Zodiac (40 page)

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 outswim 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 Basco'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 Basco 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
Basco 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 Explorers
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 belowdecks. 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 CO
₂
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 fucker 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 stern 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.”