1

Although George Ryan had never been aboard ship before, never anything more radical than a rowboat in an inland lake, he knew there was something he didn’t like about the Mara Corday. Had he been a sailor, maybe he would’ve said she didn’t feel right. But he wasn’t a sailor. He’d never even been in the Navy or the Merchant Service. He’d spent three years in the Army, very landlocked, as an enlisted man in an engineer battalion. The closest he’d ever gotten to the ocean was a six-week stint at Edwards in California when they’d repaved runways. On the weekends, he and a few of the others would drive out to Ventura for a few days of sun, surf, and women. But that was it.

So this was his first time at sea.

And money or no goddamn money, he’d decided it would be his last.

They’d sailed at six in the morning, some twelve hours before, and at first, George had strutted about the decks like an experienced salt. It was nothing, he kept telling the green faces of his co-workers, all of whom had succumbed to seasickness almost immediately. None of them, save for Saks, had ever been out in deep water before. The rolling seas and the violent pitch of the ship hadn’t really affected George at that point. Sure, he had trouble walking the spar deck without pitching every which way (much to the amusement of the ship’s crew who all seemed to be studies in balance and control), but beyond that, everything was okay. All the worrying and fretting he’d done was for nothing.

He wasn’t going to get sick like the others. He was going to take it like Saks. He was a tough guy, too, he’d show ‘em all right.

Saks had told them all in Norfolk the night before they’d sailed that they were going to be miserable the first day out. “Well, you listen to me, girlies. The sea’ll turn you into babies. You pussies’ll be crying for your mommies when we lose land and you start puking your guts out.”

George had decided that, as afraid as he was of going out to sea, he wasn’t going to get sick. He wasn’t going to give Saks the satisfaction. He was going to show that loudmouth macho asshole how wrong he was.

And he had. Oh, yes.

That was… until they’d hit the so-called “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” off Hatteras, that place of evil seas and wild weather patterns. The very convergence of the warm Gulf Stream current pushing north and the cold currents sweeping down from Arctic waters. Oil and water, they just did not mix very well. Right away, the sea began to turn choppy and angry, the Mara Corday responding with what a sailor might have deemed a gentle roll, but to George was an all-out assault on his stomach. So, without further ado, he very promptly hurled his lunch into the head.

After that, of course, he really got sick.

The others were starting to get a little better by then. But George was lying in his bunk feeling like he’d swallowed a bucket of butterflies. He was nauseous, sweating, shivering… so dizzy he couldn’t even stand up to take a piss. Saks had looked in on him. He couldn’t refuse the opportunity, had a big, shiteating grin on his sunburned, leathery face.

“Not so tough after all, eh, George?”

“Fuck… you,” George managed and then got the dry heaves again.

Saks was his boss — technically, the foreman of the crew — but he seemed to enjoy it when you mouthed off to him. It made him laugh. Made him feel good, George supposed, knowing which buttons to push to totally piss you off. That’s the kind of guy Saks was.

The porter gave George Dramamine and Hyoscine for what ailed him. After a few hours, the worst seemed to be over.

He was able to sit up anyway.

A little while later, gripping the bulkhead of his cabin like a blind man full of whiskey, George actually made it to the porthole and looked out at the sea. It was fairly calm. Yet the ship pitched and yawned like a carnival ride. Maybe it was just him, though.

“Oh, Jesus, what have I gotten myself into?” he asked and sank back into his bunk.

If it wasn’t for the fact that he needed the money, that the bank was about to chew his balls off, he would’ve never signed up for this.

As his eyes closed and he drifted off, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about the Mara Corday that he just didn’t like.

2

“We’re making good time,” Cushing said, staring out over the water which almost looked black under the gray March sky. “I’m guessing we’re right on top of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain on the edge of the Sargasso.”

Fabrini rubbed spray from his swarthy face. “What the hell is an abyssal plain, smart guy?”

“Just a submarine plain. Kind of like on land, but this one is about 16,000 feet down,” Cushing explained.

Fabrini backed away from the bulwark fencerail. “Shit,” he said, maybe afraid he’d get sucked off the deck and down into the churning blackness.

Cushing chuckled. “Yeah, I figure the Bahamas and Cuba are southwest of us right now.”

“Cuba?” Menhaus said, lighting a cigarette from the butt of his last. “I’ll be gone to hell.” Cushing gripped the rail as tight or tighter than the other men. When he was twelve his older brother, as a gag, had thrown him off a bridge into the drink. The drop had been only twelve feet at most. No harm done; he swam to shore unscathed. But ever since then, railings of any type made him nervous.

“Hey! You guys!” Gosling, the first mate, snapped as he passed. “You watch yourselves out there for chrissake. We get a good swell and you’ll be knocked ass over teakettle into the drink.”

They ignored him like experienced mariners. They’d been through the initiation, they figured, the sickness and all, they knew what they were doing. They were old hands now.

“Don’t worry about us,” Menhaus laughed.

He always laughed. “Yeah, don’t sweat it,” Fabrini said.

“Yeah, sure,” Gosling said. “And I’ll be the one who’ll have to fish your asses out before the sharks get ya.”

They laughed this off and Gosling went on his way, grumbling.

“You suppose there are sharks out there?” Menhaus wondered.

“No, he’s full of shit.”

“There’s sharks out there,” Cushing said. “We’re out in the ocean, aren’t we? They’re probably all over the place.”

“Fuck that,” Fabrini said. “Fuck that noise.”

“I read this book once.” Menhaus began.

“You read?” Fabrini snorted. “No shit?”

Menhaus laughed briefly. “No, I read this book about a shipwreck. And this guy was hounded by sharks the whole way.”

Nobody wanted to talk about that. None of them had ever been to sea before, save Saks, and the topic that kept coming up was the ship sinking. It was a subject that had been discussed to death the week before they left. And in each man’s mind, it was still there, a black sore festering.

“You ever hear about the guy with the little head?” Menhaus asked, grinning once again. “This guy gets shipwrecked and washes up on this island. He finds a bottle and opens it and out pops this genie. Blonde, beautiful. Just like that broad in that genie show. She says, ‘I’ll grant you any wish, master’. So the guy says, ‘I haven’t been with a woman in two months. You’re very beautiful. I’d like to make love to you’. The genie shakes her head, ‘That is forbidden, master’. Then the guy says, ‘Well, how about a little head?’”

Fabrini burst out laughing, slapping Cushing on the back several times. Cushing laughed, too, but gripped the rail a little tighter, afraid maybe that Fabrini’s good cheer was going to knock him over.

A gust of salty wind tore into them, making their jackets flap and rustle like flags on a high pole. Menhaus and Fabrini hugged themselves against the chill, but Cushing preferred to hang on. Tight. He was a big reader. He’d read books on just about everything. When he was younger, he’d been fascinated by the sea. He’d devoured books on marine life, naval battles, even the folklore of the sea. But, he realized right then, he’d never read anything about surviving a shipwreck. The idea of that bothered him.

“How about the one about that guy’s brother?” Menhaus went on, now that he had a captive audience. “He gets thrown off the same boat, but washes up on a different island. He finds the bottle, rubs it, out pops this genie. She gives him the same shit about granting his wishes. So he says, ‘I’d like my cock to be so long it drags on the ground’. So the genie makes his legs two inches long.”

They all laughed again and another gust came up. Perfectly punctuating the punch line this time. It occurred to Cushing that it was like the sea was laughing along with them… or at them. The wind hammered out of the north, yanking at their coats, making the legs of their pants flutter. The tarps on the lifeboats up on the boat deck snapped and strained at their moorings.

Fabrini said, “Let’s go in. Let the swabbies deal with this.”

The wind cranked up again, this time tearing the baseball cap from Fabrini’s head and sending it out over the water.

“Shit,” he said. “My lucky hat.”

Menhaus in tow, they left, leaving Cushing alone out by the rail. Cushing wasn’t even aware that they were gone. He watched Fabrini’s cap (it said CAT above the brim) get tossed about by the conflicting, angry winds. It came to rest on a wave, was inundated by the crest of another. Still it floated, drenched, bobbing, carried by ripples of foam. Something silvery came out of the deep and nudged it.

But by then, it was out of range.

3

George Ryan was feeling more himself by the time darkness fell over the ocean. There was no twilight. No moment where day and night stood balanced in some beautiful neutrality. One moment the dying arcs of the sun were glinting off the spray-beaded pane of the porthole, the shadows growing long like teeth, and the next, it was dark. More so, black. So black he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. The only light there was spilled in from the porthole, from the dimly-lit decks. Beyond the railing, it was utter blackness. Like a mineshaft at midnight.

Darkness.

Complete.

Unrelenting.

George rubbed his eyes and lit a cigarette. According to Morse, the captain, and good old Saks, they would be docking in Cayenne, French Guiana late the next evening. Saks said they could spend the night out on the town. But come first light, they had a job to do and they were damned well going to do it. George thought he’d probably pass on a night of drink and debauchery and just rest up in his hotel room on dry land. The other could wait until the job was done. He started thinking that two days at sea wasn’t bad. Not when you thought of the days when people spent months, years even, on a voyage.

“I could’ve stayed home,” he said under his breath.

And part of him still wished that he had.

But that part of him didn’t worry about creditors. It didn’t have the banks biting at its ass. It didn’t have two ex-wives salivating for alimony. It didn’t have a son to raise. It didn’t have a big, fat, juicy mortgage to worry about. It didn’t have monstrous dental bills from the kid’s braces. And it surely didn’t have to wade hip-deep through medical bills from the wife’s back surgery. No, that part of him didn’t give a shit in a high wind about any of that.

All it had was paranoia.

All it had was that tinny, metallic voice that kept echoing in George’s skull about how all of this was one colossal fuck-up. How this was one big mistake and he should’ve listened and now it was just too goddamn late, buddy.

George took drags off his cigarette, licking his dry lips.

Saks had organized the job. He’d recruited the crew which included George. The set-up was simple: west of someplace called Kaw just off the Kounana River, there was a diamond mine on the Guiana Shield that had been hacked from the jungle. It was owned in partnership by a French mining company and Franklin Fisk. The same Fisk of Fisk Technologies, the electronics magnate out of Miami, who’d made a killing with lithium batteries. The problem was this mining camp had no airstrip. Supplies had to be brought in by truck which took several days and the product had to go out the same way. During the rainy season, many of the roads were washed out, and in some cases, washed completely away. It cost money to keep rebuilding them not to mention the money lost while trucks idled away for days waiting for a decent, passable road. So Fisk wanted an airstrip. It would save the collective millions every year. Fly in what you need, fly out the product. What took trucks days to manage on hazardous jungle roads, planes did in a few hours.

It made sense.

Saks was a construction jobber out of Miami. He was the lowest bidder. He got the job, set everything up. Fisk’s people would have flatbed trailers waiting for them in Cayenne to off-load the heavy equipment onto. They would also have all the labor needed and all the materials waiting at the camp. Saks had already been there a few times and surveyed it all out. When the crew arrived, they would cut a strip into the jungle and each get fifteen grand a piece. Saks, of course, got a bigger cut. They all got paid well for a month’s work and Saks said they could wrap it up in three weeks tops. The local labor, mostly Maroons and Amerindians, didn’t fare so well — they worked for practically pennies a day.

George had already spent his money.

The fifteen grand — cash, no taxes — would pay off the dentist and take a good bite out of the medical bills. Lisa hadn’t wanted him to go. She didn’t like the idea of him cruising over the open sea in a ship loaded with big dozers and barrels of diesel fuel. But the money had changed her mind. Jacob, his boy, thought it was great. It was like an adventure to him. He wanted to come along. And wasn’t that just like a boy? Bring me something home, dad, he’d told George. You know, like a big snake or a shrunken head.

“Be careful of those big crocodiles,” Lisa had said before he left. “I saw it on TV. They eat people down there.”

Yeah, George thought, and so do the ones in the New York sewers.

George had never been in a real jungle before. He’d worked bridges and cut roads in the Louisiana bayou and Florida everglades. But, according to Saks, those places were about as tropical as Boise compared to the real, primeval green hell of French Guiana. This was a land of spiders bigger than your hand, poisonous insects, toxic plants, and venomous snakes. A lush, dripping, steaming green world where cholera and dengue fever, malaria and typhoid went unchecked. You had to be careful, Saks told them, because in the jungle things happen. Bot flies would lay their eggs in any open cut. Huge ticks would suck your blood. Parasitic worms would get under your skin. And biting sand flies would infect you with tropical ulcers that would eat holes right through you… yeah, it was all part of the allure and mystery of central French Guiana.

George finished his cigarette, slapped on his boots and slicker and went out onto deck. The wind had died down. And even though the ship was listing, it wasn’t as bad as earlier. He was almost starting to get used to its motion. The only thing that bothered him was the dark. It was black out there. Living in towns and cities, you tended to forget just what night really was after a time. That night meant night. It meant blackness, it meant absence of light, it meant forget about your eyes because they weren’t worth a damn out on a starless, moonless night on the ocean.

Yeah, George felt easier with the roll of the ship, but he didn’t dare go by the railing for fear of the pit of watery blackness beyond. It felt oddly and eerily to him like some huge mass grave that could never be filled.

And as he moved along the cabins, it fell over him again: the bad feeling. The gnawing, unpleasant sense that all was not right with this ship. Just a feeling. Yet, it gripped him like ice.

It’s just the dark, he told himself, the sea. That’s all.

And maybe that’s all it was, but he didn’t like it any better.

The ship bothered him.

He couldn’t quite put a finger on why, but it did. Morse, the captain, seemed able. As did the mates and crew. Some of them were drinkers, he knew, smelling of whiskey and gin. But not drunks. Not so far as he saw. Just men who had to work in the elements and needed a nip or two to keep them warm. Nothing wrong with that.

Maybe it was the cargo.

The way it was stowed. The decks were obstructed, crowded really, with the heavy equipment they needed to clear a strip in the jungle. Two big Cat dozers. A pair of shiny yellow John Deere graders. Scrapers. Front-end loaders. A roller. Anywhere you went on deck you had to weave your way amongst them. Huge crates containing iron concrete forms, picks and shovels, form spikes, strike boards. Spare parts for the machinery.

Just too much clutter, too much confusion.

Then, George supposed, that was probably the way things were done. Every available space on a cargo freighter meant money and you had to pack it in any way you could. Just like in the back of a truck.

The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if it really was the ship that was bothering him. Maybe it was something else. Something waiting out there… on the sea or in the jungle. Regardless, it was down deep in his belly like tacks.

George went aft to join the others. The night seemed even darker.

4

The Mara Corday was a 720-foot container ship driven by a single-screw, 32,000 horsepower steam turbine. She had a 38,700 ton displacement and could do twenty-two knots fully trimmed. She had seven holds and a special dangerous cargo area in the fore hold. Though her keel was laid back in the early 1950s, she had been extensively retrofitted with advanced computer and navigational systems and could be crewed by twenty-one men.

George Ryan was mistaken in thinking there was something wrong with the ship. She held fine in heavy seas and whispered over calm ones. Not a sailor on board felt what he was feeling. They could feel the Mara Corday under them and she was solid, tight. If there was trouble ahead, then it wouldn’t be from the ship.

