Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

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  Deepkill

  Michael Kilian

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  For my father, Frederick Kilian,

  U.S. Coast Guard, World War II; and

  for Col. Chris Branch (U.S.A.F.)

  and Lt. Kara Hultgreen (U.S.N.),

  among the heroes at Arlington

  Chapter 1

  It was a half hour past the agreed-upon time and yet the bomb had not been detonated.

  The parades of headlights and taillights moving over the great Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the summer twilight continued unabated—the traffic bound for the Eastern Shore and the Atlantic beaches as heavy as the westbound flow heading home for Washington and Baltimore and the workweek to come.

  Somewhere in that westbound ribbon of red—if actuality was conforming to plan—was the White House Homeland Security adviser, riding with his wife in a government car driven by an Executive Protection Service officer and accompanied by an escort vehicle containing two other protectors.

  Gabor Turko wondered why this target had been selected. The American Secretaries of Defense and State were much more desirable victims. But, inconveniently, neither of those more prominent officials had weekend beach houses on the Delaware shore. They were also nearly as well protected as the President and the Vice President. The Pakistanis in Turko’s crew were not up to a challenge that formidable.

  Jozip Pec, Turko’s boss in this enterprise, had decided on the Homeland Security aide as the most acceptable alternate choice and the easiest to bring down. A man of habits, the adviser left his oceanfront house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, around seven P.M. on Sunday evenings, returning to his suburban Chevy Chase, Maryland, home about three hours later.

  Passing over the Bay Bridge at about nine-fifteen.

  The bridge was the major component of the plan. Its destruction would spread fear and confusion throughout the country like a virulent disease. Who would willingly drive across the Golden Gate or the George Washington Bridge or through the Holland Tunnel if this mighty span was dropped in the water? New York would strangle this time. It might even die.

  Turko had arrived early at the waterfront restaurant so that he might assure himself of a table on its outside deck. The establishment was situated on the western shore of Kent Island, just at the eastern end of the great bridge. The spectacular water view provided an excuse to be sitting there, but not forever. He’d been there for nearly an hour and a half, his meal long finished.

  It was fully dark now. Turko was lingering over his third cup of coffee. The overweight waitress had put down his check and had come near twice, looking at him pointedly. Turko guessed she was about to go off duty and was irritated by his keeping her this long.

  He laid a credit card down. It had been issued to him as Anthony Bertolucci. Turko was dark, and counted on being taken for Italian. He assumed that the waitress would pay more attention to the credit card and the generous tip he would leave than she would to his face and appearance.

  He wore the kind of clothes favored by the other customers—khaki trousers, a short-sleeved knit shirt, running shoes. He’d worn sunglasses into the place, but had taken them off when the light had left the sky.

  He could not remain there much longer.

  Once again, he carefully removed his slim cell phone from his pocket and made certain it was still on and that there were no messages. The lack of word bothered him almost as much as the lack of an explosion.

  They had worked on this operation for several months and had rehearsed it a half-dozen times, using Turko’s rental Ford as the target vehicle for the drill. It had gone as planned every time in these exercises.

  It was a simple plan, employing a chase car that was to fall in behind the Homeland Security adviser’s as it turned from Highway 404 onto Highway 50. The slow-moving truck and the blocking car would then move onto the Bay Bridge just ahead of the target vehicle. When they reached the towers of the high suspension portion of the span, the final phase of the operation would be executed.

  Turko trusted the men in his attack group, but only because he had been told he must. Their cell had been organized and trained by someone else and he had never met any of the men before picking them up at the assigned collection point in Oxon Hill, Maryland, a few weeks before. He had to assume they would carry out his instructions. He had made it very clear they were to notify him by cell phone the instant anything went awry.

  There was another of his instructions he’d been counting on them to obey—though his confidence in their doing so may have been misplaced. In executing the climax of the plan, they were to blow up themselves along with the truck. It was not too much to ask of men of faith. Others had done it with enthusiasm, and to great effect. Many Chechen women had given their lives this way in the war against Mother Russia. These Pakistanis had all sworn to commit this selfless act. It was the one great advantage of their enterprise.

  But it was nothing Turko wished to do himself. He worried that they might not be much different than he.

  Mary Ann Ryan was driving well over the speed limit. She had her two youngest children in the backseat and her oldest beside her, but her need for haste was compelling. She had promised her husband she would be back from the beach by ten. It was nearly that, and she was still an hour from home. He was always angry when she was late.

  She was tired, a little sunburned, and had her own job to go to early in the morning. Her children were crabby and the two in back were punching each other with increasing frequency, while the one beside her continued to make annoying noises. She had shouted at them, effectively at first, but no longer. Were the traffic not moving along so well, she would have pulled off the highway on Kent Island and administered a couple of roadside spankings.

  Instead she endured, willing the miles ahead to vanish. There had been construction blocking one or more of the three lanes on the westbound span of the bridge for more than a year, but they’d finally finished the project. Despite the Sunday night volume, she was able to maintain fifty to sixty miles an hour, even in the center lane.

