Deepkill

by Michael Kilian

“What’s wrong with you, Burt? You keep passing out.”

  “Comes and goes.”

  “But what’s wrong with you?”

  “Too old.”

  “Can you help me fly this thing?”

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath, then exhaled, and then did nothing.

  “Burt?”

  Nothing. She heard the noise of something scraping on metal, but it was not coming from him.

  Cat leaned over her instruments. The readings all seemed normal. Fuel was low, but there was enough to get up to Dover. The aircraft was climbing. She adjusted the trim, then sat back again.

  A moment later, large hands closed around her neck.

  Chapter 36

  The remaining gunman by the runway watched the receding airplane with raised hands.

  “You hit?” DeGroot asked.

  “No,” said the man. Westman recognized him as a crewman off Gergen’s salvage tug. “Where’s your boss?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Why did you throw in with terrorists?”

  “You have to ask him.”

  “Take him to the terminal building and hold them,” Dewey ordered DeGroot. “I’m going to check on the inflatable. It’s gone quiet out there. I don’t like that.”

  Westman was looking out to the bay. He took out his cell phone.

  “You calling the local police?” Dewey asked. “They should have been here by now.”

  “Ocean City won’t come out unless they’re called to assist,” Westman said. “This is Worcester County’s jurisdiction.”

  “Are you calling the sheriff?”

  “No. I’m following standard operating procedure.”

  Special Agent Leon Kelly answered on the fourth ring, yawning.

  “It’s Westman.”

  “Jeez, Erik. Where are you? We’ve got an advisory on you.”

  “An advisory.”

  “Request for assistance from the Coast Guard. You’re AWOL or something.”

  Westman swore. “I’m at Ocean City Airport.”

  “What’re you doing there?”

  “I’ve got a case for you.”

  “A case?”

  “I think you’ll like it. We have some dead terrorists. Another live perp.”

  He explained the situation further. “Payne can take the credit.”

  “Payne’s not here.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Didn’t say. But he left a good guy in charge.”

  “You’ll be coming?”

  “You bet.”

  Westman clicked off.

  “You want to come with me?” Dewey said. “We’ve got to clean this up.”

  “You’ll have plenty of help shortly. FBI. I’d like to get scarce.”

  “Am I supposed to let you do that?”

  “Then you won’t have to ‘apprehend’ me.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I want to take one of the pontoon boats and go back to Ocean City.”

  “What for?”

  “Continue my investigation.”

  Dewey seemed dubious. “Those aren’t your orders.”

  “They are tonight.”

  “And tomorrow? You’re on a lot of bad paper, Erik.”

  “Deal with that then.”

  “How many years do you have in the service?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “We’ll get over there when we can.”

  Cat couldn’t understand why she wasn’t dead. The bearded man was strong enough to break her larynx with one hand. But he was also supposed to be dead. The woman in the cutoffs had shot him twice. His face had been covered in blood.

  Yet here he was, a Lazarus, having found the strength and will to climb all the way up the ladder to the flight deck and attack her.

  He was an idiot. Burt was passed out. She was flying the Hercules. The stupid bearded bastard would kill them all.

  She was beginning to black out. In the passing seconds she’d been thinking these thoughts, she had not been breathing. Her neck was being crushed. Her head was tilted painfully against the back of the seat. The only parts of her that were functioning were her arms and hands, which were currently occupied with gripping the control wheel.

  Cat managed one last thought. The son of a bitch was obviously in a weakened state, or she’d have been dead by now. There was only one opportunity left to her, and there was actually a chance that what she had in mind would work.

  She yanked back on the yoke, making the cargo plane’s strange clown nose commence to rise. Gergen removed one hand from her neck to take hold of the seat back in an effort to keep his footing despite the rising angle of the floor. She wondered how much he knew about flying. She wished she could recall their altitude. Last time she had looked they were climbing out of two heading for three.

