“What causes them?”
He chuckled. “Officials claim that what residents are hearing is the continental shelf shifting, which lets methane gas escape and explode in the ocean. That’s what the newspaper reports.”
“What do you think?”
“Sheeeit,” he said, drawing out the four-letter word. “Locals have always said it’s Sunny Point blowing something up. Doing tests, maybe. Or getting rid of old stuff. But my whole point is that they’re real secretive. For good reason, I suppose.”
“But you’re on the water all the time. You must go right by there.”
“True, but you can’t get near Sunny Point in a boat. There’s a large area of restricted waters surrounding the place, patrolled by the Coast Guard. You travel the shipping channel on the river just going by and they come over the radio right quick. Tell you to keep moving and don’t enter the restricted waters.”
“Okay, so when container ships are loaded up with their cargo at Sunny Point, how do they get to the ocean?”
“You ain’t been out on your boat much lately, have you?”
I rubbed my temples, thinking that I might be on my boat more than I wanted to in the upcoming weeks. “Been working too much when I’m supposed to be retired. Humor me.”
He reached into a shirt pocked and produced a Goody’s aspirin powder for me. “Well, they have wharfs just off the shipping channel. Once a ship is loaded, it runs southwest on the Cape Fear, along the shipping channel. Same route commercial and pleasure boats take. About eight nautical miles along, the ship passes Bald Head Island and heads into open water.”
“Open water meaning the Atlantic Ocean, right?”
“Ain’t the Pacific, Jersey. You sure you weren’t brain-damaged? Yes, the Atlantic. From there, a container ship can go anywhere. In the case of Sunny Point cargo, most ships are probably headed for the Middle East.”
“And these boats are packed with all kinds of hazardous cargo and explosives,” I mused aloud. “How many containers are on one ship?”
Pete looked upward to think. “I reckon an average cargo ship is about three hundred meters long and might could hold four or five thousand forty-foot containers. Same size boxes you see on an eighteen-wheeler, going down the highway. ’Course, some cargo ships are much smaller and others are much bigger.”
I’d seen the cargo ships and knew exactly what Pete was describing. They are giants. More curious was the fact that John had purposely directed me to think about the incoming shipments when being “helpful” by giving me the printed schedule. But he’d dismissed the outgoing schedules as unreliable.
“How many men are on board?”
“Ships are so automated now that they operate with small crews. Maybe eight or ten men on an average cargo ship.”
I bid good-bye to Captain Pete, grateful now more than ever that he’d taught me how to operate my boat. I still wasn’t adept at backing into slips but would have to take my chances. I finished packing, stuffed Mama Jean’s autopsy report and my other MOTSU paperwork into a briefcase, rounded up some food and weapons, left a note reminding Spud to feed the dog, and let Ox know that I’d be taking off for a few days. He understood it was for the safety of others and didn’t try to dissuade me. To the contrary, he’d already figured out my next move before I had, and simply handed over the keys to his truck.
Once on the road, I spotted my government tail immediately and lost them just as quickly before heading to the day spa, where I parked Ox’s truck and went in for my facial. Afterward, I took a cab to the Cape Fear Marina.
TWENTY-TWO
Ashton was fuming when I called him from Incognito and he let me know it. “You purposely evaded our coverage”—his word for surveillance—”which by the way, was there for your protection.”
“I didn’t mean to, really. I wasn’t even paying attention.”
He did the throat clearing thing, his way of silently counting to ten. “Where are you?”
“Just enjoying a few days on the water, Ash. You did pull me from the assignment and told me to rest and recuperate after my concussion,” I said into the bulky—and untraceable—satellite phone that Soup installed on my boat.
“I don’t care where you are, I expect to hear from you every day by oh-nine-hundred and again by twenty-one-hundred hours. No exceptions.”
I had tied up outside Fishy Fishy but left the generator running to keep the cabin cool and the water pumps on. The leather sofa perfectly accommodated my stretched-out body, and the flat-screen plasma television was tuned to a digital music station. Nursing my first beer since the car explosion, it occurred to me that my headache had finally dissipated. “Sure,” I agreed. “I’ll call you twice a day. What shall we talk about?”
