Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (47 page)

The M4 shoots what looks like a small round, 5.56 mm, but that little bitty bullet has a great big powder case behind it and travels at the speed of heat, squared. I started at the bow and worked my way back to the stern, stitching a dotted line of holes right at the waterline, inch by inch, until the magazine was empty. The sudden silence was dramatic. On the outside, the holes would be tiny punctures, but inside, they were probably the diameter of a coffee cup.

Then I scrunched back into the woods, reloaded, and waited. The
Keeper
didn’t do anything, at first. I wondered if Billy had come to yet. If he had, he was probably praying for unconsciousness to return right about now. I actually thought about going back there and doing it all again. That kick would have gone eighty yards, easy. I looked back at the boat.

She hadn’t moved from her anchored position out in the canal, but I could see her deck now, barely tilting toward me. I moved behind a stout tree just in case Trask decided to get one of his guns and rake the bank. But there wasn’t any movement out there. No emergency lights, no sudden starting up of engines or bilge pumps. Nothing, just more and more deck coming into view as she began to heel over.

I missed my shepherds. They should be out there in the woods now, making sure no one was creeping in on me. It was quiet enough for me to hear pretty well, but still, not like they could.

Quiet?

I realized that big siren had gone off the air. Good. They must have their moonpool problem under control. Or the last guy leaving the plant had turned it off as he ran for his life out the door. I couldn’t detect any wind, which was probably a good thing.

Keeper
was really listing now, and I thought I heard some stuff inside falling over. Her port side railings were in the current, the stanchions lifting tiny individual bow waves of their own. The anchor line was also at a much flatter angle as she settled. One hole in a boat can be dealt with; thirty holes cannot. The water finally reached the rear hatchway, and a minute later, she went completely over with a lot of creaking noises and a couple of big vents of air from inside the hull. She flopped upside down for a few seconds, and then she went out of sight, leaving only a long trail of bubbles in the current.

Current.

The plant was still running, or there wouldn’t be any current.

I relaxed just a bit, not that I’d really been afraid of some
big radiation release. Much. Still, there was always a chance that the moonpool had not been the main event. Trask might even be up there in the plant, pretending to help, ordering his security forces around while Moira went after the main reactor control systems and I sat out here in the cold darkness, thinking I was doing something worthwhile. Maybe it was time to just get up, find my vehicle, and go home. Tomorrow would be a very interesting day, to say the least.

But I didn’t do that. If Trask
had
been on the boat, he was now out there in that black water, maybe holding on to a cushion from the main cabin. My guess was that he would deliberately drift downstream until clear of the shooter on the bank, and then come ashore for a little one-on-one. Or, being smart in his crazy way, he’d go to the other side and simply walk away

I was sitting behind a tree twenty feet or so from where I’d done the shooting. I decided that I needed to move downstream, in the direction of the current. Movement was dangerous, though; an old Ranger like Trask would get to the bank and then cling there like a crocodile, listening hard. If he was coming this would be a battle of sound, because it was pitch-dark out there now as even the ambient starlight was gone. But I still needed to move, because otherwise, if he came to my side of the canal, he could get behind me. That was not a happy thought.

I rolled slowly to my right, holding the M4 out in front of me, and began the tortuous process of inchworming my way through all the litter on the forest floor, one elbow forward, the corresponding hip forward, then the other elbow, and so on. Foot by foot, I crawled in the downstream direction, parallel to the canal banks, orienting myself as much by smell and sound as sight. That was a strong current out there. If Trask had gone into the water about the time she began to keel over, he’d have been swept a hundred feet or more downstream before he could achieve either one of the banks.

If he was even out there.

He was out there. I sensed it, and I wanted it.

I almost collided with a large white pine tree, from the
smell of it. Its fragrant, heavy branches swept out over the ground in all directions, and I’d crawled under them without even knowing it. I was tempted to stop right there; it was good cover. The blanket of pine needles under the tree would deaden any sounds I made, and besides, I was really tired.

I got close to the trunk, conscious of a zillion tiny insects moving around in all those pine needles. Even in the cold, the chiggers would be waking up about now, the mother of all blood meals right on top of them. My cheek touched the trunk and was rewarded with a dollop of pine sap.

Sap running? In November?

I turned my face full on to the trunk, brought my left wrist up, pointed my watch at the trunk, and flicked on the tiny light. There was a very fresh gash on the trunk, which was weeping sap. I quickly covered the light just before it winked out, and then began to roll over onto my back, a degree at a time, while trying to get the M4’s barrel pointed in the up direction.

“That you down there, Lieutenant?” Trask called from somewhere way up in the canopy.

“You bet, Colonel,” I said. Did he still have that shotgun? “Sorry about the boat.”

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” he said. His voice was muffled by all those pine branches, so I had no idea of precisely where he was. I considered just emptying a clip straight up, but the tree was much too dense, and I only had the one clip left.

“Billy’s not busy anymore,” I said. “In case you were waiting for some reinforcements.”

“He dead?”

“No, just wishing he was. One of the guards told me he shot my dogs.”

“You bring an extra mag for that Colt?” he asked.

“Two, actually,” I said.

“Bullshit,” he said. “We only issue one in the weapon and one on the side.”

“Tell me, Colonel,” I said, while I tried to think about position. It was comforting to be next to the trunk, but I was completely
blind, and, in fact, a shotgun blast straight down the trunk had a better chance of getting a hit than I did through all those branches. I started to move. “What was all this really about?”

“My contribution to the war effort, like I told you before,” he said. He was speaking amiably enough, but there was strain in his voice. He knew this was endgame.

“Won’t work, you know,” I said, gaining another few inches of distance from the trunk. It was hard, moving on my back while keeping that weapon pointed up in the direction of potential business. Pine needles were dropping into my eyes as I moved, and that wasn’t helping.

