Claws

by Russell James

  “Spoiler alert,” Nathan said. “Your lures work.”

  “Just what Larsson deserves,” Gianna said.

  “Our plan to get them to deep water can still work?”

  “Even better, now that there are so many in one place. Get us a head start, I’ll turn off those lures, and turn on ours.”

  “Let’s warn Kathy out of the way, and then you throw the switches.”

  Nathan angled the skiff toward the cabin cruiser. In a minute, they’d closed on the slower boat. Kathy looked at Nathan with surprised relief. He slowed to pace the cabin cruiser on its port side.

  “You’re alive!” she said.

  “It takes more than giant killer crabs and mercenaries to keep a historian down.”

  “Who’s that?” she said looking at Gianna.

  “Gianna. Formerly of yesterday’s sinking yellow kayak. Presently helping get this crab lure and the rest of the crabs offshore. I’m leaning toward waiving her park entrance fee. Just for today, of course.”

  “We have just the place to drop the lure. The crabs’ den is up ahead. Drop it inside and send them all home. Then we’ll seal it shut.”

  “How?”

  “Come around the other side.”

  Nathan brought the skiff around the Solitude’s stern. The propellers from a torpedo hanging from the winch almost hit him in the face.

  “Whoa, Kathy. Where’d you get the hardware?”

  “A long story. The den’s opening should be a half mile dead ahead. Get ahead of us and we’ll blast the horn when you’re near the location. Lead the crabs, drop the lure, and get out of the way. We’ll let the torpedo loose when you’re clear.”

  “You’re on. See you after the crab boil.”

  Nathan gunned the engine, cut across the Solitude’s wake, and pulled out ahead of the cruiser.

  “That torpedo looks…old,” Gianna said. “Your ranger friend knows how to make it work?”

  “Totally covered it in class at NPS Orientation. Just another day protecting national treasures.”

  Gianna didn’t smile.

  “The owner of the boat knows,” Nathan said, more seriously. “Navy veteran. Or Coast Guard. Whatever. We do our part, they do theirs, the world is saved.”

  “Let’s bury some crabs,” Gianna said.

  Chapter 38

  The Solitude trailed a hundred yards back in the skiff’s wake.

  “We’d better call those crabs,” Nathan said.

  Gianna nodded. She tied the lure to the skiff’s stern line. She went to the console and switched off the other lures. She reset the controller and engaged their lure. It vibrated and she tossed it over the side. The stern line played out and the lure followed underwater a dozen feet behind the boat.

  The mass of crabs crawling over each other in the shallows behind them paused. Then they moved as one in the skiff’s direction. And they moved fast.

  “It works,” Nathan said with false enthusiasm. “Totally awesome. Giant crabs heading our way.”

  ***

  “How far out are we?” Kathy called up to Marc.

  “Be there in a minute.”

  “Give them a blast of the horn when you think they’re on top of the den.” Kathy went back to bailing.

  “Your little historian gonna be able to pull this off?”

  “He’s stayed alive so far. I have faith in him.”

  Marc compared the den’s marking on the map and their location. He held his finger over the button to sound the ship’s horn.

  ***

  Nathan looked down in the water behind the skiff.

  “The good news is that the lure is working,” he said. “The bad news is that the lure is working.”

  The sea floor below dropped away, but the view remained pretty clear. Giant crabs seemed to cover the sand as far as Nathan could see. And they were closing fast.

  Gianna reeled in the lure and held it in the water alongside the boat.

  The Solitude’s horn sounded.

  “That’s the signal.”

  Up ahead loomed a dark hole in the sea floor, partially covered by what looked like a concrete cap.

  “I’ll never get the lure in there like this,” Gianna said. “You’ll need to stop the boat so I can drop it in.”

  “You know that the ocean is full of giant crabs, right?”

  “And if this lure doesn’t get in the den, it still will be.”

