Death in Deep Water

by Paul Kemprecos

  I rolled over, got my legs under me, and sprang after him, ready to get an arm around his neck and sink a knee into his spine. But he twisted onto his back and kicked out. The full force of his leg power would have slammed into my rib cage and launched me down the aisle like a bowling ball, but he reacted too soon. His feet caught me lightly on the chest. I sidestepped and went for him again, trying to grab his head to smash it against the floor.

  Fingers came out of the darkness and clamped onto my cheek, searching for my eyes. I jerked my head back and smashed the hand away with a karate chop. The motion threw me off balance. A fist battered into my shoulder and I tumbled backward.

  He could have finished the job and enrolled me in dance class at the Elysian fields, but he disengaged. He was up and running. I tried to do the same, but my foot slipped on something in the aisle and I fell. I reached down and felt the cold metal of a flashlight. It wasn’t mine, so it must be his. I scrambled to my feet and dashed after him, trying to ignore the pain stabbing at my shoulder.

  At the top of the aisle leading into the passageway, I paused and clicked on the flash. The cone of light caught an elbow and heel disappearing around a corner. He was moving behind the bleacher section. If he got to the gate before me, it could be a repeat of the other night. He could lock me in again and get away. I sprinted through the passageway, rounded the same corner, and played the flashlight beam toward the gate.

  Captured in the yellow bull’s-eye was a man wearing a black shirt and slacks and a black baseball cap. He was big, over six feet, with a top-heavy torso, football-pad shoulders and short legs. The flame of recognition flickered in my brain.

  “Flagg!” I shouted reflexively.

  The man stopped and turned to look directly at me, his dusky face frozen in astonishment. Then his mouth widened into a wide and white-toothed grin.

  “Shit,” his deep voice said. “That you, Soc?”

  “Naw, Flagg, it’s your grandmother.”

  He let out a whooping laugh. We approached each other and shook hands.

  I was stunned. “For Chrissake, Flagg, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was wondering the same thing about you. Douse that light. I don’t want the world to know we’re having a reunion.”

  I snapped the flash off and we stood in the darkness, both still panting from the chase. “I should have known it was you in that ninja suit from the way you took me out. You okay?”

  “Knees got scraped and hurt like hell. But I’ll live. How about you?”

  “Every bone in my shoulder is broken and it’s only sheer luck you didn’t pop my eyes out.”

  “Naw, Soc. It wasn’t luck. You knew what you were doing. Except you shouldn’t sneak up on a guy in the dark like that. Can’t tell what he’s packing.”

  “Knowing you, Flagg, you’re probably carrying an arsenal. I work here, what’s your excuse?”

  “I guess you could say I’m working here, too, ex officia.” He chuckled. “Hell, man. Fishing and detecting businesses must have gone to hell for you to have a real job.”

  “I can explain the whole thing. Let’s get out of here. I know a bar in Hyannis where we can talk.”

  We went through the gate and I secured the padlock.

  “By the way,” I said as we headed for the exit, “how’d you get in?”

  “I got pass-keys, you’ve got a night watchman who likes to drink. It wasn’t hard.”

  “I didn’t see a car.”

  “You weren’t supposed to. It’s parked up the road. I walked here. You can give me a ride back.”

  Remembering why I had come by the park, I said, “Okay, I’ve got to pick up my scuba gear first. Meet you out by my pickup.”

  He kept on going while I went to Ben’s office and listened at the door. The TV set was still on, but there was a new sound, like the noise of a tractor trailer climbing a mountain road. Ben’s snoring. I went to the storeroom, got my diving gear, and hauled it out the employee door to the truck. Flagg was leaning against a fender. He got in the pickup and I dropped him off a couple of hundred yards away from Oceanus where he had pulled his car onto a side street. Then I drove to a country-and-western bar in Hyannis with Flagg following.

