Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

  “How’d it go?” Amy asked.

  “Not so good.”

  She took a few deep breaths. Next thing she knew, Burt had come down from the bridge and was leaning over her.

  “What’d you find?”

  “A lawn chair. And a rowboat.”

  Turko, playing a slot machine that faced the entrance to the Dover Downs racetrack casino, spotted the new men almost immediately. Two of them entered together, dressed almost identically in blue jeans and short-sleeved shirts. They came a few steps inside, then stood there, waiting, until the third joined them. He was wearing shorts and a bowling shirt. All had on sunglasses.

  Having won twice, after losing only a little of his original ten-dollar stake, Turko had to put an inconveniently large amount of quarters into his pockets. He did so quickly, leaving the empty cardboard bucket on the machine. Careful to show no haste, he made his way to the entrance, leaning to whisper one word in Arabic to the man in shorts, whom he took to be Middle Eastern. Then he proceeded outside and from there to the parking lot.

  He kept on until he was deep into the cars. Glancing back to make certain they were following, he found a space between a van and what the Americans called a sport utility vehicle and slipped into it. The three appeared shortly after.

  The two in blue jeans were Uzbeks, and from the same tribe and village. The man in shorts was an Iraqi, a former member of the Fedayeen Saddam. The Uzbeks fortunately spoke Russian; the Iraqi, English. Turko could only wonder how the three of them had communicated with each other, but he was content that he could at least make himself understood with each.

  Turko opened the sliding side door to the van, which he had stolen the night before in Newark, Delaware. Motioning the others to enter, he went around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. He had decided on this vehicle because it looked so innocent; something a man with a young family might drive. It later occurred to him that the lack of such a family in so docile an automobile would make him and his passengers stand out. He commanded the others to stay down.

  When they were on the wide, limited-access highway that led north toward Philadelphia, he allowed them to sit up.

  “Where were you staying?” he asked.

  “Nearby,” said the Iraqi.

  A careful fellow. Turko was pleased.

  Chapter 21

  Westman returned to his apartment to change into civilian clothes and check in by telephone with his CGIS director, who was intensely curious about his experience that morning with the cabinet secretary who ruled them all. Erik made a point of mentioning his intrusion of the subject of the hydrogen bombs and the Homeland Security Secretary’s indifferent response.

  “He’s right,” said the director. “It’s an Air Force issue. If they ask for our assistance, we should provide it. Otherwise, we’ve enough to do.”

  “The bombs are in coastal waters, sir. The Manteo patrols by there regularly.”

  “Let’s stay on target, Erik. If we miss something important on the bridge case because you’re involved with some underwater exploration, the commandant will be all over us. Are you still reporting directly to Admiral dePayse?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I am.”

  “Strange she hasn’t asked for any of the other investigators.”

  “We worked together—years ago. In Puerto Rico.”

  “Even so.”

  A silence followed.

  “I’ll check in with you later, sir,” Westman said.

  “Yes. Well, good luck.”

  Next, Westman called the cell phone of Special Agent Kelly.

  “Nothing new to tell you,” Kelly said, speaking quietly. “Except we moved our command post to Ocean City.”

  “What for?”

  “Payne thinks the bad guys are still out here.”

  “Plotting what? Sabotaging the amusement park?”

  “As a matter of fact, he thinks that’s a possibility. He talked to the mayor here and got the place closed. Weren’t many customers anyway.”

  “Any word yet on distributing the suspect’s picture?”

  “Still have a hold on that.”

  “That’s crazy, Leon.”

  “They don’t want this guy to bolt.”

  “If you ran his photo on the evening news, you’d have a few million people helping you look for him. Do you remember the D.C. sniper case? The only reason they caught those two creeps was that a cop broke orders and leaked the car description and plate numbers to a television station. It was a passing truck driver who nailed those bastards, not law enforcement.”

  “I’m told we raised that point, but the big boys are kind of stubborn on the subject. They still think that releasing the picture would drive the terrorist gang underground. Maybe make them leave the country.”

  “And if they try something again?”

  “Catch ’em in the open.”

  “Crazy. If the ‘open’ looks like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center.”

  “Orders. Where’re you working today, Erik?”

  “I think I’ll head out your way.”

  “Why?”

  “Special Agent Payne may actually be right. Maybe they are after the Ferris wheel.”

  Westman made one more call before leaving, but Cat McGrath didn’t answer. It was curious she hadn’t an answering machine.

  Turko stole an old Mitsubishi station wagon in Chester, Pennsylvania, picked up his crew, and headed south toward the nuclear power plant. All of them were armed with handguns, but Turko put them in the back in the spare tire well, then piled all their fishing gear on top of that. Police were stopping cars with some frequency, seemingly at random.

  He allowed himself one slow pass by the main gate of the power plant, having turned the rearview mirror sideways so he could observe the entrance carefully without turning his head. He took note of two guards stationed outside the gate and saw a third walking across the grounds. There would be many others posted around the site, but it was encouraging that there were so few at this location.

  The Iraqi was not so encouraged. “We do this? Only four of us?”

