As best he could, he walked parallel to the beach, just inside the tree line. There was no answer on any radio, and that was not good. He had most of the men on the island coming, but it was difficult to reconstruct what might have happened. They had heard a plane, but they really didn't know where it landed. Rafe hadn't had the good sense to report on progress, so there was no telling where that Zodiac had gone. Even full of men, it would go twenty knots easily. They might be around the point, but if they were there, they should still answer the radio. More likely, Chase had taken down Rafe and three men and gotten away.
But to where?
On instinct he looked to the sky. No plane there. None on the water, at least within view.
He cursed in his head in long, rhythmic phrases with such guttural texture that his invective made poetry.
This was another waste of his time.
He dialed McStott.
'What are we finding? We're running out of time.'
'We've torn apart Ben's home place,' McStott said. 'Your guys are over there tearing apart the beach house, and we've gone through the Gibbons residence. I'm convinced he does have something amazing-beyond the methane mining. But exactly what, I don't know.'
'And why do we conclude that he has something amaz-ing?'
'Because he's been talking to the government and to American Bayou Technologies, and everybody is imploring him to tell them what he knows. Although I'm not at all sure that the requests pertain to the same subject. Or maybe they do and I just don't see the connection.'
'Doomsday, energy crisis, and living several life-spans,' Frick said. 'Could there be something else?'
'Maybe.'
'Are you nuts, McStott? What else could there be?'
'Maybe no other technology, but there's a storehouse, some sort of off-site lab. Best I can tell, it's a large house or building, where he meets with other scientists.'
'Where in the hell is it?' Frick asked.
'I think Orcas Island, near West Sound, maybe Deer Harbor. I'm working on it.'
'That's one big area, so work faster. I'm tired of all your notions. I want results.'
Frick heard the sound of the engine on the amphibian. 'Damn,' he muttered.
It stopped.
He wondered if they were headed to Orcas Island.
CHAPTER 36
Studying the plane, Haley had found a fuel tank switch that sucked from the dregs of a second ruptured tank. For just a second she had fired it up and got them started in the right direction away from the unconscious officer and then shut it down, wincing at the horrible racket.
'To paddle this plane, it's too far and will take too much time,' Sam said. 'That leaves walking or the motor. If we motor, we wake people and arouse curious eyes.'
'Some people get up at this hour. It's all dangerous. I'll leave it up to you. I'm worried about Sarah,' Haley said.
'Use the motor to get near; then we paddle.'
They both silently cringed at the noise of the big Lycoming engine and, of course, its sound was magnified greatly by their worry. It reverberated off the rocky bluffs and probably caused Haley to shut it down early. It would be a long paddle.
Fortunately, they found a second paddle behind the rear seat. With both Sam and Haley paddling, they reached the yacht in twenty minutes. The hard work had one side benefit: neither felt hypothermia In fact, they were cold but breathing strongly as they approached the yacht from the stern, then climbed out on the fantail.
It was a large, beautifully constructed north-sea trawler design. Once on the stern, teak steps rose to the aft deck. Sam tried the aft main-deck door and found it locked. It was beefy and the glass heavy, so breaking in was a poor option.
He climbed to the wheelhouse and found it locked as well. Normally yachtsmen would hide a key. He climbed back up to the wheelhouse and looked for a hiding place.
Using his fingers to hunt every nook and cranny around the wheelhouse, he found nothing. He studied the far back corner of the upper deck and saw a large round canister that held an emergency life raft. He felt underneath it and all around it. Nothing there.
He went up on the outdoor bridge above the pilothouse and took the canvas off the controls and the wheel. It was too obvious a place to hide a key, but he looked, anyway.
After opening every storage locker door, he found nothing.
The situation was getting serious. They hadn't the time to move Sarah again.
There was a door on the front deck that would be rarely used and he tried that as well.
Of course, it was locked. There was a second tender on the yacht, a large Avon hard-bottom inflatable. The owners had taken the other ashore. He took off the cover, begging the Great Spirit for a break. He didn't claim to deserve it, but he thought Sarah might.
He found a box in it, which he opened. It revealed a very large crank handle, apparently the anchor winch handle for the fiberglass tender boat. It wasn't a key, but it might do to smash one of the heavy windows.
He went to the rear window of the pilothouse on the starboard side next to the ladder to the upper bridge. As he drew the handle back, he stopped short, thinking he ought to look under each stair leading to the flybridge. He went down to his knees and felt under the first stair: there, velcroed underneath, was a key; it opened the pilothouse.
He stepped inside, his eyes looking for an alarm box. Immediately he saw the keypad and knew they were finished. Then he saw the small green light, not blinking or flashing. It was too good to be true. He shone his flashlight on the control box. The word Unarmed appeared. He could not recall being so lucky, or a wealthy owner so foolish- blessedly foolish.
One pleasant feature of this floating castle was the very large moat surrounding it. Even at the poky ten knots that was the vessel's top speed, there was no way to come on the boat easily, except over the stern, and Sam could hold off an army there in the short term. aAs quick as he could, he took Haley and Sarah below to the master stateroom, which he knew would be amidships. Using the ship's flashlights, he covered the windows with blackout curtains.
It was just over twenty-one feet across the stateroom and it had a large king-size bed on one side and a small study area and library on the other. On the side opposite the bed in the master suite stood a section of wall with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and cabinets, along with a built-in desk.
The two women went in the marble-tiled bathroom and climbed in the shower. From the sound of it they were greeted with a powerful spray of water. Sam stripped and found pants and a shirt that fit him and then found clothes that looked like they might fit the women. He tossed them through the bathroom door.
In about three minutes Haley was out of the shower and helping Sarah into the bed.
Sarah was still shaking and beyond exhausted. Sam and Haley sat on the bed and opened the laptop. It took sixty seconds to find the recipe for Sargasso stew. Below it they found information about sorting through Arc genes using Venter's computer technology. At the bottom of the page was a stand-alone notation: Archaea — closer than you know.
Haley put her chin on her fist, deep in thought.
'What do you see?' he asked after what seemed a reasonable time.
'Archaea is an organism that makes methane-or consumes it-that lives almost forever and for whom oxygen is poison. So he says they are closer to me than I know.
But their DNA is circular, I believe. It's primitive even if it's closer to ours than, say, a five-thousand-gene bacteria. But none of that leads me anywhere. It's just a bunch of facts. For some reason Ben's sorting through a bunch of different Arc genes from different Arc species. If only I knew why. This is a stew, for sure. I see why Ben