  Nathan cut the engine to idle and banked the boat into a tight turn near the opening.

  Underneath, the crabs caught up. Dozens? Hundreds? Nathan could only guess. They ran into each other, ran over each other, then began to climb on top of each other, creating a crustacean tower stretching up to the lure.

  “You need to drop that thing,” Nathan said.

  “I can’t get the rope untied.”

  One crab scampered up the pile of bodies to the top. It swiped at the skiff with its claw and grazed the hull. The skiff spun sideways. The lure flew from Gianna’s hands and dropped overboard.

  Rope played out as the lure plummeted straight down and too far from the den. Nathan gunned the engine and wheeled the skiff back toward the opening.

  The crab pile dissembled and gave chase. He uncleated the line from the stern and judged the distance from the den opening. He waited two more seconds and let the lure drop.

  Momentum carried it forward. Too far forward. It flew over the opening and landed on the concrete cover.

  “Dammit,” Nathan said.

  Then a crab scampered across the pad and accidentally kicked the lure into the den.

  “Yes!” Gianna said.

  Nathan raised a fist in victory. “Better to be lucky than good.”

  Crabs fought over each other to funnel down the opening and back into the den. Nathan opened up the engine and headed the skiff back west.

  They’d done their part. The rest was up to Kathy.

  Chapter 39

  Marc went back to the torpedo. He unlashed the winch and pushed the fish far enough away to clear the hull. He connected the wires to engage the engine.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried it again. Nothing. He grounded the positive against the hull. No spark. The battery had died, a connection had gone bad, a relay had failed. He didn’t have time to fix whatever had screwed up. He’d have to take the boat in closer, then drop the thing like a bomb and hope that the concussion didn’t crush Solitude’s compromised hull.

  He checked the steering vanes around the props and let out a low curse. They weren’t straight. Without power, he couldn’t move them, and in this configuration, the torpedo could corkscrew off to anywhere.

  That dreaded tightness clamped his chest again. His sinking boat was running out of time. His dying heart was running out of time. There was only one way to make certain this torpedo ended up on target. And he was going to do that alone.

  He pulled two life jackets from the starboard storage locker and lashed them together with the rope from the winch.

  “What’s wrong?” Kathy said from below.

  “Battery problem. I need your help. Up here, quick.”

  She dashed back to him from the cabin. “What do you need?”

  “Stand right there.” He pointed to the deck around the cockpit’s port side.

  She stepped up and faced him, looking confused. He shoved the life jackets against her chest. She grabbed them on reflex.

  “Gonna need to make this delivery personally,” he said. “Now swim.”

  He shoved her and she fell backward into the water. She broke the surface yards behind the boat and sputtered something unintelligible at him.

  The water in the cabin was already two feet deep. He pulled his scuba tank and face mask from below and propped the tank up beside the wheel. With a flick, he turned the BIL PUMP PORT switch off. One of the whining motors in the hull went silent. The boat slowed and the sound of rushing water below became louder. He killed the second pump.

  The boat sank lower in the sea.
He gave the engine under a minute before it drowned and died. Rising water splashed from the cabin into the cockpit.

  The bow dove beneath the waves. The engine coughed and died. All he had left was momentum and prayer. He lined the boat up on the heading for the crab den. Water rose to his knees, then faster to his chest. He donned the facemask, shoved the regulator in his mouth, and opened the tank valves. With a knuckle-whitening grip on the wheel, he braced himself against the rushing water.

  The sea swallowed the boat.

  Up ahead, he spied an opening in the sea floor where sand had been excavated around the edge of a great concrete cap. The lure’s flashing green light blinked from deep within the dark hole. A giant crab scuttled into the opening. A few more were just short of entering. Even if he beat them to it, the concussion ought to blast them to pieces. Just like it would do to him.

  Boys of PT 904, he thought, here comes vengeance.

