Abyss

Mobile, Alabama, McGarvey stood up above the open hatch and waved at Eve who was at the stern, a blanket over her shoulders. She waved back.

All eleven of the survivors from Eve’s team were aboard one of the motorized lifeboats. They were frightened and elated and sad and subdued all at the same time, some of them looking back at the spectacle of the badly listing oil exploration platform.

“You’re all welcome aboard,” a short, squat man in jeans, a polo shirt, and a captain’s cap called across. “Plenty of room.”

“Thanks for pulling me out of the water,” Eve told him. “But I’d prefer to be with my friends.”

One of the young techs heard her voice and she jumped up. “My God, it’s Eve!” she shrieked

The Holy Girl ’s skipper gave her a sad look and shook his head ruefully. He glanced up at the bridge where some of his people were watching. “Frankly we’d just as soon not have you aboard. You’re a godless woman who has no conception of the terror your science is about to unleash on the world. And we’re dedicated — I’m dedicated — to seeing you fail.”

Eve pointed toward Vanessa Explorer. “Including damaging property that’s not yours? Including killing innocent people? Is that what your god tells you to do?”

The skipper was stricken. “No, we did no harm. We hurt no one.”

“But you stood by and let it happen!”

“We didn’t know!”

“The helicopter that brought over our attackers, the one from which I had to jump to save my life, was off one of your boats!”

“We didn’t know what was going on. I swear—”

“You swear to whom?” Eve spat. “Your kind, loving god? Because if that’s the case, you’ve got to be talking to a different god than the one I was raised with in Birmingham.”

She took off the blanket, tossed it in the skipper’s face, and jumped down into the lifeboat.

“You’ll rot in hell,” the skipper said.

“That’s funny, because from my perspective that’s where all of you and your reverend Schlagel already are! Hanging right over the abyss.”

Gail was operating the lifeboat, and as the techs swarmed around Eve, McGarvey motioned for her to head out to the tug. The engines needed to be shut down before the deeply listing platform was pulled apart because of the stress.

At one point all of them stopped and stared with Eve at Vanessa, and she glanced at McGarvey and Gail and then back at the rig. “What a terrible waste.”

“Maybe it can still be salvaged,” McGarvey said.

Eve shook her head. “I meant all the people, Defloria and Lapides and the men who worked for them. For us.”

“And Lisa,” one of the techs said. “She never came back.”

“And Don,” someone else said, sobbing. “He was helping them.”

An infinite weariness seemed to come over Eve, as if she were on the verge of collapse, as if she could not go on, as if she could no longer see the necessity of going on. “From the start,” she said. “Maybe aboard the Big G. ” And she began to cry.

McGarvey put a hand on her shoulder, and she looked at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m not going to leave you,” he promised. “Not until you’re set up and in business in the Gulf Stream.”

SEVENTY

DeCamp had been flying for a little more than an hour at full throttle less than fifty feet from the surface when he spotted the Cuban gunboat stopped in the water off to the starboard where he expected it to be. He’d been running without lights, but he flashed them twice, and when the Cubans responded in kind he throttled back and made a wide, lazy circle around the ship.

They were in international waters here, about sixty miles northeast of the western tip of Cuba, just far enough away from the Yucatan Channel busy with ships coming from or heading to the Panama Canal to be relatively safe from detection. And the fact that the Cubans had shown up as promised, meant they’d not been illuminated by the radar of any American warship.

As he came to within one hundred yards of the gunboat a small launch headed out to meet him. He unlatched the door, shut down the engines, and released the blades so that they would autorotate. The helicopter immediately lost most of its lift and settled toward the surface of the water, DeCamp carefully maneuvering the collective and cyclic pitch to keep the machine on an even keel so that the tips of its rotors would not hit first and tear the machine apart. It was one of the hardest skills he’d had to learn in the Buffalo Battalion.

The landing gear touched and the machine settled, water pouring through the hatch, when the rotors hit the surface and came to a stop after only another half turn.

DeCamp climbed out and swam directly away until he was well out of range as the helicopter settled onto its port side and submerged within a few seconds.

Five minutes later he was scrambling up the gunboat’s boarding ladder to the deck where a smiling Captain Rodriguez was waiting for him, and they shook hands. “A skillful landing, senor.”

“Anything on radar?”

“Nothing of any importance within one hundred and fifty kilometers,” the Cuban said. “But come to my quarters where I have dry clothing and a good cognac, and I can tell you what news we have been picking up on the radio.”

“Did it sink?” DeCamp asked.

“Not yet, but it is heavily damaged and in immediate danger of capsizing,” Rodriguez said, no need to ask if that was DeCamp’s mission. “So let’s celebrate at least a partial success, shall we?”

McGarvey, the single name crystallized in DeCamp’s mind, as he followed the Cuban below decks, and he began to turn over the mechanics of three possibilities open to him: revenge, disappearance, or both.

That Night

They had been standing off from the flotilla waiting for Vanessa to capsize, expecting it to, not quite believing that its list had stopped increasing and there was just an off chance that it might be saved, when the Coast Guard showed up. First one of the helos out of Saint Petersburg and then the 110-foot cutter Ocracoke. McGarvey had gone aboard, leaving Eve terrified that he had lied to her. But Gail had remained and she had been a comfort to them all, her hand steady, her words kind, her confidence infectious. “We’ve survived the worst of it,” she’d said. “We’re safe now.”

This was a major crime scene, and the Coast Guard had taken over, ordering the flotilla to stand well off, and most of the boats had simply turned around and headed home, but the horns and whistles kept up in a sort of angry triumph, because the bodies aboard the Pascagoula Trader had been found. People aboard the oil rig had died, but God’s flotilla had suffered its own casualties for a righteous cause, which in a lot of minds evened the score.

A couple of hours before dawn the Carnival Cruise Line ship Inspiration on its way back to Tampa from Cozumel had stopped at the Coast Guard’s request to take on survivors. One of her motorized launches had been dispatched and Eve, Gail, and the others had been transferred from the lifeboat to a boarding hatch just above the cruise ship’s waterline. Passengers had gotten up from bed, and in their pajamas lined the rail to stare at the unfolding drama, flash cameras pointed at Vanessa like so many fireflies on a warm summer evening. Under ordinary circumstances Eve would have been irritated by the lack of sensitivity, but she was tired and strung out, and anyway the passengers taking the pictures had no idea of the carnage. They had never met Lisa, and they hadn’t known Don, like she thought she had.

The crew gave her a pair of white coveralls and sneakers that fit reasonably well, and when they found out who she was, the captain had come down to the ship’s clinic to personally welcome her and the others aboard. They were only a few hours out of Tampa, but they were put up in some nice cabins, Eve and Gail in one of the first-class suites and urged by the doctor to at least try to get some rest.