The Boston Breakout (11 page)

But for a brief moment, Travis could see her neck.

And there it was. The tattoo of a flying penguin.

T
he three Owls ran down the ramp as fast as they could. Several times they bumped into groups of tourists, some of whom yelled at them to slow down.

But Travis Lindsay couldn’t slow down, any more than he could stop his heart pounding. He had an emergency message to deliver – just like Paul Revere!

They were almost at the bottom of the circular ramp when they saw a security guard. The man
had seen them coming and was holding up his hand for them to halt.

But before he could say anything, the three young hockey players were sputtering and spewing out their story. None of which seemed to make the slightest sense to the guard.

“Hold on! Hold on!” he pleaded. “I can’t make heads or tails of what you’re saying. One at a time, please.” He pointed at Travis. “You!”

Travis swallowed hard. He knew he’d have to be good. “We think there are people in your tank who shouldn’t be there,” he began.

The guard laughed. “You mean fish that shouldn’t be there?”

“No, sir. We know one of the divers – and we don’t think she should be there.”

“Only authorized personnel are involved in any diving,” the guard said. “So I doubt that very much.”

Sam broke in. “She’s Frances Assisi. The protester. The one behind the Free the Penguins movement.”

This caught the guard’s attention. He reached out and put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. She was shaking, starting to cry again.

“You’re certain of that?” he asked.

Sam nodded. “Yes. I know her very well. And she said she was planning something.”

The guard took off his cap. He was sweating profusely under it, and his bald head shone in the lights of the aquarium. He seemed to be deciding what to do.

“Come with me,” he said finally. “All three of you.”

He turned and ordered the crowd behind them to make way for them to pass. Some of the people snickered to see the three youngsters being led away. They recognized them as the three who’d been running so recklessly down the ramp and were pleased the guard was doing the right thing by throwing the troublemakers out.

The guard was doing the right thing, sure enough – but it had nothing to do with giving the three Screech Owls the boot. He took them straight to the security office, where several guards were watching every area of the aquarium on video cameras, both inside and out.

The guard took them to a woman who appeared
to be the senior officer, and when Sam mentioned Frances Assisi’s name, the woman’s eyebrows jumped. They had her attention.

The senior officer turned to a bank of cameras focused on the tank itself. They could see sea creatures and divers moving about.

“Where?” she said to Travis. “Where in the tank did you see this?”

“Near the top,” Travis said.

The senior officer nodded to another guard who had come over. “They go bottom to top for the census, don’t they?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned to another guard operating the cameras. “Give us a view of the top of the tank, Peter.”

Peter nodded. He pushed some buttons to control a camera positioned above the massive tank.

The four divers were working on something near the top of the reef-like structure. It did not look as if they were counting.

“Move in tight on this one,” the senior officer said, tapping her finger on a figure with long hair flowing out of the hood of her wet suit.

The guard controlling the camera did so. The picture was a bit murky, but the Owls knew it was Frances.

“That her?” the senior officer asked.

All three Owls nodded at once.

The woman took one more look, straining to see what the divers were doing.

“Clear the building,” she said.

The guard named Peter seemed unsure he’d heard correctly. “Ma’am?” he said.

“You heard me – clear the building.
Now!
”

T
ravis expected pandemonium, perhaps even people being trampled on the ramps. But there was nothing of the sort. A very calm announcement went out over the New England Aquarium’s public-address system:

The three Owls were also taken out, by the security guard who had first stopped them. They watched people leaving, lining up neatly outside for their readmission tickets, and already Boston police were on the boardwalk ensuring that the crowds dispersed quickly and without incident.

Travis could tell from the passing voices that there was indeed some concern – “
A leak?
” “
A break in the glass?
” “
Something wrong in the water filtering system?
” – but no one seemed to consider that this was any sort of a Judgment Day.

