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WHEN MASON HOLCOMBE picked up his next card he knew Lady Luck with her shining golden hair and dress of crackling folding ht shoulder He tried to keep the look of the barracuda out of his eyes, but it was damned hard to do He had a pair of queens and triple jacks; he raised his eyes very carefullyoh, mon, he told hie" Layne, who sat across from him at the up-ended, rusted fuel druh forehead and close-set oval eyes, regarded hi to affect an off-handed aggravation "How many cards?"
"Three" He tossed the three down, took another three off the top of a dog-eared pack that had been used in boatyard ga as both men could remember
"Okay, what you puttin&039; up?" Mason said, ready to get on with it
Percy shook his head, his face wrinkled up and worried He gazed out across Mason&039;s broad shoulder at the plain of the sea beyond, then dropped his eyes back to his hand Without a word he reached beside hiarettes that had been broken in half He put four halves before hiarette halves, raked out three ed, ot, ood, I doan think," said the other man He laid down his cards in a fan shape "You can beat that, I know" Before him on the drum were two aces, tild deuces, and a six
Mason sat, nuhed out loud and took the cigarette halves to add to a growing heap "Came up lucky as all hell on that draw," he said quietly
"I ain&039;t playing no more with these old cards!" Mason said "You can just dah the back of &039;em! Jesus Christ!"
"Oh shaddup," Percy said, "and lay down your ante"
The afternoon breeze off the sea was cool and fresh It was a welcoh, away frorease, and battery acids They could hear the banging of a ha of a handsaw repeated over and over again - so in the boatyard Probably JR, or the fore theer&039;s broken hull planks The old man who operated her, Harless, or "Hairless," as the boatyard ood friend of the yard&039;s owner, Kevin Langstree, and so that accounted for the rush that had been put into the repair work
The Langstree boatyard had seen better days It was a jus, huts, piles of timber and empty oil drums, crates and boxes strewn everywhere, heavy ropes coiled like thick brown pythons, and a morass of bald tires stacked up to protect the hulls of boats It had been affluent once, bustling with traffic froe for both British and Ahters Noas kept up pri fleet and to do repair work if necessary on the yachts that cruised through here during the tourist season The work force had been cut to a third of what it had been during the early part of World War II, when the boatyard was paid handsoe Allied warships that had fought the Gerstree liked to tell everyone, the boatyard had worked fifty men on two shifts; the as plentiful and hard but the h, e of both the ser, more complex steel-hulled craft They had learned the art of fast patching, ofuse of available ain ready for the sea They could take down and put back together ocean-going diesels blindfolded, restore the snapped rudders and broken hulls of sailing sloops, rebuild skiff motors by spit and wire
But no more Many of thosejobs after the war had ended; so warships in a coet for the enemy Now most of the yard was abandoned Of two tin-roofed wooden structures used as drydocks only one was in use, and that only occasionally when a larger boat needed a patch job or some such serious work The other, allowed to fall to pieces in the salt air, had been constructed by the British navy for the purpose of storing daed warships until they could either be patched or until the heavy naval tugs could arrive for them; it was filled with supplies and equiper needed to patrol the Caribbean Although the jobs had dried up, the boatyard had alwaysthat kept Coquina on the map Most of the work either as fishermen or farlanced across; the bulkheadlike doorway to the nearest drydock had been opened and he could see JR&039;s head as the man worked in the concrete-reinforced pit Beside the shelter were the bleaching bones of an abandoned ketch, its splintered hull as white as the grass-thatched sand around it A few dozen yards away, beneath a block-and-tackle asse boats werestilts at the far end of the wharfs, facing the sea, read in weather-beaten red paint: LANGSTREE BOATYARD
Percy was not really concentrating as the cards were placed face-down before hi out at the sea He had watched the little skiff with the white h the boazed curiously out at the Abyss, where the skiff, only a white dot against the blueness of sea and sky, floated at anchor He wondered what the whitethere In theorb of sun! Moore had to be crazy as hell Even he, Percy, with his black flesh thickened by years of outdoor work, avoided the early afternoon heat, preferring instead to play poker beneath the shading palm fronds or drink beer and swap old stories with the other men up at the Landfall
He picked up his hand Four and six of clubs, heart&039;s king, ten of hearts, and ace of diamonds What to discard, what to build on? He suddenly felt like a fool sitting here He had nets toWithout the lines, and he didn&039;t want to The fish were getting too se nets on the industry boats that worked these waters on an erratic basis frightened away the fish that weren&039;t scooped up Dah for a man to feed his own mouth, much less a wife&039;s and two children&039;s
"What you want, mon?" Mason asked hi to ask for three cards, his gaze froze
The sea was boiling like a hot cauldron out in the Abyss, just beyond where Moore&039;s skiff lay Percy could see the great turbulence of it So He dropped his cards, rose up from the battery crates he&039;d been perched upon He pointed "What the hell&039;s that?"
Mason twisted around, narrowed his eyes "Jesus," he said, quietly
Theover the skiff; it was jerked down the side of a wave, then bobbed back into view again And as they watched, spellbound, they saw a eyser of water They thought at first it was a whale elinted sharply off what appeared to be a hard surface; the thing rocked back and forth as the ocean continued to churn around it
"Da up from his seat He put a hand across his forehead to shield his eyes fro his hands around hisceased and a man appeared at the shelter entrance "GET OUT HERE QUICK!"