  He aimed the boat at the entrance. It rolled to starboard from the torpedo’s weight, then inverted. The bow jammed into the hole. The torpedo’s nose struck the concrete cap.

  The sea went white.

  Chapter 40

  “Did the crazy boat owner just push your ranger friend into the water?” Gianna said.

  It certainly looked that way to Nathan. Just before the cabin cruiser sank, Kathy had taken an ungainly back-first plunge into the water. Whether she was pushed or fell, she needed to be rescued.

  He circled the skiff back to Kathy. Gianna helped her crawl aboard.

  As Kathy rolled over the gunwale, a boom thundered from under the sea. The skiff shuddered. Then off the bow, a huge mushroom of white water blasted skyward. Bits of coral, chunks of wooden hull, and shards of crab shell rained down into the water all around them. When the sea settled, a stream of white bubbles marked the location of the resealed crab den.

  “The torpedo battery malfunctioned,” Kathy said. “The only way to get it on target was to ride it down.” Kathy stared at the bubbling water. A lump formed in her throat. “He didn’t give me the chance to stop him.”

  Nathan edged the skiff over to the stream of bubbles. A few larger chunks of the Solitude popped to the surface. Suspended sand clouded the water below.

  “The opening wasn’t that big,” Gianna said. “An explosion like that had to seal it.”

  “I sure hope so,” Nathan said. “We’re fresh out of torpedoes.” He turned to Kathy. “Are you okay?”

  She swallowed back the pain of Marc’s sacrifice. “Nothing worse than tired, hungry and exhausted.”

  “Larsson and the rest of his crew are dead. We can head back to Fort Jefferson. Once the red tide scare is debunked, the Park Service will send help or the ferry will return, or both.”

  “Sounds great.” Kathy looked to Gianna. “You were the woman in the kayak? I’m so glad you survived. Can’t wait to hear the story of how you did it.”

  “And you can tell us how you ended up hauling a decrepit torpedo across the Gulf of Mexico,” Gianna said.

  “And then,” Nathan said, “we’ll see if anyone else will ever believe either story.”

  Chapter 41

  Two days later, Nathan and Kathy sat in full uniform in the office of Deputy Director Cynthia Leister. A map of the National Park system hung on one wall. The emblem of the Department of the Interior hung on the other, alongside an Ansel Adams photograph of Half Dome in Yosemite.

  This was the first time they had been alone together since a Navy helicopter had rescued them all from Fort Jefferson. A very relieved Silenius Imports security detail had whisked Gianna away from Key West Naval Air Station as soon as they landed. Then the two rangers had been separated, medically evaluated, and had their statements taken. There hadn’t been any formal debriefing, they’d just made written statements. They’d spent that night in separate quarters, awakened to fresh uniforms, and put on a plane to Washington, D.C. None of their drivers, pilots, or escorts professed any knowledge of what was going to happen to them next. The whole post-crab experience had been unnerving.

  “I’d say my career is set,” Nathan said. “My first week of my first assignment and I get to meet a Deputy Director of the Park Service. Oh, and I got to battle giant crabs.”

  “You’re still planning to write the history of the fort?” Kathy said.

  “Only as science fiction.”

  The door opened and Deputy Director Leister entered. She was in her late-fifties with short silver hair. Her lipstick shined bright red. She looked Kathy and Nathan over as she took a seat behind her desk.

  “So, Rangers West and Toland. You’ve had a hell of a week, haven’t you?” She had the gravelly voice of a chronic smoker.

  “I guess you could say that,” Kathy said.

  Leister flipped open a file folder on her desk. She separated out Kathy’s and Nathan’s original handwritten statements. She sighed.

  “So let me get this straight. Under your care, Fort Jefferson and the marine sanctuary around it suffered severe damage. Your explanation is that a rogue CIA agent tried to release giant armored crabs, vintage 1961, so he could send them to the mainland on a killing spree. With the help of a mystery engineer from a secret branch of a small import business, and an eighty-year-old former Coast Guard sailor, you saved the world with an old torpedo.”