  Just as she took a quick, deep breath, he shifted his weight and put his forearm across her neck, gravity reinforcing his remaining strength in his effort to add Catherine Anne McGrath to the KIA list in this insane battle. The stall alarm commenced its raucous warning. A joyous sound. He appeared to have no idea what was happening—or what was about to.

  The nose was pointed up at the stars now. An instant later, it dropped like a thrill ride. The windshield filled with the dark vision of the sea below as the Hercules assumed the flight characteristics of a boulder.

  Gergen lost his grip, his footing, his balance. As he flung himself forward, trying to regain all three, she whacked him hard in the face with her elbow as hard as she could manage. He didn’t cry out. He just vanished.

  There was no time to worry about him. She had done more than a few stall recoveries in her time—most in practice, a few in deadly earnest. One time, over the Pacific, she had fought compressor stalls in both of her F-14’s original lousy engines from eleven thousand feet all the way to the watery deck, restarting one only a few hundred feet above the sea.

  She had no idea how this hulking airplane would behave in a recovery attempt, but she followed procedure. Pushing the yoke forward to regain flying airspeed in the dive, giving it a little left rudder to prevent the spin it was showing an interest in, she then pulled steadily back on the controls to resume level flight.

  When the instruments showed she had accomplished that, she looked in disbelief at the altimeter. According to that most important of navaids, they had no altitude at all. She shoved the throttles all the way forward and pulled on full flaps, allowing herself finally a quick glance out the port-side window. They were passing a row of town houses along the Fenwick Island beach. Some were lighted, and she could see into their windows.

  Slowly, the big airplane began to ascend. By the time they had cleared the long stretch of empty Delaware State Seashore and were flying by Bethany Beach, she had managed to get the Hercules back up to a thousand feet. She retracted the flaps and the climb rate increased.

  “I got it.”

  In flight training, when an instructor uttered those words, one instantly removed hands and feet from the controls. To do otherwise was such a major sin, one could get washed out of the program for the transgression. But Cat did not yield command.

  “It’s all right, Burt,” she said, the words coming out in croaks. Her throat hurt enormously.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve got it. Find out what happened to that bastard.”

  “You’ve been passing out, Burt. I …”

  “Damn it, I’m fine! I’m command pilot here and I’ve got the controls. Check him out!”

  She undid her seat harness and warily rose, eyes first on Burt to confirm what he was claiming. Then she looked to the rear edge of the flight deck, where Gergen’s foot was twisted in the angle of the ladder.

  Peering over the edge, she saw him hanging upside down, making weak little efforts to grab hold of the ladder and pull himself upright again.

  “His foot’s caught,” she said. “He’s just hanging there.”

  Burt reached to his belt and handed her his automatic. “Sh
oot him.”

  She took the gun obediently, glad for its presence, but did nothing more.

  “Damn it, Cat. Shoot him. He has it coming.”

  Amy Costa. Joe Whalleys. The young Air National Guard woman. And maybe, Chief Warrant Officer and Coast Guard Investigative Service Special Agent Erik Westman.

  And who knows how many thousands or millions if he had succeeded in turning this bomb over to the fiends of fundamentalism.

  “Can’t do it, Burt,” she said, sticking the side arm in her belt. Urging the wounded man to grab hold of the ladder, she knelt and took hold of his boot. He groaned as she twisted his foot back toward her, freeing it from the ladder brace. But the boot came off in her hand. He fell the remaining distance to the cargo deck headfirst, the rest of his huge bulk coming down upon his neck and skull with a great crash.

  She climbed back into her seat, catching her breath. “He’s out of the picture,” she said. “I can take over now.”

  “No. I’ve got it. I’m doing fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Affirmative. How many jumps have you made in the Navy?”

  Cat couldn’t quite think of the total exactly. “I don’t know. A couple dozen maybe. Why?”

  “I want you to go down to the cargo hold and put on one of those parachutes you’ll find hanging along the starboard bulkhead.”

