The Moonpool cr-3

by P. T. Deutermann

  I told him it did indeed, and drove out to catch the ferry that crossed the Cape Fear River estuary. I got to Carolina Beach and drove down to the city marina. I left the dogs in the Suburban and went to the office, where an elderly guy, whose well-used cap read CAP’N PETE , asked if he could help me. I explained who I was and that I was looking for Colonel Trask, who I understood kept a live-aboard boat here. He pointed out the window to one of the piers, where I could see a largish cabin cruiser with the word KEEPER in white lettering across its transom.

  “Right there she is,” he said. “But he isn’t here. Haven’t seen him for a coupl’a days now.”

  “Any possibility we could get aboard?”

  “Got a warrant?”

  “Nope.”

  “There’s your answer, then.”

  I asked him to wait for a moment and put a call in to Ari at the plant. He sounded harassed but understood my problem. I handed the phone to Cap’n Pete, who listened.

  “Best I can do,” he said, handing me back the phone. “I’ll go aboard, see if he’s okay or even there. That help?”

  “That would help a lot,” I said. “It’s not like him to go off the grid for this long.”

  “Then you don’t know him,” he said. “Because that old boy does it all the time.”

  “Yeah, but when he does, he’s usually ambushing his own security crew over there at Helios.”

  “Not exactly what I meant,” he said, reaching for a set of keys. “I was talking about him going out at night and coming back in the midmorning. You know he collects snakes?”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  “He showed me one of ’em, one time. I thought it was a goddamned fire hose until it coiled. Had it right there, on board. Nobody fucks with that boat. C’mon.”

  I followed him out the door as we went down toward the piers. “Most of the owners here, we see ’em either once, twice a year or on every weekend. We got us maybe ten live-ons here; the rest are all just slip renters. But the colonel? He’s the onliest one goes out at night. All the damn time.”

  Which could still be all about testing his security crew over at Helios, I thought. “Does that mean he’s a fairly competent seaman?”

  Cap’n Pete nodded. “Keeps his charts and safety gear up to date, handles that old dog like a pretty woman. Knows the tide tables. Can print out his met charts right on board. Refuels the moment he comes in. Runs a tight ship, he does.”

  “When he goes, he go into the river estuary or out to sea?”

  “Ain’t nobody knows,” he said. “Or asks, for that matter. Here we go.”

  The main piers were open to pedestrians, but the finger piers where the boats actually tied up were blocked by chain-link sections and key-carded. His skeleton key opened the gate and bypassed the electronic devices.

  The Keeper was second outboard, her bow pointed out. I’m no expert, but even I could see that she’d been well maintained. Her brightwork was polished, the hull paint clean, and the bitter ends of the mooring lines were coiled into tight white spirals. There was none of the usual recreational junk I’d seen on the other boats-bloodstained coolers, rods and lines, bait baskets, dirty clothes-anywhere in evidence. There was a small inflatable dinghy hoisted on davits above the main cabin, and even the davit sheaves were polished. The high bow had a reinforcing knife-edge on it to ward off logs and snags in the river, and this was polished, too.

  Cap’n Pete asked me to wait on the pontoon pier and then walked up the short companionway to the fantail of the boat. He banged his key ring on the railing and called out for Trask. There was no reply. He went aboard through a gate in the railing, tried the aft cabin door, found it locked. He knocked on the door and called again. Silence. He looked at me and shook his head.

  “If he’d had a heart attack and was inside, what would you do?”

  “Call 911,” he replied promptly, and then realized what I was asking. He said, “Oh,” and went forward, peering into the cabin windows along the main deck. Then he went up a side ladder to the pilothouse area, found a door unlocked, and went into the interior of the boat. He was back in about a minute.

  “Ain’t nobody home,” he said. “And that’s about all I can do, legal-like.”

  I thanked him for looking, gave him one of my cards, and asked him to call me if Trask showed up.

