Black Water Transit

by Carsten Stroud

  The Barrett Model 82A1: a fifty-caliber sniper rifle that is capable of delivering a huge round at three times the speed of sound over distances of up to two miles. Almost five feet in length, superbly machined in blue steel, it weighs close to thirty pounds. It carries a heavy sniper barrel, fluted and ported, with a flared flash suppresser and bull-nosed muzzle-brake to divert the staggering propellant gasses of the huge fifty-caliber rounds. Under the barrel, just at the end of the fore-stock, there is a folding metal bipod made of flanged and drilled steel. The semi-auto receiver is angular, muscular, precision-cut as if by a German watch-maker, the right-hand cocking lever down-curved, the pistol-grip with smooth mahogany fittings set perfectly under the cheek-piece, the trigger long and slightly recurved to fit the trigger finger. The rear stock is tubular steel with an angular steel butt, padded with synthetic neoprene over hard rubber. A carrying handle is fitted just before the leading edge of the scope, angled sideways to clear the line of sight. An eleven-round detachable box magazine snaps in under the receiver block. There is a standard Leupold sniper scope fitted to the receiver mounts, but an optional Star Lite night-vision model is available, reinforced and re-engineered to withstand the massive recoil force of the weapon. Although it is as big as a barracuda and a thousand times more lethal, it rides very well in the hands, is finely balanced and easy to control. Everything fits, the ergonomics are superbly engineered, and the entire weapon is a masterpiece of the gunsmith’s art.

  There was a tab on the page that said See video?

  Oh God … why not?

  Nicky clicked on the tab, and a video clip began to run on his computer screen, with a bad sound track attached. A laconic male with a Texas accent on the voice-over reported that the video was made during the Gulf War. It showed a unit of U.S. Army Rangers that had penetrated the Iraqi forward lines at some nameless location in the endless Iraqi desert. The picture was grainy and the camera often seemed handheld, so the image was sometimes a little shaky.

  The unit had set up the Barrett on a cleft of rock at the eastern edge of a dry wash with a long view down a barren rocky valley toward a thin black highway that may have been the road to Baghdad. The camera took a position to the right and rear of the fire team, four men in desert camo, whose faces were never shown. The camera had a Telephoto lens and must have been, at that stage, tripod-mounted or braced on a rock, because it zoomed smoothly in on a small black dot moving slowly across the desert, perhaps a mile away. The air rippled and danced like a waterfall and the vehicle—an Iraqi staff car, judging from the flags on the hood—seemed to be rolling over a thin sheet of glass, probably a heat mirage.

  There was a long silence broken only by the murmuring rustle of wind over a microphone. The camera stayed on the staff car. Then someone off-camera said, “Range eighteen hundred meters,” and gave a series of numbers that Nicky recognized as windage corrections and temperature data.

  Then the sniper said, “I have him, sir.”

  Another short silence. A dry wind rustling.

  Then a single word.

  “Engage.”

  The force of the muzzle blast rocked the camera. Even on film the sound was massive, a brutal slamming explosion. The camera steadied and then regained the long image. Far away in the hazy distance, the Iraqi staff car seemed to shudder, and Nicky saw a thin puff of silvery powder jet outward from the far side of the vehicle. It may have been window glass shattering. Inside that silvery puff, darker objects, shapeless, flew from inside the car.

  The vehicle immediately lurched sideways, rudderless, and sank its front wheels into a sand drift. The driver’s door popped open and a tiny stick figure in dirty tan with some kind of scarlet flashes on the uniform collar began to stumble away to the south.

  Another word from the sniper.

  “I have him.”

  And the answer.

  “Engage.”

  Another huge cracking boom that rolled away across the desert. The stick figure seemed to straighten and lurch sidelong. Something thick and solid separated from the body of the stick figure and flew several yards farther into the desert, and the stick figure fell facedown into the dirt. There was a profound and unique stillness. The wind ruffled and rumbled across the open mike. Finally someone off-camera said, “Okay. That’s a wrap.”

  The image froze while the Texas voice-over continued. It sounded to Nicky like a sergeant speaking to a roomful of trainees.