On the Abyss ri to sort out what had happened, dazed because it had happened so quickly One reatthat depth charge, the next scrabbling wildly away as the charge hurtled into the depths He wasn&039;t bleeding anywhere, but his flesh felt raw and bruised and his head ached fiercely And then, as he stared at the hulk that had begun its eerie move to dig out: the upper above the mass of the submarine; it had been buried beneath the tons of rock and sand, and the explosion had ripped it free
Moore unfastened his straps and heaved his tank over into the boat&039;s bottoht and unyielding, and quickly cranked up the anchor with the hand winch
He laid the anchor in the bow, started up his &039;s wake
He drew up alongside it off the starboard bea well away in case it suddenly turned or heeled over for the botto across the bow and crashing with a hollow boo tower A mass of black cables and wires, secured to the forward deck, writhed like angry snakes The paint was almost completely scoured away to reveal the dark, sea-weathered iron, but here and there reinal dingy gray Moore could al under its oer, so straight was its direction, but of course the thing was long deserted - there was no noise of racketing diesels, only the relentless pounding of the sea He turned the tiller a few degrees, moved in for a closer look From the distance of only a few yards he could see the rivets in the conning-tower plates, and the sight was oddly disturbing The plates looked like scales on a huge, prehistoric reptile A cable as thick as Moore&039;s ar iron He recalled a picture he&039;d seen in an encyclopedia as a child: a black-finned ed teeth through the neck of a pterodactyl
He was entranced by the thing, lost in its aura of power and ancient menace In another fewaround the Kiss Botto wharfs and beach, others watching froan to turn, al in the reef, drawn by the influx of water there Moore turned his skiff to avoid scraping across a gnarled, green-slied reefheads So wharfs, but Moore couldn&039;t hear The hulk looked like it h the reef into Coquina&039;s tranquil harbor, but then he heard a loud grinding of iron across coral Sea foaan to rise The currents were driving the hulk across the reef; bits of coral shattered and collapsed under the thing&039;s weight The sub out of the sea like a knife&039;s black blade And then, abruptly, the grinding noise stopped The subed on Kiss Bottom, its bow out of the water but its stern deck still awash Moore could clearly see the closed vents of the two forward torpedo tubes on the starboard side, and a chill touched the flesh at the back of his neck
There wasattention Gulls swooped down fro, above the hulk, then sailed away on their currents of air as if disdaining contact with the thing Moore drew nearer; the subled crazily, now ht the stench of age, of a slow decay; it smelled to him like the carcass of a pilot whale that had beached itself in a directionless search for the sea Moore&039;s skiff moved into the submarine&039;s shadow, and it towered over him He cut his , and with a s to the submarine&039;s deck
Part of the forward deck had caved in; he could see where the deck plankings had given way There was still a lot of sand left aboard; it slithered with quiet hissing sounds around Moore&039;s feet and lay in clu tower there was a deck gun, still firood shape but for the wet sand that dripped froerly on the slippery planking He reached the deck gun and hung on to it Forward of the gun was the square outline of a deck hatch which appeared to be secured Ahead of his were twisted and broken, iron scarred and gouged He left the gun and worked his way forward as if cliun&039;s bore, black and deadly looking
He had taken only another step when the planking gave way beneath hi a cable; it held and he pulled hih the splintered opening Moore saw a glea, massive ured that the tube, protected by the iron and tiuts of the boat lay The pressure hull, he rereat depths at which these boats hadthe iron sides of the superstructure, the shell that protected the intestines, were dozens of ducts that allowed the water to streaines, the control room, the crew&039;s quarters, all the other compartments and stations necessary to the submarine&039;s operation were inside that tube It looked sined How ? Twenty-five? Thirty? Fifty? It seemed impossible that they could have found space toacross the subroans
A dead relic, Moore thought, staring at thetower He saw above it the periscope he&039;d been trying to dig out There was a second shaft that looked like another periscope, but this was battered and slightly bent to one side As the sun baked down, the so down? he wondered, and what boat was it? There were no identifying symbols or numbers; if there had ever been any, the sand had scraped the the maw of a crocodile that had come up to sun itself on the rocks Why, he wondered, did he sense so dead?
Moore heard the distant pounding of engines At first the sound chilled him until he looked toward the harbor and saw one of the beat-up old fishing trawlers approaching with athered on the wharfs, and children were running up and down the beach as if at some kind of festive celebration He waved a hand at the trawler and a , pulled up alongside; two brawny islanders leaped over onto the submarine&039;s deck Lines were thrown and secured; an anchor chain rattled down and a gangplank was tied into place between the trawler and the hulk Most of the men seemed reluctant to co a dark-blue cotton shirt and khaki trousers, crossed the gangplank and caaped in the planks
The ray hair and a firm, chiseled face He looked into the white , as if unsure of what he was seeing
"It came up from the Abyss," Moore said, still shaken
"Christ Jesus!" The black shook his head, peering doith deep-set, wary eyes through the broken planking at the pressure hull "Tellfor stuff off that freighter down there This was buried beneath a mound of sand and coral; there was an explosion"
"An explosion?" He looked up, sharply