smiling, “I did it right. He’ll be with you in a minute. He has someone in there with him and will finish quickly so he can see you and speak with you. I hope you don’t mind if I put you on hold.”

Carol nodded and Bernice’s image faded away from the screen. On the monitor Carol now watched the beginning of a short tutorial documentary on oyster farming. The piece was beautifully filmed underwater using the most advanced photographic equipment. The narration featured the mellifluous voice of Dr. Dale and the video pointed out the connection between the inventions at MOI (the Miami Oceanographic Institute, of which Dr. Dale Michaels was the founder and chief executive officer) and the rapid rise of sea farming of all kinds. But Carol had to laugh. Playing quietly behind the narration, and increasing in volume during periods of narrative silence, was Pachelbel’s “Canon.” It was Dale’s favorite piece of mood music (he was so predictable—Carol always knew what was coming next when Dale put Pachelbel on the CD player in his apartment), but it seemed strange to her to listen to the lilting strings as the cameras moved in for close-ups of growing oysters.

The oyster story was abruptly discontinued in medias res and the screen dissolved to the interior of a large executive office. Dale Michaels was sitting on a couch, across the room from his modem desk, looking at one of three video monitors that could be seen in the room. “Good morning again, Carol,” he said enthusiastically. “So how did it go? And where are you? I didn’t know that they had videos in the Marriott rooms yet.”

Dr. Michaels was tall and slim. Blond, his hair was slightly curly and receding just a trace at the temples. He flashed a ready smile that was too quick, almost practiced, but his green eyes were warm and open.

“I’m down in the comm room here at the hotel,” Carol answered. “I just sent the whale beaching story off to the Herald on disc. Jesus, Dale, I felt so sorry for those poor animals. How can they be so smart and still get their directions so fouled up?”

“We don’t know, Carol,” Dale replied. “But remember that our definition of intelligence and the whales’ definition are almost certainly completely different. Besides, it’s not that surprising that they trust their internal navigation system even when it leads them to disaster. Can you imagine a situation in which you would essentially disregard information that your eyes were giving you? It’s the same thing. We’re talking here about a malfunction in their primary sensor.”

Carol was quiet for a moment. “I guess I can see what you’re saying,” she said finally, “but it hurt to see them so helpless. Oh, well, anyway, I got the story on video too. Incidentally, the new integrated video technology is superb. The Marriott here just installed a new higher data rate modem for video and I was able to transfer the entire eight-minute piece to Joey Hernandez at Channel 44 in only two minutes. He loved it. He does the noon news, you know. Catch it if you can and tell me what you think.”

Carol paused just a beat. “And by the way, Dale, thanks again for the tip.”

“Just glad to help.” Dale was beaming. He loved it when he could help Carol with her career. He had been pursuing her single-mindedly, in his left brain scientific way, for almost a year and a half. But he had been unable to convince her that a permanent relationship would be mutually beneficial. Or at least he thought that was the problem.

“I think this whale thing could be a great cover,” Carol was saying. “You know I was worried about attracting too much attention with your telescope. And the treasure hunter bit just doesn’t fit if someone down here recognizes me. But I think I can use a whale follow-up story as the pretense. What do you think?”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Dale answered. “Incidentally, there have been a couple of other whale irregularities reported as well this morning—a partial pod beaching up at Sanibel and a supposed attack on a fishing boat north of Marathon. The owner was Vietnamese and highly excitable. Of course it’s almost unheard of that false killers attack anything related to humans. But maybe you can use the whole thing somehow.”

Carol saw that he was already up from the couch and walking around his office. Dr. Dale Michaels had so much energy it was almost impossible for him to sit still or relax. He was just a few months away from his fortieth birthday but he still had the zest and enthusiasm of a teenager.

“Just try not to let anyone from the Navy know that you have the telescope,” he continued. “They called again this morning and asked for a third set of equipment. I told them the third telescope was loaned out and being used for research. Whatever it is that they’re looking for must be very important.” He turned and looked at the camera. “And very secret. This guy Lieutenant Todd reminded me again this morning, as soon as I made a normal scientific inquiry, that it was Navy business and he couldn’t tell me anything about it.”

Carol made some notes on a small spiral pad. “You know, Dale,” she began again, “I thought this story had tremendous potential as soon as you mentioned it to me yesterday. Everything indicates that something unusual and secret is going on with the Navy. I myself was amused by the amateur way that Todd stonewalled me on the phone yesterday and then demanded to know who had given me his name. I told him that a source in the Pentagon had suggested that there was some high-priority activity at the Naval Air Station in Key West and that he, Todd, was associated with it. He seemed to buy it. And I’m convinced that the bozo Navy public affairs guy here knows nothing at all about anything that might be happening.”

Carol yawned and quickly put her hand over her mouth. “Well, it’s too late to go back to bed. I guess I’ll exercise and then go find that boat we talked about. I feel as if I’m looking for a needle in a haystack, but your guess could be right. Anyway, I’ll start with the map you gave me. And if they really have lost a cruise missile somewhere down here and are trying to cover it up, it would certainly be a great scoop for me. Talk to you later.”

Dale waved good-bye and hung up. Carol left the communications area and walked out to the end of the hotel. She had an oceanfront room on the first floor. The Herald wouldn’t pay for that kind of luxury, but she had decided to splurge anyway this time and pamper herself. As she was changing into her skin-tight workout swimsuit, she mused to herself about her conversation with Dale. Nobody would ever know, she thought, that Dale and I are lovers. Or at least sex partners It’s all so businesslike. As if we’re teammates or something. No darlings or dears. She paused for a moment and then completed her thought. Did I make it that way? she wondered.

It was almost nine o’clock and the resort was in the process of waking up when Carol walked out of her room and onto the hotel grounds. On the beach, the staff had just arrived and were setting out the chaises and umbrellas on the sand for the early risers. Carol walked over to the young man in charge (a typical Charlie Terrific, Carol thought sarcastically as she watched him strut along in front of his concession shack) and informed him that she was going for a long exercise swim. Twice at hotels previously she had forgotten to tell the guardians of the beach that she was going to swim a half mile away from the shore. Both times she had been “rescued,” much to her dismay, and had created an untoward scene.

As Carol worked into the rhythm of her freestyle stroke, she began to feel the release of tension, the loosening of the knots that bound her most of the time. Although she told most other people that she exercised regularly to stay fit, the real reason Carol spent at least forty-five minutes each morning running, swimming, or walking briskly was that she needed the exercise to deal with her fast-paced life. Only after hard exercise could she really feel calm and at peace with her world.

It was normal for Carol to let her mind drift idly from subject to subject while she was swimming long distances. This morning she remembered swimming long ago in the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean near Laguna Beach in California. Carol had been eight years old at the time and had gone to a birthday party given by a friend, Jessica was her name, whom Carol had met at soccer camp during the summer. Jessica was rich. Her house had cost more than a million dollars and Jessica had more toys and dolls than Carol could possibly imagine.

Hmm, Carol was thinking as she recalled Jessica’s party and the clowns and the ponies. That was when I still believed in fairy tales. That was before the separation and divorce…

Her watch alarm sounded, breaking her reverie, and Carol turned around in the water and headed back to shore. As she did so, she saw something strange out of the corner of her eye. No more than twenty yards from her a great whale broke the water, sending chills down her spine and adrenaline rushing into her system. The whale disappeared underwater and, despite the fact that Carol treaded water for a couple of minutes and scanned the horizon, she never saw him again.

At length Carol began swimming back toward shore. Her heart rate had started to return to normal after the bizarre encounter and now she was thinking about her lifelong fascination with whales. She remembered having a toy whale from Sea World, in San Diego, when she was seven. What was his name? Shammy. Shamu. Something like that. Then Carol remembered an earlier experience, one she had not thought about for twenty-five years.

Carol was five or six and sitting in her room, ready for bed as requested, and her father came into the room carrying a picture book. They sat together on the bed and leaned against the wallpaper with yellow flowers while he read to her. She loved it when he put his arm around her and turned the pages in her lap. She felt protected and comfortable. He read to her a story about a whale that seemed human and a man named Captain Ahab. The pictures were frightening, one in particular showed a boat being tossed about by a giant whale with a harpoon stuck in his back.

When her father tucked her in that night he seemed to linger in the room, showering her with tender hugs and kisses. She saw tears in his eyes and asked him if anything was wrong. Her father just shook his head and told her that he loved her so much, sometimes it made him cry.

Carol was so deep in this vivid memory that she wasn’t paying attention to where she was swimming. She had drifted west with the current and could now barely see the hotel. It took her a few minutes to orient herself and head back in the right direction.

3

LIEUTENANT Richard Todd waited impatiently while the data processing assistant made the last corrections on the master sheets. “Come on, come on. The meeting is supposed to start in five minutes. And we have a couple more changes to make.”

The poor girl was clearly hassled by the Navy officer hanging over her shoulder while she worked at the design monitor. She corrected a couple of spelling errors on one sheet and pushed the return key. On the screen in front of her appeared a computer line-drawn map of South Florida and the Keys. With a light pen she tried to follow Lieutenant Todd’s instructions and highlight the specific areas described by him.

“There,” he said finally, “that’s good. That finishes the group. Now hit the hard copy repro button. What’s the initial key? 17BROK01? Good. On the Top Secret data base? All right. Today’s password?”

“Matisse, Lieutenant,” she answered, standing up to walk around the machine and pick up a single collated hard copy of his presentation. Todd had a blank look on his face. “He was a French painter,” the girl said sarcastically, “M-A-T-I-S-S-E, in case you’re wondering.”

Todd signed out for his copy of the material and then scribbled the spelling of Matisse on a sheet of scratch paper. He awkwardly thanked the girl in a minimal way and left the room, heading out of the building and across the street.

The conference center for the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West was next door. It was a brand-new building of modem design, one of the few edifices on the base to break the architectural monotone that could best be described as “white stucco, World War II.” Lieutenant Todd worked in one of the nondescript white buildings as head of Special Projects for the site. Todd and his group were essentially troubleshooters for the command, crackerjack systems engineers who were moved from project to project depending upon where they were needed. Todd himself was twenty-eight, an Annapolis graduate in aerospace engineering, a gung-ho Navy bachelor who had grown up in Littleton, a suburb of Denver in Colorado. Todd was ambitious and in a hurry. He felt as if he were out of the mainstream down here in Key West and longed for a chance to move to somewhere he could really prove his mettle, a weapons design center, for example, or even the Pentagon.

The sign on the door in the conference center read TOP SECRET—BROKEN ARROW. Lieutenant Todd checked his watch. One minute remained before 0930, the time for the meeting. He entered an alphanumeric code into the door lock and walked into the back of a midsized conference room with three large screens in the front. His group of five younger officers and a couple of members of the senior staff had already arrived. They were standing around the coffee and donuts that were on a table at the left. Commander Vernon Winters was sitting alone at the center of a long table that ran across the room and virtually bisected it. He was facing the screens with his back to the entrance.

“All right, all right,” Winters said, first looking around the room and then at the digital time printout in the upper left corner of the front wall, “let’s get started. Are you ready Lieutenant Todd?” The other officers sat down at the table. At the last minute another senior staff officer entered the room and took a seat in one of the chairs at the back.

Todd walked around the table to the front of the room, to a podium with a built-in keyboard underneath a small monitor, and eyed Commander Winters. “Yes, sir,” he answered. He activated the computer system in the podium. Todd indicated that he wanted access to the Top Secret Data Base. He then entered a complicated keyed input that was the first pan of a password system. The interactive monitor in the podium next requested the password of the day. Todd’s first attempt was unsuccessful, for he hadn’t remembered the correct spelling. He began to search his pockets for the piece of scrap paper.

The only other keyboard in the room was in the center of the long table where Winters was sitting. While Lieutenant Todd fumbled around at the podium, the commander smiled, entered the password, and then added some code of his own. The center screen came alive in vivid color and showed a stylized woman in a yellow dress, sitting at a piano, while two young boys played checkers behind her. A sense of red flooded forth from the picture. It was a reproduction of one of Matisse’s paintings from his late years in Nice and was magnificently projected at the front of the room. Lieutenant Todd looked startled. A couple of the senior officers laughed.

Winters smiled engagingly. “There are some fairly amazing things that can be done with the resolution power of a 4K-by-4K image and a nearly infinite data base.” There was an awkward silence and then Winters continued. “I guess it’s hopeless to keep trying to expand the education of you young officers on this base. Go on. Continue. I’ve put you already into the Top Secret Data Base and any new input will override the picture.”

Todd composed himself. This man Winters is certainly a queer duck, he thought. The admiral who was the commanding officer of the Key West base had assigned the commander last night to lead this important Panther missile investigation. Winters had an impressive background in missiles and in systems engineering, but whoever heard of starting such a critical meeting by calling a painting up on the screen? Todd now entered 17BROK01 and, after counting the people, the number nine. In a few seconds a machine in the back corner of the room had copies of the presentation collated and stapled for the use of the participants. Todd called his first image (entitled “Introduction and Background”) to the center screen with another touch of the keyboard.

“Yesterday morning,” he began, “a demonstration test for the new Panther missile was conducted over the North Atlantic. The missile was fired at 0700 from an airplane at eighty thousand feet off the coast of Labrador. It was aimed at a target near the Bahamas, one of our old aircraft carriers. After flying a normal ballistic trajectory into the region where the ship was located, the Panther was supposed to activate its terminal guidance that uses the Advanced Pattern Recognition System or APRS. The missile should then have found the aircraft carrier and, using the reaction control jets as its primary control authority, made whatever vernier corrections were necessary to impact the old carrier on the main deck.”

Todd pushed a key on the podium and a line drawing map of the American east coast, including the area from Labrador through Cuba, appeared on the left screen. “The missile was a final test version,” he continued, “in the exact configuration of the production flight vehicle, except for the command test set and the warhead. This was to be the longest test flight yet conducted and was designed to demonstrate thoroughly the new 4.2 version of the software that was recently installed in the APRS. So of course the missile was not armed.”

The lieutenant picked up a light pen from the podium and marked on the small monitor in front of him. His markings were immediately translated to the larger screen behind him so that everyone could easily follow his discussion. “On the screen you all can see the predicted versus actual overflight path of the bird yesterday. Here, roughly ten miles east of Cape Canaveral on what appeared to be a nominal flight, the sequencer turned on the cameras. After a couple of hundred calibration images, sort of a self-test of the APRS, the terminal guidance algorithms were activated as scheduled. As far as we can tell from the realtime telemetry, nothing strange had occurred until this time.”

The right screen now showed a detailed map of south Florida and the Keys that included the target in the Bahamas. The maps on the two flanking screens remained in view during the rest of his presentation but Lieutenant Todd constantly changed the word charts in the middle to keep up with the discussion. “The a priori location of the target, which was where the cameras should first have looked for the aircraft carrier, was here at Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. The search algorithm should have fanned out in a circle from there and, if it had operated properly, found the target in about fifteen seconds. This (Todd pointed toward a dotted line on the more detailed map) should have been the impact trajectory.

“However,” Todd continued dramatically, “based on the telemetry data that we have analyzed to date, it appears that the missile veered sharply westward, toward the coast of Florida, soon after the terminal guidance system was activated. We have only been able to reconstruct its path up to this point, where it was about three miles west of Miami Beach at an altitude of ten thousand feet. After that the telemetry becomes intermittent and erratic. But we do know that all the terminal guidance engines were on at the time we lost complete data. Projecting the total control authority for the missile, the area highlighted here, covering the Everglades, the Keys, and even as far south as Cuba, represents where the bird might have landed.”

Lieutenant Todd paused for a second and Commander Winters, who had been writing down major points in a small notebook during the presentation, immediately jumped in and started taking charge of the meeting. “A couple of questions, Lieutenant, before we proceed,” Winters began in a businesslike manner with an obvious overtone of authority. “First, why was the missile not destroyed soon after it veered off course?”

“We’re not exactly certain, Commander. The command test set and the small ordnance had been installed, of course, specifically for that purpose. The change in the motion of the vehicle was so sudden and so unexpected that we reacted a little slowly at the beginning. By the time we sent the command, it’s possible that we were out of range. All we know is that we never saw an explosion of any kind. We can only assume—”

“We’ll come back to this operational error later,” Winters interrupted him again. Todd blanched at the word “error” and fidgeted behind the podium. “Where would the impact point have been according to the guidance constants active at the time of the last complete telemetry packet? And how long is it going to take us to extract additional information from the intermittent data?”

Lieutenant Todd noted to himself that the commander was sharp. Winters had obviously been associated with anomaly investigations before. Todd then explained that if the active guidance constants had not changed again, the continued firing of the terminal engines would have brought the missile to an impact point about twenty miles south of Key West. “However,” Todd added, “the constants were allowed, by the software, to change every five seconds. And they had changed in two of the last five internal data updates. So it’s unlikely they stayed the same as they were when our complete telemetry terminated. Unfortunately, although all the constants—even the future predicted ones that are being calculated by the APRS-are stored in the onboard computer, because of bandwidth limitations we only transmit the active constants with the realtime telemetry. We are now going through the dropout data manually to see if we can find out anything more about the constants.”

One of the other staff officers asked a question about the probability of the missile actually having reached Cuba. Lieutenant Todd answered “very low” and then activated an electronic overlay that placed a dotted and blinking trajectory on the right screen inset map. The blinking dots followed a path that started just off Coral Gables, south of the city of Miami, and then continued across a portion of south Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, across the Keys, and finally into the ocean again. “It is along this line that we intend to concentrate our search. Unless the bird suddenly changed its mind its general heading would have been consistent with a perceived target located anywhere along this path. And since we have no reports of any land impact near a populated area, we assume that the missile landed in the Everglades or the ocean.”