By seven that night, the wind picked-up to thirty knots and the ship moved with an uneasy, yawing leeward roll that was not surprising considering her load. The decks were full and the holds below packed tight with everything from drums of ready-mix concrete to bins of asphalt for Saks and his crew, rebuilt diesel engines and mining drills and pallets of steel girders, assorted other stores needed in Cayenne.

The Mara Corday held her own and could have held it through a hurricane. She was high and proud and tireless, a real workhorse of the seas. She could have plied her trade for decades to come and probably would, unless something interfered with her.

And right then, something was about to.

5

They ate their supper that night in shifts.

First, the captain, his mates, and the chief engineer. Then the ship’s crew down in the messroom in groups of four. Finally, Saks and his men. They chose to be last to give their stomachs a little more time to orient themselves to shipboard life. The fare was good. A thick beef stew with biscuits and French bread. Plenty of fruit. Ham sandwiches with the meat cut like slabs. Apple pie and ice cream for dessert. Life at sea didn’t agree with any of Saks’s men, but the eats were right up their alley.

“Hey, Fabrini,” Menhaus said through a mouth of bread, “how do you castrate a hillbilly?”

“Kick his sister in the jaw.”

There were a few laughs around the table at that, but not many. In the past two weeks since Saks had organized his crew, the men had spent much time together and Menhaus and Fabrini wore on the nerves after awhile.

“Where’s the hardtack and gruel?” George said as he sat down and poured himself a glass of water.

Saks wiped gravy off his lips. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Isn’t that George Ryan? The tough Irish sonofabitch who doesn’t get seasick like the rest of you babies?”

“Fuck you,” George said.

All the others — Saks, Fabrini, Menhaus, Cushing, Soltz, and Cook — were digging right in. Their stomachs had adjusted and they found that ship life made them ravenous. The wind, the weather, the sea. It made men hungry. George hadn’t been too sure he’d be able to eat a bite on his way over… but now, seeing all that food. He dug in.

“Hey, shit-fer-brains,” Saks snapped at Cook, “dish our George up some stew, will ya? He’s the last of the hard men.”

Fabrini giggled. “Yeah, he’s about as hard as Soltz’s cock.”

Menhaus thought that was hilarious. His belly jiggled and he slapped Soltz on the shoulder. Soltz spewed out a carrot. “Please,” he said, “I’m trying to eat here.”

Soltz was something of a quandary to the other men. Balding and bespectacled, he was pale as snow and soft as baby fat. Not the sort of guy you pictured on a scraper or a roller. His belly was so large it looked like he’d swallowed a beach ball. But it wasn’t hard fat like Saks had at his belt or girth like Menhaus wore proudly, it was soft fat. With his brooding hangdog-face and allergies and full pink lips (which he applied Chapstik to habitually), he looked very much like the much-put upon, last-one-to-be-picked-for-every-game sort of kid he had once been.

He just didn’t fit in.

“Yeah, leave mama’s boy alone over there,” Fabrini said.

“Saks? Do I have to put up with this?” Soltz wanted to know.

“Yeah, big bad men like us,” Menhaus chided.

“That’s enough,” Saks said. “Leave him be, you faggots.”

George felt sorry for the man. With a crew like this you had to be able to speak up for yourself, to trade insult for insult without getting your feathers ruffled. “Just tell ‘em to kiss your ass, Soltz,” he said.

Cook slid him a plate of stew. He was an emaciated guy with fine features and almost downy blond hair. He rarely spoke and when he did, most of the others with their blue collar sensibilities did not understand what he was talking about. But none of it bothered Cook, he took his share of shit and seemed to be perpetually amused by the high school mentality of the others. He never smiled nor frowned. He just accepted and went on.

“Eat up, tough guy,” Saks said.

Fabrini grinned. “If you’re still hungry, I got something for you to eat.”

“I’d starve on that,” George said and everybody laughed. Even a slight smile crossed Cook’s dour lips.

Saks finished up, pushed his plate away and burped. “There’s a kiss for you, Fabrini.” He lit up a cigar. “You boys eat good, rest up. When we hit the jungle you’ll be working sunup to sundown or I’ll throw your asses to the crocs.”

A few more insults passed in Saks’s direction. He laughed along with the rest of them. Sometimes the others never knew what to make of him. They weren’t sure if he was all hot air or the real thing. He was a short stocky guy built like a slab of cement. His arms bulged with muscles and tattoos, his chest was a drum. His face was perpetually sunburned and leathery, his powder blue eyes bulging like egg yolks. A year shy of fifty-five, he kept his thinning hair and bristle brush mustache dyed jet black. He’d pulled two tours with the Navy Seabees in Vietnam, clearing beaches and laying down airstrips under heavy fire. He started up his own contracting firm not long after. He’d worked all over Central and South America doing everything from chopping roads through the bush to rigging camps and laying railheads.

George decided Saks had asshole written all over him. He suspected that the moment he met the man and knew it for sure when they’d all gone out drinking two days before they sailed and Saks had done nothing but brag about his exploits and intimidate the others. The final straw had been when he started doing one-armed push-ups on the barroom floor.

Gradually, the talk turned away from general insults and the sexual habits of the crew’s mothers and onto French Guiana in general. Saks had a few things to say on the subject. He told them about the notorious penal colonies the French government had run there, the most celebrated being Devil’s Island. How escaped prisoners would swim from there, most either drowning or getting devoured by sharks. The few survivors that made shore would have to hack their way through hundreds of miles of primordial jungle to the Maroni River, which separated French Guiana from Dutch Guiana, now Surinam. And crossing that dirty, brown river was no easy bit.

“Infested with piranhas,” Saks said. “Dutch soldiers stationed on the river would watch convicts get boiled down to skeletons right before their eyes.”

“Remind me to stay dry,” George murmured.

“You ever been out where we’re going?” Menhaus asked him.

Saks pulled off his cigar, studied the burning end. “Once. Ten years ago. We laid a bridge over the Mara River. That’s west of where we’re going.”

“How was it?” Fabrini asked.

“It was hell, that’s what it was. We were deep in the jungle. Swamps everywhere. Mosquitoes and flies laid on you like blankets. They laughed at the bug juice we’d brought along. After awhile, we were so bitten up we started spreading mud on our faces and arms like the local boys we’d hired. But that didn’t keep the leeches off you or the goddamn snakes.”

“Snakes?” Soltz gasped. “I don’t like snakes.”

“He don’t like long, hanging things,” Fabrini said. “Reminds him of what he don’t have.”

“I’m more sensitive to certain things than you are,” Soltz explained, to which Fabrini rolled his eyes.

Saks ignored them. “Third day out we lost a kid to snakebite. He was a local. He was cutting some wood in the jungle for struts. A bushmaster got him. A big bastard. Ten feet, maybe. Came out of a hole in the mud, sank its fangs in the kid’s ankle. We shot him up with antivenin. Didn’t matter. He was dead twenty minutes later.”

“Fuck this,” Fabrini said. “You didn’t say nothing about shit like that.”

The others looked as pale as Soltz, who had now gone one shade darker than fresh cream.

“You can always swim back,” George told Fabrini.

“There were water snakes on the river. Couple of guys got bit by them. Made ‘em sick, but it passed. We were real careful after the kid died. At least we thought so until Tommy Johansen bought it,” Saks said slowly and for the first time there seemed to be something akin to real emotion on his face.

“What happened?” Menhaus inquired. “Another snake?”

“Crocodile. I’ll never forget it.” Saks exhaled a cloud of smoke. The only sounds were the wind outside, the waves crashing into the bow, and the hum of the turbines below. “I’ve seen all kinds of shit in my life. We had a pet snake in ‘Nam. A fifteen-foot python. Gentle as a baby. Used to keep the rats out of camp. Then it helped itself to some hooker’s baby she’d left alone so she could suck some dick. I seen a VC get taken down by a tiger over there. We just watched that sucker get shredded and we cheered when it dragged the little zipperhead off into the jungle. That tiger was on our side. I saw a guy get slashed by a Jaguar in Paraguay. It blinded him. I saw a guy’s pet pit bull fall into the Amazon and get turned into hamburger by piranhas. I even once saw some Mex get stung to death by bees in Bolivia. But I hadn’t seen nothing until Tommy Johansen bought it.

“Tommy and me were close. We built docks in Rio and Salvador for years. We were tight. One day, on that goddamn bridge job, one of the locals let a float drift away downriver. Tommy went nuts. Made the guy wade down there after it, Tommy leading him by the ear. I saw what happened next. Croc must’ve been a twenty-footer, maybe twenty-five. Bigger around than a goddamn refrigerator. Vicious bastard. Teeth like railroad spikes. It came up out of the water, that filthy shit-brown water, out of the weeds…” Saks had to stop here a moment, his voice was beginning to waver. His eyes were moist. He breathed in and out very slowly. “Rotten fucking lizard grabbed Tommy around the waist and we all saw it. We heard his bones shatter like twigs. Blood everywhere. Tommy was screaming and screaming. The locals were screaming. I think I was screaming, too.” He licked his lips. “Tommy was a big boy. Six-foot-five, three hundred pounds. All muscle. But to that fucking croc he was a ragdoll. He shook Tommy back and forth until there was no fight left in him. By the time we got down there, the croc had dragged Tommy downriver. I saw it drag him under. I saw one of Tommy’s arms flapping before it went under like he was saying goodbye.”

After a moment of silence, George said, “Did you find him?”

“No. Never found so much as his hat. The croc never came back.”

“I didn’t come down here to be eaten,” Menhaus pouted.

“Me either,” Fabrini said. “Fuck that.”

“A caiman,” Cushing said. “It was probably a caiman. A big one. A Black Caiman.”

“It doesn’t bring him back knowing it’s name,” Cook said.

Everyone looked up. It was the first time they’d heard him speak other than in response to a direct question. The logic of what he said shut everyone up.

“Yeah, caiman, all right. That’s what it was,” Saks finally said. “Where we’re going, maybe it won’t be that bad. Won’t be any crocs or fucking caimans around. Just watch for snakes. They’ll be spraying for bugs. You’ll be safe enough. Just be careful.”

“That’s why you’re telling us this stuff, isn’t it, Saks?” Cushing said. “So we’ll be careful.”

“Yes. The jungle is primitive, girls. Remember that. You’re not the boss there. It’s the boss. You’d better have respect for it, cause it sure as hell will have no respect for you.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Soltz said, pushing away from the table and bolting out the door. He left it wide open. The wind hammered it against the bulkhead.

The first mate, Gosling, appeared moments later. “You men secure these hatches when you come and go or I’ll throw you to the fucking fish.”

He slammed the hatch and disappeared.

Menhaus and Fabrini left next, both were bitching about the job, about life, about nature in general. Cook slipped out without a word. Only Cushing, George, and Saks were left.

“We should get some sleep,” Cushing suggested.

“Yeah,” George said, leaving his plate half-full. His appetite was gone again. He felt sick. “You coming, Saks?”

“No. I think I’ll stay and think about my friend awhile.”

Cushing and George waited, not knowing what to say.

Saks grimaced. “Well, what do you want? Get the fuck out of my sight.”

They left him alone.

6

Gosling, the first mate, licked his sandpaper lips and lit his pipe.

Something wasn’t right.

He stood outside the pilothouse door, staring across the decks. They were lit and he could see everything. Nothing looked amiss… yet, yet something was not kosher. He could feel it deep down inside. Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it whatever you wanted, but something was really wrong here. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. He could feel the steady throb of the engines through the deck plates beneath his feet. It was not mechanical. After years spent on freighters, he could actually sense when there was a mechanical failure somewhere just as a man can sense something not quite right with his own body. It was like a sixth sense you developed when you knew the sea and you knew your vessel and how she felt and responded and reacted to every wake and swell.

No, the ship was fine.

The crew was fine.

What then?

He stood there, smoking, sending feelers out in every direction.

It didn’t make any sense. Yet, he’d been sailing long enough to know he could trust his instincts. But this seemed almost beyond experience, beyond comprehension, something intangible and unknown.. . an almost physical menace.

There was trouble.

There was danger… but where? How?

Gosling’s skin had gone clammy and his hands were trembling. It was bad and he had no explanation. He threaded his way amongst the cargo lashed to the spar deck and went to the railing. The sea was calm. Like glass. Like the water in some kid’s little backyard swimming pool. That wasn’t right. He’d been sailing the Atlantic for years and he’d never seen the waters so inexplicably calm. Especially this far out in open water. And March was a notoriously bad time in this part of the ocean. Storms came and went like notions. But never, never, was the sea so positively… dead.

Okay, he thought, okay. Let’s see what’s happening here.

He walked into the pilothouse, secured the hatch, stood there with his hands on his hips.

“How goes it?” Gosling said.

Iverson, the wheelsman, was seated at the chart table, banks of computer screens glowing before him. A copy of Hustler was balanced on his knee. He shrugged. “Good to go, Mr. Gosling. Pretty quiet out there tonight.”

Gosling nodded, sighed, just couldn’t get that certainty out of his system that something was terribly wrong or about to go south on them. It was on him, in him, an almost physical sense of expectation, of dread.

The pilothouse was rectangular in shape, looked much like an air traffic control tower from the interior, windows to all sides. It was a handsome room, decked out in oak and brass, all original construction from the ‘50s. The original ship’s wheel was still in place, next to the binnacle and gyrocompass repeater which was connected to the gyro down in dunnage. Of course, nobody manned the wheel anymore. The Mara Corday was navigated exclusively by DGPS, Digital Global Positioning System, which was monitored by computer and fed to autopilot. To get to point B from point A, it was only a matter of entering preset coordinates. Gosling checked the screens, was only marginally reassured. Across the front of the pilothouse were panels of controls and instrumentation — radar units, bow thruster controls, RDF and Navtex receivers.

“You get the weather?”

“Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. NWS calls for clear skies through tomorrow night.”

Gosling checked the satellite imagery on one of the computer screens where the ship was fed continuous atmospheric info. He read through the forecast on the weather fax receiver. Yeah, like Iverson said, there was nothing of concern there. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Still, Gosling wasn’t satisfied. The ship had two Kelvin radar units and Inmarsat B and C Satnav, Electronic Chart System. Everything checked. They were on course. What the hell was it then? The more he couldn’t find the glitch here, the ghost in the machine, the more it ate at him.

“Calm tonight, eh?” Iverson said, flipping through pages.

Calm before the storm, Gosling thought morosely.

Iverson set his magazine down. Looked nervous and picked it up again. “You ever seen a calm like this, Mister Gosling?”

Gosling ignored him. He checked the communication systems. The ship had standard radiotelephone, VHF, SSB, MF/HF stations. It had voice, data, fax, and telex connectivity via Inmarsat Satcom. Gosling scanned all the channels. Everything. Commercial, marine, aviation, even the distress frequencies. There was nothing but static and a shrill white noise he’d never heard before.

“You had activity before?” he said.

Iverson nodded. “Shit, yeah. I had chatter all over the place.”

“Nothing now.”

“Gotta be.”

Iverson scanned the channels himself. He checked the components over. Everything looked good. “I don’t get it.”

But Gosling was beginning to. Because whatever was coming, he figured, it was coming now, swooping down on them out of the night. It was crazy thinking, still it persisted. His guts were roiled like stormy waters, his throat tight, his scalp itchy.

“You all right, Mister Gosling?”

Gosling looked at him hard and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nothing that would make sense anyway.