  “That, Mouseketeers, was the Barrett M-eighty-two-A-one sniper rifle, firing the Browning point-five-zero caliber round. You saw two confirmed kills at eighteen hundred meters.

  Down a slope. In a crosswind. The projectile delivered by this weapon can penetrate an armored car, bring down a Hind attack chopper, and vaporize the skull bone of a Brahma bull at three miles. When an Iraqi column reached that staff car, they thought the colonel inside it had his head bitten clean off by a lion. The inside of the staff car was like a slaughterhouse floor. The driver on the ground had nothing between his neck and his tiny rag-head pecker but pink mist and hungry scorpions. This weapon is the very hammer of Thor. Hear me, ground-pounders, and pray to the god of battle that you never—ever—come under this hammer.”

  Needless to say, this video clip ruined Nicky’s evening. This is what had killed Jimmy Rock, and those poor ATF men. That could have killed him, too. He was still brooding on it when Casey knocked on the door and came in, sat down on the bed beside him.

  “You not asleep, Nicky?”

  “Nope. You want your room back?”

  “Not yet. You can stay here if you want. She acts up, I may have to sleep with her. She needs to be watched sometimes when she’s stressed out. She’ll leave in the middle of the night, try to buy drugs. Came home once in a patrol unit. God, I’m so tired, Nicky.”

  “Is she asleep now?” he asked, his voice a whisper.

  “Yes. She is. Finally.”

  She held up a cigarette, and Nicky lit it, and watched Casey inhale, and said nothing. Through the window of Casey’s bedroom the light was changing, turning from a pale pearl to a rich deep black.

  Nicky sighed, adjusted the pillow under his head, and stared up at the ceiling. She had offered him her room, made it clear it was the bed only. Weary to his core, facing a long run through traffic back to Yonkers, he had been too tired to argue with her. She had walked away into the living room to deal with her mother, leaving Nicky too depressed to sleep after watching the CD about the Barrett Fifty.

  He had spent the last few minutes wondering about her room. Casey must have spent days sticking literally thousands of tiny golden stars, the kind they used to give kids in school, all across a deep matte-finish, navy-blue paint. He figured that when the bedside candles were lit, the whole ceiling would look like a night sky full of glimmering golden stars. Thinking about it, he had decided to light them all. He was glad he did.

  It was a very sentimental effect, very feminine, and it puzzled Nicky how a woman as hard-nosed as Casey Spandau could have a bedroom like this. On the other hand, he thought the effect was outstanding, so he had decided to say nothing, just in case she took it as an insult and immediately painted it over. Casey blew out a cloud of smoke, bent over, and retrieved a glass of wine from the floor beside her. She sipped the wine, smiled at nothing in particular.

  “Okay … the black thing. When I was a kid, because of my mom being white, well, we couldn’t live in a white neighborhood, because she was a white woman with a black kid, we couldn’t live in a black neighborhood for the same reason. So I guess I spent my time in the middle. In ‘nobody’s town,’ I used to call it. You grow up seeing both races from the outside. Since you’re on the outside, whatever’s going on inside looks normal, how things should be.”

  “I follow,” said Nicky. “I grew up a guinea wop, the street was so tight we were like a family, in and out of everybody’s place all the time. Same food, same music, the Church.”

  “Yeah … so when I went to school and I found out I was black as
far as the school system was concerned, I had to go to the colored high school in Carthage—”

  “Was the town really called Carthage?”

  Casey smiled at that.

  “Yeah. Well, it was a burned-out town all right. There is a river there, comes down out of the Adirondacks, wide and deep and fast, and the water so dark and cold it looks black. Once I watched a dog try to get out of the current, and it was still trying when it hit the sluice gates down by the bridge. Carthage, my hometown.”

  “Anyway, you were saying?”

  “About the schools … they were rat traps. Worn out, peeling paint, no books, no supplies …”

  “Yeah, like in New York. Explain me something, Casey. If you’re half white, how come the black power stuff all the time?”

  Casey clouded over completely.

