Zodiac

36

JUST ON A HUNCH , I took the long way around to Basco. Hopped Rte. I up into Chelsea and then peeled off on the Revere Beach Parkway, which runs west through the heart of Everett and just south of Basco's kingdom. When I saw the Everett River Bridge coming up, I slowed down a little and flicked on the high beams.

An abandoned van was sitting on the shoulder of the high-way-deja vu-in exactly the same place where Gomez and I had stripped our old van after Wyman, the wacky terrorist, had left it there.

From here, you could get on the freeway, or you could slog across some toxic mudflats and boltcut your way onto Basco property, or you could go fifty feet up the shoulder, disappear under the bridge and mount an amphibian operation upstream into Basco's docking facilities. I could look straight across the flats from here and into the bridge of the Basco Explorer, now nestled into place in the shadow of the main plant. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. Park a van on the shoulder here and you had a command outpost for any kind of attack on Basco.

What had Wyman been up to when he'd trashed our last van here? Was it a dress rehearsal, or a failed operation? Or had it been a real accident, one that had planted the seed of this idea to begin with?

I sure as hell wasn't going to park here. Didn't even slow down. I drove the van across the bridge until I was out of sight of Basco, parked it on the shoulder and slogged down to the riverside under the bridge, carrying half my weight in various pieces of crap. Bart and his Townie friends were already there, smoking a reefer. They'd been joined by a couple of black derelicts who evidently lived here. Bart had red them all of our Big Macs.

"Haven't you heard, man?" I said, "Just say no!" They were startled. Pot always made me more paranoid than I was to begin with; I couldn't understand how they'd want to smoke it here and now.

"Want a hit?" Bart croaked, waving the reefer around and trying to talk while holding his breath.

"See any action?" I asked.

"Big fuck-up over there," Bart said, waving in the direction of the flats. "Bunch of cop cars showed up and arrested some guys. Then one of them got stuck in the mud."

"It was great," one of the derelicts said. "They had to ask the prisoners to get out so they could push it out of the shit."

"So," Bart said, "I guess we don't have to worry about this Smirnoff dude any more."

"That was a diversion," I said. "Smirnoff's a jackass, but he's not stupid. He sent some people in through the obvious route, with boltcutters. Ten to one they're unarmed and they'll get popped for trespass. Meanwhile he's got a diver somewhere in this river with the real package. A navy veteran."

I wondered if the guy was an ex-SEAL. That would be great. What were my odds in man-to-man underwater combat in a dark sea of nerve gas with a SEAL? The only option was just to avoid the diver, find the mine and disconnect it. If Smirnoff had really rigged it up out of plastique, it had to be something pretty simple and obvious, probably timed with a Smurf wristwatch. Bart had brought the toolbox from his van and I grabbed wirecutters and a prybar.

"Did you get ahold of Boone?" I said, nodding at the walkie-talkie.

"Tried. Put out a call for Winchester, like you said, but no answer."

"That's okay. He'll figure it out. Too risky to talk on the radio anyway." I set down the box of putrescine and lifted the lid. "This is the bad stuff."

Two bottles went into my goody bag and the rest into the Zodiac. We all squatted together on the riverbank and went over it one last time, and then I made myself incommunicado by turning on the air valve and strapping my head into the Darth Vader mask. Everyone watched this carefully; one of the derelicts' lips moved and then I could feel them all laughing. I waded into the river.

First I swam across and checked out the opposite bank. Definite tracks in the muck here. Big, triangular, flipper-shaped tracks. I started swimming toward the Basco Explorer.

Technically I was swimming upstream here, but the speed of the current was zero. There had been a mild smell of the poison, not nearly as bad as earlier tonight. But I had to figure they were poisoning this river too, since it led straight to Basco Central and they wouldn't want any trail of PCB bugs leading in here from the Harbor.

Sometimes I couldn't believe the shit I did for this job. But if I could pull something off here, I'd have a good excuse for taking a couple of days off. Debbie and I could climb into a waterbed somewhere and recuperate together, not get out of bed for about a week. If she'd have me. Go out to Buffalo, maybe, get back into that honeymoon suite, buy a shitload of donuts and a Sunday L.A. Times...

