He hated the ancient submersible—and wet suits too. A year ago he'd have been diving bare-chested, bare-legged, often nude, with a double tank. The exertion kept him warm. Now, after an hour of sitting in the cockpit with the batteries doing the work, he was growing chilly despite the neoprene suit.

He was whining through crystal-clear water above a sandy bottom, forty feet below an aqua surface dimpled by the northeast trade winds.

The Whine Bottle, a Martak Dolphin wet-submersible he'd named for the noise its electric motor made, was only fourteen feet long and weighed only five hundred pounds. She was powered by seven twelve-volt golf-cart batteries. She had been donated to the Ministry of Fisheries by Woods Hole Institute in Massachusetts, which had bought dry-submersibles and needed her no longer. Now his fellow marine biologists, it was said, were cruising the bottom encased in Plexiglas without even getting their hair wet.

He'd begged his partner, Jake, to abandon the stupid thing. The noise it made scared the conch, which had keen hearing, and started their ludicrous circus procession, lurching like a column of drunken elephants when he got within half a mile.

But Jake claimed that if they turned down anything from the Ministry, he'd lose their grant: "Use it or lose it, white boy. That's one thing you learn down here."

Whine Bottle was painted pink—where the paint still hung on—and had a bulbous nose and a tapered tail. Underwater she looked like a strawberry ice-cream cone on its side. Controlled by a joystick from a World War II Corsair fighter, she dove like a brick and climbed with all the enthusiasm of a carpenter's plumb held upside down.

He had learned to cruise her at precisely forty feet. Higher, she tended to rise; deeper, she wanted to dive.

She was suicidal. She had a top speed of three knots, hardly faster than he could swim. If he tried to push her faster, her batteries went dead. If he cruised her slower, she stalled like an airplane and headed in a graveyard spiral for the sand.

Someday he would leave her quietly on the bottom to perplex future underwater archaeologists and whales.

He looked at his watch. Another half hour. Whine Bottle had spooked every conch within a quarter of a mile.

He eased her north through a school of emerald topsail fish. A barracuda flashed by, intent on a feast. Finally, as he peered ahead, a brown shadow slowly came into focus, near a reef.

The Leta was a freighter, sunk by a U-boat in 1944. Despite swift currents through Masthead Cut, which continually filled and swept away sand from the gaping wounds in her hull, she had been a playground for divers for years. Then a party of four had been trapped below and drowned in '72.

Since then she had been an evil thing, placed off-limits by Government House.