“That siren said otherwise,” he said. Was he moving, too? Could he hear any changes in the location of my voice? How high was he?

“No, I didn’t mean that you didn’t scare ’em,” I said, “but they’ll never admit it.”

“They’ll have to,” he said. “I spun up too many different agencies before we hit the pool itself. They’ll tell on each other just to cover their asses, and that’s how it’ll come out.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I was about one-third of the way from the trunk to where the branches began to thin out. “That’s one of the benefits of all this new coordination and cooperation. And it’s the one situation where bureaucracies always cooperate: to cover their collective asses.”

“Where you trying to go, Lieutenant?” he asked. “You move out there in the open, me and Mr. Greener here will have your ass.”

“We got each other, then, Colonel,” I said, but I stopped moving. “As I remember, the branches thin out up there in the air.”

“Depends on which tree I’m in, smart-ass.”

Now, that hadn’t occurred to me. Pine trees came in groves, didn’t they. He could well be up another tree. Except for that gash in the tree trunk. Keep him talking, see if you can locate him.

“Tell me something else, then, Colonel: What’d you have on Thomason?”

“He murdered his sister,” Trask said. “I found out.”

“How’d he do that?” I asked. Should I come all the way out from under those big branches, or perhaps change sector? He’d get a shot if I was in the open, unless, of course, it was a dense grove and there was no open.

“With a bottle of water,” Trask said.

What did he just say? I felt my brain blink.

I heard him bark a short laugh. “That get your attention, Lieutenant?”

It certainly had. “Allie Gardner?”

“The one and only,” he said. “I correlated a key card swipe with a radiation hit on a hall monitor. Had him cold, so to speak.”

Then I finally made the connection. Allie’s unmarried sister’s name was Thomason. If she had never been married, then that was Allie’s maiden name. I remembered that visitor log entry: Thomason visiting Thomason.

“Why’d he do that?”

“It involves family money, Lieutenant. That’s all he’d tell me. I got the impression he took her share. I didn’t push any further, because I needed him, not his back story. How ’bout it: You ready to rumble?”

“What, you coming down to join me?” I asked, tightening my grip on the Colt and anchoring the butt. God, I wished the shepherds were here. Even now, a piece of my brain heard them coming through the woods at high speed to rescue my ass one more time. But they weren’t.

Then Trask made his move, and it was impressive. Turned out, he
was
in my tree. Our tree, I guess. He was all the way at the top, and he did what you can only do in a big pine tree: He jumped away from the trunk, arms and legs out like a spider, fell through the first tier of branches, and grabbed one. As it bent under his weight, it slowed him down just a little, and then he let go and dropped through the next tier, and so on, each time braking his descent just enough to be able to drop damn near right on top of me in a hail of needles and broken branches. I heard him coming all the way down, and it didn’t do me one bit of good. I didn’t even have time to fire
the Colt, because my weary brain just wasn’t working fast enough to understand what he was doing before there he was in a whoosh of air, pine needles, and a black mass of shadow, his angry face twisted into a murderous rictus and his hands reaching for my throat.

The Colt saved me, after all.

I’d had it pointed straight up the whole time, the stock wedged on the ground, my finger near, but not on, the trigger. Trask landed right on it and drove the barrel and even some of the action through his solar plexus and right out his back. My left hand, trapped under his body, felt a sudden warm flood. Trask screamed.

There we lay for a moment, in a truly grotesque embrace. Trask didn’t make a sound except for one ghastly inhale, and then he sagged against me, insane eyes wide open, the fingers of both of his hands curling and uncurling, as if he still wanted to choke the life out of me. My sight line was directly over his shoulder, and I could see the muzzle of the Colt tenting the back of his shirt, even as a really big blood vessel emptied itself all over my left side.

I wanted to roll out from under him, but I was suddenly exhausted, so I just lay there and let him bleed. He was still breathing, sort of, and then I realized he was actually looking at me. His eyes were a hundred years old.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” I said. “With all of this?”

“Duty,” he gasped. “Duty to warn.”

“I’m sorry, man, but all they’re gonna think is that you were just nuts.”

“No,” he wheezed. “You don’t understand.” He was going fast, but determined to tell me something. “Moira came to me.”

My brain, even befuddled as it was, did a double take. “This wasn’t
your
idea?”

“No,” he said, whispering now as his life drained out of him. “Listen. Important. Moonpool. Diversion.”

He coughed some blood, which must have hurt like hell. I saw the muzzle of the Colt throbbing under the shirt with
what was left of his heartbeat. One of his hands suddenly tightened on my neck, but he was trying to get my attention, not hurt me. “The reactors,” he said. “She wants the reactors.”

His eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.

I rolled free with a shudder and wiped off my hands in the pine needles.

The moonpool was a diversion after all? Obviously Trask had given Moira access to the plant’s security computers. Was he telling me she might have access to the main reactor control system as well?

I tried to remember what Ari had said about that—same system, or were they split? Now that the moonpool was stabilized, they’d stand down from the emergency—and then she’d strike.

I looked over at that canal; the current was still running, and I thought I could smell diesel fuel now. Would the Helios people be expecting a second attack? I remembered the utter confusion at that university in Virginia, when they thought the shooting in the dorm was the main event and stopped looking.

I saw something moving through the upper branches of the trees. It looked like a blue ghost. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked again. Then it penetrated: blue strobe lights from a police car, reflecting off the tree trunks. Then there were headlights pointing down the towpath. I waited until the lights were shining right over my head and raised one bloody arm. The cop car dipped to a stop and two sets of doors clunked open. I kept the arm in the air until I knew they could see me, or rather us. I heard one of them say, “Holy shit,” and then there was lots of excited radio conversation.