Claws

by Russell James

  They made it to Marc’s boat and went aboard. He tied the raft off to the stern. Kathy decided there was no risk telling him the rest of her story, and in fact, Marc deserved the validation.

  “I stumbled on a secret basement,” she said, “excavated under the fort in the 1960s. It was full of old radio and recording tech, as well as a lot of binders of material from the CIA. Those binders backed up everything you told me about the giant crabs.”

  Marc flashed an excited grin. “Did ya take any of ’em?”

  “I escaped through an air duct. I barely got myself out of there.”

  His face fell. “The torture’s always that there’s never any hard proof to take anywhere. Not for almost sixty years.”

  Kathy’s face brightened. “Wait, I have this.” She pulled the wadded-up map from her pocket and laid it out on the seat along the cockpit. “It was on the wall.”

  Marc pulled reading glasses from the cabin, perched them on the edge of his nose, and leaned over. His eyes went wide and he slapped his thigh.

  “Well, I’ll be hog-tied. This is what I’m talking about right here. You see that embossed CIA stamp, Top Secret printed along the edge. This here’s the real McCoy.”

  He knelt down and pored over the map in detail. He smacked his finger down on the red circle marker east of Bush Key. “That’s it! That’s the Number Two thing I’ve been searching for, the entrance to the crab colony. I was looking too far east. That monster on the beach, it came right out of there.”

  “And I’m guessing there are more following behind it if someone pulled the cork.”

  “There’ll be a gaggle of them.”

  Kathy started to tell him a group of crabs was called a cast, but this really wasn’t the time. “We need to call for help. Do you have a marine radio?”

  “You betcha.”

  Marc lowered himself down into the cabin. His hesitant steps brought out his age in a way Kathy hadn’t seen when he’d been rowing. His energy level and clear mind masked the fact that Marc was an old man.

  Below deck, he flipped on the radio. A blast of shrill static filled the cabin. He spun down the volume. “Sweet Lord!”

  “Jamming,” Kathy said. “Same thing that happened to the NPS radio at the fort.”

  “Sounds like what the Cubans do to U.S. radio stations, but much worse.”

  “It has to be something Larsson put in place. I’d hoped your boat would be out of range.”

  “No way to get help,” Marc said. “So we’re gonna need to stop these things on our own.”

  Kathy thought maybe Marc had experienced a break from reality after all. “One crab took out a helicopter, and a pack of heavily armed men could barely slow it down. I’m not sure what you, I, and a tired old pleasure boat are going to do.”

  “We’re gonna start by keeping everything that hasn’t escaped the crab den trapped in the crab den. And this map marks the one and only door.”

  “We don’t have anything to seal an opening in the sea floor.”

  “Not now. But we will.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because like I said, finding their lair was my Number Two mission. I’ve already accomplished my Number One mission. Last month, I found my PT boat. And PT 904 went down carrying just what we need to keep those crabs in their place.”

  Chapter 25

  Nathan, Larsson, and Valadez leaned against the closed main doors of Fort Jefferson. As the adrenaline surge retreated, Nathan felt his legs grow weak. He slid down to the ground

  “How long can those things stay out of the water?” Larsson said.

  “Are you asking me?” Nathan said. “They’re your crabs.”

  “You’re the park ranger science geek.”

  “Actually, I’m the park ranger history geek.”

  “Fantastic. When I need to know what day Lincoln was assassinated, I’ll ask you.”

  “April 14th, 1865,” Nathan muttered. “For future reference.”

  Valadez slung his rifle over his shoulder. Sweat rolled down the sides of his round face. He took a deep breath and turned to Larsson. “You want to tell me what kind of crab can’t be stopped with a hand grenade?”

  “The kind that was designed to take on the Cuban military,” Larsson said, “then inbred for fifty years.”

  “We’re not armed to take something like that down. Our mission was a short-term defense of the key from any locals. You said the crabs wouldn’t even be here.”

  “And they weren’t supposed to be. They weren’t even supposed to be free yet. But the old warning system tripped. I thought it was just some component gone bad, but a crab showed up here, and the whole schedule had to accelerate.”