About ten seconds of those thoughts and I had got an erection and felt really drowsy and stupid. Hadn't taken enough speed. I checked the valve on the tank to make sure I was getting plenty of oxygen. Oxygen, oxygen, the ultimate addiction, better even than nitrous oxide. Tonight I needed lots. Had to keep alert, had to watch out for that SEAL. But it was such a boring trip, swimming through blackness and murk without a light. Easy to get scared, natural to fall into paranoia and despair. Every so often I broke the surface to check my direction and to see how close I was to the prow of the Basco Explorer. At first it was too far away, then, suddenly, it was much too close.

If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right under the big diesels, amidships. Even if it didn't sink the ship, this would do the most damage.

The docking facilities here weren't huge. Basco owned the end of the Everett River. That's how rivers worked around Boston Harbor-ran inland for a mile and then just ceased to exist, fed underground by sewers and culverts. Basco surrounded the river in a U shape. On one side of it they had a pier, and the other side was just undeveloped, basically a siding for a railway spur that ran up into Everett. If they had guards, they'd be on the side with the pier. So I stayed on the right, the eastern half of the river, and started to slide on up the hull of the Basco Explorer.

For the first few yards, feeling my way over the sonar dome at the bottom of the prow, I had my head above water. Then I had to face the fact that if I stayed up here, the SEAL could come from below and gut me like a tuna. Either way, I was in his element. But if I tried to be half-assed about it, I was in double trouble.

So I dove. I swam straight down to the bottom, which was only about ten feet below the bottom of the Basco Explorer's hull. I could almost stand on the bottom and touch the ship with one outstretched hand. They'd probably dredged this channel out to the Explorer's dimensions.

Then I realized that we were dealing with small volumes of water. I was used to the open Harbor. This was a lot more claustrophobic. I was in a space about the size of a couple of mobile homes, and if the SEAL was still here, he was sharing my space.

The water transmitted a powerful metallic clang. Impossible to tell direction, but obviously something had struck the ship's hull. Possibly the magnets on Smirnoff's mine. If I hunkered down, pretended to be a chunk of toxic waste and waited, the driver would swim away and I could clip the wires. But I wondered: what was the time delay on the sucker? It had to be fairly long. The diver had to get away, the water-hammer effect could kill you from a distance. This was reassuring.

From using up the compressed air, I'd become slightly buoyant, a little lighter than the water, and it was hard to stay on the bottom. So I relaxed and let myself float upwards until I was spread-eagled against "the bottom of the hull, facing down. I made sure I was a little east of the keel, so my bubbles skimmed off to the right, following the ship's curve, and came out on the unwatched side.

Another clang, very close, so close that I felt the vibrations through my tank and into my back. Then there was a light, coming toward me. You couldn't see a light more than a few feet in this shitty water. Then the light disappeared. Whoever owned it had shut it off.

Then another damn light, in front of and below me, almost on the bottom, cut into thick rays of shadow by the limbs of a diver.

Two divers. One swimming up where I was, his tank clanging against the hull. The second, the one with the light, heavier, using his weight to kick his way along the bottom. The one at my level had shut off his light so he couldn't be seen. The other was chasing him.

The prey almost got face-to-face with me and our masks looked at each other for just a second, amazed. He was wearing an underwater moonsuit, like mine, made for diving in a toxic environment.

Why? Smirnoff wouldn't know about the poison coming out of the Basco Explorer. He'd been planning this action for months. But this diver knew about it. Working for Basco?

He sank away from me because the other diver, below him, had grabbed him by the ankle and was pulling him down. He was kicking and thrashing but that's hard when you're underwater, and maybe a little tired of running. Steel glinted, and then the light was shining through a crimson thunderhead.

What was I going to do? All I could hope was that this killer with the knife hadn't seen me. I wasn't about to out swim him. If one of these guys was a SEAL, I had to figure it was the live one.

The light had gotten kicked by the victim, flailing around in his own blood, and the beam was slowly rotating as it

sank. It spun by the killer's head and I saw a bare white face, long brown hair, blue eyes.

