Zoobreak (6 page)

D
arren Vader wore his Grinch smile — a diabolical grin that stretched from ear to ear. “Really? The Man With The Plan needs me to be part of one of his world-famous operations? What an honor!”

It was Monday, after lunch. Griffin, Ben, and Savannah had followed Darren out of the cafeteria and cornered him at his locker.

Griffin scowled. He had never been a Darren fan and did not relish the idea of involving him in the zoobreak. “You won’t be
part
of the operation, just transportation. Like bank robbers need a wheelman to drive the getaway car. Only instead of driving, you’ll be sailing.”

“A sail man,” Ben added.

The smile faded. “You’re some piece of work, Bing. You’re asking for my help, but I’m not good enough to be there when you boost Drysdale’s monkey.”

“That’s better for you,” Griffin argued. “Less involved means less trouble if we get caught.”

“Right,” the big boy said sarcastically. “All I have to do is sneak out in the middle of the night, steal my dad’s boat, and sail you to Rutherford Point so you can break into private property and kidnap a zoo animal.”

“Hey,” piped up Savannah, “Cleo is rightfully mine.”

“That’s your opinion, not the cops’. So don’t talk to me about being less involved. I’d be involved enough to ask this question —” Darren leaned against the wall, stroking at chin whiskers that were not there. “What’s in it for me?”

“We’re helping Savannah,” Griffin explained.

“That’s what’s in it for Drysdale. What’s in it for
me
? I’ll give you a hint —
ka-ching!
”

“You mean money?” Ben asked in amazement. “There’s no money.”

“Sorry, guys. It’ll never work.” Darren glanced at the hall clock. “Recess time,
already? I think I hear a soccer ball calling my name —” He took a step toward the double doors.

“I’ll pay you!” Savannah blurted suddenly.

Darren froze, his Grinch smile reblooming. “Now we’re talking. Okay, let’s see — a half-day sailboat rental with an experienced captain —”

“Experienced at ripping people off,” Ben put in resentfully.

“— plus danger pay — three hundred bucks!”

“Aw, come on!” Griffin exploded. “What kid can get his hands on that kind of money?”

Savannah didn’t even blink. This might have been a game to Darren, but she took Cleopatra’s future very seriously. “I don’t have that much. But I’ll give you my allowance for the next three months.”

Darren’s eyes narrowed. “Six.”

“Done.”

Griffin pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Darren. It was a detailed map of the north shore of Long Island, with Cedarville’s marina and the Rutherford Point Preserve highlighted. “Commit this route to memory. We don’t want to end up in Bermuda.”

Savannah pressed her lips together in an expression of hopeful determination. “When are we doing it, Griffin?
All Aboard Animals
moves on at the end of this week.”

Griffin held his arms wide, drawing them into his confidence. “Wednesday, after midnight,” he announced in a low voice. “Everything will be ready by then.”

Wednesday.

Two days away.

When Melissa opened the door of the Dukakis house, Griffin and Ben both checked the number on the door to make sure they’d come to the right address. Her curtain of hair was neatly parted and pinned back, revealing a face that was not all that familiar because it appeared so seldom.

“I made guacamole,” she greeted, showing them inside.

“Oh, great,” said Griffin, a little perplexed. “Uh — why?”

The question seemed to stump her, so she wheeled out a serving cart with the dip and a basket of chips the size of an eagle’s nest.

“You might be hungry?” she suggested finally.

They stood in the front hall, snacking awkwardly.

“This is good,” Ben offered lamely. “Spicy.”

“I don’t have a lot of people over,” Melissa admitted. “None, actually. I mean, you guys are the first.”

Griffin dusted the crumbs from his fingers. “Now let’s check out the webcams.”

They trooped up to her small room, which was so cluttered with computers, printers, scanners, and modems that there was barely room for her bed. Four monitors displayed the live feed from the wireless webcams she had planted around the floating zoo.

From watching these, Melissa had been able to put together an
All Aboard Animals
timeline:

“It’s perfect,” Griffin decided. “We’ll meet tomorrow at midnight, and by the time we sail to Rutherford Point, Mr. Nasty will be gone and Klaus will be asleep.”

“We hope,” added Ben.

