The Breach

by Edward J. McFadden III

  Many people took the day after Labor Day off from work, and traffic was light. Most of the signal lights were working thanks to backup generators and smart electrical engineers, and other than a layer of tree crumbs along the shoulder of every road, Long Island’s highways and byways were in good shape. Everything was passable in both directions though it would take months for the public works guys to backtrack and pick up all the lumber. Tanner didn’t think there’d be much left by the time they got around to it. With gas and oil prices through the roof, he had a hunch tree companies and civilians fond of playing with their chainsaws and looking to save a buck would take care of many of the fallen trees.

  Carey Creek cut through a flooded residential area so Tanner was to meet Randy at the canal head on Monroe Avenue. He made a left off Montauk Highway and drove past his old elementary school and made a left on Monroe. Carey Creek was over flooded and the surrounding streets were under two feet of water. Many of the houses stood like islands and Tanner hadn’t gone far before he had to stop.

  The captain’s white Tahoe was parked across the road in front of a yellow barricade. Quinn and Randy leaned against the truck, watching Tanner as he stopped before them and jumped from the Jeep. Just past the captain’s truck, the Great South Bay lapped over the blacktop, half-a-mile inland from its normal demarcation point. A police SAFE boat waited fifty yards off and Tanner was thankful he’d remembered his hip waders. He’d need them to get to the boat, and he had a feeling he would be waist deep in shit all day.

  Tanner gave Randy the hardest look he could muster, which wasn’t much. Randy returned the stare, and Tanner understood his partner had been threatened. The two men spoke to each other telepathically; at least that’s what it felt like.

  “Before you get pissed at him, I gave him a direct order,” Captain Quinn said. “He had no choice.”

  “You always have a choice, but I understand,” Tanner said. He shot Randy another glance and his partner headed for the boat.

  “Hang out, Randy. This concerns you as well,” Quinn said.

  Randy returned like a scolded child.

  “Where’s your new partner, Tanner?”

  “Today’s gonna be a long one, and I’m not coming back until this thing is dead, or it kills me, so I figured the responsible thing to do was give Lucky-shit the day off.” The dog had barked up a storm when he tried to leave the trailer, and he was still carrying on as Tanner pulled from his driveway.

  “Easy, Ahab. While that’s the most responsible thing you’ve done in months, you’re not going out there today,” Quinn said.

  “You shitting me?” Randy said.

  “Ears only, Randy,” the captain said.

  “You shitting me?” Tanner said.

  Randy snickered and Quinn turned to him. “No, I’m not shitting you. When I get to my office, I’m calling the Chief of Police and I’m going to let this crap flow upward. By the end of the day, the Navy will be on the way.”

  “Fine. That gives me a day. Let me get going.”

  “No can do,” Quinn said. “This thing is getting big and it won’t be long before the nation’s cameras are turned this way again. It would be best if those cameras don’t focus on you. For your own good.”

  “For your own good, you mean. If the press shows up, I’ll make myself scarce, they won’t even know I’m here. Like I said, I ain’t coming back without a pelt, and by then, it won’t matter. I’ll be dead or the beast will be.”

  “If it was up to me, I’d let you go, but the death of cops, then a coastie, to say nothing of the civilians, makes that impossible. We’re not equipped to handle this, and it’s snowballing out of control.”

  “What’s the real reason you’re impeding my investigation? Don’t want to take a risk because you might fail and look bad? What the fuck happened to you?” The contempt Tanner felt had him trembling, and his stomach burned.

  “Stand down, Tanner. Don’t take our friendship for granted and put me in a bad position.”

  “Friendship? Is that what this is?” Tanner said, and he immediately regretted it. The captain had saved his ass so many times he’d lost count. He’d probably be pumping gas without him in his corner. Quinn’s shoulders sagged, his head tilted, and he frowned. Tanner said, “I’m sorry, OK? You know I’d give my life to save yours. This goddamned monster has killed, Terry, right before my eyes, and I guarantee you it will kill again. Jefferson and I think it’s coming inland into the flooded areas. We have no time to lose.”

