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fish’s body hung suspended above the surface. With a twisting action, the head and wide upper body moved forward over the boat and came down hard, driving the craft under the surface with a great splash.
    Two-foot waves crashed against the banks and rebounded toward the center of the channel.
    The water slowly calmed.
    Nothing could be seen but the wide channel stretching out endlessly into the dark.
    Suddenly the boat shot halfway out of the water, splashed back against the surface, and drifted half-submerged and partly on its side down the river.
    A moment later it began to gain speed, and moved rapidly along the center of the channel.

CHAPTER 4
    BILOXI—THE NEXT MORNING
    Mrs. Hsiao raised her face from her computer as Alan came inside the building.
    “Have they found the boys?” she asked.
    He shook his head no.
    Her husband, his hair hanging against the shoulders of his plaid shirt, was speaking on her telephone. “Governor Childress,” he mouthed. He pointed toward the telephone on the empty desk to the far side of the area.
    Alan reached for the receiver without going around behind the desk.
    Ho said, “Governor, Alan’s on line now.”
    “Dr. Freeman, how are you doing?”
    “Fine, Governor. How’s the weather down there?”
    “Hotter than hell. But as I was telling Dr. Hsiao, not as hot as it’s going to be if I don’t get some federal aid to help locate those damn Z-nets. They’re killing us. Especially between Miami and the Keys. We get rid of the foreign fishing vessels and then we learn how many of those damn nets they lost, down there God only knows where, their mouths gaped open, rolling around on the bottom, thousands of fish swimming into them every day. Just great damn killing machines. I’ve got our charter boats, all the sports fishermen, everybody and their kid brother bitching about the fishing declining.”
    As Childress paused, Alan heard him take a deep breath, and then he spoke in a more settled voice. “Well, you don’t need to hear about my problems, doctor. I’m certain you have enough of your own. It’s only that I have a meeting with an environmental group in an hour. Wanted to be positive we still have ourselves a deal. Want to be able to announce some good news anyway.”
    “You’ll have half a million fingerlings a month for release in your waters starting your way in thirty days.”
    “Guaranteed?”
    “Guaranteed.”
    “I hope so. I’m going to hear in an hour that the state’s had dealings with other companies who weren’t able to live up to the terms of their contracts.”
    “The others didn’t have Ho,” Alan said.
    Ho smiled broadly at that.
    “Okay,” the governor said. “Fine. Good. Only don’t let me down.”
    As Alan replaced the telephone receiver, Ho smiled again. “Good to have more demand than product,” he said.
    A moment later a serious expression replaced his smile. “Still find no more mature red snapper females available at any hatchery. How we produce so many babies we need with only one mother? Maybe she get tired.” His mouth moved toward the side of his thin face as he thought. “Maybe Chang in Los Angeles—he import live fish.” He reached for the telephone on his wife’s desk.
    “Ho, you keep using the phone here, how am I going to answer it?” she said, looking up at him.
    Frowning, Ho walked toward his office.
    *   *   *
    Roland Carroll, a forty-year-old copilot for Southern Air Shuttle, a small, privately held company based in the Keys, stared from the cockpit at the starboard engine of the twenty-seat craft. “It’s not sounding right,” he said, “I keep telling Jack if he doesn’t maintain these planes better he’s going to get a bunch of passengers killed one day—not to mention me.” He glanced down toward the blue-green water below the plane.
    “Look,” he said.
    The pilot looked down.
    Barely visible under thirty feet of water, a long, narrow speedboat lay upturned on the bottom. Roland ran his