  “Sounds like between that and the helicopter crash the mission is FUBAR.”

  “Hardly. It’ll be easier without having to free the crabs. The lures are there on the beach. The controllers should be in one of the crates here. Even with one deflated compartment, the Zodiac is serviceable. We’re good.”

  “Someone want to fill me in on who you all really are,” Nathan said, “and what you’re doing, which totally has nothing to do with red tide.”

  “No,” Larsson said. “I’ll just tell you we’re with the CIA. The rest is on a need to know basis.”

  “Almost being killed by a giant crab rates ‘need to know’ in my book.”

  “But not in mine,” Larsson said. “Keeping yourself useful will keep you from being at the wrong end of my pistol. Start by helping us keep this fort secure. What other ways are there in and out of here?”

  Nathan thought the south bastion fissure he’d used to get to the campground would be best kept to himself. It was too small for one of the crabs to use anyway. “One door, we just blocked it. The nature of designing a fort. And the embrasures are reinforced and too small for a crab to get in.”

  “Embrasures?” asked Valadez.

  “The big holes the cannons stick through,” Nathan said.

  “You trying to make me sound stupid?” Valadez said.

  “Hardly trying at all, actually.”

  Larsson shoved a pistol against Nathan’s chest. “Make yourself annoying enough and you can stay outside the walls and become a tragic footnote in this place’s history.”

  The barrel nearly broke through Nathan’s skin. He stepped back. “I’m okay relating history, not joining it.”

  “How’s being trapped in this fort going to help us?” Valadez said.

  “The crab has to cross the beach, and the moat, and then it stops at the wall,” Larsson said. “With that delay, we could get enough lead into it to injure it, like the last one.”

  “Unless one comes up out of the sea on the other side,” Valadez said.

  “The water shallows very far out,” Nathan said. “The crab would be out of the water early.”

  “You need to be up there on watch to the east,” Larsson said to Valadez. “I need time to assemble the controllers for the lures. Then we get out to the Zodiac and get this thing done.”

  “Roger that,” Valadez said.

  “You go up with him, History Ranger. Take the west end of the fort. Do anything stupid, and if Valadez doesn’t shoot you first, I will.”

  Nathan thought of Gianna, hiding in his room, unaware of the second crab attack. “I have binoculars in my quarters, let me get them.”

  Larsson mulled it for a second. He waved his pistol toward Nathan’s quarters. “Fast. Do it.”

  Nathan jogged to his quarters and went inside. As soon as he closed the door, he said, “It’s me, don’t come out. Larsson may be right behind me.”

  “Is everything okay?” Gianna said from the closet.

  “Not even close. A crab attacked and killed one of the men. We’re holed up in the fort defended mostly by blind faith. Whatever their plan is, they think they can still complete it. Larsson claims they’re with the CIA.”

  “They were with the CIA. I gathered that from overhearing the people on the trawler. They’d all been wronged
by the Agency at some point. I sensed a major undercurrent of revenge.”

  “He called the red and white canisters on the beach lures.”

  “If the crabs can sense the sonic frequencies the way other creatures do, they’d work that way. And if revenge is the plan, they’ll be using those lures to draw the crabs to the mainland.”

  “I have to pull guard duty. Stay here and hidden. Larsson killed Kathy. You sank his trawler so I don’t doubt for a second he’d kill you as well. We’ll figure out a way to stop them.”

  Nathan pulled his binoculars off a shelf and left the room. He practically bumped into Larsson outside the door. He slammed the door shut behind him.

  “What took you so long?” Larsson said. “Get up there!”

  Nathan sprinted for the nearby stairs, desperate to draw Larsson away from his room as soon as possible. Instead, Larsson opened the door and went in.

  Nathan froze at the base of the steps. He imagined the horror of Larsson dragging Gianna out by her hair, or worse, just the sound of a gunshot from inside his quarters. He held his breath.

  Larsson stepped out alone and slammed the door behind him. Nathan scrambled up the steps before Larsson could realize he was there.