Lieutenant Todd had consulted briefly with Winters the previous evening on the agenda for the meeting. It had been scheduled to last only an hour, but the number of questions caused it to stretch to an hour and a half. Todd was thorough and precise in his presentation but was obviously dismayed by Winters’ continued probing into the possibility of human error. The lieutenant freely admitted that they had blown the procedure to destroy the missile when it went awry, but defended his men by citing the unusual circumstances and the nearly perfect previous record enjoyed by the Panther missile. He also explained that they were going to equip their search vessels with the best possible instrumentation (“including the new ocean telescope developed by the Miami Oceanographic Institute”) and begin searching the outlined areas in earnest the next day.

Winters asked many questions about the possible cause of the missile’s strange behavior. Todd told him that he and his staff were convinced that it was a software problem, that some new or updated algorithm in the 4.2 version of the software had somehow scrambled both the initialization sequence and the optically stored target parameters. Winters accepted their opinion eventually, but not until he ordered them to prepare a “top down” failure modes analysis that would list every possible hardware, software, or operational error (Todd winced when Winters mentioned operations again) that could lead to the kind of problem observed.

Toward the end of the meeting Winters reiterated the secrecy of the activity and pointed out that the Broken Arrow project was to remain completely unknown to the press. “Commander,” Todd broke in while Winters was explaining the press policy. The lieutenant had begun the meeting with confidence but was feeling increasingly unsettled. “Sir, I had a call late yesterday afternoon from a reporter, a Carolyn or Kathy Dawson I think, from the Miami Herald. She told me that she had heard of some special activity down here and that I was supposedly connected with it. She claimed her source was someone in the Pentagon.”

Winters shook his head. “Shit, Lieutenant, why didn’t you say something before this? Can’t you imagine what will happen if the word gets out that one of our missiles wandered over Miami?” He paused. “What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. But I think she is still suspicious. She called the public affairs office after she talked to me.”

Winters gave an order that the existence of the Broken Arrow investigation was to be kept classified and that any and all inquiries about it were to be referred to him. He then called for the next status meeting at 1500 on the following day, Friday, by which time (he told Lieutenant Todd) the commander expected to see the results of the analysis of the intermittent telemetry, a more complete logic breakdown of the failure modes, and a list of recent open items with the 4.2 software.

Lieutenant Richard Todd left the meeting aware that this assignment was going to have a significant impact on his career. It was clear to the lieutenant that his personal competence was already being questioned by this Commander Winters. Todd intended to respond to the challenge in a positive way. First he called a small postmortem meeting of the junior officers in his group. He told them (they were all young ensigns, just out of the university after completing a Navy ROTC program) that their collective ass was on the line. Then he defined a series of action items that would keep all of them up working for most of the night. It was imperative to Todd that he be properly prepared for the next meeting.

4

KEY West was proud of its new marina. Completed in 1992 just after the explosion in cruises had brought an influx of new visitors to the old city, the marina was thoroughly modem. Scattered around the jetties on high towers were automatic cameras that constantly surveyed the marina. These cameras and the rest of the electronic surveillance systems were just one facet of an elaborate security setup that protected the slips when the boat owners were absent. Another of the new features of the Hemmingway Marina (it was naturally named after the most famous resident of Key West) was a centralized navigation control center. Here, using a virtually automatic traffic control system, a single controller was able to pass instructions to all the vessels in the harbor and provide for efficient handling of the burgeoning water traffic.

The marina was built on Key West Bight, on what had been a decaying part of the waterfront. It had slips for almost four hundred boats and its completion changed the nature of the city’s commerce. Young professionals wanting to be near their boats at the marina quickly purchased and upgraded all the wonderful nineteenth-century houses that lined Caroline and Eaton streets on what was known as the Pelican Path. Smart shops, toney restaurants, even little theaters crowded into the area around the marina to create an atmosphere of bustle and excitement. There was even a new Japanese hotel, the Miyako Gardens, which was famous for its magnificent collection of tropical birds that played in the waterfalls and ferns of its atrium.

Just before noon Carol Dawson walked into the marina headquarters and approached the circular information desk in the middle of the large room. She was wearing a sharp silk blouse, light purple in color, and a pair of long white cotton slacks that covered the tops of her white tennis shoes. Two petite ruby and gold bracelets were wrapped around her right wrist, and a huge amethyst set in a gold basket at the end of a neck chain dangled perfectly at the vertex of the “V” in her open blouse. She looked stunning, like a well-heeled tourist about to rent a boat for the afternoon.

The young girl behind the information desk was in her early twenties. She was blonde, fairly attractive in the clean-cut American style originally typified by Cheryl Tiegs. She watched Carol with just a tinge of competitive jealously as the journalist moved purposefully across the room. “Can I help you?” she said with feigned cheer as Carol reached the desk.

“I would like to charter a boat for the rest of the day.” Carol began. “I want to go out to do a little diving and a little swimming and maybe see some of the interesting ship-wrecks around here.” She planned to say nothing about the whales until she had picked the boat.

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” the girl responded. She turned to the computer on her left and prepared to use the keyboard. “My name is Julianne and one of my jobs here is to help tourists find the boats that are just right for their recreational needs.” Carol noted that Julianne sounded as if she had memorized the little speech. “Did you have any particular price in mind? Although most of the boats here at Hemingway are private vessels, we still do have all sorts of boats for charter and most of them meet your requirements. Assuming of course that they’re still available.”

Carol shook her head and in a few minutes she was handed a computer listing that included nine boats. “Here are the boats that are possible,” the girl said. “As I told you, there’s quite a range in price.”

Carol’s eyes scanned down the list. The biggest and most expensive boat was the Ambrosia, a fifty-four-footer that chartered for eight hundred dollars a day, or five hundred for a half day. The list included a couple of intermediate entries as well as two small boats, twenty-six-footers, that rented for half the price of the Ambrosia. “I’d like to talk to the captain of the Ambrosia first,” Carol said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Where do I go?”

“Do you know Captain Homer?” Julianne replied, a strange smile starting to form at the corner of her mouth. “Homer Ashford,” she said again slowly, as if the name should be recognized. Carol’s mind began going through a memory search routine. The name was familiar. Where had she heard it? A long time ago, in a news program…

Carol had not quite retrieved the memory when the girl continued. “I’ll let them know that you’re coming.” Below the desk counter on the right was a huge bank of relay switches, several hundred in all, apparently connected to a speaker system. Julianne flipped one of the switches and turned to Carol. “It should only be a minute,” she said.

“Vat is it, Julianne?” a booming feminine voice inquired within about twenty seconds. The voice was foreign, German Judging from the way the first word was pronounced. And the voice was also impatient.

“There’s a woman here, Greta, a Miss Carol Dawson from Miami, and she wants to come down to talk to Captain Homer about chartering the yacht for the afternoon.”

After a moment’s silence, Greta was heard again, “Ya, okay, send her down.” Julianne motioned for Carol to walk halfway around the circular desk to where a familiar keyboard was sitting in a small well on the counter. Carol had been through this process many times since the UIS (Universal Identification System) was first introduced in 1991. Using the keyboard, she entered her name and her social security number. Carol wondered which verification question it would be this time. Her birthplace? Her mother’s maiden name? Her father’s birth date? It was always random, selected from the twenty personal facts that were immutable and belonged to each individual. To impersonate someone now really took an effort.

“Miss Carol Dawson, 1418 Oakwood Gardens, Apt. 17, Miami Beach.” Carol nodded her head. Blonde Julianne obviously enjoyed her role of checking out the prospective clients. “What was your birth date?” Carol was asked.

“December 27, 1963,” Carol responded. Julianne’s face registered that Carol had given the correct answer. But Carol could see something else in her face, something competitive and even supercilious, almost a “Ha-ha-de-ha-ha, I’m lots younger than you are and now I know it.” Usually Carol didn’t pay attention to such trivia. But for some reason, this morning she was uncomfortable about the fact that she was now thirty. She started to indicate her annoyance to smug little Julianne but thought better of it and held her tongue.

Julianne gave her instructions. “Walk out that door over there, at the far right, and walk straight until you come to Jetty Number 4. Then turn left and insert this card in the gate lock. Slip “P” as in Peter is where the Ambrosia is berthed. It’s a long walk, way down at the end of the jetty. But you can’t miss the yacht, it’s one of the largest and most beautiful boats at Hemingway.”

Julianne was right. It was quite a hike to the end of Jetty Number 4. Carol Dawson probably passed a total of thirty boats of all sizes, on both sides of the jetty, before she reached the Ambrosia. By the time Carol could discern the bold blue identifying letters on the front of the cabin, she had started to sweat from the heat and humidity of late morning.

Captain Homer Ashford walked up the gangplank to meet her when she finally reached the Ambrosia. He was in his mid to late fifties, an enormous man, well over six feet tall and weighing close to two hundred and fifty pounds. His hair was still thick, but the original black color had now almost completely surrendered to the gray.

Captain Homer’s wild eyes had followed Carol’s approach with undisguised lubricious delight. Carol recognized the look and her reaction was one of immediate disgust. She started to turn around and go back to the marina headquarters. But she stopped herself, realizing that it was a long walk back and that she was already hot and tired. Captain Homer, apparently sensing her disapproval by the change in her gait, changed his leer to an avuncular smile.

“Miss Dawson, I presume?” the captain said, bowing slightly with fake gallantry. “Welcome to the Ambrosia. Captain Homer Ashford and his crew at your service. “Carol reluctantly smiled. This buffoon in the outrageous blue Hawaiian shirt at least did not appear to take himself too seriously. Still slightly wary, she took the proffered Coke from his out-stretched hand and followed him along the smaller side jetty beside the boat. The two of them then descended onto the yacht. It was huge.

“We understand from Julianne that you are interested in a charter for this afternoon. We would love to take you out to one of our favorite spots, Dolphin Key.” They were standing in front of the wheelhouse and the covered cabin area as they talked. Captain Homer was clearly already into his sales pitch. From somewhere nearby Carol could hear the clang of metal. It sounded like barbells.

“Dolphin Key is a marvelous isolated island,” Captain Homer continued, “perfect for swimming and even nude sunbathing, if you like that sort of thing. There’s also a sunken wreck from the eighteenth century not more than a couple of miles away if you’re interested in doing some diving.” Carol took another drink from her Coke and looked at Homer for an instant. She quickly averted her eyes. He was leering again. His peculiar emphasis on the word “nude” had somehow changed Carol’s mental picture of Dolphin Key from a quiet tropical paradise to a gathering place for debauchery and peeping Toms. Carol recoiled from Captain Homer’s light touch as he guided her around the side of the yacht. This man is a creep, she thought. I should have followed my first instincts and turned around.

The clang of metal grew louder as they walked past the entrance to the cabin and approached the front of the luxurious boat. Carol’s journalistic curiosity was piqued; the sound seemed so out of place. She hardly paid attention as Captain Homer pointed out all the outstanding features of the yacht. When they finally had a clear view of the front deck of the Ambrosia, Carol saw that the sound had indeed been barbells. A blonde woman with her back toward them was working out with weights on the front deck.

The woman’s body was magnificent, even breathtaking. As she strained to finish her repetitive presses, she lifted the barbells high over her head Rivulets of sweat cascaded down the muscles that seemed to descend in ripples from her shoulders. She was wearing a low-cut black leotard, almost backless, whose thin straps did not seem capable of holding up the rest of the outfit. Captain Homer had stopped talking about the boat. Carol noticed that he was standing in rapt admiration, apparently transfixed by the sensual beauty of the sweaty woman in the leotard. This place is weird, Carol thought. Maybe that’s why the girl asked me if I knew these people.

The woman put the weights back on the small rack and picked up a towel When she turned around Carol could see that she was in her mid to late thirties, pretty in an athletic sort of way. Her breasts were large and taut and clearly visible in the scant leotard. But it was her eyes that were truly remarkable. They were gray-blue in color and they seemed to look right through you. Carol thought that the woman’s first piercing glance was hostile, almost threatening.

“Greta,” said Captain Homer, when she looked at him after her first glance at Carol, “this is Miss Carol Dawson. She may be our charter for this afternoon.”

Greta did not smile or say anything. She wiped the sweat off her brow, took a couple of deep breaths, and put the towel behind her neck and over her shoulders. She squared herself off to face Carol and Captain Homer. Then with her shoulders back and her hands on her hips, she flexed her chest muscles. With each flexure her abundant breasts seemed to stretch up toward her neck. Throughout this routine her incredibly clear eyes evaluated Carol, checking out her body and clothing in minute detail. Carol squirmed involuntarily.

“Well, hello, Greta,” she said, her usual aplomb strangely absent in this awkward moment, “nice to meet you.” Jesus, Carol thought, as Greta just looked at Carol’s outstretched hand for several seconds, let me out of here. I must be on a strange planet or having a nightmare.

“Greta sometimes likes to have fun with our customers,” Captain Homer said to Carol, “but don’t let it put you off.” Was he irritated with Greta? Carol thought she detected some unspoken communication between Greta and Captain Homer, for at length Greta smiled. But it was an artificial smile.

“Velcome to the Ambrosia,” Greta said, mimicking Captain Homer’s first remarks to Carol. “Our pleasure avaits you.” Greta lifted her arms over her head, watching Carol again, and began to stretch. “Come vit us to paradise,” Greta said.

Carol felt Captain Homer’s burly hand on her elbow, turning her around. She also thought she saw an angry glance from Homer to Greta. “The Ambrosia is the finest charter vessel in Key West,” he said, guiding her back toward the stem and resuming his sales pitch. “It has every possible convenience and luxury. Giant screen cable television, compact disc player with quad speakers, automatic chef programmed with over a hundred gourmet dishes, robot massage. And nobody knows the Keys like Captain Homer. I’ve been diving and fishing these waters for fifty years.”

They had stopped at the entrance to the cabin area in the middle of the yacht. Through the glass door Carol could see stairs descending to another level. “Would you like to come down and see the galley and the bedroom?” Captain Homer said, without a trace of the earlier suggestiveness. He was a clever chameleon, there was no doubt about that. Carol revised her earlier judgment of him as a buffoon. But what was this business with muscle-bound Greta, whoever she is, Carol wondered. And just what is going on here? Why are they so strange?

“No, thank you, Captain Ashford.” Carol saw her opportunity to exit gracefully. She handed him what was left of the unfinished Coke. “I’ve seen enough. It’s a magnificent yacht but I can tell it’s much too expensive for a single woman wanting to spend a relaxing afternoon. But thanks a lot for your time and the brief tour.”

She started to walk toward the gangplank to the jetty. Captain Homer’s eyes narrowed, “But we haven’t even discussed price, Miss Dawson. I’m certain that for someone like you we could make a special deal…”

Carol could tell that he was not going to let her go without some additional discussion. As she started to leave the yacht, Greta came up beside Captain Homer. “It vould give you sometink to write about for your paper,” Greta said with a bizarre smile. “Sometink unusual.”

Carol turned, startled. “So you recognized me?” she said, stating the obvious. The strange pair grinned back at her. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Captain Homer simply shrugged his huge shoulders. “We thought maybe you were traveling incognito, or were looking for some special fun, or maybe even were working on a story…” His voice trailed off Carol smiled and shook her head. Then she waved good-bye, mounted the gangplank, and turned on the jetty toward the distant marina headquarters. Who are those people? she asked herself again. Now I’m certain that I have seen them before. But where?

Twice Carol looked over her shoulder to see if Captain Homer and Greta were still watching her. The second time, when she was almost a hundred yards away, they were no longer in sight. She sighed with relief. The experience had definitely unnerved her.

Carol walked on slowly. She pulled the computer listing that Julianne had given her from a small purple beach bag. Before she could look at it, she heard a telephone ring on her left and her eyes lifted naturally to follow the sound. The telephone was ringing on a boat just in front of her. A husky man in his early thirties was sitting in a folding chair on the same boat. Wearing only a red baseball cap, a pair of swim trunks, dark sunglasses and some thongs, the man was intently watching a small television propped up on a flimsy tray of some kind. He held a sandwich in one hand (Carol could see the white mayonnaise oozing out between the slices of bread even from her distance of ten yards or so) and a can of beer in the other. There was no sign that the man in the red cap even heard the telephone.

Carol moved closer, a little curious. A basketball game was in progress on the television. On about the sixth ring of the phone, the man gave a small cheer (with his mouth full of sandwich) in the direction of the six-inch picture tube, took a swig from his beer, and abruptly jumped up to answer the call. The telephone was underneath a canopy in the center of the boat, on a wooden paneled wall behind the steering wheel and next to some built-in counters that appeared to contain the navigation and radio equipment for the boat. The man fiddled with the steering wheel unconsciously during the brief conversation and never took his eyes off the television. He hung up, issued another short cheer, and returned to his folding chair.

Carol was now standing on the jetty, just inches away from the front of the boat and no more than ten feet away from where the man was sitting. But he was oblivious to her, totally absorbed in his basketball game. “All right,” he shouted all at once, reacting to something pleasing in the game. He jumped up. The sudden movement caused the boat to rock and the jerrybuilt tray underneath the television gave way. The man reached out quickly and grabbed the TV before it hit the ground, but in so doing he lost his balance and fell forward on his elbows.

“Shit,” he said to himself, wincing from the pain. He was lying on the deck, his sunglasses cocked sideways on his head, the game still continuing on the little set in his hands. Carol could not suppress her laughter. Now aware that he was not alone for the first time, Nick Williams, the owner and operator of the Florida Queen, turned in the direction of the feminine laugh.