“Don’t press it, Agent Barnes.”
“No, sir.”
Satisfied I wasn’t in immediate danger, Ashton calmed enough to have a real conversation. The search of John’s place yielded nothing except books on topics from surveillance to hand-to-hand combat, my former handler told me, which wasn’t unusual considering John’s occupation. He’d come up clean. To top that off, the investigation into Mama Jean’s strangulation hadn’t churned up any suspects. Numerous people visited her residence—including John, by his own admission—but nobody with an apparent motive. There was no blood, no murder weapon, and not even a missing button that might have been ripped off during a struggle. Nothing. The neighbors weren’t helpful, either. No unusual observations and no ideas on who might want to harm Mama Jean. The murder simply didn’t make sense, everyone said.
Ashton was difficult to read over the phone, but he obviously didn’t share my distrust of John. Either that, or he was frustrated by the lack of pointers, as he liked to call them. Arrows of logic, clues, observations, or pieces of the puzzle that pointed to the truth. Once the pointers sent his team in the right direction, it was a simple matter of digging. Disturbingly, nobody knew where to dig.
He cleared his throat. “Some shrimpers found a body this morning, just out from Holden Beach. A male, probably late forties, obvious homicide. Dumped after he was dead and weighted down with two cinder blocks to keep him on the bottom.”
“Ick.”
“I never did understand your hang-up about dead bodies, considering your impressive combat skills.” Something buzzed and clicked in the background.
“Sorry, Ash, but you won’t be able to trace this call. And the dead-body thing probably has something to do with my grandfather chopping the head off a yard chicken and making me watch while the body continued to run without a head. Don’t remember a damn thing about kindergarten or first grade, but I remember the chickens. Chickens totally freak me out, too. Chickens and dead bodies.”
He started to clear his throat but sighed instead. “It would seem that an undertow carried the body into the shrimp boat’s trawling area and the starboard-side dredge snagged it. When the crew pulled up their haul and dumped it on deck, a body rolled out along with all the shrimp.”
“How did he die?”
“Haven’t identified him yet, but the medical examiner says he was strangled.”
“Just like Mama Jean,” I said, unable to stop myself from glancing at the water’s surface surrounding Incognito. Creepy. “Could they be related?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Strangulation is one of the leading ways to murder somebody.”
“But?” Ashton wouldn’t have brought it up if not relevant.
“The body contained a very unique tattoo over the left bicep. A flaming skull with a beret.”
I drank some beer, enjoying the coolness at the back of my throat. “The beret may indicate he was an army ranger.”
“Right. And John’s brother, the twin who died in combat, was an army ranger. The entire unit was killed at the same time, except for one man.”
“I know,” I said, before I realized it. Between enlisting help from Soup and my partner Rita, both of whom are magnificent researchers, I’d already read a detailed account of the
attack that took the twin’s life. But Ashton didn’t need to know that, especially since he’d already reprimanded me for investigating instead of observing. The concussion must have caused my stupid neurons to multiply. “I mean, really? They all died except one?”
He did the clear-the-throat thing again. “We’re checking to see if any photographs of the soldiers’ bodies were taken for identification purposes. See if the same tattoo shows up.”
“Anything else on the dead guy?” I wondered if the shrimpers processed their haul of shrimp—the same catch that mingled with a dead, bloated body. Of course they would have. Money is money. I might never eat another steamed shrimp again.
“Funny you ask. A security card—the kind you swipe through a reader—was found inside a shoe. Traced it to a self-storage facility near Supply, North Carolina. Got some people there now, along with a bomb squad just in case.”
We talked some more, probably just long enough for Ashton to realize that he really couldn’t lock on to my location, and he abruptly ended the conversation with a reminder that I was off the case. And a demand to be careful, along with some sort of a threat about losing my government pension due to insubordination. He may have also said something about a fine line, and me walking it, but I’d tuned him out by then.