Satnav was still operational. Radar was blank… oddly blank, not so much as a cloud out there. They were still online, operational. But audio and radar were down or seemed to be… now why was that?

Lights out, Gosling found himself thinking. The lights are being turned out on us one at a time. Lights out.

He was imagining a tall building at night, all the windows lit.. . then, one by one, the lights going out. Lights Out. That was also the name of an old spooky radio show. And what did the announcer say at the beginning while that distant bell was gonging? It… is.. . later… than… you… think…

Iverson kept scanning channels. “Something funny here,” he said.

And, yeah, it was funny, all right. Gosling was thinking it was funny, too. Because something was building here, something was happening incrementally and he didn’t honestly know what it was. Only that he could feel it gathering momentum. Like some negative electrical charge in the air gaining impetus.

There was a shrill beeping.

Iverson said, “GPS says we’re off-line… interference or something…”

There was a hint of panic to his voice and Gosling knew it wasn’t just his imagination now: Iverson was feeling it, too. Maybe one system would go to hell, but all of them? One after the other?

Together, they walked over to the binnacle. The magnetic compass was spinning around in circles. The gyrocompass was rolling, trying to find a bearing.

“Jesus,” Iverson said.

7

“You see?” Fabrini said when Menhaus and he were in their cabin with Cook snoring away. “I knew there was a catch to this shit. I just fucking knew it. Didn’t I tell you that night that there had to be a catch?”

Menhaus nodded. With sleepy eyes, he studied the clouds of smoke he was exhaling. “You did indeed. You surely did.”

“And I was right, goddammit. Fifteen-thousand for what? Three weeks’ work? Yeah, that’s what he said. He left out the crap about poisonous snakes and leeches and man-eating alligators.”

“Crocodiles. Caimans. Cushing said-”

“Who gives a damn what you call ‘em. They eat your ass all the same.”

Menhaus chewed his lower lip, stroked his mustache. “Saks said it wouldn’t be like that where we’re going.”

“I don’t care what he said.”

“But we’re not working on a bridge. We’re not even by water, he said. Not too close, anyway.”

Fabrini’s dark skin went red. “Listen to yourself, would ya? For chrissake, you dumb shit, he’ll say anything. Didn’t you notice how he didn’t mention any of this shit until we were in the middle of the Bumfuck Sea? If he’d said it before we sailed, nobody in their right mind would’ve went.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Damn straight I’m right” He pulled off his shoes and threw them against the bulkhead. A few flakes of gray paint chipped free. “Sometimes, man, I wish I was still in stir”

Menhaus said nothing. He was thinking about Talia, his wife. She’d never bore him any children. Had a vicious tongue and an ass the size of a bus. He was thinking about that ass, thinking how he’d miss it if anything went wrong. Right now he wanted more than anything to hear her call him a lazy good-for-nothing slob. The idea of it made him want to cry.

“Starting right now, buddy,” Fabrini said, “you and me watch each other’s backs. Fuck the rest of ‘em. We’re coming out of this alive. And when we get back to New Orleans, we’re going to get us a couple hookers and get drunk for three pissing days. We’ll get some nice young ones, hear? Tight asses.”

Fabrini turned the light off and stared into the darkness.

Menhaus was thinking he didn’t give a damn about tight asses. He wanted Talia’s ass and her mouth and all the shit combined which made a life. It was all he saw now. All he wanted to see.

They laid there silently for a time, listening to Cook snore.

Fabrini got back up, went to the porthole. He couldn’t see a thing out there. He paced back and forth, then sat back down again. “Dammit,” he said.

“What’s eating you?” Menhaus asked him.

Fabrini was breathing hard in the darkness. “I don’t know… I gotta funny feeling or something. I got the chills here.”

Menhaus did, too. “Me, too. I feel like I got the willies something awful,” he admitted.

And whatever it was, it was growing, filling the air, inundating the ship and drowning the men one by one.

After a time, Menhaus nervously said, “Hey, Fabrini? You hear the one about the gay rabbi who wanted a sex change?”

8

In the pilothouse, Iverson had forgotten about his Hustler. Forgotten about tits and ass and everything in-between. He’d been feeling groggy when Gosling came in, knowing he was pulling the dogwatch and thinking how far away morning was, sucking down a lot of coffee.

But now he was wide awake and it had nothing to do with caffeine.

Radio was out. Satnav and Satcom off-line. Compass fucked-up. Iverson was a modern sailor. He trusted his instruments, had complete faith in them. And when they were out, it was back to celestial observation and dead reckoning, paper charts and sextants. Back to the jungle. Just like in the old days when a ship at sea might as well have been on another planet. Alone, completely alone.

Iverson sipped his coffee and swallowed.

What he was watching was the radar. The screen had been empty for the past hour, but now it had locked onto something. Something big, something spreading out for miles and miles it seemed. Something like a bank of fog that was like no bank of fog Iverson had ever seen. Even the radar’s computer was having trouble telling exactly what it was. It was not solid, certainly, it was a gaseous envelope like a patch of mist… yet much denser. And the Mara Corday was steaming right into it.

Twice now, Iverson had made to call up the old man, but had hesitated. What could he say? A bank of fog? Jesus H. Christ, Iverson, you called me up here to look at a bank of fog? No, he couldn’t call the captain in on this. Besides, Gosling had the deck and you didn’t want to be going over his head. Gosling wasn’t the sort you wanted to piss off. Gosling saw the fog coming. He’d seen it first and it was he who told Iverson that, the way it was expanding and the rate it was moving at — an unprecedented sixty-knots, if radar was reading it right — there was no way they could get around it. Whatever it was, it had them. Had them tight, by Jesus.

“Besides, for chrissake,” Gosling had said. “What the hell am I going to tell the skipper? We steamed twenty miles off course to avoid some fucking mist?”

Sure, that made sense.

But it didn’t make Iverson feel any better. Because it was almost on them now and he could see it filling the screen, opening up to swallow them like the jaws of some immense beast.

Iverson began to pray under his breath.

9

George Ryan and Cushing were forward, up near the bow watching the ship cut into the flat, glassy waters.

“This isn’t bad at all,” George said. “I could handle sailing in seas like this.”

Cushing smiled. “Don’t get your hopes up. It won’t last. A freak calm, that’s all.”

George suddenly narrowed his eyes and peered into the night. “Check it out,” he said.

“You see that?”

It was like somebody had strung up a rolling white tarp in the distance. It was getting larger by the second, blotting out everything, eating the darkness and the sea foot by foot.

“Fogbank,” Cushing said, unsure.

George had never seen anything like it. It was a huge, undulating blanket of yellow-white mist, sparkling and luminous. It took his breath away. Within a minute or so, you could see nothing else. It was like the heavens, clouds and all, had fallen to earth and consumed everything in their path.

“Quite a sight, eh?”

George and Cushing turned. Gosling was standing there, arms folded, his pipe dangling from his lips. He looked strange, tense maybe.

“You ever seen a fogbank like that?” George said.

“Sure, plenty of times. You get ‘em out here,” he said.

For some uncanny reason, George had the odd feeling that he was being lied to.

“Are you going to steer around it?” Cushing asked.

“What do you think?”

And they knew what he meant. It was everywhere, closing in from what seemed every direction. There was no avoiding it unless they were to turn back, but at the speed it was making, they’d never outrun it.

“Do they always glow like that?” George said. “Those fogbanks?”

Gosling smiled thinly. “Sure.” He tapped out his pipe on the railing.

“It’s going to be pea soup here in about twenty minutes, boys, you better get below.”

They left and Gosling stood there, feeling a strange compulsion to wait for it, to meet the mist dead on.

Trembling, he waited.

10

George couldn’t sleep.

He laid there, feeling the subtle thrum of the ship beneath him. It was nothing he really cared for, but after awhile your body seemed to adjust to anything. The mind was the real problem. A certain paranoia had settled into him now. Before, it had been merely a bad feeling. Like a sense of apprehension a person got before going to the dentist or getting their taxes done. Normal, really.

But this paranoia, it was different.

He knew it wasn’t from Saks’s tales of jungle predators. Things like that were pretty much to be expected in the bush.

This was something else.

An almost black, unrelenting dread that worried at his nerves like a cat at a mouse. It would not leave him alone. Every time he closed his eyes, they snapped back open and he started, gasping awake like he was being smothered. A brooding sense of foreboding.

An almost inescapable knowledge that the shit was about to hit.

Heavy weather ahead.

So George laid there, expecting the worse, wondering what form it would take and when. Thinking maybe he was going crazy, but knowing, somehow, that would be the least of his problems. They would be into that fog anytime now and maybe they already were. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that Gosling had been nervous about that fogbank rolling at them. George didn’t know much about fog and particularly fog at sea… but there was something unusual about this one. And he didn’t believe for a moment that fog glowed like that.

It just wasn’t natural.

What had Lisa said at the docks?

Be careful of those big crocodiles, George. And be careful out on that sea… funny things happen at sea. My dad was a sailor and he always said that. Funny things happen at sea

George was shivering.

Jesus, how prophetic those words were becoming.

11

Cushing was up later than the others.

Long after Fabrini and Menhaus shook their unease and nodded off and George finally gave in to sleep and Saks and Soltz called it a night, he was still awake. Awake and restless.

He wasn’t like the others, not really. And this wasn’t because he held some elitist notion that since he was educated and they weren’t, he was a better man. For he wasn’t better, just different. He wasn’t a grader operator or a dozer jockey like the others. He came under the guise of being an office manager, a clerk, the guy who was to be the go-between for Saks’s crew and the mine people. It was his job to see that the crew got everything they wanted and when they wanted it.

And this was true.

Within limits.

He was the only one of the crew who knew Franklin Fisk personally. Saks had dealt with him and his people on several other projects in South America. But that was strictly a business relationship. Cushing, on the other hand, knew Fisk very well, had worked for him for some ten years now. He had been instrumental in implementing the multimillion dollar marketing strategy of Fisk’s overseas interests. Fisk, it so happened, was also married to Cushing’s sister. No one on the crew knew this. No one would ever know it.

No one would ever know the truth.

And the truth was that Cushing was a spy. That he had been hand-picked by Fisk himself to keep an eye on Saks. Saks was rumored to be a nasty one. Yes, he got the job done, always brought the projects in under budget and within schedule. But rumors had it he was an alcoholic. That he spent his days and nights drinking in his tent while his men labored. That he was physically abusive of his crew. That he often treated local workers like slave labor. On his last project, Saks had been accused of raping a village girl. He had also been accused of causing the deaths of three local men in a blasting accident. The story went that Saks had set the charges to clear a shelf of rock that was obstructing the road there were laying… but neglected to inform the workers.

Saks was, in essence, a public relations nightmare.

The sort of man who could give Fisk Technologies and its parent, Fisk International, a bad reputation. Still, Fisk used him. He was always the lowest bidder. But on this job, Cushing was put in place to watch him.

Cushing didn’t like it.

But he owed everything to Fisk.

So he was going to watch and learn.

Of course, if Saks learned about any of it and the rumors were true, Cushing was a dead man. Crocodiles and snakes would be the least of his worries.

Laying there, he thought about death.

Felt it reaching out for him…

12

The ship was now thoroughly encased in the fog.

Even the running lights only cut into its churning, drifting mass a few feet. Gosling stood there, watching it, feeling it, getting to know it. It didn’t look much like any fogbank he’d ever been through before. It was too yellow, too luminous. He’d never seen mist sparkle like that, almost as if there was electricity in it, some kind of surging, dormant power. And it was cold.

Jesus, cold like a blast of air from a freezer or an icehouse.

Abnormal.

And it left an almost wet, slimy residue on the skin. And that wasn’t right. It was crazy fog, this stuff. And, deep down, he knew it was bad. He knew it was what had knocked out their radio, had made their compass go crazy, shutdown the GPS. The very idea of that compass not being able to find magnetic north, just spinning aimlessly, bothered him in ways that he couldn’t even begin to fathom.

Lighting his pipe, he studied the fog more intently. It seemed not to be just blowing past them now, nudged by unseen winds, but actually mushrooming before the bow. Spiraling and twisting and sucking like some awful vortex that the ship was being inexorably drawn into.

And the smell.

What was that awful stink?

A thick, organic smell of swamps. Rotting vegetation and hot, putrid decay. A high, wet stench that reminded him of tidal flats and putrefying things vomited onto beaches. It grew stronger and stronger until he had to lean against the pilothouse with dry heaves clawing up his throat.

And then… worse.

A pungent, cloying chemical odor of methane, ammonia, fetid gas. He went to his knees, gagging, his lungs rasping for something breathable. But it was no good. It was like trying to breathe through a mouthful of mildewed weeds. The air had gone too heavy or too thin. It was wet and dry, polluted with a loathsome stink, blighted and rank.

Gosling’s head spun with crazy lights and a screaming white noise. His skull was echoing with something like the clatter of a thousand wings flapping and flapping until it felt like his head was going to burst.

And then he was breathing again, gasping for breath. The stink, the bad air just a memory. He laid there by the pilothouse door until his head stopped pounding.

He didn’t know what had just happened.

But, mentally, he filed it under worst case scenario.

13

“What the fuck is this?” Saks said when he made it out on deck a few minutes later. He took a moment or two to check out the fog, dismissed it, and grabbed Gosling by the shoulder, spinning him around. “You,” he said. “I’m talking to you, mister. What the fuck is this?”

Gosling knocked his hand aside. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? Something went shit with the ventilation system below decks for chrissake. I got guys down there passing out and puking their fucking guts out!”

“It’s this fog,” Gosling said and then, as if realizing how silly that sounded, said, “I’ll check it out.”

“Damn right you will.”

After he left, Saks stood there looking into that boiling fog and wondering what kind of dumbfuck, inbred morons could’ve navigated them into a mess like this. Goddamn stuff was so thick they wouldn’t see a ship until it was three feet away. And it was everywhere. A solid, misting mass of yellow-white fog like nothing he’d ever seen before in his life. It looked so thick you could scoop some up with your fist and put it in a jar. But that wasn’t the worse part. The worst part was that it looked blank. Neutral. Nothing. Like they were stuck in the middle of nothing, lost in the static on a TV screen. Even the ship didn’t seem to be moving, yet he could feel the engines, hear the bow cutting the drink.

What kind of brownwater, butthole sailors are these?

More people were pouring out on deck now. The ship’s crew in addition to Saks’s own. They were all looking a little green. Some were being helped along by their mates. One of the engine room swabbies collapsed and started heaving onto the deck. They were all a real mess. A suffocating, acrid smell came from the open hatches.

“Saks,” Fabrini said, wiping his hands on his jeans like something greasy was all over them. “What is it? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Ventilation system went to hell maybe. Fumes from the engines backed-up. Something.”

One of the sailors shook his head. “Ain’t no way, mister. Nothing in those turbines smells like that.”

Another sailor wiped his yellow face with a rag. “He’s right.”

“Okay, Einstein,” Saks said, “then what the hell was it?”

Nobody said anything.

“This isn’t right,” Menhaus said, shivering. “It isn’t just the engines here, and you all know it. Take a whiff. That fog smells… smells like something dead. There’s something wrong with it.”

“Who asked you?” Saks snapped.

It was at this particular moment that someone started screaming.

Everyone promptly shut up.

