Stanner walked over to the gently lapping shingle by the wrecked dock. He watched the diver’s bubbles on the water. As he watched, the bubbles stopped coming up.
Standing at the rail on the deck of the
Skirmisher
, Cal squinted down into the murky water. He couldn’t make out much of anything, despite all the light from the surface. Sometimes he saw his Dad’s spotlit shape, in wallowy outline, but then he lost it again as the light broke up on the dark waves.
Cal had let
Skirmisher
drift in the rising tide toward the crash site, so he was nearly over the top of it, as Dad had instructed him. Dad’s cable had paid out for a while, and then stopped moving.
Minutes passing.
More minutes. Nothing from below.
He’d been waiting too long, hadn’t he? He tugged on the cable, sharply, two times, to let Dad know he was asking if all was well.
He waited, his hand on the cable, so he could feel the slightest twitch of response.
Still nothing.
Dad had geared up with only a single tank of air. It was one of the small tanks—an inspection tank, he called it—for ease of movement. For a quick look around. Fifteen minutes. It had been that already, hadn’t it? And he couldn’t see Dad’s air bubbles anymore.
That Air Force officer seemed concerned, too. The guy who’d come on the second chopper. “Hey, kid!” The officer shouted at him, from the shore. Looked like a captain or a major or something. “He supposed to be down there that long for a first inspection?”
“Uh, no! You got any divers here?”
“We got a rescue diver over here!” one of the coastguardsmen yelled from the boat. “You want him to suit up?”
Cal hesitated. It would tick Dad off big-time if Cal sent a rescue down when Dad didn’t need it. He looked down into the water— just darkness and wavering light. He wished Dad had taken a mask with a headset in it, so they could stay in radio contact—but theirs was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And Dad had wanted to get down there fast, to make the job his own.
He looked at his watch. Definitely—he was down there at least two minutes past his tank’s capacity.
“Fuck,” he muttered, looking around for a mask and tank. He was going to have to go down himself.
He figured he knew what’d happened. The satellite had smashed into the dock, which meant a lot of heavy broken timbers down there—shit too heavy and waterlogged and mired in the muck to float up. Some beam from the dock might’ve fallen in on Dad.
He could be screaming for air right now.
Feeling tears burning to escape, Cal pulled a mask on, shouting to the coasties, “I’m going down—be good if you send a man down—”
“Send a man down to what?” came a voice from the water.
Cal leaned over the railing. There was Dad’s pale face against the dark water, looking up at him, his mask pulled onto the top of his head.
“What the hell, Dad! You know how long you were down?”
“So it was a few minutes extra, so what. I know how to conserve air after all these years.”
Cal looked at his watch. More like five minutes extra, he thought. Damn, his old man had
mad skills
.
But five minutes without air? That wasn’t really possible, was it?
Suddenly Dad was there, vaulting over the railing onto the deck like a young man despite the weight of his tank, the cold water, and the exertion.
Cal remembered that you looked for signs of strange behavior in a diver who had been down too long. He might have a mild form of oxygen deprivation—dementia or something. But Dad was already over at the winch, throwing levers so it’d slowly start taking up the slack.
The Air Force officer came alongside in a launch from the Coast Guard boat. “The boat there, Major Stanner coming aboard.”
More laboriously than Cal’s dad, Stanner climbed up the ladder and swung himself onto the deck. “You’re starting your equipment already?”
Dad nodded. “It’s ready to go. The support structures happen to’ve fallen in a configuration that shouldn’t cause any problems. I haven’t started the real lifting yet—if you don’t think it’s ready to come up. But I was able to clear the sand away. It should be solidly grappled.”
Stanner raised his eyebrows. “You cleared all that sand away? From what we could make out, it’s half buried down there.”
Dad turned to look blankly at Stanner. “Maybe the sand was loosened by the impact. It’s quite clear now along the upper half of the hull. But the S.N.G. module looks to be cracked. I expect its contents have been destroyed.”
Cal looked back and forth between his dad and Stanner. The major’s face seemed to go stony, all of a sudden.
