“Shit,” Tanner said.
Police cars came screaming up the road, followed by fire trucks and ambulances. It was time to become scarce. If the police saw him, they’d want to question him, and once that began, he’d never be allowed to rejoin the chase.
“Where are you going?” Randy said. “You gonna fight this thing with your bare hands? Tanner the scorpion fighter? Come on, it’s over.”
“Bullshit. It’s not over until that thing is on a hook or I’m in a box,” Tanner said.
“Yeah, I know.”
Tanner stopped and looked at his mates. He didn’t have the answers, and they knew it. They were out of ammo, had no boat, and no way of tracking the beast into the wetlands that surrounded the river. He said, “You guys hang back. I can’t. I’m going to track this thing. Give me your radio.”
Randy sighed but handed over his radio.
“Go back, get a twenty-two, answer their questions, then call me and come find me. I’ll be on our hush-hush channel.”
“But what—?” Jefferson said.
“No buts, and you go too. I’ll be fine. I’ll hang back and track the thing and I won’t do anything until backup arrives. Promise.” Tanner looked at where the creature had disappeared up the street. “We can’t let it get away and hide.”
Tanner turned his back on them and ran into the darkness, following the trail of blue blood.
25
“Hey, wait up!” Jefferson ran beside him and Tanner stopped.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m coming with you, and before you start with all your macho bullshit, let me remind you I’m a Coast Guard officer, not some delicate flower.” She still wore her light blue uniform shirt, but it was stained and ripped in several spots. Somewhere along the line, she’d lost her ribbons and her cover, and her patent leather shoes no longer shined. In the moonlight, he saw mud on her face, and her eyes stood out against her brown skin, which was slick with sweat. Despite all this, she still looked amazing.
“I just thought you’d be more help with the others, that’s all. Don’t give me the equal rights garbage. I was thinking of your safety.”
“And I was thinking of yours,” she said.
Tanner said nothing and resumed trudging through the woods. Thin oaks, scrub pine, and underbrush of pricker bushes and weeds filled the forest, but it didn’t appear to be slowing the sea scorpion, which trundled along, breaking trees and pushing them aside like a snowplow. The blue blood trail was getting thicker and wider.
They walked in silence for several minutes, the sound of cracking trees filling the stillness. The longest day of Tanner’s life was showing no signs of ending, and it had become an effort just to put one foot in front of the other. Jefferson looked a little better off, but not much. She was dragging, and her breathing had become labored.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked. “I never came right out an asked you when we had our beer the other day.”
The question threw him, and he looked at his feet, considering what he should say. He didn’t have a girlfriend, but did he want her to know? He’d always heard women were more interested in men able to commit and will overlook the “stealing your boyfriend” thing if they felt the man worthy of a long-term commitment. This was ridiculous to Tanner. What made people think a cheater would stop cheating?
“OK, that’s a no,” Jefferson said.
“Why do you ask?”
“No reason.” She flashed him a half-smile.
Ahead, the sound of breaking trees had stopped, and Tanner listened hard, the way they’d taught him at the shooting range in boot camp. He filtered out the wind, the pounding of his heart, and the sigh and rustle of leaves.
To Tanner, it sounded like the massive beast was taking labored breaths, wheezing and gurgling in between intakes of air. “It’s hurt,” he said.
“Maybe it will die and save us a lot of trouble.”
“You don’t know me well. If you did, you’d understand there’s no way that’s happening.”
“Why is that?”
“‘Cause I’m the unluckiest bastard alive,” he said.
“Really? Huh, ‘cause I think all the dead people are a bit more unlucky than you. You’ve been attacked by this thing how many times? And you’re still here.”
Tanner said nothing.
The heavy breathing continued, and they inched forward until the beast’s outline became visible in the darkness. It had stopped at the edge of a field of water reeds, their brown broom-like tops swaying in the breeze. The scorpion appeared to be surveying the area, its head rotating back and forth, antennas darting about.
