Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

  Chapter 11

  Turko was still alive. He didn’t understand why. He supposed it was not going to be for long. Pec would be trying to arrange the most unpleasant death for him he could. The Kosovar knew of many from his years of murdering Serbs.

  They had put him in the trunk of a car, with Sandor’s body for company. His hands and ankles were tightly bound and they’d put duct tape over his mouth. He could breathe well enough, and almost wished he couldn’t. He’d shot Sandor in the belly and the bullet had torn open much of his digestive tract.

  There had been three of them, including Sandor. He could hear the other two talking up in the front seat. Both were ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, like Pec, and Turko didn’t understand the language, but it struck him they were just chatting—about sports or women. They might have been furniture movers.

  They had efficiently cleaned out Turko’s Ocean City apartment in about five minutes—removing groceries along with Sandor, but performing only a minimal cleaning up. He had no idea what had happened to the fat blond woman across the alley. It would be a terrible mistake to leave her where she fell. The Ocean City police might not have had a lot of experience with homicides, but the FBI was out on the Eastern Shore in force. Any violent death in the area was going to be thoroughly investigated by the best the Americans had.

  Wherever they were taking him, it was taking a long time. To occupy his mind, and distract him from the unpleasantness of his deceased companion, Turko tried to calculate their eventual destination.

  It was certain they’d left Ocean City by the causeway and bridge to the mainland. There’d been a long rumble across the span. Not too far beyond, they’d made a right turn onto a major highway used by heavy trucks. Traffic moved fairly fast, but there were many stoplights. Turko guessed it was Highway 113, and was sure they were traveling north. He had no useful idea of the passage of time, though they were consuming a lot of it. But when their speed picked up, and the interruptions from traffic lights ceased, he figured they had moved onto Delaware’s only limited-access north-south road—Highway 1. The possible destinations were many: Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Atlantic City—or some farmer’s field in New Jersey where his body would not be readily discovered.

  He tried thinking about something else. His wife’s face. His wife’s voice. The touch of her hand on the back of his neck.

  He’d been promised Paradise, where the clerics said she’d be waiting. This required of him only a martyr’s death. He wasn’t sure if being tortured and executed by a wrathful Pec qualified.

  The car stopped. Turko frantically tried to produce one last desperate idea that might effect his escape. The trunk lid was opened quickly and he was pulled halfway out, head down. As he attempted to see where he was, one of the men hit him with something heavy. The other then pulled a bag down over his head and he was lifted completely out and set tottering on his feet.

  Fighting to stay conscious, he stumbled along as they dragged and pulled him up a flight of wooden stairs and across a porch, then through a doorway. The door that was slammed behind him made a sound that indicated it had a glass window in it. Then he was held up against a large metal object he quickly realized from the motor vibrations was a refrigerator. He was in a kitchen—on a second floor. Houses had kitchens on the first floor. This was an apartment. The wooden stairs and porch would belong to an old building, probably in a run-down neighborhood, judging from the smell. They must have parked in the alley.

  One man held him against the refrigerator. He could hear the other one moving away—walking on a wooden floor. There was an exchange of words in the Albanian language Turko didn’t understand. Then a sharp command. He was yanked away from the refrigerator, pushed along a hallway, then made to turn into a room, whereupon he was kicked from behind and sent sprawling on the floor. He swore—in Chechen, in Russian, and in English. One of his escorts then rolled him over on his back and yanked off the hood. Blinking, Turko found himself staring up at Pec, who sat in an armchair not six feet from him, holding a gun.

  Westman had called ahead to the Lewes-Cape May ferry, discovering that it was still not operating. This meant he’d have to take the long way around, driving up to Wilmington and taking Interstate 95 over the Delaware Memorial Bridge to New Jersey, then heading south to Cape May.

  Tim Dewey was expecting him. The Manteo was on 24/7 duty, but was authorized to return to the Coast Guard station at Cape May as necessary. This included refueling and dinner breaks.

