of water around the long left-handed bend, which led to the protected dead-end waters below Mount Richards.
Bob Lander slowed to below four knots while they searched for an anchorage. Tug Mottram caught sight of two old, rusting, gray buoys spaced about four hundred feet apart, some fifty yards off the rocky western lee shore. “That’ll do just fine,” he muttered, at once wondering if it had been Captain Cook who had left them there in the first place. But then, still looking through his glasses, he spotted something beyond both his imagination and comprehension.
Speeding toward them, at about fourteen knots, was the unmistakable shape of a US-made Naval assault craft, one of the old 130 LCVP’s, complete with two regulation 7.62mm machine guns mounted on the bow. What was really disconcerting to Tug was the line of big red and white dragon’s teeth painted about two feet high across the shallow bow. Worse yet, there were ten men standing on the deck, each wearing white military-style helmets. Tug could see the sun glinting off the ones worn by the for’ard gunners.
“Where the hell did they come from?” asked Captain Mottram standing stock-still on the deserted deck. He could only guess they were French, but he called out for Kit and Bob to take a look. Lander was thoughtful. “That’s an old Type 272,” he said. “Haven’t seen one of them for a few years.”
But young Berens, sharper by nature and a frontier Texan by heritage, took one look, grabbed for a set of keys, and announced he was headed for the arms cupboard, “RIGHT NOW!”
The Captain pulled his loaded sidearm from his drawer, and Bob Lander slowed the ship to a halt. Moments later the assault craft pulled alongside, and the leader requested permission to board. To Tug’s eye he looked Japanese beneath his big helmet.
Eight of the armed military men on board the LCVP climbed over the rails. Captain Mottram offered his hand in greeting, but this gesture was ignored. Instead the visitors trained their guns on Captain Mottram and his crew. The Captain and Bob were ordered flat against the bulkhead, arms outstretched. Mottram did not reckon his pistol would be much of a match for the Kalashnikovs the raiders carried.
Bob Lander turned to ask by whose authority this action was being undertaken and was felled by a blow to the head from a machine-gun barrel. At just this moment Kit Berens swung around the corner with a loaded submachine gun and opened fire.
Inside the communication room, Dick Elkins heard two bursts of machine-gun fire. He raced to the bridge window and tried to assess the situation. He knew there was little time, and he charged back into his office and slammed both locks home. A half-minute later, the first ax crashed through the top of the door.
Dick had only split seconds. He opened up his satellite intercontinental link, punching out a desperate message…
“
At which point the message to the Woods Hole command center was interrupted by an ax handle thudding into Dick Elkin’s head.
Nothing, repeat, nothing, was ever heard from the US Oceanographic Institute research ship again. No wreckage. No bodies. No communication. No apparent culprit. Not a sign.
And that was all eleven months ago.
At forty-one years of age, Freddie Goodwin was resigned to remaining a local newspaper reporter for the rest of his days. He had always wanted to be either a marine engineer or a marine biologist, but his grades at Duke University were not good enough to gain him a place in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic doctorate program.
Which more or less wrapped it up, deep-seawise, for Freddie. He decided that if he could not conduct scientific research on the great oceans of the world, he would write about them instead. And he would leave the academics to his much cleverer first cousin Kate Goodwin, with whom he had always been secretly and privately in love since he first met her, when she was just nineteen, after the death of her father…and his uncle.
Freddie set off into the rougher, more competitive path of journalism and was offered a place on his local newspaper, the
He attracted the editor’s attention because of his somewhat nifty turn of phrase, and his obdurate tenacity in running the captain to ground in the back room of a Cypriot restaurant in south Boston. The purple pen, which had unhappily proved to be an insufficient weapon to impress the MIT professors, with their tyrannical insistence on FACTS, was just fine for the
The news department in Hyannis also liked facts, but not with the furtive missionary fervor of the scientists. Within a very few years Freddie Goodwin became the lead feature writer on the paper and could more or less pick his own assignments, unless something really big was happening over at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, where he was always a welcome visitor.
He was a bit of a hell-raiser by nature, a striking-looking man, and talented, and he probably could have made it in Boston or New York had he been able to tear himself away from Cape Cod. As it was he felt contented enough when his feature stories were syndicated to other papers, including the
Cape Cod, the narrow land of his youth, his family’s headquarters for four generations, would always be home. He had never married — some said because no one quite measured up to his beloved, unobtainable Kate — but he had his boat, he even had a lobsterman’s license, and he had a stream of girlfriends. In the summer he crewed in the Wianno Senior racing class, and he watched the Cape Cod Baseball League, supporting the Hyannis Mets. In the winter, when the population of the Cape crashes by about 80 percent, he tended to drink too much.
On occasional assignments “off-Cape,” as the locals referred to the world outside their sixty-five-mile-long peninsula, Freddie Goodwin quickly missed the sight of his homeland — not just Mulligan’s bar up in Dennisport, but also the great saltwater ponds, the marshes and the sweeping sandy coastline, the shallow, gentle waters of Nantucket Sound, and the soft warm breezes of the Gulf Stream, which wrap themselves around the western reaches of the Cape for six months of the year.
He particularly missed those gentle breezes as he stood alone in the shadow of the great windswept icy cliffs that surround Christmas Harbor on the island of Kerguelen. And he wept helplessly again for his lost Kate, and for all of the twenty-three Cape Cod seamen and six scientists who had vanished off the face of the earth on that fateful December morning almost a year previously.
He had known many of them, especially Bob Lander. Freddie’s entire family had gone to the funeral of Bob’s wife just two years ago. The Landers had lived within a mile of Freddie’s parents in Brewster for almost fifty years, and the Goodwins were grief stricken by her death from cancer. Freddie wondered how the Landers’ three children were coping with this latest tragedy.
Through Kate, he knew big Tug Mottram, and Henry Townsend, and Roger Deakins, and Kate’s two assistants, Gail and Barbara. The Woods Hole oceanographic community was as tight-knit as any law firm despite the vast size of the waterfront complex, the 1,400 employees, and the 500 students. Those who make long and perilous ocean voyages to the Arctic and the Antarctic in pursuit of deep scientific research are often bound together for all of their days.
Freddie Goodwin could not bring himself to believe the entire ship’s company of the
There is no evidence to suggest that
At various times Freddie had demanded to know in both his newspaper and in letters to various Washington government departments how anyone could explain away
