Zavala had felt a slight jounce when the load lightened and suspected he had lost one of his passengers. He brought the helicopter around in a banking turn, hovered for an instant, then dropped down so his friend could reach the rope ladder. For the second time that day, Trout was reaching for the rope. But as his stiff, sore fingers came within inches of the loop, he found himself dragged away by a strong current. Trout was a strong swimmer who had been around the ocean all his life, but the more he stroked, the farther from the rope he found himself.
The helicopter tried to keep pace.
The current was pulling Trout with such force that he found it impossible to stay in place long enough to reach for the loop. Time and again, he tried. He was rapidly drawn back to the edge of the whirlpool, sucked into the ring of breakers and swept under the wall of foam.
It was all he could do to keep his head above water to breathe. The whirlpool seemed to be trying to drag back at least one of the humans who had the audacity to escape its clutches.
The current carried him around the rim. Trout struggled to keep his head above water in the surflike conditions around the whirlpool.
Austin had no intention of giving up on his friend. He pulled himself up the line hand over hand and back into the helicopter. Then he braced his legs, grabbed the rope in two hands and hauled Gamay aboard.
He gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then threw the line back through the open door and climbed down to the end of the crude ladder.
Zavala was following Trout around the frothing rim. Again he brought the helicopter down until the rope was close enough for Trout to reach. Trout made a feeble grab for the line but it again eluded his grasp.
Austin guessed that Trout was too exhausted to pull himself out. He saw Gamay peering anxiously down at him from the helicopter. He gave her a wave, took a deep breath and jumped from the helicopter.
He came down in the water several feet from Trout and stroked his way closer to his friend. Trout croaked like a bullfrog with a bad cold:
"What… the … hell … are … you … doing … here?"
"You looked like you were having fun, so I thought I'd join you."
"You're crazy!"
Austin gave him a soggy grin. He struggled to buckle their flotation vests together. With that task finally accomplished, he looked up and saw the helicopter swooping back and forth over their heads.
Austin waved, and Zavala brought the helicopter in for another rescue attempt. After several tries, Austin saw that he would have to have the speed of a rattlesnake to grab the flapping rope. The cold water had sapped his energy, and he knew there was little chance he'd be able to pull them both from the water. But he kept on trying for the line, and didn't notice right away that something odd was occurring.
They were moving more slowly around the whirlpool. The angle of the water in the great watery pit was less steep than it had been. He thought it was his imagination, or simply an optical illusion, but after a moment or two he saw that the bottom of the whirlpool was rising, giving the gyre a bowl shape.
Around the rim of the gyre, the raging circle of breakers seemed to be subsiding. The water was dropping back to ordinary sea level.
The bottom continued to rise. At the same time, their forward motion slowed, until they were moving at the pace of a walk.
Zavala had seen the change in the whirlpool's configuration, and once more brought the helicopter in low over the struggling figures.
> Austin felt a surge of adrenaline-fueled energy. He reached up and his fingers closed around the line. Gamay was tending it and giving him plenty of slack. His cold, fumbling fingers slipped the line under Trout's armpits, then around himself, and he signaled Zavala to haul them out.
As they rose above the wavetops, Austin could see the NOAA ship and the Throckmorton cutting the distance in their direction.
He glanced down, and his eyes grew wide at the sight that greeted them. The whirlpool had virtually vanished, and in its place was a great, dark circle of slowly rotating water filled with every kind of ocean debris imaginable.
At the center of the puckered area was a massive bubbling, like that made when a scuba diver is about to surface, only much bigger. Then the water rose in a greenish white mound, and a huge object emerged from the sea and wallowed in the waves.
In its death throes, the maelstrom had disgorged a ship.
11
The LA-250 Renegade amphibious airplane had followed the rocky Maine coast to Camden, where it wheeled above a line of swanlike windjammers leaving the picturesque harbor and then headed east over Penobscot Bay. Its destination was a pear-shaped island easily identified by the candy-striped red-and-white lighthouse that stood on a high promontory at its narrower end.
The plane made a water landing near the lighthouse and taxied up to a mooring buoy. Two men got out of the plane, climbed into an outboard skiff that was tied up at the mooring and headed toward a wooden dock, where a cigarette boat and a forty-eight-foot schooner were tied up. They left the skiff and walked along the dock to a steep flight of stairs that led up the side of a rugged cliff. The bright Maine sunshine reflected off Spider Barrett's shaved head and colorful tattoo. Barrett looked as if he could single-handedly cause a biker riot. He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt that revealed thick arms covered with skull tattoos. His eyes were hidden behind round-framed, reflecting blue sunglasses. A gold ring dangled from one ear, he had a silver stud in his nostril and an Iron Cross hung from a silver chain around his neck.
The Hell's Angel look was deceiving. Although Barrett owned a fortune in classic Harley-Davidson motorcycles, he was an honors graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he had majored in quantum physics.
The pilot was named Mickey Doyle. He was a compactly built man who looked like a walking sports bar. He wore a Celtics T-shirt and a New England Patriots zippered sweatshirt. A Red Sox baseball cap was jammed down on a thatch of unruly hair the color of carrot juice. He was chewing on a thick cigar stub. Doyle had grown up in tough, working-class South Boston. He had a quick, street-smart intelligence and antic Irish sense of humor, and a disarming smile that charmed the unwary but failed to soften the hardness in his blue eyes.
A man carrying an automatic rifle materialized from a thicket of low-growing blueberry bushes. He was dressed in a camouflage uniform and wore a black beret at a rakish angle. He gave the two men a hostile stare, jerked the gun barrel toward the base of the cliff and followed a few paces behind, his weapon cradled in his arm.