They found Dr. Sam in the control room with Cavenger, Emilio, and several other electronics technicians.
“Dad,” Loch called from the doorway.
Dr. Sam looked up from calibrating the graphic recorders. He was surprised to see Loch and Zaidee.
Cavenger saw them too. “Get rid of them,” he ordered Dr. Sam.
Dr. Sam moved quickly to the door, his face flushed. “What are you doing here? I told you the base was off-limits today.”
“We’ve got something to tell you-” Zaidee started.
“Not now,” Dr. Sam cut her off, sharply.
“It’s important, Dad,” Loch said.
“I told you to stay at the trailer.” Dr. Sam raised his voice, wanting Cavenger to know it wasn’t his fault the kids had shown up. Loch picked up on exactly what his father was doing. He really hated it whenever his dad was afraid to stand up to Cavenger even when it just meant taking a minute out to talk to his own kids.
“Daddy, something wonderful-” Zaidee tried to get the words out.
“Look. Just leave. And I mean on the double,” Dr. Sam yelled at them, acting like a stranger as he practically pushed them out the door.
Zaidee stared down at the deck. She wanted to cry. They had the most wonderful news in the world to tell their father, and he wouldn’t even give them a minute.
Loch put his arm around his sister. “Sorry we bothered you,” he told Dr. Sam.
“It’s just not the right time,” Dr. Sam said, guilt crawling into his voice now. “You’re going to get me fired.” He went back into the control room and slammed the door.
“He doesn’t mean it,” Loch told Zaidee.
“Yes he does,” Zaidee said.
Loch kept his arm around Zaidee as they walked along the deck. “What do you say we go down to Sarah’s cabin?”
Zaidee ducked out from under his arm and glared at him. “No thanks. She’s probably having a bad hair day. You’re not going to tell her about Wee Beastie, are you?”
“No,” Loch said. “Let’s just see how she’s feeling.”
“That’s a definite pass.”
“You used to like her,” Loch reminded Zaidee. “I don’t get it. Lately, all you do is put her down.”
“Because she’s turned into a really horrible, spoiled, rich brat, that’s why,” Zaidee said.
“How can you say that?”
“It’s easy. Her father gives her everything she wants, and she’s got too many Harrods and trendy store shopping bags.”
“What does it matter how many shopping bags she has?”
“She always has them on display in her room, with all the brand names and logos of her clothes staring at us. Remember last year I had this nice new blouse from Penney’s and it had a little fox logo on it, and she saw it and kept asking, ‘Who has the fox, oh, who has the fox?’ Remember that? Her father lets her buy so much junk, nothing means anything to her, including people.”
Loch flicked his hand up the back of Zaidee’s neck. “Zaidee, don’t be jealous.”
“Look, just don’t tell her about Wee Beastie is all I’m saying,” Zaidee pleaded. “He’s ours.”
“Okay,” Loch said.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“Excellent,” Zaidee said. “In that case, I’ll wait on the rear deck. I’ll be lounging.”
Loch went down the stairway to the lower deck. What he really needed was a minute to himself to shake off the way his father had treated them. He knew the whole power play around Cavenger was very complicated, but the bottom line was that his father jumped whenever Cavenger blew his whistle. It seemed to be eating away part of his father’s very being.
The second cabin on the left was Sarah’s. Loch combed his hair with his fingers and knocked on the door.
“What?” came Sarah’s voice.
“It’s me,” Loch said.
The door opened. Sarah stood there, looking sleepy in pajamas. “Loch, what’s the matter?” she asked, when she saw how flushed he looked. She had come to know the look, and knew what caused it.
“Nothing.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Zaidee and I stopped down to see Dad,” Loch explained. “She’s up on the sundeck. How’s it going?”
Sarah brushed her hair back from her face. “All that riveting and hammering going on around here is driving me crazy,” she said. She closed the door behind them. “I really needed sack time. I had a hundred and forty-three nightmares about that horrendous monster trying to kebab me!”
“Yesterday was a nightmare” was all Loch said, knowing he couldn’t tell her about Wee Beastie. “Looks like your father’s still going to try to catch one of the creatures.”
“That’s all he talks about every second,” Sarah admitted. “I think he’s starting to go a little psycho. He knows if he gets one, it’ll be his vindication against all the people who have said he was nuts for going on crazy expeditions all his life. Let’s take a walk.”
“Okay.”
“I just have to throw on some clothes.”
“I’ll wait outside.”
“You can just turn around.”
Loch turned his back, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot while she threw off her pjs and put on a top and jeans.
“Do you remember how you used to drive me crazy pretending to eat out of dog-food cans?” she asked. “And you’d lift the cheese off a pizza and wear it on your face?”
“How do you know it wasn’t Mighty Dog?”
Sarah laughed as she slipped on multicolored leather boots. “I guess we both always liked weird things.” She led the way out into the hall and up to the sundeck. Zaidee was stretched out on a chaise longue reading a magazine. She made a face when she saw Loch had brought Sarah.
“Hi, Zaidee,” Sarah said.
“Hello,” Zaidee said. She grimaced at the sight of Sarah’s boots and went back to reading her magazine. Sarah and Loch went to the railing and looked down at the dock below to watch all the activity.
“Say, do you think you can borrow some wheels tomorrow?” Loch asked.
“Sure. Dad always lets me take one of the jeeps. What’s up?”
“I need to get a few things from town.”
An armored vehicle pulled up to the edge of the dock. The driver got out, unlocked the rear doors, and threw them open to reveal a few racks of high-caliber rifles. Randolph was on hand with a clipboard, assigning the guns and ammunition to the fleet crews. Sarah started walking to the bow. “Why all the artillery?” Loch asked, following her as the riveting started in again, vibrating through the entire yacht. “Nobody would want to kill a plesiosaur. They’d want to study them. It’s the chance of a lifetime.”
“Tell that to Erdon,” Sarah said.
Loch stopped at the railing. He stared down at the construction in progress at the front of The Revelation. A welder in a protective mask held a blowtorch, sealing a seam on a metal base. The riveters worked securing an immense steel harpoon gun to the deck. Nearby, its lethal ammunition lay in a heap-monstrous steel arrows to harvest a leviathan.
“Dad told me he doesn’t need to take a creature alive,” Sarah said. “He says even a fin or a tail, any piece of one of them, would prove they exist.”
7
Jesse Sanderson stood up, went to the refrigerator in the kitchen of his cozy apartment above the boathouse, and took out another beer. He had just finished watching the last of three laser discs on his new Sony entertainment system. The realism of the bullet sounds and throbbing music made the ruddy-faced old-timer marvel at the advances of technology.
From the picture window in the living room he could see the sunset and the first fingers of night fog crawling in from the water. It was on a night like this that he had sighted the creature far out in the lake, the creature with “a head the size of a big barrel,” as he liked to tell the story at the local bars. The night of the sighting he’d had a great deal more to drink than usual, but he was certain he had seen it anyway and swore by it. Whether it was really some appalling prehistoric creature of the lake or a swimming moose did not matter to him at all. The only thing that concerned him was that nothing happen around Lake Alban that would make him lose his job and comfortable apartment.