  John Flagg and I met a million years and miles ago, or so it seemed. I was in the Marines and Flagg was an ex-paratrooper in Operation Phoenix, a hard-assed unit whose job was to destroy the Viet Cong infrastructure. Flagg was a Wampanoag Indian from Gay Head, a tiny town on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod. He had become a hired gun for the same white man’s government that had stripped the dignity and identity from Native Americans, and the fact troubled him. I was the eldest son of successful Greek-Americans with a strong sense of their ancient culture. I had every chance in life, but I blew it off, leaving the tightly knit community and deserting the family business to save the world. Despite our different backgrounds, Flagg and I shared a common rootlessness and a vague guilt neither one of us was happy with.

  We first met at the NCO club in Quang Tri province. I saved his butt from a drunken Marine who wanted to carve him up with a switchblade, and Flagg and I became good friends. Our dreams of fishing for striped bass back in the real world ended when my unit turned some captured VC over to Phoenix. Flagg’s guys threw the POWs out of a helicopter when they wouldn’t talk. I blamed Flagg and didn’t learn until years later, after I cast my hatred aside, that I had tagged him with a bum rap. The last I knew, Flagg was working for a troubleshooting CIA subsidiary that had more letters in its name than a can of alphabet soup.

  Flagg and I found a table away from the bar crowd, I ordered a Bud. Flagg, who doesn’t drink booze, asked for a Perrier. The waitress looked at him. “We don’t have that foreign stuff. You get Poland Spring.” She whisked off, a champion for Made in the USA.

  He warned me with a flat-eyed glare against wisecracks about his upscale taste.

  “Was that you I chased out of the orca stadium the other night?” I said.

  “Yep. I saw you by the whale tank and beat-feet when you started up the aisle. Looks like you got smart this time. Came around from behind. Too bad you made all that noise, you might have surprised me.”

  “I stepped on a plastic cup. What the hell were you doing there?”

  “Just listening to the wind.”

  “Flagg, it’s great that you’ve gone back to your Wampanoag roots, and it wouldn’t bother me at all if you went around wearing a headdress full of eagle feathers, but I wish you’d stop with your noble redman metaphors.”

  “Guess we all look alike to a white man. Feather headdress is for Plains Indians, not Wampanoag,” he said with mock seriousness. “It’s like I told you before, Soc, you can crash through the woods and scare everything, or you can sniff the wind, listen and watch, and maybe something will come to you.”

  Speaking of which, the waitress came with our drinks. I chugalugged half my beer and ordered another before she left the table. Flagg sipped at his spring water.

  “Forgive my Caucasian obtuseness,” I said. “But you must admit it’s odd when someone who works for a spook agency so obscure most people in the Company don’t even know about it spends his nights babysitting for a killer-whale. What did you expect to hear on the wind at Oceanus?”

  He seemed to drift off into a trance, his broad face went stony, and his voice came as if from a distance. “That whale, he talks if you listen to him.”

  It was funny to hear Flagg say that. I had done the same thing, watching Rocky and listening. Deep down, I guess, I yearned to know what went on in his brain, not just about Eddy Byron.

  Rocky was born in the ocean, knew its rhythms and moods because he was part of them. Migod, what sights those great round eyes must have seen before he was captured. He knew his blue world, not like I did, skimming the surface in a boat or timidly making ridiculously shallow dives, but to its depths. He
could tell us about his wonderful stories of the deep, if only we knew how to hear him.

  “I think I know what you mean about the whale, Flagg. But why would you be interested in anything he had to say?”

  The distant look faded and he refocused his gaze on me. “Navy business. Now it’s my turn to ask questions. You putting in overtime at Oceanus?”

  “I’m working for the park’s owners. They hired me to go undercover, to look into the death of Eddy Byron, the whale trainer. Seems his demise is stirring up a hell of a mess that could hurt a big real-estate deal, and they want the whole thing settled. Your turn again.”

  “Huh,” Flagg said. “Well, now.” A glint of amusement flickered in his onyx eyes. “Remember back in ’Nam we used to say we should have gone Navy, stayed on a ship with showers and dry bunks just lobbing shells at shore installations that couldn’t shoot back.”

  I chuckled ruefully. “Sure, Flagg. It beat slogging through rice paddies any day. What’s that got to do with Oceanus?”