  He examined the card and then declared that he’d give it to Trask, when and if he showed up, and that he would call me, assuming he wanted to. I smiled and thanked him again. Cap’n Pete looked out for his permanent people.

  I called Pardee from the car and told him I’d found the boat but no Trask. He reported that they were about a half hour north of Southport. He said Moira was a happy camper. She had purchased not one but two computers, and apparently the university had continued to direct-deposit her salary during the time she’d been “away.” The Octopus covering its bets. Interesting program.

  Pardee had a question. “Seems to me,” he said, “that Trask would be all over a major problem in the plant. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

  I told him it had certainly crossed my mind, but until those daring divers got there, we wouldn’t know anything.

  I just made the Southport-bound ferry, parking on the very back of the boat. The ferry pulled out, but then slowed way down. The captain made an announcement on the topside speakers that the ferry at the other end had been delayed by a mechanical problem and that there would be a thirty-minute hold. We were all invited to enjoy the scenery while he milled about smartly in the river.

  I got out of my car and walked up through the rows and lanes to the superstructure to get some fresh air. I left the shepherds in the car; the last thing I needed was for Frick to see a seagull flying by and make one of her impulsive bad judgments. Other people had also gotten out of their vehicles and were enjoying the afternoon, which was cool, clear, and breezy.

  Then I saw a familiar face. It was Anna Petrowska’s number two at the moonpool. I didn’t remember his name, but I definitely recognized his face. He hadn’t seen me, or at least I didn’t think he had. I wondered what he’d been doing over in Carolina Beach when there was a dead body in his moonpool. He was talking to someone on a cell phone, so I went around to the other side of the superstructure and made a call of my own.

  Ari answered on the second ring. “Anything?” he asked.

  I told him about my visit to Carolina Beach, and then asked if he had the divers lined up.

  “There was a crew finishing up a project up at our plant near Raleigh; they’ll be here in about an hour.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll have to go through all the safety checks and briefs, set the bridge up so the handlers can do their thing, and all that. Two hours or so, then the guy can actually go down. But.”

  “But?”

  “They tell me a minicam won’t be of much use for making an ID-the water’s too turbulent around the stack. And they can’t get that close. There are several fairly young bundles in that stack.”

  I thought about that. “Well, then, call the local cops and get some of their drowning-incident grappling gear. They don’t have to know where you’re going to put it.”

  He laughed, although it was the short bark of an unhappy laugh. “It’s not like they’ll be getting it back,” he said. “Come by in an hour; maybe you’ll see something interesting.”

  “Can’t wait,” I said. Having seen some floaters before, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

  I joined the small crowd standing on the platform above the moonpool. It was, if anything, hotter and more humid in the chamber, and our paper moonsuits didn’t help. A steel, gantry-like motorized bridge was positioned out over the pool. There were four handlers on the bridge, all concentrating on the stream of bubbles foaming up beneath them and a bundle of cables, tubes, and smaller wires leading down into the water to a dark, helmeted shape. A compressor was clattering away on the side of the pool. Two nervous-looking Brunswick
County EMS techs were waiting by the main access door, with a body bag folded discreetly at their feet.

  Dr. Anna Petrowska was sitting at a console inside the control room, wearing the same kind of headphones that one of the techs out on the bridge was wearing. Her hair shimmered in the fluorescent light, but the steel glasses she wore took all the pretty right out of her fiercely concentrating face. Three more of her people were watching assorted instruments. Ari, dressed out in a white suit, was standing at the railing with some of his people. He walked over when he saw me come in.

  “Can they get to it?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know yet,” he said. “We’ve had to change the cooling water circulation around the fuel bundles. That’s why it’s so warm in here.”

  “How does this work?”

  “One diver on a platform that can be raised and lowered from that bridge. Another diver in contact with the diver who’s down. The guy in the water is covered in TLDs. They get readings every five feet, and that portable out there computes the allowable stay-time.”

  “He seen anything useful?” I asked.

