“Still reading you scratchy,” Miami Air said. “Let’s try eight-nine.”
“Shifting to eight-nine,” Knowles said. “Is that correct?”
“Affirmative,” Miami Air said.
By the time Knowles and the air station had decided on a frequency, it was time to call Bluerock again. Randazzo made contact and told them he was checking ADIZ.
“Go ahead, seven-two,” Bluerock said.
“Inbound heading two-three-three,” Randazzo said. “One thousand feet, speed one-fifty. Squawking mode three, zero-six.”
“Roger, out,” Bluerock said.
It was going to be a quiet morning. The ocean below, despite the hurricane advisories, seemed calm and unruffled, glinting with touches of golden sunshine. There were very few small boats out on the water; those damn advisories had probably scared hell out of everybody. Off to port, and far out on the horizon, Randazzo could see what looked like a Russian trawler, but no, the lines were different. Still for a moment it had looked like one. Dead ahead, a tanker plodded down toward Key West, its white masts gleaming in the sunlight. It was going to be a quiet morning.
At 0930, Randazzo contacted the radar plane on UHF.
“Checkmate,” he said, “this is Coast Guard seven-two, seven-two with a position.”
“Go, seven-two,” Checkmate answered.
“Saddlebunch at three-oh. One thousand feet. Estimating Key West at three-four. Relay to Bluerock.”
“Seven-two, Checkmate. Roger your position.”
At 0934, Randazzo swung over Key West, and switched course to Key pat four-alpha, a flight path that would take him farther south of the reef line, and then northeast.
It was going to be a quiet morning.
From the moment he had come aboard at five-thirty that morning, Alex Witten had been making snide remarks. He had hailed Randy from the dock, climbed aboard The Golden Fleece, walked into the wheelhouse where Annabelle was standing in a flannel robe preparing coffee at the two-burner Primus stove, and had immediately said, “Gee, you two are barely out of bed,” and then grinned pointedly at Randy to make his meaning absolutely clear. Randy chose to ignore the innuendo. Annabelle seemed not to catch the tone of Alex’s voice. She turned the flame a little higher and then said, “Excuse me, I want to get dressed,” and went below, closing the slatted swinging doors behind her.
“Did Jason get off all right?” Alex said.
“Yes.”
“What have you heard on the hurricane?”
“Nothing yet this morning. We’ll be under way long before the next advisory is due.”
“Hmm,” Alex said, “well,” and shrugged.
Annabelle came up the ladder wearing the black raincoat. The rain had abated considerably, but there was still a wet sprinkle in the air driven by the wind, more a sharp cold penetrating mist than a real rainfall. Her long brown hair was tucked up under the rubber folds of a yellow rainhat, and the spray in the wet air put an immediate glossy sheen on her cheeks. She was five feet nine inches tall, a big woman, and she carried her unborn baby with all the monumental grace of an Egyptian pyramid. There was about her face with its high cheekbones and narrow slitted eyes, its generous mouth and strong jaw, the suggestion of a hill peasant in Wales or Ireland. This hint of peasant stock was echoed in her body as well, big-boned, full-breasted, wide-hipped, and magnified by her current state of pregnancy. She seemed capable of planting crops and harvesting them, of grinding grain and milking cows and chopping wood. It was perhaps this very impression of something primitive, the country girl in bursting pregnant bloom, that provoked the steady barrage of remarks from Alex.
As she came up the ladder, he said, “Ahh, the lovely bride,” and again glanced at Randy.
“I was just going to pour the coffee,” Randy said. “How do you take it, Annabelle?”
For an instant the slitted eyes in the angular face flared with an intelligence that denied any primitive heritage, that threw aside any false illusions her face and body had permitted. “Black,” she said, and paused for the briefest instant while her eyes flicked Alex’s face like a whiplash. She smiled wickedly. “Like my heart,” she added.
Her voice had dropped a decibel, had become almost a knifelike whisper that slid past the evil smile and across the cockpit to lodge in Alex’s heart. Alex ignored the thrust. He was having too much fun pulling Randy’s leg, and he did not intend to stop now, Jason’s wife or no. He had to admit that her eyes and the sound of her voice back there just a second ago had carried something reminiscent of Jason Trench himself, oh, going away back to when he’d been skipper of the 832, and Alex had been his exec. Even then, though Jason had been only twenty-two, there had been an icy resonance to his voice whenever he snapped a command, and Alex had heard that same distant chill in Annabelle’s voice just now: “Like my heart.” You choose your mate, he thought, and then said aloud, “This is like a little honeymoon cottage, ain’t it?” and enjoyed the look of pain on Randy’s face, and the angry intelligence that flashed again in Annabelle’s eyes, and suddenly wondered if they had.
The Golden Fleece got under way at dawn.
Even coming down the Intercoastal Waterway, shielded as it was from the Gulf Stream by the Florida Keys landmass through which it cut south and then west, Alex felt again the thrill of piloting a vessel on water. It was a miserable gray wet dawn, and he piloted the boat from inside the wheelhouse and wished there were a flying bridge so he could feel the spray on his face and smell all the mysteries of the ocean deeps, smell fish and coral and sunken treasure and dead men floating, smell all that secret teeming life. He piloted a lousy twenty-seven-foot boat down a protected coastal waterway, and felt the same thrill he had known whenever Lieutenant (j.g.) Jason Trench gave him the conn of PT 832, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. There was a big difference between this twenty-seven-foot pleasure craft and an eighty-foot United States Navy motor torpedo boat, and the difference wasn’t so much in the handling as in the knowledge that the two torpedo racks on either side of the Navy boat were capable of wreaking immediate destruction on anything that happened to float into their way. The biggest thing that had ever floated into the way of the 832 was a Japanese minesweeper. Goody Moore had been gunner’s mate second class aboard the boat, and had been standing bow lookout watch when he spotted the Jap vessel far out on the horizon and called it up to Alex, who had the conn. Clay Prentiss, who was the boat’s radioman second, had come up onto the bow and taken the glasses from Goody, verifying the ship as a Jap, and then they had gone below to wake Jason.
There would normally have been no question about attacking. The PT boat carried four torpedoes and was equipped with a pair of twin.50-caliber machine guns, and a 20-millimeter cannon. Her most effective weapons, of course, were her speed and her maneuverability, and normally Jason would have plotted an attack course with Alex and with Fatboy, who was the boat’s chief torpedoman. They’d have made their run then, and dropped their fish, and got the hell out of there before anybody aboard the Jap ship knew what hit them. That was normally. But the boat had been heading back under orders for drydock in Pearl when Goody spotted the minesweep, and the reason she was going into drydock was that a blade was damaged on her screw, which severely limited both her speed and her maneuverability. The question was should they continue on their course which was away from the minesweep’s and heading toward Pearl, or should they alter course and attack?
Jason decided to take the chance.
They had come in on the minesweep’s fantail, on the hunch that the jerrybuilt superstructure there had created a blind spot, and then swung out past the ship and come in abeam for their one and only run, firing two fish almost simultaneously, connecting with both and apparently hitting a storage locker of live mines somewhere below. The Jap ship came out of the water in two pieces, splitting in the center and rising like the steeple of a church, and then cracking and falling back into the ocean while the 832 raced away.