All the arguments and grumbling skidded to an echoing halt. The screaming was coming from aft, on the deck. Somewhere out in that maze of equipment and containers lashed to the spar deck. But in the fog… it was really hard to say exactly where. Everyone turned and made ready to go, to investigate… made ready and that was about it. Because everyone just stood there, faces pale, lips locked tight. No one moved. They all wanted to know what the hell was going on, but nobody wanted to be the first to charge through that fog and see. Maybe it was the sheer quality of that scream which was more than just a scream but the shriek of somebody being slowly roasted over a hot bed of coals. It was loud and shrill like nothing they’d ever heard before.

It was the sound of someone who’d just lost their mind.

“Jesus,” Saks said. “We better-”

The screaming broke down into painful, sharp squeals and the guy who was doing it appeared suddenly out of the murk. One of the deckhands. He was soaking wet, wearing rubber chest waders which had fallen down to his hips now. The front of his denim apron was red and glistening and he clawed frantically at it. His face was hooked into an awful, gray, twisted mask and everyone got out of his way.

“Get it offa me get it offa me get it offa me!” he howled, thrashing away across the decks, leaving a trail of blood. “OH JESUS JESUS JESUUUUS IT’S IN ME IT’S YAAAHHHHH…”

Before anyone could move, he ran to the railing. They saw him as a dim form convulsing in the fog. And then he threw himself over into the sea.

“Sonofabitch!” Saks said, breaking the spell. “Man overboard! Man fucking overboard!”

But no one came.

And everybody just stood there, not knowing what in the hell to do. To a man, nobody even moved an inch toward that spot where he’d gone over. Yes, they’d all been watching him, wanting to help him, but the screams, the blood, the very nightmarish absurdity of the whole situation had kept them from doing anything. They just watched. For it almost appeared as if he’d been pulled over the railing, rather than jumped of his own accord. And the splashing they heard… huge, echoing splashes… it didn’t seem like a man could make that kind of noise. It sounded more like somebody had dropped a car into the drink.

There was complete silence for a moment or two.

It was like everything was suspended, locked down tight and motionless. You could hear the water, something that might have been a distant drone of wind, the faint thrum of the engines, but nothing more.

“Man overboard,” one of the sailors said very quietly. “Man overboard. There’s a man overboard.”

But no one seemed concerned.

Reality had taken a beating in the last few minutes and it was still reeling, still trying to find its proper footing and the men with it.

“He’s gone,” Saks said. “Even if we turned this crate around, we’d never find him. Not in this.”

“Oh dear God,” Menhaus said. “That man.”

One of the sailors ran off and a few seconds later an alarm began to sound. It was high and whining like an air raid siren. The sort of thing that went right up your spine, filled your head, made you want to grind your teeth and squint your eyes.

Despite the racket, everyone started talking at once. Talking almost in low tones like they didn’t want the others to hear what they were saying.

Fabrini had his own way of dealing with the unreal, the frightening. He got angry. “This is bullshit,” he said, walking around in a loose circle. “This is fucking bullshit. We’ve gotta turn back. You hear me? We gotta turn back. I ain’t gonna die like that.”

“Like what?” Saks said.

“Yeah,” Menhaus said. “We don’t even know what happened.”

Fabrini realized they were all staring at him. His swarthy skin had an almost moonish pallor to it now. “You heard that guy for chrissake! All of you heard him! You heard what the fuck he was saying! Get it off me, get it off me! He was bleeding like somebody stuck a knife in him! Something got him, right? Something must’ve bit him!”

Saks rolled his eyes. “For the love of Christ, Fabrini, the guy was nuts. He probably slit his own fucking wrists or something.”

No one argued with that hypothesis. It was neat and tight and safe. It made sense. You could fit it into a box, close the lid, and be sure it wouldn’t get back out again. And it was much better than the alternative and nobody even wanted to consider that. At least not openly. Not yet.

Saks looked around carefully. He didn’t like any of this. He’d seen situations like this in the war. Times when the shit hit the fan from every which direction and the tension was so high you could feel it pulsing from man to man in an unbroken circuit. And when things got that stressed out, men cracked. Men started thinking crazy shit and somebody didn’t throw water on it and quick, they started doing crazy shit. And particularly when you had some nut like Fabrini running around feeding their fears, saying the crazy, dangerous things that were on everyone’s minds. And when that happened… mass hysteria soon set in and people got hurt.

Already he could see everyone pairing off in twos and threes, getting paranoid, not trusting their neighbors. Trench mentality. Jesus H. Christ. Saks didn’t need that shit. There was a job needed to be done in French Guiana and he needed these boneheads to do it. A lot of money was riding on the contract and Saks wasn’t about to let somebody screw him out of that. After it was done? Then he didn’t care, they could de-nut each other with potato peelers, they wanted to. But not now.

Not just yet.

“All right, you guys,” he said in a loud, sure voice because he had none other. “Quit acting like a bunch of schoolgirls and try acting like men. That goes double for you, Fabrini. You wanna suck dick and wear a dress, you do it on your own time. Not mine. Everything’s fine here.”

There was a rabble of conflicting viewpoints.

“Fine?” one of the sailors said. “Fine? A guy I knew for three goddamn years just lost his mind and jumped overboard and you call that fine?”

“We got to get out of here,” his buddy said. “You know, I got a wife and kids and, shit, I can’t be doing this. I can’t get involved in this.”

Saks wanted to ask him what, what exactly couldn’t he be doing or getting involved in. Because nobody knew what any of this was. And as far as he was concerned they were just lost in a freak fogbank and that was that. But he didn’t push it. Didn’t ask the guy because they were all thinking the same thing and he knew it. They were all thinking that something had gone seriously sour here… only nobody knew just how or why.

Everything seemed unreal, dreamlike, the world as they knew it veering out of control, heading for some dark abyss that would suck them down and fill their lungs with black silt. And through it all, that siren kept shrilling through the fog like the warning cry of some prehistoric bird circling its nest.

The sailor’s face had gone all rubbery. “You know I got kids and I don’t know what any of this is about… I don’t like it, I don’t like any of this… people going crazy and us almost getting poisoned down there. What kind of way is that to run a fucking ship? I

…I gotta get out of here… this is all wrong and I don’t know why, but my wife and my fucking kids and aren’t any of you going to do a goddamn thing here but just stare… Jesus, what the hell is this?” He looked around from face to face and knew they were all thinking he was going nuts, but they were all wrong because he was just fine, it was they who were out of touch here. “Are you all going to just stand there or what?” he shouted at them. “C’mon, get us out of here, will ya?”

Saks laughed at him. “You wanna go home?”

“Damn straight I do,” the guy said.

“Well, it’s your lucky day because I just happen to have a helicopter shoved up my ass,” Saks said. “You get me a greasy spoon and I’ll pop that prick out for you, you goddamn pussy.”

That got a few chuckles, defused the situation a bit and that had been Saks’s plan all along. But it wouldn’t last and he knew it.

Sure, the electricity was rising again, Saks saw. Surging and crackling. The group of men before him were on the verge of mob violence only they were all so goddamn confused they didn’t know who or what to take it out on.

The sailor wrapped his arms around himself and was shuddering uncontrollably. His teeth were chattering and there was drool running from his lips. “You,” he said in an airless voice. “Look at all of you. Standing there. Doing nothing. Just waiting to go crazy! Just waiting for that thing to get you, too!”

“C’mon, buddy,” Saks said, putting his arms out to the sailor and indicating to the others with his eyes to do the same. “You need some rest.”

The sailor didn’t fight. The fact that so many people were suddenly concerned about him did wonders. Four or five of his mates helped him below and this very action seemed to calm everyone.

The siren had ended now and the ship was slowing.

Menhaus said, “What was he talking about? What thing?”

“Crazy talk, dipshit. Don’t worry about it,” Saks said. “Now, listen, everyone. Let’s quit acting like a bunch of old ladies and get something going here. You sailors got jobs to do and you better get to ‘em before the captain reams your asses clean. Let’s go.”

Everyone slowly went below decks again. Saks was proud of the way he handled things. But if there was nothing else in this world he was good at, it was handling men and handling trouble. He’d done it in the war and he’d been doing it ever since. Holding hands and kicking asses. He was good at it.

He looked at his own crew. Menhaus and Fabrini stood motionless, wind-up soldiers waiting to be put into action. Ropes of fog clung to them like scarves. “Let’s go find that goddamn captain and see what kind of shit we’re into here,” he said.

There were no arguments.

14

When Gosling heard the alarm and found out one of his boys jumped overboard, he pretty much went apeshit. He ordered the navigator to bring the ship around. Workboats were lowered and a search was carried out for Stokes, the kid who’d jumped over the side. The search went on for nearly an hour in that moist, rank pea soup, led by Gosling himself, but it was hopeless and everyone knew it. First thing he did when he was back on the ship was to jump up and down on his sailors, reaming them out about protocol concerning men overboard. When he was done jamming maritime law and regulations down their throats, he went up one side of Saks and down the other. By the time he was done, Saks had a sore asshole. Saks wasn’t the sort to take crap like that, but Gosling was his kind of man — tough as saddlehide and with a set of balls on him he should’ve been pushing around in a wheelbarrow.

“You want to run my ass up the flagpole, Gosling,” Saks said after he ordered his boys away, “you take me aside and do it. You don’t treat me like that in front of my men.”

But Gosling wasn’t having it. Saks was a tough old bastard himself — just ask him — but Gosling towered over him by nearly a foot and looked like he’d kicked more balls in his time than the Dallas Cowboys. “Well, see, you’re wrong there, Mr. Saks, dead-ass fucking wrong,” he explained. “On this ship I’m the First. First Mate. That means I’m God and Ghandi and Hitler all rolled into one. I run this goddamn ship and if you’re on it, then I run you, too. You’re mine. When the shit comes down, I’m there with the biggest fucking shovel you ever saw and if you don’t believe that, I’ll crack that shovel right across the back of your fucking skull, scoop up what runs out and throw it right over the side. You can believe that.”

“You better watch that mouth,” Saks told him.

“And you better shut your pisshole before I throw your ass into the deep six,” Gosling told him. “We lost a man out there. And if you or your boys had gotten off your dead asses and alerted us to the situation a little sooner, that man might be alive now. So don’t give me any shit, Mr. Saks, because you do and you’re going to look real funny with my size twelve boot hanging sideways out of your ass.”

Saks saw that intimidation wasn’t going to work with this guy, so he just started laughing. “I like you, Gosling, you’re a grade-A prick.”

With that, Saks left.

And Gosling stood there, taking hard breaths and thinking hard thoughts. He didn’t need Saks and his shit because right then, the First had a full plate. Sure, the alarm had been sounded, but not soon enough for Gosling’s liking. In situations like that, it was never soon enough. And why those goddamn mother-rapers — his own crew included — had stood there while Stokes danced over the railing, was beyond him. It should have been obvious what the kid was attempting, particularly given his state of mind.

Gosling just shook his head, watching the fog get thicker and their chances get thinner.

15

George Ryan had been sleeping when the madness hit. As had Cushing and Soltz. They came awake at roughly the same time, gagging and coughing and finding it impossible to draw so much as a breath. They heard the men stampeding in the corridors outside, but decided not to join them.

In fact, it really wasn’t even a choice.

Soltz passed out before he made it to the porthole. George made it there and Cushing just barely did. Within the span of a few minutes it had all passed and they were left lying on the floor, leaning up against bulkheads, their throats raw and dry as desert sand.

They never heard the screaming.

Never even knew what hell had been let loose on the decks above. Everything they would learn, they would learn later and in varying detail from the others. For now, it was just enough for them to be able to breathe.

“What happened?” Soltz asked them.

“A very interesting question,” Cushing said, coughing.

George ignored the sarcasm of that. “We better get topside and see what this is.” Soltz said, “Are we sinking?”

He was staring up into the rafters of the cabin, at the lifejackets and survival suits hanging up there.

“No, we’re not sinking.”

Cushing was staring out the porthole by this time. “Look at that fog,” he said. “You ever see anything like it?”

16

Gosling had one last pipe before he went to the captain.

He stood out on the hurricane deck, staring out over the bow, feeling the wind in his face and watching tendrils of mist snake over the forward decks. There wasn’t much of a stink to the fog anymore. Any that he noticed, that was. Just sort of a vague dank, dark smell about it. And he had to concentrate to really notice it. They’d been in the fog for upwards of three hours now. Nothing had changed. The radio was still picking up only dead air and the compass, though not spinning frantically now, was moving in a lazy, jittery circle, counterclockwise, as if it could not detect magnetic north. The gyrocompass was caught in a perpetual lazy roll. The RDF was dead and the SatNav was equally lifeless. It was like being in a vacuum.

Nothing was working right.

Nothing was as it should have been.

Gosling kept telling himself it was the fog, freak weather patterns, atmospheric disturbances, sunspots. Nothing seemed to fit, though. He’d been in plenty of heavy fogs, but none of them like this.

“Shit,” he said to himself. “Sonofabitch.”

He went to the captain’s cabin and knocked gently on the door before entering. Things weren’t terribly rigid or strict aboard the Mara Corday, but the captain was still the ship’s master and deserved respect.

Captain Morse was seated at his desk, his fingers drumming nervously. Morse was a heavy man, a curious combination of fat and muscle. He was clean-shaven and slicked his hair straight back from his brow. Gosling had never seen him smile.

And he was not smiling now. “Well?” he said.

“No dice, Sir,” Gosling told him. “Stokes is gone. If those idiots would have told me we had a man overboard… well, piss on it. Stokes is gone. In this fog, well, we couldn’t see a damn thing. It’s worse when you get water-level, Captain… thicker, smellier… I couldn’t even see the boys in my own damn boat, let alone anything floating out there.”

Morse’s deadpan face did not change. “Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell.” Gosling sat down and pulled his watch cap off, smoothing down his hair. “Well, nothing worth mentioning. Some of the boys were getting a little spooked down there.”

Morse raised an eyebrow. It arched like the back of an inchworm. “Let’s have it.”

So Gosling told him… what there was to tell. How the fog was thick and membranous below on the sea which was flatter than a sheet of glass. How they couldn’t see a damn thing, how they lost sight of the Mara Corday almost instantly.

“What was spooking them?”

Gosling said he didn’t know exactly what it was. Everyone was wound up tighter than trampoline springs, so it probably made things worse than they might have been. The only way the two boats kept in contact was with the bullhorn and searchlights. “We kept hearing sounds out there, Skipper. I don’t know… splashing sounds, things moving in the water. Big things. Maybe a pod of whales moving by, I don’t know exactly. In that fog, well it got under the mens’ skins and I didn’t blame ‘em either. I didn’t care much for it myself.”

He was leaving out things and Morse knew it, but he didn’t press. Gosling wasn’t about to tell the ship’s master that a deckhand named Crycek in the other boat started screaming, saying he saw something with a long neck and eyes watching him from the fog. That one of his men claimed he heard Stokes calling out there… except that it sounded like maybe his mouth was full of mud and kelp. Gosling had heard it, too, but he couldn’t say how it was a human voice. It was something, something bad, he just wasn’t sure what.

“Anything else?”

Gosling shrugged. “Like I said, sea is flat as glass. Not so much as a ripple. Patches of seaweed floating around, rotten-smelling stuff. Given the calm and the weed, could be we’re farther into the Sargasso than we should be.”

