“They don’t want to work here anymore,” Blaine said.

“The hell they don’t.” Frik took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed the lab.

“Trujold? Frik. Listen carefully. I want you to get the speedboat and bring your ass over here.”

“I’m not going anywhere near your boats,” Trujold said. “Your dogs’ll eat me alive.”

Frik thought for a moment. “All right. I’ll send Blaine for you. It’ll only take him a few minutes in the chopper, so don’t mess around.”

“What’s the emergency?” Trujold asked.

“None yet.” Frik looked at the indistinct image on the screen. “But I smell one coming on.”

2

The helicopter carrying Paul Trujold moved quickly toward the Oilstar drilling platform where Frik’s men had been testing drill sites in the Dragon’s Mouth. The passage earned its name from the toothy spears of rock that pierced the surface of the water and connected the dots between Trinidad’s Chaguara Peninsula and the coastal range of the Venezuelan mainland. Many a ship’s hull had been chewed by those teeth when her captain didn’t know the waters, or he was caught by a storm. Given that history, why would Frik think it surprising that some parts of the Dragon’s Mouth were also believed by the locals to be haunted or cursed?

“Sorry to pull you out of the lab,” Frik shouted over the slowing thump of the blades as he reached up and helped Paul out of the chopper.

Such courtesy, Paul thought. Must be something mighty important. “What’s going on?”

“I sent a couple of divers down. Only one of them came back, and he died kicking and screaming on the deck before he could tell us a thing.”

“Sounds like a bad case of the bends.” Must have shot straight to the surface without a decompression stop. What could spook a diver enough to do that? Paul winced at the thought of nitrogen bubbles fizzing through his bloodstream, ending in an air embolism to the brain. “No sign of the other?”