Gently lapping water always puts me in a Utopian mood. I climbed the ladder to the covered flybridge to read my three newspapers and enjoy both my beer and the heightened breezes. An occasional stray seagull squawked, the sun played hide-and-seek with puffy clouds, and happy people had begun streaming into Fishy Fishy in search of lunch. When grilling smells drifted my way, I decided to join them.
TWENTY-THREE
It was going to be a most productive day, John thought, as he broke the seal on a short container loaded with C-4 explosive. Once inside, he was thrilled to find that this box had a damaged seam in the wall, which created an outlet of sorts. Perfect to run a receiver’s soft wire antenna so it would hang outside the box—a receiver that attached to a pocket-sized detonator. Small enough to go unnoticed in his pants pocket, but plenty big enough to do the job.
Working quickly, John double-checked the container’s contents against a bill of lading, just as he’d done with several others to ensure the government wasn’t getting ripped off by suppliers. Spot-checking outgoing inventory had been a regular part of his duties for years. Only today, he worked solo. Random counts were always performed by two people, but the other uniform hadn’t so much as flinched when John sent him on an emergency errand. Heart racing, John scribbled check marks on the clipboard and worked his way back to the damaged spot in the container wall. He saw that the wood pallets of product were perfectly spaced apart, and smiled. He would not have to rearrange anything to install the detonator, or run the small antenna wire—his insurance—to the exterior of the box. He’d secured the best electronics available, but would not take the chance that the remote-control signal might not penetrate the shell of the metal. The result of years of waiting and planning, this mission was too important to screw up with an oversight. Even the weather forecast was cooperating, as though the man upstairs had blessed tomorrow’s big event.
“Ready to load this one, boss?” an AJAT worker called through the container’s open rear doors. He saw John kneeling, tying a shoelace in the cramped quarters.
“Came up one pallet short but I think it’s my math,” John told him. “I didn’t get nearly enough sleep last night, but, hey. She was worth it.”
The man grinned.
John stood up, wiped the sweat from his face. “I’ll do a recount, to be sure. Give me five minutes.”
“Got it,” the man said, and relayed the information to the crane operator via two-way radio.
John finished the installation in less than two minutes. He exited the sweltering container, shut the doors, and applied a special security seal, coded to indicate that the container had been randomly examined. With a hand motion, he gave the okay for loading. Even though he knew exactly where the container would be set, he watched with the anxiety of an all-or-nothing gambler waiting for photo-finish race results. Though his face remained impassive beneath dark shades, John’s sigh of satisfaction would have been audible to anyone listening. It was perfectly set, so that the detonator’s antenna wasn’t blocked in by other containers. How ironic that small amounts of RDX, the main ingredient in C-4, were also used to make commercial fireworks. Thoroughly proud of himself, John reveled in the knowledge that he was going to put on a spectacular show that would be seen from miles and miles away.
Finally, he would atone for his twin’s death. The military sent his brother into a battle zone and the military should have outfitted him properly. It would have cost less than a tank full of gas per soldier to provide stronger helmets and body armor. But in their haste, the policymakers didn’t take into account the safety of their soldiers. They simply hadn’t cared.
John’s meticulously packaged explosive charge and the detonator would easily trigger an explosion of the nearest carton of C-4. That explosion would almost instantaneously blow the entire container load of C-4. The rest would be an unprecedented event. High-charge ammunitions for the M1A1 Abrams main battle tank, firing into the crowd, killing those who’d escaped the wrath of flaming, flying metal. A destroyed residence, or maybe twelve or twenty homes. An indeterminable number of secondary explosions. The prettiest, loudest, brightest, and most deadly fireworks display ever seen from the shores of Southport. All launched from a pocket-sized detonator built in his root cellar.
The U.S. military, main manufacturer of the putty-like material, praised C-4’s stability. It was relatively safe, everyone knew, since it needed both heat and pressure to blow. They were right about its characteristics. John had experimented with bar soap—sized bricks of the material and learned for himself that the claim was true: a bullet fired directly into C-4 didn’t do anything. Once, he’d shaved off pieces and set them on fire, only to watch them slowly burn, like a tiny campfire. By tomorrow night, though, the world would be talking about C-4 and wondering if it was really as safe as first thought. Nobody would know what triggered the original explosion on the container ship. No evidence would remain. No crewmen to tell their tales, either. Details of the most fabulous explosion ever on water would belong to him, and only him.
