Preston switched on the fathometer and saw that for the first time in days, the depth recorder didn't plunge off the bottom of the page. A line marking the sea bottom began to appear at the seven-hundred-fathom mark as the continental shelf rose rapidly from the depth. It was an area that snapper fishermen and royal red shrimp­ers called the "edge of the earth."

As they approached the coast of Florida, the weather improved and the seas calmed down. Preston made a course correction, put the boat on automatic pilot, and went on deck where his crew sat basking in the sun like turtles on a log. Wearing clean, white shorts and a new T-shirt, a fresh-shaven Blake was stretched out asleep, soaking up the warm rays. "We'll be coming up on royal red bottom in a few hours," Preston called up to Charlie, who was perched on the wheelhouse roof looking at a freighter passing in the distance. "This boat has enough cable to drag the bottom in four hundred fathoms. If we didn't have this daggone schedule to keep, I'd sure like to drop the nets out and see what's on the bottom."

"Not me," Charlie hooted from his roost. "I'm retired from shrimping, Cap'n. When I get my fifty grand, I'm gonna hit every whorehouse from Key West to New Orleans. I ain't never gonna work that hard as long as I live." He jumped to his feet, cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered across the empty ocean, "I want some cooter! And I want it now!"

"Charlie, quit jumping around up there like a scalded ape," Preston said, laughing. "You bump into that antenna and it'll send enough voltage through you to cook you like gumbo."

"Aye-aye, Captain!" he yelled, and gave a mock salute in the sar­castic manner of Paul. He flopped down on his bottom, snatched off his T-shirt and revealed his "Mother" tattoo. He wiggled his toes in the sunshine and drummed his fingers on the rooftop.

Preston squinted up at him, slowly rubbing the thick stubble on his thick jaw, worrying that his deckhand had cracked under the strain. One minute Preston found him withdrawn, moodily depressed, or edgy, the next he'd be elated, booming with confidence, and boasting about what he was going to do with his money. No longer was he the dependable, easy-going, good ol' Charlie-boy he'd known for the past ten years. Since the storm Preston had to remind him to pump the bilge, to change the fuel filters, or even to go on watch. He spent an inordinate amount of time in the head. Last night when he saw Charlie on watch, pacing around the cramped wheelhouse, snapping his fingers at his side, Preston asked him if anything was wrong.

"You can tell me, Charlie," Preston urged, thinking his deckhand had broken under the tension of the pirate attack, the storm, and Paul going overboard.

"Couldn't be better, Skipper," he beamed, and slapped Preston on the back. "Couldn't be better! We're gonna get rich."

Preston noted Charlie's glazed eyes and dilated pupils. It wasn't the pot. He wondered if the bullet had fractured his skull.Well, it won't be much longer, the captain thought. We'll soon be coming up the coast to the Florida Panhandle, get this crap off-loaded, and be done with it one way or the other. Preston didn't believe for a minute that Popcorn Charlie would ever retire from shrimping, no matter how much money he had. He'd seen times when the shrimp were running good, when he'd paid Charlie two thousand dollars on Friday, and after juking all weekend, he'd be back Monday morning dead broke, wanting to borrow money for cigarettes. When they got back to work, the captain thought, he'd settle down.

The hum of an airplane broke Preston's reflections. He glanced up, wondering if he really had heard anything. But as the drone became louder, all their eyes turned to the sky. More to himself than the others, Preston asked in bewilderment: "What would a plane be doing way out here?"

Blake opened an eye, listened for a moment, and scrambled to his feet with his hands clasped over his eyes. "Don't know," he said nervously. "Could be a seaplane or a charter flight. We're off the usual airways, though."

Then they saw it coming high up, miles away, and headed straight toward them. It was a big, white plane with a red racing stripe on its tail.

Charlie let out an agonized wail of despair from the roof. "Oh, shit! It's the Coast Guard." He hopped to the deck. "Pray he keeps right on going and doesn't come back," Preston said.

Charlie's eyes sank deeper into their sockets, and he fixed his gaze on the disappearing plane as if he were looking out from two caves. "I wish they'd go back to cleaning buoys like they used to and leave us alone." He paced the deck, snapping his fingers anxiously. "Maybe it's just a chance meeting."

"Maybe," echoed Blake. He took a deep breath and stifled his fear. His voice was quiet, controlled. "It could be anything. It could be he's looking for a boatload of Haitian refugees or Cubans. We're approaching the coast -- we're in the right area for that. Or it could be a search-and-rescue mission."

"Or, more likely he's on reconnaissance," Preston said fatalisti­cally, "looking for boats like us, hauling dope, and April's schedule is off. We're stuck. If they have a cutter nearby, they'll board us. A shrimp boat loaded like we are... "

"Our ass is grass!" Charlie finished for him with a hysterical laugh. "Get it? Our ass is grass!"

The other two ignored him. Blake's eyes were cold. "We'll just have to go to Plan B."

"What's that?" Preston asked hopefully. "Dump the load?"

"You kidding?" Blake gave a short, sardonic laugh. "It took forty Indians three hours to get it all loaded. It'd take the four of us a full day to throw it all off. No... At the first sign of a cutter, I'm going to blow her to hell and send her to the bottom."

He produced a black suitcase he had brought with him, but had never opened. He unsnapped the silver locks solemnly, quieting even Charlie. He opened the lid, exposing a number of plastic bags that looked like they were filled with white dough. "We have guns to deal with the pirates. I brought this in case we meet the Coast Guard." He pulled out one of the soft chunks. "This is C-4, plastic explosives," he said above the wind and creak of the rigging. "If the Coast Guard comes up, we'll open the seacocks, set fire to the boat, and blow a hole in the bottom big enough to drive a tractor trailer through. She'll sink like buckshot."

