Chapter 17 Three Beats Answered

It took them until half past six in the morning to make anybody believe it. The first transmission was a carrier with nothing on it, a keyed note out of a radio sixty-one miles away, as regular as a man tapping a pipe. Then the three beats came. Three, pause, three, pause, three, and Omar Hadid put both hands flat on the plank and left them there. "That is our convention," he said. "That is the relay's convention." "The relay has not transmitted since four-twelve yesterday. The relay went to a zero frame and then it stopped, and I have been sitting on this mountain for thirty-one hours telling everyone that thing is dead." He sat down on the gravel. "Say the call sign, Halleck. Slowly, and give the book to me and let me do it." The call sign came out of the noise the way a name comes out of a room, and it was the *Vera K*. Nathan Pike had twenty-six feet of crab boat and four days of diesel fuel and eleven days of generator and a crew of one, because his deckhand had gone north on the second night with four other men in a boat with a canvas cover over it and had not been heard from since. He had gone out of the bay on Tuesday morning at four in the morning on a routine run, twenty-one miles of a coast he knew in the dark, and when the sea went out of the harbor at ten to seven he was two miles off the point with a deck full of crab pots and no way at all to explain any of it. They had run north. They had run for four days, standing off and going in to look, and they were sixty-one miles north-northwest of the point at a depth where his sounder showed nothing but ocean and his radar showed, on the second night, a bay full of roof ridges and one enormous standing disturbance on the waterline at the mouth of the channel. "I saw your ring," Pike said. "I have been looking at it since Tuesday. It was forty feet across when I first saw it and it has not stopped getting wider and I have been sitting here every watch wondering what I was looking at." "You have been watching a hundred yards of white water go around in a circle," Juna said. "I have been watching it turn left." Delgado took the handset from Halleck and held it and said his name and his title and the date, because a man who has spent three days being the reason thirty-one people were in danger can be given the microphone for ninety seconds without doing anybody any harm. The *Vera K* had heard the relay. That was the part that made Omar put his hand over his mouth. For three nights, on the hour, at the top of each hour, something under the water had been keying three beats into the emergency frequency, and on the second night Pike had answered it, and something under the water had answered him back, and he had been answering it every hour since, alone, on a radio in a boat, for seventy-one hours, and telling a lighthouse keeper on the mainland what he knew about a town that was not on any chart he owned. "We could not raise anybody on the mainland," he said. "I gave it up about forty hours ago. I have been talking to the rocks." "Talk to the rocks," Juna said, "and then talk to us." Bernice Aughrim had come up behind the tote at some point without any of them hearing her, and she took the handset off the clip and held it the way she held a register. "How many people are in Tidefall Harbor," she said. Nobody answered her for a moment. Then Pike said, "Ma'am, I am sixty-one miles off your harbor mouth in a boat that was built to go twenty. On the second night I put my light on the town and I could see rooftops for two miles, and I could not tell one roof from another, and I have been sick about it for three days." "Roofs are roofs." Aughrim did not raise her voice and did not let go. "How many are in the water." "Nobody knows that. The state has nobody on the ground." A pause with a lot of weather in it. "I would not lie to you and tell you there is any way to count them from here." "Right," said Bernice Aughrim, and gave the handset back, and sat down on the gravel pad on the side where the children were asleep, and said, "Then the first thing anybody says out loud on that coast is that we do not know. Not the second thing. The first. I have had a piece of paper on this mountain since Wednesday with thirty-one on it, and thirty-one is what I can stand up in front of. I will not have anybody else writing a different number down without saying that mine is a count and not a census." Halleck wrote it on the board under the wind speed in Perrin's careful hand, and Perrin read the whole line back to him twice to make sure he had it, which is what Perrin did with everything. He gave them the fuel in his own boat, the eleven days of generator, and the radar. He gave them the hour and the bearing of every one of the other eight boats still out of the bay, and the one worth having out of the eight was the *Ansel Reyner*, a fifty-four-foot purse seiner forty miles south of him with room for twenty-two and a skipper who had put his wife and two children into somebody's car on the north road at six o'clock on Tuesday night and then gone back down to the dock to shut down his own engine. And he gave them the thing none of them had thought to ask for, which was a depth sounder off his own transom that would do eight hundred feet and a man who had been running it since Tuesday out of pure boredom. "Point it anywhere you want," Pike said. "I have got four hours before I have to think about diesel and weather. Tell me where you want the bottom." Then, at four minutes past seven, a shore station on the mainland came up on the net and asked Pike for a vessel name and a position, because Pike had raised him at the top of the hour with a name and a count and had been transmitting it ever since, waiting for a grown-up to come to the boat. The station asked three questions. Where is the landing. How many people. Is there fuel on the ground where they are. There was no landing. There was no fuel on the ground. There was a peak, a hole in the ocean, and eight children. Then Pike came back on, and his voice had changed into the voice of somebody who has been talking to a professional for twenty minutes and has learned the shape of the thing. "They will put an aircraft on the county strip at the mouth of the estuary within the day," he said. "The strip is at eleven feet. I have known that since Tuesday and I did not want to say it." "How long is it under?" "Since about six-forty yesterday morning." Somebody on the gravel made a sound. Juna put her hand flat on the mast leg and left it there. "Then the creek," Juna said. "The north creek," Halleck said. "It comes out at the north head, eight miles off, and it is a wide shallow mouth with a bar across it and a pump house on the knuckle above it." "Pump house has a generator in it." "Pump house has a generator in it and eight hundred gallons of diesel in a tank on the pad behind it, and I know that because I certified the fuel line on that pump house in 2011." Delgado said it to nobody and to everybody. "The pump house is on a rock knuckle at twenty-two feet. It does not go under." Halleck was already untying his boots on the gravel. "Then we go and sound the creek," he said. "We sound the creek before anybody puts a single foot on that saddle." ---