Without warning, the scorpion jerked forward, throwing itself into the reeds, wriggling side to side, burying itself in the black mud that made up the river bottom. The rank smell of rot and shit assailed Tanner, and when the creature stopped working itself into the mud, it couldn’t be seen.
“Now we wait,” Tanner said. He sat and leaned against a tree and was asleep in minutes.
***
The annoying radio call sounded like Tanner’s alarm clock, and it brought him upright. Darkness pressed in around him, and the silence made him uncomfortable. Normally, the crickets, frogs, and other creatures of the night created a symphony so loud it made talking in a normal tone difficult.
The creature hadn’t moved. The mound of mud still sat amidst the flattened water reeds before him. He lowered the volume on the radio and stayed still. The ground trembled for an instant, and the pile of mud lifted a few inches, and then fell still.
“White Whale, you copy?” Randy said.
“Copy.”
“Heading into the mouth of the Anduin. Location? Over.”
“I’m south of the fishing dock just inside the mouth,” Tanner said.
“That’s a 10-4, White Whale. Out.”
Tanner looked at Jefferson and smiled.
“You two play war when you were kids?” Jefferson asked.
“That obvious?”
“I’m a trained professional,” she said. “How long?”
“The Anduin is code for Carmans so not long at all.”
“So you’re Middle Earth boys?”
“There are things he and I instinctively know the other will also know with a hundred percent certainty. We would kill on a game show like that one where they separated couples and asked them questions and then compared the answers.”
“The Newlywed Game,” Jefferson said.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“You’ve seen The Newlywed Game?”
“TV Land, dinosaur,” Jefferson said. She put up a hand. “Listen.”
The sound of outboards gurgling in the stillness brought a smile to Tanner’s face. He pulled free his radio and turned it on. “White Whale calling Solo. Copy,” Tanner whispered into the radio, trying not to disturb the creature.
“Copy, White Whale. How we doing this?” Randy’s voice crackled through light static.
“End dock on the south end. Come in slow and dark. There’s some tall poles sticking above the dock which is still underwater. You’ll see us, but the scorpion is right here, so run silent. Copy?”
“Be there in two. Out.”
“Let’s go. We need to work our way to the end of this small marina. I’ll find the dock and we’ll walk out.”
Jefferson looked south toward the bay, then back to Tanner, but said nothing.
“What is it?” he asked.
“They let Randy come alone?”
To the west, the skyline was lit by helicopter searchlights as they focused on responding to the emergency at Fireplace Neck, but soon some intrepid officer would trace the path of destruction and find their position. The beast had traveled part of the way on the road, but it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to discover where it entered the woods and dug its foxhole.
The sound of outboard motors came closer and they reached the end of the marina. A hundred yards
off, Randy’s SAFE boat was outlined in the darkness.
“I need to risk some light,” Tanner said. “Grab my belt, and stay right on me while I lead us down the dock. Keep an eye on our little friend.” He did his best Al Pacino impersonation on the last part.
“Scarface. Great flick.”
Randy turned on the radio’s emergency flashlight, and a thin beam pierced the night. Two feet below the surface, the dock waited like a slippery unmoving eel. He stepped forward, checking his footing before taking another step. So it was that it took five minutes to go twenty feet, but they avoided falling into the drink and arousing the sea scorpion.
“Damn good to see you, brother,” Tanner said. “You also, Ravac.”
“You two are alone? How’d you pull that off?” Jefferson said.
“We didn’t officially check in,” Randy said. He looked at Tanner, a smile splitting his face, his eyes looking for praise.
“You done good, Randy,” Tanner said. He had. “How long we got?”
“An hour. Maybe two.”
Tanner sighed, but said nothing.
