Zodiac

23

WHICH IS WHAT WE DID . There was a nice blue heap of shattered safety glass out in front, where Bart had busted into Roscommon's car. Tess's car wasn't there, which was good. She was steering clear from trouble, our house.

I had a little trepidation about finding a bomb or something in there, but it was paranoia. We'd beefed up all the doors and windows, making the place hard to break into. Anyone could have broken in, of course, but they'd have to cause some obvious damage in the doing and there wasn't any of that. So we went in and filled a couple Heftys. The answering machine was blinking. We stood around it with our Heftys, breathing and listening, doing lip-synch impressions of the voices on the tape.

"S.T., this is Tess. What the fuck is going on? Please call me at Sal's. The numbers in the back of the phone book."

Beeep.

"Uh ... this is Roscommon. I hate these machines. Don't go into the basement. It's, uh, dangerous now-got some exposed electrical cables and there's water on the floor. So I nailed the door shut. Don't try busting in there, you hear me? Or else you're out of there. You're fucking out on your ass."

Beeep.

"This is Domino's. Is Bart there? He ordered some pizza and we're calling to double-check the order."

Beeep.

"It's Debbie. It's about 1:00 A.M. Look, I borrowed the Omni and took it to a party, and then I drove it home and someone ripped it off. I can't believe this is happening. I heard something outside, looked out the window, there was a big guy out there-in a suit-and there was a big black car waiting next to him, and this guy just got into the car with keys and started it up and drove away. They already had keys made."

Beeep.

"Your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now."

Beeep.

"Hi, this is Dolmacher..." but I missed the rest because Bart was throwing a chair through a window.

About ten seconds later my train set got scattered all over Brighton and points downward. We were lying down in Boston's largest backyard, behind a heap of Roscommon's concrete trash. A few pieces of his stupid vinyl siding fluttered down on our backs, but that was it.

I got an A in chemistry and I could tell it wasn't a gas explosion. It was high explosives. Planted there the night before. Which meant it had been done with Roscommon's help. But why would he help? Because they were big. Big enough to make him an offer he couldn't refuse-a Basco-sized organization-and because he wanted to get rid of this house anyway.

BRIGHTON BOMB FACTORY EXPLODES, KILLING 2

FBI SAYS TAYLOR WAS ACTUALLY A TERRORIST

"DIRECT-ACTION" CAMPAIGNS A COVER FOR

VIOLENCE?

Bart rolled over on his back. "Intense," he said.

I yanked the revolver out of his belt, grabbed it by the barrel, and laid open his right eyebrow. I grabbed his keys and ran for the van.

"I THOUGHT S.T. WAS MAN OF PEACE,"

SAYS SHOCKED ROOMMATE.

GEE TERRORIST'S DESPERATE ESCAPE FROM BOMB SITE INSIDE: Sangaman Tayhr: Jekyll & Hyde Personality?

While I was headed crosstown, it started to rain. Downtown there was a waterfront park and that's where I assembled the Zodiac. Out on the water, a coast guard cutter was towing an eighty-foot pleasure palace out away from a yacht club, into the open water.

GEE CAR FOUND NEAR YACHT CLUB

ABANDONED IN MINING ATTEMPT?

I recognized the yacht; Alvin Pleshy liked to go fishing in it. It was being shadowed by a couple of fireboats and cops were swarming around on the decks.

PLESHY'S TERROR CRUISE

S.T.'S BOMBS ON EX-V.P.'S YACHT

"He hated Pleshy from the beginning"

I just took it out of there nice and easy, didn't crank up the throttle until I was out past the airport, and then ran full tilt until all I could see was waves, and rain, and rain-a Nor' caster bearing down from Greenland. A big blue nasty-looking son of a bitch. We had an exposure suit in there, so I pulled it on, then crammed myself back into my Levi's so I wouldn't be so fucking orange. I pointed her north, into the storm clouds, into the waves. Nothing could find me in that. Not Cigarettes, not CG cutters, neither helicopters nor satellites.

Or so I thought until the helicopter gunship came up on my stern.

This was just what I was afraid of. Once they pinned the terrorist label on me, they didn't have to screw around with cops and warrants anymore. Life during wartime.

It was one of the new ones with the incredibly skinny bodies, the occupants sitting virtually on top of each other. A guy on top to fly it, a guy on the bottom to manage all those guns, missiles, bombs and rockets.

They couldn't possibly fly through this shit. The rain was just starting to come down heavy, we had a forty- or fifty-knot headwind. But I was remembering a rescue operation in the spring when they plucked some Soviets off a freighter in weather this bad.