  At the terreplein, he looked over and saw Valadez, rifle at the ready, watching the east beach. Out to the west, a single boat cut a slow path through the sea, far off. He raised the binoculars for a closer look. It was Marc Metcalf’s cabin cruiser, from what seemed like weeks ago. Two people stood in the cockpit. One little man at the wheel wore a wide-brimmed hat that obscured his face. But he recognized the other. Tall, with dark hair and an embarrassingly filthy NPS Ranger uniform.

  Kathy wasn’t dead after all.

  Chapter 26

  From Marc’s boat, the fort was too far away for Kathy to make out any detail, especially with the sun in her face. The good news was that she’d seen Nathan get into the fort before the crab had killed one of Larsson’s men. She hoped Larsson had the brains to see he was short-handed and decide to keep Nathan alive.

  Then Kathy thought about how furious Larsson would be when he found she’d escaped. She prayed he wouldn’t take that anger out on Nathan.

  But these were things she could not control. But she could seal off any remaining crabs from the rest of the world. Then they would have time to warn the country about the ones that escaped.

  Marc stood at the wheel to the right of the cabin door. The old boat still had classic round gauges for speed and temperature that rivaled fine clocks in quality. But newer readouts stared out from an opening hacked into the side of the console. Sonar, hydrophones, a few other items she didn’t recognize. The map she’d stolen hung clamped to a chart clip. The compass read due west.

  “How long did it take you to find your PT boat?” Kathy asked.

  “Years. I couldn’t start looking for a while, didn’t have no boat. Then with it being a secret mission and all, didn’t have any real records or a location fix. Hell, didn’t have no satellite nav back then. So I had to go by memory as to where she went down. And believe it or not, from sea level, all of the Gulf of Mexico looks about the same.”

  “Since they were armed, I can’t believe the government didn’t salvage the boats.”

  “Can’t salvage something unless you’re prepared to admit it exists. And after the Bay of Pigs, weren’t no one in a hurry to admit nothing existed…not our boats, and especially not giant crabs.”

  A while later, the GPS pinged and Marc throttled back the engine.

  “Welcome to White Shoal, conveniently just off the edge of NOAA’s nautical map 11420. A swell place to anchor boats on a secret mission. Or so thought the CIA.”

  Marc went up to the bow and lowered an anchor into the water. He played out a hundred feet of line and tied it off to a cleat. When he returned to the cockpit, he flipped on a display. A green line swept around a black sonar dial. As it crossed the lower third, a fuzzy green outline of a ship’s hull appeared.

  “And that there is PT 904,” Marc said. “About forty feet down. Resting in peace, and in pieces.”

  “Forty feet? When you said we were salvaging something, I assumed the boat was washed up on a key somewhere. How are we going to get anything up from there?”

  Marc held up a finger for her to wait, then he lowered himself a step at a time into the cabin. He returned with a scuba tank. He hoisted it up onto the deck. It landed with a clank.

  “I’m going to swim down and pick us up a torpedo.”

  “Torpedo? No way! You aren’t swimming down there…” Kathy trailed off before insulting him.

  “‘At my age?’ Was that what you were gonna say? I still dive every week, thank you. I’m perfectly capable. Are you certified to dive?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then I guess that brings it back to me, don’t it?”

  He disappeared back down into the cabin. After a little banging and cursing, he reemerged wearing a black wetsuit, carrying swim fins and a mask. The suit was riven with cracks, and small, missing chunks dotted the seams. With only his wrinkled face sticking out of the hood, he reminded Kathy of a turtle without its shell. In the skin-tight suit, he looked even frailer.

  Marc opened a locker on the back of the cockpit and pulled out two heavy canvas straps. He slipped the loops at each end over the hook on the winch’s cable. With a grunt, he swung the winch arm out over the water. He pushed a red down button with the palm of his hand and the cable unwound. He released the button and the cable stopped.

  “Now when I go in, you’re gonna press that red button so I can play out enough cable to get the straps around the torpedo. Then I’ll scrape the cable hard enough to make it sing. That’s your cue to use that green button to haul us up.”

