The Ocean Dark

29

Gabe stopped about twenty feet up the beach and surveyed the island. From their approach they’d already gauged it at about half a mile wide and three times that in length — not much land, but it could still take all day and more to search if they weren’t smart about it. He tried to think like Ruiz, the captain of the Mariposa. If he’d brought the guns ashore, worried about an attack come nightfall, where would he hole up?

Closest to the sand were towering skeletal palm trees, their heavy fronds barely rustling in the light morning breeze. At the bases of those trees grew a sparse sea grass. Farther inland there were other trees, green and tangled, and prickly-looking underbrush. Gabe didn’t see any obvious footpaths, but there were natural patterns in the growth, almost like coves on the shore, inviting travelers with easier access. Now that he looked more closely, he realized that the island wasn’t as flat as he’d imagined. A ridge of mounds — a sort of spine of natural rises — ran along its length.

“You ever seen breakers like that?” Bone asked, coming up beside Gabe. He wore a light pack and clutched a water bottle. “Black like that, I mean?”

Gabe glanced along the beach at the weird rock formations that jutted into the water. On either side of the cove there were places where jagged shards of the same ebony stone thrust up from the sand or the white foaming surf.

“Something like it,” Gabe replied. “Looks volcanic.”

“You think there’s a volcano here?”

The captain studied the island again. “Hell if I know. I’ve seen a couple of volcanoes, and it doesn’t look anything like that. But I’m not a geologist.”

“It’s weird, though, right?”

Gabe didn’t bother to reply. Bone had answered his own question. He turned toward the others. Tori and Kevonne stood a little farther up the beach, well away from where Pang was helping Boggs and the other two sailors dig anchors into the sand to keep the lifeboats from floating away on the first big wave. They were wasting their time; the tide was as high as it would get. But they were good sailors and had procedures to follow.

“All right, let’s go,” he called.

Boggs reached into one of the lifeboats and pulled out a long vinyl bag, unzipped it, and withdrew the rifle from inside. He loaded it quickly, then slung the weapon over his shoulder.

“Do we really need guns? There’s nobody here,” Bone said, a pleading tone in his voice. Gabe wondered if he’d been this way back in California, if he’d left because he’d been getting on his surfer buddies’ nerves.

“Maybe not. But the guys from the Mariposa are dead.” The captain wore a nine-millimeter pistol in a holster on his right hip. He reached down and popped the snap that kept it in place. “I’d rather be prepared than join them.”

Gabe walked down to meet Boggs and the others, who gathered around him.

Bone hurried to catch up. “Hey, Captain, do you think I could have one, then?”

“When we find our cargo, you can all have guns for all I care. But let’s get to work. Four teams. Kevonne, take Pang and head west along the shore. Look for any sign of the Mariposa’s crew — footprints, guns, breaks in the tree line. Tori and I will head east.”

He turned to Boggs. “The rest of you go with the chief. Head inland maybe a hundred yards, then split up, two in one direction, two in the other. Crisscross that section. They won’t have taken the guns much deeper than that. Don’t waste time with the overgrown areas or the hills.”

“We should go in as far as the bottom of those hills, though, Captain,” Boggs said. “There may be decent defensive positions there. If the Mariposa’s captain wanted a place to hide, or to fight from, he might have gone that far.”

Gabe didn’t like to be contradicted, especially by a man like Boggs, but he couldn’t deny that the chief had a point.

“All right. Go in as far as the hills, but don’t climb. Even if they wanted the high ground, they didn’t lug crates of guns up those hills, and the guns are what we’re looking for. They’re all that matters. Make sure every team has at least one radio. Let me know the second you run across anything that’s even a question mark. I’ll decide for myself what is and isn’t important. Got it?”

The men all began to move out. Tori knelt in the sand, double-checking her pack, making sure they had food and water. When they had first set out on this voyage, Gabe had hated the idea of some office girl coming along, looking over his shoulder, reporting back to Viscaya. Now he was glad to have her along.

Tori had surprised him with her resilience. The typical cubicle slave would be curled up in a weepy fetal ball back in their quarters right now. But Tori had steel in her, a survivor’s edge, and he admired the hell out of that. He had brought her out to the island to make sure that he had a witness that Esper and the rest of his bosses at Viscaya would trust. Gabe would do whatever it took to get those guns, to finish the job, but if they ended up going home empty-handed, he wanted Tori to be able to tell them firsthand that he’d done everything possible.

