Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

  She raised her eyes from her wine, from which she had only taken a small sip. “I have a little headache. I’m all right.”

  Burt was seated on the opposite side of the table from her, with Amy on his right. It wasn’t the best part of the restaurant, but they hadn’t had a reservation, and counted themselves lucky. Burt was eating with a better appetite than she had seen in all her time in Lewes, though Joe Whalleys was outdoing everyone in the volume of food consumed. He’d even asked for a second serving of mashed potatoes.

  She took another sip of her wine, which was delicious. This dinner would cost her entire food budget for a month. She supposed Burt could afford this one indulgence. She hoped so.

  He and Amy were holding hands under the table. Cat was happy for them, but not really happy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pushing back her chair. “I’m going to the head. Be right back.”

  Burt nodded, his concern still evident.

  Slipping carefully out the front door, she ran the block to the river and then over the bridge, not slowing until she was in the gravel parking lot of the Lighthouse. Collecting herself, catching her breath, fighting back a bit of dizziness, she walked the rest of the way to the front door.

  He still wasn’t there. She looked into all the rooms and out on the deck. It was too humiliating to ask the cocktail waitress again if he’d been by.

  There were four cop cars at the crime scene by the time Lieutenant Connelly and Westman got to the docks—but very little evidence of crime. Someone was playing a heavy-duty flashlight along the side of the tug. A window had been shot out.

  Bear Gergen was talking to one of the uniformed policemen. Noticing Westman and Connelly, he came over.

  “I’m sure glad to see you guys. Damn druggies. Like to have killed me.” He squinted at Westman. “You’re the Coast Guard man, right? Hard to see. You remember I dropped a dime on these guys from Philly? Well, they came down for some payback.”

  “You know for certain it was them?” Westman asked.

  “No, I don’t. But who else could it have been? They tried a drive-by, but it was a little hard with all these ship containers. I’m lucky.”

  “Nobody’s hurt?” Connelly asked.

  “No. We were all below. Three of us.”

  “You fire back?” Connelly asked.

  “I’m not going to break the law, Lieutenant.”

  “Not even in self-defense?”

  Bear folded his arms. “I’ve got a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson in the pilothouse, Lieutenant. Perfectly legal. You can examine it. Didn’t fire a shot. I told you. We were below.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “North, I think. Up the street. Real fast. I’m surprised you didn’t bump into them.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Black Lincoln Navigator. Just like the one they came calling on me in the last time.”

  “Automatic weapons?”

  “Yeah. Sounded like AK-47’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Twelve years in the Navy. Nine in the SEALs.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I did. I called it in.” He took a step closer. “You gonna give me some protection? They could come back.”

  “I’ll ask,” said Connelly, making a few quick notes himself. “You’re sure nobody’s hurt?”

  Gergen nodded. “You gonna go arrest Diller? Go to Philly?”

  Connelly shook his head. “My authority stops at the state line. I’ll inform Philly PD, though.”

  “How about you, Coast Guard?”

  “Already have a case,” said Westman.

  Joe Whalleys, who had two desserts, drove home to his father’s farm outside Georgetown in his beaten-up old Toyota pickup. Cat took Burt—which also meant Amy now—home in her Wrangler, declining his invitation for a nightcap.

  She put the letter from the Navy in a desk drawer and then went into her living room. Inserting a Miles Davis CD in her old stereo, she then sank slouching into her favorite old chair by the open window. When the CD finished, she closed her eyes, listening to the sea.

  Cat was just beginning to slip into sleep when she heard the knocking at her door.

  She ignored it. She did not want to join in Burt and Amy’s little party, or talk about the bomb, or even think about what had to be done the next day.

  But the knocking came again. Finally, she rose and went to the door, prepared to fling it open and communicate to Burt that, this night at least, she would very much like to be left alone.

  Instead, she opened it slowly, carefully, suddenly fearful that it might not be Burt at all.

  It wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry to be so late,” Westman said. “There were developments in my case. I was up in Wilmington.”

  “I don’t mind.” She opened the door fully.

  Chapter 23

  Westman awoke to the cool air and slanted sunlight of early morning, and the sounds of seagulls and the horn blasts of the first Lewes-Cape May ferry of the day. It was a pleasant way to return to consciousness, made all the more so by his memories and the presence of the beautiful, troubled woman lying next to him.

  But then he realized she wasn’t there. She had spent much of the night pressed warmly against his side, her head on his shoulder and her long blond hair flung across his chest. Now she was gone. He reached and touched the sheet, and found it cold.

  Turning, he saw her seated in a chair by the window, a blanket around her shoulders.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Did I …?”

  “No, Erik. You have been wonderful. It’s just that …”

  “You have regrets.”

  “No. I had a dream about the bomb.”

  Westman sat up, his gaze steady upon her. “I guess that’s not surprising.”

  “All that death, Erik, in such a small package. It’s almost Biblical.”

  “I think they said something like that when they tested the first atom bomb at Los Alamos.”

  “I don’t want to go down there again, Erik. I don’t want to touch that thing again.”

  “You won’t have to. Now that you’ve found it, the military will take over.”