  Her youngest began kicking the back of her seat. She reached behind it to grab his ankle, but missed and was struck in her elbow by the heel of his shoe, the numbing pain running all the way down the bone of her arm. She shouted again, and swore—as she almost never did in front of the children.

  “Stop it! All of you stop it! Or we’ll never go to the beach again!”

  That silenced them—for about a minute. Her middle child, in the right rear seat, began calling the youngest names. The punching resumed.

  Mary Ann rubbed her still-stinging elbow, holding the steering wheel loosely. The cars ahead were slowing. There was a rental truck in the right-hand lane, moving slowly, compelling the vehicles behind it to pull out in front of her to get around it. Then a car from the lane to the left moved into hers and slowed down abruptly. She tried to switch to the fast lane herself, but there were other cars coming up swiftly on the left.

  Hitting the brakes, she waited for them to pass. Two other vehicles were coming up behind her on the right—a dark sedan and then a large SUV with high bright lights. The car in front of her was slowing still more, as was the truck. Seeing a break to her left, Mary Ann jerked the wheel and hit the accelerator, sliding into place.

  There was steel g
rating in the pavement here, causing the tires to slip from side to side and make an irritating whining noise. She gripped the wheel tightly with both hands, but then her youngest let fly another kick against the back of her seat. She tried to whack him, taking her right hand and her attention from the wheel. Her left front tire struck something and, before she could do anything about it, her car skidded sideways into the bridge railing, bouncing off it like the bumper cars at Funland on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk. She tried desperately to correct, but so violently that the skid only increased. Spinning sideways, she was struck by the front end of the car behind her.

  That auto and the following SUV then collided and careened off to the right, jammed together against the bridge. The driver of the truck in the right-hand lane now hit his brakes. She saw the red taillights get larger and larger. She stood on her own brakes, but it was too late. Her car crunched into the left rear corner of the truck.

  The air bag in her steering-wheel column explosively inflated. She felt as though she’d been head-tackled by some huge football player. As it collapsed, she saw that the bag beside her had inflated as well, enveloping her oldest child. The two kids in the back were screaming.

  A man got out of the driver’s side of the truck. Another man joined him, and then a third. She thought they were rushing to help her, but they hurried past her car and kept on running.

  The explosion came just as Turko was signing the credit card slip, causing his hand to jump. He looked up to see a flare of orange that illuminated the four towers of the two bridge spans, but it was much smaller than it should have been. He rose, the scraping of his chair suddenly the only sound in the restaurant. The other diners had all fallen silent, and were staring gape-mouthed toward the bridge.

  Turko went to the railing. All of the traffic on both spans had stopped. Horns were honking, pointlessly. Boats out on the water stopped. Somewhere in the night, a tug whistle sounded.

  He waited. The orange light flared again and then rapidly began to diminish. According to the plan, the towers by now should have been beginning to crumple, the bridge twisting and falling into the darkness of the bay, spewing hundreds of headlights and taillights into the night and the water below.

  But there was only the rapidly vanishing orange light. Nothing more. And then it was gone.

  Turko quickly took his copy of the credit card bill and, easing his way through the crowd that was gathering on the deck, went first to the men’s room and then out to his car, keeping his pace slow.

  He’d go no farther along Highway 50 than the nearest bar. He needed to watch the television reports. That was a wonderful thing about America. Everything was on television.

  Chapter 2

  Lieutenant Timothy Dewey was nearing the end of his tour as the skipper of the 110-foot Island Class cutter Manteo, having happily been reassigned to the larger, Puerto Rico-based U.S. Coast Guard cutter Sentinel. The Sentinel’s captain was retiring at the end of the year and Dewey had been told he would likely be replacing him.

  He would be assuming a considerable responsibility. The Sentinel was one of the big new blue-water cutters taking part in the ongoing “Operation New Frontier,” the Coast Guard’s weapon against the drug smugglers who for years had been operating with near-impunity on the high seas because of their high-speed, fifty-eight-knots-an-hour go-fast boats.

  The Sentinel carried one of the new MH-68A attack helicopters, capable of two hundred miles an hour and armed with an MK-40 machine gun and a special .50-caliber sniper rifle that could blow apart a boat engine with a single shot. On the same aft deck, the Sentinel also carried a twenty-six-foot, thirty-knot-an-hour, high-speed interdiction inflatable intended to put boarding parties aboard suspect vessels fast. And the mother ship was amply armed with cannon and machine guns as well.

  There were New Frontier “packages” working both Atlantic and Pacific waters, and they were enjoying an extraordinary success rate. Before their advent, the Coast Guard had been able to apprehend only about ten percent of the drug-smuggling craft it located. With the cutter-helicopter-interdiction boat package, the apprehension rate had gone up to ninety percent.