  “You ever wonder, Nicky, why black blood is so fucking potent that even one drop in your history means you’re a nigger? And while you’re at it, explain to me why it is that if you have a white mother, even your black friends think you’re an Oreo, and you can’t be happy in either race?”

  Nicky kept his mouth shut, which was a smart move. He reached out, took her hand in his. She let him. He touched her cheek. He felt a deep shaking tremor run through her. She reached for another cigarette, lit it with short hard motions, and kept her body half turned away. Nicky was silent. He was looking up at the starfield above them. The candle flames flickered and the ceiling shimmered with soft golden sparks. It was possibly the silliest and certainly the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  “Casey, is it all about these gold stars?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Gold stars, like you get at school. Are you doing this for your mom so you can get a gold star? From her, I mean?”

  “I never thought about it. But thanks anyway, Oprah.”

  “I sound like Oprah? Thank you. I think.”

  “Nicky, Oprah Winfrey is a forty-watt bulb. She shines, but she’s dim. People are drowning in shit, she throws them a little wicker basket of positive affirmation. I once heard her refer to a bunch of Crip thugs in South Central as ‘sad little boys crying bullets.’ I mean, give me a break. My mother’s a doper and I’m her keeper. That’s reality.”

  “Well, you gotta do something about it.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But something. You need to do something that’s good for you, not just your mother, or the city, or the goddamn NYPD. Something just for you.”

  Casey turned to look down at him.

  “Really? What did you have in mind?”

  SATURDAY, JUNE 24

  HIGHWAY 11 WESTBOUND

  EASTERN PENNSYLVANIA

  0430 HOURS

  Sometime during that night-long run down to Allenwood Prison, they began to track the Susquehanna River. Jack could get glimpses of its wide flat reach as they flew through the hilly countryside, the rippling surface of the big river gilded with tiny yellow flames under the light of a yellow moon, the river water half seen through spiderweb gray tangles of scrub brush and spindly trees. Here and there along the course of the river he could see the outlines of low islands in its stream, where the river would boil and bubble around their shores, making the yellow moonlight that glinted off it spark and flare in the darkness that seemed to lie in the deeper valleys and ravines.

  Against the screen of stars, he could make out the rounded hump-backed shapes of conical hills as uniform and regular as if they were man-made, looking like great mounds of coal or the tailings of a huge open-seam mine. Along the far shore of the river there were necklaces and chains of cold white and green and violet lights shaped into grids and rectangles and towers and arcs, and inside one of these constructions he’d seen a tall steel tower with a plume of fire at its tip, burning bloody-red and cobalt-blue and sulfur-yellow, fluttering crazily, plucked and flaring in a smoking wind.

  Between the narrow winding track of the highway and the riverbanks there was a rail line. Now and then, as they drove through the countryside, a freight train would keep pace with them. Jack could see the spray of red sparks coming off the brake pads as the train slowed its descent down a valley slope or chuffed into a siding, picking up speed again as it cleared a ridge. It slowly pulled away from them, and faintly through the greasy windows of the van he heard the steady drumming of steel wheels on the tracks.

  Then there’d be an explosion of town lights as they raced through some run-down village and Jack could see by the pale-yellow glow of the street lamps the boarded-up facades of wooden row houses with sagging porches and peeling paint, the hulks of rusted cars parked under low tumbledown shelters.

  Here and there in the tiny front yards was a brightly painted swing set or a pair of shabby lawn chairs, and once as they flew past, Jack got a brief but oddly memorable glimpse through a bay window into a front room where a fat old man in a white T-shirt sat on a stuffed chair and stared intently into the flickering glow of a hidden television, all of this lit by a single overhead bulb.

  Then the scene was behind them and they were back in the country again, the road ahead a tunnel of spidery gray trees caught inside the hard white cones of the headlamps. In the sudden dark, he had nothing to look at but the pale glint of his handcuffs and the greenish light that came up from the dashboard and outlined the shapes of the guards through the grid of the steel cage that held him.