Midnight would be here before he knew it, John thought, consulting his diver’s watch. He finished his shift as usual and went home to rest, so he’d be fresh and physically strong. One more detail needed tending to.
TWENTY-FOUR
Peggy Lee delighted the solace she found in the laboratory. Even though it was an extension of the company, she worked solo and had come to think of it as her personal place. After all, Chuck had built it specifically for the first phase of Project Antisis, and she was the head chemist. She was the only chemist on the project, aside from him, and his involvement was merely oversight. She had the IQ to make it happen and he knew it. He loved her for her brains and her ability to reason and think things through—not for something as insubstantial as big breasts or shiny hair. Looks faded with time. Skin sagged and eyelids drooped. But the ability to implement a project that would change the world … that was substantial. That was an accomplishment to last forever.
Elbow deep into purified gel from the leafy shiff bush, Peggy Lee’s thoughts strayed to her wedding. Of course there wasn’t yet a ring or a date, but she knew it was coming. If she had any friends, she would have jumped at the chance to be in one of their weddings as a bridesmaid, just to get some ideas. She would have been happy just to attend someone else’s wedding. It would be sort of like relishing in the foreplay, creating savory anticipation for the real deal.
She found the small vial she’d dropped into the vat, retrieved it, and washed her hands and arms. Automatically, she dipped her fingers into a pile of waxy substance, residual from manufacturing the original purified gel. Made up of pureed fibers, seeds, and the guts of the plant, Peggy Lee had discovered that it made
a wonderful moisturizer. It even had a pleasant smell. Of course, she used very little of the real wild leafy shiff bush, since she’d found a way to manufacture a chemically identical, synthetic version. But, perhaps she’d talk Chuck into marketing the plant by-product as a high-end cosmetic or at the least, a hand lotion.
Her daydreams strayed back to Llewellyn’s Bridal Shoppe, and the mother and daughter she’d seen shopping there. Peggy Lee wasn’t a nosy person by nature, she thought, but she remembered everything she’d heard that day, right down to the street location and date of the wedding. Even if they were checking a guest list and she couldn’t get in, she could certainly watch the outdoor ceremony from the beach. After all, anybody could go to Bald Head Island as long as they had a boat, or didn’t mind taking the ferry. It’s not like only the rich people were allowed.
Although, it would be nice to join the ranks of the wealthy, Peggy Lee thought, smiling at her stainless-steel vats and tables of shiny equipment. Soon, she could have anything, including an oceanfront house on an island and her very own yacht. Very soon. The chemist decided to lock up the lab and head home early so she could pick out something to wear to the wedding. She knew the bride’s name was Janie, and wondered if Janie would have used her as a bridesmaid, had they been old friends. Probably not. But Peggy Lee would enjoy the wedding, just the same, because it would be her turn next.
TWENTY-FIVE
John awakened at precisely midnight, drank a protein shake, and headed for his root cellar to collect scuba-diving gear and tools. He was pleased to find the marina quiet. The few live-aboards appeared to be asleep and their boats were dark, shades pulled. He smeared on camouflage grease streaks and motored quietly out of the slip.
The familiar waterways whispered encouragement as John navigated his twin-engine offshore fishing boat beneath a sliver of moonlight, without flipping on his navigation lights. Outfitted in a solid black wet suit, he felt powerful, invisible, unstoppable. John arrived at the allocated rendezvous spot three minutes before two o’clock in the morning. Equipped with his own diving gear, Fred waited in a jon boat. Another of John’s hired men, Fred had been so startled by the photograph of his dead team member, he knew better than to make John angry by being late. The boss was getting out of control. But he paid well, and Fred needed the money. They tied off to a cypress tree trunk in the small alcove, and—carrying an assortment of supplies including a battery-powered scuba propulsion unit—waded into the Cape Fear River.
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