Extinct Page 3

  Carolyn had said she was worried what might be going on in her son’s mind. Why didn’t she simply ask him?

  And Alan wondered why he hadn’t told her that.

  * * *

  The bow rope trailed the small aluminum boat, drifting backward down the channel.

  A long ripple behind the craft.

  The massive head thrust up through the water. Water streaming in rivulets back around its black eyes, the head continued to rise until several feet of the great fish’s body hung suspended above the surface. With a twisting action, the head and wide upper body moved forward over the boat and came down hard, driving the craft under the surface with a great splash.

  Two-foot waves crashed against the banks and rebounded toward the center of the channel.

  The water slowly calmed.

  Nothing could be seen but the wide channel stretching out endlessly into the dark.

  Suddenly the boat shot halfway out of the water, splashed back against the surface, and drifted half-submerged and partly on its side down the river.

  A moment later it began to gain speed, and moved rapidly along the center of the channel.

  CHAPTER 4

  BILOXI—THE NEXT MORNING

  Mrs. Hsiao raised her face from her computer as Alan came inside the building.

  “Have they found the boys?” she asked.

  He shook his head no.

  Her husband, his hair hanging against the shoulders of his plaid shirt, was speaking on her telephone. “Governor Childress,” he mouthed. He pointed toward the telephone on the empty desk to the far side of the area.

  Alan reached for the receiver without going around behind the desk.

  Ho said, “Governor, Alan’s on line now.”

  “Dr. Freeman, how are you doing?”

  “Fine, Governor. How’s the weather down there?”

  “Hotter than hell. But as I was telling Dr. Hsiao, not as hot as it’s going to be if I don’t get some federal aid to help locate those damn Z-nets. They’re killing us. Especially between Miami and the Keys. We get rid of the foreign fishing vessels and then we learn how many of those damn nets they lost, down there God only knows where, their mouths gaped open, rolling around on the bottom, thousands of fish swimming into them every day. Just great damn killing machines. I’ve got our charter boats, all the sports fishermen, everybody and their kid brother bitching about the fishing declining.”

  As Childress paused, Alan heard him take a deep breath, and then he spoke in a more settled voice. “Well, you don’t need to hear about my problems, doctor. I’m certain you have enough of your own. It’s only that I have a meeting with an environmental group in an hour. Wanted to be positive we still have ourselves a deal. Want to be able to announce some good news anyway.”

  “You’ll have half a million fingerlings a month for release in your waters starting your way in thirty days.”

  “Guaranteed?”

  “Guaranteed.”

  “I hope so. I’m going to hear in an hour that the state’s had dealings with other companies who weren’t able to live up to the terms of their contracts.”

  “The others didn’t have Ho,” Alan said.

  Ho smiled broadly at that.

  “Okay,” the governor said. “Fine. Good. Only don’t let me down.”

  As Alan replaced the telephone receiver, Ho smiled again. “Good to have more demand than product,” he said.

  A moment later a serious expression replaced his smile. “Still find no more mature red snapper females available at any hatchery. How we produce so many babies we need with only one mother? Maybe she get tired.” His mouth moved toward the side of his thin face as he thought. “Maybe Chang in Los Angeles—he import live fish.” He reached for the telephone on his wife’s desk.

  “Ho, you keep using the phone here, how am I going to answer it?” she said, looking up at him.

  Frowning, Ho walked toward his office.

  * * *

  Roland Carroll, a forty-year-old copilot for Southern Air Shuttle, a small, privately held company based in the Keys, stared from the cockpit at the starboard engine of the twenty-seat craft. “It’s not sounding right,” he said, “I keep telling Jack if he doesn’t maintain these planes better he’s going to get a bunch of passengers killed one day—not to mention me.” He glanced down toward the blue-green water below the plane.

  “Look,” he said.

  The pilot looked down.

  Barely visible under thirty feet of water, a long, narrow speedboat lay upturned on the bottom. Roland ran his eyes across the water in every direction. There was no sign of a life raft or people floating in preservers. He reached for the radio mike.

  The pilot shook his head. “Probably been down there for years,” he said.

  “I didn’t see it any other time,” Roland said.

  “You probably didn’t look down at this exact same spot, Roland. You thought of that?”

  Roland moved the mike to his mouth and started transmitting anyway.

  * * *

  Alan leaned forward at his desk and looked through the folder Ho had handed him on the fingerlings’ latest survival ratio. When companies trying to meet the demand for more seafood started growing saltwater varieties in a controlled environment they encountered a grim surprise. They had already known the seas were the most dangerous places on earth. While mortality rates of seventy percent in such places as African game parks were said to demonstrate how deadly such places were to the animals living there, that rate paled in comparison to the mortality rates routinely found in the ocean. It was not unusual for as few as two to three percent of fingerlings ever to reach thirty days of age.

