Peter Benchley - The Deep

Can’t send a bunch of bunnies out here to pick around in the sand with their fingers.”

“Two days, no. But not much more than that, to make ’em middling competent. And when he’s ready, they’re going to come fast. I think maybe we’ll be working nights, too.” He saw a look of chagrin on Gail’s face, and he said, “Not tonight. We’ll give your bugle a rest.”

“What will you do with this?” Sanders rested his hand on the artillery shell.

“Nothing, for now. I just wanted to get it out of there.

Later on, I’ll clean it up and sell the brass.”

“Is it really live, after thirty years?”

“Aye.” Treece said. He set the shell in a vise bolted to the starboard gunwale. From a locker he took a huge wrench which he fit to the bottom of the shell. He tugged on the handle, but the wrench didn’t budge. “Corroded into a bloody weld.” He braced his foot against the bulkhead, wrapped both hands around the wrench, and leaned back.

His biceps balled into tight knots; the sinews in his neck strained against the skin, and a red hue suffused his face.

There was a metallic squeak, then the sound of a crack, and the wrench handle moved. Treece heaved again and broke the seal. He unscrewed the bottom of the shell and dropped it on the deck. “Look here.”

The interior of the shell was filled with stiff, gray, spaghettilike strands, bunched tightly together.

Coffin handed Treece a pair of pliers and a box of matches. Treece fished one of the strands from the shell casing and, holding it with the pliers, gave Sanders the matches. “Light it.”

“What is it?”

“Cordite. That’s what makes everything explode.”

Sanders held a match to the end of the cordite strand.

There was a flash, and the strand burned with the brilliance of magnesium.

Gail said, “That’s all there is to a shell that big?”

“All? Christ, girl, pack a hundred of ’em together and touch a primer charge to ’em, and you can blow Bermuda to pieces.”

“How many are there?”

“No way to know,” Coffin said. “There was about ten ton when we started, but some of it’s been salvaged.”

Treece tossed the cordite overboard. It hissed as it hit the water, and, sinking, emitted a stream of bubbles.

They fetched the air hoses from the water and coiled them on the deck. Treece fastened the air-lift tube to the gunwale, then started the engine.

Charlotte, who had been sleeping on the bow, lurched to her feet and-like a soldier reluctantly assuming a midnight watch-took her post on the pulpit.

Coffin hoisted the anchor, and Treece eased the boat through the reefs and headed for shore.

“What time tomorrow?” Coffin said.

“Early. Say eight o’clock. We’ll do four or five hours in the morning, dry off for the afternoon, and start again around six.” He teased Coffin. “I know you old folks need your afternoon nap.”

“The hell you say!” The boat was still seventy-five yards from shore. “I’ll outlast ’em all.”

Coffin hopped onto the gunwale and dove overboard.

Treece watched, grinning, until he saw Coffin surface and start to swim toward shore. Then he swung the boat seaward.

As the boat rose and fell in the gentle swells, something slid off the steering console and clattered to the deck: the escutcheon plate. Gail picked it up and handed it to Treece.

“Lordy, I almost forgot about that,” he said, adding, with a smile at Sanders, “what with all the excitement caused by the daredevil shark hunter.”

“Adam said it was a plate that went around a lock.”

“Aye, but not just any lock. I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know that any others still exist. It was called a three-lock box.

See the three keyholes; it took three keys to open the lock.”

Sanders said, “What was the point of that?”

“To keep one or two people from making off with the goodies inside. Three partners, three keys. Say someone was sending something from the New World back to Spain. The King had a master set, all three keys. The man in wherever it was-Havana-probably had two, the captain of the ship one. They locked the box in Havana, and the captain took it aboard ship. He couldn’t open it with only one key. When he got to Spain, he presented the box to the King.”

“Wouldn’t be hard to pry open.”

“No, but they didn’t usually. The Spaniards took locks as… well, not holy, but special. The British and Dutch sent documents and what-all back and forth in regular boxes; if a ship was pirated, that was that. No lock would do any good. The Spaniards locked everything, almost symbolically. But a three-lock box!” Treece ran his fingers over the escutcheon plate. “Aye, that is interesting.”

“Why?”

“It means there was something very damned important in that box. More’n likely, something very damned important to the King of Spain.”

By the time they tied up to Treece’s dock, the sun was resting on the western horizon, a swollen ball of orange.

Treece sniffed the evening air and said, “Going to get messy tomorrow.”

Sanders” impulse was to ask Treece how he knew the weather would change, but by now he could anticipate the answer, something like “Got a feeling” or “You can smell a breeze coming.” So he said instead, “How bad?”

“Maybe twenty knots, out of the south. It’ll bounce us around a fair amount.”

“Can we work?”

“Got no choice. Cloche’ll be working, you can bet on that. It’ll be all right; we’ll weight-up heavy.”

Sanders began to peel off his wet-suit pants, but Treece stopped him.

“We’re not done yet.”

“We’re not?”

“Got to put away the ampules. Can’t leave ’em lying around on the boat.”

“I know, but I figured…” He stopped when he saw Treece pointing overboard at the dark water. “Oh.”

“I want you to know where they are, in case something happens to me.”

“What’s going to happen to you?”

“Who knows? Maybe a terminal case of the ague, or a sudden onset of heebie-jeebies. Maybe nothing. It’s just insurance. There’s a cave underwater at the base of the cliff. Tide washes it, but if we put ’em way back and bury ’em, they’ll stay.” He turned to Gail. “You don’t need to come.”

“I can,” she said, “if you want me to.”

“No. You’ll be more use up here, passing bags to us.”

They rigged two scuba tanks and brought the bags of ampules up from below. Treece half-filled the canvas bags, then handed Sanders a flashlight. “Overweight yourself,” he said. “That bag’ll want to come to the surface. Adam squeezed all the air he could out of the plastic bags, but you can’t get every last bit. If you’re way heavy, you can let your weights drag you and the bag to the bottom. When you get down, follow my light.”

“Okay.”

Treece pointed to a rectangular wooden box on the dock and said to Gail, “Fetch me a fish out of that box.”

“A fish?”

“Aye. It’s full of salted fish. I keep ’em there for Percy. He lives in the cave.”

Gail climbed onto the dock and opened the lid of the wooden box. The smell of fish made her step backward and hold her breath.

“Pick a big one,” Treece called. “Want to keep him occupied so he doesn’t take a shine to us.”

“What’s Percy?” Sanders asked.

“A frightful big moray eel, a green. He’s lived in that cave long as I can remember.

We get along all right, but he’s a hungry bastard, and I like to keep on his good side by giving him dinner now and again.”

Gail reached into the fish box and grabbed the largest tail she saw. She swallowed, to keep from gagging.