  Westman drove fast. When he finally reached the Coast Guard station at Cape May, he stowed his gear aboard the cutter, then joined Dewey for the walk to his apartment. To his amazement, Sally Dewey had a piping hot dinner waiting for them.

  “It’s just macaroni and cheese,” she said. “Had it warming in the oven.”

  She was a sweet-faced and trimly athletic young woman who worked when she could as a substitute teacher, though Dewey’s postings often prevented it. She accepted this, as she did his absences. It bothered Dewey that she didn’t have more of a life for herself, and he tried to compensate her whenever possible. Westman liked them both. He envied them their marriage.

  As they ate, Erik related the details of the investigation so far, leaving out nothing, knowing he could count on Sally’s discretion absolutely. Dewey took a last bite of dinner, then leaned back in his chair.

  “A cutter on port security patrols makes kind of a poor base for someone working a homicide investigation,” he said.

  “This is more than a homicide investigation.”

  “Exactly. You need a lot more resources than you’ll have sitting on the Manteo. And I’m under separate orders.”

  “What I need is a place to work from that’s total Coast Guard and where no one’s going to interfere with me.”

  “Sounds like your office over in Alexandria.”

  “I think this bastard is still on the Eastern Shore, Tim. Don’t worry, if we have to be in different places, I’ll jump ship and get out of the way. But if we get a break on this, I’d like knowing I can call on you for backup.”

  “That’s standard operational procedure.” He grinned, then stood up. “Got to get back to the ship. You want to sleep aboard or in some Cape May bed-and-breakfast?”

  “You’ll be monitoring all the emergency and police channels?”

  “Operational procedure from the git-go.”

  “I’ll sleep aboard.”

  Sally produced a thermos full of coffee and a bag of brownies. “See you both for breakfast,” she said, proceeding to give her husband the kind of kiss and hug usually reserved for much longer voyages.

  Erik had gone too many years without that kind of life. Someday he’d have to do something about that.

  But not this day.

  “You killed Sandor before he could speak,” said Pec. “You did not let him speak.” He rested his gun hand on his knee, almost casually pointing it at Turko’s midsection, preparing to shoot him where he had shot Sandor. The Kosovar was a small man of striking countenance, with sharp, dark, narrow features, cold blue eyes, and very short hair. His problem was that he looked like exactly what he was. He had none of the chameleon qualities that Turko and some of the others had mastered.

  “I thought he had come to kill me.” Turko was still lying on his back, his arms bent painfully beneath him.

  “If he had come to do that, it would have been on my orders, which means you would have died. For Allah.”

  Turko said nothing. He had not thought of Pec being particularly religious. The two other men in the room had taken seats. He still had no plan, no hope to grasp for. All that kept him alive was the tension of the trigger of Pec’s automatic. A slight contraction of Pec’s index finger and Turko’s world would vanish.

  “Why did you kill your three Pakistanis?” Pec asked, almost idly, as though asking the time. His gun hand relaxed, the barrel dropping slightly.

  “Because they were incompetent, cowardly, and might have revealed things to t
he Americans.”

  “Exactly,” said Pec, smiling. The expression looked odd on him.

  “Exactly?”

  “Exactly why I sent Sandor to kill you.”

  “You should have sent someone else.”

  “Yes. You’re better than he was. Not smarter, but quicker. Unfortunately, I had no one else. Our resources here are not unlimited. Which is why I am going to allow you to live.”

  “You are?”

  “You saved your life twice by shooting Sandor. Once then. And now. I need you to replace him.” He nodded to one of the others. In a moment, Turko’s bonds were removed, and he was allowed to sit up. He made no further move.

  “How replace him?”

  “We are going to do another operation. Yours was a cockup. We will try again. Sandor was to do it. Now you will.”

  “But there are police and federal agents everywhere.”

  “Soldiers too. All getting in each other’s way. We have picked a good place. Near, but not where they expect.”

  “Another bridge?”

  “No.”

  Turko rubbed his wrists. The skin was raw in many places. He waited, looking away from Pec. This displeased the Kosovar.