  The low survival rate, coupled with the pressure of fishing and pollutants, the overheating or overcooling of particular spots in the oceans, the creating of deadly algae, was the reason entire species of fish often disappeared temporarily from large sections of water stretching over thousands of square miles. And that was one of the reasons most seafood restaurants featured “Fish-of-the-Day” on their menus. It was not because the restaurants were offering their customers a service by providing a varying menu, but because they had no choice—they often didn’t know until the fish were delivered to them each morning what kind they would be serving that night.

  So several companies had seen the opportunity for profit in establishing a dependable supply of seafood.

  The surprise had been that after the companies started trying to grow the fish, they were able to increase the survival rate of most species only a meager five to six percent above what it had been in the wild.

  This had to do with the mechanics associated with raising the fish, and the fish themselves. Many of the saltwater species turned out to be cannibalistic when contained close together in the comparatively small grow-out tanks, and that accounted for up to sixty to seventy percent of the mortality rate. The remainder of the deaths were due to the ocean algae. The fingerlings couldn’t live without them, for the algae were not only the vital first nutrient in the baby fishes’ food chain, but among the algae strands were contained rotifers and copepods, minute crustaceans that were to become the second and third steps in the chain.

  The problem had been that immediately after the fingerlings were hatched they were even smaller than the crustaceans, and were eaten by them until the fish became large enough to turn the tables on these creatures. By then, combined with their own cannibalistic behavior, less than ten percent of the fingerlings survived.

  There had been some improvement over the years. In using the coarsest algae from among the ninety thousand species found in the oceans, the companies had discovered that the fingerlings were provided a place to dwell safely once they reached the inner strands where they fed. Though the rotifers and copepods still were present, their slightly larger size prevented them from getting deep into the algae in pursuit of the tiny fish until the fingerlings were large enough to swim back out and attack their erstwhile nemeses.

  Ho g
ave their company an edge here. His research had developed an even coarser algae than was used by—

  “Alan,” Ho said, and Alan raised his head.

  “Chang not have any red snapper either. He said maybe next week. So what we do? Wait?”

  Alan closed the folder. “We get them ourselves.”

  “How we get them when none available?” Ho asked.

  “Catch them, Ho. Like everybody else does—go fishing.”

  “We have to have them not harmed.”

  “We can net them instead of using a gaff. Rig up some kind of live tank to get them back here.”

  Ho had a strange look on his face. “Why we not do that before?”

  “The curse of convenience, Ho. Everybody always orders from the labs.”

  “More case of bureaucracy, Alan. We must watch that in future.” A pleased expression swept Ho’s face now. “And I know perfect boat to ask to rig live tank. Mr. Herald say he do us favor when he can for me showing boys around. He retired and help out some on boat at Broadwater Marina.”

  * * *

  Paul ran his bumper car into one driven by a boy several years older. The boy frowned across his shoulder at being jolted and spun his steering wheel. In a moment he drove his car hard into Paul’s and kept following him, bumping him no matter which way he turned. Carolyn frowned.

  “I’m getting ready to go to jail,” she said to her mother. “For teenager abuse.”

  Martha smiled a little. She looked at Paul and back at Carolyn. “Your grandfather died when you were six, Carolyn. You cried yourself to sleep that night, and more than once after that. But the worst eventually passed. It will pass for Paul, too.”

  Carolyn knew that. It was logical. And who else was more logical than she? Her father said she had decided on math for her major in college because it was the only thing she could find where two and two always added up to four—no matter what. Completely logical-thinking. Except when it came to Paul. Not that she wasn’t at first—right at the very first.

  The delivery had taken an especially long time. She had already decided it best her child come naturally and had resisted the doctors who wanted to deliver Paul by cesarean rather than let her labor continue any longer.

  He had been born with one leg slightly shorter than the other and slightly smaller in circumference. His shoes only needed a slight thickening of one sole; no one could tell without measuring. But she knew. Despite the doctors saying the length of time she was in labor had nothing to do with the slight impairment, she had never been able to completely accept that.

  And now, instead of being logical in raising her child, she had to be careful to keep from being too protective—and hurt him again in that way.

  It had already happened in the hours since Skip and Dustin’s deaths the day before. She knew she needed to do what she could to keep Paul from having the tragedy on his mind, and she knew what he liked most, to anchor the boat and swim and play in the clear water off the barrier islands. They had done it a hundred times. Yet, now, every time the thought passed through her mind, she felt a surge of nervousness. That certainly wasn’t logical. She would be with him every second he was in the water. Yet the thought still bothered her.

  “And he’s to worry about?” her mother said. “He’s going to be fine.”

  The older boy and Paul had left the small vehicles and were now talking friendly about something as they walked toward the miniature golf course at the front of the complex.

  Carolyn watched them for a moment, then turned her face across the four lanes of Highway 90 bordering the small amusement complex. Past the pavement, the white sand beach ran down to the Mississippi Sound, its wide, murky waters spreading out toward the barrier islands, seen in the far distance only by the tops of the trees growing high above their low shapes.