  “I know, but this is business,” Quinn said. “Randy, take the boat and go meet the coasties. Tanner is staying with me.”

  Randy didn’t move.

  “Did you hear me, Randy?”

  Tanner shifted his gaze from the captain to Randy, and his best friend lowered his head, turned, and slowly waded into the water heading toward the boat.

  “I’m calling Newsday today, my friend,” Tanner said. “Giving them the whole thing. Good luck then.” Dredging up what happened that night was the last thing he wanted to do, but his recent struggles pulled his past into the present like the tide.

  “You know damn well what happened wasn’t my fault,” Quinn said. “It wasn’t yours either. It was dark. The kid had a toy gun. A toy with all the orange reflective markings colored over in black marker to make it look real. You couldn’t have known.”

  “We shouldn’t have been there at all. You get that? The senator hadn’t been enough. You pushed me into that situation, and now I live my life knowing I killed a thirteen-year-old boy who thought he was protecting his sister.” Pain raced up Tanner’s back, and he shook with rage, clenching his fists and biting his tongue.

  “The boy was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt, Tanner. Holding a toy gun in a drug house.”

  “We should have waited ‘til daylight. Rested up and gone in with backup, but you had to have the twofer, and I had the hat-trick.”

  Quinn sighed. “Audrey’s my fault now, too? You didn’t mean to kill that boy. It wasn’t our fault.” Quinn was pleading, and to Tanner it seemed like he was trying to convince himself more than him.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tanner said. “He’s dead because of your glory, and my stupidity, and I took the blame for it so you could stay clean. Marine division. Why didn’t you put me in prison? I would have retained at least some of my respect there.”

  “You’d kill our careers to get back on the bay? Destroy my reputation? Because the record says I wasn’t there, and if you say I was, what happened doesn’t even matter.”

  “It does to me, and I don’t care. I’ll go to Florida and be a charter boat captain, and you can go fuck off.”

  “All right,” Quinn said. He sighed and breathed deep. “We can’t have this loose command structure anymore. The coasties have been informed of your removal.”

  “Randy’s in charge,” Tanner said. “I’ll advise him.”

  “What about Jefferson?”

  “Don’t worry about Jefferson. We’re going to war and she’s got no beef with me.”

  Randy had reached the boat and was taking his time looking for the mooring rope, which was underwater.

  “I’ll tell the brass I missed you, but expect to be called in,” Quinn said. “I don’t have the final say.”

  “Expect me to disobey that order,” Tanner replied.

  The captain smiled and held out his hand. “Good luck and try to come back alive. Don’t give your life away for nothing.”

  Tanner took Quinn’s hand and said, “I won’t.”

  The SAFE boat’s engines rumbled to life and Tanner waved at Randy, who shut down the motors and rushed out onto the deck like an expectant bride.

  The captain left as Tanner pulled on his waders.

  “You need help with anything?” Randy shouted.

  “Nay, be there in a second.” Tanner hid the Jeep’s keys under the seat and trudged out into the floodwater. The houses to his left stood just above the encroaching bay, and the water went from two inches deep to t
wo feet deep by the time he’d reached the SAFE boat.

  Tanner climbed aboard and clapped Randy on the back. “Thanks for waiting.”

  “You kidding? What would the Sundance Kid do without Butch? The crew is waiting with Big Boy at the mouth of the creek.”

  Tanner sparked the Hondas and backed the SAFE boat into deeper water. Trees, street signs, and houses stuck from the green bay water, and the buzz of hydraulics echoed through the pilothouse as Tanner lifted the motors a little. Debris floated just beneath the surface and he didn’t want to damage the engines.

  The sun rose in the east, pushing away the dusk and illuminating the shattered world. Tanner turned the boat south and headed for the open bay.

  14

  The bay was flat and covered in thick fog. It would burn off by noon, but until then, visibility was minimal. There were no whitecaps, and the wind was a light three miles per hour out of the north. Tanner inched the SAFE boat through the canal mouth into the bay and Big Boy’s red navigation light and aft emergency light cut through the fog like mismatched eyes. The deep bellow of Big Boy’s horn echoed across the water and Tanner headed toward it. The air was thick and humid, and his blue uniform shirt was already wet in all the tight places.