  “How safe is raising a fifty-year-old torpedo?”

  “I’m hoping safe enough we can handle it, and unsafe enough we can kill crabs with it. It can’t go off without ignition. I dropped a bunch in the Coast Guard, and I’m still alive.”

  “You dropped them?”

  “Yeah, but I’m older and wiser now. Gonna carry this one like a baby.” He looked down into the water. “But to be safe, you should stop the winch with the fish well under the hull. Just until I get a full inspection in the daylight.”

  Marc finished donning the rest of his gear, adjusted his regulator and mask, and then dropped backward over the side of the boat. His head popped up from the water, and he grabbed the canvas straps with one hand. He gave her the thumbs-up with the other.

  Kathy took a deep breath and pressed the red button. Cable played out from the winch. Marc’s head dipped below the surface and with a splash from his flippers, he headed down, pulling the cable behind him.

  Dread coiled around Kathy’s spine as the deeper water swallowed the old man. She had an awful premonition he’d never resurface.

  Chapter 27

  Larsson stood under the withering sun in the parade ground beside the supplies they’d salvaged from the wrecked chopper. He shielded his eyes and could see Valadez on the east side of the fort watching the beach and the Zodiac. Ranger Nathan was watching the west side. If both his other men were still alive, hell, if one of them were alive, he’d shoot Nathan off the terreplein right now and let him plop into the sea as crab food. But Nathan had to stay. Larsson needed every set of eyes he could get so the crabs didn’t get the drop on him, and, if necessary, someone expendable to throw to the crabs to save himself and Valadez, in that order.

  He pried the top off the crate from the trawler. Inside were the two controllers for the lures. He pulled out one of the metal briefcases and opened it. The lower half held all the controls. For something so important, the controls were deceptively simple. A row of switches across the top—one for each of the lures, and master on and off switches on the bottom. Throw the switch to turn on a lure and a light beside the switch turned green and said that the lure was transmitting. Turn them on in the right order and an army of crabs would follow from one to the next,
all the way to south Florida.

  He powered the unit up. It completed a self-diagnostic and showed no faults. Finally, something about this plan was going right. Now he just had to get this into the Zodiac with the lures, and he’d be ready to lay a trail of sonic breadcrumbs for the crabs now that they’d been released from their trap. A few lures had been damaged, but he still had enough to do the job.

  He’d need the map from the CIA bunker, and that reminded him that he had the other park ranger locked away down there. She ought to be hungry, thirsty, and a lot more compliant by now. But then again, there wasn’t any reason to keep her alive. She’d been a pain in the ass since he’d arrived. A pistol in the ribs would keep the history ranger in line. He wasn’t sure anything would keep Kathy from being trouble.

  He headed back to the powder magazine and went inside. He slid the table back and pulled out his gun. Like a weightlifter’s clean jerk, he threw the heavy trap door open.

  “Good morning, buttercup,” he said.

  No answer.

  Maybe she’d passed out from dehydration. That would make this much easier. No chasing her around to kill her. He pulled a penlight from his cargo pocket and snapped it on.

  Step by step, he crept down the stairway. At the base, he played the beam around the room. He knit his brow. She wasn’t there. He swept the beam across the walls. The backup planning map was gone. And the rusting air vent cover that had been behind it was missing.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  He went to the ventilation shaft. It was just big enough for someone to escape through. He flashed his light inside and could see where swaths of the sides had been brushed clean of dust and cobwebs. And there was only one someone who’d been down here to brush them.

  He cursed and kicked the table leg. He didn’t know where this shaft opened up, but he could see some dim light at the far end. Since Kathy wasn’t wedged in it, she’d gotten through it. And she had to be somewhere on the island.

  He laughed. That meant she wasn’t in the fort. And she wasn’t getting in under Valadez’s watchful eye or through that closed main gate. He had the keys to the Zodiac’s motor, and all the ammo and weapons were behind these brick walls. Which left her trapped and defenseless, with nowhere to hide in the company of giant crabs.