Tom Akers was working for Smirnoff. Which meant the dead guy was fiasco's. So maybe Tom wouldn't decide to cut me up. I pushed off against the hull and began sinking down into his level. He grabbed the light and nailed me with the beam, paralyzing me, getting a look at who I was. It was all up to him.

Through my eyelids I saw the light diminish as he pointed it somewhere else. When I could see again, I wished I couldn't. Tom was curled into a fetal position in the water, vomiting, groping around for his mouthpiece.

I was able to get over to him and shove the mouthpiece toward him again, but he just shot it out on a yellow jet of bile. SLUD. He was quivering in my arms and I saw him suck in a big bellyful of that awful black water and swallow it down. Then he looked up into my eyes-his pupils were dilated so there wasn't any iris left-and held up two fingers. Which could have meant two, or peace, or victory.

By the time I'd wrestled him up to the east side of the ship, he was dead. I left him bobbing there, face down, and swam back underneath to look for the mine.

And I found it-it was easy to look when I didn't have to worry about other divers-but it wasn't what I was looking for. This was a real mine, not a homemade one. An honest-to-god chunk of official U.S. Navy ordnance, stuck to the bottom of the hull, not exactly in the right place, a dozen yards forward of the engine room.

Maybe Tom had been trying to tell me there were two mines. That would make sense. Two divers, two mines. I swam back and found another one under the engine room, this one made from the bottom of a plastic garbage can and a couple of big old industrial magnets.

To pry it off and find the wires leading to the digital timer was easy enough. I clipped them off with the wirecutter and let this piece of junk sink to the bottom.

Now for the second. I swam back for a closer look and noticed a new fact: it was right in between a couple of vents in the bottom of the hull. Probably vents for toxic waste. This mine had been planted by a fiasco diver, in protective gear because he knew the water was poisoned. They were sending their evidence to the bottom.

Laughlin was a goddamn evil genius. Poison the Harbor, kill the bugs, blow up the evidence, get rid of a rusty old tank, collect the insurance, blame it on wicked terrorists.

I tried to yank it off, but it wasn't going to come peacefully. Its magnets were bigger and more powerful than Smirnoff's. Bart's prybar got under it, but as Archimedes pointed out, the lever's no good without a place to stand. I had to invert myself and put my feet against the bottom of the hull. There were three divers down here tonight-The Three Stooges Stop Pollution-two of us were dead, and that left me to handle the slapstick comedy. That's probably what it looked like. But eventually the mine came loose and dropped to the bottom.

Next question: how much damage could it do from there? As my last major suicide attempt of the night, I swam down there and dragged it across the bottom until it was off to the side, maybe forty feet away from the ship. If it went off there, that was just too bad. The Bosco Explorer would just have to take it like the sturdy old bucket she was.

When I paddled wearily away from that mine, I allowed myself to hear again, and what I heard was diesels. Immense diesels. Didn't need to break the water to know what it was. I swam under the ship, emerged under the Basco pier, climbed up a ways into the pilings, and lobbed one bottle of putrescine up there.

Bart's signal was the sound of projectile vomiting from the security guards on the pier. He came in fast and loud on the Zodiac, kept the Basco Explorer between him and the guards, and got his assistants to lob the rest of the putrescine up onto the ship. He was pretty good at this; maybe GEE should hire him as my replacement.

I'd always wanted to bomb a toxic waste ship, or a factory, with this stuff. If you really soaked it, the target would become worthless. You'd have to tow it out to sea and burn every last bit. That was going to be the Basco Explorer's fate, but not immediately.

All I could see was the side of the ship and the underside of the decking on the pier. I had to follow the action by noises. An awesome mixture of putrescine and vomit was dripping down through the cracks, raining down around me, and about the time Bart and company made their attack, I could hear some thudding and clomping as one of the guards staggered off the pier in the direction of an adjacent building.

There were guards on deck, too, and they didn't last long. The trick was going to be getting the putrescine below-decks. The crew was probably out carousing somewhere, but Laughlin might be downstairs arranging the evidence.