  “The Navy was even smarter than we thought. Wasn’t just us ignorant grunts doing all the dirty work. The Navy figured out how to use dolphins and whales for military missions.”

  The military connection again. Sally Carlin said Eddy Byron had been in Vietnam.

  “Go on,” I said. “This is real interesting.”

  Flagg nodded. “Back in the 1960s, the Department of Defense started looking at dolphins and whales. If began with low-key stuff, like training them to pick tools up or torpedoes off the seabed. Then they got them to push divers along so they wouldn’t have to use up so much energy. Training system they used was called ‘operant conditioning.’ I’ll explain it to you if you want me to.”

  “You don’t have to, Flagg. It’s a system of reward and punishment. Give the animals a fish when they do a trick, punish them when they don’t.”

  Flagg reacted as if he had just seen a goldfish swimming in his Poland Spring water. He put his glass on the table and squinted at me. “If you want, I’ll let you tell me what I’m doing.”

  “Don’t be touchy, Flagg. You know me, I’ll scavenge a fact here and there, but I don’t know the big picture. It’s still your deal.”

  He stared at me with hooded eyes, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll lay it out for you. The military said, hell, if we can train a dolphin to carry a lost tool, maybe we could get them to put a magnetic mine on an empty ship. So they trained the animals to attach a limpet bomb under an enemy ship and swim away. Friendly ship had a metal plate welded to the hull so the fish could ID it. That got the navy thinking about defending their own ships. They figured a dolphin would make a good underwater guard. Vietnam came along and they had the chance to field-test their theories. They used dolphins as guard in Cam Rahn Bay.”

  “Dolphins are pretty friendly guys. How did the navy manage to turn them into underwater Dobermans?”

  “Simple. The animal would push the enemy frogman to the surface where a patrol picked him up. Worked okay, I guess, because they used dolphins in 1987 in the Persian Gulf to guard a command barge during the Iran-Iraq War. Then the navy decided it wasn’t enough to herd an enemy frogman. They started to arm their dolphin guards and gave them instructions to shoot to kill.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Flagg. I can see how the dolphin might push a diver around. It’s part of their natural instinct. But how the hell are you going to teach them to kill somebody? They like people, although it beats me why when we do stuff like this to them.”

  “Dolphin didn’t know it was killing people, Soc. Navy stuck a cone with a forty-five in it on the dolphin’s nose and taught it to ram enemy frogman. Thing had a trigger attachment. Dolphin bumps a frogman and bang, guy’s been perforated. Navy wanted them to guard a Trident nuclear-sub base up in Bangor, Washington. They were going to use sea lions for the same thing. Project was called the ‘swimmer nullification program.’ ”

  I shook my head. The military must have whole battalions of guys thinking up these euphemisms to sugarcoat its functions, which were mainly killing people and blowing things up.

  Something occurred to me. A killer whale was essentially a big dolphin. Could an orca be programmed to kill?

  Intrigued, I said, “Was the program a success?”

  “Naw. Those crazy dolphins were lousy guards. Like you said, they like people. The Navy tried to train them to ram a target trainer, but they’d just swim away or put their snout on the guys shoulder. Then up at the Trident base some of the dolphins died. They were from the Gulf of Mexico and couldn’t take the cold water. Guess nobody figured that. Some of the animal-rights groups raised hell. A judge said the Navy had to do a study to see if the dolphins would be harmed by bringing them to the base, and the project went down the drain.”

  “So was that the end of the dolphin draft?”

  “Nope. The Navy’s still serious about it. The Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego spends fifteen to twenty million bucks a year, which is small change, but still not bad. They had over a hundred dolphins in San Diego and Key West. Dolphins get shipped to San Diego for boot camp, then go to other bases for specialized training.”

  I shook my head. “You have to admit it’s a cute trick, getting someone who’ll work for a few fish.”

  “Shit, Soc, it gets even cuter. Remember what I said about the gun-toting dolphins? Some genius came up with another idea. The dolphin carries a long hollow hypodermic needle on its snout to inject CO2 into the enemy frogman.”

