The Admiral's Mark (Short Story) Read Free

west. He kept time with the deck’s jerking pitch, glad to know that his sea legs had not left him.
    The navy had taught him how to dive ten years ago. He liked it but, unlike his father who’d been a submariner, he hadn’t wanted a career underwater. The sky appealed to him, so he learned to fly fighter jets.Ultimately, he was steered toward the law, where he found a home first as a JAG officer, now in the Justice Department.
    “We go down thirty feet,” Dubois said as he adjusted his own harness. “Lots of current. Watch yourself. I show you where it happened.”
    “Did you fish him out?”
    “Yeah, mon. He not come up, so I go down.”
    “Why didn’t you go down with him?”
    Dubois eyed him with irritation. “ ’Cause Scotty say he don’t want me down there.”
    None of which had been detailed in the police report. But the whole thing was more overview than report. Few details, even fewer conclusions. Just a simple statement of “diving accident.”
    “Scotty?” he said. “You and him buddies?”
    Dubois eyed him again with a cool stare. “I like him. He okay.”
    Then Dubois rolled over the side into the water.
    Malone followed.
    A gray reef shark immediately greeted him. The air from his tank carried a dank, oily aftertaste, probably from a bad compressor. He hadn’tbeen underwater in five years, but he quickly acclimated himself, listening to the burbling sound of his exhaled breath.
    Dubois led the way to the bottom.
    He checked the depth gauge snaking from his regulator.
    Twenty-five feet.
    Shallow enough to have no decompression worries.
    He stared around in the aquamarine sea and noticed only a few tropicals here and there, some wrasses and an angel, but nothing like the numbers one would expect. He knew Haiti’s reefs had been decimated by overfishing and sedimentation. Most of the trees on the island were gone—cut down for fuel and shelter with few replantings—allowing rainwater to cascade from the mountains unimpeded, carrying along tons of mud that ended up on the seafloor. Not enough reef fish also meant fewer to keep the coral clean of algae. So the twisted limestone hulks loomed mostly lifeless, everything stained dark green.
    Dubois motioned to a formation fifty feet away and indicated that Malone should lead the way.
    He swam toward it.
    A loud rasp from the regulator accompanied each of his breaths. He was trying to ignore the foul-tasting air and hoped nothing was toxic.
    They came to a coral formation, this one, too, devoid of polyps. A few fish were gorging on the algae. The shark had drifted off. The water was warm and comforting, almost too much so, and he cautioned himself to stay alert. Rays of bright sunshine, fractured by the surface, danced to a quick beat. Dubois had been right. A steady current in their face made the going difficult.
    They arrived at the limestone hulk, which rose ten feet toward the surface, stretching out many more yards toward the open sea. A darker hue in the water a few hundred feet away signaled greater depths, and he assumed that was where the shallow reef ended.
    Dubois pointed to an opening in the rock, where chunks had fallen away to reveal a crack that spread for twenty feet. A small, cavelike opening led into the crevice. Dubois motioned with his hands, indicating that a storm had caused the damage.
    Malone swam close and peered inside. He saw what appeared to be wood timbers on the bottom, encrusted with barnacles and algae. Other shapes lay embedded in the sand, thick with encrustation.
    A wreck of some sort. Old, too. Hidden beneath this rock mound for a long time. He motioned—
Is this all?
—and Dubois nodded. He decided he’d seen enough. He’d need to return for a closer inspection, but first more information was called for.
    He motioned for them to surface.
    They drifted away from the limestone wall.
    Scott had apparently found a shipwreck. But there were probably thousands of those in these waters, as Cap-Haïtien had been a