He had found her in a small bar overlooking Apra Harbor, where her boat was moored a hundred yards away. She was attractive but didn’t look as though she had done much about it lately. There were papers strewn all over her corner table, and a half-drunk mug of beer stood out amid the clutter.
“Excuse me,” Blaine said to her when he reached the table.
“No.”
“What?”
“I said no. You’re not excused. Go away. Whatever it is, I’m too busy.”
“You think I’m trying to pick you up?”
She looked him up and down and cast a disapproving scowl. “Mister, you wouldn’t have a chance even if I did have the time.”
“It’s your ship I’m after, Miss Hunsecker.”
“Wait a minute, how did you know my name?”
“Mine’s McCracken, if it matters.”
“It doesn’t.”
Blaine was going to sit down, then thought better of it and answered her question. “Naval records,” he said, which was mostly the truth.
She threw her pen down hard on the table where the scraps of paper swallowed it. “What’s this got to do with my ship?”
“I’d like to charter it.”
Patty Hunsecker smirked. “Yeah? Well, just take your rods and reels and head down two bars.”
“What I’m after is stuck on the ocean floor and isn’t likely to bite at any bait, Miss Hunksitter,—”
“That’s Hunsecker.”
“—and I don’t need a captain who knows where to find marlin. I need a boat with high tech salvage gear, strictly state of the art.”
“Sorry,” Patty snapped back, feeling about the paper for her pen, “I’m not for hire.”
This time Blaine did slide into the booth opposite her.
“I didn’t ask you to sit down.”
“And I’m afraid I wasn’t asking to use your boat. You see, any ship operating in these waters does so with the permission of the United States Navy. In other words they own your ass.”
“Nobody owns my ass, mister!”
“Miss Hunsecker,” Blaine responded immediately, “I could go to the navy right now and have your boat impounded indefinitely. I’m trying to do this the easy way.”
“You talk like a federale.”
“Of sorts.”
“How long?” she sighed.
“Two days, three at most.”
“At which point my grant becomes history. Look, it might not mean much to you, but the whole future of the world is tied up in the secrets of the ocean.”
“Absolutely,” McCracken told her, “but not for the reasons you think.”
And now, as he pulled on his sneakers to join her on deck, Blaine reflected on how well he had come to know her in a single day. She might have come on a little strong, but Patty Hunsecker wasn’t a bad person, and not an unattractive one either. Her blond hair was cut short and worn in a shaggy style that required little care and could survive the harshness of constant exposure to salt air and water. The sun had become so much a friend to her that she wore her tan naturally and without worry. They had sat on deck in the dark hours of Sunday night, as her boat, the Runaway, glided through the currents on autopilot.
“Interesting name,” McCracken had said.
“More than interesting — accurate. Describes my life.”
“In Bel Air?”
“The little time I spent there. I was always off at schools, and when I came home my parents weren’t there. Always loved the sea, though. My grandmother died, and as soon as I turned twenty-one I used the trust fund she had left me to buy this ship, outfit it, and run away. Learned what I had to in college. My parents thought I was studying acting.”
“They must have had good reason to if you fooled them for four years.”
“I left after three,” Patty Hunsecker corrected. “Knew what I had to by then. The rest I could learn out here. Kind of on-the-job training.”
“With all that money, why bother about the grant?”
“Legitimacy, proof that someone cares about what you’re trying to do. Otherwise I’d just be the young dreamer my parents figured I was when I sailed off.”
“Motored,” Blaine said.
“Excuse me for saying so, mister, but it doesn’t seem much different for you.”
“We’re all running away from something, Patty, and I’ve got an Indian friend who’ll tell you it’s always ourselves. We create our own little worlds of illusions, and once they’re gone, all we’re left with is reality. That can be pretty tough to take.”
“But in the end we’re the only ones who can figure it out for ourselves, right? I think that’s what I like most about making a home for myself here on the Runaway.”
“Except you’re still running, still deluding yourself. It might be the Pacific Ocean, but when you’re out here and can’t see anyone else it’s your ocean, which puts us right back where we started. Believe me, I know where you’re coming from. You’re out here to save the water. For a long time I was out to save the world.”
“Not this time?”
“It might come to that, yeah, but all I give a damn about is one twelve-year-old boy who deserves more than the short end of the stick he got stuck with at birth. It’s time he saw it in all its length.”
Patty Hunsecker eyed him quizzically but didn’t press. McCracken had taken his leave soon after and drifted off into an uneasy sleep that ended only when she had awakened him minutes before. Yawning as he stepped up into the morning sun, he noticed Patty had settled herself before one of the many gadgets on the deck of the Runaway.
“This might be your lucky day, McCracken,” she said without looking up at him.
“Planning to ask me out?”
“Even better.” Her eyes rose slowly. “My readings indicate that your coordinates are located smack dab on a large swell in the surface of the sea.”
“Is that good?”
“Well, since the pressure in regular depths in these parts is sufficient to turn any ship into a tin can, it is if you were hoping to find something reasonably intact.”
“Then it’s a ship that’s down there?”
“Magnetometer readings indicated a large steel mass almost directly beneath our present position.”
“And can you find it?”
“With a little help from a friend, absolutely.”
“Excuse me?”
“RUSS.”
“Who?”
“Not who, what. RUSS, R-U-S-S. Stands for Robotic Underwater Systems Sight. Step right this way and I’ll introduce you.”
McCracken followed Patty to the stern to a mechanism tightly wrapped in a custom-fit tarpaulin. She undid the zippers and ties, and he helped her strip the covering off to reveal a white squat object as long as he was tall, looking like a miniature submarine or an overweight torpedo.
“Meet RUSS.”
“The pleasure’s all mine.”
RUSS was mostly white with some red splashed on and came complete with a miniature conning tower like the kind found on manned submarines. Its front nose was composed of specially sealed glass, and Blaine didn’t have to be told to know that a camera behind it broadcast everything it saw back to the Runaway. It was sitting on some sort of motorized hydraulic mechanism obviously constructed to ease the process of lowering it to and raising it back from the water.