“Excuse me,” Carol began in a friendly way, “I just happened to be walking by and I saw you fall…” She stopped. Nick was not amused.

“What do you want?” Nick fixed her with a truculent glare. He stood up, still holding (and watching) the television and now trying as well to put the tray back together. He didn’t have enough hands to do everything at once.

“You know,” Carol said, still smiling, “I could help you with that, if it wouldn’t injure your masculine pride.” Uh oh, Nick thought in a flash, Another pushy, assertive broad.

Nick put the television down on the deck of the boat and began to reassemble the tray. “No thank you,” he said. “I can manage.” Obviously ignoring Carol, he set the TV back on the tray, returned to his folding chair, and picked up his sandwich and beer.

Carol was amused by what Nick had clearly intended as a putdown. She looked around the boat. Neatness was not one of the strengths of the proprietor. Little odds and ends, including masks, snorkels, regulators, towels, and even old lunches from fast-food restaurants were scattered all over the front of the boat. In one of the corners someone had obviously taken apart a piece of electronic equipment, perhaps for repair, and left the entire works a jumbled mess. Mounted on the top of the blue canopy were two signs, each with a different type of print, one giving the name of the boat and the other saying THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.

The boat looked out of character for the sleek modern marina and Carol imagined the other boat owners reacting with disgust each day as they passed the Florida Queen. On an impulse Carol looked at the computer listing in her hand. She almost laughed out loud when she saw the boat listing as one of the nine available for hire.

“Excuse me,” she began, intending to start the discussion about chartering the boat for the afternoon.

Nick heaved an exaggerated sigh and turned away from his televised basketball game. The miffed look on his face was unmistakable. It said, What? Are you still here? I thought we’d finished our conversation. Now go away and let me enjoy the afternoon on my boat.

Mischievous Carol couldn’t resist the opportunity to harass the arrogant Mr. Williams (she assumed that the name on the computer listing and the man in front of her were the same, for she couldn’t imagine a crew member acting with such apparent confidence and authority on someone else’s boat). “Who’s playing?” she said cheerfully, as if she had no idea that Nick was trying to get rid of her.

“Harvard and Tennessee,” he answered gruffly, amazed that Carol hadn’t got the message.

“What’s the score?” she said quickly, now enjoying the game she had just created.

Nick turned around again, his quizzical look acknowledging his exasperation. “It’s 31-29 Harvard,” he said sharply, “just before the end of the first half.” Carol didn’t move. She simply smiled and returned his fierce stare without blinking. “And it’s the first round of the NCAA tournament and they’re playing in the Southeast Regional. Any more questions?”

“Just one,” she said. “I would like to charter this boat for the afternoon. Are you Nick Williams?”

He was taken by surprise. “Whaat?” Nick said. At that minute Tennessee tied the basketball game again, distracting Nick even further. He watched the game for a couple of seconds and then tried to collect himself. “But I have had no calls from Julianne. Anyone who wants to charter a boat here at Hemingway has to sign in at the desk and…”

“I came down to look at another boat first. I didn’t like it. So I stopped by here on the way back.” Nick was watching the television again and Carol was losing her patience with him. At first he had been amusing. At least I don’t have to worry about his pawing me, she thought. The guy can’t even concentrate on me enough to get his boat chartered. “Look,” she added, “do you want a charter for this afternoon or not?

The first half of the basketball game ended. “All right… I guess so,” Nick said slowly, thinking to himself, only because I need the money. He gestured to Carol to descend onto the deck of the boat. “Let me just call Julianne and make sure you’re legit. You never know these days.”

While Nick confirmed Carol’s identification with the marina headquarters, a jaunty young black man in his early twenties came down the jetty and stopped just opposite the Florida Queen. “Hey, Professor,” he said, the moment Nick was off the phone, “am I in the wrong place?” He motioned to Carol. “You didn’t tell me you were entertaining beauty, style, and class today. Wooee! Look at that jewelry. And that silk blouse. Should I go now and come back to hear your stories later?” He winked at Carol. “He’s no good, angel. All his girlfriends eventually end up with me.”

“Cut the crap, Jefferson,” Nick reacted, “this woman is a potential customer. And you’re late, as usual. How do you expect me to run a charter dive boat when I don’t have any idea when or if my crew is going to show up?”

“Professor,” the newcomer jumped down on the boat and walked up to Carol, “if I had known that you had something that looked like this down here, I would have been here before dawn. Hello, there, young lady, my name is Troy Jefferson. I am the rest of the crew on this lunatic asylum of a boat.”

Carol had been slightly discombobulated by the arrival of Troy and the quick repartee that followed. But she adapted swiftly and regained her composure. She took Troy’s out-stretched hand and smiled. He immediately leaned up and almost brushed his cheek against hers. “Ooueee,” Troy pulled back grinning. “I just caught a whiff of Oscar de la Renta. Professor, didn’t I tell you this woman had class? Well, angel,” he looked at Carol in mock admiration, “I just can’t tell you how much it means to me to finally meet up with someone like you on this tub. Usually we get old ladies, I mean old ladies, who want to—”

“Enough, Jefferson,” Nick interrupted him. “We have work to do. It’s almost noon already and we’re still at least half an hour away from being ready to leave. We don’t even know what Miss Dawson wants to do.”

“Carol is fine,” she said. She paused for a moment, assessing the two men in front of her. Might as well, Carol thought, nobody is going to suspect anything if I’m with these two. “Well, I told the desk that I wanted to go out to do some swimming and diving. But that’s only partially true. What I really want to do is go out here (she pulled a folded map out of her beach bag and showed them an area of about ten square miles in the Gulf of Mexico to the north of Key West) and look for whales.”

Nick’s brow furrowed. Troy peered over Carol’s shoulder at the map. “There have been numerous irregularities in the behavior of whales in this area lately, including a major beaching at Deer Key this morning,” Carol continued. “I want to see if I can find any pattern in their actions. I may need to do some diving so one of you will have to accompany me. I assume that at least one of you is a licensed diver and that your dive gear is onboard?”

The two men regarded her with disbelieving stares. Carol felt on the defensive. “Really… I’m a reporter.” she said as an explanation. “I work for the Miami Herald. I just did a story this morning on the Deer Key beaching.”

Troy turned to Nick. “Okay, Professor, I guess we have a live charter here. One who says she wants to look for whales in the Gulf of Mexico. What do you say? Should we accept her money?”

Nick shrugged his shoulders indifferently and Troy took it as assent. “All right, angel,” Troy said to Carol, “we’ll be ready in half an hour. We’re both licensed divers if we’re really needed. Our gear is onboard and we can get more for you. Why don’t you pay Julianne at the desk and get your things together.”

Troy turned and walked over to the jumbled mess of electronics at the front of the boat. He picked up one of the boxes with its housing partially removed and began toying with it. Nick pulled another beer out of the refrigerator and opened the built-in counters, exposing racks of equipment. Carol did not move. After about twenty seconds Nick noticed that she was still there. “Well,” he said in a tone of dismissal, “didn’t you hear Troy? We won’t be ready for half an hour.” He turned around and walked toward the back of the boat.

Troy looked up from his repair work. He was amused by the friction already developing between Nick and Carol. “Is he always so pleasant?” Carol said to Troy, nodding in Nick’s direction. She was still smiling but her tone conveyed some irritation. “I have a few pieces of equipment that I want to bring onboard. Can you give me a hand with it?”

Thirty minutes later Troy and Carol returned to the Florida Queen. Troy was grinning and whistling “Zippity-Do-Dah” as he pulled a cart down the jetty and came to a stop in front of the boat. A partially filled footlocker was resting on the cart. Troy could hardly wait to see Nick’s face when he saw Carol’s “few pieces of equipment.” Troy was excited by the turn of events. He knew that this was no casual afternoon charter. Reporters, even successful ones (and Troy’s street intelligence had quickly informed him that Carol was not just an ordinary reporter), did not have everyday access to the kind of equipment that she was carrying. Already Troy was certain that the whale story was just a cover. But he wasn’t going to say anything just yet; he wanted to wait and see how things developed.

Troy liked this confident young woman. There was not a trace of superiority or prejudice in her manner. And she had a good sense of humor. After they had opened the back of her station wagon and she had showed him the footlocker full of equipment, Troy had demonstrated to Carol that he was fairly sophisticated about electronics. He had recognized immediately the MOI insignia on Dale’s ocean telescope and Troy had even guessed the meaning of the MOI-IPL acronym on the back of the large monitor and data storage system. When he had looked at her for an explanation, Carol had just laughed and said, “So I need some help finding the whales. What can I say?”

Carol and Troy had loaded the gear on the cart and wheeled it through the parking lot. She had been a little dismayed at first by Troy’s recognition of the origin of the equipment and his friendly, probing questions (which she handled adroitly with vague answers—she was helped by the fact that Troy wanted mostly to know how the electronics worked and she, in truth, didn’t have the foggiest idea). But as they talked, Carol developed a comfortable feeling about Troy. Her intuitive sense told her that Troy was an ally and could be counted on to be discreet with any important information.

Carol had not, however, planned for a security check inside the Hemingway Marina headquarters. One of the primary selling points of the slips at the new marina had been the almost unparalleled security system offered the boat owners. Every person who went in or out of the marina had to pass through computerized gates adjacent to the headquarters building. A full listing of each individual entrance and exit, including the time of passage through the gate, was printed out each night and retained in the security office files as a precaution in case any suspicious or untoward events were reported.

Materiel entering and leaving the marina was also routinely scrutinized (and logged) by the security chief to prevent the theft of expensive navigation equipment and other electronics. Carol was only mildly irked when, after she paid for the charter, Julianne asked her to fill out a sheet describing the contents of the closed footlocker. But Carol really objected when the summoned security chief, a typical Boston Irish policeman who had retired in the Key West area, Forced her to open the locker to verify the contents. Carol’s objections and Troy’s attempts to help her were to no avail. Rules were rules.

Because the cart would not fit through the door into the adjacent security office, the footlocker was opened in the main clearing room of the marina headquarters. A couple of curious passersby, including one giant, friendly woman about forty named Ellen (Troy knew her from somewhere, probably she was one of the boat owners, Carol thought), came over and watched while Officer O’Rourke carefully compared the contents of the locker with the list that Carol had prepared.

Carol was a little rattled as she and Troy pulled the cart down the jetty toward the Florida Queen. She had hoped to attract as little attention as possible and she was now angry with herself for not anticipating the security check. Nick, meanwhile, after performing a few routine preparations on the boat and opening another beer, had become engrossed again in the basketball game. His beloved Harvard was now losing to Tennessee. He did not even hear Troy’s whistling until his crewman and Carol were just a few yards away.

“Jesus,” Nick turned around, “I thought you had gotten lost…” His voice trailed off as he saw the cart and the foot-locker. “What the fuck is that?”

“It’s Miss Dawson’s equipment, Professor,” Troy answered with a big grin. He reached into the locker, first picking up a cylinder with a clear glass face, a large flashlight-looking object on a mounting bracket. It was about two feet long and weighed about twelve pounds. “Here, for example, is what she tells me is an ocean telescope. We attach it to the bottom of the boat by this bracket and it takes pictures that are displayed on this here television monitor and also stored on this other device, a recorder of some—”

“Hold it,” Nick interrupted Troy imperiously. Nick walked up the gangplank and stared incredulously into the locker. He shook his head and looked from Troy to Carol. “Do I have this right? We are supposed to set up all this shit just to go out into the Gulf for one afternoon to look for whales?” He scowled at Troy. “Where is your head, Jefferson? This stuff is heavy, it will take time to set it up, and it’ s already after noon.

“And as for you, sister,” Nick continued, turning to Carol, “take your toys and your treasure map elsewhere. We know what you’re up to and we have more important things to do.”

“Are you through?” Carol shouted at Nick as he walked back down the gangplank onto the Florida Queen. He stopped and turned partially around. “Look, you asshole.” Carol raged, giving vent to the frustration and anger that had been building inside of her, “it is certainly your right to deny me the use of your boat. But it is not your right to act like God almighty and treat me or anyone else like shit just because I’m a woman and you feel like pushing somebody around.” She stepped toward him. Nick backed up a step in the face of her continued offensive.

“I told you that I want to look for whales and that’s what I intend to do. What you might think I’m doing is really of no significance to me. As for the important things that you have to do, you haven’t moved from that goddamn basketball game in the last hour, except to get more beer. If you’ll just stay out of the way. Troy and I can set all this gear in place in half an hour. And besides,” Carol slowed down just a bit, starting to feel a little embarrassed about her outburst, “I have already paid for the charter and you know how hard it is to straighten out these computer credit card accounts.”

“Oooeee, Professor,” Troy grinned wickedly and winked at Carol. “Isn’t she something else?” He stopped and became serious. “Look, Nick, we need the money, both of us. And I would be happy to help her. We can take off some of the excess diving gear if it’s necessary to balance the weight.”

Nick walked back to the folding chair and the television. He took another drink from his beer and did not turn around to look at Carol and Troy. “All right,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “Get started. But if we’re not ready to sail by one o’clock it’s no deal.” The basketball players swam in front of his eyes. Harvard had tied the game again. But this time he wasn’t watching. He was thinking about Carol’s outburst. I wonder if she’s right. I wonder if I do think that women are inferior. Or worse.

5

COMMANDER Vernon Winters was trembling when he hung up the phone. He felt as if he had just seen a ghost. He threw his apple core in the wastebasket and reached in his pocket for one of his Pall Malls. Without thinking, he stood up and walked across the room to the large bay window that opened onto the grassy courtyard of the main administration building. Lunch hour had just finished at the U.S. Naval Air Station. The crowds of young men and women heading either toward or away from the cafeteria had died out. A solitary young ensign was sitting on the grass reading a book, his back against a large tree.

Commander Winters lit his nonfilter cigarette and inhaled deeply. He expelled the smoke with a rush and quickly took another breath. “Hey, Indiana,” the voice had said two minutes before, “this is Randy. Remember me?” As if he could ever forget that nasal baritone. And then, without waiting for an answer, the voice had materialized into an earnest face on the video monitor. Admiral Randolph Hilliard was sitting behind his desk in a large Pentagon office. “Good,” he continued, “now we can see each other.”

Hilliard had paused for a moment and then leaned forward toward the camera. “I was glad to hear that Duckett put you in charge of this Panther business. It could be nasty. We must find out what happened, quickly and with no publicity. Both the secretary and I are counting on you.”

What had he said in response to the admiral? Commander Winters couldn’t remember, but he assumed that it must have been all right. And he did remember the last few words, when Admiral Hilliard had said that he would call back for an update after the meeting on Friday afternoon. Winters had not heard that voice for almost eight years but the recognition was instantaneous. And the memories that flooded forth were just a few milliseconds behind.

The commander took another drag from his cigarette and turned away from the window. He walked slowly across the room. His eyes slid across but did not see the lovely, soft print of the Renoir painting, “Deux Jeunes Filles au Piano,” that was the most prominent object on his office wall. It was his favorite painting. His wife and son had given him the special large reproduction for his fortieth birthday; usually several times a week he would stand in front of it and admire the beautiful composition. But two graceful young girls working on their afternoon piano lessons were not the order for the day.

Vernon Winters sat back down at his desk and buried his face in his hands. Here if comes again, he thought, I can’t hold it back now, not after seeing Randy and hearing that voice. He looked around and then stubbed out the cigarette in the large ashtray on his desk. For a few moments he played aimlessly with the two small framed photographs on his desk (one was a portrait of a pale twelve-year-old boy together with a plain woman in her early forties; the other was a cast photo from the Key West Players production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, dated March 1993, in which Winters was dressed in a summer business suit). At length the commander put the photographs aside, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and succumbed to the powerful pull of his memory. A curtain in his mind parted and he was transported to a clear, warm night almost eight years before, in early April of 1986. The first sound that he heard was the excited nasal voice of Lieutenant Randolph Hilliard.

“Psst, Indiana, wake up. How can you be asleep? It’s Randy. We’ve got to talk. I’m so excited I could shit.” Vernon Winters had only fallen asleep himself about an hour before. He unconsciously looked at his watch. Almost two o’clock. His friend stood next to his bunk, grinning from ear to ear. “Only three more hours and we attack. Finally we’re going to blast that A-rab lunatic and terrorist supporter to heaven with Allah. Shit, big buddy, this is our moment. This is what we worked our whole life for.”

Winters shook his head and began to come out of a deep sleep. It took him a moment to remember that he was onboard the USS Nimitz off the coast of Libya. The first action of his military career was about to occur. “Look, Randy,” Winters had said eventually (on that night almost eight years ago) “shouldn’t we be sleeping? What if the Libyans attack us tomorrow? We’ll have to be alert.”

“Shit no,” said his friend and fellow officer, helping him to sit up and handing him a cigarette, “those geeks will never attack someone who can fight. They’re terrorists. They only know how to fight unarmed people. The only one of them that has any guts is that Colonel Gaddafi and he’s nutty as a fruitcake. After we blow him to kingdom come, the battle will be over. Besides, I have enough adrenaline flowing that I could stay awake for thirty-six hours with no sweat.”

Winters felt the nicotine coursing through his body. It reawakened the eager anticipation that he had finally conquered when he had fallen asleep an hour earlier. Randy was talking a blue streak. “I can’t believe how goddamn lucky we are. For six years I have been wondering how an officer can stand out, distinguish himself, you know, in peacetime. Now here we are. Some loonie plants a bomb in a club in Berlin and we just happen to be on duty in the Med. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Shit. Think how many other midshipmen from our class would give their right nut to be here instead of us. Tomorrow we kill that crazy man and we’re on our way to captain, maybe even admiral, in five to eight years.”

