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they were to turn back, but at the speed it was making, they’d never outrun it.
    “Do they always glow like that?” George said. “Those fogbanks?”
    Gosling smiled thinly. “Sure.” He tapped out his pipe on the railing.
    “It’s going to be pea soup here in about twenty minutes, boys, you better get below.”
    They left and Gosling stood there, feeling a strange compulsion to wait for it, to meet the mist dead on.
    Trembling, he waited.

10
    George couldn’t sleep.
    He laid there, feeling the subtle thrum of the ship beneath him. It was nothing he really cared for, but after awhile your body seemed to adjust to anything. The mind was the real problem. A certain paranoia had settled into him now. Before, it had been merely a bad feeling. Like a sense of apprehension a person got before going to the dentist or getting their taxes done. Normal, really.
    But this paranoia, it was different.
    He knew it wasn’t from Saks’s tales of jungle predators. Things like that were pretty much to be expected in the bush.
    This was something else.
    An almost black, unrelenting dread that worried at his nerves like a cat at a mouse. It would not leave him alone. Every time he closed his eyes, they snapped back open and he started, gasping awake like he was being smothered. A brooding sense of foreboding.
    An almost inescapable knowledge that the shit was about to hit.
    Heavy weather ahead.
    So George laid there, expecting the worse, wondering what form it would take and when. Thinking maybe he was going crazy, but knowing, somehow, that would be the least of his problems. They would be into that fog anytime now and maybe they already were. Try as he might, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head that Gosling had been nervous about that fogbank rolling at them. George didn’t know much about fog and particularly fog at sea … but there was something unusual about this one. And he didn’t believe for a moment that fog glowed like that.
    It just wasn’t natural.
    What had Lisa said at the docks?
    Be careful of those big crocodiles, George. And be careful out on that sea … funny things happen at sea. My dad was a sailor and he always said that. Funny things happen at sea
    George was shivering.
    Jesus, how prophetic those words were becoming.

11
    Cushing was up later than the others.
    Long after Fabrini and Menhaus shook their unease and nodded off and George finally gave in to sleep and Saks and Soltz called it a night, he was still awake. Awake and restless.
    He wasn’t like the others, not really. And this wasn’t because he held some elitist notion that since he was educated and they weren’t, he was a better man. For he wasn’t better, just different. He wasn’t a grader operator or a dozer jockey like the others. He came under the guise of being an office manager, a clerk, the guy who was to be the go-between for Saks’s crew and the mine people. It was his job to see that the crew got everything they wanted and when they wanted it.
    And this was true.
    Within limits.
    He was the only one of the crew who knew Franklin Fisk personally. Saks had dealt with him and his people on several other projects in South America. But that was strictly a business relationship. Cushing, on the other hand, knew Fisk very well, had worked for him for some ten years now. He had been instrumental in implementing the multimillion dollar marketing strategy of Fisk’s overseas interests. Fisk, it so happened, was also married to Cushing’s sister. No one on the crew knew this. No one would ever know it.
    No one would ever know the truth.
    And the truth was that Cushing was a spy. That he had been hand-picked by Fisk himself to keep an eye on Saks. Saks was rumored to be a nasty one. Yes, he got the job done, always brought the projects in under budget and within schedule. But rumors had it he was an alcoholic. That he spent his days and nights drinking in his tent while his men labored. That he was physically abusive of his crew.