Free Beast by Peter Benchley

heads, for Whip had taught him that an old ship would have struck the coral head and stuck there until another sea came along and broke her loose and cast her innards into the sand, which would embrace them and cover them over.
    Now Sharp never missed a chance to fly, and whenever he flew—whether supposedly to keep his hours up, or to train new pilots, or to test new equipment—he always kept an eye out for shipwrecks. He flew as low as possible, yawing back and forth to keep the sun’s rays at a cutting angle through the shallow seas, and if one of his crew ever asked what the hell he was doing, he would reply with something vague like, Putting her through her paces.
    So far, he had found two ballast piles, two shipwrecks. One, Whip said, had been explored in the sixties. One was new. They’d go have a dig on it one of these days.
    The beeping was loud and regular now, and Sharp could see something yellow sliding up and down the rolling seas. He pushed the collective-power-control lever down, and dropped the helicopter to a hundred feet.
    It was a raft, small and empty and apparently undamaged. He circled it, careful to stay high enough so that the downdraft from his rotors didn’t start it spinning or capsize it off the top of a wave.
    “Privateer … Huey One …”
    “Yeah, Marcus …” came Whip’s voice.
    “It’s a raft. Nobody aboard. Just a raft. Could’ve fallen off a boat. Some of those EPIRBs are salt-water activated.”
    “Whyn’t you let me pick it up with my davit? I’ll cruise around, see if there’s any swimmers, then bring it to shore. Nobody has to get wet.”
    “You got it. It’s three-four-oh from where you were. Should be here in an hour or so. Meantime, we’ll set a search grid and swing back and forth till fuel sends us home.”
    “Roger that, Marcus.”
    “False alarm, I guess. But the land of the free and the home of the brave is grateful to you anyway, Whip.”
    “My pleasure. Privateer standing by… .”

8
    “MAYBE THE DAY isn’t a dead loss after all,” Darling said as he climbed the ladder to the flying bridge.
    “Why’s that?” Mike was stowing the last of the coiled wire leaders.
    “Got us a chance to pick up a raft. If she’s a Switlik and nobody’s name’s on her, there’s a couple thousand, maybe more.”
    “Somebody’ll claim it. They always do.”
    “Probably … the way our luck’s been running.”
    They raised the raft in less than an hour, and Darling made a slow circle around it, studying it like a specimen on a laboratory slide.
    “Switlik,” he said, pleased.
    “Looks brand-new off the shelf, like nobody was ever on it.”
    “That, or they were rescued right quick.” Darling saw none of the normal signs that people had spent time in the raft: no dirt, no scuff marks from rubber shoes, no fish blood from anything they’d caught, no bits of clothing.
    “Sharks got ‘em?” Mike said.
    Darling shook his head. “Shark would’ve bit through the rubber, collapsed one of the cells, maybe burred it with his skin. You’d see it.”
    “What, then?”
    “Whale, maybe.” Darling kept circling as he pondered that possibility. Killer whales had been known to attack rafts, dinghies, even big boats. Nobody knew why, because they’d never gone on and attacked the people; there had never been a true case of an orca eating a human being. Perhaps they just got to playing with a raft and, like a kid who had grown too fast, they didn’t know their own strength.
    Humpback whales had killed people, but always by accident. They had come up to rafts out of curiosity, to see what they were, and gotten underneath and given a flip with their tails, and people had been flung to death.
    “No,” Darling said, dismissing the thought. “Everything would be upside down and akimbo.”
    Mike said, “Could be she just slipped off the deck and fell in the ocean.”
    “Then what turned on the EPIRB?” Darling pointed to the Styrofoam-cased beacon. “That’s not