Several Minutes dragged by. Occasionally one of the searchers would appear on the deck only to vanish again down a hatchway.

The only sound in the Catawba's wheelhouse came from the static over the ship's open radiophone loudspeaker, turned up to high volume and tuned to an emergency frequency.

Suddenly, with such unexpected abruptness that even Dover twitched in surprise, Murphy's voice loudly reverberated inside the wheelhouse.

"Catawba, this is Arnie Marie."

"Go ahead, Arnie Marie," Dover answered into a microphone.

"They're all dead."

The words were so cold, so terse, nobody absorbed them at first.

"Repeat."

"No sign of a pulse in any of them. Even the cat bought it."

What the boarding party found was a ship of the dead. Skipper Keating I s body rested on the deck, his head leaning against a bulkhead beneath the radio. Scattered throughout the boat in the galley, the messroom and the sleeping quarters were the corpses of the Arnie Marie's crew. Their facial expressions were frozen in twisted agony and their limbs contorted in grotesque positions, as though they had violently thrashed away their final moments of life. Their skin had turned an odd black color, and they had gushed blood from every orifice. The ship's Siamese cat lay beside a thick wool blanket it had shredded in its death throes.

Dover's face reflected puzzlement rather than shock at Murphy's description. "Can you determine a cause?" he asked.

"Not even a good guess," Murphy came back. "No indication of struggle. No marks on the bodies, yet they bled like slaughtered pigs.

Looks like whatever killed them struck everyone at the same time."

"Stand by."

Dover turned and surveyed the faces around him until he spotted the ship's surgeon, Lieutenant Commander Isaac Thayer.

Doc Thayer was the most popular man aboard the ship. An oldtimer in the Coast Guard service, he had long ago given up the plush offices and high income of shore medicine for the rigors of sea rescue.

"What do you make of it, Doc?" Dover asked.

Thayer shrugged and smiled. "Looks as though I better make a house call."

Dover paced the bridge impatiently while Doc Thayer entered a second Zodiac and motored across the gap divining the two vessels.

Dover ordered the helmsman to position the Catawba to take the crab boat in tow. He was concentrating on the maneuver and didn't notice the radio operator standing at his elbow.

"A signal just in, sir, from a bush pilot airlifting supplies to a team of scientists on Augustine island."

"Not now," Dover said brusquely.

"It's urgent, Captain," the radio operator persisted.

"Okay, read the guts of it."

" 'Scientific party all dead.' Then something unintelligible and what sounds like 'Save me.' " Dover stared at him blankly. "That's all?"

"Yes, sir. I tried to raise him again, but there was no reply."