  “Only that the body is stuck headfirst in the fuel assembly matrix.” He looked at me. “That’s the hottest part of the pool. Not good.”

  “How the hell…?”

  “The suction grates for the water circulation system are directly under the fuel elements.”

  It was bad enough the guy was dead. But sucked down into the glowing water around the fuel elements? I shivered, even in the hot air. “You get grapples?” I asked.

  He pointed to the bridge, where I saw the usual drowning retrieval gear and a frightened-looking cop in a white suit trying his best not to look down into that glowing water. Then one of the bridge techs was talking to him.

  They slowly began lowering the grapple hooks down into the pool while the radio tech talked them through the positioning process. Petrowska signaled for Ari to join her in the control room. I went with him.

  “The diver’s about three meters over the stack,” she said, pointing to a television display. I could see the shape of the diver shimmering on the screen. He was hard-hatted, and the top of his head was emitting a stream of truly beautiful bubbles. “I’ve shut off the circ pumps, so we have some hydrogen generation and rising temps. That will be as low as he can go. He’s got sixty more seconds to get that hook on, and then we’ll have to extract him.”

  “How hot?”

  “Rems,” she said. Initially, that didn’t mean anything to me, but it sure got Ari’s attention. Then I remembered that our personal dosimeters measured millirems. Milli, as in one thousandth of a rem.

  I swallowed. There was a reason why that water was glowing down there. I wondered if the diver could see his TLDs.

  The radio tech on the bridge suddenly signaled a thumbs-up. One of the others helped the cop pull on the grapple rope, while the others began to raise the suspended platform to get their buddy the hell out of his radiation bath.

  The diver came up a lot faster than the body, which was understandable. He had something to lose; the corpse no longer did. But when the body broke the surface, my heart sank. The grapple had hooked the man’s belt at the back, so the body was bent in half at the waist.

  That wasn’t the bad part, though.

  From about the collarbones up, there was nothing but gleaming white bone. No skin. Just a blue-white, shining skull with no face.

  And certainly no ID.

  Until I saw the small, black knife pouch on the man’s right boot as he dangled, dripping, on the chain. I’d seen that knife before.

  “I think that’s Carl Trask,” I said, pointing to that boot knife.

  “Oh, shit,” Ari muttered. He stared at the faceless figure. The height, weight, general build made it possible. “I think it is.”

  One of the techs, looking a bit unwell, pointed a distant-reading radiation monitor at the sodden figure and shook his head. He signaled the bridge people, and the body was lowered back into the moonpool to a depth of about ten feet.

  Anna Petrowska was staring at Ari over the upper rim of her eyeglasses from inside the control room, as if asking Tony’s favorite question: Now what?

  Great question, I thought. Ari Quartermain’s face was a study in anxiety.

  “We need the second diver to go down,” he said. “That’s not a body anymore. That’s highly radioactive nuclear waste. We’re definitely going to have to entomb that.”

  A few hours later, Ari and I were sitting in the front seat of my Suburban sipping some Scotch from my emergency flask. To say that things had become complicated would be the understatement of the year.

  First, they’d had to get the second, unexposed diver suited up and into the water to bag the body, which was now suspended on a chain in the moonpool, because the first diver down had come dangerously close to going over his annual TLD limits. Then they’d brought the bag up and called in the foam team, who’d proceeded to do the same routine on the bag that they’d done on the truck. This produced a white, oblong semisolid object some eight feet in length that was still capable of setting off radiation alarms.

  The Bureau had told Ari to call them when he had a body on deck. He duly made the call, but then had to explain that there was probably not going to be a proper identification, much less an autopsy. This news did not sit well with our Bureau. They’d told him to freeze the scene and await the imminent arrival of adult supervision. I took that as a clear signal to fold my tents and steal away into the desert night.

