see now. My right eye is dominant, but I preferred to wear the night vision monocular over my left. When I closed my right, it was like looking through a magic green tube. The night bloomed bright with details. I could see Arlis sitting up, watching me from the distance. The cypress trees above him were isolated and set apart from the starry skyline, their leaves iridescent and waxy.
When I turned my head, the swamp gloom was illuminated, and I could see that two of the monitor lizards had returned. The animals were perched on the high bank among cattails, tongues flicking, probing air molecules for a scent of prey or the warning scent of predators. Their eyes no longer glowed. Through the monocular, their reptilian eyes appeared as opaque as the eyes of a snake that was shedding its skin.
In reality, I was not looking through the monocular. I was seeing an amplified electronic image on a phosphor screen. The device collected a broad spectrum of light, intensified it, then reassembled real-time images that produced the illusion that it was high noon as if viewed through a Heineken bottle, not a windy, starry February night.
Underwater, the monocular would be even more effective once I activated the built-in infrared light. The infrared was invisible to anyone or anything not equipped with night vision, and the unit was waterproof to a hundred feet.
As I swam toward the marker buoy, I gave some thought to the Nile monitor lizards that were still watching me from shore. The monitor is a foul-tempered pet and a prolific breeder that has, over the years, caused too many impulse buyers to dump their purchases along the sides of the road rather than risk their cats or dogs being killed and eaten. Monitors are superb swimmers, they can scramble up trees, they nest in unseen burrows and they will eat just about anything that moves—or doesn’t move fast enough.
The Nile monitor is a relentless diurnal predator that hunts in packs when necessary—and there is no shortage of prey in the suburbs of the Sunshine State. On its native continent, monitors are hunted for food by crocs and by humans. In Florida, though, where filet of lizard tail isn’t on the menu, the animal has been allowed to ascend to the position of an alpha predator. That’s why it has multiplied so rapidly throughout the state.
The lizards didn’t cause me any uneasiness, though. They were the size of bulldogs, although twice as heavy. Even if there had been a dozen of them, I doubted if they would have risked attacking a full-grown man. Had I been in Indonesia, though, not the pasturelands of Florida, my reaction would have been much different.
I had spent time in Indonesia and so I knew from experience.
On the islands surrounding Pulau Komodo, there lives a close relative of the animals that were now watching me. There, as in Florida, the monitors have no natural predators, so they have evolved to a massive size—“island gigantism,” the phenomenon is called. They grow to eleven feet long, three hundred pounds, and their attacks on man are well documented. The animal’s tail is as lethal as its bite.
Their hunting technique is also well documented. Indonesian monitors use their tails to knock their prey to the ground, then inflict one or more tearing bites. Then they wait patiently. When the wounded victim is immobile— it doesn’t have to be dead—the monitor begins to feed.
For more than a century, biologists believed that carrion-borne bacteria in the lizard’s mouth is what caused paralysis in victims, man and animal alike. It is now known, however, that the monitor lizards of Komodo are indeed venomous. At least one very fine Australian scientist is now assembling evidence that most, if not all, monitors are equipped with poison glands.
They are an ancient species articulately equipped for survival.
I had seen monitors on islands near Sumatra that were the size of rottweilers, not lapdogs, that, with their viper tongues, wind-scented primates as quickly as carrion. One time, on the island of Gili Motang, on the Suva Sea, an Australian friend and I had found the claw and tail prints of a big monitor on a beach beneath coconut palms not far from the lagoon where we had anchored our boat.
The two of us spent the afternoon tracking the animal through dense Indonesian rain forest. A couple hours before sunset, my friend and I were both exhausted and frustrated—outsmarted by a reptile?—and so we returned to the lagoon and our little ridged hull inflatable.
We hadn’t lost the monitor lizard, it turned out. She was in the shadows waiting on us. It was one of the big females, probably a couple hundred pounds. She was ten feet tall, standing on her hind legs in a thicket of traveler’s palms as if begging for a treat.
It was a rare encounter. Her tongue had probed the air experimentally like a snake, tasting the flavor of us in advance of attacking. She’d been shadowing us the whole time, we guessed later, anticipating our moves. Why she didn’t press her attack as we backed away toward our boat and then escaped by sea, we didn’t know.
Days later, an Indonesian naturalist, who was as knowledgeable as she was beautiful, suggested it was because some Komodo monitors are nocturnal hunters, either by predilection or genetic coding, so the animal was waiting for nightfall to attack.
If the naturalist was right, sunlight had saved us, not our quick feet.
King’s voice interrupted my thoughts, chiding me from the shoreline. “Hurry back, now—you hear, Jock-a-mo! Bring your new boyfriend something real pretty, okay? Perry’s waiting!”
Because I suspected he would do it, I had my hands up, shielding my eyes, when he tried to blind me with one of my own flashlights. A second later, a chunk of rock the size of a baseball landed in the water nearby. By the time I’d made it to my marker buoy, the man had lobbed three more rocks at me. I’m not often tempted to reply with a middle finger, but I was tempted now.
Instead, I turned away from the rocks and the blinding light and used night vision to have a last look toward the swamp The third monitor lizard had returned to the bank—a presence I found reassuring instead of disturbing. If three small lizards were in attendance, it suggested that a very large gator or croc was nowhere in the area.
I tested my regulator, then checked my new watch, a Graham Chronofighter. My pals at the marina had given it to me as a present—Tomlinson’s idea, as I knew. It had a big round face that was luminous with orange numerals. The watch read
I twisted the bezel, marking the time of my descent, and then I deflated my BC. I submerged, feetfirst, using the buoy line to feel my way downward.
The water was clear again. Details of my fins and my hands were bright through the monocular. Soon, when I could distinguish the bottom, I turned and began to kick slowly downward, hearing the crackle of fast-twitch muscle fiber as fish spooked ahead of me. Sand appeared a luminous blue and fossilized oysters were black—a dinosaur-era tableau that created a nagging worry in the back of my brain. I wasn’t sure why. It had something to do with those three monitor lizards, flicking their tongues, wind-profiling me, before I had submerged.
It took a minute to formulate the details, but it finally came to me. The results were unsettling: Nile monitor lizards are diurnal, unlike their monster-sized cousins in Indonesia. They hunt at sunrise and they hunt at sunset, but they spend their days and nights underground.
What were the three lizards doing outside their dens watching me long after sunset? Why were Nile monitors hunting at night?
NINETEEN
NEAR THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KARST TUNNEL, AS I reached for the mammoth tusk to steady myself, I stopped and listened, aware that something large had entered the water somewhere above me.
It wasn’t close and it wasn’t loud, but the object had weight. The awareness came to me as a feeling, not a linear observation. Water, displaced by mass, exerts an expanding wave of pressure. I sensed the subtle force before the vibration registered in my ears.
My first thought was that Perry had forced King into the lake to help me with the jet dredge.
But, no . . . it wasn’t King. I had heard only the percussion of entry, no amateurish thrashing and splashing. It wasn’t King and it certainly wasn’t Perry.
It was something else—something not human, I felt sure. An inanimate object possibly. It could have been a boulder or a chunk of tree trunk. I pictured King throwing something big into the water, another attempt to irritate me. In him, humor took the form of harassment when violence wasn’t an option.
Maybe so, but he hadn’t thrown a chunk of wood. Wood floats. Whatever had breached the surface now continued to move. I could hear it, descending rapidly down the lake’s incline. It made a scraping, clanking noise that was impossible to identify.