  “Yes. Two in a truck. Two in a boat.”

  “To blow up a big plant like this?”

  “I told you. Not the plant. Just one of the spent-fuel storage bunkers. Very easy to get to. Just beyond the fence.”

  “And where do we go afterward?”

  “To a car we’ll have hidden nearby.”

  “And then?”

  “We rendezvous with your Uzbek friends and head south.”

  “Why south?”

  “Because the winds will be blowing the radioactivity north.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because we won’t do this until the winds are blowing from the south.”

  The Iraqi rubbed his face, thinking. Turko straightened the rearview mirror. The Uzbeks were listening intently, though they could not understand a word.

  “We need to practice,” the Iraqi said.

  Turko shook his head. “Practicing will be noticed. We need to acquire more weapons and the explosives. And a truck. Then we move quickly, as soon as the wind turns.”

  “And now we go fishing?”

  “We go to the water side of the plant. And pretend to fish. I’ve explained all this.”

  “I only want to understand.”

  He was a small man with a hooked nose and large black eyes. Turko supposed he used to have a mustache.

  “What did you do before you joined us?” Turko asked.

  The Iraqi stared straight ahead. “I help run narcotics through central Africa. I fought in a war in Nigeria—against the Christians in the north.”

  “I mean when you lived in Iraq.”

  “I was a kind of soldier. A bodyguard for important officials. Before the Americans came.”

  “Did you ever kill anyone?”

  “Oh, yes. Many. Once I kill a disloyal general with a blowtorch.”

  They had anchored the Roberta June in waters
on the edge of the grid they had laid out on the chart, having worked the area thoroughly all morning.

  Burt was drinking a beer, his first of the day. He’d been behaving himself during this effort, as he had not always when he had fishing parties aboard, but his hangover was getting the better of him.

  Cat was feeling a little fuzzy herself, but it wasn’t from booze. Her nerves were not happy with this work.

  She took a seat next to Burt’s. Declining a beer, she accepted a Diet Coke. Amy was forward, checking the anchor chain. Joe Whalleys was aft, drowsing by the empty bait box.

  Cat nodded toward Amy. “What’s going on with you two?” she said quietly.

  Burt replied with a blurry grin. “What’s going on with you and that Coastie?”

  “He seems a nice guy. And he wants to help us.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s he done for us lately?”

  “Need I remind you that he got us out of the OC slammer? Couldn’t do a lot of bomb hunting from in there, could we?”

  Schilling took a deep drink of his Heinekens. “Not doing much better out here.”

  It was a muggy day with low clouds lying in the haze. The wind had dropped and the grayish water looked flaccid and uninviting. “Don’t give up hope now,” she said. “We’re just beginning.”

  “What do you think we should do?” He squinted at the horizon.

  “Keep looking.”

  “But where? We’ve worked that grid good. If your calculations are right …” He finished his beer in two more gulps.

  “Let’s move the grid to the south.”

  Burt squinted in that direction. “Doesn’t look right.”

  “Let’s just try it.”

  Westman had a Coast Guard radio under his dashboard that he kept tuned to the operations frequency. He turned it on as he crossed the Bay Bridge, listening to what sounded like normal chatter. An HH-60 Jayhawk chopper was approaching from the south on a standard LE patrol. A forty-one-footer had found something off Tilghman Island and had summoned a forty-seven to assist. A suspected oil spill had been detected across the bay up by Aberdeen.

  It might have been an ordinary summer’s day, were it not for those terrible people out there. Perhaps there was only one left, the one they were calling Bertolucci. Westman desperately hoped so. A man alone couldn’t do so much harm. And wouldn’t put up so much of a fight if finally cornered.

  But it was likely there were more of them. The murders at those two Ocean City apartment buildings indicated that.

  The bridge descended toward the Eastern Shore. Westman glanced at the dashboard clock and decided to stop off on Kent Island for lunch, turning off Highway 50 at the first exit and doubling back to the restaurant on the water where the Bertolucci suspect had dined while waiting for the bridge to blow.

  Westman took a table out on the deck, near to where the waitress had told him Bertolucci had sat. The view was the same that Bertolucci had had, except for the bright daylight. He could not comprehend the mind of a man who could sit in such a place watching a thousand or more people driving along the span, waiting and hoping for their doom. How could anything like that relate to religion, or politics?

  He was being naïve. There had been men like that through the centuries. An endless parade of them.

  He’d lost his appetite, but he ate anyway, idly listening to the television set in the main dining room behind him. When the news came on, he became more slightly attentive, but there was nothing much of interest. The set was tuned to a Baltimore station and the stories had to do with the city council and some minor crimes. There had been a rash of auto thefts from garages and parking lots in the Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Wilmington areas—twice the normal number. Police were also investigating an attempted break-in at an art museum, and the murders of two teenage boys in North Baltimore. A woman jogger had been attacked on the waterfront.

  Except for the spike in auto thefts, it sounded like an ordinary day in Baltimore.

  He paid for his lunch, inquiring after the waitress who had told him about the Bertolucci man. He was informed she had quit her job.