  She glanced at the altimeter. They were back up to two thousand. There was still sufficient fuel. “Why?”

  “You have a chance to get out of this, Cat. Nobody knows you’re involved.”

  “The National Guard woman.”

  “She’s dead, right? You told me they killed her.”

  “The woman who came aboard with Gergen. We let her go.”

  “You let her go. I would have blown her brains out. But she’s not going to talk to anyone. Damn it, Cat. We’ve got the bomb. We’re in the clear. You’ve done your bit. You’ve got your reinstatement hearing coming. Why fuck that up? Put that chute on and get the hell out of here!”

  “But what about you?”

  “Look at me. I’m flying the aircraft. I’m taking it to Dover.”

  “They’ll crucify you.”

  “They’ve already done that.”

  “Burt …”

  “You said you were my friend. Do it!”

  Cat shook her head, hesitated, then rose and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Okay, Captain.”

  She descended the ladder, still reluctant, stepping gingerly over the motionless form of the tugboat skipper.

  The chute was a familiar fit but a painful one. There was no place on her body that didn’t hurt.

  With difficulty, she climbed back up the ladder to the flight deck. “I don’t want to do this, Burt.”

  “Damn it, Cat, you’re just complicating things. I don’t want to have to worry about you, okay? Now get going. I’m fine. Thousands of hours in Hercs.”

  He took his right hand from the control wheel and reached back toward her. She put her hand over his.

  “Love you, Cat.”

  “You too, Burt.”

  He squeezed her hand hard, then returned his to the controls. “I’m going to head over Cape Henlopen. With this wind, I’m going to drop you over the dunes so you don’t miss the beach and end up in the water. You’ll have to walk home.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve got to lower the ramp again. When you jump, take a running leap out the hatch so you’ll, clear the prop wash fast. Got it?”

  “Got it.” She took a step down the ladder, then halted.

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  He was right. “Good-bye, Burt.”

  “Good-bye, Cat. Hell of a time we’ve had.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hell of a good time.”

  “See you soon.”

  She descended to the cargo deck again. Moving back toward the hatch, she paused to look at the long dark shape of the bomb. Maybe one day, they would get rid of all these damned things.

  But probably not. She shuddered, and moved on to the hydraulic lever by the door. The ramp lowered swiftly when she pushed it. She could see Bethany Beach receding in the distance behind them. Below was a thin strip of barrier reef that was also part of the Delaware State Seashore. As she was looking backward, the Atlantic was on her left, the wide expanse of Rehoboth Bay to her right. Then the lights of the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk suddenly appeared below.

  She moved closer to the ramp, the flatbed truck just behind her. The garish boardwalk passed beneath, and then she could see house lights. Henlopen Acres. Houses in the woods belonging to rich people. A thin line that was the canal that linked Rehoboth with Lewes appeared just to the west.

  The beach below widened, spreading back into rolling dunes. The time had come.

  With what seemed the last strength left to her, she leaned back, then bolted forward, four quick steps taking her across the downward-angled ramp. Then she was a bird in flight. For a brief, crazed moment, she thought of spreading out her arms and sailing to earth and ending life in one final, perfect, extraordinary flight.

  But she pulled the rip cord.

  Burt could no longer see the instruments clearly. He hadn’t told Cat, but he’d taken a round through the leg in the fracas at the airport. It hadn’t hit bone. The leg still worked. But there’d been bleeding, and it hadn’t stopped. He couldn’t quite remember how many times he had gone under since. If he let it happen again, he and the bomb and this great big wonderful airplane were going into the drink.

  He didn’t want that to happen. More than anything in what life was left to him he didn’t want that to happen. And so he wouldn’t let it. Whatever it took, blurry-eyed or no, half-dead or no, he was going to Dover.