Morse just nodded. “Could be a lot of things, I guess. What have you got for me, Mister?” he asked. “What happened to Stokes?”

Gosling didn’t have any real answers there, either. Marx, the chief engineer, had a couple deckhands go into the aft starboard ballast tank with the first assistant engineer, Hupp. There was only four feet of water in there, but the intake was clogged. It turned out it was clogged with weeds. Hupp cleaned it out and about that time, Stokes started screaming, fighting his way to the hatch.

“I don’t know, Skipper, there was blood all over the damn place. Around the hatch, on the deck, bulkheads, going up the companionway. Christ if I know what happened. Maybe he got claustrophobic and… well, nothing really explains it, but…”

“But what?”

Gosling just shook his head. “Lot of people heard what he was screaming about. That there was something in him or biting him, something like that. I suppose we could have sucked just about anything into the tank.”

Morse didn’t doubt that. The size of those ballast tanks, a shark could’ve been at home in there. Or a whale. Not that those things could get in through the intake. But smaller fish did quite frequently. Mollusks, shrimp, mussels, you name it.

“Something that bit him,” Morse said. “Chewed into him. Hmm. Is that tank sealed?”

“Yes, sir, it’s secured, all right.”

They talked about the fog, their predicament. The chances things might clear out there.

“I wish there was something I could tell you, but this is all beyond me.” Gosling sighed. “I’ve been sailing a long time, Captain. We both have. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not in the books or out of it.”

Morse’s face did not change. “Tell me something, Paul. Anything.”

“Okay. Radio’s working, but all we’re picking up is static. RDF is also working but, again, it’s not picking up a goddamn thing. SatNav seems operational, but it, too, is locking in on zilch” He shook his head. “It’s all pretty crazy. Satellite could be messed-up. I’ve seen it happen before, but we should get something. It’s almost like it’s not even up there anymore.”

Which was crazy. He didn’t need to tell Morse how GPS worked. That the GPS was a satellite-based navigation system provided by a network of no less than twenty-four satellites in separate orbital paths. Sure, one might go out and maybe even two or three… but all twenty-four?

Morse considered it. “All right. How about radar?”

“Working. Everything checks. We’re not reading a damn thing. No land masses, no ships. Nothing. Now and then we’ll get a few blips, then they disappear. Could be reflections or nothing at all. I really don’t know. Depthfinder’s okay. We’re reading bottom at twelve-hundred feet. Seems pretty consistent. Compass is moving counterclockwise still.”

“Mechanical?”

“No way. Back-up’s doing the same. Even the one I keep in my kit is doing it. Gyro can’t grab a fix, either. LORAN’s belly-up. There’s nothing wrong with our instruments, Captain. It’s gotta be this fog or this sea or something.” He shook his head. “I pulled her off autopilot

…I got Iverson on the wheel now. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I just don’t trust technology today.”

Morse stared at his hands. There were callused and rough from a lifetime spent battling the wind and weather. They shook slightly. “We better keep running quarter-speed until…”

Gosling licked his lips. “Until what?”

“Until we get out of this”

Gosling just nodded. There was really nothing else they could do. He knew Morse was thinking the same crazy things he was. Crazy, comic book shit about the Devil’s Triangle and the Sargasso Sea and all the silly stories they had inspired. But neither would speak of it.

“What about that smell before?” Morse asked.

“All I can tell you is that it’s gone. It didn’t come from us, I know that much. It came with the fog. Whatever sense that makes.” He chewed his lower lip, thinking. “It was more than a stink, Captain. We both know that. It was almost like there suddenly was no air.”

“Keep that to yourself” Morse said.

They sat there in silence for a moment. Then Gosling cleared his throat. “You ever seen anything like this?”

Morse pursed his lips. “What do you think?”

“Yeah, I guess. Nobody’s seen this before. Have you checked your watch?”

“My watch?”

Morse had a digital. It seemed to be operating.

Gosling had a diving watch. The hands were running backward. “And it’s not just mine.”

Morse exhaled. “I think,” he said slowly, “we’re in deep shit.”

17

About ten minutes later, Morse met with Saks and his crew. It was not something he was particularly looking forward to. He met with them in the observation lounge and answered their questions. The observation lounge was a space generally reserved for the brass of the shipping company and assorted VIPs: politicians, privileged guests etc. It contained a wet-bar, marble fireplace, imported leather furniture, and gleaming walnut paneling. Morse hoped, maybe in some small way, that the lavish accoutrements would give Saks the impression that he was thought highly of by the crew and officers of the Mara Corday… and particularly, the captain himself.

Of course, it was all a ruse. Morse was no more impressed by the man than his First was, but he knew all about men like Saks. If you could control him, you could control his people.

“The sea can get a little freakish this time of year,” Morse told them. “I’ve seen fogs wrap up a ship for two, three days. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Saks nodded. “That’s what I figured. You idiots hear what the captain said?”

Fabrini just shook his head. “Yeah, we heard, we heard.”

“Good. Now you can quit with the ghost stories all ready.”

“There really is no reason for alarm,” Morse told them, maintaining his demeanor, just damn glad they couldn’t see him on the inside — the quivering, white-knuckled thing he had become.

“Shit,” Fabrini said. “Do you guys even know where we are?”

“We’re on course. But we’re moving slow. We don’t have a choice in this soup.”

Saks scowled at that. “How much of a delay are we talking here? I got a contract to fill, you know.”

“A day, maybe two. No more than that.”

Soltz shifted uncomfortably in his seat. His glasses reflected the fluorescents above. “What about the man who threw himself overboard?”

“A terrible business,” the captain said. “We’ll never know for sure what happened there. When we reach port there’ll be a formal investigation. But even then… who can say?”

Fabrini giggled dryly. “Who can say? What kind of bullshit is that?” he wanted to know. “We saw him. We all saw him. The guy was covered in blood screaming that something had him, something was inside him.”

Saks’s heavy brow furrowed. “Shut the hell up, Fabrini. You saw a guy with blood on him. A guy totally out of his mind for chrissake. If he said Jesus and Mary were chasing him down the hallway with chainsaws would you believe that too?”

Fabrini shook his head slowly from side to side. “You know, Saks, you’re really starting to piss me off here. What’s with you? What’s with all you guys?” He looked around at them with accusing eyes. “You know something’s totally fucked up here. This fog ain’t right. The captain here is serving up the bullshit on a platter and expecting us to chew and swallow and Saks? Saks is pretending nothing has happened. Well, I ain’t fucking buying it. No way. And neither are any of you.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Saks said in disgust.

Soltz just shook his head. “He’s right. Something’s wrong here.”

Cook and Menhaus kept silent, but their minds were going full tilt. Cook was the sort of guy who rarely said anything. Menhaus didn’t like confrontation; he would wait and see what the majority thought and then adopt this thinking himself.

The next one to speak was George Ryan. What he had to say was simple and to the point. “What is it you think is happening, Fabrini?”

Cushing nodded, smiling thinly, seeming to enjoy the anarchy. “Yes, tell us.”

All eyes were on Fabrini now. His dark face was somehow flushed, a vein at his temple throbbing. “I don’t know what happened. But it sure as hell wasn’t just some guy going nuts and jumping overboard. There’s more to it than that. Christ, look at that fog. I’ve seen fog before and it doesn’t fucking glow. And it doesn’t suck away the air.”

Captain Morse just stared, then cleared his throat. “I’ll be the first to admit we’ve experienced some strange phenomena here, but nothing that has happened is what I would call supernatural, gentlemen. I’ve been sailing the Atlantic for over thirty-five years and it still never fails to surprise me.”

“What is it you think happened, then?” Cushing said, amused by it all.

“I don’t know really. My guess is that we experienced some bizarre atmospheric anomaly. The fog is just the result of some strange weather pattern, maybe the sun acting on a cold sea. The lack of air and those gases that nearly suffocated us all, those could have came from a mile down… a bubble of methane, maybe. It’s happened before.”

“That’s right,” Saks said. “A day or so and we’ll be out of this, so all of you knock it off with the spooky stories here.”

Cushing and George looked at each other. Like Fabrini, they knew bullshit when they heard it. They knew when somebody was telling them something just to shut them up and that’s exactly what was going on here. The real ugly, unpleasant part of it all, they knew, was that nobody knew what was going on. And that was scary.

“This is pointless,” Fabrini said and stomped off.

Soltz followed suit.

There was nothing more to say.

18

Gosling wasn’t present at the session between Morse and Saks’s crew. But the captain filled him in on it. Morse wasn’t a guy who enjoyed lying. He would’ve liked to have told the others the truth. The only problem being he didn’t know what the truth was. No one did. Yes, something was wrong, but what? They were sailing blind here. No navigational aids. No radio contact. Even the radar was acting screwy. The thick fog made visual navigation impossible… there were no stars that could be seen. It was all very disturbing.

Gosling had never been in a situation like this.

It was insane.

He assumed they were somewhere between Norfolk and South America, which was pretty much saying they were a needle in the biggest haystack in creation. Somewhere between Norfolk and French Guiana.

That was slick. Like telling someone the contact lens they’d dropped was somewhere between Milwaukee and Buffalo.

But where else could we be? he asked himself. Sure, the fog and everything else is goddamn strange, but it doesn’t mean much in itself. We’re caught in some freakish weather pattern here and like Morse said, it’ll blow over sooner or later. So what is it I’m worried about?

He had no answer to that.

What you’re worried about, a low, menacing voice in his head said, is that Morse is wrong. And down deep, you know he’s wrong. This is no fucking weather pattern, freak or otherwise. Weather patterns might screw with the radio or the RDF, but they couldn’t touch the GPS and sure as hell not the radar. And if that isn’t enough, then why don’t you tell me about the compasses? Why are they spinning counterclockwise? Why the hell can’t they zero in on magnetic north? You’ve never seen one act like that and you know it. Even the feel of the sea is wrong. The water’s too calm and that smell is just not right. You have no explanation for any of this and if you did, you wouldn’t want to admit it.

Licking his lips, Gosling left his cabin.

He would not think anymore.

That was the way it would have to be from now on. No thinking, no theorizing, no wild guesses. Whatever was happening here would have to take care of itself. The wheels were spinning now and he’d just have to wait and see where they took him. Took all of them.

But, again, that damn voice, sharp and cutting in his head: You know very well what you’re avoiding here, Paul. You know very well. You’ve heard about things like this from sailors too drunk to know better. In books. On TV. You’ve heard about strange seas like this. Places where compasses spin and technologies die a hard death. Where nothing is right. Where everything is wrong.

Dead Sea.

“Dead Sea” not as in the Dead Sea itself, but as in a phenomena which has been reported since men began sailing the seas. Strange becalmed bodies of water where everything suddenly goes insane. Where men kill themselves rather than face the reality of what has happened to them. The Bermuda Triangle. The Devil’s Sea. The Sargasso Sea. Ship’s graveyards. Maritime dead zones few return from.

He shook his head. No. Absolutely not.

I will not accept this.

He started walking again. Moving blindly, not seeing anything. The gears of his brain were revolving madly now and it was all going so fast he could make no sense of any of it. And he didn’t want to. He didn’t plan on touring the ship, but this is what he did. He walked the decks from the stern to the bow, visited the boat decks and checked the equipment stowed on the spar deck. He checked hatch covers and derricks. He went up to the pilothouse, made sure Iverson was steering the ship with his hands and not his feet, staying true on course. Then down into the lounge and messrooms, crew’s hall and forward cargo holds. He walked aimlessly, lost in thought. He hadn’t planned on making the galley his ultimate destination, yet, somehow, he knew that’s exactly where he was going.

The night kitchen.

It was kept running even in the wee hours, for there was always someone on duty or out on watch that needed a meal or a hot cup of coffee. Gosling walked in there, found Bobby Smalls, the second cook and one of the new porters on duty. They nodded to him and Gosling nodded back. The porter was filling Tupperware containers with cold cuts, pickles, cheeses, and veggies for late-night sandwiches for the dog watch crew.

The chief steward was the head cook, but the second cook did all the baking and prep work. The porters handled clean-up and serving.

“Fog thinning any?” Smalls asked, as he kneaded a huge glob of dough with his fists.

“Not yet,” Gosling told him.

The porter arranged condiments on a serving platter and headed off to the crew’s mess with them.

Gosling walked around the kitchen. The stainless steel counters gleamed and the tiled floors smelled of pine cleaners. He examined the rows of shining stoves, peaked aft into the pantry, ran a hand along the cool steel door of the immense walk-in freezers. He rummaged through cupboards, scrutinized foodstuffs, stared into drawers of cutlery.

“You need something, First,” Smalls said, without looking away from his dough, “ya’ll let me know.”

Gosling smiled. “I don’t need anything, Bobby. Just restless.”

Smalls was in his fifties, thickset with a graying crewcut and shaggy sideburns that angled up to his cheeks. Almost muttonchops, but not quite. Gave him the look of a Victorian London cop, but his West Texas twang quickly erased that.

“Sure, we’re all restless here, we’re all thinking things,” Smalls said.

“You knew Stokes, didn’t you, Bobby?” Gosling said, trying to sound like he was just making conversation. “The kid who-”

“Sure, I knew him. He was a good boy. This was only his second run. But, yeah, I knew him.”

“He ever seem… well, funny to you?”

“Funny? You mean could he tell a good joke? Yes, sir, that kid had some mouth on him.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Gosling said.

Smalls nodded. He still had not looked up from his dough. “You mean, do I think he was crazy? Prone to nervous breakdowns? The heebie-jeebies? No, Mr. Gosling, I do not. He was as balanced as any other, I figure”

“Yeah, I figured that, too”

Smalls began pressing out his dough on the floured stainless steel table. “Funny that fog out there. Thick like that, shiny like that. Haven’t seen anything like it in years.” That gave Gosling pause. “You’ve seen this before?”

Smalls did look up now. His eyes were gray as puddles on concrete. “You telling me you’ve spent a lifetime sailing the Atlantic and you never came across anything funny out this way?”

Gosling wetted his lips. “Maybe once or twice. Minor things. Bad compass deviation… things like that. Atmospheric problems, you’d call them.”

Smalls didn’t look like he believed that. He went back to his dough, rolled it out with firm strokes of the rolling pin which was almost as big as a baseball bat. “I been on these waters going on thirty years now. Years ago, I was a deckhand on a bulk freighter. The Chester R. We were bringing a belly full of grain out to Bermuda from Charleston. About an hour out, we made radio with Hamilton. Same old, same old. Then we sailed into this fog… a lot like we got out there. It was a real mother, that fog. Thick, smelled funny, had a weird sort of shine to it.”

Gosling’s throat was dry. The comparison was pretty accurate so far. “What happened?”

“The sort of things that happen in these waters when some of that yellow fog swallows up your vessel — you know, our compass began to spin, we couldn’t find our heading. RDF went toes-up, LORAN was all tittywonkle,” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Yeah, we were spooked pretty bad. The lot of us. Radio was shit, nothing but dead air on VHF and side-band. Radar kept showing us things that were there, then gone. This was the days before GPS, but I don’t think it would have mattered. You think so?”

Gosling said he thought probably not. “How long were you in it?”

