Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

  “I’m informed you’ve recovered some victims,” Payne said. He was losing his hair and wore an FBI baseball cap with his jacket and open-collared shirt.

  Lieutenant Dewey nodded toward the stiff forms under the orange slickers. “The last one about half an hour ago.”

  “I’d like to take a look at them.”

  “Sure,” said Dewey.

  A deckhand obligingly turned back the coverings as Payne went from one body to the next, oddly resembling a general reviewing his troops. His expression was set and grim, but became more so when he came to the child.

  Westman followed. He had looked at each of the victims as they’d been hauled aboard the Manteo, but his interest then had been compassionate, not investigatory. Now, in brighter light, he paid closer attention, keeping his observations and conclusions to himself. Payne was not much interested in assistance from the Coast Guard.

  When the FBI agent had finished, he took out a small notebook and jotted down a few lines. Then he closed it with a snap, signaling finality.

  “You don’t want to examine them more closely?” Westman asked.

  “I’ll leave that to forensics. A car got blown off the bridge—a minivan with a family in it. This must be them. We’ll need to make a positive identification.”

  “There could be more than these three.”

  “Not many. And only a dozen injured.” Payne looked up at the bridge, where the damaged flooring gaped like a missing tooth. “We’re lucky. Reminds me of the World Trade Center.”

  “Reminds you of what?”

  “The first time. In 1993. The sons of bitches tried to blow the one tower into the other when both buildings were full of people, top to bottom. Instead, they screwed up—caused a little structural damage but only killed six people. Put their truck bomb in the wrong part of the garage.” He turned toward one of the huge support towers. “If they had done this one right, they might have knocked down the bridge. It’s funny they didn’t try it from the water.”

  “We maintain patrols here,” Dewey said. “They would have been noticed.”

  Payne drew their attention back to the bridge span. “Whatever they had in mind up there, they sure blew it. The truck bomb was placed the wrong way. The force of the explosion went lateral—straight out the side of the truck. It blew the truck and that minivan off the bridge, but most of the blast went into the air.”

  “Terrorism is losing its touch.”

  “You making a joke, Westman?”

  “I’m making an observation, Special Agent Payne.”

  Payne looked to what seemed a junk pile on the forward deck. “What’s that?”

  “Recovered debris,” said Dewey. “We’ve fished out all we could find.”

  Payne went over to it, gingerly retrieving a license plate. “Why didn’t this sink?”

  “It was caught in some flotsam—some floating rubbish.”

  “Maybe it was there in the first place.”

  “There are scorch marks,” said Westman.

  Payne studied the plate more carefully. “It’s a rental plate. Probably from the truck.”

  “Then you have a piece of evidence,” Westman said.

  “Right.” Payne looked to his associate, who stepped forward, producing a large, clear plastic bag. He carefully but efficiently put the plate inside it.

  Payne started toward the ladder.

  “What about the rest of it?” Westman asked.

  The FBI man halted, turning to Dewey. “Can your crew bag those items for us?”

  “We have some kitchen garbage bags in the galley. Will that do?”

  “Sure. You know the procedure, don’t you, Westman?”

  “Something about not contaminating the evidence.”

  “Make sure you don’t.”

  “Very well. What about the bodies?”

  Payne halted again. “Can you take them into shore for us, Lieutenant? We’re going to check out all the other boats who’ve been working out here.”

  “Where do you want them?” Dewey asked.

  “Annapolis. Municipal dock.”

  “I’ll have to transfer them to one of the forty-seven-footers,” Dewey said. “We’re too big for that mooring.”

  “Okay, okay. Thanks.” Payne disappeared over the side. A moment later, the police boat was under way, heading out to the middle of the ship channel.

  Westman went to the dead man lying on the deck. He was missing most of his shirt and his left arm was burned, but the body was otherwise intact. Carefully, Westman started searching him. Rolling the body over, he reached into the man’s left rear pocket, removing a wallet.