  It wasn’t that far—a flight measured in minutes. Straight up the western shore of Delaware Bay and then a quick shallow turn to the left onto final. He could do it in his sleep. He had done it in his sleep in a thousand tortured dreams. He could almost see the runway lights. And then he actually could—twin strobes at the apron, parallel rows of amber lights running back from there. It was a wide runway and went on and on forever—built to handle the biggest jumbo cargo jets known to man.

  Piece of cake.

  Burt slapped himself hard. He had let the nose drop, gathering too much speed and losing too much altitude. Adjusting his trim, powering back the engines, he pulled on flaps, then moved his hand to the landing gear control.

  He didn’t think about what might happen to him—what was most certainly going to happen to him when his beloved U.S. military got their mitts on him. None of that mattered, except he wasn’t too high on the idea of spending his last days and hours a lonely old man in some military prison hospital, expiring unvisited and unmourned.

  He worried about Cat. She was all he worried about. He’d given her a chance. He thought it was a pretty good one—if she kept her mouth shut and went by the Navy book. She’d been done wrong by that flight leader and the Navy now recognized that. They’d become highly sensitive to sex cases in the years since Tailhook and the Naval Academy scandals.

  But Cat had been through a lot—maybe too much. Like him, she’d lost pretty much everything—including, apparently, this Coast Guard man of hers, a pretty good guy, except that he wasn’t a pilot.

  She might blow it all with one little ill-timed, ill-directed, wrong-headed outburst.

  There was nothing he could do about that. All he could do was land this big bird and deliver its strange, precious, monstrous cargo to where it belonged, as he had meant to do all those years before.

  It was almost a giddy feeling, that he was doing this. That he and a few good people had accomplished what the military had not and would not. He was completing a mission—as it occurred to him, the most important mission he had ever flown.

  He lowered the gear, listening to it fall into place. Then he pulled on full flaps as he made his turn.

  Things were very blurry
now. He could barely make out the distant runway. He realized he had turned too soon, that he was not properly aligned. There was no chance for a go-around. He wasn’t sure he could stay conscious that long. He had to make this landing.

  He put on full power, slewing the Hercules to the right and crossing the approach flight path obliquely. Hitting left rudder hard, he turned back again, making yet one more turn to finally line himself up.

  But he’d put on too much power. He was much too high and the runway was fast approaching. He cut power sharply, pointing the nose down. But that gave him too much speed. He was flying like an aviation cadet on his first solo.

  Burt blinked and then rubbed his eyes, hard. He was fading fast. Seat of the pants. Get it down. Keep it straight. Get it down.

  The sudden jerk of the opening chute caused Cat to lose her shoes. She was beyond laughing at anything, but suddenly found her stupidity vastly amusing. They’d be found by some beach walker who’d presume they’d been left by some careless swimmer. But they were Catherine McGrath’s shoes. They’d be a monument to her. Maybe the only one she’d ever get.

  She put them from her mind. There was something more important to attend to. Burt had warned she might drift back over the surf, but the wind and her momentum from the C-130’s speed were carrying her north, toward Cape Henlopen itself and its narrow point. She needed to spill air and steer to stay over the beach. Otherwise she was going to get very wet.

  Tugging hard on the canopy lines, she went into a slow spiral. At what she guessed was about five hundred feet, she let go of the lines and allowed the chute to resume its forward glide.

  Her landing was hard. Her feet caught in a line of rope fencing that set the bird sanctuary apart from the public beach area, and she slammed down on her backside and elbow and rolled twice, the parachute shrouds tangling around her. Letting waves of pain rise and subside, she lay there for what seemed a very long time, then set to work extricating herself.

  When finally clear, she dragged the chute and harness to the shallow, tidal water on the lee side of the cape, carrying it out to where the canopy could catch the wind. It didn’t travel very far, collapsing a few yards farther, but it began moving out to sea.

  Then she took a deep breath. It was a long walk. She was more exhausted than she had ever been in her life. But she wanted to be in that little house of hers more than anywhere she had ever wanted to be in her life.