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?”