True, Tori’s eyes had a glint of fear, but they all looked afraid. The difference was that everyone else seemed content to let him lead, while Tori had an air of determination that had nothing to do with Gabe Rio or his orders. Terrified she might be, but she would do whatever it took to get the job done and get home safe. They were in it together, and he liked that.

“Thanks,” she said as she shouldered her pack and they started east along the sand together.

“For what?”

“Not sending me with Boggs.”

Gabe had been starting to search the sand and the tree line, but now he glanced at her. “You honestly think I’d have done that to you?”

“I thought maybe you’d see me as a liability,” Tori said.

The irony of the comment, given what he’d just been thinking, made him shake his head. “I don’t.”

“Glad to hear it.”

They walked near the tree line, where the sand did not give way so readily beneath their feet. Beyond the cove, the black rocks were not so prominent, but there were many places where patches of dark stone were visible under the sand, as though it had been worn away to reveal the rocks beneath, like the beach was only a disguise for the real island under it.

In one spot, they came upon a great hump in the sand, but as they drew closer Gabe saw that it was an old rowboat, overturned and half-buried in the sand, wood bleached white by time and sun. As they stood puzzling it out, Tori tapped his arm and pointed into the trees farther along the beach, where what had once been a small yacht — forty feet or so — lay among the trees and brush, partially overgrown, two downed palms evidence of its violent arrival on shore.

“Must have been a hell of a storm,” Tori said.

“They’re born around here all the time,” Gabe replied, though when he glanced at the blue sky, felt the baking warmth of the sun and the bare whisper of the day’s wind, it was hard to imagine a hurricane striking this tiny island.

Farther along they came upon another outcropping of the black rock where the remains of at least two lifeboats were scattered. There were derelict ships half-sunken — and some completely submerged — off the island here as well, but they were not as numerous away from the cove. In the surf, a small boat with an outboard — a Whaler no doubt used as a runabout by the rich owners of one of these ruined yachts — swayed back and forth with the waves.

“I don’t see a thing,” Tori said when they had gone perhaps three-quarters of a mile. “Are we even sure the Mariposa stopped here?”

Gabe glanced at her, a dozen harsh replies playing on his lips. What came out instead was honesty. “I’m not sure of anything, but it feels like someone’s been here.”

Tori actually laughed, and he glanced at her sharply, only to see her gesture toward the nearest offshore wreck. “It feels like plenty of people have been here. The place is like the Bermuda Triangle’s backed-up drain.”

He had been trying to avoid such thoughts. “I don’t believe in that crap.”

They walked half a dozen steps before Tori replied. “I don’t, either. But the only other thing I can think of is pirates. Could be they attack these other ships, kill the crews, steal whatever they can, then take them here and scuttle them. Like home base or whatever.”

“Could be,” Gabe said.

But he didn’t believe it. Not only did it feel like bullshit, but they had yet to see any sign of visitors. No remnants of a camp or a cooking fire or even prints in the sand. The weather could eradicate such things, but not if they were recent. And if it wasn’t pirates, he didn’t have the first clue what had happened to all of these ships.

Tori paused to check out a gap in the tree line, but only for a moment before moving on. Gabe started to do likewise, but the breeze lifted slightly and rustled the fronds of the palm trees, and he looked up.

The gap provided a perfect view of the nearest of the island’s hills. They were green and brown and thick with vegetation in some places — making him wonder how far seabirds might carry seeds — but there were peaks and ridges made of that same glassy black, and he realized that his thoughts about the beach hadn’t been completely off. Much of the island’s spine consisted of that ebony stone. He’d never seen anything like it.

Tori had kept walking and now Gabe picked up his pace to catch her. They must have traveled nearly a mile by now — half the distance they’d need to meet up with Kevonne and Pang on the other side, with no sign of any visitors to the island except the ruined boats. None of it made any sense.

Gabe paused to examine an area of undergrowth that seemed to have been disturbed, but the ground around it showed no sign of passersby, and he figured it had been bad weather or some kind of animal, though they hadn’t seen anything at all so far.

“What is it, Captain?” Tori prodded.

He turned to her, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t have to call me Captain out here, Tori.”

“Okay. What’s on your mind, Gabe? You’re distracted, and it isn’t just this.”

Something about her cool brown eyes brought the truth out in him. “Just thinking about Maya. About how things ended.”

Tori thrust her hands into her pockets as they continued along the sand. “It got ugly, huh?”

“Very. If I end up in prison over this, I don’t think she’ll care,” Gabe said, thinking that Maya might even be happy. Then she could carry on fucking whoever she wanted and never have to worry about his jealousy again.