  I told Ari that I’d wait outside in my vehicle and got one of the vital area techs to escort me back out of the building. I called my guys at the beach house and brought them up to date and, once again, instructed them to be vigilant. Tony said he had one shepherd on the front porch and the other lurking in the back garage with the door open. Moira had gone to bed, but he and Pardee were planning to keep watch for a while. I reminded them that, if the G did show up in the night, they’d be after Moira and me, not them. Tony gently reminded me about the role of co-conspirators in the double-oh-jay statutes.

  “Our threat to go public with their detention operation was a holding action, at best,” I said. “You guys don’t have to babysit her or me. You want to bail, you probably should.”

  “You just want to be alone with the wild woman,” Tony said.

  “She’s as scary as the Bureau right now,” I said.

  “She’s got some interesting shit pre-positioned on her computer, and she backed it all up on Pardee’s. That girl’s a hot sketch, you know that?”

  “Remember her nickname, paisan,” I said. “Chances are, she earned it.”

  “What-me worry? Nice redheaded Catholic girl like that?”

  Now Ari was looking longingly at the flask, but then decided against it.

  “So,” I said. “Who or what put Carl Trask in the moonpool?”

  He shook his head slowly, as if he still didn’t believe it. “He pissed people off all the time, but everybody knew he was just doing his job-as he saw it. I can’t finger a single soul who’d want to kill the man.”

  I thought briefly about Billy the Kid, but then saw the improbability. “Well, we should be able to narrow down the suspect list pretty quick,” I said. “It has to be someone with access to that building and all three levels of security.”

  He looked over at me in the gloom of the parking lot. “Not if it was Trask who took his killer in there,” he said. “Then it could be anybody.”

  “But the cameras, the card readers-won’t they show who went in, and when?”

  “The FBI’s all over that as we speak,” he said. “And the short answer is-yes.”

  “Short answer?”

  “Well, you know what can be done with video-camera data, if someone knows how.”

  “C’mon, Ari-you’ve been watching too many movies. That’s harder than it looks, and it implies some detailed planning and premeditation. And I’ll warn you right now: The Bureau is going to want a sit-down with you, a
nd it won’t be a casual conversation.”

  “Well, I am the head of technical security.”

  “And because this just about has to be an inside job. C’mon: You must have a theory about what the hell’s going on here.”

  He stared out the window for a long moment. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his cell phone chirped. He sighed and looked at the data window. Then he answered it.

  In response to a question, he said he was outside, getting some fresh air. Then he looked over at me, his eyes widening. “No way,” he said. “Where’d they get that?”

  He listened some more, then said he had no idea but that he’d be back inside in five minutes. He snapped his phone shut.

  “That was your favorite Russian,” he said. “The Bureau’s apparently turned up a tape showing you and Trask going through the moonpool security tiers. She confirmed to them that you had been up there tonight. She said they wanted to know if I knew where you were.”

  “Yes, you do,” I replied. “I’m gone.”

  Two hours later, Tony nosed our boat alongside Carl Trask’s Keeper over in the Carolina Beach marina. We’d come through the narrow defile of Snow’s Cut and down the city dock channel to the marina at idle and with our running lights off. The Keeper was tied up on one of the outboard finger piers because of her deeper draft, which kept her two piers away from most of the other live-on boats. Tony brought our boat alongside, squished some fenders, and then held her steady. I passed the shepherds up onto the Keeper ’s deck, and then Moira and I followed. The marina office was dark, as were all the boats that we could see, and nobody seemed to be out and about on the nearby downtown streets. I was glad it was the off-season.

  Tony passed up our gear and then, as agreed, backed away quietly and headed back out to the Cape Fear River. I led Moira up the slanting ladder to the bridge area, and we went through the same interior door Cap’n Pete had used to see if Trask was on board. A centerline companionway led down into the main lounge. I assumed there were cabins forward and the usual amenities aft of the lounge. Moira stretched out on a deep sofa and ran her fingers through her hair. We’d left the interior lights off, but I checked our surroundings through the portholes anyway. The shepherds went around checking out the scents and then plopped themselves down in front of the couch.