He flipped channels for the flotilla frequency.
“Sea Fit, Toy, over.”
“Sea Fit, over,” Sherill answered back immediately.
“Fit, you sure know how to pick ’em.”
“You like? We get part of the swag, right? If you’ve got it, we’ll continue.”
“Oh, no,” Steve said. “This is an all hands evolution. All boats, relay, proceed to location of Sea Fit for all hands clearance.” He paused for a moment, then keyed the radio again. “Fit… Is that thing listing?”
“Yeah,” Sherill replied. “And you gotta see why…”
* * *
“Bloody buggers…”
The megayacht was…massive. As long as the cutter with some of the same lines but…prettier. It was anything but utilitarian. And it was, indeed, listing.
On the starboard side of the yacht was a “boarding and support center” that was basically a door in the hull of the boat that dropped down to water line. There was also a boarding ladder down from the promenade deck, which was above the height of the Toy’s flying bridge.
The reason for the list was immediately apparent. There was a heavy hawser pointed straight down from the boarding area for “support boats.” Attached to it, as was apparent from looking down through the crystal clear water, was a sport fisher, probably as big as Sherill’s bertram or a tad bigger. About sixty feet down. Bobbing up and down from the swells. Underwater.
“I can’t believe this thing hasn’t capsized,” Sherill said over his loudspeaker.
The yacht also had a contingent of zombies. But they were sort of background to the big fishing boat attached to the much bigger ship.
“Well, that there’s a puzzler,” Fontana said, looking over the side of the Toy. He spit in the water. “It’s so clear I sort of thought it would keep dropping.”
“You don’t realize how clear til you see something like that,” Steve said.
“And them,” Faith said, pointing to the circling sharks.
“Okay, here’s the puzzler,” Steve said. “The way the zombies are now, they’re easy meat.”
They were lined up on promenade deck, their arms waving and reaching for the nearby boat. There was a waist-high railing but there was plenty of room above it for a shot. Of course, there was a steel bulkhead behind them, which meant that any round was going to bounce. At least any that went through.
“Bouncers,” Fontana said.
“Move back to the aft deck,” Steve said, pointing but not looking. He was still considering the sunken boat. “The problem being, that someone is going to have to go down there and release that thing. If you try to cut the hawser…you don’t want to get close enough to cut the hawser. It’ll snap back like a sixty foot taipan and twice as deadly. That means raising it or releasing it. Raising it…no. However, there is, unless I’m mistaken, a quick release on it. So…hook up a line, pull and it goes into davy jones locker.”
“Makes sense,” Fontana said. “Except for the being sixty feet down and we don’t have SCUBA gear.”
“That is not an issue,” Steve said. “I am an expert free diver.”
“And then there’s them,” Faith said, pointing to the sharks again. “You know, the sharks. The man-eating sharks. The man-eating, probably-been-surviving-on-zombies-that-fell-off sharks?”
“Right, those,” Steve said. “About those…”
* * *
“You sure about this?” Sherill asked.
Some people tended to call him “Captain Gilligan” for his vague resemblance to Alan Hale, Jr. He had the same blue eyes, thinning blond hair. As he was getting his beer gut back, the resemblance was increasing.
His devotion to the His Sea Fit was almost doglike. He’d already lost three crewmen who couldn’t take the constant pounding of being on a 35ft sport fisher, in deep ocean, day in and day out. Thirty-five foot sport fishers were not designed for long-endurance, at-sea operations. Captain Gilligan didn’t seem to care. You’d pry him out with a crowbar.
“If they don’t leave,” Steve said, sitting on the bulwark of the aft deck of the Fit wearing swim fins and goggles, “no.”
The sharks were still circling below but with luck that was going to change soon. There was another shot from the aft of the boat and Steve vaguely heard the ricochet go by overhead. There was a flush-deck at the rear of the yacht, which had the infecteds right at waterline. Whether they dropped in the water or not, the blood from them should attract the sharks.
“You’d better not shoot my boat,” Sherill said.
There was a splash in the distance and first one of the larger sharks then the entire group headed aft.
“Unlikely,” Steve said. “Angles are wrong.” Or course, they were probably going to be putting holes in the yacht but he figured it could probably take it. The “boarding support area” was half-way underwater and the yacht hadn’t sunk.
He took a deep breath and slid quietly over the side.
He porpoised down into the depths, spinning in a three sixty to keep an eye around. In his left hand he had a light line with a spring clip on one end. The other hovered over his H &K.
While there had been snorkels, swim fins and masks aplenty among the boats, not one single speargun had been found. Steve was hoping, really hard, that he wasn’t going to have to test if you could fire an H &K USP.45, with octagonal barrel and Austrian engineering, sixty feet underwater.
He hadn’t had much of a chance to do breathhold diving in a while. Most of the times they stopped there were sharks around the boats and zombies to kill. People to save. Even Jew Bay was a no-go zone. In fact, he hadn’t had a lot of time for anything but the Program in a while.
But while he’d grown up on a station, it was close to the coast. And he’d grown up swimming and free diving. This was home territory. Including the sharks, which in Australia were just one of those things like box jellies, spider and snakes you had to put up with.
When he reached the hawser he put his right hand on it and followed it down to the latch point. The hawser wasn’t tied to the fishing boat. It was connected to a quick release latch, which was, in turn, connected to an apparently massively strong davit.
Steve felt like he was out of air but knew it was just CO2 build-up so he let out some air as he carefully connected the clip to the quick release. That was as much as he could handle on one breath so he started back up. He spun around, again, looking for potential threats but the sharks were busy feasting at the aft of the boat. His motions were smooth and regular, just another healthy, happy fish in the water. Nothing to attract them.
His heart beat faster as a massive hammer head came coasting down the length of the megayacht. It seemed in no hurry to get to the feeding frenzy aft. On the other hand, it didn’t turn towards Steve.
He surfaced and swam, splash free, to the dive platform on the rear of the Sea Fit and pulled himself completely out of the water, sprawling out on the platform.
“You okay?” Sherill called from the tuna tower. He was holding a rifle in his hands.
“Fine,” Steve said. “Is that for zombies or sharks?”
“Yes!”
Steve breathed deeply and waved with two fingers for Sherill to back the boat closer to the megayacht. The less lateral distance he had to cross the better.
This time he slipped off the dive platform face down to get a better head start. He spun in place and then tried not to panic as the massive hammer came coasting towards him. It had apparently decided that the other boat was probably going serve up tasty zombies as well.
Steve decided to just keep heading down. Hammerheads were known to attack humans and this one was obviously accustomed to feeding on infecteds. But they were also fairly smart for sharks and also tended to focus on distressed, fish, birds and mammals. Steve’s movements were regular and steady. It should ignore him. Should.