  “Orders, boss?” Randy asked.

  Tanner chuckled. “I advise you to…”

  “Lt. Tanner, I order you to act as captain of the SCPD vessel Herman, AKA Big Boy, until further notice. Is that clear, sailor?”

  “Sailor?” The two men laughed and Tanner clapped Randy on the back. “We both have to lead today, brother. But thanks.”

  Randy hailed the coasties, and they agreed to meet at the breach where they’d set the day’s search pattern and exchange updates. They reached Big Boy and Tanner prepared to disembark.

  “I want you on this twenty-two. Piloting a craft you’re comfortable with. I’ll send you Toby, and I want you to be my wingman. You got me?”

  Randy nodded.

  “You remember that stupid movie, right? Never leave your wingman. I was able to forgive you the night you met Tina, but they’ll be no acceptable excuses tonight except one.”

  “Which is?”

  “You have kids, and they’re like my kids, and—”

  Randy revved the engines, but they were so quiet he had to turn up the radio.

  “Randy, I’m not screwing around,” Tanner said.

  “I know. I won’t do anything stupid. If I have to retreat and leave you, I will.”

  “You don’t have to be so flippant about it. I mean, pause for a little contemplation for shit’s sake.” Tanner left the wheelhouse as Randy brought the boat close to Big Boy.

  “Kim, you there?” Tanner said. Big Boy was shrouded in fog.

  A woman with short-cropped blonde hair and black-rimmed glasses walked to the bow. “Yeah, I’m here. Tanner? What are you doing here? Our orders—”

  Randy’s voice boomed from the exterior public address system. “Tanner is in command of Big Boy at my order. Toby is with me.”

  The SAFE boat crept alongside the gray patrol boat. Tanner stepped up onto the SAFE boat’s blue pontoon gunnel, and then down onto Big Boy’s dive platform. Officer Toby Overbier, better known as Otto, said hello to Tanner and jumped onto the SAFE boat and joined Randy in the cabin. Both boats came about and headed across the bay toward the breach.

  Big Boy’s wheel trembled beneath Tanner’s hand. The Herman, AKA Big Boy, was a forty-two-foot powerhouse made of thirty-six tons of aluminum that’d been beaten and hardened over twenty years of use. It had a flying bridge, thick tubular guardrails, and two old-school diesel engines pushing 4,000 RPMs each. The vessel sounded like a ferry to Tanner, but when he jumped on it, the old mother could go forty knots. Its command console was replaced two years prior, and its modern lines and current equipment made it look out of place in the old pilothouse. The boat could house four men for a cruise of ten days and was similar in style to the war boats that had gone up the Mekong River in the Vietnam War. The harder you pounded Big Boy’s aluminum hull, the stronger it became. Behind the pilothouse, a short-range tactical Zodiac waited in its cradle. A heavy-duty boom arm sat folded beside it and when deployed, it could launch the boat in minutes. Tanner ordered the smaller craft stocked with ammo in case they needed to get into it fast.

  Tanner was pleased with the modifications to Big Boy, the largest of which was the addition of an old M1919 Browning heavy-duty machine gun Randy had borrowed from the local Army reserve base. It came with a thousand rounds. In addition, two midsized M60 machine guns were mounted atop tripods on the upper deck, and a case of grenades sat open on the forward deck. Next to the grenades was an M9 bazooka with two three-and-a-half-inch shells stacked beside it. Everything was secured under a cargo net. All the improvements were military issue, and thus technically weren’t allowed to be used by civilian police departments, but given the situation, the reservists had made an exception with the proviso that Randy never reveal where he’d gotten the stuff, no matter what happened.

  The fog was already dissipating and lifting when they crossed the center of the bay. Big Boy pushed through the green water at twenty-eight knots, with Randy running alongside him. Tanner was on the bow, surveying the water and sky for any signs of animal life. Normally, flocks of piping plovers, geese, ducks, and seagulls filled the sky, and little shiners jumped from the water, but there were no signs of them. The scent of rot and decay permeated the air. Dead fish lay in thick patches of seaweed, and the bay was quiet and still. Several PD and fire rescue boats searched, but many waited on full readiness standby, waiting to be called in.

