Chameleon by William Diehl Read Free Book Online

was like a magnet. He spun end over end through the water and smacked against the column upside down, his head cracking like a whip against the enormous post. His body shuddered violently, a death spasm, arid a burst of red bubbles tumbled from his regulator and wriggled toward the surface.
    The leader glared through his good eye and hauled in the limp form by the life line and peered through the face mask. The injured man’s eyes were half open and only the whites showed. Blood, gushing from his nose, was filling the mask. He shook his head toward the other members of the team and, unhooking the box, let the lifeless form go. The dying man was swept to the end of his life line by the harsh tide.
    The leader swung his flippers toward the column and let the sea throw him up against it. The other diver joined him. Together they worked their way down the column until they found a welded joint. Struggling against the vicious sea, they lashed the box to the steel leg while the driver of the scooter tried to keep the machine aimed into the tide. When the box was secured, the leader pulled a handle on the side of it and the top popped off. He aimed his light into the opening in the box. It was a timing device. He set it for four hours and then he and the other diver worked their way back up the column to the steel line. The third diver hung grotesquely below them, his body battering the column. Bubbles no longer came from his regulator.
    When they reached the scooter, the leader cut the line holding it to the column with a pair of aluminium wire cutters, and it lunged forward and the three huddled together, their companion, tossed by the undersea waves, dangling behind them at the end of the life line, as the leader checked his compass and pointed the flashlight into the darkness, guiding the scooter away from the deadly column.
    They disappeared into the black sea, pulling their macabre bundle behind them.
    III
    A bank of monitor screens along one wall gave Lansdale a closed-circuit view of the control rooms and the exterior of the Thoreau. Sleet was sweeping through the rigging and almost straight out across the deck.
    The wind’s up to a hundred and ten, maybe twenty, knots already, he thought, Gale force and picking up.
    There was a tap on the door.
    ‘It’s open,’ Lansdale said.
    Marge came in and closed the door and smiled at him for a couple of seconds and then snapped the lock on the door without taking her eyes off him.
    ‘You’re downright shameless,’ he said.
    ‘There’s no such thing on this barge,’ she said.
    ‘Barge! Jesus, that’s sacrilegious!’ He laughed. ‘You’re just going with me because I’m captain of the football team.’
    ‘Naw. I wanted to see if hardhats really make love with their socks on.’
    ‘Depends how cold it is.’
    ‘It’s about twenty below out there and falling.’
    ‘Then maybe I’ll keep them on.’
    ‘The hell you will.’
    She walked across the living room, stopping for a moment at his bookcase. Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Franek’s Zen and Zen Classics, French and Spanish dictionaries, copies of Red Harvest and Blood Money by Dashiell Hammett. Through the porthole she looked out over the gray, bleak, endless sea, the waves lashed by sleet and wind.
    ‘It’s scary,’ she said. And then she turned her back on the window. ‘God, I’ll be glad to get back to civilization where it’s light in the daytime and dark at night.’
    He made her a rum and Coke and carried it across the room to her. ‘Why the hell did you stay out here for the holidays anyway?’ he said. ‘It sure as hell wasn’t the bonus.’
    ‘It helps. Sixty-two fifty a day on top of a hundred and twenty-five. That’s almost a thousand dollars for two weeks. Anyway, one of my sons is someplace in Vermont with the college skiing team, and the other one is at his girl friend’s house in Ohio. What’s to go home to?’
    ‘That’s it?’
    ‘Well ... you’re here, too.’
    ‘I thought