The hum of the engines below his feet seemed to take on a feverish pitch. Like an unleashed hound, the Catawba seemed to pick up the scent of her quarry. Anticipation gripped all hands.

Ignoring the rain, they lined the decks and bridge wings.

"Four hundred meters," the radar operator sang out.

Then a seaman clutching the bow staff began pointing vigorously into the rain.

Dover leaned out the wheelhouse door and shouted through a bullhorn. "Is she afloat?"

"Buoyant as a rubber duck in a bathtub," the seaman bellowed back through cupped hands.

Dover nodded to the lieutenant on watch. "Slow engines."

"Engines one third," the watch lieutenant acknowledged as he moved a series of levers on the ship's automated console.

The Arnie Marie slowly emerged through the precipitation.

They expected to find her half awash, in a sinking condition.

But she sat proud in the water, drifting in the light swells without a hint of distress. There was a silence about her that seemed unnatural, almost ghostly. Her decks were deserted, and Dover's hail over the bullhorn went unanswered.

"A crabber by the look of her," Dover muttered to no one in particular. "Steel hull, about a hundred and ten feet. Probably out of a shipyard in New Orleans."

The radio operator leaned out of the communications room and motioned to Dover. "From the Board of Register, sir. The Arnie Marie's owner and skipper is Carl Keating- Home port is Kodiak."

Again Dover hailed the strangely quiet crab boat, this time andressing Keating by name. There was still no response.

The Catawba slowly circled and hove to a hundred meters away, then stopped her engines and drifted alongside.

The steel-cage crab pots were neatly stacked on the deserted deck, and a wisp of exhaust smoke puffed from the funnel, suggesting that her diesel engines were inling in neutral. No human movement could be detected through the ports or the windows of the wheelhouse.

The boarding party consisted of two officers, Ensign Pat Murphy and Lieutenant Marty Lawrence. Without the usual small talk they donned their exposure suits, which would protect them from the frigin waters if they accinentally fell into the sea. They had lost count of the times they had conducted routine examinations of foreign fishing vessels that strayed inside the Alaskan 200-mile fishing limit, yet there was nothing routine about this investigation. No flesh-and-blood crew lined the rails to greet them. They climbed into a small rubber Zodiac propelled by an outboard motor and cast off.

Darkness was only a few hours away. The rain had eased to a drizzle but the wind had increased, and the sea was rising. An eerie quiet gripped the Catawba. No one spoke; it was as though they were afraid to, at least until the spell produced by the unknown was broken.

They watched as Murphy and Lawrence tied their tiny craft to the crab boat, hoisted themselves to the deck and disappeared through a doorway into the main cabin.