  “That’s not nice,” I said. “You stick a diver with pressurized gas and his guts will get forced out of every hole in his body.”

  Flagg stared at me and smiled.

  “Okay, Flagg, where do you fit in?”

  “Some people don’t like what the Navy’s been doing. Aside from the moral part, using dolphins for war, they say trainers have kicked and beaten animals, and that a lot escape every year wearing muzzles on their snouts. Animals can’t eat and they starve to death.”

  “Is any of that true?”

  “Navy says the animals get mistreated sometimes, and about a fifth of them escape with muzzles on them. Everything else they deny, or won’t comment on. San Diego’s pretty tight-lipped about what it does, probably because the whole subject is so controversial. Back a while ago in Boston there was a big flap when the aquarium wanted to trade an ornery dolphin to the Navy for one that’d be easier to train. The aquarium backed down after protesters picketed the place and threatened a lawsuit.”

  “You still haven’t told me where you fit in.”

  “Getting to that, Soc. Like you said, Byron’s death stirred up a hell of a mess. That Boston deal, even the flap in Puget Sound, was just a little thing compared to this.”

  “What’s Eddy Byron’s death got to do with the Navy?”

  “It’s got the whale huggers all raising hell. You know what the goody-goodies say when some punk kid wastes a cop who just wanted to talk to him. Wasn’t the kid’s fault. He’s just a product of his environment. That’s what they’re saying about that whale. Keeping him in that tank just made him mean. I don’t blame him. They make me do tricks for the kiddies all day, I’d get some pissed, too. Anyhow, the whale people have been beating up on Congress. They want laws that’ll free every marine mammal in captivity, even the ones the Navy’s using.”

  Walden Schiller had told me the same thing. “Do you really think there’s any chance of that?”

  “I don’t, but the Navy’s nervous. They might have to let on what they’re doing. The taxpayers might get mad if they find out their dough’s been spent to tie a bomb onto Flipper’s head and send him off on a kamikaze mission. Navy gets nervous, my bosses get nervous, so they say, you’re from around Cape Cod, go on down to Oceanus, poke into it, and see what’s happening. The park is closed, and I don’t want to make a big fuss by showing my badge. Park’s security perimeter looks pretty weak, so I do a little r
econnaissance and get caught at it. Two times. I must be slipping. Glad it was you, Soc. Learn anything yet?”

  “Not much. I’ll tell you what I know. I may need your help later on.”

  “You got it whether you talk now or not, but I guess you know that.”

  “Yeah, Flagg, I know. And thanks. Here’s what I got.”

  I started from the beginning, telling Flagg how I was hired by Bay State to look into Eddy Byron’s death because the furor was jeopardizing the sale to the Japanese. I told him about Hanley’s death, my interview with Austin, what Sally Carlin had said about Byron’s Vietnam background and his training methods, and filled him in on my talks with Jill, Arnold, and Doc Livingston.

  Flagg let me ramble on without interrupting. When I was through, he sat there silently, thinking. Finally he spoke.

  “So the way you see it, Byron did something to the whale that got him killed.”

  “It’s looking that way, but I’m not sure. Something about Oceanus smells worse than an old sneaker.”

  “I think so, too. But I’ve done all the creeping around in the night that I can get away with. Only thing I can do now is check out the background of everybody involved.”

  “I talked to someone else you might be interested in. His name is Walden Schiller.”

  Flagg cocked an eyebrow. “Head guy for the Sentinels. You’re a jump ahead of me, Soc. That was the other part of this job, check him out. What did you think of him?”

  “Intelligent. Uncompromising. Fanatical.”

  “You think he’d ever do anything violent?”

  “He said he would do anything in his power to accomplish his aims.”

  “That makes me feel real good, Soc. Knowing that guy’s got a few pounds of Semtex.”

  I stared at him for a second. “Semtex? What the hell are you talking about?” Semtex was a plastic explosive loved by terrorists because it’s tough to detect and can be molded into any shape. A couple of pounds of Semtex brought down Pan Am flight 103 and killed two hundred and seventy people.