Smalls shrugged. “About an hour, according to the chrono. We were sailing blind all that time. We missed Bermuda even though we hadn’t changed our heading. A few degrees could have made us miss it, you know, could have put us on this side of the Azores we kept it up. But that’s not where we ended up. When the fog died out, we weren’t anywhere near Bermuda and we sure as hell weren’t out in the middle of the Atlantic steaming across the pond like you might think. No sir, we were due north of the Leeward Islands down in the Caribbean.”

Gosling said, “You telling me you were running east and ended up a thousand miles south of your last position? And within an hour?”

“That’s what happened, all right.” Smalls began cutting biscuits out of the dough with an aluminum cutter. “Hard to believe, ain’t it? Well, ya’ll imagine our poor captain trying to explain a navigational tanglefuck like that to the ship’s owners. Wasn’t pretty. Guess what I’m saying here, First, is that you start playing out in the Sargasso like we are and the stars are right, conditions favorable for funny business, and you run into what we’re running into. Folks these days, they call it the Bermuda Triangle and what not. But I’m old school. Sargasso to me. The Sargasso Sea. That triangle they bullshit about just touches the southern edge of the Sargasso, but most of those ships and planes that have trouble are really in the Sargasso. I should know, on account I was on one of them.”

Gosling knew Smalls too well to think that the man was spinning tales here. But the Sargasso Sea was no true mystery. It existed, all right. It was an oval region of the western North Atlantic, roughly between the east coast of the U.S., the West Indies and the Azores. Unlike other seas that were bordered by land, the Sargasso was bordered by ocean currents — the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic, Canary, and North Equatorial — which flowed in a clockwise pattern around it, creating a deadly calm within its boundaries. Because of the calm, the Sargasso was a great floating desert of sargassum seaweed. In the old days of sail, it had been called the Sea of Lost Ships because of the many craft that had been becalmed or trapped in its vast weed banks. And in the realm of maritime folklore, it had a centuries-old reputation of disappearing vessels and derelict ships, ghost ships and sea-monsters and bizarre phenomena.

But Gosling knew those tales were just bullshit.

They couldn’t be anything else.

Modern tankers and freighters could plow through the Sargasso without hesitating. It was only smaller boats that got their props tangled with weed. And as for the rest… well, sailors liked to tell stories and you could leave it at that.

“Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” Gosling said.

“You do that,” Smalls said to him. “We’re bound to come out of it sooner or later. Maybe we’ll be on course and maybe we’ll be down by the Bahamas… or maybe we’ll be somewhere else entirely.”

Somewhere else entirely.

That last bit was loaded with allusions Gosling wasn’t about to let himself think about. Not yet. He told Smalls they’d get together and discuss it all in more depth later on and Smalls said that his calendar was wide open for the foreseeable future.

And again, Gosling didn’t care for what that implied.

19

Gosling thought: What the hell is it I’m looking for?

But he didn’t know, couldn’t know. Not yet. He was down in engineering, near the stern of the ship, making his way down the port side companionway to the steering flat. On the metal steps which were painted an abysmal off-yellow that reminded Gosling of the color of vomit, he was seeing the darker splotches and stains of Stokes’ blood. You could maybe write it off in your mind as worn-in grime or grease, but if you knew what happened… could see in your mind Stokes stumbling up the companionway, spilling blood and screaming, his face hooked into a rictus of terror and agony… it wasn’t quite so easy.

It was blood.

Probably take lacquer thinner to get the dried stains out.

Gosling moved down the steps, studying the bloodstains, keeping his boots from making contact with them the same way a kid avoided sidewalk cracks. He wasn’t even aware he was doing so. At the bottom of the companionway, he could gauge Stokes’ mad flight up to the spar deck. Yes, Gosling could gauge it… but he could never understand the depths of stark madness that had peeled the kid’s mind free.

There were a few flecks on the bulkheads that hadn’t been mopped away.

Below, in the steering flat, Gosling paused.

Still, he was not sure what he was looking for. Stokes had lost his mind here and maybe Gosling thought he might find it, laying about somewhere like a cast-off rag. The steering flat was a huge room in which the massive gear quadrant that moved the rudder was located. Just off it, was the shop with its assorted lathes and drill presses, grinders and milling machines.

Gosling went forward to the main engine room, feeling the hum and vibration of the gigantic plant. Boilers produced steam which was fed to the high and low pressure turbines which were connected to the propeller shaft by reduction gears. This room — if room it could be called — was cavernous, you could have dropped a three-story house in there and had plenty of elbow space. Everywhere, the engine room was webbed in piping, ducts, and armored hoses. One of the assistant engineers was studying a bank of overhead gauges.

Gosling breezed past him and went down the companionway to the pump deck, closed the hatch to get the thrum of the engines out of his ears. They weren’t as loud below, but you could feel them just fine. Here, on the pump deck, was a veritable maze of manifolds, ballast pumps, distribution piping, and valves. The tanks themselves held well over three million gallons of water at any one time.

Gosling stood before the aft starboard tank, studying the hatch.

Here, too, the blood had been mopped away, but you could still see signs of it where the bulkhead met the deck. Other than that, there was nothing really to suggest a tragedy here.

Yet, Gosling could almost feel something buzzing silently in the air.

But he knew it was just the silence. Even with the throb of the turbines above, it was complete and thick and somehow chilling in its total lack of life. It reminded him of someone holding their breath, waiting, waiting. A nameless hush. The sort of empty silence you would hear in a tomb.

What happened here, Stokes? What drove you mad?

Finding any evidence in this arterial labyrinth of conduits and pipes, tangled hoses and jutting equipment would be no easy feat. Yet, Gosling felt compelled to look and keep looking. It would have taken thirty men all day to canvas the pump deck minutely, and even then the margin of missing something was high. Gosling turned on all the lights and began searching, moving in what he thought would have been Stokes’ general path.

And it didn’t take him as long as he thought.

Jammed between the metal floor grating and the lines snaking from an electrical junction box, he found something. Using a screwdriver, he dug it out.

At first Gosling thought it was a horn. It was a small, three-inch section of hard, chitinous flesh. Mottled brown, dead, covered with tiny sharp spines. It had been cut from something. Severed. It ran from the thickness of a cigar to a pointy little tip. It was no horn. Neither was it some discarded length of rubber hose or plastic tubing like he had also first thought. It was a piece of something. Like the tail end of a snake or some other animal.

Gosling prodded it with the blade of the screwdriver.

He couldn’t bring himself to actually touch it. Something about it was revolting.

It was slimed in strands of some snotty, gluey material like transparent silicone caulk.

It’s nothing, he told himself. Nothing to be concerned about. If you’re thinking this might have something to do with Stokes, then I would have to say you’re definitely barking up the wrong tree here. You’re simply assuming too much, my friend.

But was he?

He wrapped the section carefully in a rag and, even more carefully, stuffed it into the pocket of his pea coat. It could’ve been nothing, but it could’ve been everything. He had never seen anything quite like it. But that meant nothing in of itself. The sea was full of strange creatures and new ones were discovered all the time.

Was this part of the thing that had bit Stokes? Was that even feasible? Had it got at him and he sliced it in half?

Because, regardless of whether that scenario made sense or not, it looked like a knife had done the job.

20

Marx, the chief engineer, had it wrapped in a handkerchief. Just a garden variety lockblade knife. Lot of the crew members carried them in sheaths at their belt. Gosling carried one himself.

“Found it about an hour ago,” Marx said to the first mate. “Got kicked under a boiler coupling… maybe by Stokes, maybe someone else.”

Sitting there with the Chief in the Engine Control Room, Gosling was looking at that knife. There was something on the blade. Something crusty and dark. Could have been blood… or rust. Maybe it had been lying under the coupling for the past two or three voyages… but Gosling didn’t think so.

Looking at it, thinking of what was wrapped up in his pocket, he felt his mouth go very dry. “You suppose… you suppose Stokes sliced himself open with it?” he asked, though he did not believe it for a moment. Not now and maybe not before.

“Dunno,” Marx said. “Could be. Could be how it happened.”

Marx was a big fellow with a head bald as a mountaintop and a thick gray beard, ZZ Top style, that hung down to his chest. There was a Harley tattoo on his left forearm and an old Molly Hatchet insignia on his right. He looked very much like a biker and very little like a freighter engineer. But he was the Chief and he was the best.

Hupp, the first assistant engineer, was the only other person in the Engine Control Room. Years ago, there might have been a dozen men, but these days with advanced computer controls and desktop interfaces, it didn’t take many men to man the station. The room was pretty much wall to wall video screens and computer terminals, monitors featuring displays of various systems. Most engine room functions could be manipulated by merely selecting the diagram of the system via touch screen and highlighting it, bringing up its menu.

Morse came through the door. He nodded to Gosling and Marx, went over to Hupp at his console. “You went in that tank with Stokes and the other man. What happened?”

Hupp went through it all for what seemed the fiftieth time in the past few hours. “I cleaned some weeds out of the intake… Stokes, he was behind me, he said there was something in the water. Fish, I figured. We’re always sucking fish through the screens, Sir, nothing new there. Well, we must have pulled in a lot of weeds because the mud box was full of them…”

Gosling just listened, hearing it now for the second or third time himself. The ballast intake was fitted with a grid to filter out large objects and a finer screen in the mudbox for the removal of smaller objects.

“… I replaced the screen and… well, Stokes said something brushed his leg. Something like that. I didn’t think much of it. Well, he took out his knife and slashed at something in the water… I don’t know what… and I told him to quit fooling around and lend a hand. We were replacing the second screen. You know how they rot away. Anyway, Stokes cut himself with his goddamn knife and… well, couldn’t have been more than a few moments later he started screaming and thrashing. He yanked off his coat and threw it at us, then he stumbled into the water, thrashing around. Before we could get to him, he was up and out of there. That’s all I know.”

Morse just nodded. He turned to Gosling and Marx. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go have a look in that tank.”

Down to the pump deck they went, pausing before the service hatch to the starboard aft ballast tank. There was a strong smell of stagnation and dank saltwater about it. The hatch was secured with a couple dozen bolts. Marx put a ratchet on them and they creaked at first, his muscles bulging, then they came loose easily. It hadn’t been that easy when Hupp had removed it. The bolts had been rusted in place since the last time the ship was serviced and they had to use an air ratchet to get them loose.

When Marx was down to the last few bolts, Morse said, “I’m thinking about what Hupp said. About how Stokes had cut himself. Maybe he got blood in the water and maybe it attracted something.”

It was a leap, but considering what had happened and what was happening, not much of one. Gosling thought it over, his brain churning up nasty images of creatures that could smell blood in the water: sharks, piranhas, other things he didn’t want to think about.

Marx loosened the last two bolts and Gosling helped him lift the hatch free. The stench of stagnation and cloying wetness was stronger now, wafting up from the depths of the ballast tank. It reminded Gosling of tidal pools and stranded marine life. Morse and he donned the rubber chest waders Marx had set out for them, yellow hardhats with highpower halogen lights strapped to them.

“You hear any funny business down there, Chief,” Morse said. “Feel free to send in the Marines.”

Marx offered him a sly grin and handed both men gaffs, being it was the only thing resembling a weapon that engineering could come up with on such short notice. They were basically meat hooks screwed onto the ends of broom handles.

Without further ado, Morse clicked on his light and slid through the manway, his rubber boots finding an uneasy purchase on the slimy iron rungs leading down. One step at a time he descended into the murk and Gosling was right behind him. The ballast tank was huge, about the size of a basketball court. At the bottom of the service ladder, Morse’s boots slipped into the brown, stinking water. It came up past his hips.

Gosling eased into it, feeling the dank chill of it wafting around him.

“How’s the water down there?” Marx called from above.

“Nice,” Morse called up to him. “Strip down to your skivvies and take a dip with us.” Marx chuckled from the hatch above, his voice echoing around with an eerie resonance.

No, there was nothing funny about the sound of that laughter and standing in the sluicing brown water, it was even worse. Gosling hadn’t been down in a ballast tank in years. Not since he was a deckhand and had to clean them out. Even when they were drained, there was still a foot of oozing sediment that had to be hosed out. And right then, Gosling could feel the muck with each step he took. Every movement made was amplified by the cavernous tank, coming back at them with volume. The darkness was thick down there, a mist wafting off that filthy water. A few dead fish and bits of weed floated on the oily surface.

They played their helmet lights around and there was nothing to see but water and silt built up on the walls.

The stench was stronger now, almost overpowering. Like decay and brackish swamps, putrescent mud. Water was dripping. The air close and clammy.

They started off and Gosling could feel the breath in his lungs, the papery rustle of his heart. He’d never been prone to claustrophobia… but he was feeling it today. The tank was like some immense, submerged casket, the air thin and moist, all that brown, smelling water like some heady organic soup drained from a primordial, subterranean sea.

Morse led them forward, the beams of their headlamps bobbing and jumping, creating vast shadows and murky forms that rose from the mildewed water.

“See anything?” Morse asked and his voice sounded dry, airless.

“Not a damn thing,” Gosling said, panning his light looking for… he did not know what he was looking for. But maybe something that could smell blood in the water, something with teeth.

Morse stopped. “You hear something?” he said.

Gosling just shook his head, sucking that charnel mist into his lungs. He listened and heard only the drip of water from some intake pipe. He scanned his light back and forth. Grotesque, huge shadows crawled around them. Clots of weeds drifted past, a stray cigarette butt.

“What did you hear?”

Morse just shrugged, looked like he wasn’t going to say anything at all and then, almost in a whisper, he said, “Funny… sound. A sliding, swishing sound… but just for a second there. Behind us maybe.”

They put their lights back there and there was nothing but a few stray fish floating belly up. Morse motioned with his gaff and they moved forward, stepping carefully now. The water had been calm before, but now there were ripples and secret currents. Gosling was wound-up tight and he figured Morse was about the same.

“There,” Gosling said. “What the hell is that?”

It was something floating in the water, just beneath the surface. It could have been a large patch of weeds or maybe a scum of filth, but neither man thought so. They stood there looking at it, then at each other, then slowly — very slowly — they moved toward it. Whatever it was, it began to move and bob in the wake they created. Morse reached out with his gaff, his hands so tight on the handle that Gosling could hear his knuckles popping. In the splash of light from the first mate’s helmet, Morse’s face was sallow and lined with shadow. He looked confused, frightened maybe. There was no reason for it, not yet, but it was in both of them, chewing away at something vital and important within them.

“Let’s see,” Morse said, wielding his hook with a fixed, deadly intensity. “Let’s see what… this… is…”

He caught it with the gaff and Gosling tensed, made ready to swing his hook… was certain that it would begin flapping and writhing, but it did neither. It was nothing alive. As Morse brought it up from the water, they both saw it was only a denim work jacket.

“Stokes’?” Morse wondered aloud.

He told Gosling to get rid of it, knowing something like that could easily plug one of the lines. Gosling took hold of it and brought it back to the ladder. He went up half way and Marx caught the jacket with his own gaff and hauled it up.

Gosling went back down.

He was beginning to feel very ridiculous. Ridiculous because he wasn’t the high-strung sort. Fear, real fear, wasn’t something he had much truck with or use for. The ballast tank was just a ballast tank, not the home of some flesh-eating monster. It was time to start acting like a man here. There was a job to be done.

His chest inflated, heat burning where there’d only been a cold trembling before, he started back to Morse. Made it most of the way and then stopped. Stopped cold as if someone had taken hold of him.

Stopped there, he breathed slowly, waiting.

