Poqulay, who had obviously witnessed the carnage before, stayed on the dock with his men. Hannah handed Queet her camera and told him to shoot the entire roll of film.
Hannah and I threaded our way from one corpse to the next. It was always the same.
"Elliott," she muttered, "I can't believe what I'm seeing." All I could see was her eyes peering out in horror from her partially masked face. "It must have been terrible.''
Fragments, timeless and out of sequence, were coming back to me. Disjointed recollections of Deechapal and the way it once was played tag with my mind. "This was a beautiful place," I said softly, "a virtual paradise." My mind catapulted back through time. Gibby was standing beside me. Mary Mary was trying to prepare us for what we were about to see. Papa Coop looked like a skeleton, a prisoner for seven months because they charged him with transgressions we all knew he didn't commit. I could still see him.…
Hannah interrupted the chain of painful reflections. "Elliott… notice anything?"
"You mean like on the Bay Foreman?"
"That's it exactly. It isn't just the people and the animalsit's everything. The trees are dead — the insects, the birds, everything. Except for natural decay and the heat of the sun, these bodies haven't deteriorated."
It was the same all over the beach. Whatever had happened, it had been sudden, deadly and disastrous. It was the same, yet it was different. We found remains clustered around campfires, still sitting at the tables in their makeshift shelters. One man was tending his animals. Elsewhere, a couple was making love. But they all had one thing in common; their charred, bloated, grotesquely disfigured remains appeared to be frozen in one terrible moment in time.
In the hour that we were allotted, we were able to canvas the entire beach. Hannah kept count — 151 residents of Deechapal littered the once beautiful stretch of sand and coral. An hour was all we could take. We staggered back to where Poqulay still stoically surveyed his island domain.
"You've been here before. How extensive is it?"
The lieutenant's response was partially muffled by the strip of colorful fabric that covered his ugly little face. "All of Deechapal looks like this, Mr. Wages. Not just the beach — the entire island."
"What about the other islands?" Hannah wanted to know.
"There were very few inhabitants on the other islands," Poqulay informed her, "but the foliage looks much the same as it does here."
"Black, throats out or abdominal areas severely damaged?" Hannah suddenly sounded less than compassionate and a great deal more clinical.
"Even the fish, Ms. Holbrook. The first time I came, the waters were littered with dead fish. The tides and the predators have taken care of most of them."
"What about your government, Lieutenant. Has it conducted any kind of investigation?"
Poqulay studied the woman a moment before he shook his head. "We have not," he admitted. "Perhaps to do so would be dangerous. After all, we do not know what killed them."
"Dangerous because of what, Lieutenant? Dangerous because it might be something contagious… or dangerous because Alonzo Zercher doesn't want anybody poking around in his drug kingdom?"
Poqulay stiffened. "Mr. Zercher is a very influential man with many connections in many high places."
"That's sheer stupidity," Hannah snarled. "You're right — it could be dangerous. If whatever killed these people happened to get beyond the confinement of these islands, you and your government could be responsible for a disaster beyond comprehension. The World Health Organization should have been notified when this terrible thing first happened. This could have catastrophic implications."
Poqulay was not impressed. He turned away from us and began walking aft of his patrol boat. When he paused, he turned and stared at us with empty eyes. "That is not the way it is, Ms. Holbrook. Alonzo Zercher has instructed us to cordon off the Cluster. My provincial government has complied. Those are my orders."
Poqulay folded his arms and waited. Hannah was first, Queet followed, and I boarded last. There was a brief flurry of activity while his crew cast off and maneuvered out into the coral-pocked harbor. When we were clear, the little man turned to me.
"Even Alonzo Zercher has not witnessed this, Mr. Wages. Would you not agree that it was worth five thousand dollars?"
Poqulay deposited us back aboard the Sloe Gin, saluted us, arranged to follow us into Negril the following day for his money and departed. His patrol boat swung around the reef and headed for the channel where the Bay Foreman had been anchored. If the little man wondered what had happened to the vessel of the dead, he never let on.
Later that night at dinner, which was in reality a concoction of fish stew and rice, courtesy of Sargent, I called for a team meeting. The announcement that we were heading back into Negril the following day to replenish our air tanks and conduct some other business brought a mixed reaction. Maggie and Hannah were all for it. Queet and Sargent didn't seem to care one way or the other. Only Huntington registered a protest.
"Every day we delay getting those cylinders to the surface just lengthens our odds of being able to revive the occupants."
Hannah wasn't about to let the little man get away with it. "Come on, Byron, one more day after forty-some years isn't going to make any difference, and you know it."
Surprisingly, Maggie appeared to be siding with Huntington. "Byron has a point. We wasted half a day when you three went over to Deechapal. We know the cylinders are down there. Why don't we go get them?"
Even though it was supposed to be a team meeting, it didn't seem to be the time or place to unveil some of my evolving suspicions about Bearing Schuster. Besides, at this point they were little more than educated guesses. I decided to try to change the subject.
"We can be back hard at work day after tomorrow. Those pictures you developed give us a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with."
Maggie bought it. Anxious to show her contribution, she spread seven separate prints on the galley table. "There's nothing conclusive, I'm afraid."
We studied them one by one.
Maggie began pointing out various details. "These four are all of our first dive. There's nothing in any of them that looks even remotely like what I imagine we're looking for. The other three are the ones Hannah took. I don't see anything in them either."
It was time to haul out Lamillian's log from the Bay Foreman. I turned to the entry that described where Crompton had confirmed finding the cylinders, then I went back to the snapshots. "Damn it, we're in the right place. What the hell happened to them?"
"It's very simple," Huntington bristled. "Your friend was wrong. Maybe he was a con man, too."
Huntington was one slim inch from eating a very nasty knuckle sandwich. The mere questioning of Crompton's integrity irritated me — and questioning mine was just as bad. I gave the little man my best contemptible look and counted to ten. "Damn it, Huntington, Crompton was a pro.
I'd go to the bank on what that man told me."
"Suppose," Hannah interrupted, "just suppose, the Bay Foreman retrieved those cylinders — and suppose whatever happened over there on Deechapal happened before the captain could get it recorded in the ship's log?"
I looked up at Sargent. "Is that possible?"
The black man's scarred brows furrowed. "I'm not the one to ask, mon. Remember, they pulled my papers, mon."
"All right, Ms. Holbrook," Huntington came back at her, "if, as you suggest, the Bay Foreman did retrieve all of the cylinders, where were they? You say you saw one. Both you and Mr. Wages were aboard just last night. If they had retrieved all of them, surely you would have seen them."