“What’d you call it?” Stanner asked.
Just a flicker of hesitation from Dad. “I said satellite module. Why?”
“I thought you said something else.” Stanner looked at him again. Cal’s dad gazed unflinchingly back.
Shit, the old man could be chilled steel when he needed to.
Finally Stanner glanced at his watch, looked at the cable slicing down into the water, and said, “We’ve got a small navy vessel coming to take it aboard, be here any minute, so we’d better have it ready. I don’t want it out in the—” He broke off, glancing at the shore. Then he turned to Cal’s dad and said, “Okay. Let’s hope you know what you’re doing. Hoist away.”
Waylon thought he might be crouching on an anthill. He pictured the ants looking for a good spot to start burrowing under his testicles. He scratched and shifted on the hummock.
The grassy hummock—
hey, I’m on a grassy knoll, dude!
—was on the hillside in the thicket of fur and oak trees overlooking the old restaurant and the smashed dock. He stood up, to let his blood circulate, shifting his weight from foot to foot, watching the navy vessel—what was it, a PT boat?—hauling ass toward San Francisco Bay, with that big metal thing they claimed was a satellite tied down under a tarp on its aft deck. It might’ve been a satellite. He hadn’t been able to see it very well.
Probably was. Which was disappointing.
He shifted around on the hummock. Scratched one knee against the other.
Was
something crawling up his legs? Ants? Something else? Hadn’t Adair said all kinds of nasty shit lived in this woods?
He left the hummock and climbed up on a nearby tree stump. Probably get termites up his pants, too.
He had to hunker down and peer between the trees to watch the boat. He made out three boats. The coastguardsmen were following the Navy boat, some kind of escort. The trawler that had winched up the Unknown Artifact, as Waylon thought of it, was tooling off in a different direction, piloted by that older kid, Adair’s brother. Her dad—he thought it was her dad, though he was a ways off and Waylon had seen him only one other time—was walking toward his truck.
Waylon wished he had binoculars. He thought he’d seen ordinary English-language lettering on the side of the thing when it was hauled up, but he was too far away to be sure. Well, it was under a tarp now anyway.
He was getting cold and damp and wanted to check his pants to see if he had any unauthorized visitors of his own.
He sighed. Time to go home. He tended to put off going home because Mom’s anxiety attacks were back big-time, and if it wasn’t the anxiety attacks, she was plastered, and it made him feel like shit when she was drunk.
He heard a persistent rattling. It went lower in frequency, became more distinct, a thudding—and then he saw it coming.
It was a single light, approaching low over the trees. The tree-tops tossed about as it came.
“Oh, shit. The black chopper.”
The same one. He could see the markings on it, D-23.
And as he said
the black chopper
, a searchlight switched on, making a thin column of harsh blue shine down into the trees. A doe, with ears like a mule’s, ran from the questing blob of light.
The chopper changed direction, coming right toward him, its searchlight probing.
“Fuck this,” Waylon muttered, and started off through waist-high ferns, the trees seeming to run toward him as he skidded along the slope.
He fell, sliding on his ass through blackberry vines, feeling them burn across his skin. The chopper boomed overhead, the trees surging in its wind, leaves caught up in its private dust devil, spinning into his eyes.
He stopped hard against a mossy-slick pine tree, goose-egging his shin on it. “Shit!” he hissed, and ducked behind the tree as the searchlight swept over the bole where he’d been a moment before, and passed on. The chopper carried its wind and restlessly probing searchlight with it, back into the farther reaches of the night sky.
Heart thudding, tasting metal but feeling a certain elation, Waylon started down the hillside, skidding toward the road. His leg ached, his face stung with blackberry thorns, and he had a long walk home. Maybe his mom’d be asleep when he got there.
Suddenly he stopped, aware of hunched, stealthy movement in the shadows of the slope below him.
That deer he’d seen, probably. But he kept still and watched. After a moment, he made out two pale faces peering up toward him, catching moon and starlight where it dappled through foliage. No more of them was visible.