An alarm bell went off. The guards were asking for help. It was time to get the hell out of here. I'd already kicked off my flippers and now I worked my way over to a ladder and climbed up to where I could look out over the surface of the pier.

Three of the guards were doubled over on their sides, writhing around.

Did this count as violence? Assaulting the senses with something unendurably disgusting?

How about the strobe light on top of the U-Haul, back there in Buffalo? Same deal. A bunch of security guards had been assigned to look out for us and we had made life miserable for them.

I guess it all came under the heading of "obnoxious behavior, creative forms of." One of these days I'd have to work it all out. Someday, when I had a little free time.

It seemed like these guys weren't going to be shooting at me, but to make sure I picked up their submachine guns. They looked like Bart's UZI-replica water pistols but they were much heavier. I spun them off into the river. Then I ran for the gangplank, carrying my last bottle of putrescine like a grenade. "Gangplank" is a primitive word; it was an aluminum footbridge, complete with safety railings and a nonslip surface. And I was right in the middle of it when the hatch opened up, right in front of me, and Laughlin stepped out.

The jumbo chrome-plated revolver-the one he'd bought to protect himself from terrorists-looked a little tacky so close to his gold Rolex, but that's in the nature of a revolver. He was carrying a briefcase in his other hand, an executive to the fucking end. And when he saw me blocking the gangplank, he did a funny thing. He held it up between me and him, like a shield, and peeked at me over the top. I got a couple of steps closer. Then he dropped the briefcase.

Which didn't help me a bit. I wasn't here to subpoena the bastard. I kept moving, trying to decide when I was going to chicken out and jump off into the water.

Movement on a ship ain't easy. The stairs are narrowed and steep, the hatches weigh a lot and you have to step over a big ledge when you go through them. Laughlin was centered in the hatchway, but his right shoulder, the one attached to the revolver, was interfered with by the doorframe. When he tried to bring his arm up, he twitched against the trigger-already had the thing cocked, the guy was a born killer-and fired off a shot underneath the pier.

I wound up and tossed a kind of weak Bob Stanley palm-ball in the general direction of his face. The jar described a neat stinky parabola through space, bounced off the top of his head and exploded behind him. He fired again and drilled a hole in the Basco factory. I was scared enough to fall down on my face. Hard to run with an oxygen tank on your back, damn hard.

He had to be wading through a putrescine sea by now anyway, but he didn't notice. A good yuppie has no sense of smell. Laughlin's next shot hit a railing support right next to me and drilled a few metal splinters in my direction. Some of them stuck in my flesh and one shattered the face plate on my Darth Vader mask. Laughlin closed in for a closer shot, made the mistake of stepping through the hatchway and then Boone nailed him in the ear with the output of a CO2 fire extinguisher.

I fucked up my hand trying to rip all those little triangles of glass out of my facemask. Managed to smear a nice gob of blood and putrescine directly on the bridge of my nose. I could still breathe bottled air, fortunately.

Several barfing blue-collar gnomes came up from below, stumbled over the writhing Laughlin and headed toward me, which is to say they tried to get the fuck out of there. Boone had grabbed Laughlin's revolver and that scared the shit out of them.

I grabbed the mask and pulled it away from my mouth.

"Take him!" I shouted, pointing at Laughlin. "Get that nicker out of here. Take him with you."

If we stole the ship with them on board, it'd be kidnapping: a serious charge. We had to get Laughlin off. But if we dragged him off, that might be kidnapping too.

They grabbed Laughlin and dragged him down the gangplank. The ship was empty. Boone had put on an oxygen mask, he'd stolen from a fire box somewhere.

He was pointing at Laughlin's briefcase. He gave it a kick so it slid a few feet away, then brought the revolver down and fired at it. The bullet dug a crater in the fine Moroccan leather, then stopped. Kevlar-lined. Anti-terrorist luggage for the paranoid executive.

For the first time, I got a chance to look down the river, toward the Mystic River and the open sea. The megatug, Extra Stout, was crawling toward us through the blue predawn light, looking like a power plant on a toboggan, plugging the entire river, kicking out a galaxy of black smoke. It was atonement time for Clan Gallagher. 21,000 horses of Irish diesel proceeded ass-backwards, shaking the earth and the water, rattling the windows of the factory. It almost drowned out the meaty splash made when we deposited the gangplank into the Everett River.