  Callahan drove and played country music on a Nashville station while Buster, in the shotgun seat, chain-smoked menthol Kools the entire run. Jack could see the red spark of the cigarette as Buster turned to speak to Callahan, see the tip flare as he drew on it, and when he exhaled the green light made the smoke luminous, and sometimes Buster would look up into a convex prisoner-view mirror over his seat and stare directly at Jack, never speaking—you don’t speak to meat—his scarred-up face greenish and alien in the glow of the control panel, his eyes dead spaces. The smoke of the cigarette would drift backward through the wire grid and fill up the inside of the cage so that for months afterward, whenever he smelled a certain kind of menthol cigarette smoke, he would see that same blurred tunnel of tangled gray trees and the black ribbon of the two-lane blacktop in the headlamp glare and the weird green light that glowed through the drifting smoke inside the van. When a sun the color of a rose-pink lightbulb climbed high enough in the sky to turn the trees and the grassy hillsides from gray to pale purple, Callahan saw a Denny’s sign near a mile marker and turned around in her seat to look at Jack slumped on the prisoner’s bench, his head resting on the window glass.

  “Hey there, Heck. You ever have that nature call?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Jack, in his exhaustion, that he did need a washroom, but when he remembered, it suddenly became a priority.

  “No. But I sure as hell need one now.”

  Callahan laughed, looked back at the road.

  “A Denny’s. Couple miles up. Me and Buster, we always stop here. You can get a good breakfast. I love the Grand Slam. We’ll stop, get us some coffee, get you drained and cleaned up. Can’t have you showing up for your very first day in prison looking like we dragged you backward through a bramble. Makes a poor impression.”

  Buster grunted, reached up, tapped the rearview, and looked across at Callahan, who checked the mirror and narrowed her brown eyes, tightened her lips up.

  “Hey, cowboy. You know anybody in a blue Benz?”

  Jack twisted around in his shackles, craned to look out the rear window panels. There was a large navy-blue Mercedes-Benz following them, perhaps a quarter mile back. As he watched it, it seemed to be gaining on them, its blue-white headlamps on high. The glow from the beams lit up the inside of the van and Jack squinted against the glare.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  Callahan jumped at that, and Buster turned to glower at him.

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know who this is. But the guy who got me into this shit drives a blue Mercedes-Benz that looks a
lot like this one here.”

  “Well, Buster first noticed him way back there, outside of Nanticoke. He’s been laying back a mile or so ever since.”

  Although Jack found it hard to believe that Earl Pike would be hunting a U.S. marshals van, he found his breath coming short, and Callahan picked up on his reaction.

  “Not a friend, I take it,” said Callahan.

  “No. Not a friend. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

  “Well, he’s coming up fast now the light’s getting better.”

  The big Benz was clearly accelerating to overtake them. The headlamp glare filled the interior of the truck. Callahan reached down and pulled something out of a slide drawer, and when she straightened she was holding a large Glock pistol. Buster now had a short-barreled shotgun in his hands and was glaring into the mirror, watching the oncoming car as it moved out to pass. Jack tried to see who was driving the car, but the light from the lamps was too strong. The Benz came alongside, and Jack turned to watch it pass. White plates. He couldn’t make out the state or the numbers. The plates were coated with mud and road dust. The windows were heavily tinted. He heard the sound of a big engine winding out. Buster tracked the passing car and held the shotgun tight. It blew by the van without slowing, cut back into the lane in front of them, and moved away fast, finally disappearing around a curve of two-lane blacktop.

  Callahan tapped Buster’s shotgun lightly.

  “You got that musket right in my face, Buster.”

  Buster lowered the shotgun, settled back in the seat.

  “Guess it was nothing, hah, cowboy? Unless you recognized the driver? I couldn’t see anybody myself. Windows were too dark.”

  “Neither could I. But I don’t think Pike’s Benz had tinted windows. I can’t remember. Did you get the plates?”

  “Maybe New York. I got three of the numbers.”

  She picked up the microphone.

  “Marshals four five, radio?”

  The radio hissed and popped and settled into a low white noise, like water rushing over sand. Callahan looked at the conical hills all around them, the rocky ravines and gullies, shook her head.