"What?" cried Preston with total disbelief. "Blow the boat? My boat! You're crazy!"

"It's not your boat," Blake snapped. "It will be the U.S. Custom's once they confiscate it. It will be tied up at their dock in Miami and sold at auction while we're rotting in prison."

"As soon as they order us to stop," Blake continued, holding up a coil of explosive plastic putty encased in tubing. "I'll set fire to the engine, then I'll light this and the cord will go off in ten minutes. That's long enough for us to launch the Zodiac and go running to them." He patted the suitcase. "There's enough here to level a two-story building. She'll go down in two seconds."

"Man, I like it, I like it!" cried Charlie, as if Blake had just revealed a plan for finding buried treasure. "We'll tell those squids we're so glad to see them we could just hug their necks, right?"

"No one will be more surprised than we are when she blows. The boat caught fire and they saved us just in time," Blake concluded. "They'll be heroes."

Preston hooted in derision. "You think they'll believe that? Sheee-it."

Blake's smile faded. He looked at the captain's suntanned face with icy, silencing eyes. "It doesn't matter what they believe," he said. "It's what evidence they have." He laid the packets of C-4 out, one by one. "And the evidence, all four hundred bales, will be sitting on the bot­tom in two hundred fathoms. That's about as deep as you can get."

Blake's eyes flickered momentarily as he considered this possibility. He paused, uncoiling the cord. "Then we'll nail the hatch covers shut. The bales can't get out! I'll peel the keel open, and she'll go the bottom. And if she doesn't," he shrugged callously, "what have we got to lose for Christ's sakes? It's for your own goddamn protection, Barfield, not mine. I'm looking at twenty years in the pen. They've got a sheet on me. With you, a first offender, it might go easier, especially if their evidence is sitting two thousand feet on the bottom."

Preston looked anxiously at the empty sky, his heart pounding in his chest. He knew Blake was right, but the idea of blowing up the boat sickened him and he prayed silently, Please, Lord, let it be a chance meeting. Don't make us have to kill this boat. There'd been times the Coast Guard had approached the Lady Mary for a good look without actually boarding. Maybe they'd be so lucky this time.The plane vanished, but not for long. Within a few minutes, the distant droning grew louder. Against the glint of the sun they could just see the Coast Guard plane making a wide turn. With growing despair,they watched it turn 360 degrees, drop altitude and bank. No more than five hundred feet above, they saw the pilot looking down on the Aquarius, then watched it zoom by and head back in the direction it had come, steadily gaining altitude.

Blake took a deep breath. "That does it," he declared. "Let's get busy. Charlie, get down from there and help me move the bales around. I want to make sure she blows out the bottom instead of the wheelhouse."

"Wait a minute!" Preston cried in protest, watching him unpack­ing a spool of copper wire and packets of gray explosive clay. "For God's sake, it could still be a chance meeting. Don't you blow us to hell out here in the middle of nowhere!"

"Don't worry," Blake said cheerfully, heading for the engine room. "I'm very good at what I do. They don't call me Wonderman for nothing. If the cutter doesn't come, I won't trigger it."

"Listen, I've got another idea," Preston persisted. "Why don't we go shrimping?"

"Shrimping? The Coast Guard is coming and you want to go shrimping! Have you lost your mind?"

"We're almost to the royal red grounds off the Tortugas," Prestonwent on. "Let's drop the nets down and start dragging. If the Coast Guard sees we're just a working boat, they might let us be. They know there's three or four boats that work out here regular."

"Hey, it's not a bad idea," Blake said thoughtfully. "Go for it. But I'm still wiring her up to blow."

Preston turned to Charlie, but saw him vanishing into the head. "Come on, Charlie," he shouted, pounding on the door. "Hurry up! Let's get these nets ready to fish, damn it!"

"Be out in a minute," Charlie called. Hastily he stuffed a finger­full of white powder into his nose and felt the explosive rush surge through him as the cocaine burned into his mucous membranes. Once again his heart pounded, and the noise of the engine and the swish of the sea against the boat magnified as his senses sharpened. A smile of joy spread over his face and he burst out of the head. "I'm ready!"

It took forty-five minutes for the nets to reach the bottom in two hundred fathoms, and by the time they were dragging, Blake emerged from the engine room. "She's all ready." Going into the cabin, he snatched the navigation chart off the wall. It was filled with Preston's Loran scribbles marking their course to Colombia and back. Ripping it up, he handed it to Charlie. "Take this out on deck and burn it."

"Why? I wanted it as a souvenir."

"Forget it. It's evidence that we made the trip. And we've got to protect our money man. If they know where we've been, the DEA might be able to trace it back to our connection down there. The cartel is our ticket out of jail. They'll pay bail."

"Well, maybe we won't have to worry about it," said Preston, collapsing nervously in his chair. "We've been dragging for two hours now. I don't see any sign of a cutter on the radar. You know, that plane could have just checked us out and gone on."

But shortly afterwards, while they were burning the chart, they heard a faint chop-chap-chop in the distance.

"Hey!" cried Preston, "I hear something. It sounds like a helicopter." He searched the sky. "Look over there!" He pointed to a dark speck coming over the blue horizon.

They rushed on deck in time to see the helicopter bearing down on them like a dragonfly hovering over a mosquito. And they could see the white body, the big red stripe, and the huge black letters on the fuselage -- UNITED STATES COAST GUARD. The chopper circled them, and they could now make out the form of two men looking down from several hundred feet studying them.