Ravac spoke, addressing Jefferson, his superior officer, as if making a status report. “Ma’am, they’re blocking the channel beneath Smith Point Bridge, and they’ve closed William Floyd Parkway. CNN is running cellphone footage of the scorpion destroying Fireplace Neck. It’s like a kaiju movie teaser. The Army and Marines have deployed teams, and they’ll be here within the hour. The Navy is moving in as we speak.”
Nobody spoke. That was it. Game over.
Tanner said, “What do we have weapon wise?”
“Not much,” Randy said. “9mm shells for the guns. Shotgun loads. Two MK18s. One harpoon, and two grenades.”
Tanner said nothing. They all stared at him. He didn’t think they’d given up, but they definitely didn’t exude confidence.
“You got any food? Water?” Jefferson asked.
“Yeah,” Randy said. He went to a white cooler mounted behind the pilothouse and brought back bottles of water and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in deli wax paper.
“Where’d you get these so fast?” Tanner needed a few minutes to think, and he didn’t want to be asked questions, so he asked some.
“We slipped through the emergency operations tent. It was chaos, so getting supplies wasn’t hard. There were local civilians in there locking and loading.”
“Great,” Tanner said. “The forests around Carmans will be an open season shooting gallery.” It was starting to look like a lost cause. With the big guns coming in, he had to consider the possibility of friendly fire. He and his crew weren’t authorized to be on the river, and military commanders didn’t screw around. For all he knew, they might plan a major offensive using any number of tactical weapons that would leave him and his team fried. He couldn’t let that happen to Randy, or Jefferson. Shoot, even he and Ravac the stoic deserved better than that.
“Perhaps we should quit,” Tanner said. It was gut-wrenching to say the words, but sometimes that’s what leaders had to do. Flee and live to fight another day.
As if a god above had heard his admission of doubt and decided it would not stand, a spotlight shone down from above and the whomp whomp announcing an approaching helicopter broke the stillness.
“Shit, Randy, they must have followed you,” Jefferson said.
“That might not be a bad thing,” Tanner said.
26
Tanner’s entire gambit depended on who was in charge of the approaching team, whether he got a cowboy or a player. A cowboy wanted to get the job done no matter the cost, and a player wanted to be in control no matter the cost, even if it meant losing. If he got the latter, that meant game over for him. If he got a cowboy, someone who would ignore orders to send him back because they needed his local knowledge of the area, then he had a chance.
The helicopter was loud, and the monster stirred, first throwing up its spike and then its claw.
Tanner set his radio to the emergency channel. “Whoever is coming in on the copter, back off. You’re scaring the thing away! Back off!” he yelled into the radio. If they heard, they ignored him, because the spotlight got bigger as the copter descended toward the surface of the river.
The sea scorpion was a hundred yards away and shaking off mud. The beast didn’t seem to notice them, and as it eased into the water, Tanner let out a sigh of relief. Within seconds, the creature had disappeared into Carmans River, and only the outline of its dark black spike was visible in the moonlight.
“Shit, it’s taking off,” Randy said. “Pursue?”
Tanner looked upriver at the scorpion as it swam toward Montauk Highway, then out toward the bay, then up at the whirlybird dropping from the sky. “No. Let’s wait for these guys. It won’t go far. As soon as this copter leaves, it’ll bury itself in the mud again up river.”
“What’s that?” Randy said.
The copter’s spotlight beam was intermittently blocked by something dangling beneath the fuselage. A black rectangle hung in the white light above, and it swung in a wide arc when the copter pulled up and settled, treading air and holding steady. The gale caused by the SH-60 Seahawk flattened water reeds, tore leaves from trees, and stirred the water.
“It’s an NSW,” Jefferson said.
“What?” Randy yelled. The pounding of the rotors and churning winds made talking difficult.
“Naval special warfare insertion,” Ravac said. Tanner and Jefferson inched in close. “The copter is an SH-60 Seahawk. Very good craft. A heavy lifter. Has a top speed of a hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour with a load capacity of five thousand pounds. That’s a Zodiac special ops boat hanging from cables beneath it. Something like Little Boy but better. Much better, I’d guess. These guys are probably SEALS. They’ll have all the newest shit.”
