Free Beast by Peter Benchley Page B

reached the area where they had recovered the raft, they had found two seat cushions and a rubber fender.
    “Wonder why Marcus didn’t see these,” Mike said as he brought the fender aboard. “It’s not like they were underwater.”
    “A helicopter is a wonderful contraption, but you got to fly it real slow over open water or you overwhelm the scanners in the human eye.” Darling looked out over the water. There were no signs of life, present or past. “That’s it, then.”
    He took a bearing on the dim hump in the distance called Bermuda, and headed for home.
    By six o’clock, they had left the deep behind, the ocean swell had faded and the water’s color had changed from blued steel to dark green. From the flying bridge they could see sand holes on the bottom and dark patches of grass and coral.
    “Who’s that?” Mike asked, pointing to a boat silhouetted against the lowering sun.
    Darling shaded his eyes and looked at the boat, appraising the rake of the bow and the shape of the house and the size of the cockpit.
    “Carl Frith,” he said.
    “Hell’s he doing? Trolling?”
    “In the shallows? Not bloody likely.”
    They kept looking. They could see movement aboard the boat, which rolled as if it were taking on a weight and then rolled back as if releasing it.
    “You don’t think … ?” Mike began. “Nah, he’s not that stupid.”
    “Stupid? Maybe not,” Darling said as he turned toward the boat and pushed his throttle forward. “But how about greedy?”
    Mike glanced over at Darling. There was a set to Whip’s jaw, a cold and squinty hardness to his eyes.
    Carl Frith had been a trap fisherman, and one of the noisiest protesters when traps were outlawed. He was always bleating about freedom, independence and the rights of man, despite having received over $100,000 from his settlement with the government—enough for any man, Darling thought, enough to let him change over to line fishing or charter fishing or start another business altogether. But it was beginning to look as if Carl Frith wanted to have it both ways.
    Because they were approaching from the northwest, upwind, they got to within a hundred yards of Frith before he heard Privateer’s engine. They had a clear view of him reaching underwater with his boat hook and snagging the sunken buoy, pulling the rope up to his winch, hauling the big fish trap aboard his boat, opening the door and emptying the catch into the fish hold.
    “Miserable sonofabitch,” Darling said.
    “Gonna run him down?”
    “Gonna fillet the bastard.”
    “Good enough.”
    Darling felt a rage rising in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t care that what Frith was doing was illegal: As far as Darling was concerned, most laws were whores assigned to serve politicians. What burned him—outraged him, sickened him—was the mindless selfishness of the man, the headlong rush at destruction and waste. And it wasn’t only that Frith was still trap fishing, he was using submerged buoys so that the marine police wouldn’t see them on the surface. A passing boat might catch the buoy in its propeller and cut it away, or a storm might shift the trap so Frith couldn’t find it. Either way, the trap would be lost on the bottom, where day after day, week after week, it would kill and kill and kill.
    Frith heard him coming now. He had a trap hung over the side, and as soon as he turned and saw Privateer bearing down on him, he pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt and cut the rope holding the trap, and the trap splashed into the water and sank away.
    Darling kept up speed until he was ten yards from Frith’s small boat, and then he turned sharply and pulled back on the throttle, throwing a wake that slammed into Frith’s boat and staggered the man.
    “Hey!” Frith shouted. “What you think you’re doin’?”
    Darling let his boat wallow beside Frith’s. He leaned on the railing of the flying bridge and looked down. Frith was in his fifties, big-bellied and bald. His