Winters reacted negatively to his friend’s suggestion that one of the benefits of the strike against Gaddafi would be an acceleration in their personal advancement. But he said nothing. He was already deep in his own private thoughts. He too was excited and he didn’t fully understand why. The excitement was similar to the way he had felt before the state quarterfinals in basketball in high school. But Lieutenant Winters couldn’t help wondering how much the excitement would be leavened by fear if they were preparing to engage in a real battle.

For almost a week they had been getting ready for the strike. It was normal Navy business to go through the preparations for combat and then have them called off, usually about a day ahead of the planned encounter. But this time it had been different from the beginning. Hilliard and Winters had quickly recognized that there was a seriousness in the senior officers that had never been there before. None of the usual horsing around and nonsense had been tolerated in the tedious and boring checks of the planes, the missiles, and the guns. The Nimitz was preparing for war. And then yesterday, the normal time for such a drill to be called off, the captain had gathered all the officers together and told them that he had received the order to attack at dawn. Winters’ heart had skipped a beat as the commanding officer had briefed them on the full scope of the American action against Libya.

Winters’ last assignment, just after evening mess, had been to go over the bombing targets with the pilots one more time. Two separate planes were being sent to bomb the residence where Gaddafi was supposedly sleeping. One of the two chosen pilots was outwardly ecstatic; he realized that he had been given the prime target of the raid. The other pilot, Lieutenant Gibson from Oregon, was quiet but thorough in his preparations. He kept looking at the map with Winters and going over the Libyan gun emplacements. Gibson also complained that his mouth was dry and drank several glasses of water.

“Shit, Indiana, you know what’s bothering me? Those flyboys will be in the battle and we’ll be stuck here with no role unless the crazy A-rabs decide to attack. How can we get into the fight? Wait. I just had a thought.” Lieutenant Hilliard was still talking nonstop. It was after three o’clock and they had already gone over everything associated with the attack at least twice. Winters was feeling lifeless and enervated from lack of sleep but the astonishing Hilliard continued to exude exuberance.

“What a great idea,” Randy continued. talking to himself. “But we can do it. You briefed the pilots tonight, didn’t you, so you know who’s going after what targets?” Vernon nodded his head. “Then that’s it. We’ll tape a personal ‘screw you’ to the side of the missile that’s going to get Gaddafi. That way part of us will go into battle.”

Vernon did not have the energy to dissuade Randy from his crazy plan. As the time for the attack drew closer, Lieutenants Winters and Hilliard went into the hangar on the Nimitz and found the airplane assigned to Lieutenant Gibson (Winters never knew why, but he immediately assumed it would be Gibson who would score a missile on the Gaddafi enclave). Laughingly, Randy explained to the fresh ensign on watch what he and Vernon were going to try to do. It took them almost half an hour to locate the right plane and then identify the missile that would be the first to be launched against the Gaddafi household.

The two lieutenants argued for almost ten minutes about the message they were going to write on the paper that would be taped on the missile. Winters wanted something deep, almost philosophical, like “Such is the just end to the tyranny of terrorism. “Hilliard argued persuasively that Winters’ concept was too obscure. At length a tired Lieutenant Winters assented to the visceral communication written by his friend. “DIE, MOTHERFUCKER,” was the message the two lieutenants inscribed on the side of the missile.

Winters returned to his bunk exhausted. Tired and still a little unsettled by the magnitude of the coming day’s events, he pulled out his personal Bible to read a few verses. There was no comfort in the good book for the Presbyterian from Indiana. He tried praying, generic prayers at first and then more specific, as had been his custom during critical moments in his life. He asked for the Lord to guard his wife and son and to be with him in this moment of travail. And then, quickly and without thinking, Lieutenant Vernon Winters asked God to rain down terror in the form of the missile with the taped message on Colonel Gaddafi and all his family.

Eight years later, sitting in his office at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West, Commander Winters would remember that prayer and cringe inside. Even then, in 1986, just after he finished the prayer, he had felt weird and disoriented, almost as if he had somehow committed a blasphemy and displeased the Lord. A brief hour of sleep that followed was torturous, full of dreams of hideous gargoyles and vampires. He watched the planes leave the carrier the next morning at dawn in a dreamlike trance. His mouth had a bitter metal taste when he mechanically shook Gibson’s hand and wished him luck.

For all those years Winters had wished that he could have rescinded that prayer. He was convinced that God had permitted that particular missile carried by Gibson to take the life of Gaddafi’s infant daughter just to teach Winters a personal lesson. On that day, he thought as he sat in his office on a Thursday in March 1994, I committed sacrilege and violated Your trust. I overstepped my bound and lost my privileged position in Your sanctuary. I have asked for forgiveness many times since then but it has not been forthcoming. How much longer must I wait?

6

Vernon Allen Winters was born on June 25, 1950, the day that the North Koreans invaded South Korea. He was reminded of the significance of his birthdate throughout his life by his father, Martin Winters, a man who was a hardworking, deeply religious corn farmer in Indiana at the time Vernon was born. When Vernon was three years old and his sister Linda was six, the family moved off the farm and into the town of Columbus, a white, middle-class town of thirty thousand or so in south central Indiana. Vernon’s mother had felt isolated out on the farm. particularly during the winter, and wanted more company. The Winters’ farm provided a nice cash profit. Mr. Winters, by now almost forty, put most of the nest egg aside as security for a rainy day and became a banker.

Martin Winters was proud to be an American. Whenever Mr. Winters would tell Vernon about the day of his birth, the story would inevitably center around the news of the start of the Korean War and how it was explained to the nation by President Harry Truman. “I thought that day,” Mr. Winters would say, “that it was surely no coincidence. The good Lord brought you to us that special day because of his purpose for you. And I bet he meant for you to be a protector of this wonderful country we have created…” Later banker Winters would always see to it that the Army-Navy football game was one of the key events of the year and he would tell his friends, particularly when it became obvious that young Vernon was a good student, that “the boy is still trying to choose which of the academies to attend.” Vernon was never asked.

The Winters family lived a simple Midwestern life. Mr. Winters was moderately successful, eventually becoming the senior vice-president of the largest bank in Columbus. The family’s chief social activity was church. They were Presbyterians and spent almost all day Sunday at the church. Mrs. Winters ran the Sunday school. Mr. Winters was a deacon and voluntarily managed the church finances. Vernon and Linda helped supervise the smaller children at Sunday school and were responsible for the special Bible displays on the bulletin boards in the kindergarten and primary school rooms.

During the week Mrs. Winters sewed and watched soap operas and sometimes played bridge with friends. She never worked outside the home. Her husband and her children were her job. She was an attentive, patient parent who deeply cared for her children and tirelessly chauffeured them to their many activities throughout their years of adolescence.

Vernon played all sports in high school, football and basketball because it was expected of him, baseball because he loved it. He was above average at all sports, not outstanding at anything. “Activities are important, particularly sports,” banker Winters often told him approvingly. “The academies look at much more than your grades.” The only significant decision that Vernon had to make in the first eighteen years of his life was which of the service academies he preferred. (Mr. Winters, being cautious, was prepared politically to secure a nomination for Vernon to any of the academies. He strongly urged Vernon to think about applying to all three just in case.) In his junior year at Columbus High School, Vernon took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and made such a high score that it was obvious he would be able to pick his own favorite. He chose Annapolis and was not questioned about the reasons. If he had been, he would have answered that he just liked the idea of himself in a Navy uniform.

Vernon’s teenage years were remarkably linear, particularly considering that they occurred at a time of great social turmoil in the United States. The Winters family prayed together for hours after the Kennedy assassination, worried about local boys in the Vietnam War, remarked with concern when three prominent high school seniors refused to cut their hair and were expelled from school, and attended a couple of church-sponsored meetings on the evils of marijuana. But all these anxieties were outside the daily harmony of the Winters family. Music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did penetrate the controlled Winters culture, of course, and even some of the protest songs sung by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez were played on Vernon’s stereo. But neither Vernon nor his sister Linda paid much serious attention to the lyrics.

It was an easy existence. Vernon’s closest friends were all from families like his. Mothers did not work, fathers were bankers or lawyers or businessmen, almost all were Republicans (but a patriotic Democrat was accepted) and believed fervently in God, country, and the entire litany that ends in apple pie. Vernon was a “good kid,” even an “exceptional kid,” who first drew attention to himself by his performances in the annual church pageants at Christmas and Easter. The pastor of their church was a great believer that reenactment of the birth and crucifixion of Christ, performed by the children of the town, was a powerful way to reconfirm the faith of the local citizenry. And Reverend Pendleton was correct. The Columbus Presbyterian Church pageants were one of the highlights of the local year. When the church congregation and their friends saw their own children acting in the roles of Joseph, Mary, and even Christ, they became involved in the depicted events at an emotional level that was virtually impossible to achieve in any other way.

Reverend Pendleton had two casts for each pageant, so that more children could participate, but Vernon was always the star. When he was eleven years old Vernon first portrayed Christ in the Easter pageant and it was mentioned in the religious column of the Columbus newspaper that his tortured dragging of the cross had “captured all of man’s suffering.” He was Joseph at Christmas and Jesus at Easter for four years running, before he became too old and therefore no longer eligible for the pageants. The last two years, when Vernon was thirteen and fourteen, the role of the Virgin Mary in the “A” cast was played by the pastor’s daughter, Betty Vernon and Betty were together quite often while rehearsing and both families were delighted. All four parents made no secret of the fact that they would generously approve if, “assuming God wills it,” the Vernon-Betty friendship would eventually mature into something more permanent.

Vernon loved the attention he received from the pageants. Although Betty was touched deeply by the religious aspects of their performances (she remained truly devoted to God, without wavering, through everything in her life), Vernon’s joy was standing by his proud parents after each performance and soaking up the praise. In high school he gravitated naturally toward the small drama activity and was the lead in the school play every year. His mother supported this over his father’s mild objections (“After all, dear,” she would say, “I don’t think anyone is really going to think Vernon’s a sissy when he’s playing three sports.”) and because she also vicariously enjoyed the applause.

During the summer of 1968, just before he entered Annapolis, Vernon worked in his uncle’s cornfields. Only a little more than a hundred miles away there were riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, but in Columbus Vernon spent his summer evenings with Betty, talking with chums and drinking root beer at the A & W Drive-in. Mr. and Mrs. Winters played miniature golf or canasta with Vernon and Betty from time to time. They were delighted and proud to have “good clean kids” who were not hippies or drug victims. All in all, Vernon’s last summer in Indiana was ordered, constrained, and very pleasant.

As expected, he was a model student at Annapolis. He studied hard, obeyed all the rules, learned what his professors taught him, and dreamed of being the commander of an aircraft carrier or a nuclear submarine. He was not outgoing for the big-city boys seemed way too sophisticated for him and he did not always feel comfortable when they talked about sex so casually. He was a virgin and he was not ashamed of it. He just didn’t feel the need to broadcast it around the U.S. Naval Academy. He had a couple of dates a month, nothing special, just when the occasion called for it. After a blind date early his junior year with Joanna Carr, a cheerleader at the University of Maryland, he took her out several more times. She was vivacious, lovely, fun, and modem. She drew out the best in Vernon, made him laugh and even relax. She was his date for the weekend of the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

(During his entire time at the Academy, Vernon went home every summer and every Christmas to Indiana. He always saw Betty Pendleton when he was home. Betty graduated from high school and entered a nearby state college to study education. Once or twice a year, on special occasions such as the anniversary of their first kiss or New Year’s Eve, Betty and he would celebrate, in a sense, by doing a little something intimate. Like controlled petting [outside only] or kissing lying down. Neither of them ever suggested any variation in this well-established routine.)

Vernon and Joanna were joined for the weekend by another midshipman, the closest acquaintance that Vernon had at Navy who was still not quite what one would call a friend, Duane Eller, and his date from Columbia, an extremely loud and pushy girl named Edith. Vernon had never spent much time around a New York City girl and he found Edith absolutely obnoxious. Edith was violently anti-Nixon and anti-Vietnam and seemed, despite the fact that her date for the weekend was going to be a military officer, anti-military as well. The original plan for the weekend had been decidedly proper, even backward given that it was 1970 and casual intercourse was not unusual on college campuses. Vernon and Duane were to share one motel room and the two girls were to share another. Over a pizza dinner the night before the game, Edith frequently insulted Joanna and Vernon both (“Miss Betty Crocker-Go-Team-Go” and “Onward Christian Soldiers, God’s on Our Side”) and Duane did nothing to intercede. Seeing that Edith was annoying Joanna, Vernon suggested to Joanna that it might be easier if the two of them shared a room instead of following the original game plan. She readily agreed.

Vernon had made no sexual moves on Joanna on the four or five dates that they had had together. He had been attentive, had kissed her good night a couple of times, and had held her hand most of the evening on their last date. Everything had always been extremely proper, but there had never actually been any opportunity for intimacy. So Joanna really didn’t know what to expect. She liked this handsome Hoosier midshipman and had thought, a couple of times, about the possibility of the involvement developing into something serious. But Vernon was not yet anyone “super special” for her.

Just after they made the room change (which a drunken Edith made more difficult by embarrassing them and herself with lewd comments), Vernon very carefully apologized to Joanna and told her that he would sleep in the car if she were offended. The room was a typical Holiday Inn room with two double beds. Joanna laughed. “I know you didn’t plan this,” she said. “If I need protection, I can order you to your bed.” The first night they enjoyed watching television and drinking more beer in the room. They both felt a little awkward. At bedtime they shared a couple of almost passionate kisses, laughed together, and then went to separate beds.

The next evening, after the postgame dance sponsored by the Naval Academy at a downtown Philadelphia hotel, Joanna and Vernon returned to their room at the Holiday Inn just before midnight. They had already changed into their jeans and Vernon was brushing his teeth when there was a knock on their door. Joanna opened the door and Duane Eller was standing there, a gigantic shit-eating grin on his face and his hand clenched around some small object. “This stuff is fuckin’ fantastic,” he said, thrusting a joint into Joanna’s hand. “You’ve just got to try it.” Duane withdrew quickly with a wild smile.

Joanna was a bright young woman. But it did not occur to her that her date had never even seen a joint, much less smoked one. She herself had smoked marijuana maybe a dozen times over a four-year period, beginning in her junior year in high school. She liked it, if the situation and the company were right; she avoided it when she couldn’t have control of her environment. But she had enjoyed the weekend with Vernon and she thought this might be a perfect way to loosen him up a little.

Under almost any circumstances Vernon would have said no to any offer of marijuana, not just because he was against all drugs, but also because he would have been terrified that somehow he would be discovered and eventually thrown out of Annapolis. But here was his lovely date, a mainstream American cheerleader from Maryland, and she had just lit a joint and offered it to him. Joanna quickly saw that he was a grass neophyte. She showed him how to inhale and hold in the smoke, how not to bogart the joint, and eventually how to use a roach clip (one of her hairpins) to finish it off. Vernon had expected to feel as if he were drunk. He was astonished to find that he felt more alert. Much to his own surprise, he began reciting e.e. cummings poems he had been studying in Lit. And then he and Joanna began to laugh. They laughed at everything. At Edith, football, the Naval Academy, their parents, even Vietnam. They laughed until they were almost crying.

An overpowering hunger attacked Vernon and Joanna. They put on their jackets and walked out into the cold December air to find something to eat. Arm in arm they paraded down the suburban parkway, finding a convenience store that was still open about a half mile from their motel. They bought Cokes and potato chips and Fritos and, much to Vernon’s astonishment, a package of Ding Dongs. Joanna opened the potato chips while they were still in the store. She put one in Vernon’s mouth and they “Mmmed” while the checkout clerk laughed with them.

Vernon could not believe the taste of the chips. He ate the entire bag while they were walking back to their room. When he was finished, Vernon burst spontaneously into song, singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by the Beatles. Joanna joined in vigorously on the “Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon his head…” She reached up with the side of her fist and playfully banged on the top of his head. Vernon felt jaunty, liberated, as if he had known Joanna forever. He put his arm around her and kissed her ostentatiously as they turned into the driveway leading to their motel.

They sat on the floor with all their munchies spread out in front of them. Vernon turned on the radio. It was tuned to a classical station in the middle of a symphony. Vernon was mesmerized by the sound. For the first time in his life, Vernon could actually hear the individual instruments of the orchestra in his head. He visualized a stage and saw the musicians pulling their bows across the violins. He was fascinated and excited. Vernon told Joanna that all his senses were alive.

To Joanna Carr, it seemed that Vernon was finally opening up. When he leaned over to kiss her, she was more than willing. They kissed sweetly but deeply several times while the symphony was playing. During a momentary break for some more munchies, Joanna tuned the radio to a rock and roll station. The music changed the pace in their necking. Driving, jangling sounds increased the tempo and their kisses became more passionate. In his ardor Vernon pushed Joanna down on the floor and they kissed over and over again as they lay side by side, still fully clothed. They became enthralled by the strength of their arousal.