“We
know
,” Griffin amended. “A good plan leaves nothing to chance. If it happens at
All Aboard Animals
, we see it on these screens.”

The words had barely passed his lips when a menacing shape appeared before the interior-view webcam. It grew larger and larger until it completely filled the monitor. For an instant, there was wild, frenzied action, and sharp claws slashed at the camera. Then the screen went dark.

Ben was wide-eyed. “What was
that
?”

Melissa was at the keyboard, typing at light speed. “The video feed has stopped. The camera is offline.”

“What do you mean, offline?” Griffin asked.

“Either the camera failed or the transmitter did,” she explained. “Maybe the battery died early.”

“Or,” Ben added uneasily, “our webcam just got eaten by that — that
thing
!”

“There’s no thing,” Griffin said, a little less certain than he would have liked.

“So what was it, then?”

“How about this: Klaus finds the mini-camera. He doesn’t know what it is, but it’s stuck in a wad of gum, so he chucks it in the trash.”

Ben was not convinced. “That didn’t look human to me.”

Melissa had a theory. “It might have been a ghost image generated by the webcam as it lost power.”

“See?” Griffin was triumphant. “Mystery solved.”

“I said it
might
have been,” she amended. “We can’t be sure.”

“Well, we definitely have to find out before we get on the boat with it —” Ben regarded his friend with alarm. “Don’t we?”

“Zero hour is already set,” Griffin argued. “There’s no way we can put it off. It’s supposed to rain on Thursday, and who knows if Darren can sail in bad weather? And Friday,
All Aboard Animals
moves on. It’s now or never.”

“So much for ‘a good plan leaves nothing to chance,’ ” Ben complained. “I’d say an
unidentified webcam-eating monster counts as leaving something to chance.”

Griffin couldn’t allow himself to be distracted by his friend’s jitters.

The countdown was on.

D
ressed in a black sweater and his darkest jeans, Griffin sat in his bedroom window, glaring at the tiny square of light coming from the garage door below. What a time for Dad to pull one of his late-night marathons on the Rollo-Bushel! Forty-five minutes to Operation Zoobreak, and he was still in his workshop, tinkering.

Right now, Griffin knew, Ben was tiptoeing out the sliding door at the back of the Slovak home. If he reached the rendezvous spot and Griffin was a no-show, he’d have a heart attack. Loyaltywise, the kid was rock solid, but he had a very low freak-out threshold.

What was that?
Griffin heard footsteps on the stairs and peered out the window again. The garage light was off! He heard
his father in the bathroom for a few minutes, water splashing in the sink, and the small motor of an electric toothbrush. Then more footsteps and the
whump
of his parents’ bedroom door closing.

The hardest part was waiting to make sure Dad was asleep. Minutes passed like weeks. School today had been even worse. Who could concentrate on English or math on the day of an operation? Between periods, he’d rushed to the library to check the online boating forecast. It was always the same:
SE winds 10–15 knots, seas 1–2 ft, light swells
. Griffin didn’t even know what a knot was, but he assumed Darren would.

At last, the coast was clear. He threw his backpack over his shoulder and tiptoed down the stairs, wincing at the clinking sound made by the three flashlights and heavy-duty wire cutters inside. As silently as he could, he slipped out the back door, got on his bike, and rode to the small park where he was meeting Ben.

As he approached the rendezvous point, a blinding beam assaulted his eyes.

“What kept you?” Ben demanded, his face white behind his flashlight.

“I’ll explain on the way!” Griffin promised.

Eleven jet-propelled minutes later, they pedaled up to the Cedarville Marina at the north end of town. There they found Savannah, Melissa, Logan, and Pitch, waiting not very patiently on the narrow, rocky beach.

“You’re late!” Savannah seethed.

“Trouble sneaking out,” Griffin explained briskly, taking stock of their faces. “Where’s Darren?”

“He’s not here yet,” Pitch said. She surveyed the line of bobbing watercraft in the nearby slips. “I wonder which boat is the Vaders’.”

“Look for the S.S.
Bigmouth
,” Ben suggested.

“Don’t knock Darren,” Savannah said sharply. “Without him, we’d have no way to get to Rutherford Point. If he takes us to Cleo, he can be Sir Bigmouth of the Round Table.”

“Okay,” said Griffin. “Equipment check.”

