The Island by Peter Benchley Read Free Book Online Page B

captain with a master’s ticket—by law he was qualified to drive the frigging QE II —and manned by a crew of first-rate professionals. She sank, if she sank, on a flat-calm day, with a loss of all hands. I tell you, in those conditions a baby could’ve floated around on a seat cushion for three days and still come out of it okay. She’s a bad example because she was a Bahamas-registered boat, and the Coast Guard doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to her.”
    “Do they have any theories?”
    “Oh sure. They figure she either hit a reef and sank, or else one of her engines blew up. But you have to try to blow up a diesel engine, and if you do, it’s gonna scatter trash all over the frigging place. But there’s no debris. And if she went up on a reef and sank, why didn’t anybody get to shore? They say sharks. Shee-it!” Florio picked up a dental drill, turned it on, and held his breath while he probed delicately at one of the eagle’s eye sockets.
    He blew bone dust away from the eagle’s eye and said, “The Banshee was a better example. She was registered in Wilmington, owned by a guy who made a bundle in cedar shingles. They had been fishing for a month, dicking around between Puerto Rico and Haiti, trying to raise a record marlin. The owner, he flew home from Port-au-Prince, and the captain started back with the boat. He radioed ahead to Mayaguana that he’d be there by nightfall. That’s the last anybody ever heard from him or the boat. Good weather, two mates who’d been with him for fifteen years, no hitchhikers. The Coast Guard thought maybe the captain had ditched her and split for parts unknown. But look here: The man made thirty thousand a year, plus half the charter fees for when the owner wasn’t using the boat, plus free private-school education for his three kids, plus a house in Fort Lauderdale. Man, he could have gone to Palau and not found a deal like that.”
    “What’s your answer . . . for either boat?”
    “I don’t have one. The drug thing is a possibility. They were both long-legged boats, had a range of a thousand miles or more. They’d be prizes for the grasshoppers. But I know for a fact that the skipper of Banshee carried guns aboard, so I don’t believe he was hijacked. Even if he was—even if they both were—that leaves six hundred and nine others. One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo!, roll over another one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to know what happened to those boats. Not to all of them . . . not to half of them.”
    “Why not?”
    “Another beer?”
    Florio began with the simple explanations: the difficulty of patrolling vast expanses of open ocean, the ignorance and carelessness of the new breed of sailor, the incomprehensible magnetic disturbances that rendered compasses and radios useless, and the sudden savagery of weather, the full potential of which was still only a matter of conjecture.
    “You heard of rogue waves? Some people call them superwaves.”
    “No.”
    “Waves travel in what are called trains, sequences with different distances between crest and trough. Every now and again, the trains get in step. Three or four of them crest and trough together. The waves they make are monsters. Some of them go a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet high, and they come out of nowhere. They only last for a minute or so—the trains fall out of step pretty quick—but that’s all it takes. There’s a tanker, say, plowing along nice and easy through twenty-foot seas. All of a sudden, right in front of him, roaring down on him at fifty or sixty miles an hour, is a ten-story-high wall of black water. The hole in front of these things is sometimes deeper than the tanker is long, so he finds himself steaming straight down, with a mountain or water—millions and millions of tons of dead-weight water—ready to break