The uniformed Boston police moved the crowds back as a large armored bus rolled up and a heavily armed police
SWAT
team poured out of it and took up position around the outside of the aquarium building. The security guard told the Owls that
SWAT
stood for Special Weapons and Tactics. This was the law enforcement unit that handled only the most high-risk operations.

When the
SWAT
team was in place, a signal was given and they all entered the building at once, several of them going through the open side of the aquarium where the construction was taking place.

Sarah turned to the other two.

“
What if we’re wrong?
” she asked, her face reddening.

Sam answered, “We’re not.”

“W
e have to go.”

The security guard looked baffled. These three youngsters had caused one of Boston’s top attractions to be evacuated and a
SWAT
team to storm the building. No one outside the New England Aquarium except them knew why, and now they had something
more important
to do?

“We have to,” Sarah pleaded. “We play our final game of the tournament in an hour.”

Quickly they explained to the guard, who had never even heard of the Paul Revere Peewee Invitational Hockey Tournament. He took down their details – their names, where they were staying, their home numbers – and raking a hand over his sweaty brow, he nodded that they were free to go.

They raced back to the hotel, arriving just as Mr. D was loading his portable skate-sharpening equipment onto the back of the old bus.

“
There
you are!” he shouted. “You three are running late! Grab your bags and get them down here. We leave in five.”

The three Owls looked at each other. There was no time to tell anyone what had happened.

Besides, who would believe them anyway? And they didn’t
really
know what had happened.

“Where the hell were you?” Nish said, as Travis sank into his stall in the dressing room at the
TD
Garden.

“We went to the aquarium again –”

“Bor-ing!” Nish said before Travis could continue.

Travis just smiled. He had no idea how to describe his morning, but
boring
was not one of the choices.

He put on his pads, right, left. All was quiet. He pulled his jersey over his head, kissed the Screech Owls crest from behind, and sagged in his stall. He was exhausted – and the final game still had to be played.

Travis could not recall a time when he’d been so out of it in a tournament. Was it just because it was summer? No – he’d been wrapped up in something else entirely. He had to get his focus back.
Had to
. He was captain, after all. He was Travis Lindsay, captain of the Screech Owls, and his teammates depended on him.

Their opponents in this final deciding match would be the Mini-Penguins. The Pittsburgh team, who’d been defeated by the Owls on Travis’s goal and Nish’s Hail Mary pass, had gone on to beat the Chicago Young Blackhawks 5–2, proving Muck’s point that the Owls had found their game following that resounding opening loss to the Young Blackhawks.

Muck had little to say. His pregame talk set a new record for brevity.

“Have fun.”

It was exactly the right thing for Muck to say. From Game 1, when the Owls had been humiliated, they had grown in confidence with every game, every shift. They were still far from mid-season form, but they were playing real hockey again, the game they loved so well.

And it
was
fun. It was fun when Travis pumped through that first corner on the fresh ice of the
TD
Garden. It was fun when he thought about being on the same ice that the Stanley Cup champions played on. It was fun when he hit the crossbar on his first warm-up shot. Fun when both Sarah and Sam slammed their sticks into his shin pads before the opening face-off. Fun when he and Nish did their ritual taps with Jenny, who’d be playing nets for the Owls. Fun when he came off from his first
shift and looked down the bench to see Nish leaning over hard, his head buried between his knees. Travis didn’t need to see any more to know the defenseman had his game face on.

The Mini-Penguins were going to be tough again, perhaps even tougher than in the previous match. The big center – the Lemieux-Crosby clone – was in brilliant form, leading rush after rush up the ice. Travis loved watching how effortlessly he stickhandled, but he also knew it was his job to ensure that the center’s stickhandling didn’t end up with a puck in the net behind Jenny.

There was no score in the first period and, amazingly, no score in the second. Muck always argued that there could be nothing better than a 1–0 game in hockey, but Travis had never agreed with that. Virtually every legendary game ever played – the 1972 Summit Series, the 1987 Canada Cup finals – had had the same score, 6–5, and he figured any game with eleven goals had to be superior to a game with only one.