  “What’re you doing, Erik?” Dewey asked.

  “Whoever he is,” Westman said, opening the wallet and taking out what looked to be a very new driver’s license, “I doubt very much he is married to this woman. I think he may have been with the truck.”

  The wallet also contained a passport and a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Nothing else.

  “This was no family man,” Westman said.

  “What are you going to do with that stuff?” Dewey asked.

  “Put it back. But I’d like to photograph the driver’s license and passport first. Do you have an evidence camera aboard?”

  “Sure. Regulations.” He sent a seaman to fetch it from his cabin. “Shouldn’t we call Agent Payne back to look at these things?”

  “He didn’t seem very interested.”

  “You’re going to piss him off.”

  “Did that a long time ago.”

  Turko’s comrades, as they considered themselves, liked to rage against Americans, denouncing them as Zionists and infidels and worshippers of Satan who deserved death by any means. But Turko was actually fond of the U.S. and its people, and the life he had been leading here. There was an exuberant rapaciousness in the way Americans went about their business, much as people did back home in Chechnya. Also as in Chechnya, the criminal class was well entrenched at the higher end of society and enjoyed distinct freedoms and privileges. Though they could be obstreperously patriotic if pushed, Americans seemed to value self-indulgent pleasures and the making of money above all other things. Turko thought of them as kindred spirits.

  For the Pakistanis, the attack on the bridge had been part of Jihad. They could not understand Turko’s doing his part solely for the money.

  But there was of course more to it than that. Turko hated the Russians who had killed his wife and brother. In their war on Islamic fundamentalism, the Americans had made common cause with Moscow. The Russians committed atrocities every day in Chechnya. The Americans said nothing. It was altogether logical for him to be fighting them.

  Jozip Pec, the Kosovar who was running this show, understood Turko. Because Turko had undertaken the assignment for money, Pec trusted him to do his job. Turko trusted the Pakistanis to do their jobs because of faith, but faith had failed them.

  The goal of these attacks was not simply to kill Americans but to provoke them, to make them turn the full force of national fury on Islam, and thus cause millions of Moslems to rise up in a massive rebellion as the dervishes had done under the Mahdi more than a century before in the Sudan, as modern-day Moslems had come close to doing several times now. In the face of such an overwhelming uprising, the Russians would be compelled to release their death grip on Chechnya.

  Not that it really mattered to Turko now. His wife was gone. He had nothing waiting for him in Chechnya. He’d been paid well. He hoped to remain in the United States, and be paid again. There was a lot of money behind what was going on.

  His future would be up to Pec, a man motivated by neither faith nor money but a fierce and unyielding hatred—directed at perhaps the entire human race. Pec was no more religious than Turko, but had killed relentlessly in the 1999 Kosovo war simply because his victims were Serbs and Orthodox Christians. He’d lost a brother too, to an American bomb that had gone astray. He’d lost his parents when the Serbs had first come through his village.
When the war turned the other way, he’d sought out the Serbs who had done the killing. But when he tried to shoot them, the Americans arrested him and locked him up. This was called peacekeeping. Pec had fled to Albania the moment he had a chance to escape.

  Turko did not trust Pec.

  The television news reports Turko watched were calling the bridge bombing a major terrorist attack. The authorities were certainly taking it seriously. Both spans of the Bay Bridge had been sealed off. The nation had gone on “red alert”—the highest threat level. Police checkpoints were in place at key points everywhere and the Air Force had doubled the combat air patrols over America’s major cities. The vice president had been flown to “an undisclosed location” and cordons had been put around the Capitol and the White House. Politicians were talking war once again.

  But they weren’t yet fighting one. There’d been no waves of cruise missiles or air strikes against yet another foreign nation. An investigation had been launched. The results were awaited.

  Pec would not be satisfied with that. He wanted the United States raging mad again, lunging about the planet.

  There was the sound of tires on gravel. Turko leaned forward slightly to look out the window, fearful that it might be a police vehicle. Instead, he saw a pickup truck with three men in the front, talking excitedly.