  “When you say it like that,” Nathan said, “you make it sound outlandish.”

  Leister shot Nathan a withering, unappreciative look for his sarcasm. Nathan’s smile drooped.

  “No one will ever hear this ridiculous story,” Leister said.

  She gathered up the papers and dropped them in a shredder beside her desk. The motor chugged through the files.

  “Here’s what really happened,” Leister continued. “The park was closed due to a red tide. A recent violent thunderstorm damaged some of the aging fort structure. In an unrelated item, a private firm has donated an old CH-47 to be used as a base for a new coral reef. It’s on the east beach awaiting relocation to deeper water. The park will reopen in the near future.”

  “What about the crab carcasses on Garden Key?” Kathy asked.

  “Never saw any.”

  “And the CIA bunker under the powder magazine?”

  “There’s no trap door and nothing but sand under the fort.”

  “And Marc Metcalf’s death?”

  “Never heard of him. And the Coast Guard has no record of his service.”

  Kathy stood up, face red with fury. “We almost died, others did, and you think you can just cover all this up?”

  “Not me,” Leister said. “We are going to cover it up.”

  “And why would we do that?”

  “Because now you’re part of a bigger picture.”

  Leister walked over to the Park Service Map. “Ranger Toland, you’re the historian. When was the Park Service founded?”

  “On August 25, 1916, an act of Congress created the National Park Service, and President Wilson signed it.”

  “For the purpose,” Leister said, “of regulating, and I quote, ‘the use of the Federal areas known as national parks to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein.’” She rolled her eyes. “Not quite.”

  Leister stepped over to the shield of the Department of the Interior.

  “It really started in 1872, when Congress set aside Yellowstone as a National Park and quickly added other parks over the next few years. All managed under the Department of the Interior. Ostensibly, Congress set them aside for public recreation. But that reason sounds a little hollow. In a time without cars and roads, few visitors could get to any of these places.

  “The National Parks are not what they appear. North America was the last and most sparsely populated continent on the planet when Europeans blundered upon it. There was a good reason for that. It was the most perilous. Dangerous creatures beyond explanation lived in certain areas. Contact with mankind always proved to be fatal. Keeping people safe from that was Department of the Interio
r’s job.”

  “The original department seal,” Nathan said, “had an eagle clutching arrows and two crosses. Now I get the symbolism.”

  “Interior officials presented President Grant with a list of the creatures and their locations. As a military man, he latched onto the idea of creating a network of National Restricted Areas. The secure system would keep the public from the creatures and the supernatural. As a cover story, they were to be called National Parks.

  “Thirty years later, the nation’s growing population pressed closer to these dangerous locations. There were tragic deaths that had to be covered up. President Wilson wanted tighter control over these threats and created the National Park Service as the cover. Of course, the general population couldn’t be made aware of these horrific creatures in their midst. Most were unknown, but some were already local myths.”

  “Like the Dry Tortugas crabs,” Nathan said.

  “Exactly. So worried was Wilson about the truth getting out, only one percent of the Park Service employees even knew the real mission. Over time, places of natural beauty without any unnatural threats were added to the system as cover.”

  “How many of the parks are hot spots like Fort Jefferson?” Kathy asked.

  Leister walked back to the map. “We don’t know. During World War II, most of the leaders of that secret section were recruited into the OSS.”

  “The forerunner of the CIA,” Nathan said.

  “And none of them survived the war. They also took the location of the secret park records with them to their graves. Even today, I’m one of the few people who know anything about the true mission of the Park Service, and I know little more than I’m telling you now.”

  “And why are you telling us at all?” Kathy said.

  “Fort Jefferson isn’t the first place where things once quiet have gotten out of hand. Something is affecting these creatures. Rising global temperatures, chemicals in the environment, who knows. But we need to hold the line on these things now, defend against them.