  Two SAFE boats with orange pontoon gunnels raced through the breach toward Big Boy. The tide was going out, and bay water ran through the breach like a river, the current pulling anything in its path out into the Atlantic Ocean. Sandbars created by the strong currents loomed on both sides of the Coast Guard vessels, and the SAFE boats were forced to pass single file through the breach.

  Tanner went to the bridge. “Full stop,” he said, and the hum of Big Boy’s engines lessened. They floated toward the breach channel, the tide and wind moving them along at a steady three knots.

  Broken shells covered the sandbar to port, and Tanner sighed when he saw no clam or oyster shells among the mollusk wreckage. The Great South Bay had once been the Mecca of oysters and sea scallops, and Blue Point oysters were still served all over the globe despite the fact that no oysters had been commercially harvested from the bay in over fifty years. Overfishing had killed off the oysters and scallops, and clams were on the way out. When Tanner was a boy, hundreds of boats would venture out onto the bay each day in search of bounty, and that had shrunken to little more than a dozen in recent years.

  “Captain, the coasties are asking to board,” the helmsman announced over the PA.

  Tanner went back to the bridge. “Get Randy over here as well. We’ll meet in the wardroom.”

  Ten minutes later, Jefferson entered the wardroom with her security escort and strode up to Tanner, who regarded her from where he sat at a table with a chart of the bay laid out before him. “Lt. Vernon?” she said to Tanner.

  Tanner sighed. He thought she was going to arrest him for an instant. “Aye, ma’am,” he said.

  Jefferson’s mate stared at the floor and Randy snickered.

  “You have taken over for Lt. Tanner? I was informed by the brass he is no longer on duty.”

  “That’s correct,” Tanner said, playing along with the ruse.

  Jefferson’s security guy had never meet Tanner, and if questioned later, Jefferson could tell her superiors she’d made a mistake, and the locals hadn’t set her straight. It wouldn’t work, but it was better than outright disobedience and it might save her tail if things went to hell.

  “Coffee?” Randy asked.

  “Please.”

  Randy fetched coffee and sat next to Tanner.

  Jefferson took a long sip and closed her eyes, savoring it. “Thank you. You guys do coffe
e way better than we do.”

  “We aim to please,” Tanner said.

  “Quiet out there this morning.”

  “It’s as if every living thing knows a new alpha is in town except us.”

  “Isn’t that always the way with the alphas?” Jefferson said.

  “Guess so.”

  “Can we get to it?” Randy said.

  Tanner shot him a dirty look. “I think we should head out to Bellport. The coastline there is still flooded, and the sea scorpion could penetrate way inland there.”

  “What about Carmen’s River?” Randy asked.

  “Possible, and if we don’t have any luck this morning, I think that’ll be out next stop.”

  “I’ve got two boats and so do you,” Jefferson said. “Should we split up?”

  “I think we should,” Randy told her. “It’s not like we’re talking long distances here. If we need a full force, it would only take a few minutes to make that happen.”

  “So let’s stay together until we get to the mainland,” Jefferson said.

  “Should we get underway while we talk?” Tanner said.

  “Makes sense.”

  Jefferson’s security man, seaman First Class Tito Leppords, left the wardroom to go give the orders from Big Boy’s bridge.

  “Do we wanna chum the water?” Randy asked. “I brought two barrels of the nastiest shit I could get. The crap would wake the dead.”

  “Maybe we should leave a slick through the breach out into the ocean. The thing might follow it out,” Jefferson said.

  “Really?” Tanner said. “It killed one of your men, and two of mine. You’d just let it walk…crawl off?”

  “No,” Jefferson answered. “But let’s hold off on chumming the water until we get inland and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “Agreed.”

  Big Boy shuttered as the engines engaged, and the boat listed for a second as it got underway. The hum of the motors, the sound of rushing water, and the bump and rattle of the stores in the wardroom’s cabinets made talking hard, but there wasn’t much left to say.