The sound.

It came again. A sort of muffled splashing noise, like something large had just dipped beneath the surface. Gosling panned his light over near the far side and, yes, there were ripples moving gently in his direction. They were too far away to have been caused by either himself or Morse. Then, he heard it again… this time from over near the captain. That same, almost hissing splash of something submerging.

More ripples, this time from behind him.

He felt something in his chest unwind, open like a flower. Yes, there was something in the tank with them. Something moving through that dirty water and moving with great stealth, playing a demented game of hide and seek. And all Gosling could think was that it sounded large and as he thought this, his flesh went tight and rigid as if his skin was preparing to be attacked. He stood there, waiting for whatever it was, waiting for something to take hold of his ankle or loop around his throat.

Another splash, then another. Finally, the worst sound of all.. . a snaking, sliding sound like something thick and wet brushing against the steel bulkhead.

And Gosling thought: It doesn’t know exactly where we are… it’s casting for us like a hound for a scent…

Morse started back. Coming fast. He held his gaff tightly in his hands, was ready to use it as the sounds came from just behind him. There was a look of abject terror on his face and if he had something to say, his lips were pressed so tightly even a breath couldn’t get out. Gosling turned and made for the ladder, splashing wildly forward, afraid he would go on his ass. But he made that ladder and started going up it.

There were more sounds in the water now.

Morse just said, “Climb! For the love of Christ, climb!”

It seemed to take a long time to fight his way up the ladder. The waders he wore were wet and heavy, the boots slipping on the ladder rungs, his hands gripping tightly. He had dropped his gaff and did not remember doing so. All he could remember as he reached up for the light, for Marx’s outstretched hands, was catching a quick glimpse of something as Morse started splashing toward him. A strange, convoluting form moving just behind the captain. Whatever it was, it was big. Very big.

When he was up, both he and Marx yanked Morse up through the manway and the three of them sat on the deck, not saying a word. Morse and Gosling were panting and thinking things and not honestly knowing if they’d overreacted or not. But were pretty sure they hadn’t.

Morse wiped water from his face. “Put that fucking hatch back on,” he said and it was not a suggestion.

Gosling helped the engineer put it in place.

Marx grabbed a bolt and was about to screw it in, but then he stopped. “What… what in the hell?” he said.

By then they were all looking.

Looking at what they assumed — and correctly — to be Stokes’ work jacket. It was laying on the steel deck not four feet away, rank-smelling water draining from it in little streams. What caught their eye was that the jacket was moving.

Or something in it was.

Marx stood up, grabbed his own gaff, said, “Something inside there

…you see that? There’s something inside there…”

Gosling just stared. Not scared or even nervous at this new revelation, just oddly amused. Thinking that there was a fish or something in there and it was nothing to worry about.

Marx hooked a sleeve with his gaff and lifted the coat up a few feet.

Water rained from it to the deck. Water that just smelled foul. Too foul for even ballast water. This was worse… it was rich and organic and almost gamy. Marx shook the coat and it moved again. Inside, maybe from a sleeve or the lining itself, there was something. Something white and fat and coiling, hanging on like a leech.

Marx shook the coat and it dropped to the deck.

It was bleached, bloated white, oozing with slime. Some sort of marine worm about the thickness of a garden hose and not more than a foot in length. It was winding and curling on the deck, trembling fatly, making slopping, slapping sounds. The outer layer of its flesh was nearly transparent and you could see a tracery of blue veins in there… but not for long. As it coiled, more of that slime bubbled forth, inundating it in a pool of mucus.

They all saw it.

They all stared dumbly at it, repulsed by its form, by its very existence.

Morse took his gaff and smashed it, cutting it in half. A gout of brown fluid spilled to the deck, looking much like spider blood and stinking like a corpse pulled from a river. It made a wet, gulping sound and on one of its ends, something like a puckered, black mouth opened and they could all see something in there… something like a tongue. And then Morse kept smashing it with his gaff hook until it was in five or six pieces and still, floating in a bile of that slimy jelly and brown blood.

Morse was breathing hard, sweat beaded on his brow. “Ain’t right,” he said. “Ain’t right, something like that.”

And all Gosling could think was that it had been in the coat all the time. Hiding in a sleeve or fold. Standing on the ladder, he’d used the gaff to hold it high above his head until Marx hooked it. And at any time, that horror could have dropped down onto his face.

Gosling would have been disgusted, but there was no time.

For something hit the service hatch from below and then hit it again and all he could think of was those bolts laying on the deck, the bolts Marx hadn’t had time yet to screw into the hatch flange. Something hit against it from below and Marx grabbed a bolt, dove on the hatch cover and managed to start a bolt and then the hatch exploded open and both he and the hatch were pitched aside.

What came slithering out of there was not the thickness of a garden hose, but probably big around as a man’s thigh. A worm. But the mother of all marine worms, something mottled gray above and dripping white below, loops of transparent slime hanging from the puckered black mouth like drool.

Marx made a sound and Gosling didn’t have the wind to.

“Oh my God,” Morse said under his breath.

About four feet of it came up through the hatch. It was wet and slimy and stinking, undulating repulsively under the electric lights. Its black, puckered mouth shriveled away from what was inside. A tongue. A tongue that was shaped like a corkscrew, something designed to drill into its victim’s flesh. Like an abyssal hagfish, a slime eel, this monstrosity — like the dead one on the deck — would bore into its victim’s flesh and devour it from the inside out.

At least this is what crossed through Gosling’s mind and he was pretty certain it was close to the truth.

It was moving side to side like a swimming snake, making a hissing sound, that hideous pink tongue jutting from the mouth maybe five or six inches. It was obscene. It was invidious. Morse hit it with his gaff and it made a high, keening sound. He kept hitting it and it reacted by inflating its body like a balloon, rivers of that vile slime pouring from its flesh, tangling it in a snotty web.

All Morse had done was piss it off.

Another two feet of the thing came up through the manway and it was puffed and swollen so thickly in defense mode, that it was big around now as a man’s waist.

Gosling grabbed a wrench and pegged the thing at what he thought might be its head.

Morse kept ducking in and swatting it with his gaff.

But Marx was way ahead of them. He ran off and came back with a CO ^2 fire extinguisher. He pulled the tab and hosed the worm down with a freezing mist of white. The effect was immediate. The creature had inflated itself probably as a defensive mechanism and now it shrank back to its original size, spiraling and looping on the deck, trying to throw off the spray from the extinguisher that was sucking away its body heat.

“Here, have some more, you sonofabitch,” Marx said, spraying the thing down until you couldn’t even see it anymore. Just that white, rolling mist and all the slime the worm was pouring out. With a shrill, deafening squeal, it slipped back through the manway and they all heard it splash below.

Nobody needed prompting.

They threw the hatch cover in place and started turning those bolts into the flange until they could turn them no more. All the while, gagging on the cloud of CO ^2 and the stench of the beast. Coughing, Marx put the ratchet on the bolts and locked the cover in place.

There were no more sounds from below.

Everyone was panting and gasping, just beside themselves with a combination of horror and nausea and bunched nerves.

When Morse found his breath, he said, “Seal off those outlets below, Chief. And… drain that goddamn tank. Flood it with bleach or bug spray or anything you fucking got.”

Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense.

21

“Hey, Paul.”

Gosling heard his name spoken and nearly jumped. Lots of things made him jump now. But it was just George Ryan, out taking a walk or something. He was leaning up in the corridor outside the crew’s mess smoking a cigarette.

“Are you doing a little detective work?”

Gosling cleared his throat of whatever had been stuck in it. “No. Why the hell would I be doing something like that?” he said a little more sternly than he intended.

“Why wouldn’t you? You’re just as curious as the rest of us, aren’t you?”

“There’s nothing to be curious about.”

George ran thin fingers through his matted beard. He dragged slowly off his cigarette. “Isn’t there?”

“No, there isn’t.”

Christ, this was the last thing Gosling needed right now. It hadn’t even been an hour yet since they danced the nasty with that fucking worm and he was beginning to wonder if it had happened at all. Morse was up in his cabin, trying to figure out their next move. Gosling himself had taken a hot shower and still he could smell that thing on him… that sharp stink of carrion. What he didn’t need right now was George Ryan reading his mind.

George laughed. “No, I guess getting lost in some weird fog and having a deckhand go crazy is par for the course at sea. I gotta get out more.”

“Jesus bloody Christ, George. I thought you were smarter than that. I was starting to think that you and Cushing were the only ones with brains on this goddamn ship. I guess I was wrong.”

George was smiling. “Save it,” he said. “Save it for Saks and those other idiots, okay? All the dumb swabbies who’ll swallow anything you guys tell ‘em. I know better”

“And what is it you know?”

“I know you guys are clueless. You don’t know what’s going on here or where we are or how we’re going to get out of any of this. And I also know there’s a lot more to that bit with that deckhand than any of you guys want to let on about. Why don’t you just admit it?”

Gosling just stood there, feeling completely defenseless. There were a lot of things he could have said. Countless lies he could have manufactured. But it would have all been pointless. George had him and he knew it.

“You want me to tell you we’re lost in the Bermuda fucking Triangle, George? You want that?”

“If it’s the truth”

“Well, it’s not, so if you don’t mind, I got work to do,” he said, walking away and leaving George standing there, that amused little grin on his face. Sonofabitch was just too damn smart for his own good.

Gosling made his way topside and coming up that companionway, he started to get a bad feeling. There was no real reason for it. But, regardless, it descended on him and filled him with a bitter sense of hopelessness, an anxiety that left him feeling utterly helpless. He paused there, leaning up against the bulkhead, and he honestly didn’t have the strength to face any of it. Things had already happened that were beyond anything rational and they would keep happening. Keep happening, he figured, until he was drained dry, without an ounce of fight left in him. And that was really the problem, wasn’t it? Gosling was a handson sort of guy. Very blue-collar, very working class. He was not the imaginative sort. His world was very black and white, the perimeters very well-defined. He asked very little of reality other than for it to always be the same.

And now this.

It was just too goddamn much.

He started up the steps again, telling himself in no uncertain terms to suck it in. He was the First and that meant people looked to him. Looked to him for strength and stability. Sometimes, when the going got rough, the First was the only thing standing between chaos and calm.

Gosling came out of the hatch into that boiling fog and right away, he knew there was trouble. Just as something in him had suspected. Somebody was hollering, crying out frantically.

“Now fucking what?” Gosling said under his breath.

It was coming from somewhere in front of the superstructure, somewhere out on the bow. Gosling made his way forward, that fog thicker than pillow down. He could hear one of the men shouting about something and then the sound of feet running in his direction. The fog whistle sounded, as it did every few minutes, but this time it made him jump.

One of the deckhands — Pollard — came bounding out of that soup, his eyes wide and wet and his mouth trying to form words.

Gosling took hold of him and slammed him up against the bulkhead. “What in the Christ are you yelling about?” he snapped at him.

“It… it was… I saw… oh Jesus, Mr. Gosling, he was right there and then he was gone and I saw it! I fucking saw it!” He was blabbering on and not making a lick of sense so Gosling shook him like a rag doll. Things like this he could handle. Men out of control, men about to shit their drawers because the sea had kicked their legs out from under them. “There was… there was… shit, I was out on the bow and Burky, you know Burky, First… well he was on watch, out on the bow and something got him! Just fucking grabbed him! He was four feet from me and I saw it, I saw something come out of the fog, First!” He slid down the bulkhead, making a pained, sobbing sound. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath. “It came out of the fog and grabbed Burky! Pulled him away and there wasn’t anything I could do!”

Gosling pulled him to his feet. “All right, take it easy. Take a deep breath. I think you’re hyperventilating, by Christ.”

Pollard was just a kid. This was his second run on the Mara Corday. He’d spent a couple years in the Coast Guard and signed on as a deckhand, wanted nothing better than to get his mate’s ticket. He chewed his lips, pulling air hard through his nose.

“Now what did you see?” Gosling put to him.

“Something…” He shook his head. “Something came out of the fog… I saw a dark blur… and, damn, it was big, whatever it was it was real big.” He looked at Gosling, maybe to see if the first mate and his superior was going to laugh dead in his face. But Gosling was not laughing; he was just staring. “It just grabbed him, First, grabbed him real quick… I think, I think it had wings… big, black wings… and it just yanked Burky off his feet and pulled him off the deck and out into the fog.”

Gosling gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Listen to me now. I want you to go below to your cabin and I want you to lay down. That’s an order.”

“But I got watch,” he said. “I was going to replace Burky.”

“You let me worry about the watch. Just go below and take it easy and don’t go telling anybody about this. We don’t need a general panic here.”

Pollard nodded. “Okay, okay I will. But… what’s with this fog, First? What the hell gives here?”

Gosling just sent him below. He stood there, watching that awful fog billow and surge. It was bad. By God, it was real bad. But Gosling was almost glad it was there, hiding things, masking others. For if it cleared, he was almost afraid of what they might see out there.

And what might see them.

22

Iverson was at the wheel, steering the freighter through the fog, and Gosling was at the chart table making computations the old fashioned way. With a pencil and quadrant laid over a chart of their last confirmed position, he had plotted their course… he hoped. But without working compasses, LORAN, GPS, or even a plain old star to pinpoint their position, they were sailing blind and he knew it.

He was just going through the motions.

But, honestly, he didn’t know what else to do.

“Come left to one-twenty-three,” he told Iverson.

“Aye, sir, one-twenty-three and holding.”

“Rudder amidships and keep her so,” Gosling said. He scribbled a few figures on the chart. “Mark your head.”

“One-twenty-three, sir, steady on”

Gosling sighed, staring down at the chart. In the old days with a good compass and a few stars, it was all you needed. Gosling was a good navigator and he had complete faith in his ability to navigate the old-fashioned way. But out here, out in this damnable sea on the far side of the Devil’s asshole, all he was doing was making wild, desperate guesses. He was changing their heading just about every hour on the hour, hoping they’d sail clear of that damn fog.

But it wasn’t happening and he had a nasty feeling it never would.

“Sir… the radar,” Iverson said, a note of panic in his voice.

But Gosling was already on his feet, the alarm of the collision-avoidance radar pulling him from his daydreaming. He stood before the console. What he was seeing nearly filled the screen and the Mara Corday was on a collision course with it. Something, according to the radar, that was about the size of a football field.

“Right hard rudder!” he called out.

Iverson spun the wheel and the ship canted to starboard. Everybody on board was feeling it now, that sudden drastic shift. Gosling was staring intently at the radar screen. Whatever was out there, it wasn’t a ship. It was big as one, but it was just too low in the water. The Mara Corday missed it by a matter of feet. As whatever in the hell it was swung past the freighter’s port side, it vanished from radar… then reappeared, only it wasn’t a single immense object, but a school of smaller blips each about the size of a station wagon, according to the screen. As it or they passed, they vanished from radar again and did not come back.

Gosling felt something in him drop. It had been close. Damn close. He exhaled, wiped a dew of sweat from his face. “Come left to one-twenty-three,” he said.

“Aye, one-twenty-three,” Iverson repeated. He was breathing hard himself. “What in the fuck was that?”

“Hell if I know. Whatever it was, we almost hit it.” Gosling sank into his chair at the chart table. “I thought… I thought maybe it was an overturned hull riding that low… then it broke up into something like a pod of goddamn whales. You log it.”

