“Got it in one. When I know who I am, everything comes back to normal. But…”
“Yes?”
“But my memory’s not always there. You know what I mean? One minute I’ll be looking at something familiar, a knife, maybe, or a spoon, and the next I’ll be thinking, well this is really great but what is it called? What does it do? A spoon, mind you, and I can’t remember what it’s for.”
She stood in silence, weighing it up. Which was worse? Too much memory, or not enough?
“What’s your problem?” he asked, like her, going to the heart of the thing with childlike directness.
“What problem?”
“Start with Sam. What’s that all about?”
“He…I don’t know how to explain it. He knows something about me…” She could feel herself blushing in the dark, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.
“Go on,” he prompted gently. “You can tell Doc. I won’t hold it against you. Chances are I won’t even remember it when I wake up in the morning.”
She began to laugh, but then with a strange kind of emotional lurch she realized he meant it seriously. Literally. Her whole body began to shake. She held on to the low windscreen in front of her and took a deep, deep breath. “Okay. It started when I was just a kid in high school. Ninth grade. There was this guy selling drugs…”
When Martyr brought his daughter up a cup of soup, he found her so deep in conversation with Weary that he just left it convenient to her elbow and went away again, feeling like an intruder. He joined Hood and heard, much as Robin had done five hundred miles south of here, the story of their meeting. At once he saw the dangers to the boat and to his daughter of a man whose memory did not work, but Sam put his mind at rest. “Funny thing, Mr. Martyr,” he said in that deep, gentle, strong bass of his, “I’ve never known him to switch off in action, you know? Unless he hits his head, like this afternoon, he’s always clear as a bell when there’s anything to do. But if he’s resting, say, or just sitting around, then it can sometimes slip away from him. I remember we were anchored off Silhouette just a couple of weeks ago…”
“Sam!” Doc’s voice interrupted the conversation.
“Yeah, Doc?”
“I think we’re coming up on the right spot. You want to start checking with the echo-sounder?”
They dropped anchor just after 23:30 and decided to go down at once. Richard had described the box he wanted in careful detail, especially after his bad luck with the original. As long as there were no unwelcome visitors down there to disturb them as he had been disturbed, they should get the thunderflashes up and stowed within half an hour. Then they could all get some rest and sail again at dawn.
Sam and Doc suited up. They would dive while Chris and her father pulled the boxes carefully aboard and checked them, leaving them on the afterdeck to drain. Robin’s wetsuit was too small to fit either man, so they split Richard’s. Doc got the leggings and Sam the top. Both men had their own flippers for snorkeling, and the masks and tanks were standard size.
Vividly aware of Richard’s warnings about marine life in this area, they both took spear guns and powerful torches with flotation chambers, designed to rise quickly to the surface if they were dropped. Quietly, tensely, they went over the simple routine they had worked out, then it was time to go down into the warm, inky water. They rolled off the back of the lazarette, side by side. Christine put the bright waterproof guiding lights in the water, the beacons that were designed to vector them back to Katapult. For a moment Chris could see them, two bright yellow beams shading to green as they went deeper. Then there was only an occasional, secretive glimmer and the sound of the bubbles among the other restless sea sounds in the night.
Chris and C. J. Martyr sat at Katapult’s stern, legs dangling, close together and silent. So much had happened since they had boarded the Concorde at JFK that they felt a little like new people, like strangers starting a new relationship. Chris was at the heart of the change, changing herself, swiftly as a chameleon today alone. Her own head was spinning so much that she had no idea how the changes might seem to an observer, but she was aware of nothing special except that she had somehow come to terms with the look in Sam’s eyes. She was pleased she had handled Katapult well in a crisis. Had her father asked her, she might also have admitted that she proposed to wear bikinis more often in the future. And that she wanted Doc to come back, safe and sound and soon.
He exploded out of the water at their feet so unexpectedly that they both jumped. There had been no warning of his approach because he had switched off his torch while swimming toward the brightness of Katapult’s guiding lights. “They’re there,” he gasped. “Sam’s sorting out the ones we want. It’s a mess down there. I’d like to meet the criminal bastards who mixed that lot all up and then dropped it overboard. I know Richard only asked for one box, but we’d better bring a couple up in case there are more duds.” They threw him down the line to secure to the first of the chosen boxes and he caught it easily. Then, with a wave and a wash of water, he was gone.
This was not Doc’s idea of fun. As he switched on his flashlight and powered back along Katapult’s sleek hull toward the anchor chain, pulling the rope behind him, he turned over in his mind what it was he had become involved in. He liked the Mariners. He respected them, both individually and as a team. He wanted to help them and he wanted them to help him and Sam. But the thought of charging around a supertanker armed with Kalashnikovs and thunderflash grenades really had to give him pause. He thought he had left that sort of thing in Vietnam. And yet. And yet, the more he thought about it, the more he had to admit that it excited him. The prospect of action. Of going back to the edge one more time before settling down to build boats and make babies and grow fat and happy.
The first box was sitting waiting by the anchor as agreed. No sign of any others yet, or of Sam. He hung there, secured the rope to the handle at its side then pulled twice. The line tightened, the box stirred and began to slide across the sea bed. He turned to follow it up.
Sam Hood was swimming purposefully in the opposite direction, carrying another of the boxes close to his chest, trying to get out over the long drop where he could get rid of it safely. It was one of the broken ones, one of the ones Richard had warned them to be par- ticularly careful with. But the warning had been in vain. There was something going on inside it Sam did not like at all. There was something hot in there. Something trailing a thickening stream of bubbles behind it. Although smashed, the box remained stubbornly impenetrable, its lid locked, its sides damaged with cracks too narrow to admit prying fingers. God knew what was in there. Some grenades for certain — he had just been able to make them out in the beam of his torch. But there was something else there as well. Long pipes, like candles: flares of some kind, maybe. And one of them had ignited, he had no idea how or why. It just had, a cloud of bubbles giving it away. As soon as it became clear the thing was not going to explode at once, he decided to take the calculated risk of moving it. This was a small box. Light. He reckoned his chances were okay. And anyway, if it went off close to all the other stuff it would probably set off a chain reaction that would blow them all out of the water.
Dare he drop it yet? Not really. Heaven knew what the detonation would do to Doc’s head if it went off too close. Especially after this afternoon. Hood felt sorry about that. His reaction to the girl and her father had resulted in Doc getting it in the head once more. Well, not again. Not again today.
It must be coming up to a minute now and nothing had happened except that the flare had started the plastic round the grenades to melting. He shone his torch down, the beam powerful enough to show him the sea bed, still close at hand. Littered with boxes and piles of rubbish. But close beyond, a cliff edge, and over that a bottomless abyss by the look of it. Another thirty seconds away. Another thirty seconds couldn’t hurt.