“Turn off that flashing light on your helmet. Makes my eyes hurt.”
Jake did so. He took off the helmet. Then he got out his second baby bottle of drinking water and took a big slug. He held it out for Flap. “Here.” Flap had to feel for it. The darkness was total. There were some stars visible, but the moon wouldn’t be up for some hours yet.
“Shit. This is water.”
“What did you expect? Jack Daniel’s?”
Flap drained the bottle and handed it back. Jake carefully screwed the top back on and stowed it.
“Want to try mine?”
Jake felt in the darkness. Another baby bottle. He sipped it. Brandy. The liquor burned all the way down. He passed it back. “Thanks.”
“So what’s for supper?”
“I got a candy bar in my vest someplace,” Jake told the Marine. “Stuck it in here while we were in the Philippines, so it’s only three months old.”
“I’ll wait. I got one from Singapore. Maybe for breakfast, huh?”
“Yeah. You hurt any?”
“Scratched up in a couple places. Nothing bad.”
“I did a little bleeding from a cut on my neck. Maybe the sharks will come.”
Flap had nothing more to say, so Jake sat thinking about sharks. He hated the whole idea. An unseen terror that stalked and ate you — it was something from a horror movie, some poorly animated, low-budget monstrosity designed to make kids scream at the Saturday afternoon matinee.
But it was real.
Real sharks lived in these waters and they would come — of that he was absolutely certain.
Lying there in the darkness in this rubberized canvas raft with your butt in the water, shivering because the water kept wicking up your flight suit and evaporating, bobbing up and down, up and down, endlessly, up and down and up and down, your mind fixated upon sharks, on the giant predators with row upon row of huge, sharp teeth that even now were following the blood trail, coming closer, coming up from deep deep down toward this flimsy little raft that their teeth could slash through as if it were tissue paper, coming to rip and tear your flesh and eat you!
At some point he realized that he had his Colt automatic in his hand. He hadn’t thumbed off the safety, thank God, but it was there in his hand and he couldn’t remember pulling it from its shoulder holster.
He hefted it.
He had always liked the bulk of it, the thirty-nine ounces of smooth blued steel and oiled wood that promised deadly power if he ever needed it. Tiger Cole had given it to him. It held eight big .45 caliber slugs, any one of which would kill anything from a mouse to a moose. If he shot a shark with this thing, it was going to die quick.
The problem was that the sharks were under water and bullets don’t go very far when fired into water. Certainly not these big slow lead slugs. It would be better if he had his .357, but life wasn’t like that. If the shark would only stick his head out of the water and hold still…
His survival knife! It wasn’t all that sharp and, to tell the truth, wasn’t really much of a knife, but he could stick a shark with it. And probably get his hand ripped off.
He transferred the automatic to his left hand and got the knife from his survival vest.
The first thing the sharks would do was bump the raft. He would feel that, he hoped. They would bump it and rub it with their sandpaper hide and sniff the blood and finally use their teeth. If they punctured the raft he would go into the water. Then he was doomed. Sooner or later they would get a leg or foot and even if he killed the bastard that did it, the blood would draw more sharks that would finish the job, if he hadn’t already bled to death.
He was living a nightmare. If only he could wake up.
He sat in the darkness listening to the slop of the water and waiting for the bump and shivering from the cold. Every sense was alert, straining.
How long he sat like that, half-frozen with fear, listening, he didn’t know, but eventually the moon rose and a sliver of light came through a gap in the clouds. Flap saw him then.
“Hey, what’s the knife and gun for?”
He was so hoarse that he had trouble with the word and had to clear his throat before he got it out. “Sharks.”
“You stick that knife into your raft and you’ll be swimming.”
Jake just sat shivering.
“Throw out some shark repellent. You got some in your vest, don’t ya?”
“It don’t work. Ain’t worth shit.”
“Won’t hurt. Throw it out.”
Now he had the problem of what to do with the gun and knife. “Hold the gun, will ya?”
“Holster it. The knife too. Believe me, there’ll be plenty of time if you need ’em.”
When he had tossed the shark repellent packets into the water, Jake felt better. It was crazy. The repellent — allegedly a mixture of noxious chemicals and ground-up shark gonads— was worthless: someone had done a study and said it had no noticeable effect on sharks and was a waste of government money to acquire. Even though Jake knew all that, throwing the repellent into the water still gave him a sense that he was doing something, so he felt better. Less terrorized and more able to cope.
The moonlight helped too. At least if he got a glimpse he could shoot or stab.
“Sorry I got you into this,” he told Flap.
“If this moonlight cruise causes me to miss Australia, Grafton, I’m going to kick your ass up between your shoulder blades. I’ve been sitting here thinking about Australia and those chocolate aborigine women who will think I’m Sidney fucking Poitier, and believe you me, this buck nigger is really really ready.”
“Those aborigine men may show you how to use a boomerang for a suppository if you mess with their women.”
Flap dismissed that possibility with an airy wave. He was shivering too, Jake noticed.
“Actually I ought to charge you a travel agent’s fee,” Jake told the BN. “You’ll cadge free drinks on this tale for years. A silver moon, a tropical lagoon—”
“And you. I wouldn’t pay ten cents Hong Kong money to go on a moonlight cruise with you. You got all the romance of a…”
They bantered back and forth for a while, then talked seriously about their situation. The U.S. Navy would search until Jake and Flap were rescued or the heavies were convinced they were dead, no matter how long it took. Right this very moment the ships of the task group were making their best speed eastward, eating up the sea miles, their screws thrashing the black water into long foamy ribbons that stretched back under that pale slice of moon to the horizon. At dawn the carrier would pause in her eastward charge only long enough to veer into the wind and launch her planes.
Just in case someone was up there right now, Flap got out his radio and made a few calls. There was no answer, which didn’t upset them.
In the morning. The carrier’s planes would come in the morning. And if that pirate was anywhere around when the sun came up, he was going to Davy Jones’ locker faster than the Arizona went to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
Eventually the conversation petered out and exhaustion caught up with them. Both men dozed as their tiny rafts rocked in the long swells.
Jake woke up to vomit. The equilibrium of the raft was too precarious to stick his head over the side, so he heaved down his chest. He slopped some sea water over himself to ash the worst of it away.
Seasick. Fuck it all to hell!
He heaved until his stomach was empty, then retched helplessly as his stomach convulsed.
Flap was philosophical. He wasn’t sick. “These things happen in the best of families, even to swab jockeys. It won’t kill you. You’re tough.”