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impatiently while Doc Thayer entered a second Zodiac and motored across the gap dividing the two vessels. Dover ordered the helmsman to position the Catawba to take the crab boat in tow. He was concentrating on the maneuver and didn’t notice the radio operator standing at his elbow.
    “A signal just in, sir, from a bush pilot airlifting supplies to a team of scientists on Augustine Island.”
    “Not now,” Dover said brusquely.
    “It’s urgent, Captain,” the radio operator persisted.
    “Okay, read the guts of it.”
    “ ‘Scientific party all dead.’ Then something unintelligible and what sounds like ‘Save me.’ “
    Dover stared at him blankly. “That’s all?”
    “Yes, sir. I tried to raise him again, but there was no reply.”
    Dover didn’t have to study a chart to know Augustine was an uninhabited volcanic island only thirty miles northeast of his present position. A sudden, sickening realization coursed through his mind. He snatched the microphone and shouted into the mouthpiece.
    “Murphy! You there?”
    Nothing.
    “Murphy . . . Lawrence . . . do you read me?”
    Again no answer.
    He looked through the bridge window and saw Doc Thayer climb over the rail of the Amie Marie. Dover could move fast for a man of his mountainous proportions. He snatched a bullhorn and ran outside.
    “Doc! Come back, get off that boat!” his amplified voice boomed over the water.
    He was too late. Thayer had already ducked into a hatchway and was gone.
    The men on the bridge stared at their captain, incomprehension written in their eyes. His facial muscles tensed and there was a look of desperation about him as he rushed back into the wheelhouse and clutched the microphone.
    “Doc, this is Dover, can you hear me?”
    Two minutes passed, two endless minutes while Dover tried to raise his men on the Amie Marie. Even the earsplitting scream of the Catawba’s siren failed to draw a response.
    At last Thayer’s voice came over the bridge with a strange icy calm.
    “I regret to report that Ensign Murphy and Lieutenant Lawrence are dead. I can find no life signs. Whatever the cause it will strike me before I can escape. You must quarantine this boat. Do you understand, Amos?”
    Dover found it impossible to grasp that he was suddenly about to lose his old friend. “Do not understand, but will comply.”
    “Good. I’ll describe the symptoms as they come. Beginning to feel light-headed already. Pulse increasing to one fifty. May have contracted the cause by skin absorption. Pulse one seventy.”
    Thayer paused. His next words came haltingly.
    “Growing nausea. Legs . . . can no longer . . . support. Intense burning sensation . . . in sinus region. Internal organs feel like they’re exploding.”
    As one, everybody on the bridge of the Catawba leaned closer to the speaker, unable to comprehend that a man they all knew and respected was dying a short distance away.
    “Pulse . . . over two hundred. Pain . . . excruciating. Blackness closing vision.” There was an audible moan. “Tell . . . tell my wife . . .” The speaker went silent.
    You could smell the shock, see it in the widened eyes of the crew standing in stricken horror.
    Dover stared numbly at the tomb named the Amie Marie, his hands clenched in helplessness and despair.
    “What’s happening?” he murmured tonelessly. “What in God’s name is killing everyone?”

2
    “I SAY HANG THE BASTARD!”
    “Oscar, mind your language in front of the girls.”
    “They’ve heard worse. It’s insane. The scum murders four kids and some cretin of a judge throws the case out of court because the defendant was too stoned on drugs to understand his rights. God, can you believe it?”
    Carolyn Lucas poured her husband’s first cup of coffee for the day and whisked their two young daughters off to the school bus stop. He gestured menacingly at the TV as if it were the fault of the anchorman announcing the news that the killer roamed free.
    Oscar Lucas had a way of