  Beyond them were the gentle breezes and crystal-clear waters and quiet anchorages stretching to the Chandeleur Islands.

  She made up her mind.

  “I don’t have a charter booked tomorrow. I’m going to hold the boat open and take Paul out to the islands.”

  Her mother nodded. “He’ll like that.”

  Carolyn nodded. “Me, too. I need to have something else on my mind.” She started to say how she had awakened with a start during the night after dreaming that Paul had gone in the water with Dustin and Skip. That all three of them …

  She was pulled out of her thoughts by Paul walking toward her. He had his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his shorts, and his head hung down.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  That’s what he always said when he didn’t want to do something.

  “You’re not having fun?”

  “I’m tired,” he repeated.

  CHAPTER 5

  NEAR THE MOUTH OF THE GULF OF MEXICO—11:30 A.M.

  A Coast Guard boat, its bow marked by a diagonal orange stripe, floated at anchor under a bright sun shining down on the water off the Everglades. Known in Coast Guard jargon simply by its length in feet, the “forty-one” had responded to the report of a sunken speedboat lying upside down on the bottom in thirty feet of water.

  A pair of divers were down.

  One of them, Petty Officer Matt Rhiner, lowered his head and, shining his watertight light ahead of him, peered under the speedboat. No bodies lay with the hull on top of them. He hadn’t expected there to be. But neither had he expected what he had seen when he first dove down to the boat—long, narrow slashes up and down its hull. The damage had to have been caused by the craft having slammed hard into the jagged protrusions of a reef. Yet there wasn’t a shallow-water reef projecting near the surface anywhere close to the area. And the damage actually didn’t look to Rhiner much like what would come from a reef’s protrusions. Rather, each of the slashes started with a round puncture at one end, narrowing almost to a point at the opposite end of the cut, similar to the marks that would be left if a construction crane had let down a big steel bucket and its metal teeth had dug into the craft’s hull before then pulling through the fiberglass, and slipping loose.

  But the most unusual circumstance was where the craft lay—over seventy miles from where it had been reported missing some three months before off the west side of the Keys and, supposedly, on its way down the chain toward Key West.

  That not being a heavily traveled route, Command had first thought about the possibility of drug smuggling. Yet smugglers didn’t take drugs south toward the end of the Keys, but north toward the mainland. And the possibility of smugglers had gone completely by the wayside when it was learned that the two men on the boat had been prominent, older doctors off on an annual two-week fishing party without their wives.

  So with the craft being found, instead of answers being given, new questions were raised. Rhiner pushed himself away from the hull and looked across his shoulder through a school of small brightly colored fish to the second member of his diving team, gliding slowly a few feet above the bottom, searching for any sign that might have to do with the boat. Rhiner used his flippers to push off against the craft’s hull and swam out over the sand.

  The sun was almost directly overhead, its strong beams passing easily through the light-green water and reflecting off the sand almost as if it was a polished surface. Everything could be seen. It was a good time to search.

  But for what? He looked back across his shoulder at the boat. Was there something obvious he was missing? He moved his gaze toward the sand beneath him, the current flowing there expressed in the slight leaning of the sea grasses below him. He quit swimming, holding his hands and flippers motionless, and watched the grasses.

  Slowly he felt his body pushed gently forward, the grasses starting to move backward underneath his form. As he neared the low remnants of a reef that had once flourished with color but was now a gray, dead chunk of rock, he noticed his drift was forced slightly to the side by the current moving around the structure. But the current’s movement—at least at this point in time—was directed generally south, in
the opposite direction of the way the speedboat would have had to drift to come to where it lay. Besides, despite this lesser-traveled area off the Everglades, the route wasn’t completely devoid of traffic. Somebody would have spotted an empty, floating boat in the time it would have taken to drift here, wouldn’t they? But the fact was they hadn’t.

  Then deciding to leave such technical speculation to the investigators and oceanographers who would be familiar with the reefs, the currents, and what they could do, how far they ran, and from where, he started kicking his flippers again. In any case, he now had a creepy story to tell his children, he thought—about a boat so far from where it should have been, and empty of its occupants—his own personal version of the Flying Dutchman. A smaller, two-man speedboat version, he thought, but his version. When he was older and the story grew exaggerated in his mind, it would become a really creepy story to relate to his grandchildren. He smiled to himself.

  Then he caught sight of a sparkling reflection below him.

  He waited until the sun reflected off the object again, then tilted his head down and let the work of his flippers carry him toward the spot without using his hands.

  He saw it more clearly. It was an off-white or a light beige, but shiny at the same time. Drawing near it, he saw the object was triangular in shape, with its blunt base notched with a curving indentation at its center. He kicked his flippers a last time and reached his hand out.