The radio now started playing “Light My Fire” by the Doors. And Vernon Allen Winters of Columbus, Indiana, third-year midshipman at the U S. Naval Academy, was no longer a virgin by the time the long song was over. “The time to hesitate is through, no time to wallow in the mire, try now you can only lose, and our love become a funeral pyre… Come on baby, light my fire… Come on baby, light my fire.” Vernon had never lost control of himself before in his entire life. But when Joanna stroked the outline of his swollen penis underneath his jeans, it was as if a giant wall of steel and concrete suddenly gave way. Years later, Vernon would still marvel at the raw passion he showed for two, maybe three minutes. The combination of Joanna’s insistent kisses, the grass, and the driving rhythms of the music pushed him over the edge. He was an animal. Still on the floor of the motel room, he pulled vigorously on Joanna’s slacks several times, nearly tearing them as he managed to free them from her hips. Her underpants half followed the slacks. Vernon grabbed them roughly and pulled them down the rest of the way while he was squirming out of his own jeans.

Joanna tried in a quiet voice to slow Vernon down, to suggest that maybe the bed would be better. Or at least it would be more pleasant if they actually took off their shoes and socks and didn’t make love with their pants around their ankles restricting their movement. But Vernon was gone. Years of restraint left him no ability to deal with his own surging desire. He was possessed. He crawled on top of Joanna, a look of frightening seriousness on his face. For the first time she was scared and her sudden fear heightened her sexual excitement. Vernon struggled for a few seconds (the music was now in the frenzied instrumental part of “Light My Fire”) to find the right spot and then entered her abruptly and forcefully. Joanna felt him drive once, twice, and then shudder all over. He was done in maybe ten seconds. She intuitively knew that it had been his first time and the pleasure of that knowledge outweighed her bruised feelings about his lack of finesse and gentleness.

Vernon said nothing and quickly fell asleep on the floor next to Joanna. She gamely went to the bed, pulled the bed-spread off, cuddled into Vernon’s arms on the floor, and wrapped the spread around them. She smiled to herself and drifted off to sleep, still a little puzzled by this Hoosier lying next to her. But she knew that they were now special to each other.

How special Joanna would never really know. When Vernon woke up in the middle of the night, he felt an over-powering sense of guilt. He could not believe that he had smoked dope and then virtually raped a girl he hardly knew. He had lost control. He had been unable to stop what he was doing and had clearly crossed the bounds of propriety. He winced when he thought about what his parents (or worse, Betty and Reverend Pendleton) would think about him if they could have seen what he had done. Then the guilt gave way to fear. Vernon imagined that Joanna was pregnant, that he had to leave Annapolis and marry her (What would he do? What kind of job would he have if he were not a naval officer?), that he had to explain all this to his parents and to the Pendletons. Worse still, he next imagined that at any minute the motel would be raided and the police would find the butt of the joint in the roach clip. He would first be kicked out of the Academy for drug abuse, then find out that he had made a girl pregnant.

Vernon Winters was now really scared. Lying on the floor of a motel room on the outskirts of Philadelphia at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, he began to pray in earnest. “Dear God,” Vernon Winters prayed, asking for something specific for himself for the first time since he asked God to help him on the day that he took the SATs, “let me get out of this without harm and I will become the most perfectly disciplined naval officer that You have ever seen. I will dedicate my life to defending this country that honors You. Just please help me.”

Eventually Vernon managed to fall asleep again. But his sleep was fitful and disturbed by vivid dreams. In one dream Vernon was dressed in his midshipman’s uniform but was on stage back at the Columbus Presbyterian Church. It was the Easter pageant and he was again Christ, dragging the cross to Calvary. The sharp edge of the cross on his shoulder was cutting through his uniform shirt and Vernon was aware of anxiety that he might not pass inspection. He stumbled and fell, the cross cut deeper through the uniform as he had feared and he could see some blood running down his arm. “Crucify him,” Vernon heard someone shout in the dream. “Crucify him,” a group of people in the audience shouted together as Vernon tried vainly to see through the klieg lights. He woke up sweating. For a couple of moments he was disoriented. Then again his emotions went the cycle from disgust to depression to fear as he played through the events of the night before.

Joanna was tender and affectionate after she woke up but Vernon was very distant. He explained his attitude by saying he was worried about his coming exams. A couple of times Joanna started to talk about what had happened the night before, but each time he rapidly changed the subject. Vernon suffered through brunch and the drive back to College Park to Joanna’s sorority house. Joanna tried to kiss him meaningfully when they parted but Vernon did not reciprocate. He was in a hurry to forget the entire weekend. Back in the privacy of his own room in Annapolis, he contritely bargained again with God to let him escape unscathed.

Midshipman Vernon Winters was true to his word. He not only never talked to Joanna Carr again (she called and failed to reach him a couple of times, sent two letters that were unanswered, and then gave up), he also gave up dating altogether during his final eighteen months at Annapolis. He worked very hard on his studies and attended chapel, as he had promised God, twice each week.

He graduated with honors and did his initial tour of duty on a large aircraft carrier. Two years later, in June of 1974, after Betty Pendleton had completed college and obtained her teacher’s certificate, Vernon married her in the Columbus Presbyterian Church where they had played Joseph and Mary a dozen years earlier. They moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and Vernon believed that the pattern of his life was set. His life would be going out to sea for long stretches and then coming home for short stays with Betty and any children they might have.

Vernon regularly thanked God for keeping up His part of the bargain and he dedicated himself to being the finest officer in the U.S. Navy. All of his fitness reports praised his dependability and thoroughness. His commanding officers openly told him that he was admiral material. Until Libya. Or more specifically, until he returned home after the Libyan action. For the entire world changed for Vernon Allen Winters during the few weeks after the American attack against Gaddafi.

7

Carol and Troy were sitting in deck chairs at the front of the Florida Queen. They were facing forward in the boat, toward the ocean and the warm afternoon sun. Carol had removed her purple blouse to reveal the top of a one-piece blue bathing suit, but she was still wearing her white cotton slacks. Troy was shirtless in a white surfing outfit that came quite a way down his beautiful black legs. His body was lean and sinewy, clearly fit but not overly muscled. They were talking casually and animatedly, laughing often in an easy way. Behind them underneath the canopy, Nick Williams was reading A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exley. Every now and then he would look up at the other two for a few moments and then return to his book.

“So why didn’t you ever go to college?” Carol was asking Troy. “You clearly had the ability. You would have made a fantastic engineer.”

Troy stood up, took off his sunglasses, and walked to the railing. “My brother, Jamie, said the same thing,” he said slowly, staring out at the quiet ocean. “But I was just too wild. When I finally did graduate from high school, I was hungry to know what the world was like. So I took off. I wandered all over the U.S. and Canada for a couple of years.”

“Was that when you learned about electronics?” Carol asked. She checked her watch to see what time it was.

“That was later, much later,” said Troy, remembering. “Those two years of wandering I didn’t learn anything except how to survive on my wits. Plus what it was like to be a black boy in a white man’s world.” He looked at Carol. There was no noticeable reaction.

“I must have had a hundred different jobs,” he continued, looking back at the ocean, “I was a cook, a copyboy, a bartender, a construction worker. I even taught swimming lessons in a private club. I was a bellman in a resort hotel, a greenskeeper for a country club…” Troy laughed and turned again to see if Carol was paying attention. “But I guess you’re not interested in all this…”

“Sure I am,” Carol said, “it’s fascinating to me. I’m trying to imagine what you looked like in a hotel uniform. And if Chief Nick is right, we still have another ten minutes to pass until we reach where we’re going.” She dropped her voice. “At least you talk. The professor is not exactly social.”

“Being a black bellhop at a southern Mississippi resort hotel was an amazing learning experience,” Troy began, a smile spreading across his face. Troy loved to tell stories about his life. It always placed him center stage. “Imagine, angel, I’m eighteen years old and I luck into a job at the grand old Gulfport Inn, right on the beach. Room and board plus tips. I’m on top of the world. At least until the chief bellman, an impossible little man named Fish, takes me out to the barracks where all the bellhops and kitchen staff live and introduces me to everybody as the ‘new nigger bellhop.’ From bits of discussion I can tell that the hotel is in some kind of trouble because of possible racial discrimination and hiring me is part of their response.

“My room in the barracks was right behind the twelfth green on the golf course. A small bunk bed, a dresser built into the wall, a desk or table with a portable lamp, a sink to brush my teeth and wash my face—that’s where I lived for six weeks. Down at the other end of the building was the great community bathroom that everyone left whenever I showed up.

“In my high school in Miami virtually the entire student body was Cuban or black or both. So I knew almost nothing about white people. From books and television I had this fantasy image of whites as handsome, competent, educated, and rich. Ha. My fantasy quickly vanished. You would not have believed the crew that worked in that hotel. The head bellman Fish smoked dope every night with his sixteen-year-old son Danny and dreamed of the day he would find a million dollars left in somebody’s room. His only other goal in life was to continue screwing the chef’s wife, Marie, in the supply closet every morning until he died.

“One of the other bellmen was a poor, lonely soul whose real name was Saint John because his brilliant parents thought that ‘Saint’ was a given name. He had only six teeth, wore thick glasses, and had a giant tumor underneath his left eye. Saint John knew that he was ugly and he worried all the time about losing his job because of his personal appearance. So Fish exploited him unmercifully by giving him all the shittiest assignments and forcing him to pay kickbacks with a portion of his tips. The other bellmen also ridiculed Saint John at every opportunity and made him the butt of their practical jokes.

“One night I was sitting quietly in my room reading a book when there was a soft knock on the door. When I answered it, Saint John was standing there. He looked confused and distracted. He was holding a small game box in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. I waited a few moments and then asked him what he wanted. He looked nervously in both directions and then asked me if I knew how to play chess. When I told him yes and added that I would enjoy a game, Saint John grinned from ear to ear and mumbled something about being glad that he had taken a chance. I invited him in and we played and talked and drank beer for almost two hours. He was one of nine children from a poor, rural Mississippi family. While we were playing, Saint John casually let slip that he had been a little reluctant to ask me to play because Fish and Miller had told him that niggers were too dumb to play chess.

Saint John and I became friends, at least sort of, for the few more weeks that I stayed there. We were united by the deepest of bonds, we were both outsiders in that strange social structure created by the employees of the Gulfport Inn. It was from Saint John that I learned about the many misconceptions that Southern whites have about blacks.” Troy laughed. “You know, one night Saint John actually followed me to the bath-room to verify with his own eyes that I was not significantly larger than he was.”

Troy returned to his deck chair and looked at Carol. She was smiling. It was hard not to enjoy Troy’s stories. He told them with such enthusiasm and self-involved charm. Under the canopy Nick also had put his book aside and was listening to the conversation.

“Then there was this giant Farrell, early twenties, who looked like Elvis Presley. He supplied liquor to the guests at cut rates, operated an escort service on call, and took excess hotel goods to sell at his sister’s market. He rented part of my room to store some of the liquor. What a character. After big convention breakfasts Farrell would pour the leftover orange juice in the pitchers into bottles and keep it for resale. One morning the hotel manager found a case of the juice temporarily sitting in a room off the lobby and demanded to know what was going on. Farrell grabbed me and took me out front. He told me that he wanted to make a deal. If I would acknowledge that I had taken the juice, Farrell would pay me twenty dollars. He explained that if I confessed, nothing would happen to me, because niggers were expected to steal. But if he Farrell were caught, he would lose his job…”

Nick came out from under the canopy. “I hate to break this up,” he said, a little sarcastic edge in his voice, “but according to our computer navigator, we are now at the south edge of the region on the map.” He handed the map back to Carol.

“Thanks, Professor,” Troy laughed, “I believe you saved Carol from being talked to death.” He walked over to where all the monitoring equipment had been set up on the footlocker next to the canopy. He turned on the power supply. “Hey, angel, you want to tell me now how this all works?”

Dale Michaels’ ocean telescope was programmed to take three virtually simultaneous pictures at each fixed setting. The first of the pictures was a normal visible image, the second was the same field of view photographed at infrared wavelengths, and the third was a composite sonar image of the same frame. The sonar subsystem did not produce crisp pictures, only outlines of objects. However, it probed to greater depths than either the visible or infrared elements of the telescope and could be used even when the water underneath the boat was murky.

Affixed to the bottom of almost any boat, the compact telescope could be driven thirty degrees back and forth about the vertical by a small internal motor. The observation schedule for the telescope was usually defined by a preprogrammed protocol. The details of this sequence as well as the critical optical parameters for the telescope were all stored in the system microprocessor; however, everything in the software could be changed in realtime by manual input if the operator desired.

Data from the telescope was carried to the rest of the electronic equipment on the boat by means of very thin fiber optics. These cables were bracketed along the edge of the boat. About ten percent of the pictures reconstructed from this data were then displayed (after some very crude enhancements) on the boat’s monitor in realtime. But all the data taken by the telescope was automatically recorded in the one hundred gigabit memory unit that adjoined the monitor. Another set of fiber optics connected the same memory unit with the boat’s central navigation system and the servomotor actuators controlling the telescopes. These circuits were pulsed every ten milliseconds so that the orientation of the telescope and the boat’s location at the time of each telescope image could be stored together in the permanent file.

Next to the monitor on top of the footlocker, but on the other side from the memory unit, was the system control panel. Dr. Dale Michaels and MOI were famous throughout the world for the cleverness of their inventions; however, these ingenious creations were not so easy to operate. Dale had tried to give Carol a crash course on the workings of the system the night before she had driven down to Key West from Miami. It had been almost useless. Eventually frustrated, Dale had simply programmed into the microprocessor an easy sequence that mosaicked the area under the boat in regular patterns. He then set the optical gains at normal default values, and instructed Carol not to change anything. “All you have to do,” Dr. Michaels had said as he had carefully loaded the system control panel into the station wagon, “is push this GO button. Then cover the panel to make certain that nobody inadvertently hits the wrong command.”

So Carol certainly could not explain to Troy how anything worked. She walked over beside him on the boat, put her arm on his shoulder, and grinned sheepishly. “I hate to disappoint you, my inquisitive friend, but I don’t know any more about how this thing works than I told you when we were setting up all the equipment. To operate it, all we have to do is turn on the power supply, which you have already done, and then push this button.” She pushed the GO button on the panel. A picture of the clear ocean about fifty feet underneath the boat appeared immediately on the color monitor. The picture was amazingly sharp. The threesome watched in wonder as a hammerhead shark swam through a school of small gray fish, swallowing hundreds of them in his awesome rush.

“As I understand it,” Carol continued as both men stayed glued in fascination to the monitor, “the telescope system then does the rest, following a planned set of observations stored in its software. Obviously we see what it sees here on this monitor. At least we see the visual image. The simultaneous infrared and sonar pictures are stored on the recorder. My friend at MOI (she didn’t want to alert them even more by using Dale’s name) tried to explain how I could change between the visual and infrared and sonar images, but it wasn’t simple. You’d think it would be as easy as pushing an “I” for infrared or an “S” for sonar. Nope. You have to input as many as a dozen commands just to change which output signal is fed into the monitor.”

Troy was impressed. Not just by the ocean telescope system, but also by the way Carol, a woman admittedly not educated in engineering or electronics, had clearly grasped the essentials of it. “The infrared part of the telescope must measure thermal radiation,” he said slowly, “if I remember my high school physics correctly. But how would underwater thermal variations tell you anything about whales?”

At this point Nick Williams shook his head and turned away from the screen. He recognized that he was hopelessly out of his intellectual element with all these engineering terms and he was more than a little embarrassed to admit his total ignorance in front of Carol and Troy. Nick also didn’t believe for an instant that Carol had brought all this electronic wizardry on board to find whales that had strayed from their migration route. He walked over to the small refrigerator and pulled out another beer. “And what we’re going to do for the next two hours, if I understand it correctly, is ride around in the boat while you look for whales on that screen?”

Nick’s derisive comment carried with it an unmistakable challenge. It intruded upon the warm and friendly rapport that had been created between Carol and Troy. She allowed herself to become irritated again by Nick’s attitude and fired back her own verbal fusillade. “That was the plan, Mister Williams, as I told you when we left Key West. But Troy tells me that you’re something of a treasure hunter. Or at least were some years ago. And since you seem to have convinced yourself that treasure is really what I’m after, perhaps you’d like to sit here next to me and look at the same pictures to make sure I don’t miss any whales. Or treasure, as the case may be.”

Nick and Carol glared at each other for a few moments. Then Troy stepped between them. “Look, Professor… and you too, angel… I don’t pretend to understand why you two insist on pissing each other off. But it’s a pain in the ass for me. Can’t you just cool it for a while? After all,” Troy added, looking first at Nick and then at Carol, “if you two go for a dive, you’re partners. Your lives may depend on one another. So knock it off.”

Carol shrugged her shoulders and nodded. “Okay by me,” she said. But seeing no immediate response from Nick, she couldn’t resist another shot. “Provided that Mr. Williams recognizes his responsibility as a PADI member and stays sober enough to dive.”

Nick’s eyes flashed angrily. Then he walked over to the deck railing and dramatically poured his new beer into the ocean. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart,” he said, forcing a smile, “I can take care of myself. You just worry about what you do.”

The ocean telescope microprocessor contained a special alarm subroutine that sounded a noise like a telephone ring whenever the programmed alarm conditions were triggered. At Carol’s request, Dale Michaels had personally adapted the normal alarming algorithm just before she left for Key West so that it would react to either a large creature moving across the field of view or a stationary “unknown” object of significant size. After he had finished the logic design for the small change and sent it to his software department for top priority coding and testing, Dale had smiled to himself. He was amused by his complicity with Carol. This piece of technological subterfuge would certainly convince Carol’s companions, whoever they might be, that she was earnest in her search for whales. At the same time, the alarm would also sound if what Carol was really seeking, supposedly an errant (and secret) Navy missile currently under development, appeared on the ocean floor underneath the boat.