We had to get this damn ship disconnected from the pier. That was the whole objective. It was connected by a bow line, a stem line, and two spring lines: four lines. Something big and heavy slapped into my hand. Boone had gotten me a fire ax. He had one of his own.

"This is your only warning," said a voice over some loudspeakers. "Put your hands in the air now or we will be forced to shoot."

One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to bitts back there.

Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don't get anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both techniques on the spring line, and I didn't chop it through, but I reduced it to a few shreds of yam that could be relied on to break. Bone severed the stern line in about four strokes.

The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn't see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.

Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the oxygen mask and splashed it.

By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin's briefcase in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was going to take it out to Extra Stout, now about fifty feet away; they'd attach it to a hawser, and we'd haul that up here and attach it to the Bosco Explorer. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.

I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.

Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant crack-crack-crack.

"M-16s," Boone said, "or AR-15s, actually."

I slid the briefcase over to him. "I'm done with my part," he explained, and kicked it back to me.

Sawdust flew and a narrow trench appeared in the deck about four feet away from me. At this range, the rounds from the rifles had picked up a vicious tumbling action that would cause them to chew around inside your body like some kind of parasite from outer space.

My air tank exploded and I felt myself being stabbed in the back. There was continuing noise; I was hollering but that wasn't just me. It was the Extra Stout's boathorn, giving us the signal to pull. Boone was going to need help so I got the briefcase in between my face and the water tower and crawled forward, toward the hawse-hole.

I found the rope and started pulling on it. Boone didn't seem to be helping any. There was a lot of slack and then it started pulling back.

Joe Gallagher had told me to look for the towing bitts- sturdy posts sticking out of the deck. If I looped the hawser onto anything else, the Extra Stout would just rip it loose. I found the bitts and rolled their way, trying to keep that briefcase with me, hauling on that rope. If I kept hauling, I'd find Gallagher's hawser. A Kevlar towing line. Kevlar-a wonder material, doubly useful tonight. A product of America's chemical industry. Helping to keep our nation strong. But it was heavy. I put a turn of the rope around the bitt so that it wouldn't slide back on me, and kept pulling on the fucker.

The briefcase jumped into the air as it soaked up a few high-velocity rounds and landed on the deck, out of my reach. I was judging the distance to it when everything was drowned out by sound and light. Maybe they'd thrown up some star flares and started artillery bombardment. This was deep-shit industrial noise, loud enough to cause kidney failure, and fulgurating light, brighter than the sun.

Time to surrender. I scooted away from the cleat, waving my hands. I writhed loose from the remains of the air tank, but it still felt like someone was standing on my back in hockey skates. That allowed me to roll over, belly up like every fish in the Harbor, and stare into the unpolluted heavens. But there was something in the way. Fifty feet above me, a symbolic eyeball looked down from a halogen tornado: a chopper from CBS News.

They wouldn't blow us away on national TV, would they? Highly mediapathic. If they were still shooting, they were missing. I started pulling on the rope again. Boone wasn't helping me because he'd been pretty badly shot.

It went on forever. CBS News would have to edit. The viewing public was sitting around and watching as I endlessly hauled on a fucking rope. On and on and on. CBS watched, the snipers and the guards watched, Gallagher's crew watched, Boone kind of watched through unblinking eyes. No one said anything.

And finally I was holding a big, fat eye splice in my hands, a loop at the end of the Kevlar line, thick as my wrist. The end of the rope. The one that's supposed to go over the bitt. Sailors call it the bitter end. So I tossed it over the bitt,

crawled way up to the prow, pulled myself up to my knees, and gave the Extra Stout the thumbs up.

The navy mine exploded and sent up a waterspout and a shock wave that nearly swatted the chopper out of the air. Pretty soon the ship started to list-or was that me? I looked up to wave goodbye to the snipers, but the water tower wasn't there anymore. The Everett River Bridge was above me. The derelicts were down there raising a couple of McDonald's pseudoshakes, toasting my health, cheering me on. Brothers in arms.