  The reassignment would mean long patrols in the Caribbean and time away from Sally, his bride of six months. But at twenty-nine, Dewey was not about to decline an opportunity for action. He’d done a couple of tours as a junior officer on icebreakers in the Great Lakes, a stint at the Coast Guard’s national headquarters in Washington as an operations officer, and a year in his present job, performing mostly search-and-rescue operations out of Cape May, New Jersey. If he was ever going to make admiral, as his Naval officer father had done, he needed to mix it up with the bad guys sometime in his career. The Caribbean was awash with bad guys.

  In the meantime, the Manteo was all his. For the last month, his boat had been doing port security duty at Baltimore Harbor, and was now relieved of that mission to go back on station at Cape May, New Jersey.

  He was at that hour heading for the upper reaches of Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal that cut across the narrows of the Delmarva Peninsula and connected Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. The Manteo’s base at the Cape May Coast Guard station was directly across the mouth of Delaware Bay from Cape Henlopen and the Delaware town of Lewes. Every ship headed for Philadelphia and the other upriver ports passed through Dewey’s jurisdiction. He was their guardian, and these were nervous times.

  He and Sally had a rented apartment in an old Victorian Cape May house a block off the beach. The Manteo would be tying up there by noon the next day. He was counting the hours.

  “Port twenty degrees, Bill,” Dewey said to the bos’n’s mate as he peered down at the computerized chart on the video screen of the bridge console. They had cleared Baltimore’s outer harbor and were rounding Sparrows Point.

  “Port twenty degrees it is,” said the bos’n’s mate, a red-haired, ruddy-faced man named McKeon.

  Someone had once asked Dewey if one said “Aye, aye” or “Yés, sir” in the Coast Guard. Dewey was viewed as a straight-arrow, by-the-book officer, but he’d replied, “Either—and often neither.”

  On the Manteo, at least when there were no high-ranking superior officers aboard, the rule was “neither.”

  The lights of Fort Howard were visible on the port side of the Manteo and those of Bayside Beach on the starboard. Dead ahead, the Eastern Shore was a dark, distant band separating the dark, blue-gray sky and the silvery, moonlit waters of the Chesapeake.

  Dewey moved to the starboard side of the bridge, standing at one of the windows. There were two large coal ships steaming in toward Baltimore, almost side by side. They’d be dropping anchor soon, to wait for a harbor berth. It could be a long wait, as the dockside moorings were full and they’d not be allowed in the Baltimore harbor until there was clearance. South, down the bay, were the lights of a large vessel identified on the radar as a tanker.

  Chief Petty Officer Hugo DeGroot, the quartermaster on the Manteo, came up the companionway. He was officer of the deck the next watch, but had arrived early.

  The bos’n’s mate at the helm acknowledged him first; then Dewey gave him a nod. DeGroot had twenty years on the lieutenant, and the relationship was more one of father and son than superior and subordinate. The Coast Guard was not much of a stickler for formality, at all events.

  “Got a bay full of boats, I see,” said DeGroot.

  “I was just thinking how long it would take to search ’em all,” Dewey said. “If we ever go back to doing that.”

  “It would take all damn week.”

  DeGroot went to the computer console and punched up a magnified view of the chart. They’d be passing by Pooles Island, which was part of the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground. There was little to stop intruders from making landfall there—except that sooner or later they’d run into a lot of Army.

  The computer displayed a continuous projection of the Manteo’s position on the electronic chart. After they had passed the Sparrows Point
shoals, Dewey called out a new course, resulting in a tighter turn to port. The three vertical white lights of a safe-water channel marker appeared directly off the bow.

  “It’s all yours, Chief,” Dewey said. “But I think I’ll hang out here a while.”

  DeGroot grunted. The crew called him “the Dutchman,” and sometimes “the Flying Dutchman” when he had the Manteo up to full speed. Dewey was “the Admiral,” not because of his father or his ambitions, but after the Spanish-American War Naval hero, to whom he was distantly related. Dewey hoped that sometime in his career he’d be assigned a WEPS officer named Gridley.

  Two of the bridge windows had been partially opened to admit the summer night air. Hearing a thud of thunder to the south, Dewey looked up, surprised. The sky was clear. There was still moonlight. He clicked on the weather radar. There was no precipitation for a hundred miles, and not much out there.

  He went outside onto the small bridge deck. The southern horizon was clear of cloud. But there was a strange orange light off the stern quarter.

  The radio began crackling with alarm. Annapolis was reporting a major accident on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. DeGroot had already called for a 180-degree turn by the time orders came for them to proceed down to Kent Island and stand by to assist.

  Dewey returned to the helm. The strange orange light was soon dead ahead. The turn completed, he ordered full speed.

  “That’s not an automobile accident, Hugo,” he said.

  “Maybe somebody hit a tanker truck.”

  “Maybe. But I wonder.” Dewey watched the light flare and then diminish. Then he went to the intercom and summoned all hands to their duty stations.

  His No. 2, Lieutenant J.G. Bob Kelleter, was on the bridge within a minute, coffee cup in hand.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Big trouble on the Bay Bridge,” said Dewey.

  “Station Annapolis patrols that area,” DeGroot said. “They’re supposed to check out the bridge base.”