They were about seventy feet away from him, but he thought he knew who it was. Two of those marines who’d come to replace the cops. He had seen them earlier, from the brush close by the road.
Now they seemed to raise their heads and sniff the air, to listen like animals. It almost looked as if they were down on all fours, but they couldn’t be; it must be that they were leaning their hands on a steep part of the hillside.
They were climbing up toward him.
They came on, seeming almost to glide effortlessly up the hillside. They were so quiet, so stealthy, it was like they were on some kind of combat training exercise, creeping up on the enemy camp. And it was like they were moving in tandem—
he moves and I move,
he moves and I move
—fast as lizards up the hill.
This thing has me freaked out. I’m imagining shit,
Waylon decided. They were just climbing the regular way, looking for him because someone had seen him, and they were worried he’d spotted their crashed UFO—or whatever it was.
But suppose they caught him. Would they have to
liquidate
him, to keep the cover-up secure?
I’m just being paranoid. It was just a satellite, and they don’t want the
bad publicity. They just want to scare me o f, like the guards at Area 51
with their threats.
But even as he thought all this, he climbed back up the hillside, through the trees, and then started down again, diagonally this time. Moving laterally away from the two men. He’d seen a path on the far side of the dock, along the edge of the water, probably used by fishermen—Chinese and Latino guys who fished in every bay he’d ever seen, no matter how polluted the water was.
He reached the road and sprinted for the rocky path, made it, and ran past little poplar trees and big juniper bushes, threading between boulders and chunks of concrete left here to provide a tide break.
He paused a couple of times to see if he was being followed.
Maybe. Something was rustling back there. The doe stepped into the moonlight, then bounded off. He waited and didn’t see the soldiers. He moved on.
Fifteen minutes later, Waylon found himself rounding a small point that stuck out into a little inlet. On the other side, not even a quarter mile away, was a brightly lit marina thronged with sail-boats. Beside the docks was a steak and fish restaurant.
He followed the curve of a gravelly beach to the marina. As he passed below the surf-and-turf place, he heard people on the restaurant’s deck, which extended over the water under strings of twinkling lightbulbs, talking and drinking as they waited for a table. Someone was speculating about what was supposed to have crashed into the bay.
“I heard it was a small plane,” a woman said.
He almost felt like telling them—telling
someone
—what he had seen, telling them about the chopper and the unnatural soldiers who’d harried him through the brush.
But he was too tired to be laughed at.
He trudged up a boat ramp to the road, stuck out his thumb, and got a ride back to Quiebra with some drunk college students who made fun of the bramble welts on his face.
Thinking to himself,
Of course they were after you, dude. Ever since
the terrorists flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, the fucking military’s been even more paranoid, ready to nail
anybody who sni fs around. If that wasn’t a crashed UFO, it was probably
a spy satellite. Some sort of top secret shit. What did you expect? The
Shadow Government will track your ass down if you get in its way.
When Waylon got home to the condo, his mom was asleep on the couch, snoring loudly, with the TV on but the sound off. The Shopping Channel. She liked to look at the chintzy things they hawked, but she never bought anything. Her long curly bottle-blond hair was straggling over her open mouth. Wine coolers were lined up on the coffee table, and cigarette butts were spilling out of the ashtrays.
She was still wearing the dark blue dress suit she wore for her paralegal job; she was about forty pounds overweight, and spilling out of it. He pulled her shoes off and drew her long wool coat over her like a blanket.
Then he turned off the TV and went to take a shower.
November 24, midmorning
Lacey Cummings stood on her porch, looking at the eight-foot-high bird-of-paradise plant that nodded in the smoggy breeze like some otherworldly bird. She looked at the sky, blue overhead and gray-brown above the eastern horizon. Then she looked at her packed bags on the doormat and thought,
Am I ready to go or not? Have I got
everything?
She was on the front porch of her rented L.A. bungalow, waiting for the cab—thinking it was crazy to take a cab in L.A. If you weren’t part of the limo set, you bought a car. But she had sold her car; she was going to the train station, for the Coast Starlight to Berkeley.