  “They damn well better.” She thought upon this a moment, then gave him a warmer look, then rose and came back to the bed, pulling the sheet over her long body and turning to face him. “Do you have to leave?”

  “Soon.”

  “Not so soon,” she said, moving closer.

  Captain Baldessari wanted nothing more than to go for a run on Pickering Beach, which was what he usually wanted to do when he was working. He ran in the morning before reporting for duty, ran during his lunch hour, ran before going home, ran in the evening, and sometimes he ran late at night.

  It was just past nine in the morning. Baldessari had two file folders on the desk in front of him—a slim one containing three typewritten letters and a thick and very musty one containing some very old and recently declassified reports. He decided to make a single file of it all, putting the three letters on top of the reports. Then he called Colonel Baker.

  The colonel’s desk was home to an array of grown-up toys, some of them electronic gizmos from the Sharper Image, some of them museum souvenirs, a few of them models of Air Force aircraft. Most prominent among these was a large-scale model of a B-1 bomber.

  Baker had been a B-1 pilot. As far as nonpilot Baldessari had been able to determine, the B-1 was the least efficacious aircraft the Air Force had ever put on line. Brought in during the Reagan era at a price of $300 million a copy, the B-1 was supposed to have replaced the half-century-old B-52 as the service’s main strategic bomber. There’d been crashes from the git-go. On a demonstration flight for members of Congress over Northern Virginia, a B-1 had lost two of its doors. The aircraft finally saw service in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the Iraq War, but as an infantry weapon. They used it to kill tanks—a task a
t which A-10 Warthogs were far superior.

  Baldessari remembered working a Pentagon news conference once at which a two-star general had been asked what the B-1, which had cost the taxpayers more than thirty billion dollars for the entire fleet, had been good for. Without hesitation, the general had said: “Deterence.” Also without hesitation, an aviation writer had added: “The concept worked. The Russians were deterred from building anything like it.”

  Baldessari had not been surprised to learn that Baker had been a B-1 pilot.

  “Captain,” said the colonel as Baldessari approached his desk. “Is this really worth the bother?”

  “Think so, sir.”

  Baker frowned.

  “Okay. Have a seat. But make it short—and sweet.”

  Baldessari sat, set the thick file folder on the desktop, opened it, and started to hand the colonel one of the three letters. Baker waved it off.

  “Just tell me,” he said.

  “I already did, I think, sir. The retired C-130 pilot who dropped a couple of H-bombs off Delaware Bay?”

  “What?”

  “Back in the sixties.”

  Baker had started to come forward in his chair. At the word “sixties,” he sank back again. “Oh, yeah. That guy. He wrote another letter?”

  Baldessari held it up. “Yes, sir.”

  Because he had been a pilot, Baker would make general someday. Baldessari was a public affairs officer who wore glasses and had last flown an aircraft as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol. He would be lucky to make lieutenant colonel.

  “This makes three,” Baldessari added.

  “So what does he say this time?”

  The colonel had picked up one of his Sharper Image toys—a handheld game that gave off tiny beeps.

  “More or less the same thing. That he has reason to believe that one of two bombs he jettisoned off the mouth of Delaware Bay was armed—fitted with a plutonium core and trigger device.”

  “What do all those official files say?”

  Baldessari pulled out the one that had arrested his attention.

  “They say it was impossible for that to be the case. Those were Mark 28’s. They were never armed during transport. The cores were shipped separately.”

  “Two bombs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how many cores arrived in Germany?”

  Baldessari flipped through the pages.

  “Doesn’t say,” he said.

  “Does it say if anyone checked?” Baker was getting irritable.

  “It says no information available, sir.”

  The little beeps ceased. “That’s all?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And they just let this go?”

  Baldessari shrugged. “Apparently so.”

  “You got the guy’s 201 file?”

  “Yes, sir. Good record—up until the incident. Subsequent to that, he was grounded. Then separated from active duty.”

  “You mean pilot error was involved in that thing?”

  “No, sir. Flight surgeon took him off the duty roster after the incident. He left the service a few months later.”

  Baker pursed his lips. “Booze?”

  “Partly. They lost a member of the crew in that thing. The flight engineer.”

  The colonel sighed and set down his handheld game. “So what do you think?”

  “I think we ought to listen to him. He called again this morning. Said he’s found one of the bombs.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Baldessari shrugged. “I’m not, sir. If he’s a nutcase, he didn’t sound like it. He wants us to recover the object.”

  “We don’t do that. The Navy does that.” The colonel frowned. “How do you think it would go down with the public—and the Congress—our pulling up half-century-old H-bombs that could have been leaking radioactivity into seafood all this time?”

  “They’d be nervous. Somebody in Congress would hold hearings.”

  “The chief of staff would be on my ass if that happened.”

  Baldessari wished the man would stop thinking aloud.

  “Those files are classified?” Baker asked.

  “Ours are. The pilot’s aren’t.”

  The colonel swiveled around to stare out his window. There was a gigantic C-17 rising slowly into the sky.

  “Well, it really isn’t a concern for this base, is it?”

  “That C-130 was based here, sir.”

  The colonel swiveled back, picking up one of his model airplanes by its stand. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  “I think we should talk to him, sir.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Just down in Lewes.”