Of course, the freighter had been stationary. I sure as hell wasn't. I'd long since stopped cutting through the waves and started riding up and down them. The water doesn't actually move; the surface of it just goes up and down. So if you're in a Zodiac, and you head into a thirty-foot roller-like that one, right in front of me-you are going up, skipper. Fast. And then you're going down, virtually in free fall. As soon as you bottom out, the acceleration squashes you into the floorboards again and you're on your way up, leaving your stomach somewhere down between your testes. If your boat is strong enough to handle the G-forces, you're fine. Otherwise it just gets thrust beneath the surface and breaks apart. That wasn't about to happen to the Zodiac.

First I thought a bolt of red lightning had struck, but actually it was a river of Gatling gun fire digging a hole in the wave right in front of me, or was it above me? When there is no horizon, you can never tell. This was called firing across the bow. A warning.

But it was too kind to call it a river of fire. It was a series of tentative spurts, all in different places, kind of like my first orgasm. One of those spurts landed about thirty feet behind/ below me, and I got to thinking maybe it wasn't a warning at all. Maybe it was just poor workmanship.

Just for the hell of it, I tried sighting down my index finger, tried to see if I could keep it aimed at that helicopter. And it was impossible, I couldn't even keep my eyes aimed at it. Those poor bastards couldn't shoot straight. They didn't have a hope.

I figured this out as the water was tossing me full into the air, into free fall off a liquid cliff. A big gust of wind hit me at the top and almost flipped the boat over. I saw a wall of black rain from that vantage point, and then all I could see was the next wave; it was bigger. The chopper was a few yards away; I could look the bastards right in the goggles. Then it was far above me, twisting in a gust, and I almost lost sight. Which meant they could lose me. So I tried to head diagonally away from them.

Anyway, it didn't matter, because they couldn't hit me with any of that firepower. Not in this. So I flipped them the bird-maybe they'd pick it up on infrared-and headed for Maine. I had full tanks to run on, and they'd take me fifty miles. All the raindrops in the sky suddenly merged. I didn't see the chopper again.

I ran out of gas half a mile .off the coast sometime before noon. It was time to start hitting the LSD. I'd been up for more than twenty-four hours, I hurt real bad, I'd thrown my back out hauling on that ripcord and now I had to paddle this son of a bitch through a rainstorm. Fortunately the swell had gone down to about five feet.. I was carrying the acid on a sheet of paper in my wallet, a sheet of blotter paper with a bogus map drawn on it, stuck behind Debbie's graduation picture. When I took it out, I sat and looked at that photo for a while and started crying. A poor, utterly fucked, duck-squeezer castaway, bobbing in the Atlantic, soaking in the rain, sobbing over his girlfriend.

That went on for about ten minutes and then I put a little corner of the paper into my mouth and sat down to wait. In about twenty minutes I was able to paddle the boat without groaning in pain. In thirty minutes I didn't feel anything. In forty I was enjoying it more than I'd enjoyed anything since my last time in the sack with this girl, so I took another half. In an hour, I was ready to take on a Cigarette. My teeth hurt because I was paddling through the cold rain with them bared in a huge shit-eating grin. Once every hour or so I actually remembered to check the compass to see if I was headed for land.

It was stupid for a fugitive terrorist to go to a gas station, but in order to be a fugitive you have to fuge, and it's hard to fuge without gas. So I got a refill. The guy running the gas station was a dead ringer for Spiro Agnew and I couldn't stop laughing. He got pissed off and told me to hit the road. I did, gladly; if I saw Nixon, I'd shit my pants.

I guess in order for me to have gone to the gas station I must've made it to the land, right? Because that's where gas stations are. So I'd paddled all the way to Maine. To the Maineland. Now it was time to fuge inland, to ply my fugitive trade on freshwater. Like the Vikings, whose shallow-drafted ships enabled them to sail up previously unnavigable European rivers and pillage villages-that rhymed- previously considered invulnerable to marine forces. The Zodiac was the modern equivalent of the Viking ship. Someday I'd mount a dragon on the prow. By God, there was the dragon now! Or was it a seagull?

There was something involving a lake. This led me to a river, and from there to another, smaller lake. Ran out of gas, deflated the Zodiac, and sank it, using its own motor as a weight. Threw the gun in there too; it hadn't worked. Then I was in the White Mountains. Wandered there for forty days and forty nights. Before the Indians found me.