The basic structure for both alarm algorithms was easy to understand. To identify a moving animal, it was sufficient to overlay two or three images taken less than a second apart (at any wavelength, although there was greater accuracy in the process with the sharper visual images), and then compare the data using the knowledge that most of the scene should be unchanged. Significant miscompares (connected areas in the overlay that differed from image to image) would suggest the presence of a large moving creature.

To identify foreign objects in the field of view, the alarm algorithm took advantage of the tremendous storage capacity of the memory unit in the telescope data processing system. The near simultaneous infrared and visual images were fed into the memory unit and then crudely analyzed against a data set that contained chains of pattern recognition parameters over both wavelength regions. These pattern parameters had been developed through years of careful research and had been recently expanded by MOI to include virtually everything normal (plants, animals, reef structures, etc.) that might be seen on the ocean floor around the Florida Keys. Any large object that didn’t correlate in realtime with this existing data base would be flagged and the alarm would sound.

The alarms made it unnecessary to sit patiently in front of the screen and study the thousands of frames of data as they were received on the boat. Even Troy, a confessed “knowledge junkie” whose interest in everything was almost insatiable, grew tired of staring at the monitor after about ten minutes, particularly when the boat entered into deeper water and very little could be seen in the visual images.

A couple of solitary sharks triggered alarms and created momentary excitement about twenty minutes after the telescope was activated, but a long period void of any discoveries followed. As the afternoon waned Nick became more and more impatient. “I don’t know why I allowed myself to be talked into this wild goose chase,” he grumbled to nobody in particular. “We could have been preparing the boat for the weekend charter.”

Carol ignored Nick’s comment and studied the map one more time. They had traversed from south to north the region she and Dale had defined and were now moving slowly east along the northern periphery. Dale had constructed the search area based upon his own inferences from the questions asked him by the Navy. He probably could have pinned down the area of interest with greater certainty with a few more questions of his own, but he hadn’t wanted to arouse any suspicions.

Carol knew that the search was a little like finding a needle in a haystack, but she had thought it would he worthwhile because of the potential payoff. If she could somehow find and photograph a secret Navy missile that had crashed near a populated area… What a scoop that would be! But now she too was growing a little impatient and it was hard for her to revive her earlier excitement after the long afternoon in the sun. They would have to head back to Key West soon to ensure arrival by nightfall. Oh well, she thought to herself with resignation, at least I gave it a shot. And as my father used to say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

She was standing all the way at the prow of the boat when suddenly alarms started coming from the memory unit next to the monitor. One ring, then two, followed by a brief silence. A third ring then sounded and was rapidly joined by a fourth. Carol rushed excitedly toward the monitor. “Stop the boat,” she shouted imperiously at Nick. But she was too late. By the time she reached the monitor, the alarms had stopped and she could not see anything on the screen.

“Turn around, turn around,” a frustrated Carol hollered immediately, not noticing that Nick was again glaring at her.

“Aye, aye, Cap-i-tan,” Nick said, jerking on the wheel with such force that Carol lost her balance. The monitor and other electronic equipment started to slide off their flimsy mountings on the top of the footlocker; they were rescued at the last minute by Troy. The Florida Queen veered sharply in the water. Despite the quietness of the ocean, a small wave came over the railing on the low side of the deck, catching Carol from the knees down. The bottom of her cotton slacks were left clinging to her calves. Her white tennis shoes and socks were drenched. Nick made no effort to hide his amusement.

Carol was about to joust with him again when the renewed ringing of the alarms diverted her attention. Regaining her squishy footing as the boat leveled off, she saw in the monitor that they were above a coral reef. And deep beneath the boat, barely discernible on the screen, were three whales of the same kind that she had seen on the beach that morning at Deer Key. They were swimming together in what appeared to be an aimless pattern. But there was more. The special alarm message code indicated that there was also a foreign object in or near to the same field of view as the desultory whales. Carol could not contain her excitement. She clapped her hands. “Anchor, please,” she shouted, and then she laughed. She saw that Troy had already thrown the anchor overboard.

A few minutes later Carol was hurriedly putting on her buoyancy vest in the aft portion of the boat behind the canopy. Her mask and her flippers had already been adjusted and were beside her on the deck. Troy was helping her by holding up the air bottle that was built into the back of the bulky vest. “Don’t worry about Nick,” Troy said. “He may be grumpy today for some reason, maybe because Harvard lost the basketball game, but he’s a fabulous diver. And he has the reputation of being the best dive teacher in the Keys.” He grinned. “After all, he taught me a couple of months ago and we’re not even supposed to be able to swim.”

Carol smiled and shook her head at Troy. “Don’t you ever stop joking?” she said. She slid her free arm through the second opening and the vest fell into place. “By the way,” she continued softly, “for an expert diver your friend certainly uses antiquated equipment.” At this moment she regretted her decision to leave her customized diving vest in the station wagon. She always used it when she dove with Dale and it had all the latest advances, such as ABC (Automatic Buoyancy Compensation) and a perfect pocket for her underwater camera. But after all the brouhaha when she came through the marina headquarters with her footlocker of electronic equipment, Carol had decided not to attract further attention by bringing in a state-of-the-art diving vest.

“Nick thinks the new vests make it too easy for the diver. He wants them to have to adjust their buoyancy manually—so that they are more conscious of how far down they are.” Troy looked Carol over. “You’re pretty light. This belt may be enough by itself. Do you normally use any weights?”

Carol shook her head and pulled the belt around her waist. Nick came around the canopy carrying his mask and flippers. He had already put on his diving vest with air bottle and his weighted belt. “Those whales of yours are still in the same spot down there,” he said. “I’ve never seen whales hang around like that. “He handed her a piece of chewing tobacco. She rubbed the tobacco on the inside of her mask (to prevent fogging) while Nick walked around behind her. He looked at her air gauge and checked both her regulator and the secondary mouthpiece that he might have to use to share her air in the event of an emergency.

Nick talked to Carol while he was making her final equipment checks. “This is your charter,” he began in what sounded like a friendly tone, “so we can go almost anywhere you want while we are down there. The dive will not be too difficult, since it’s only forty-five feet or so to the floor. However,” Nick moved around in front of Carol and looked directly in her eyes, “I want one thing thoroughly understood. This is my boat and I am responsible for the safety of the people on it. Including you, whether you like it or not. Before we dive, I want to make certain that you will follow my lead under the water.”

Carol recognized that Nick was trying to be diplomatic. It even flashed through her mind that he looked sort of cute standing there in front of her in his diving gear. She decided to be gracious. “Agreed,” she said. “But one thing before we descend. Remember that I’m a reporter. I will have a camera with me and may want you to move from time to time. So don’t get angry if I motion you out of the way.”

Nick smiled. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll try to remember.”

Carol put on her flippers and mask. Then she picked up her underwater camera by the strap and threw it over her neck and shoulder. Troy helped her tighten the strap in the back. Nick was sitting on the side of the boat at a break in the railing, right next to a crude ladder that Troy had just dropped overboard. “I’ve checked the water already,” Nick said, “and there’s quite a current up here. Let’s go down the anchor rope until we reach the ocean floor. Then you can pick the direction from there.”

Nick rolled backward off the boat. In a moment he surfaced, treading water. Carol returned his thumbs-up sign (the signal between divers that everything’s all right) and sat down herself on the side of the boat. Troy helped her make one last comfort adjustment to her vest. “Good luck, angel,” Troy said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for. And be careful.”

Carol put the regulator in her mouth, took a breath, and then repeated Nick’s backward roll maneuver. The ocean water felt cool against her sunbaked back. In a few seconds she joined Nick over at the anchor rope and the two of them repeated the thumbs up sign. Nick led the way down. He went hand over hand, cautiously, never completely releasing the rope. Carol followed carefully. She could feel the strong current that Nick had mentioned. It pulled at her, trying to take her away from the rope, but she managed to hold on. Every six to eight feet in the descent, Nick stopped to equalize the pressure in his ears and looked up to see both that Carol was following and that she was all right. Then he continued his descent.

There was nothing much to see until they reached the reef beneath them. The telescope pictures had been so sharp that they had been misleading. The reef with its riot of color and its surfeit of plant and animal life had seemed to be right underneath them because of the automatic focusing action of the optical system. But thirty-five feet is a long way down. Any normal three-story building could have been sitting on the ocean floor underneath the Florida Queen and it would not have touched her hull.

When they finally reached the top of the reef where the anchor was implanted, Carol realized she had made a mistake. She did not recognize her surroundings and therefore did not know which direction to take to find the whales. She reproached herself briefly for not having spent a few more moments studying the monitor to make sure that she knew where all the landmarks were. Oh well, Carol then thought, It’s too late for that now. I’ll just pick a direction and go. Besides, I don’t have any idea where the alarm object is anyway.

Visibility in the water was fair to good, maybe fifty to sixty feet in all directions. Carol adjusted her buoyancy slightly and then pointed to a gap between two reef structures, both of which were covered with kelp, sea anemones, and the ubiquitous coral. Nick nodded his head. Tucking her arms to her side to streamline her movement, Carol kicked up and down with her flippers and swam toward the gap.

Behind her, Nick watched Carol swim with appreciation and admiration. She moved through the water as gracefully as the school of yellow and black angelfish beside her. Nick had not interrogated Carol very much about her diving experience and had not known exactly what to expect. He had suspected from her ease and familiarity with the equipment that she was a seasoned diver; but he had not prepared himself for an underwater peer. Except for Greta, Nick had not encountered a woman before who was as comfortable under the water as he was.

Nick absolutely loved the peace and serenity of the rich and vibrant world beneath the ocean surface. The only sound he ever heard down there was his own breathing. All around him the coral reefs teemed with life of unimaginable beauty and complexity. There, underneath him now, was a grouper taking a bath by sitting at the bottom of a natural hole and letting dozens of tiny cleaner fish eat away all the accumulated parasites. A moment earlier, Nick’s downward excursion toward the ocean floor had scared up a manta ray hidden in the sand. This large ray, called a devilfish by the cognoscenti, had undulated out of its hiding place at the last moment and just missed Nick with its powerful and dangerous tail.

Nick Williams felt at home down in this watery world at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. It was his recreation and his refuge. Whenever he was distressed or disturbed by events on the surface, he knew that he could dive and find relaxation and escape. Except on this particular dive he was aware of an ineffable emotion, a beginning perhaps, a longing that was barely defined, possibly mixed up with a memory of years ago. He was following a beautiful mermaid as she swam along the reef and the sight stirred him. I have acted like a schoolboy, he thought, and a bore. Or worse. And why? Because she is pretty? No. Because she is so alive. So much more alive than I am.

Carol and Nick made two different excursions, each time starting from the anchor rope, without finding the whales or anything else unusual. When they returned to the anchor after the second unsuccessful foray, Nick pointed at his watch. They had been under the water for almost half an hour already. Carol wagged her head up and down and then held up her index finger, indicating that she would try one more direction.

They found the whales right after they crossed over a big upward bulge in the reef that came within fifteen feet of the surface. Nick saw them first and pointed down. The three whales were about twenty feet below them and maybe thirty yards ahead. They were still swimming slowly, more or less together, in the same directionless, near circular pattern that Nick and Carol had watched on the screen. Carol waved Nick out of the way and pointed at her camera. She then swam toward the whales, taking pictures as she approached them while carefully monitoring her depth and equalizing the pressure in her ears.

Nick swam down beside her. He was certain the whales had seen the two of them, but for some reason they had made no attempt to flee. In all his years as a diver, Nick had only once seen a whale in the open ocean accept the nearby presence of a human. And that had been a calfing mother, in a Pacific Ocean lagoon off of Baja California, whose birth pangs were a more powerful force than her instinctive fear of humans. Here even when Carol approached to within twenty feet or so the whales continued their indolent drift. They appeared to be lost, or maybe even drugged.

Carol slowed her approach when the whales made no attempt to get away. She took some more photographs. Close-up pictures of whales in their natural habitat were still uncommon, so her trip had already been a journalistic success. But she too was puzzled by their behavior. Why were they ignoring her presence? And what were they doing hanging around this particular spot? She remembered being surprised by the solitary whale during her morning swim and wondered again if somehow all these strange events were related.

Nick was off to her right, about twenty yards away. He was pointing at something on the other side of the whales and gesturing for Carol to come toward him. She swam away from the great mammals and headed in Nick’s direction. She saw immediately what had attracted his attention. Below the whales, just above the ocean floor, there was a large dark hole in the bottom of an imposing reef structure. At first glance it appeared to be the entrance to an underground cave of some kind. But Carol’s sharp eyes noticed that the lip-shaped fissure was extremely smooth and symmetric, almost suggesting to her that it was an engineering construction of some kind. She laughed at herself as she swam up beside Nick. The amazing underwater world and the bizarre behavior of these whales were playing tricks with her mind.

Nick pointed down at the hole and then at himself, indicating that he was going down to check it out more closely. When he started to leave, Carol had a sudden impulse to reach for his foot and pull him back. A moment later, as she watched Nick swim away, a powerful fear of unknown origin swept over her. She began to tremble as she struggled gamely with this strange emotion. Goose bumps appeared on her arms and legs and Carol felt an overwhelming desire to get away, to escape before something terrible happened.

An instant later she saw one of the whales move toward Nick. If Carol had been on land she could have yelled, but fifty feet deep in the ocean there was no way to warn someone from afar. As Nick drew near the opening, unaware of any danger, he was brushed to the side by one of the whales with such force that he bounced against the reef and then caromed off. He fell down onto a small spot of sand on the ocean floor. Carol swam toward him quickly while keeping a careful eye on the whales. Nick had lost his regulator and did not seem to be making any attempt to replace it. She drew up beside him and flashed the thumbs-up sign. There was no response. Nick’s eyes were closed.

Carol felt a surge of adrenaline as she reached for Nick’s regulator and thrust it into his mouth. She beat against his mask with her fist. After a few painfully long seconds, Nick opened his eyes. Carol tried thumbs up again. Nick shook his head, as if he were clearing out the cobwebs, smiled, and then returned the okay signal. He started to move but Carol restrained him. She indicated with gestures for him to sit still while she hurriedly looked him over. From the force with which Nick had hit the reef, Carol feared the worst. Even if his diving gear was all right, certainly his skin would have been ripped and torn by the sharp coral and the impact. But incredibly, there did not appear to be significant damage to either Nick or the equipment. All she could find were a couple of small scrapes.

The three whales remained in the same area where they had been before. Looking up at them from below, Carol thought that they looked like sentinels guarding a particular piece of ocean territory. Back and forth they swam, inscribing a total composite arc of maybe two hundred yards. Whatever it had been that had caused one of the whales to vary its swimming pattern and run into Nick was certainly unclear. But Carol did not want to risk another encounter. She motioned for Nick to follow her and they swam about thirty yards away, to a sandy trench between the reefs.

Carol planned to return to the surface as soon as it was clear that Nick was not seriously hurt. But while Carol was thoroughly surveying his body to make certain that she had not overlooked any serious lacerations in her hurried check, Nick discovered two parallel indentations in the sand below him. He grabbed Carol’s arm to show her what he had found. The indentations were grooved like tank tracks and were about three inches deep. They appeared to be fresh. In one direction the tracks ran toward the reef fissure underneath the three whales. In the other direction the parallel lines extended as far as Nick and Carol could see, running along the sandy trench between the two major reefs in the area.

Nick pointed up the trench and then swam away in that direction, following the tracks with fascination. He did not turn around to see if Carol were following. Carol quickly backtracked as close to the fissure as she dared (was she imagining again or were the three whales watching her as she crept along the ocean floor?) to take some pictures and to verify that the tracks did indeed emanate from the opening in the reef. She thought she saw a network of similar indentations converging just in front of the fissure, but she did not tarry long. She didn’t want to be separated from Nick in this spooky place. When she turned around, he was just barely in sight. But he had fortunately stopped when he realized that Carol was not behind him. Nick made an apologetic gesture when she finally caught up with him.

At one point the parallel lines disappeared as the sandy trench turned to rock, but Nick and Carol located the continuation of the same tracks some fifty yards farther along. The trench eventually became so narrow that they were forced to swim six feet or so above it to keep from banging against the rocks and coral on either side. Soon thereafter the tracks and the trench made a left turn and disappeared under an overhang. Carol and Nick stopped and floated in the water facing each other. They carried on a conversation with hand gestures. At length, they decided that Carol would go down first to see if anything was under the overhang, since she wanted a close-up photograph of the disappearance of the tracks anyway.

Carol swam carefully down to the floor of the trench, skillfully avoiding contact with the edges of the reef on both sides. Where it disappeared under the overhang, the trench was just wide enough for her to put one of her flippered feet down lengthwise. The overhang was about eighteen inches above the floor, but there was no way she could bend down and look underneath without scraping her face or hands against the reef. Carol gingerly slid her hand under the overhang in the last direction of the tracks. Nothing. She would have to brace herself against the rocks and coral and stick her hand deeper into the area.

While Carol was trying to move herself into a better position, she momentarily lost her balance and felt the sting of coral on the back of her left thigh. Ouch, she thought as she put her right hand back under the overhang, that’s one for me. One physical reminder of an amazing day. Weird even. Bizarre whales. Tank tracks on the bottom of the ocean… what is this? Carol’s hand closed around what felt like a metallic rod about an inch thick. It was such a surprising touch, she immediately withdrew her hand and a shudder raced down her spine. Her heart rate accelerated and she tried to breathe slowly to calm herself. Then she purposefully put her hand back and found the object again. Or was it another object? This time she felt something metallic all right, but it seemed to be wider and to have four tines like a fork. Carol slid her hand along the object and refound the rod portion.