The boat continued its drop from the sky toward the middle of the river.
“Randy, light it up for them,” Tanner said. “Shows we’re here and that we want to help.”
“Wow,” Randy and Jefferson said at the same time.
Randy switched on the SAFE boat’s exterior floodlights and the area was illuminated in a ball of harsh white light. When the incoming boat was ten feet from the surface of the water, a soldier stood up and pulled a quick release and the Zodiac dropped the last ten feet. It landed with a loud smack and started toward them straightaway.
“They rowing?” Tanner said. No outboard rumbled.
The whirlybird’s exterior light went out, and the copter’s engine cycled up as it lifted away. The copter rolled, and before their new friends were within fifty yards, the Sikorsky was nothing but running lights and background noise.
The black Zodiac cut into the beam of their bow light and came straight on. They were under power but Tanner couldn’t tell what was powering the vessel. Dark figures sat along each gunnel, and a man in fatigues and rain slicker stood on the bow, staring into Tanner’s spotlight like he was pissed Tanner hadn’t turned off his high beams when he came around a bend in the road.
As the newcomers got closer, Tanner smiled. Two guns, barrels down, were mounted on the boat’s bow, though he couldn’t tell what type they were. Soldiers in full body armor and helmets with tinted face shields sat at attention on each gunnel, their dark silhouettes casting long shadows across the swaying water reeds.
A faint buzzing sound rolled across the river and as the black Zodiac slowed, the sound lessened. Randy’s SAFE boat rocked as the inflatable bumped into the twenty-two and the man in the green fatigues stepped aboard. He strode across the bow, slide open the pilothouse door, and said, “Who’s in command here?”
Randy looked at Tanner who looked at Jefferson who stared back at Tanner.
The man chuckled and said, “Guess it’s you.” He gestured toward Tanner.
“Lt. Tanner, sir. This is Petty Officer First Class Belinda Jefferson of the Coast Guard and her mate Ravac… Don’t know his last name or rank. Officer in charge is Lt. Randy Vernon there. Who are those
Stormtroopers?”
“They’re my support team,” the man said. “Five of the most skilled special ops soldiers on the planet. They’re face shields allow for night vision.” Silence fell as the man sized them up. “You know where it is?”
Tanner looked at Jefferson, and said, “Yeah. I do.”
“I take it you’re familiar with this area as well?” the man said.
“Who am I talking to?” Tanner asked. “I mean, I called you sir because anyone that can drop out of the sky like that is of higher rank than me, but forgive me if I’m suspicious. It’s been one of those days.”
“I heard,” the man said. “Harry Silva. I work for the federal government and specialize in anomalies, and I think your creature qualifies.”
“You Navy?”
“I’m everything,” Agent Silva said.
“Aren’t we confident,” Jefferson said.
The agent’s gaze flicked to her and when Jefferson stared back defiantly, Silva got in her face. “Are you aware this man Tanner is wanted by his people? That he’s not supposed to be on this case? That he’s been busted down in rank and essentially AWOL?”
“Aye, sir, I’m aware,” Jefferson said. Her chin was out, her eyes stern. “I’m also aware that I’m in command of my people, and I’ll decide the best course of action for them.”
Tanner had more respect for her in that moment than he’d ever had. He felt something for her, he couldn’t deny that, and it was more than just a sense of responsibility and commitment born of their shared experiences. She made him warm in places that had been cold for a long time.
“So I take it we need him?” Agent Silva said.
“That’s about the size of it,” Jefferson said. “And he knows it and handles himself as you might expect a local to.”
Silva chuckled and Tanner grit his teeth and cracked his neck. “Glad you two agree. You do realize you scared the creature off with your diva entrance. I don’t give a shit who you are or where you came from, this is my backyard.”
The Breach Page 13
