Oil Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 4) (33 page)

“I regret that I must now bid all of you a good night.”

“All right,” shouted Bennington, stepping forward still more and gesturing to the lifeboats, which Nina remembered from her earlier trip out to Aquatica. “Let’s make a deal! We let you get on the helicopter! We let you take off. You agree to give us ten minutes before you push that thing. In ten minutes, we can fill these six lifeboats and get them launched.”

The nearest lifeboat was only a few feet from Nina. She peered down into its darkened interior, which looked not too different from the interior of the helicopter.
Strange
, she found herself thinking. The thing still looked like a monstrously long okra plant, purple in color, and heavily plated to withstand the fifty foot plunge into the sea.

It was built, they had told her, to go through burning oil slicks.

But tonight…

Could it withstand the explosion that might be coming? Instinctively, she put her hand on what seemed to be the door leading into the thing, while Barrington implored again:

“Give us ten minutes! We’ll let you go, if you’ll give us ten minutes!”

Holder shook his head, bellowing:

“Don’t make deals with that SOB! If you let him get on that copter, he’ll blow us up!”

The man who was now at the point of entering the helicopter nodded:

“All right. You have your ten minutes. I shall circle the craft for that length of time, then fly shoreward. As many people as can be gotten off Aquatica…will be saved. Some of you, at least, will live to tell the story.”

“Ok. We’ll take you at your word.”

“Excellent!”

And even as the man smiled, even as he climbed into the helicopter, Nina knew that he was lying.

He was going to give them nothing.

No time at all.

He was going to fly one half mile away.

And then he was going to do the job he and his ‘crew’ had been paid to do.

He was going to blow up Aquatica.

And nothing could prevent that.

She was going to die.

They were all going to die.

And the Gulf Coast was going to die.

He was on the copter now, in the pilot’s seat.

The rotors began to spin faster, as the engine roared.

All she could think of was Frank.

Maybe I’m going to see you now, Frank.

Maybe we’ll be walking along the beach together, as we always did.

And it will be a beach in heaven.

A clean beach.

In heaven.

Strange. She wasn’t even trembling, as the helicopter lifted off.

She was just watching, like a spectator at an athletic event.

The helicopter rose slowly, a foot off the pad. Two feet.

And then it happened. It came from out of nowhere. A gigantic, black crate seemed to come crashing down out of the heavens. It was as though an asteroid had fallen to earth, slanting, its path straight for the helicopter.

“Watch out! Watch out!” screamed several crewmembers at once, as they looked on, horrified.

CRASH!

The crate swung mightily against the hovering copter, as the wrenching screams of metal on twisted metal drowned out the overmatched piping screams of sprinting, orange-clad men, who sounded like terrified birds watching the thing that many of them worked their hardest, during loadings and unloadings, to prevent.

A crane accident.

The helicopter, Nina saw, had been knocked out of the air and was lying at a forty five degree angle on the edge of the deck, black smoke pouring from its forward engine, a gaping hole in its side.

“She’s gonna go over! Get the pilot out! Get him out!”

And crewmembers were indeed running across the circular yellow landing pad, slipping on its rain-soaked tarmac.

They had almost reached the door when one of them, looking up and behind him, screamed again:

“Watch out!”

For the asteroid was falling again.

And again the huge black metal crate came crashing out of the sky, the bloated pendulum of some gigantic seismic grandfather clock, falling terribly against the rotored-craft below, which, with another agonized screeching of metal against twisted metal, heaved and gave up and toppled over the side and into the black, surging ocean.

“Man overboard! Man overboard!”

Water from the crash into the ocean sprayed up over Nina and soaked her, as, looking up and behind her she saw the crane operator, who smiled down at her.

Penelope!

Penelope whose lips were mouthing some pitiless obscenity.

But who was, nevertheless, smiling broadly.

“Good job, Penn,” Nina whispered.

She felt an unutterable sense of relief.

It was to last perhaps two seconds.

And after those two seconds she became aware of two things, simultaneously:
 
first, a group of Aquatica workers were sprinting toward her, shouting, “Get away! Clear away! The life boat’s going down!”

Second, the interior of the lifeboat had begun to flash red and then yellow; then black, red and yellow, as if it had been the inside of a circus chamber of horrors, or a border bordello.

Now a loud buzzing noise filled the air…

..and now an automated voice bellowing in her ear from some amplification system that must have been installed in the life boat itself:

“BOAT LAUNCH IN TEN SECONDS! BOAT LAUNCH IN EIGHT SECONDS!”

