Free Barracuda by Mike Monahan Page B

pride of the ichthyologic community and
justify the grant from the Florida Museum of Natural History.
    Celestial invited James aboard the Hummingbird and liberally poured two glasses of rum. Inside
the wheelhouse, James could finally see the big man, whose
shoulders filled the wheelhouse and made James feel puny by
comparison. Celestial was a dark-skinned, middle-aged man with huge
hands. His head was bald, and a nasty scar ran from the corner of
his left lower lip to his ear. James had a quick thought that
Celestial resembled a large fish that had been hooked on a line and
tore the hook out his mouth rather than be caught.
    The two new friends moved out to the rear of the
boat where they sat and enjoyed a warm glow courtesy of the rum.
They talked about the numerous aberrant behavior of the Bikini
Atoll fish, the gray reefer included. Celestial spoke of huge
groupers he had caught that weighed more than one hundred
pounds.
    “The larger the fish, the stranger they act,” he
stated. “Some have extra fins, eyes, and teeth. I saw some very
strange angelfish. Usually, angelfish eat coral with their little
beaks and don’t get much bigger than two feet. One day, a fisherman
came running back to the dock with a nasty wound to his hand. He
had been out net fishing with his sons, and while he was removing
all of his fish he was bitten by a giant angelfish. He said the
beak was sharp and twisted, bigger than he had ever seen. It must
have been, too, because the beast tore off two of the man’s fingers
and half of his palm. His sons set out the fish on the pier for
everyone to see.”
    “Had you ever seen anything like it?” James
asked, fascinated.
    Celestial answered. “Things changed in Bikini
Atoll from all those nuclear bombs so many years ago.”
    James couldn’t dispute this simple man’s
deduction.
    “I can’t charter my boat for another day,”
Celestial told him. “I’m changing a fuel pump in the morning and it
will probably take all day. Besides, there has been news of a storm
for early afternoon, and the shark graveyard is about twenty
kilometers from the dock. We’ll have to wait.”
    The seafarers said goodnight, and James walked
back to the hotel as Celestial drank rum on his boat. Halfway to
the hotel, he ran into Tanya. It was an accidental meeting, but
Tanya was always an opportunist.
    She was dressed in a pink, pastel dress that
enhanced her sexy curves.
    “I guess our dark dock doesn’t scare you at
night,” she said, in her most seductive voice.
    “It’s beautiful down there,” he countered.
    “Wait until the full moon. Then it lights up
like a Christmas tree with all the fish scales sparkling and the
moon beams reflecting off the water.”
    “I can’t wait.” He smiled. James was falling
under her spell.
    “Mmmm…it’s getting chilly. How about buying a
gal a drink?” she purred.
    “How about a rain check? We’re doing an early
dive tomorrow to beat the inclement weather.”
    “I’ll hold you to that,” she said with a
wink.
    James walked back to his room, fantasizing about
Tanya until Dr. Collins snapped at him.
    “Where have you been?”
    James spent the next hour talking about his
conversation with Celestial. Tanya spent the next hour plotting
with Andrej.
    ***
    “Can’t you move any faster, James? We don’t have
time to spare,” Dr. Collins lamented.
    “I could go much faster if you would carry some
of this stuff,” James returned.
    “You know I’m busy on the computer checking the
satellite links. I want to get out to the passageway and check on
the video equipment before the storm arrives. We will have to leave
it on continuous play while we investigate this shark cemetery. We
can always download the information later. Please hurry.”
    James hustled the gear to the skiff while the
professor made the final computer adjustments. They weren’t taking
all the gear they normally carried since this would be a short dive
to calibrate the video camera and the piggyback