They ran through the list of gear, piling it up on the sand between them. Everything was ready.

Melissa consulted the clock on her BlackBerry, which was monitoring the three surviving webcams. “It’s twelve-twenty-five,” she ventured timidly.

“Isn’t that just like Darren,” Pitch spat. “He helps us, but first he has to make us sweat.”

Logan spoke up. “I know some good breathing exercises for stage fright.”

Savannah was too wired to be patient. “Let’s not and say we did.”

Griffin had the last word on the subject. “Calm down, you guys. All we can do is wait.”

The zoobreak team paced nervously, the task ahead weighing heavily on their young shoulders. A chill wind came off the water, making them glad they were all in warm sweaters and fleeces. Time ticked away. No Darren.

The BlackBerry told the tale. “One a.m.,” Melissa reported blandly.

They all knew, but it took Pitch’s plain talk to put it into words: “That backstabbing rat-creep! He stood us up!”

Savannah was devastated. “But what about Cleo?”

“He stood her up, too,” Griffin said grimly. “Especially her.”

“You mean that’s it?” she persisted. “We just go home?”

Griffin tried to make her understand. “Every good plan has built-in options for what you can do when something goes wrong. But there’s always a spot where there’s no plan B — where it has to happen exactly right or not at all. Getting to Rutherford Point is the linchpin of everything. There’s nothing we can do.”

Shy Melissa spoke up. “There’s one thing we can do.” Everyone stared at her. “We can wait longer. Darren probably isn’t coming, but maybe he is. It’s better than giving up.”

The team digested this. There was a strange simplicity to Melissa’s thinking that had the ring of the wisdom of the ages.

“You’re dreaming,” said Pitch. “He’s a no-show.”

“We’ll take a vote,” The Man With The Plan decided. “All in favor of going home …” Pitch, Logan, and Griffin. “And of staying …” Savannah and Melissa. “Home wins, three to two.” He froze. “Wait a minute — where’s Ben?”

They looked around. Ben was nowhere to be seen.

Out came their flashlights, and they searched the marina. No Ben.

And then Griffin heard a telltale snort — one he had heard many times before. Snoring!

He followed the sound along the beach until his flashlight illuminated Ben, fast asleep, curled up on a pile of fishing nets in an ancient wooden rowboat.

“Ben!” he hissed.

“I’m awake!” the smaller boy exclaimed, scrambling to attention. He took in his surroundings in drowsy embarrassment. “Oh, man, I crashed! Is Darren here yet?”

Griffin didn’t answer. His gleaming eyes were focused on two wooden oars lying inside the old dory.

Transportation.

B
en dragged the heavy oar through the water, his eyes focused on Griffin, who stood in the dory’s bow like Washington crossing the Delaware.

“The preserve was a long ride by bus because we had to drive down one neck and up another,” Griffin explained, his flashlight trained on the map in his hands. “By water we can just cut straight across. It can’t be more than a mile or two.”

“Two miles is pretty far by
rowing
!
”
Ben panted. “Especially if the boat sinks halfway there.”

Pitch examined the wooden deck. “I think she’s seaworthy. The floor’s totally dry.”

“Only because I haven’t thrown up yet,” wheezed Logan, who was prone to
seasickness. “No actor should have to work in these conditions.”

“The acting part’s over,” Griffin told him. “It’s all search and rescue from here on in.”

Savannah took the oar from Ben’s hands. “Here, I’ll row for a while. Maybe somebody should give Melissa a break, too.”

“That’s okay.” Even from behind the curtain of hair, Melissa’s eyes glowed like a pair of hovering fireflies. “This is really cool.”

The eeriest part was when they got far enough from shore that the Cedarville Marina faded into an endless dark coastline. They couldn’t see their destination, but home had disappeared, too. It was like being lost at sea.

The journey progressed with agonizing slowness. After one of their flashlights died, Griffin declared a new rule: No more than three lights on at a time to conserve battery power.

“Are we there yet?” groaned Pitch, staring up at the starry sky.

“I think I’m going to start barfing now,” Logan gurgled.

“Go ahead,” said Savannah. “It’s a normal function for all living creatures.”

“Just lean over the side,” Griffin added. “Remember, this is a round-trip cruise.”