  Baker pressed his lips together hard, swiveling a few inches back and forth in his chair. “Can’t we just send this file on to the Pentagon?”

  “That’s where it came from, Colonel—minus Captain Schilling’s letters.”

  Baker came forward in his chair, opening a leather-bound appointment book. Baldessari knew the colonel had a golf game with the general in the afternoon and lunch with his wife just before that.

  “Right,” Baker said. “Do you suppose he could get up here by eleven?”

  “I suppose so. He seemed anxious to see us.”

  “Then see to it. I don’t have a lot of time to spare for this.”

  Bear Gergen walked in through the front door of Homer’s grungy saloon with Roy Creed following behind him. The bar was empty except for a lone drunk still slumbering in a corner from the night before, but the two tugboat men made the place almost seem crowded. Homer was surprised to see them.

  “Breakfast?” he asked.

  Bear nodded. Homer poured two shots of whiskey, and then set out two steins of beer. Fetching two eggs from the refrigerator, he cracked them into the two steins and pushed the lot across the bar. Gergen sipped his whiskey, but Creed poured his shot into the beer and then drank the entire mix down, asking Homer for another but nixing a second egg.

  “What’re you doing here, Bear?” Homer asked.

  “Changing my mind.” He drank again, wrinkling his nose. The bar smelled of equal parts of spilled beer, vomit, urine, and ammonia.

  “About what?”

  “About your request, on behalf of your, uh, client.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “You put your garbage out last night.”

  “Yeah. Maybe this week they’ll collect it.”

  “There’s an extra bag out there. You might want to check it out.” He finished the whiskey. “It’s kinda heavy.”

  Homer pursed his lips, then nodded, understanding. “That’s good.”

  “See if you can get more money.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want it at the boat by midnight. Send Railroad Bob with it.”

  “You got it.”

  Cat and Westman were having coffee in her kitchen when Burt came up the front steps and entered without knocking. Westman was dressed, but Cat was not. Giving Schilling a dark look as she pulled a dish towel around her, she went quickly upstairs, returning in shorts and T-shirt.

  “If you’re not careful, Captain Schilling, somebody’s going to think you’re a dirty old man.”

  Schilling had taken a seat and a cup of coffee for himself. “I’m sorry, Cat. I’ve got news. The Air Force wants to see us.”

  “Us?”

  “Me. But you’ve got to come with me. You identified the thing. They might look at me as some sort of crazy man, but if you’re along—anyway. It’s just up in Dover. And …”

  Cat smiled. “Calm down, Burt. Of course I’ll go with you. This is what we’ve been waiting for, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so.”

  “When?”

  “Today. Eleven o’clock.”

  She glanced at Westman, who was looking upon her amiably. “I’ll go with you,” Westman said.

  Cat was surprised. “But you’re on duty.”

  “Dover’s on the way to Wilmington.”

&nbs
p; “I appreciate this,” Burt said.

  There was the slam of a screen door. In a moment, Amy appeared at Cat’s front steps.

  Turko had taken two rooms at the Atlantic City hotel—one for himself and the other for the two Uzbeks and the Iraqi. It was on the cheap side, but had a casino and a sort of night-club and there was cable television that included the Weather Channel among its offerings. Every ten minutes, they gave the local weather, a detailed forecast for the next two days, and a more general one for the week.

  The winds were currently from the northeast, owing to a high-pressure center lingering over Washington. This was predicted to slide slowly eastward, changing the wind direction and raising temperatures above their summer norms. The change could occur within the next twenty-four hours.

  If he was to go through with this, it would have to be now. Pec would be onto him with guns blazing if he let this opportunity slide.

  Turko needed his weapons and explosives. It was an hour’s drive to Wilmington and the bar where he hoped they would be waiting. He didn’t want to drive there—didn’t want to expose himself to either the U.S. authorities or Pec for that length of time before attempting the mission. But he didn’t dare send any of his crew. The Uzbeks would get lost and end up in Perth Amboy.

  He finished his vodka and Pepsi Cola, then mixed another. When that was gone, he would go.

  The conference room was predictably utilitarian—gray metal-top table, blue-gray metal-frame chairs, walls painted a lighter shade of blue-gray, the only decoration a large, framed painting of a B-1 bomber in flight. Slatted blinds had been partially drawn against the sun. Though there was air-conditioning and the windows were tightly closed, aircraft engines were making a distracting noise.

  The three visitors had been given seats along one side of the table. Colonel Baker and Captain Baldessari sat opposite them. An Air Force major from the Pentagon had taken a chair in the corner, which clearly bothered Schilling, the old C-130 pilot. He kept glancing over at the man, who was wearing aviator-style sunglasses indoors. The major had a shiny pair of pilot’s wings on his chest, and his uniform was very sharply pressed, unlike either of the other officers.

  Baker had the very thick, complete file on the bomb matter in front of him. He opened it and read something on the cover page, then sat back and eyed Schilling as he might a pile of rancid Brussels sprouts. Then, abruptly, he smiled. Your friendly neighborhood brass hat, extending hospitality to some of the nice citizens who paid his wages.