White Shark Read Online Free PDF Page A

used to want to be buried at
sea, but not now, not anymore.   I don't
like the thought of being lunch for creepy crawlies."
    They saw a few more recognizable items as
they crept toward the bow:   pots from the
galley, the frame of a bunk, a radio.   Webber shot them all.   He was
readjusting one of his cameras when, at the edge of his field of vision, he saw
what looked like a letter of the alphabet painted on a steel plate.   "What's that?" he said, pointing.
    The pilot turned the submersible around
and moved it slowly forward.   Looking
through his porthole, he said suddenly, "Bingo!   We just identified the boat."
    "We did?"
    "The kind, anyway.   That's a U painted on one of the conning-tower
plates.   It's a U-boat."
    "A U-boat?   You mean she's
German?"
    "She was.   But what she was doing this far south in the
middle of nowhere, the Lord only knows."
    Webber shot pictures of the U from several angles as the pilot
nudged the submersible on toward the bow of the submarine.
    When they reached the forward deck area,
the pilot disengaged the motor and let the submersible hover.   "There's what sank her," he said,
focusing the lights on an enormous hole in the deck.   "She imploded."
    The deck plates were bent inward, their
edges curled as if struck by a giant hammer.
    As Webber shot a picture, he felt sweat
running down his sides; he imagined the moment, half a century before, when the
men on this boat suddenly knew they were going to die.   He could imagine the roar of rushing water,
the screams, the confusion, the panic, the pressure, the suffocation, the
agony.   "Christ..." he said.
    The pilot put the motor in gear, and the
submersible inched forward.   Its lights
reached into the hole, illuminating a skein of wires, a tangle of pipes, a...
    "Hey! " Webber
shouted.
    "What?"
    "There's something in there.   Something big.   It looks ... I don't
know..."
    The pilot maneuvered the submersible above
the hole, tilted the bow down and, using the claws on the ends of the artificial
arms, tore away the wires and pushed aside the pipes.   He angled the lights into a single
five-thousand-watt beam and shone it straight down into the hole.   "I'll be damned..."
    "It looks like a box," Webber
said as he watched the lights dance over the greenish-yellow surface of a
perfect rectangle.   "A
chest."
    "Yeah, or a
coffin."   The pilot paused, reconsidering.   "No.   Too big for a coffin."
    For a long moment, neither of them
spoke.   They just stared at the box —
wondering, imagining.
    At last, Webber said, "We ought to
bring it up."
    "Yeah."   The bastard's
gotta be eight feet long.   I bet it
weighs a ton.   I can't lift it with this
boat."
    "How about both
boats together?"
    "No, we can't lift a thousand pounds
apiece, and I'm just guessing.   It could
be a lot more than that.   We
couldn't..."   He stopped.   "Just a sec.   I think they've got five miles of cable in
the hold of that ship up there.   If they
can weight an end of it and send it down, and if we can get a sling around the
box, maybe... there's a chance..."   He pushed a button and spoke into his microphone.
     
    *           *           *           *           *
     
    It took the two submersibles nearly an
hour to retrieve the weighted cable sent down from the mother ship and to
secure the box in a wire sling.   By the
time they gave the ship the order to begin lifting, they were pushing the
limits of their air supply.   And so, as
soon as they made sure that the box was free of the submarine's hull and was
rising steadily, they shed ballast and began their own ascent.
    Webber felt exhausted and elated and
challenged, impatient to get to the surface, open the box and see what was
inside.
    "You know something weird?" he
said as he watched the depth gauge record their meter-by-meter progress up
toward daylight.
    "This whole thing's weird," the
pilot said.   "You
thinking of something in