Chameleon by William Diehl Page B

its beam diminishing to a pinpoint, he opened his mouth, like a fish in a bowl, and the sea flooded in, and his life, too, blinked
    The Henry Thoreau lay upside down. The cables that had held it firmly to the bottom were either uprooted or had snapped. Its once mighty legs pointed straight up. Buffeted by the storm, they bent before the gale and then were torn from their mounts on the deck. Their air pockets burst. The escaping air hissed out. And the Thoreau plunged straight down, four hundred feet, leaving in its wake a trail of bubbles, debris and bodies which bobbed upward, like innocent toys from a stricken dollhouse, toward the raging surface of the Chukchi Sea.
    V
    The Greek tanker, ploughing through the gale, arrived on the scene forty minutes after the Thoreau had gone down. The tanker’s searchlights swept the area, picking out one life raft with three bodies lashed to it. Three men, all frozen to death. For more than two hours the tanker lay in the troughs of the pounding waves while several volunteers recovered one corpse, then another. When the captain finally decide4 to abandon the search, they had fished fifteen men and a woman out of the sea. There was no sign of the Thoreau.
    By eight o’clock the next morning the storm had passed, and the sea, although still running high, had lost its muscle, the storm clouds raced onward, sweeping south toward the Bering Strait and Nome. Winds were down to twenty to twenty-five knots. Three more bodies were recovered. The captain sent a simple message to the Air Force rescue station at Point Barrow, two hundred miles northeast of the disaster area:
    ‘Henry Thoreau down in 70 fathoms. Location: 72 degrees north, 165 degrees west. Nineteen bodies recovered. No survivors. Holding position. Please advise.’
    The Russian air station at Provideniya, just south of the Bering Strait, offered assistance, but three Air Force rescue planes arrived on the scene forty minutes after the tanker’s message and reported no signs of life or the fated oil rig. They thanked the Russians but declined help. One of the planes swept low over the tanker and wiggled his wings in a final salute to the Thoreau and its crew.
    ‘This is Air Force 109,’ the pilot radioed the tanker. ‘Please drop a marker and you are relieved. Thank you and Happy New Year.’ He banked sharply and joined his formation and the three planes headed back toward Barrow.
    On the bridge, the man who had led the scuba-diving team the night before peered through powerful binoculars, watching the three planes leave. He had been there all night, watching the rescue attempt. Now he lowered the glasses. There was a patch over his right eye now, and a deep red scar ran, from his hairline to the edge of his jaw, down the right side of his face. He nodded to the captain, left the bridge and went to the radio room, where he sent a simple message:
    ‘Mission accomplished. Scratch Thornley. Le Croix.’
    That afternoon, eight hours before the beginning of the New Year, the man whose neck had been broken planting the explosives on the leg of the Thoreau the night before, was buried from the deck of the tanker as it ploughed southward toward the Bering Sea.
    3
    Eddie Wolfnagle was on top of the world. It was a gorgeous day, the temperature was in the mid-eighties, and the sun was blazing, except for an occasional downpour that started suddenly and stopped just as suddenly. He guided the rented Honda along the Hana Road, Which had started out as a respectable two-lane blacktop and now had petered out into a dirt road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. As the road got narrower, the forest got thicker, so that before long he was driving under a canopy of mango, kukuis, African tulip blossoms and pink Rainbow Shower trees. Hidden among them, parrots squawked indignantly aid ruffled the rainwater out of their feathers, and to his left, a hundred yards below, the Pacific Ocean was putting on quite a show, smashing at huge boulders