  Following Highway 50 from Kent Island onto the Delmarva Peninsula, he considered heading for Bethany or Lewes, but decided to stick to his decision to visit Ocean City instead—though not to call upon the new FBI command center. He’d go to the local police headquarters, where there was a fairly elaborate computer system.

  He’d need that. It had suddenly occurred to him that it might be well worth his while to check out all those stolen car reports.

  The first marina Turko had gone to rented only small bass boats, which would be difficult to operate in choppy weather. The two Uzbeks looked to be poor mariners and might well swamp or capsize such a craft before they got near the power plant. The smallness did offer the advantage of a low profile in the water when they approached the plant security fence, but Turko was not interested in that. Whether they realized it or not, the Uzbeks’ role in this enterprise was diversion. He wanted them to draw as many guards and as much fire as possible. The higher the silhouette and the noisier the engines the better.

  Farther downriver was a marina that rented large pontoon boats. The young woman on duty in the small shack of an office hardly gave Turko a glance as she took his driver’s license, a new one in the name of Skouras, and a two-hundred-dollar deposit. The youth with her watched him sign the rental form, but said nothing.

  He led Turko and his party down to the dock. Explaining the workings of the rectangular-shaped pleasure craft and the rules for its use, he stood by as they took their fishing gear aboard and then cast off the lines after Turko started its big outboard engine. Waving good-bye, Turko headed the boat downriver first, dropping anchor close offshore and instructing the others to cast their fishing lines into the water.

  He had filled two large thermos bottles—one with tea for them and another containing vodka and a little orange juice for him. He poured himself a plastic cupful of the latter, then sat at the helm, calmly watching the river traffic while they fished.

  The Iraqi knew what he was doing, but the Uzbeks had neither ability or interest, and were content to let their lines drift in the current. When the bait of one was taken by a fish, the daydreaming miscreant let the rod slip out of his hands and into the water. Turko finished his drink and restarted the engines, taking the boat out into the main ship channel and then turning upstream.

  “We’re going too fast,” said Cat to Burt, who sat slumped in his chair at the Roberta June’s helm as they made another pass over the new grid.

  “What do you mean?”

  She stepped closer.

  “You’re going too fast for the sonar. You’re getting impatient, Burt. I don’t know if it’s to get this done or if you just can’t wait to get to the bar. But you’ve been going too damn fast for the sonar and the magnetometer. We’ll never find anything this way.”

  He put the engine into neutral. “I’m not in a hurry for the next drink,” he said. He squinted, as he often did when feeling belligerent, then opened a side storage compartment and pulled out a pint of Jim Beam, taking a large slug of it.

  Cat’s impulse was to fling the bottle into the sea, but she restrained herself—barely. “Do you want me to help you with this?”

  “I’m the captain here—Lieutenant.”

  “And I’m the one who’s going into that deep, dark water.”

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The veins were very prominent. She stiffened as he put his arm around her waist. “I’m sorry, Cat. I just don’t have very long, you know.”

  “You’re not going to die tomorrow, Burt. We’ve only just started. This could take weeks. Now, come on.” She moved from his grasp, but then gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “You have time enough to do this last row on the grid again, Cap’n. Slowly this time.”

  Burt put the bottle back into the storage bin. “Okeydoke,” he said, engaging the engine and moving the throttle ever so slowly forward. The Ro
berta June shuddered and turned back onto the course they had just finished. The big boat seemed as reluctant as her skipper.

  Westman and his Ocean City police captain friend went into the department’s computer section, intruding upon a sergeant who was sitting back in his chair, eating a sandwich.

  “Yes, sir,” said the man, still chewing.

  “The Coast Guard here says there’s been a spike in auto thefts in the area—Philly, Wilmington, Baltimore, maybe Delmarva too. Can you get me some numbers?”

  “Yes, sir. What’s going on?”

  “I think the bridge terrorists may be responsible for some of them,” Westman said. “I’d like to map the locations, and I’m particularly interested in where the most recent ones took place.”

  “It’ll take a while,” the sergeant said.

  “An hour?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll go for a drive.”

  Turko had forgotten the exact distance from the power plant that passing vessels were required to stay under the new Homeland Security rules now in force. He estimated what might be a half mile and decided to stick to that, approaching the facility on a parallel course from the south and maintaining his speed, so it would not seem he was making a reconnaissance.

  “It looks so big from the water,” the Iraqi said.

  “It is big,” said Turko.

  “How can we do this?”

  “It will be easy. Easier than knocking down the World Trade Center.”

  “Those men died.”

  “We won’t.”

  Turko had made the Uzbeks sit on the side of the pontoon boat facing the shore, so they could look at the plant without seeming to be paying it particular attention. He asked them if they noticed the little jetty poking from the shore and the chain-link fence on top of it that extended far out into the water. A small motorboat with a low profile was sitting just to the left of this obstruction.

  “If you come up fast to the right of that fence, you’ll have them at a disadvantage,” he said, speaking in Russian. “They’ll have to come all the way around it to get at you—and you can get them when they do.”

  One of them nodded. The other merely stared.