  They continued talking as they entered the house, coming through the door without noticing Turko—the result he had hoped for in positioning his chair. He waited until the third man was inside and had closed the door behind him. He then shot that man first, firing at the next two in order. It took three shots to fell the man closest to him, who died at his feet.

  The house was wooden, had a gas stove, and burned easily. Flames were visible in his rearview mirror as Turko drove out of the trees into the road. He’d set up a safe house for himself over in Ocean City that no one knew about. He was not ready to talk to Jozip Pec yet.

  Chapter 6

  Clothed now in an old, faded polo shirt emblazoned on the chest with a Naval aviator’s insignia, a pair of khaki shorts, and some beat-up L.L. Bean boat shoes, Cat McGrath walked to the wharf on the river where Burt Schilling moored his big head boat, the Roberta June. It was a little past seven-thirty A.M. Amy Costa was aboard, on the big aft deck, cutting pieces of squid as bait and putting them into plastic cups for the customers. Joe Whalleys, the other deckhand, was on the wharf, preparing the fishing rods for the day trip.

  Amy was small, dark, and a bundle of muscles, her skin so deeply brown from sun it seemed a permanent stain. A local girl from the Delaware farm country just to the west, she was very bright, but woefully uneducated. Cat had felt a kind of angry sympathy for her from the start. She deserved better than a life of bean fields and chopping bait, but nothing much else seemed in prospect—especially if she ended up marrying someone like Joe Whalleys.

  He was a very good-looking boy. Dressed up, with his wild hair combed and presentable, he could pass for an Ivy League college student. But he was dumb as a brick and had no ambition. One could imagine him as old and grizzled as Burt Schilling, still working head boats—on them, not owning them.

  “Where’s Burt?” said Cat, making a little jump of the step off the gangplank onto the Roberta June.

  “Said he’d be late,” said Amy, with a quick look up that did not halt her slicing of squid. “You coming out with us?”

  “Thought I would. If you’re going out.”

  “Why wouldn’t we?”

  “Didn’t you hear about the Bay Bridge? Somebody tried to blow it up last night.”

  Amy simply stared.

  “They didn’t succeed, but the government’s closing things down,” Cat said. “Maybe even this river. I’m not sure any tourists are going to show up.”

  “Maybe that’s just as well,” Amy said, “if Burt’s having another one of his ‘late’ days. But I hope not. I need the day’s work.”

  Cat gave her a quick and, she hoped, reassuring smile. “Maybe someone will turn up.”

  It looked to be a good weather day. There was an abundance of sunshine among the piles of cumulus clouds. The breeze was enough to cool their passengers in the summer heat, but hadn’t kicked up much chop out on the bay.

  There were only three customers on the dock by eight and Burt still had not appeared. He needed to do better than this. He’d only just paid off the boat, which he’d had for sixteen years. The Roberta June was shabbier than the tourist boats moored farther upriver by the Savannah Avenue bridge. Unlike them, she’d been built as a commercial fishing boat—a trawler—with a wide aft deck. Burt had removed most of the gear, installing an awning and some stadium seats he’d bolted to the deck flooring along each side, but she still looked like a vessel of labor, not fun.

  Cat climbed the ladder to the flying bridge Burt had constructed above the wheelhouse, noting unhappily the grimy bait bucket and soiled rags left in a corner. She opened a small storage locker, fearing she’d find a bottle of whiskey or vodka. Happily, there were only charts. After so many years at this, Burt needed no underwater maps. He doubtless knew every reef and shoal by name. But Cat had no such intimate familiarity, and would need a chart’s guidance as long as she had the helm.

  She pulled out the plastic-coated section for south Delaware Bay and its inlets, flattening it down over the control console.