The door at the rear of the pilothouse opened and Morse appeared. He did not look happy. “What in the hell’s going on, Mister?”

“We came over hard,” Gosling told him. “Something… something bearing down on us.”

“What?”

The question was addressed to Gosling, but Iverson couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Ghosts, sir,” he said, tittering under his breath. “Just ghosts.”

23

The captain’s Christian name was Arlen Morse.

The sea was in his blood and always had been. When other boys had wanted to be Major League ball players or pilots or locomotive engineers, Morse had only wanted to be a sailor. He wanted to be ship’s master and have a craft of his own. Something big, something powerful, something important. In his twenty years in the Navy he’d helmed destroyers, tankers, minesweepers, patrol boats, light cruisers, and even tugs. It was his life and he wanted no other.

Then one day the Navy soured for him. He’d been a petty officer. Then, through ROTC, had made ensign. He climbed through the ranks to captain almost effortlessly. He did what he was told and in the way he was told to do it. There were only two types of men in any navy — those who followed orders and went by the book and those that didn’t. And those that didn’t went nowhere.

Morse played the game by the rules.

And in the end, the rules turned on him.

He had command of his own ship but that was it. Because he was not an Annapolis graduate he would never go beyond where he already was. His career was over. And this is why he left the Navy. Took his retirement at twenty years and went into the commercial service. He had no regrets. Life had been good to him.

Then came this voyage.

Like any other sailor, he’d heard stories and yarns from day one. Some sailors, it seemed, were more afraid of the water than kids were of dark closets. They made up stories. Missing ships were snatched by malefic forces or gobbled up by sea monsters. Howling winds were the moaning, disembodied voices of the drowned dead. Odd patches of mist were ghost ships. Stories of spooks and monsters and haunted seas were numerous.

Every sailor had a story.

But they were just that.

Stories.

But now Morse was really beginning to wonder.

24

The next bad thing happened toward morning.

The night seeped by like tar, slow and drawn-out, just as black and enveloping. Every man on board wanted daylight, hoping, praying maybe that it would burn off the fog and bring the world back to them. For everyone, even the ones who had not witnessed any of the true madness with their own eyes, was certain that they were lost now, lost in some terrifying plane of madness. Maybe it was the stories circulating like colds bugs, tall tales certainly no worse than the raw, unflinching reality of the situation. And maybe it was just something every man felt right down to his marrow, a sense that Hell had unzipped beneath them and swallowed them whole.

So the night moved toward day.

According to the ship’s digital chronometer, it was just after four a.m. when the shit duly landed and sprayed in every conceivable direction. Gosling, unable to sleep, unable to close his eyes without seeing immense mutant sea worms, was in the pilothouse. Pierce was at the wheel. At the chart table Gosling was drifting off, his eyes finally closing.

Then Pierce started shouting, spinning the wheel and moving the rudder hard to the right. About that time, the deckhand out on watch was on the intercom: “Barge… bearing down on us! We’re gonna collide! Hard over! Hard over! She’s running with no fucking lights on, no fucking lights…”

All of this happened within the span of a few seconds and by then Gosling was on his feet. He saw the mystery barge on the radar screen. Managed to see it, open his mouth… and then the barge slammed into the Mara Corday’s bow, port side, and he was thrown to the deck. The barge was a thousand-footer and carried enough iron and weight on her to cut a liner in two. She struck the Mara Corday doing 14 knots, shearing open the freighter’s stem, her own bow slicing into the forward cargo hold… the special double-hulled dangerous cargo hold which contained nearly 100 tons of hi-speed diesel fuel bound for French Guiana. Over two hundred barrels were shattered, their contents flooding the hold. Within seconds, the Mara Corday began settling to port. The barge, still under full thrust from its twin-screws, tore itself free from the freighter, swinging around and ramming her amidships with its stern. Immediately, millions of gallons of water flooded into the port holds. The list to port grew worse.

The initial impact had compromised the integrity of the superstructure, port-side decks collapsing beneath it. There was a screech of torn metal and the pilothouse yawned over a few feet, the windows shattering, the decks buckling.

Picking himself up, Gosling saw Pierce was down, his face covered with blood. Morse came stumbling through the door that led down to his private office.

All Gosling could say was: “Skipper… we got jeopardy…”

25

George Ryan came awake when he hit the floor.

In his ears, there was a phone ringing and ringing.

He opened his eyes slowly, wondering vaguely in the back of his mind who could possibly be calling at this time of night and what the hell he was doing on the floor. Then he came fully awake and felt the heave of the ship and realized where he was. The second thing he realized was that something was wrong. Dangerously wrong.

He could hear men shouting above the damned ringing.

Cushing was shaking Soltz. “Wake up, dammit!” he was shouting. “Fire! There’s a fire on board!”

George was on his feet then, mechanically pulling on his boots and pants and sweater. He slid his slicker on over this and finally sleep was slapped from his brain and reality insinuated.

“What? What’s going on?” Soltz said.

“Fire,” Cushing said as calmly as possible. But his voice wavered, trembled with anything but calm. “Fire… I think we’re on fire.. . we hit something…”

But by then, they could already feel the uncomfortable list to port. Smell something like smoke.

“What happened?” George asked.

“Hell if I know,” Cushing admitted. “I came awake hanging out of my fucking bunk, hearing that goddamn alarm. I heard someone shouting fire. We better get on deck.”

Soltz moved quickly then. Much quicker than either man could’ve imagined he’d move. By the time they’d gathered themselves together, Soltz was fully dressed and had his suitcase in hand.

“Jesus, nobody said we were sinking,” George said.

“I’m not leaving this behind. All my things are in here.”

Saks was barreling up the corridor as they went out. He looked angry. Maybe frightened, too, but probably just angry that he was frightened. He was carrying a heap of life jackets. “Put these on,” he said, throwing the life vests to the floor.

“Is it that bad?” Cushing asked.

“Come on, you dumb shits,” he snapped, “unless you wanna be toast.”

George looked up in the rafters, the survival suits hanging there. They could keep a man afloat and warm for days, it was claimed. “The suits…”

“Fuck the suits,” Saks said. “Now move!”

The corridor was filling with smoke. It was more of a mist than anything, but it was getting heavier by the moment. The air had an awful scorched, acrid stink to it.

They followed Saks up to the deck, donning the vests as they went.

“What happened?” Cushing asked.

“Are we sinking?” Soltz wanted to know. “Are the lifeboats ready?”

“Barge slammed into us, slammed into us hard. We’re taking on water,” Saks said. “Fucking barge tore into the forward hold, lit up that diesel fuel in there. Amidships and forward hold are an inferno. The rest of those drums go and…”

He didn’t need to say more. They could pretty much envision what it would be like sitting on a stick of dynamite.

The first explosion rang out when they reached deck.

26

Fabrini felt the explosion before he actually heard it. He and Menhaus were standing by one of the graders, lost in the ever-present fog. The impact threw them face first to the deck. They heard the muffled, mushrooming roar while they were airborne, followed by the sound of shattering glass and men screaming.

And while all of that was bad, the worst thing was the ship itself. It shuddered with a heavy, crawling roll, seeming to shift alarmingly further port without righting itself, flinging men across the decks like jackstraw.

“This can’t be happening,” Menhaus kept saying as he pulled himself to his feet, wiped blood from his lips, and was spilled to the deck again by the violent heaving motion of the ship.

“Oh, it’s happening,” Fabrini said. “It’s happening just like I fucking knew it would.”

Containers stacked amidships had been reduced to shrapnel as the hatch covers beneath them were blown free, gouts of flame raining over the spar deck. It lit things up just fine. Encased in the luminous fog, the flames reflecting against it… the ship looked like something that had burst the gates of Hell.

Saks came charging forward, moving with an almost feline grace despite the jerking decks. “Give a hand with the lifeboats, you pussies,” he called out. “To the boat deck, move your asses! Come on, Fabrini, you fucking wop, move it!”

Menhaus grabbed his arm as he rushed by. “Saks? It isn’t happening, is it? Tell me it’s not happening! I got a wife… I don’t wanna die out there! I don’t wanna die!”

Saks shoved him to the deck. “Listen, you fucking baby! Your mommy’s titty ain’t nowhere in sight, so quit acting like a shit and lend a hand or so help me I’ll-”

There was a high pitched metallic groaning from below and the decks trembled, dropping Saks on top of Menhaus. He crawled free.

“Move it! Move it!” he shouted. “Fabrini, you fucking cock mite, what the hell are you standing around about? Lend a hand, goddamn you!”

The decks were mass confusion as crewmen and mates rushed about in the swirling mist, calling out orders, clearing debris, and desperately stripping tarps from lifeboats.

The ship continued to drift with a jolting, uneasy motion, leaning further and further port as the fire raged and the sea rushed in.

27

Gosling jogged across the lurching decks, climbing the see-sawing ladders to the pilothouse. The air was thick and pungent with belching black smoke and the stink of charred wood.

He saw the deck lights flicker in that cloistral fog.

Go out.

The ship was plunged into seething blackness. Men started to scream again and he wondered if they’d ever stopped. The world was a hive of noise. Timbers crunching, metal creaking and groaning with fatigue. Voices were calling for help. Voices were arguing. Grown men were shrieking like babes and he wanted very much to join in.

Then the lights came back on, flickered with a dim strobe effect, but finally caught.

As he entered the pilothouse, or was thrown into it, he saw Morse at the radio. He was shouting into it. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” he bellered. “THIS IS AN SOS! THIS IS AN SOS! WE’RE SINKING… OUR POSITION…” he tossed the mic against the bulkhead. The lights kept flickering. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! We don’t have any goddamn juice!”

Gosling grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. “Captain, we have to get off her,” he stammered. “The sea’s coming in too fast for the pumps… if the rest of those drums go-”

“I’ve seen the Fourth of July, Mister, I know what’ll happen. Let’s get off this bitch. Lower those boats.”

Gosling had already given that order, just as he’d given the order for the men to don their survival suits just as they’d been trained to do… but in the confusion and panic with the ship yawing and rolling severely, well, he figured most never heard.

“Let’s go, First,” the captain said.

He took the lead, Gosling at his heels, making for the hatch… but never got there.

A tremendous ear-shattering roar ripped the night into shreds. The deck beneath them heaved and buckled. The pilothouse collapsed in a rain of splintered wood, glass, and twisted metal.

Gosling crawled from the wreckage, bleeding from a dozen gashes in his face. He found what was left of Morse: he’d been split in two by a beam.

It happened that quick.

Gosling made it out to the ladder, started climbing down the superstructure, deck by deck. The fog had thinned now, it seemed, been replaced by funneling black smoke. He almost made the spar deck when another explosion tossed him through the air. Girders and flaming sheet metal collapsed on top of him.

He tried to pull himself free, but his foot snagged.

“Help!” he called out. “Over here! Lend a hand!”

28

George, Soltz, and Cushing were gripping the portside handrail for dear life as they’d been instructed by one of the mates when the latest series of explosions barked in the night. They were thrown to the deck, but they all saw what happened.

And what a sight it was.

The explosions hit with more force than the previous ones. Like cannon shots. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! The decks reeled and buckled with a cacophonous screech of tormented metal, splitting open with great jagged rents that emitted eruptions of boiling flames. George saw the hatch cover over the starboard cargo bay actually bulge momentarily like a balloon suddenly filled with air before bursting its latches with a thundering boom and shooting into the sky like a rocket. Great rolling clouds of mushrooming fire and black greasy smoke poured into the sky, mixing with that noxious fog into a seething storm of fumes that sucked the oxygen from the air.

“Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,” Soltz whimpered.

George held on to him and Cushing, almost afraid to let go. Flames licked over the decks now, engulfing everything in their path. Lifeboats went up like kindling. Men were blazing like torches. The big dozers were shrouded in fire. George saw four or five men dive off the writhing decks, stick matches consuming themselves.

The deck lights went out for good now.

They were no longer needed. The ship had become a flickering funeral pyre of orange and yellow billowing light, backlit by the mist.

There were flashes of purple and red light, more detonations from below, more flames, more dying and screams of agony. The air was reeking with a hot, raw stink of seared flesh and crackling thunderstorms.

“Come on!” George screamed over the jarring racket. “We gotta get off her before she goes!”

They got unsteadily to their feet as the ship lurched further and further to port, the mangled decks dipping down to the water line. There was a sudden awful blaring noise of screeching metal as both of the dozers snapped their moorings and slid across the decks, taking howling, crushed men with them as they burst through the railing and into the black waters below. Huge fireballs cascaded into the night.

George and the others ran towards the bow, vaulting the injured and the dying as the ship heaved. Jagged fissures opened up before them, swallowing one of the graders and four men who’d been trying to toss a lifeboat over the side. Their screams split the air.

“Over the side!” George screamed. “Now!”

“I can’t swim,” Soltz blubbered. “I’m afraid to-”

George shoved him into the darkness and planted his foot on Cushing’s backside. Both men careened to the waters below, vanishing into the fog. George took one last look around before doing the same. The ship was going down fast. It seemed he could almost feel it sinking. The decks and cabins were raging with fire now. He gripped the railing and made to jump.

But stopped.

Someone was calling for help.

Just go, goddamn you, a voice cried out in his head.

But he couldn’t. This one voice seemed to rise up above everything else and he couldn’t ignore it. He jogged through the smoke and pillars of fire. The voice was louder. It was coming from up near the superstructure… or the jagged pile of burning shrapnel it now was.

“Help me out of here,” Gosling moaned. “For the love of God…”

His ankle was trapped between two timbers. George wrapped his hands around the upper one, the encroaching fire singing the hairs of his beard. With a great heave he budged it an inch, two inches, three. Gosling pulled his leg free.

They made it to the railing together.

“Over the side!” Gosling shrieked.

Another explosion rocketed through the night and both men were catapulted into the sea along with shards of steaming metal and burning wood. There was that dizzying moment of descent, lost in the fog and blackness, then the water. The sea was warmer than George anticipated. Warm and soupy, yet oddly refreshing after the heat of the ship. He plunged down into the waters, sinking and sinking, wondering why the lifejacket wasn’t working, and then he surfaced, sucking in smoky, salty air. Something gripped his shoulder and he realized it was Gosling’s hand.

“Swim!” he gasped. “Swim away from her!”

29

George followed in Gosling’s wake, distancing himself from the ship, realizing the vacuum of it going down would probably pull him under if he didn’t. The water was bobbing with wreckage. It was like swimming through an obstacle course. He heard voices crying out. Heard voices answering. At least they weren’t alone in their plight. The sea was flat as a tabletop… but the water itself… odd. Not just warm, but turgid, thick… water but not water as George knew it. But there was no time for observations. He kept up with Gosling and soon the ship was a flaming silhouette in the distance.

“We’re okay now,” Gosling panted. “Far enough.”

George watched the Mara Corday give up her ghost.

The fog was still a constant, but visibility had improved. The ship had listed now until its port gunwale practically touched the water. Then there was a booming rush of fountaining bubbles and she righted herself. For a second. The bow sank lower and lower, waves rushing up and over it. The stern rose up vertically like a jutting black finger and then she went down with an enormous hissing, leaving a sucking whirlpool in her wake. A few moments later, more cargo and flotsam bobbed to the surface.

Then there was only the cloisterous fog pressing in and that stillborn, tideless sea.