  “Face me,” said the Kosovar. Turko quickly did so. The two men, never friendly, stared at each other. Finally, Pec spoke again. “The Americans will be worried about Washington. That’s where their attention will stay focused. We will strike nearby, but in the other direction. Just across the Delaware River.”

  Turko wasn’t certain of his location. “Are we in Wilmington, Delaware?” he asked.

  “Maybe you are smarter than Sandor,” he said. “Yes. We are. And to do what you must do, you must cross the Delaware River.”

  “To New Jersey?”

  Pec nodded.

  “What’s there?”

  “Something to make me very happy. If you can blow it up.”

  Chapter 12

  Erik awoke the next morning to a message broadcast over the intercom he had not heard in years.

  “Mr. Westman. Lay to on the quarterdeck.”

  He’d brought only civilian clothes. Pulling on shorts, knit shirt, and boat shoes, he hurried up the stairs to the bridge. Master Chief DeGroot was at the con, and Skipper Dewey was at the chart table. The main computer screen was showing a chart of the Delaware coast extending down to Maryland and Ocean City.

  “We’ve got an ops order,” said Dewey. “I thought it might interest you.”

  “Everything interests me now,” Westman said.

  Dewey drew him closer to the electronic chart. “Some bodies have washed up,” he said. His finger moved down the Delaware shoreline from Henlopen to a long stretch of Delaware State Seashore near Bethany Beach. “One’s here. A young woman.” His finger moved slightly down the shoreline. “Two others here. Young men. They look to be American.”

  “Not terrorists?”

  “Not the guy you’re after, for sure. Not Middle Eastern. Probably drowning victims. We had a pretty bad storm kick up off the capes couple days ago.”

  “Can’t the Indian River station handle this?”

  “They’re on the scene in a forty-seven. They alerted us in because of the terrorist watch—dead bodies being suspicious activity.”

  “Anyone else on it?”

  “A salvage tug out of Wilmington hauled in a motor-sailor yesterday. It had been adrift. Maybe these people were off it.”

  “I’ll be happy to join you for a look-see, but it doesn’t sound like it’s linked to the bridge incident.”

  “You never know until you know.” Dewey turned to the con. “Mr. DeGroot, let’s get under way.”

  The master chief gave a command to the helmsman, then stepped out on the bridge wing and began giving orders to the deck crew. Within three minutes, the lines were slipped and the Manteo was heading out into the Cape May Channel.

  Erik kept out of the way. There was a danger area in the shoal waters directly off the mouth of the channel. Once into the bay, DeGroot called a course of south-southeast.

  Standing off to avoid an incoming Lewes ferry, the Manteo then increased speed, shifting course to due south to clear Prissy Wicks Shoal and then angling southwest with a bearing on the Cape Henlopen Light, the cutter’s wide bow spreading the deep blue water aside with ease. Gulls swept in to follow, perhaps taking them for a fishing boat.

  “Kill” was the old Dutch word for stream or channel, and some of the deep underwater ravines that cut between the Delaware Bay and Atlantic shoals still bore the name in a number of variations. Broadkill was just up the coast from Lewes, Deepkill to the south of Cape Henlopen. Erik’s favorite was a tidal river up Delaware Bay actually called Murderkill. It was not far from the bayside Slaughter Beach.

  Coffee was brought up and they stood drinking it. Westman noticed that the cover had been removed from the twenty-five-millimeter deck gun.

  “Cleared for action?”

  “Orders. They’ve issued me an extra machine gun too—and another one of those engine-killing .50-caliber sniper rifles.”

  Westman had his nine-millimeter automatic in his duffel. He noted that Dewey and DeGroot had theirs in holsters. “Any news this morning?”

  “CNN is on down in the galley, if you want to watch it,” Dewey said. “Nothing new beyond what you told me last night, except there’s something about sources in the Justice Department saying they’ve now accounted for the entire gang. All four of ’em.”