“Get away from there! The boat is going down!”

She looked down.

The helicopter, like a black, massive, shining ,sea creature, was sinking into the ocean. But a figure had escaped from the cockpit and was thrashing in the water.

The Tool Master—for what else could she call him?––had not drowned.

Damn!
she found herself thinking.

BOAT LAUNCH IN…

“Get away from there!”

No.

She could not ‘get away from there.’

Because the man who was swimming away from the drowning helicopter would, almost certainly, make it onto the lifeboat.

The lifeboat which was, as she had been told earlier by Sandy Cousins, programmed to be shot through oil slicked water at high speeds, at least for a mile.

At that distance he could still blow up the craft.

He would be rescued of course.

Brewster Dale, sole survivor, left to tell the tale.

She could not let that happen.

“Get away! It’s going down!”

BOAT LAUNCH IN TWO SECONDS!

She threw herself inside.

“Get out of there!! It’s…”

And at that moment, the lifeboat exploded away into the water.

She was hurtled forward in the craft, which fell sickeningly and forever as she tumbled like a pool ball, thrown first one direction and then another. She may have lost consciousness for an instant; but when she regained awareness she was sitting folded between two rows of seats, her forehead bleeding, her wrist aching, and her brain filled with the flashing of garish lights and the braying of horns that seemed to come from super animated World War II movies:

RAAA DAAA! RAA DAA! RAADAAA!

For a few instants she was not able to move at all.

Finally, she crawled to an upright position and looked around. She was alone on the lifeboat which was rocking heavily in churning waters.

Around her, the ocean was ablaze with lights, all pouring down off the decks of Aquatica.

The rails were lined with people, all shouting down at her.

And now, she could make out what the boats’ PA system was braying:

“Jettison in one minute. Jettison in fifty five seconds…”

The lifeboat, then, was not programmed to be instantly shot away from Aquatica; instead it was programmed to stay by the craft to pick up any people who might be swimming toward it.

And there…

THERE!

There was a person swimming toward it.

White hair, ruddy face, riding high in the water…

Hands swimming expertly…

One of those hands was holding the detonator.

And he was no more than fifteen feet from her.

He would reach the life boat where she was in only a few seconds.

He would clamber aboard.

He would kill her.

Then the boat would be jettisoned.

Then he would be two hundred yards from Aquatica.

Then he would press the button.

Then the explosion.

She looked over the side again.

He saw her now, and was smiling at her as he swam.

When, from the deck of the ship, another voice rang out:

“Man overboard! Man overboard!”

She looked up. A body came hurtling down off the deck…

SPLASH!

Spray inundated her.

She wiped her face with her sleeve, which, like the deck beneath her and the seats beside her, were drenched.

Then she looked overboard again.

Two figures, not ten feet from the side of the lifeboat, were locked in combat. Both were flaying madly at the water and then at each other, their shouts and curses muffled and gasping as they tried to grasp and escape, breathe and kick, claw and survive.

One of the figures was the Tool Master, snarling, red-faced still, his big hands clenching and unclenching, his grasp seemingly unbreakable, the detonator still held firmly above water.

The other was smaller, darker, and far more slender.

Hector Ramirez.

Hector was losing.

He was under the water now.

And now the other, free of the boy, began swimming in powerful strokes again toward the lifeboat.

“Ahhaguu!”

Hector lunged up out of the water and flayed at him, both fists flying, those sad eyes ablaze now, his whole body writhing:

“DAMN YOU!” shouted the tool man, pulling an arm up and out of the water, ready to deliver a final blow.

But as he did so, the detonator slipped from his hand.

He might as well have thrown it like a baseball player, so perfectly centered did it land, clattering, on the deck of the lifeboat not two feet from Nina’s feet.

She stared at it.

It glowed blue and yellow and green, lying half in rainwater, its screen like a miniature pinball machine.

“Don’t go off,” she prayed.

“DROWN, DAMN YOU!”

She looked right.

There was only one figure now.

The Tool Master was alone in the water, swimming toward her, and glaring at her.

Ten feet away.

Eight feet away.

Hector was gone, his body, she knew, sinking.

But the detonator was here, with her.

She picked it up, reared her arm back…

“NO,” screamed the figure in the water, “NO! DON’T THROW IT!”

She stared through rain-filmed eyes at the figure swimming toward her, and then shouted:

“Go to hell, you bastard! Here goes your precious detonator!”

And she prepared to heave it as far as she could…