“I was just wondering about the range underwater,” he said. “How close will Fluke have to stay to the boat?”
“It’ll be okay up to fifty yards.” Slater’s bald head seemed to be gleaming with annoyance. “Didn’t Constance explain all that to you?”
“Yes, I guess she did. But with the searchlight she’s going to attach to Fluke’s head —”
He didn’t need to go on. Pete was standing on the afterdeck. He ran his hand through his wet hair. It was the signal they had arranged. The plastic bag was safely stowed away.
“Oh, I see, yeah, that’s a pretty powerful light,” Jupe finished.
“Then let’s get on with it,” Slater walked back on deck. Constance was leaning over the side, talking to Fluke in a friendly, reassuring voice.
“Where’s that other kid?” Slater asked her. “I thought there were three of them.”
“Bob’s got a bad cold,” Pete explained. “We left him at the cove. We thought —”
“Okay.” Slater unhitched the line that was holding the wheel on center and put his hand n the throttle of the outboard motor. “How fast can that fish swim?” he asked Constance.
“He’s not a fish,” Constance told him coldly. “Fluke’s a highly intelligent and civilized mammal. And he can swim at least fifteen miles an hour when he feels like it. But I’d sooner you kept the speed down to eight knots. I don’t want him to tire himself.”
“Whatever you say.” Slater eased the throttle forward and steered out to sea. Constance stayed where she was, leaning over the rail and talking to Fluke as he swam playfully along beside the boat, sometimes leaping and diving in long, graceful arcs.
“The Coast Guard guys who rescued us told me we were five miles offshore when they picked us up,” Slater said.
Jupe glanced at Pete. There were some sensible questions he wanted to ask, but in his role of dummy he preferred that Pete ask them.
“How long?” Jupe mouthed silently.
Pete understood him at once. “How long had you been in the water?” he asked Slater.
“At least two hours.”
“Tide?” Jupe mouthed.
“Was the tide coming in or going out?” Pete asked.
“It was getting dark,” Slater remembered. “And the waves were so high it was hard to see anything. But I did get an occasional glimpse of the shoreline, and it seemed to be getting farther and farther away no matter how hard we tried to swim toward it. So I guess the tide was going out.”
Two hours, Jupiter calculated silently. He recalled the night of the storm. The gale had come up from the northwest. The wind would have carried them parallel to the shore, so he could forget that factor in his calculations. Handicapped by their life jackets, Captain Carmel and Oscar Slater would have been capable of little resistance against the tide. Jupe figured it would have carried them around two miles out to sea in two hours.
He eased over to Pete and whispered to him.
“I’d say the boat must have gone down about three miles offshore,” Pete told Slater.
“How do you figure that?”
“The wind and everything,” Pete explained vaguely.
“Maybe. Your guess is as good as mine.” Slater glanced at his watch and made some calculations of his own. He slackened speed.
“We must be about three miles out now,” he said after a minute. He turned to Constance. “How about getting that mammal harnessed up and we’ll search up and down the line we’re on now.”
He turned the boat so that it was idling slowly along, parallel to the shore.
“Fluke,” Constance called. “Come close, Fluke.” She reached for the canvas harness on the deck beside her. She had already fastened the television camera and the searchlight to it. She slipped into the water and fitted the straps over Fluke’s head.
Jupe was pinching his lower lip. Three miles out, he thought. But three miles out from where? From Slater’s vague information the boat might have gone down anywhere along a ten-mile lane of ocean. It was going to be like looking for a lost nickel on a freeway unless they could fix the location of the wreck more exactly than that.
Constance had the light and the television camera fastened to Fluke’s head. She climbed back on board. Jupe sidled over to her.
“Did your father ever manage to say anything else to you?” he asked. “Anything about the night of the storm?”
Constance shook her head. “Nothing that made any sense to me,” she answered. “I told you what he did say.”
Jupe remembered. That stuff about keeping those two Polish guys in line. He might have meant anything. He might even have been talking about something that had happened years ago.
Jupe stared at the shore three miles away.
There was very little to see. The cliffs were high, hiding all but the distant line of mountains from the boat. An occasional house showed on the top of a hill. An office building rose out of the landscape. There was a tall television relay tower on top of another hill. What looked like a factory chimney showed way over to the right of it.
“Better get into a wet suit, Pete,” Constance said, “and we’ll check the air tanks so we’re all ready to dive with Fluke.”
Pete nodded and walked forward into the cockpit, where the scuba equipment had been set out for them.
Jupe was still staring at the coastline. He was pinching his lower lip so hard that he had pulled it all the way down to his chin.
Diego Carmel was an experienced sea captain. When he knew his boat was going down, he would have tried to take a sighting of some kind. If only he was well enough to talk…
Jupe’s eyes shifted quickly from the television tower to the tall chimney. Suddenly he saw them as they would look at dusk in a storm.
“Two poles.”
He grabbed Slater’s arm. This was no time to pretend to be stupid.
“Keep the two poles in line!” he shouted excitedly.
“What? What are you jabbering about, boy?”
“Captain Carmel,” Jupe told him. “When the boat started to sink, he tried to get a fix on the shore. He saw that television tower with the factory chimney behind it.”
“What?”
“Don’t you see?” It seemed to Jupe it was Slater who was being stupid now. “All we’ve got to do to find the area of the wreck is to go back down the coast until those two landmarks, those two poles, are in a straight line!”
Jupe stood on the foredeck with the binoculars to his eyes.
He held them focused on the shoreline three miles away. As the boat moved down the coast, the television tower and the factory chimney were drawing closer together. Another hundred yards, he figured.