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