  The course to the fishing grounds was simple enough. She’d follow the river northwest from the wharf out to where it entered the sea through the cut at Roosevelt Inlet. After that, a heading toward the buoy at Starsite Reef and then around Cape Henlopen into the ocean fishing grounds, unless Burt wanted to go first to an underwater valley called Deepkill and the adjoining shoal that bore the same name.

  Which, for the last few months, he always did.

  Delaware Bay had some depth to it—seventy-four feet in the main channel between Cape May and Cape Henlopen and 150 feet or more in its wider reaches. But there were shoals and reefs scattered all across the bay and out into the ocean beyond.

  In Cat’s time here, the Deepkill shoal had never proved much of a fishing ground, but Burt usually made straight for it, working the territory over in zigzag fashion before going on to richer beds worked by the other boats. It was a ritual.

  Schilling appeared a few minutes after eight. She could tell he’d continued with his drinking, but not enough yet to spook the customers, who numbered seven by the time Amy was ready with the bowline.

  He came up the ladder slowly, nodded to Cat, then settled himself onto the chair mounted on the other side of the bridge.

  “I sure appreciate your comin’ along, Cat. Really not myself today.”

  “I can’t fly. The federal government shut down all the general-aviation fields on the Eastern Shore. Might as well help you out. You’re lucky to have any customers at all.”

  She started the engines, then shouted to Whalleys to cast off the aft line. When he’d done so, she spun the wheel to port and eased the throttle into reverse, causing the big stern to swing out into the channel. Holding the Roberta June there a moment, she waited as the brightly white head boat Kenna Dale burbled by, then called to Amy to release the bowline. The girl, as always, was ahead of her. As Cat throttled forward, the bow came about smartly and the Roberta June headed downriver in train with the Kenna Dale.

  “You sure you want me to do this?” she said to Burt.

  “Shit, Cat. I’d trust you with an aircraft carrier.”

  Cat knew boats as well as airplanes. Both her uncle and father had been sailing men as well as pilots and she’d been crew for one or the other from the time she was eight. The Lewes river was tricky, but she’d always managed it. Her qualms arose from something else.

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You ought to have Amy up here. She could run this boat in her sleep.”

  He shook his head, not looking at her. “She’s too small. Looks too young. Might spook the customers.”

  As Cat steered the Roberta June down the mi
ddle of the river, Burt took up the loudspeaker mike, pulling himself together sufficiently to welcome and instruct the passengers, and sounding very much like the airline pilot he’d been after his truncated Air Force career.

  Done, he put down the microphone and slumped back, looking drained.

  “How many more of these trips are you good for, Burt?”

  She meant it as a joke, but his reply was quite serious.

  “Not many, Cat. Hardly enough to count.”

  There was a yellow look to his cheeks. His eyes were caves.

  “Are you okay?”

  He lighted a cigarette. “Sure. Just got a few things on my mind.”

  Cat moved the helm to starboard a little. The excursion boat Lewes Princess was coming upstream.

  “You know, I may not be around to help you anymore,” she said.

  “Every man’s luck runs out. I’ve been lucky to have a year of you.”

  “Burt, I’ve got a shot at a job.”

  “Back with the government?”

  “No. Airline.”

  “Pilot?”

  “Right seat, not left. Twin-engine turboprop. Little feeder commuter line for one of the trunk carriers.”

  “Where?”

  “Iowa. I guess there are a few flights into Illinois and Wisconsin.”

  “Not exactly your speed.” His eyes were on the approaching excursion boat.

  “It’s a job. I need one.”

  “Girl’s gotta eat, don’t she?”

  “Girl’s gotta get on with her life.”

  “Give up on the Navy?”

  “No, but …” She shrugged.

  “I’ll miss you big-time, honey.”

  He looked extremely old. As she studied him, he began coughing, and she turned away. With the Lewes Princess finally past them, Cat edged back into the middle of the channel and increased their speed slightly.

  There was a small Coast Guard patrol boat standing off Roosevelt Inlet in Delaware Bay. The boat had its machine gun mounted and the crew looked vigilant, but they let the Roberta June pass unmolested.