From his vantage point above her, Nick could tell that Carol had discovered something. Now it was his turn to be excited. He swam down to her as she struggled unsuccessfully to retrieve the object. They changed positions and Nick reached under the projecting rock. He first touched something that felt like a smooth sphere about the size of the palm of his hand. Nick could tell that the bottom of the sphere rested on the sand and that the rod attached to it was elevated by several inches. Nick steadied himself and jerked on the rod. It moved a little. He moved his grip sideways on the rod and heaved again. Several more pulls and the object was out from under the overhang.

For almost a minute Nick and Carol hovered over the gold-metallic object lying beneath them on the sand. Its surface was smooth to the eye as well as to the touch and altogether it was about eighteen inches long. Nothing but the polished, reflecting surface could be seen, suggesting that the object was indeed made from some kind of metal. The long axis of the object was an inch-thick rod that was, at one end, tapered and worked into a kind of a hook. Four inches back from the hook was the center of a small sphere, symmetrically constructed around the rod, whose radius was a little over two inches. The larger sphere that Nick had felt when he first put his hand under the overhang had a radius of four inches or so and it was right in the middle of the rod. This sphere was also perfectly symmetric around the rod axis. Beyond the two spheres the object was unadorned until the rod broke into four smaller branches, the tines that Carol had felt, at its other end.

Carol carefully took photographs of the object as it lay exposed in front of the overhang. Before she was finished, Nick pointed at his watch. They had been underwater almost an hour. Carol checked her air gauge and found that she was almost into the red. She waved a sign at Nick and he swam down to pick up the object. It was extremely heavy, weighing an astonishing twenty pounds or so in Nick’s estimation. Then it wasn’t caught on anything when I was trying to pull it out, Nick thought, it’s just that heavy.

The weight of the object only increased Nick’s excitement that had begun when he had first seen the gold color. Although he had never seen anything quite like this hook and fork with spheres, he remembered that the heaviest pieces from the wreck of the Santa Rosa had all been made of gold. And this piece was far heavier than anything he had ever touched. Jesus, he thought to himself as he discarded some of the lead weights in his belt to make it easier for him to carry the object up to the boat, if there’s even ten pounds of pure gold here, at current market value of a thousand dollars an ounce, that’s $160,000, and this may just be the beginning. Wherever this thing came from, there must be more. All right, Williams. This may be your lucky day.

Carol’s thoughts raced at a mile a minute as she swam in tandem with Nick toward the anchor rope. She was busy trying to integrate everything she had seen in the last hour. She was already convinced that everything was somehow associated with the errant Navy missile—the behavior of the whales, the golden fork with the hook, the tank tracks on the bottom of the ocean. But at first Carol had no clue about what the connections were.

During the swim back Carol suddenly remembered reading some years before a story about Russian submarine tracks being found on the ocean floor outside a Swedish naval yard. In her journalistic mind she began to concoct a wild but plausible scenario to explain everything that she had seen. Maybe the missile crashed near here and continued to send out data even when it was underwater, she thought to herself. Its electronic signals somehow confused the whales. And maybe those same signals were picked up by Russian submarines. And American. Her thoughts came to a temporary dead end for a moment. So there are at least two choices, Carol thought again after swimming a few more strokes and watching Nick approach the anchor rope with the golden object still firmly in his hand. Either I’ve found a Russian plot to locate and steal an American missile. Or the tracks and goldenfork are somehow part of an American effort to find the missile without alerting the public. It doesn’t matter. Either way it’s a big story. But I must take that golden thing to Dale and MOI to analyze.

Both Nick and Carol were dangerously low on air by the time they reached the surface beside the Florida Queen. They called Troy to give them a hand with their prize from the deep. Carol and Nick were exhausted when they finally crawled into the boat. But they were also both on emotional highs, thrilled with the discoveries of the afternoon. Everyone started talking at once. Troy had a story to tell too, for he had seen something unusual on the monitor while Nick and Carol were following the tracks in the trench. Nick pulled some beer and sandwiches out of the refrigerator and Carol tended her coral cuts. The laughing trio sat down on the deck chairs together as the sun was setting. They had much to share during the ninety-minute trip back to Key West.

8

THE camaraderie lasted most of the way back to the marina. Nick was no longer taciturn. Excited by what he believed was the initial find of a major sunken treasure, he was positively a chatterbox. At least twice he retold his version of the whale encounter. Nick was certain that the collision was accidental, that the whale simply happened to be moving in that direction for some other reason and just paid no attention to the fact that Nick was there.

“Impossible,” Nick had scoffed when Carol had initially suggested that the whale might have deliberately hit him because he was heading for the fissure in the reef. “Whoever heard of whales guarding a spot in the ocean. Besides, if your theory’s right, then why didn’t the whale really smack me, and finish me off? You’re asking me to accept that the whales were protecting an underground cave? And then that they were warning me to stay away with that gentle push?” He laughed good-naturedly. “Let me ask you something, Miss Dawson,” he said, “do you believe in elves and fairies?”

“From where I was watching,” Carol replied, “it sure looked as if the whole thing was planned. “She did not pursue the subject further. In fact, after her initial outbursts, Carol did not talk very much about anything on the trip back to Key West. She too was excited and she was worried that if she talked too much she might inadvertently give away her thoughts about the possible connection between what they had seen and the lost Navy missile. So she didn’t mention either her eerie fear just before the whale hit Nick or the network of tracks she thought she saw converging just under the base of the fissure.

As far as Nick was concerned, the object they had retrieved was definitely part of a treasure. It didn’t bother him that it was hidden under an overhang at the end of some strange tracks. He shrugged it off by suggesting that maybe somebody had found the sunken treasure several years earlier and then tried to hide a few of the better pieces. (But why were the tracks fresh? And what had made them? Carol wanted to ask these questions but realized it was in her best interest for Nick to remain convinced that he had found treasure.) Nick was blind to all arguments and even facts that didn’t support his treasure theory. It was emotionally vital to Nick for the gold fork thing to be the first piece of a great discovery. And like many people, Nick was capable of suspending his normally sharp critical faculties when he had a vested emotional involvement in an issue.

When Nick and Carol finally quieted down enough to listen, Troy had a chance to tell his own story. “After you guys left the area underneath the boat, I guess to follow your trench, I became worried about you and started watching the screen more often. Now, angel, by this time those three whales had been swimming about in that same dumb pattern for over an hour. So I wasn’t checking them real close.”

Troy was up out of his deck chair, walking back and forth in front of Carol and Nick. It was a dark night; low clouds had rolled in from the north to block the moon and obscure most of the stars. The spotlight from the top of the canopy occasionally caught Troy’s chiseled features as he moved in and out of the shadows. “Because I wanted to find you guys, I lifted the alarm suppression the way you showed me and was regularly serenaded by the ding-dong-ding from the three whales. Now listen to this. After a couple of minutes, I heard a fourth alarm. I looked down at the monitor, expecting to see one of you, and I saw another whale, same species, swimming underneath the other three and in the opposite direction. Within ten seconds the original whales turned, breaking their long pattern, and followed the new whale off the monitor to the left. They never returned.”

Troy wound up the story with a dramatic inflection and Nick laughed out loud, “Jesus, Jefferson, you do have a way of telling a story. I suppose you’re going to tell me now that these whales were stationed there and the new guy came along with different orders. Or something like that. Christ, between you and Carol, you’ll have me believe that the whales are organized into covens of whatever.” Nick stopped for a moment. Troy was disappointed that Carol didn’t say anything.

“Now,” Nick continued, dismissing Troy’s story and getting to the subject he had been thinking about for almost an hour, “we have an important issue to discuss. We have brought back something from the ocean that could conceivably be worth a lot of money. If nobody else can prove conclusively that it is theirs, then it will belong to the finders.” Nick looked first at Carol and then at Troy. “Even though I’m captain and owner of this boat and I carried the thing up from the ocean floor, I’m prepared to offer that we split the proceeds in thirds. Does that sound fair enough to the two of you?”

There was a moderately long silence before Troy answered. “Sure, Nick, that sounds fine to me.” Nick smiled and reached across to shake Troy’s hand. He then extended his hand to Carol.

“Just a minute,” she said quietly, looking directly at Nick and not taking his hand. “Since you’ve decided to start this conversation, there are several more items that must be discussed. It’s not simply a question of money for this object. There’s also the issue of possession. Who keeps the golden trident? Who determines when we’ve been offered a fair price? What do we agree to say, or not to say, to others? And what if other objects are found down there by one or more of us? Do we all share? There’s an entire agreement that must be worked out before we dock.”

Nick frowned. “Now I understand why you’ve been so quiet these last few minutes. You’ve been thinking about your share. I misjudged you. I thought you might decide not to create any more trouble—”

“Who said anything about trouble?” Carol interrupted him abruptly, her voice rising slightly. “If you must know, I’m not that interested in the damn money. I will gladly take my one-third if any dollars are forthcoming from the trident there, for I certainly deserve it. But if any more such treasures are down there and you and Troy can find them without me, then be my guest. I want something else.”

Both men were now listening intently. “First and foremost, I want exclusive rights to this story, and that means absolute secrecy about what we have found, when and where we found it, and anything else associated with it—at least until we’re certain there’s nothing more to learn. Second, I want immediate possession of the object for forty-eight hours, before anyone else knows that it exists. After that you can have it to take to the authorities for evaluation.”

Uh oh, Carol thought to herself as she saw the searching looks she had elicited from Nick and Troy. I overdid it. They suspect something. Better back off just a bit. “Of course,” she smiled disarmingly, “I’ve just given my initial position. I expect that some negotiations may be necessary.”

“Wow, angel,” Troy said with a laugh, “that was some speech. For just a minute there, I thought that maybe there was a whole other game going on here and you were the only one playing. Of course the professor and I will be delighted to discuss an agreement with you, won’t we, Nick?”

Nick nodded. But he had also been alerted by the careful organization and unmistakable intensity of Carol’s response. It seemed out of proportion to the journalistic value of their find. Is she trying to make this some kind of a contest between us? he thought to himself. Or am I missing something altogether?

They had worked out a compromise agreement by the time the Florida Queen reached the dock in Key West. Nick would take the golden trident (both of the men liked Carol’s name for the object) with him on Friday morning. There was an elderly woman in Key West who was a compendium of treasure knowledge and she would be able to assess its value and to give its probable place and date of origin. The woman would also be a witness to their find in case the trident were ever misplaced. On Friday afternoon, the three of them would meet on the boat or in the marina parking lot at four o’clock. Nick would give the object to Carol and she would keep it over the weekend. After she returned it to Nick on Monday morning, he would be responsible for its care and eventual sale. The three of them had joint ownership of the trident, but Carol waived any interest in future discoveries. Carol wrote the terms of the simple agreement on the back of a restaurant menu from her purse, they all signed it, and she promised to bring copies back the next day.

Troy was quiet and subdued while he was loading all Carol’s equipment back into the footlocker. He lifted the locker onto the cart and then pulled the cart along the jetty. Carol walked beside him. It was about nine o’clock and very quiet at the marina. The tall fluorescent lights created a strange reflection on the wooden jetties. “Well, angel,” Troy said as Carol and he approached the marina headquarters, “it’s been quite a day. I’ve really enjoyed your company.” He stopped and turned to look at her. Her black hair had dried unevenly and looked a bit disheveled, but her face was beautiful in the reflected light.

Troy looked away, out at the water and the boats. “You know, it’s a shame sometimes the way life works. You meet somebody by chance, you strike up a friendship, and then poof, they’re gone. It’s all so… so transient.”

Carol came over beside him and stretched to kiss his cheek. “And you know I like you, too,” she said, lightening up the conversation with a grin and making certain that Troy understood what kind of a friendship they could have. “But cheer up. All is not lost. You’ll see me tomorrow for a while and then maybe when I return the golden thing on Monday.”

She hooked her arm through his as they momentarily walked back down the Jetty, away from the loaded cart. “And who knows,” Carol laughed, “I’m down in the Keys from time to time. We could have a drink together and you could tell me some more stories. “They could just barely make out the spotlight above the canopy on the Florida Queen some hundred yards in the distance. “I see your friend the professor is still at work. He’s not strong on good-byes. Or any other area of manners as far as I can tell.”

She turned, switching locked arms, and they walked back to the loaded cart. They moved through the apparently deserted headquarters without speaking. When the footlocker had been replaced in the station wagon, Carol gave Troy a hug. “You’re a good man, Troy Jefferson,” she said. “I wish you well.”

Nick was almost ready to leave by the time Troy returned to the boat. He was packing a small exercise bag. “Looks innocent enough, doesn’t it, Troy? Nobody will ever suspect that one of the great treasures of the ocean is in here.” He paused a moment and changed the subject. “You put her safely in her car? Good. She’s a strange one, isn’t she, all feisty and aggressive but still pretty at the same time. I wonder what makes her tick.”

Nick zipped up the bag and walked around to the side of the canopy. “Just finish up with the diving gear tonight. Don’t worry about the rest of the boat—we’ll fix it up tomorrow. I’m going to go home and dream of riches.”

“Speaking of riches, Professor,” Troy said with a smile, “how about that hundred-dollar loan I asked you for on Tuesday. You never answered me and just said we’ll see.”

Nick walked deliberately over to Troy and stood right in front of him. He spoke very slowly. “I should have made my Polonius speech to both of us when you asked me for a loan the first time. But here we are now, borrower and lender, and I don’t like it. I will lend you a hundred dollars but, Mister Troy Jefferson, this is positively the last time. Please don’t ever ask me again. These loans for your so-called inventions are making it hard for me to work with you.”

Troy was a little surprised by the unexpected harshness in Nick’s tone. But he was also angered by the connotation of the last sentence. “Are you suggesting,” Troy said softly, suppressing his temper, “that I’m not telling the truth, that the money is not being spent on electronics? Or are you telling that you don’t believe an uneducated black man could possibly invent anything worth having?”

Nick faced Troy again. “Spare me your righteous racial indignation. This is not a question of prejudice or lies. It’s money, pure and simple. My lending you money is fucking up our friendship.” Troy started to speak but Nick waved him off. “Now it’s been a long day. And a fascinating one at that. I’ve said all I want to say on the subject of the loan and I consider the issue finished.”

Nick picked up his bag, said good night, and left the Florida Queen. Troy went behind the canopy to organize the diving gear. About ten minutes later, just as he was finishing, he heard someone calling his name. “Troy… Troy, is that you?” an accented voice said.

Troy leaned around the canopy and saw Greta standing on the jetty under the fluorescent light. Even though there was now a slight chill in the air, she was wearing her usual skimpy bikini that showed off her marvelous physique. Troy broke into a grand smile, “Well, well, if it isn’t superkraut! How the hell are you? I can see you’re still taking care of that wondrous body.”

Greta managed the beginnings of a smile. “Homer and Ellen and I are having a small party tonight. We noticed that you were working late and thought that maybe you’d like to join us when you’re done.”

“Just might do that,” Troy said, nodding his head up and down. “Just might do that.”

9

“OH, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us. It’s so quiet here, now.” She was speaking to the stars and the sky. The old man’s head slumped forward in the wheelchair as he drew his last breath. Hannah Jelkes knelt beside him to see if he was indeed gone and then, after kissing him on the crown of the head, she looked up again with a peaceful smile. The curtain fell and rose again in a few seconds. The cast assembled quickly on stage.

“Okay, that’s it for tonight, good job.” The director, a man in his early sixties, gray hair thinning on the top, approached the stage with a bounce. “Great performance, Henrietta, try to can that one for the opening tomorrow night. Just the right combination of strength and vulnerability.” Melvin Burton nimbly jumped up on the stage. “And you, Jessie, if you make Maxine any lustier they’ll close us down.” He spun around with a flourish and laughed along with two other people at the front of the theater.

“Okay, gang,” Melvin turned back to address the cast, “now go home and get lots of rest. It was better tonight, looked good Oh, Commander, can you and Tiffani stay around for a moment after you change? I have a couple more pointers for you.”

He jumped back down from the stage and walked back to the fourth row of the theater where his two associates were sitting. One was a woman, even older than Melvin but with twinkling green eyes behind her granny glasses. She was wearing a bright print dress full of spring colors. The other person was a man, about forty, with a studious face and a warm, open manner. Melvin fretted as he sat down beside them. “I worried when we picked Night of the Iquana that it might be too difficult for Key West. It’s not as well known as Streetcar or Glass Menagerie. And in some ways the characters are just as foreign as those in Suddenly, Last Summer. But it looks almost okay. If we can just fix the scenes between Shannon and Charlotte.”

“Are you sorry now you added the prologue?” the woman asked. Amanda Winchester was an institution in Key West. Among other things, she was the doyenne of the theatrical entrepreneurs in the revitalized city. She owned two of the new theaters near the marina and had been responsible for the formation of at least three different local repertory groups. She loved plays and theater people. And Melvin Burton was her favorite director.

“No, I’m not, Amanda. It clearly adds to the play to get some kind of initial feeling for how frustrating it would be to lead a group of Baptist women on a tour of Mexico in the summer. And without the sex scene between Charlotte and Shannon in that small, stuffy hotel room, I’m not sure their affair is believable to the audience.” He paused a moment, reflecting. “Huston did the same thing with the movie.”

“Right now that sex scene doesn’t play at all,” the other man said. “In fact it’s almost comical. The hugs they exchange are like the ones my brother gives his daughters.”

“Patience, Marc,” Melvin answered.

