"What's that smell?" Maggie asked.
Sargent shimmied back up to his perch with the binoculars, and Hannah went below to see if she could roust someone on the barge's radio. The more the darkness moved in, the more the continuing silence became ominous. Minutes later, Hannah was back on deck to report no response.
Queet finally asked, "Are we just gonna stand here and wonder, mon, or are we going over there and find out what's going on?"
Boarding another man's vessel, especially when it's obviously moored over what could be a salvage site, isn't something that one decides to do without giving the matter at least a modicum of consideration. Men have been shot for a whole lot less. Still, Queet was right. Standing there and watching a cloak of blackness wrap itself around the old tub wasn't going to give us any information, either. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances; I had Hannah break out some of her toys.
Maggie and I lowered the Achilles raft while Hannah and Queet rigged up two auxiliary magna beacons, one aimed at the expanse of water between the Sloe Gin and the Bay Foreman and the other at the Foreman's aft deck. It took a while to coax some life out of the little Yamaha, but when we did, we headed straight for the barge.
For some unexplained reason, I had the presence of mind to take along my trusty survival kit. In fact, I even went so far as to search out the old broom handle and tuck it securely in my belt, careful to make sure the tail of my shirt concealed the fact that I was carrying it. That little inner voice was telling me to keep the Mauser a secret, and I was doing just that.
The closer we got to the Foreman, the more she looked like a derelict bucket of rust. And the closer we got to the old tub, the more I experienced that overwhelming sensation of something gone drastically wrong.
"Smell that?" Queet asked. He didn't have to ask. The closer we got, the more overpowering the stench became.
"Methane?" I wrinkled my nose.
We were within grasping distance of the Foreman when the Achilles bumped against the stern under the outline of the boom. Startled, I spun around, dancing the beam of my flashlight across the black water. When the spot of light picked it up, my stomach recoiled. It was the body of a manor at least the top half of what had once been a man. It floated — a blue, gas-bloated, shredded face, staring stupidly from hollow sockets at the blackness of the Jamaican night. I could feel Queet flinch when he saw what was in the light.
He reached out with the auxiliary oar and probed at our gruesome find. Every time he made contact, chunks of rotting flesh chipped away and floated grotesquely on the surface of the water until they slapped up against the hull of the Foreman.
''Sharks," Queet announced. His proclamation lacked emotion; it was a statement of fact. He rolled the mutilated torso over in the water to reveal shredded strands of flesh trailing away to nothingness. The salt water, the incessant Caribbean sun and the sharks had all exacted their toll. The longer we lingered, the more oppressive the overpowering smell of death became.
On one side, apparently fatally wounded, we had the lumbering Bay Foreman, its hull ripped open by the coral. On the other, less than 50 yards from the reef, was another kind of devastation altogether.
I threw a towline over the winch on the stern of the Foreman and secured the Achilles. Queet boarded first, with me right behind him. There in the darkness, the beam of my light played slowly over one of the most grotesque and bizarre sights I had ever seen. The deck of the barge was littered with death — birds, insects, even the carcasses of two dogs. All had been dead a long time.
Queet threaded his way through the litter and sliced the beam of his light down into the hold. With each new discovery he recoiled.
I went to the wheelhouse — and wished I hadn't. There were three bodies in the tiny eight-by-eight steel cubicle. Each of the unfortunate souls looked the same. Their throats had been ripped out, seemingly by their own hands, and in some cases it looked as if the chest cavity had actually exploded. The bodies were discolored and bloated; identification was impossible.
Queet staggered up from the hold, retching and shaken. He sagged against the wall of the wheelhouse and stared at me in disbelief. Both of us were having trouble breathing.
"I never seen anything like this, mon."
"Whatever it was, it was sudden and violent and caused excruciating pain. Nothing lived through it. Nothing."
We worked our way forward from the wheelhouse. The story was the same. The Bay Foreman was littered with the rotting bodies of an entire crew.
Queet began to count. When the toll reached an even dozen, he stopped.
Queet took the Achilles back to the Sloe Gin and picked up Hannah. The scene of devastation and carnage on board the Foreman wasn't exactly the sort of thing a gentleman invites a lady over to see, but I needed her help. The floating coffin had to be inventoried. She toughed it out and made her own survey. When she finished, we were pretty much in agreement. All 12 of the victims had, she figured, died at the same time, and the cause of death seemed to be the same for each of them. The only exception was the mutilated body Queet and I had found in the water, and there the cause of death was impossible to determine. Hannah speculated that the man either tried to escape or was knocked in the water by whatever had happened aboard the barge. Beyond that, it didn't matter. The sharks had done the rest.
Under most circumstances, the situation would have prescribed a fairly definitive course of action. But this wasn't "most circumstances." In fact, there wasn't anything routine about this situation. We had knowingly entered what we knew to be a restricted zone late in the day to avoid the provincial patrol boats. That had been a calculated gamble. Estimating that the reef and the big island were farthest from the site of the Deechapal disaster, we had rightly figured that the Westmore police weren't likely to be patroling that area late in the day. So far we had won our bet.
"Well, that confirms one of our suspicions," Hannah muttered. "Everything points to the fact that all of this has been here for quite a while. And the Westmore police either haven't discovered it, or they've made a conscious decision not to do anything about it."
Queet stared off into the misty darkness shrouding the island. "Maybe they're too afraid to come in this close to the island," he speculated.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," Hannah snapped.
"The locals believe it's haunted," Queet stated matter-of-factly.
Hannah's expression was hard to read with the red and white bandana covering most of her face. "Haunted?"
"Big Doobacque was an island paradise. The Caribs thrived here in the Cluster after they were driven off the mainland. When the great storm came, everything changed. Everything died."
Hannah continued to stare at the black man but said nothing. I knew right then that the lady wasn't through asking questions.
Queet and I tended to the gruesome task of sifting through the carnage, looking for some sort of clue that would tell us what had happened. After another hour we met on the aft deck and drew a few admittedly hasty conclusions. The Bay Foreman was anchored, but the storm or whatever had caused the disaster had slammed her up against the reef. There was a gaping hole in the port hull at the water line and she was taking on water; how much water depended on both the tide and the nature of the sea. There were no weapons, nothing to indicate that someone had gone berserk and waged a one-man vendetta against the entire crew. Also there was nothing to indicate that the crew had any warning of the impending disaster. One man was found in the radio room, but there was no evidence that he had radioed for help; the toggle switch was in the closed position. We found one body in the cooler in the ship's galley. His body was slightly more preserved than the others. The agony etched into the man's fear-frozen face gave some indication of the terror he had experienced in the final minutes of life.