Wrapped up in his own thoughts, he missed the way Tori stiffened and the fear that flared in her eyes. But when she said his name, her voice had become so small that he looked at her anew.

“I can’t go to prison, Gabe. Not even jail. Not for a single night.”

Some of the respect he felt for her slipped away. “None of us wants to go to jail, Tori. It’s definitely not part of my plan. I’ll do whatever it takes—”

Tori shook her head, fixing him with hard eyes. “You don’t understand. I can’t go to jail. The cops will find out who I am, and then …”

Gabe frowned as her words trailed off. “What do you mean, who you are?”

She sighed, gnawed her lip a bit, and he saw in her eyes the moment when she decided to trust him. Tori started walking again and, sensing it was what she desired, Gabe fell in beside her. While they walked, she told him the story of her life before she came to Miami, of her cruel father and criminal husband, of her plan to escape, and the hideous coincidence that allowed her to do so without anyone realizing she had gone.

Tori told the story without ever mentioning her real name.

“He thinks I’m dead, Gabe,” she said, turning to him once more, eyes pleading. “Everyone thinks I’m dead. But if I go to jail, he’ll find out I’m alive, and that’s the one thing I know I couldn’t survive.”

Gabe watched her a moment, absorbing her fear, and the truth of it. It frightened her more to imagine seeing her ex-husband again than it did to think of going to prison, or dying out here the way the crew of the Mariposa had.

“All right,” he said. “Before we reach port, I’m going to get Viscaya to off-load the guns onto a smaller ship. No reason I can’t off-load you, too. If you don’t come into port, you can’t be blamed for beating the crap out of an FBI agent and holding him captive.”

“But Josh knows I was on the Antoinette.”

Gabe shrugged. “The FBI can’t arrest you if they can’t find you, Tori. You’ve started over before. You can just vanish, like you did in New York.”

Her eyes widened. Somehow, this option had never occurred to her.

“But none of that’s going to work if we don’t find the damn guns,” he added.

She nodded and they picked up the pace. Just a few minutes later, the radio clipped to his belt chirped and he snatched it up.

“Go ahead,” he said.

Boggs’s voice came through with only a smattering of static. “Captain, we found something. A couple of caves in the base of a hill.”

Caves. Could the Mariposa’s crew have hidden there, or at least stashed the guns there? The scenario spun out in his head and Gabe could see it was possible. The dying man on the fishing boat had said they thought they’d be safer on land, which Gabe figured meant whoever attacked them had greater numbers and they wanted to fight back from cover. The trees would provide some, but as a base, the caves would make perfect sense.

“Any sign of the guns? Or people?”

More static. “Not yet.”

“All right. Keep looking. Call in if you find anything. If you see other caves, search them, too. And, Chief?”

“Yeah.”

“Watch yourself.”

“I hear that.”

With a final blast of static, they signed off. Gabe put the radio back on his belt. Tori had slowed down to listen to the exchange, but was still a few paces ahead.

“You think they’ll find anything?” she asked as he caught up.

“Them or us. We’ll find something.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Gabe shot her a sidelong glance. “Worst-case scenario, the pirates or whatever found the guns and took them, right? Which means they killed everyone on the island. If we don’t find the guns, you can be damn sure we’ll find the bodies.”

“Well, there’s a pleasant thought,” Tori teased.

He had no reply. Gabe had always enjoyed her company, but — much as he would have liked to set her at ease — he couldn’t find it within himself to make light of their situation. There was nothing pleasant about it.

So he said nothing, and they walked on in silence, with Gabe stealing occasional glances at Tori. He’d always flirted with her, found her attractive, even beautiful at times. But it had been a long while since he’d walked on the sand with a woman other than his wife, so despite the many other things on his mind, he found his thoughts straying to Maya. If he’d listened to her, he might have avoided all of this — the FBI, the murdered crew of the Mariposa, this island.

If you’d listened to her, she might not have started screwing someone else.

A ripple of anger passed through him, not at Maya but at himself for even entertaining such thoughts. She had known who he was, and how much he belonged to the ocean, when she married him. Gabe hadn’t changed at all, but somehow her expectations had.

You’ll get out of this, he told himself, as if that would show her how wrong she had been. It was a foolish instinct. Maya wouldn’t care. Yes, he had a plan that just might keep him and Miguel from serving any real jail time, but after what Maya had done to him, did it matter? The question that settled in and gnawed at his heart was whether or not Viscaya would be able to give him a job when it was all over — whether anyone would hire him to crew a ship after the shitstorm that this would all bring.

Without Maya, he had nothing to go home to.