“Something has to be done or we should take the prologue out altogether,” Amanda agreed. “Marc’s right, the scene tonight was almost comical. Part of the problem is that Charlotte looks like a child in that scene.” She paused a moment before continuing. “You know, the girl has gorgeous long hair and we have it stacked on top of her head to look prim and proper. Clearly she wouldn’t wear it down all day in the heat of a Mexican summer. But what if she took it down when she went to Shannon’s room?”

“That’s a great idea, Amanda. As I have often said, you would have made a fabulous director.” Melvin looked at Marc and they exchanged a warm smile. Then the director settled back in his seat and started thinking about what he was going to tell his two cast members in a few moments.

Melvin Burton was a happy man. He lived with his room-mate of fifteen years, Marc Adler, in a beach house on Sugarloaf Key, about ten miles east of Key West. Melvin had directed plays on Broadway for almost a decade and had been associated with the theater in one capacity or another since the mid-fifties. Always careful with his money, Melvin had managed to save an impressive amount by 1979. Worried about the impact of inflation on his savings, Melvin had sought advice from an accountant who was a friend of a close associate. It was almost love at first sight. Marc was twenty-eight at the time, shy, lonely, unsure of himself in the maelstrom of New York City. Melvin’s savoir faire and theatrical panache opened Marc up to aspects of life that he had never known.

As the stock market ratcheted upward in the mid-eighties, Melvin watched his net worth near a million dollars. But other factors in his life were not so bullish. The AIDS epidemic hit the theatrical community in New York with a vengeance and both Melvin and Marc lost many of their lifelong friends. And Melvin’s career seemed to have peaked; he was no longer in demand as one of the premier directors.

One night on his way home from the theater, Marc was mugged by a group of teenagers. They beat him up, stole his watch and wallet, and left him bleeding in the street. As a saddened Melvin ministered to his friend’s wounds, he made a major decision. They would leave New York. He would sell his stocks and convert his fortune to fixed income investments. They would buy a home where it was warm and safe, where they could relax and read and swim together. Maybe they would do some community theater work if it was available, but that was not the most important thing. What was important was that they share Melvin’s remaining years.

Melvin ran into Amanda Winchester one day while he and Marc were on vacation in Key West. They had worked together briefly on a project that had never panned out twenty years before. Amanda told him that she had just formed a local amateur repettory group to do two Tennessee Williams plays a year. Would he be interested in directing them?

Melvin and Marc moved to Key West and started to build their house on Sugarloaf Key. Both of them thoroughly enjoyed their work with the Key West Players. The actors were everyday people, dedicated and earnest. Some had had a little acting experience. But for the most part, the secretaries, housewives, and retail clerks, plus officers and enlisted men from the U.S. Naval Air Station, were all novices with one thing in common. Each of them viewed his few days on the stage as his moment of glory, and he wanted to make the best of it.

Commander Winters came out of the dressing room first. He was wearing his uniform (he had come right over to rehearsal from the base) and looked a bit stiff and uncertain. He sat down in one of the theater chairs next to Amanda Winchester. “I was really glad to see you back again,” said Amanda, taking his hand. “I thought your Goober last fall was just right.”

Winters thanked her politely. Amanda changed the subject. “So how are things out at the base? I read an article the other day in the Miami Herald about all the modern weapons the Navy has these days, pilotless submarines and vertical takeoff fighters and search and destroy torpedoes. There seems to be no limit to our ability to build more powerful and dangerous toys for war. Are you involved with all that?”

“Only in a limited way,” Commander Winters answered pleasantly. Then, anticipating the discussion with the director, he leaned forward so that he could see Melvin and Marc as well as Amanda. “I apologize if I was a little flat tonight,” he began. “We have a couple of big problems out at the base and I may have been a bit distracted, but I’ll be ready tomorrow—”

“Oh, no,” said Melvin, interrupting him, “that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s your first scene with Tiffani… Ah, here she comes. Let’s go up on the stage.”

Tiffani Thomas was almost seventeen years old and a junior at Key West High School. A Navy brat all her life, Tiffani had gone to seven different schools in her eleven years since kindergarten. Her father was a noncommissioned officer who had been assigned to Key West about three months before. She had been recommended to Melvin Burton by the high school drama teacher when it became apparent that Denise Wright simply could not play the role of Charlotte Goodall.

“She hasn’t done anything for me yet except rehearse,” the teacher had said of Tiffani, “but she learns her lines quickly and has a quality, an intensity I guess, that sets her apart from the others. And she’s clearly been in plays before. I don’t know if she can get ready in three weeks, but she’s my first choice by far.”

Tiffani probably would not have been called beautiful by her Florida classmates. Her features were too much out of the ordinary to be be properly appreciated by most high school boys. Her assets were olive eyes, quiet and brooding, light freckles on a pale complexion, long red eyelashes tinged with brown, and a magnificent head of thick auburn hair. Her carriage was proper and erect, not slumped like most teenagers, so she probably seemed aloof to her peers. “Striking,” Amanda called her, accurately, when she first saw Tiffani.

She was standing on the stage alone in her short-sleeved blouse and jeans as the two men approached. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail the way her father liked it. Tiffani was very nervous. She was worried about what Mr. Burton was going to say to her. She had overheard the buyer who was playing Hannah Jelkes say that Melvin might do away with the part of Charlotte altogether if “the new girl can’t hack it. “I have worked so hard for this part, Tiffani thought. Oh please, please, don’t let it be bad news.

Tiffani was looking down at her feet when Melvin Burton and Commander Winters joined her on the stage. “Well, now,” Melvin began, “let’s get straight to the point. The first scene with you two in the hotel room is not working. In fact, it’s a disaster. We must make some changes.”

Melvin saw that Tiffani was not looking at him. Gently he put his hand under her chin and lifted it until her eyes met his. “You must look at me, child, for I’m trying to tell you some very important things.” He noticed that her eyes were brimming with water and his years of experience told him immediately what was wrong. He leaned forward and whispered so that nobody else could hear, “I said we would make some changes, not do away with the scene. Now get yourself together and listen up.”

Burton regained his director’s voice and turned toward Winters. “In this scene, Commander, your character Shannon and young Miss Goodall engage in foreplay that leads to intercourse later that night. In the following scene they are discovered, in flagrante delicto, by the confused Miss Fellowes. And that establishes the desperate situation causing Shannon to run to Maxine and Fred at the Costa Verde.

“But our scene does not work right now because nobody watching it will recognize what you two are doing as foreplay. Now I can change the movement to make it easier—putting Shannan already on the bed when he discovers Charlotte behind the door would be one way—and I can change Charlotte’s clothing so that she looks less like a little girl, but there’s one thing that I cannot do…” Melvin stopped and looked back and forth from Tiffani to Winters. They were both staring blankly at him.

“Come here, come here, both of you,” Melvin said, gesturing impatiently with his right hand. He dropped his voice again. He took Tiffani’s hand with his left and Commander Winters’ with his right. “You two are lovers for one night in this play. It is essential that the audience believe this or they will not understand completely why Shannon is at the end of his rope, like the iguana. Shannon is desperate because he was originally locked out of his church for giving in to the same lust…”

They were both listening but Melvin’s director’s intuition told him he was still not reaching them. He had another idea. He took Tiffani’s hand and put it into the commander’s, closing his own hand over theirs for emphasis. “Look at each other for a moment. That’s right.” He turned to Winters. “She’s a beautiful young woman, isn’t she, Commander?”

Their eyes were in contact. “And he’s a handsome man, isn’t he, Tiffani? I want you to imagine that you have an uncontrollable desire to touch him, to kiss him, to be naked with him.” Tiffani blushed. Winters fidgeted. Melvin was fairly certain that he saw a spark, albeit a fleeting one.

“Now tomorrow night,” he continued, looking at Tiffani and taking his hand off theirs, “I want you to capture that feeling when you’re hiding in his room. I want it to explode out of you when he notices that you are there. And you, Commander,” he looked back at the middle-aged naval officer, “you are torn between an overpowering passion to possess this young girl physically and the almost certain knowledge that it will be the final ruination of both your life and your soul. You are hopelessly trapped. Remember, you fear that God has already forsaken you for your past sins. But, despite that, you finally relinquish yourself to your lust and commit another unpardonable sin.”

Tiffani and Commander Winters both realized at virtually the same time that their hands were still intertwined. They looked at each other for a moment and then, embarrassed, awkwardly separated them. Melvin Burton slipped between his players and put his arms around their shoulders. “So go on home now and think about what I’ve said. And come back tomorrow and really break a leg.”

Vernon Winters drove the Pontiac into his driveway in suburban Key West just before eleven o’clock. The house was quiet, the only lights were in the garage and the kitchen. As regular as the stars, Vernon thought, Hap to bed at ten, Betty to bed at ten-thirty. In his mind’s eye he saw his wife go into his son’s bedroom, as she did every night, and fiddle momentarily with his sheets and coverlet. “Did you say your prayers?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hap always answered.

Then she would kiss him good night on the forehead, turn out his light as she left the room, and go into her bedroom. Within ten minutes she would have changed into her pajamas, brushed her teeth, and washed her face. She would then kneel beside her bed, her elbows on the top of the blanket and her hands clasped right in front of her face. “Dear God,” she would say aloud, and then she would pray until exactly ten-thirty, moving her lips silently with her eyes closed. Five minutes later she would be asleep.

Vernon was aware of a vague disquiet as he walked through the living room toward the three bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from the garage. There was something stirring in him, something that he could not identify exactly, but he assumed it was associated with either the nervousness of opening night or the sudden return of Randy Hilliard to his life. He wanted to talk to someone.

He stopped at Hap’s bedroom first Commander Winters walked in quietly in the dark and sat on the side of his son’s bed. Hap was fast asleep, lying on his side. A tiny nightlight beside his bed illuminated his profile. How like your mother you look, Winters thought. And act. You two are so close. I’m almost a trespasser in my own home. He put his hand gently against Hap’s cheek. The boy did not stir. How can I make up for all the time I was gone?

Winters gently nudged his son awake. “Hap,” he said softly, “it’s your dad.” Henry Allen Pendleton Winters rubbed his eyes and then sat up quickly in bed. “Yes, sir,” he said, “is anything wrong? Is Mom all right?”

“No,” his father answered, and then laughed. “I mean yes. Mom’s all right. Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to talk.”

Hap looked at the clock beside his bed. “Ummm, well, okay, Dad. What do you want to talk about?”

Winters was quiet for a moment. “Hap, did you ever read the copy of the script that I got for you and your mother, the one from my play?”

“No, sir. Not much,” Hap replied. “I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t get into it. I think maybe it’s above my head.” He brightened. “But I’m looking forward to seeing you in it tomorrow night.” There was a long pause. “Umm, what’s it about anyway?”

Winters stood up and looked out the open window. Beyond the screen he could hear the gentle susurration of the crickets. “It’s about a man who loses his place with God because he can’t or won’t control his actions. It’s about…” Winters turned his head around quick1y and caught his son eyeing the clock. A sharp emotional pain raced through him. He waited until it had abated and then drew a breath. “Well, we can talk about it some other time, son. I just realized how late it is.”

He walked to the door. “Good night, Hap,” he said.

“Good night, sir.”

Vernon Winters walked past his wife’s room to the third bedroom at the end of the hall. He undressed slowly, now even more aware than before of an unfulfilled longing. He thought for a fleeting second about waking Betty up to talk and maybe… But he knew better. That’s not her style, he said to himself, never was. Even before when we slept together. And after Libya and the dreams and tears at night who could blame her for wanting her own bedroom.

He slipped into his bed in his undershorts. The soothing melody of the crickets enveloped him. And besides. She has her God and I have my despair. There is nothing left between us except Hap. We couple as strangers. both fearing any discovery.

10

“THE communication room will close in five minutes. The communication room will close in five minutes.” The disembodied, recorded voice sounded tired. Carol Dawson was weary herself. She was talking to Dale Michaels on the videophone. Photographs were strewn all over the desk underneath the screen and the video camera.

“All right,” Carol was saying, “I guess I agree with you. The only possible way for me to decipher this puzzle is to bring all the photos and the telescope recording unit back to Miami. “She sighed and then yawned. “I’ll come up there first thing in the morning, on the flight that arrives at seven-thirty, so that IPL can get an early shot at the recorded data. But remember, I must be back here in time to pick up the golden trident at four. Can the lab process all the data in a couple of hours?”

“That’s not the hard part. Trying to analyze the data and piece together a coherent story in an hour or two will be the tough job. “Dr. Dale was sitting on the couch in the living room of his spacious condominium in Key Biscayne. In front of him, on the coffee table, was a magnificent jade chess board with green and white squares. Six carved chess pieces were still on the board, the two opposing queens and four pawns, two from each side. Dale Michaels paused and looked meaningfully at the camera. “I know how important this is to you. I’ve cancelled my eleven o’clock meeting so I can help you.”

“Thanks,” Carol said automatically. She felt a trickle of irritation. Why is it, she thought while Dale talked about one of his new projects at MOI, that men always demand gratitude for every little sacrifice? If a woman changes her schedule to accommodate a man, it’s expected. But if a man revises his precious schedule it’s a big fucking deal.

Dale droned on. Now he was enthusiastically telling her about a new Institute effort to survey the underwater volcanoes around Papua, New Guinea. Whew, Carol smiled to herself when she realized that Dale’s self-centered focus was bothering her, I must really be beat. I believe I’m on the verge of being bitchy.

“Hey,” Carol interrupted him. She stood up and started to pick up the scattered photographs. “Sorry to bring a halt to this party, but they’re closing the room and I’m exhausted. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Aren’t you going to make a move?” Dale replied, pointing at the chess board.

“No, I’m not,” Carol said, showing just a trace of anger. “And I may not ever. Any reasonable player would have accepted the draw that I offered you last weekend and gone on to more important things. Your damn ego just can’t deal with the idea that one game out of five I can battle you to a tie.”

“People have been known to make mistakes in the end-game,” Dale answered, avoiding altogether the emotional content in her remark. “But I know you’re tired. I’ll meet you at the airport and take you to breakfast.”

“Okay. Good night.” Carol hung up the videophone a little brusquely and packed all the photographs in her briefcase. As soon as she had left the marina, she had taken her camera and film straight to the darkroom at the Key West Independent, where she had spent an hour developing and studying the prints. The results were intriguing, particularly a couple of the blowups. In one of them she could clearly see four separate tracks converging to a spot just under the fissure. In another photo the bodies of the three whales were caught in a pose that looked as if they were in the middle of a deep conversation.

Carol walked through the spacious lobby in the Marriott Hotel. The piano bar was almost deserted. The lithe black pianist was playing an old Karen Carpenter song, “Good-bye to Love.” A handsome man in his late thirties or early forties was kissing a Rashy young blonde in a nook off to the right. Carol bridled. The bimbo must be all of twenty-three, she said to herself, probably his secretary or something equally important.

As she wound her way down the long corridor toward her room, Carol thought about her conversation with Dale. He had told her that the Navy had small robot vehicles, some of them derived from original MOI designs, that could easily have made the tracks. So it was virtually certain that the Russians had similar vehicles. He had dismissed the whales’ behavior as irrelevant but had thought that her failure to find out if anything else was under the overhang had been a serious mistake. Of course, Carol had realized when he had said it, I should have spent another minute looking. Nuts. I hope I didn’t blow it. In her mind’s eye she then had carefully revisited the entire scenario at the overhang to see if there were any clues that something else may have been hidden there.

The biggest surprise in the discussion with Dale had come when Carol, in passing, had praised the way the new alarm algorithm had worked. Dale suddenly had become very interested. “So the alert code definitely read 101?” he had said.

“Yes,” she had answered, “that’s why I wasn’t that astonished when we found the object.”

“No way,” he had said emphatically. “The trident could not have caused the alert code. Even if it was at the edge of the field of view of the telescope, and that seems unlikely given how far you followed the trench, it’s too small to trigger the foreign object alarm. And how could it have been seen under the overhang anyway?” Dale had paused for a few seconds. “You didn’t look at any of the infrared images in realtime, did you? Well, we can process them tomorrow and see if we can figure out what triggered the alarm.”

Carol felt strangely defeated as she opened the door to her motel room. It’s just fatigue, she said to herself, not wanting to admit that her conversation with Dale had made her feel inadequate. She put her briefcase on a chair and walked wearily to the bathroom to wash her face. Two minutes later she was asleep on the bed in her underclothes. Her slacks, blouse, shoes, and socks were all stacked together in the corner.

She is a little girl again in her dream, wearing the blue-and-yellow striped dress that her parents gave her for her seventh birthday. Carol is walking around with her father in the Northridge Mall on a busy Saturday morning. They pass a large candy store. She lets go of his hand and runs into the store and stares through the glass case at all the chocolates. Carol points at some milk chocolate turtles when the big man behind the display case asks her what she wants.

In the dream Carol cannot reach the counter and doesn’t have any money “Where is your mother, little girl?” the candy store man asks. Carol shakes her head and the man repeats the question. She stands on her tiptoes and tells the man in a confidential whisper that her mother drinks too much, but that her father always buys her candy.

The man smiles, but he still won’t give her the chocolates. “And where is your father, little girl?” the candy store man now asks. In the case Carol can see the reflection of a kindly, smiling man standing behind her, framed between two piles of chocolates. She wheels around, expecting to see her father. But the man behind her is not her father. This man’s face is grotesque, disfigured. Frightened, she turns back around to the chocolates. The man in the store is now taking the candy away. It is closing time. Carol starts to cry.

“Where is your father, little girl? Where is your father?” The little girl in the dream is sobbing. She is surrounded by big people, all of them asking questions. She puts her hands over her ears.

“He’s gone,” Carol finally shouts. “He’s gone. He left us and went away and now I’m all alone.”