  “How can they possibly know that’s all? Did they ask the four dead guys? And did they kill each other? Or do you suppose there might possibly be a fifth guy out there who had something to do with it? Maybe even a sixth.”

  “I guess the Justice Department wants to put this down as a success. The bridge is intact. No important U.S. official among the victims. The perpetrators all killed. Plot foiled.”

  Westman smiled. “If that’s the official line, how come we’re not standing down?”

  “Admiral’s orders. We’re not part of the Justice Department.”

  “We are blessed.”

  As they passed Cape Henlopen, the helmsman altered course, bearing off to starboard to move around a large fishing boat anchored dead ahead.

  “That boat was here yesterday,” DeGroot said.

  “I remember,” Dewey said. “Let’s pass a little nearer.”

  DeGroot gave the order and the bos’n’s mate turned the Manteo toward the stern of the head boat.

  “A little less speed, Hugo,” Dewey said.

  Westman went to a forward window and took a pair of binoculars from the hook where they were hanging. “Roberta June,” he called out.

  “Lewes boat,” said DeGroot.

  Signaling their intention with two blasts of their ship’s horn, and receiving two in reply, they passed around the fishing boat by the stern, moving along its starboard side. Westman went to the port side of the bridge to get a good look at the craft. It was dirty, with rust stains at the scuppers.

  There were only a few people visible, two of them women. One, a long-haired blond, was at the controls on the boat’s flying bridge. She seemed to be staring at them. He lowered the binoculars.

  “No one’s fishing.”

  “Maybe they’re not biting,” Dewey said.

  “Maybe he converted to whale watching,” DeGroot said. “That’s a swindle. No whales in these waters. Just dolphins.”

  “No one aboard is watching whales—or dolphins,” said Westman. “Just us.”

  The radio crackled. The skipper of the forty-seven on the scene south of Rehoboth, a bos’n’s mate, reported that the Delaware State Police wanted to remove the girl’s body. A big crowd had gathered, he said, most of them young people, some of them drunk. They were trampling the crime scene.

  “Negative,” said Westman. “She’s our case if she came off that motor-sailor. Tell the state cops to deal with the crowd. We’ll take care of the victim.”

  Cat McGrath watched the Coast Guard cutter cross th
e Roberta June’s stern—much too closely for a vessel just passing by. She hoped they weren’t going to be hassled. Burt had been drinking again and, as master of the Roberta June, he could be in for serious trouble if the Coasties wanted to make an issue of it—which they undoubtedly would.

  When she was in the Navy, Cat hadn’t really thought of the Coast Guard as a military service. More like oceangoing narcs and immigration agents—and lifeguards. But now, with creeps running around America knocking down and blowing up things, they were the ones on the front line on the water. It was the Navy that was backup.

  There was a very tan, gray-haired man on the bridge of the cutter, watching her. She might have thought him the captain, were it not for his wearing civilian boating clothes instead of the regulation blue uniform. Whoever he was, he was definitely curious about them.

  She waved. He didn’t wave back, but turned away. The cutter kept on going, heading south.

  “Burt,” she said. “Maybe we ought to call it a day.”

  “It’s still morning. I want to move out to the shoal and see what we find with this magnetometer.”

  Cat went to the control console, waiting for Burt to prepare his little sensing device. Flying for a puddle-jump little airline in Iowa was beginning to seem attractive.

  The dead girl had been sampled by the denizens of the deep, but her face was still intact, her eyes wide and bulging. Westman had brought his digital camera ashore, and he now took three pictures—one of the entire body, a close-up of her face for identification purposes, and another of her right hand, which was badly scratched. He then knelt in the sand to examine the body, paying particular attention to the inside of her arms and the skin between her toes.

  “User,” he said, rising.

  “Let’s hope she was high when she went under,” Dewey said, looking on.

  Erik looked down at the tortured face. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re the Investigative Service,” Dewey said. “Why don’t you take charge of this?”

  Westman nodded, then took out his cell phone, calling a now-familiar number.