O'Malley held his breath, regretting that his duty required him to remain aboard while these other men – good men, brave men -potentially risked their lives.

Something was very wrong.

'Captain?' The two-way radio beside O'Malley crackled.

Picking it up, O'Malley answered, 'Reception is clear. Report.'

'Sir, the deck is deserted.'

'Understood. Remain on battle alert. Establish sentries,' O'Malley said. 'With caution, check the lower decks.'

'Affirmative, Captain.'

O'Malley waited the longest five minutes in his life.

'Captain, there's still no sign of anyone.'

'Keep checking.'

'Affirmative, Captain.'

O'Malley waited another tense five minutes.

Flashlights wavered on the trawler's deck. Lights came on. The two-way radio crackled. 'Captain, we can't find anyone. The trawler appears to be completely deserted.'

O'Malley knew the answer to his next question. The team would surely have reported the information. But he had to ask it anyhow. 'Did you find any corpses?'

'No one alive or dead, Captain. Unless they're hiding somewhere, the vessel's been abandoned. It's kind of spooky in a way, sir.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, Captain, the television's on in the crew's recreation area. There's a radio playing in their quarters. There's food on plates in the galley. Whatever it is happened, it must have been fast.'

O'Malley frowned. 'What about damage to the trawler? Any evidence of a fire, any reason they might have abandoned ship?'

'No, sir. No damage at all. And anyway, the lifeboats are still aboard.'

Then what the hell happened? Where in God's name did they go? How? O'Malley nervously wondered but didn't allow his apprehension to affect the sound of his voice. 'Understood,' he said with authoritative calmness. The trawler's engines?'

'Shut down, but we got them started again. No problem, Captain.'

'Fuel?'

'The tanks are half full.'

'What about the shortwave radio?'

'We found it turned off, but it's in working order, sir. If they wanted to, if there was trouble, they could have sent a Mayday alert.'

'No one's reported hearing any. Keep checking.'

'Aye, aye, Captain.'

O'Malley set down the walkie-talkie. Pensive, he stared through the darkness toward the lights on the massive trawler. On occasion, he'd heard stories about vessels found abandoned at sea. The explanations were usually obvious: a rustbucket that an owner had scuttled in order to collect insurance but that had failed to sink as the owner intended, or a yacht that pirates had looted after killing the passengers (raping them as well, if there were females) and throwing the corpses overboard, or a fishing boat that drug smugglers had abandoned because they feared that the Drug Enforcement Agency suspected their cargo and was about to try to capture them.

In previous centuries, O'Malley was aware, a crew would sometimes (though rarely) mutiny, execute their captain, toss him to the sharks, and use lifeboats to escape to a nearby coastline. Again from previous centuries, he knew about ships upon which a plague had broken out, one-by-one the corpses of victims hurled overboard until the last man alive, suffering from the hideous disease, had managed to complete a diary about the ordeal and then jumped into the ocean, preferring a quick, relatively painless death by drowning instead of a prolonged, agonizing one.

Then too, O'Malley had heard legends about crewless ghost ships, The Flying Dutchman, for example, although in that case the captain was reputed to be still aboard, doomed to drift for all eternity because of a gamble that he'd lost with the Devil.

The most famous abandoned ship was the Marie Celeste, a brigantine transporting commercial alcohol from New York to Italy, found crewless between the Azores and Portugal in 1872. But O'Malley had never understood why that ship acquired its mysterious reputation. After all, its sails had been damaged, its cabins soaked with water, its lifeboats missing. Obviously a severe storm had frightened the crew into thinking that the Marie Celeste was about to sink. They'd foolishly used the lifeboats to try to escape and been swallowed by the storm-churned sea.

All easily explainable.

But despite O'Malley's familiarity with these accounts, he'd never in all his lengthy varied experience in the Coast Guard actually ever come across an abandoned vessel. Certainly, he'd seen barges torn apart on reefs because of a storm, but they didn't fit in this category. A ship in calm open water, drifting without a crew for no apparent reason? O'Malley shook his head. He wasn't superstitious or fanciful. Although he felt a chill, he didn't believe in lost gambles with the Devil or visitors from outer space abducting humans or time warps or the Bermuda Triangle or any other of the ridiculous theories that the supermarket tabloids promoted. Something was terribly wrong here, yes, but its explanation would be logical, and by God, he intended to find out what that explanation was.

He turned to a crewman. 'Contact headquarters in Portland. Tell them what we've got here. Ask them to send another cutter. Also ask for assistance from the local police, maybe the DEA and the FBI. Who knows how many other agencies will be involved by the time we sort this out? Also… I'm sure headquarters will think of this… they'd better notify the Bronze Bell 's owner.'

'Right away, Captain.'

O'Malley brooded again toward the massive trawler. There were so many details to anticipate. He couldn't leave the Bronze Bell with his men on board her, but as soon as the other Coast Guard cutter arrived, either it or the Sea Wolf would begin a search for sailors in the water. At dawn, air reconnaissance would join in the search. Meanwhile the Bronze Bell would be escorted to Portland, where various investigators would be waiting.

The two-way radio crackled. 'Still nothing, Captain. I mean we've looked everywhere, including the cargo hold. I'll tell you this. They sure had good luck fishing. The hold's almost full.'

A thought abruptly occurred to O'Malley. 'Almost full? What were they using to fish?'

'This big a catch, they had to use nets, sir.'

'Yes, but what kind of nets?' O'Malley asked.

'Oh, shit, sir, I think I see what you mean. Just a minute.'

O'Malley waited. The minute stretched on and on.

'Damn it, you were right, sir. The bastards were using drift nets.'

Furious, O'Malley pressed his hands on a console with such force that his knuckles whitened. Drift nets? Sure. The Bronze Bell was owned by South Koreans. They, the Taiwanese, and the Japanese were notorious for sending trawlers into the North Atlantic 's international waters, casting out drift nets made of nylon mesh that spread for dozens of miles behind each trawler. It had recently been estimated that as many as thirty thousand miles of these nets were in use in the North Atlantic, scooping up every living thing, in effect strip-mining the ocean. The nets were intended to be an efficient means of trapping enormous (unconscionable!) amounts of tuna and squid. The effect was to depopulate these species. Worse, the nets also caught dolphins, porpoises, turtles, and whales, creatures that needed to surface periodically in order to breathe but that couldn't when caught in the nets. Eventually, cruelly, they drowned, their carcasses discarded as commercially useless when the nets were reeled in. Thus those species, too, were depopulated.

The bastards! O'Malley thought. The murderous bastards!

He strained to keep rage from his voice as he spoke to the walkie-talkie. 'Is the net still in the water?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Then turn on the winches. Haul the damned thing in. We'll be taking the Bronze Bell to Portland. The weight of the drift net will hold her back.'