Stop at Nothing
Page 5
Ruby hit the screen, pausing it.
“No way!” she said. “But I asked Martin for the dive footage, and he said it was unavailable.”
The diver gave her a wink.
“Yeah, well, can’t hurt to take a copy for myself, can it?” he said, looking around. “Believe it or not, Lieutenant Martin can be a prick. He got a shippie shit-canned for getting loaded on board last trip out, a good buddy of mine, who was the best sailor in the entire seventh. I tried to tell Martin that he had just found out his girl was leaving him, but he couldn’t care less.
“I yelled at him pretty good in front of everyone at dinner about a week later, and since then, he’s been busting my chops pretty good. Any screwup, he could just blame me, right? So that’s what the folks at GoPro are for. I’m documenting everything I do. I have to cover my ass.”
Ruby pressed Play again. She sat up when she saw the first older dead man in the captain’s chair.
What in the hell? she thought, looking at the white-haired guy. He didn’t look military. He looked like a lawyer or a businessman or something.
The moment she saw the blue patches on his face and the dried blood, she knew what had probably happened to make the plane crash.
There had been a sudden loss of cabin pressure, Ruby realized.
The bluish face on the screen was almost identical to a picture of a plane fatality victim she had seen in one of their training manuals about cabin pressurization system failure.
At high altitude, pressure system failure was extremely deadly. First, the rapid change in pressure often induced nosebleeds. Then because of the low percentage of oxygen at 40,000 feet, a rapid loss of consciousness would almost immediately occur. Even after only thirty seconds of losing oxygen at a high enough altitude, pilots could become completely incapacitated.
A sudden loss of cabin pressure knocking out everyone on board also explained the challenging search for the plane, Ruby realized. If the autopilot was on at the time, the only limit to how far the plane could have traveled was based on how much fuel was in the tank. If the Gulfstream’s tanks were even relatively full, it could have come from virtually anywhere, Ruby realized. South America. Heck, maybe even Europe, she thought.
Ruby shook her head when she realized that the plane might have even had military-grade radar-jamming capability.
No wonder they had been so frantically looking for it.
It had been a true ghost plane.
She watched as the camera lit over the rest of them. Still no uniforms. They all looked like civilians, four civilians. Even the pilots’ uniforms looked like commercial ones.
She remembered the dataplate again. The blank dataplate.
What in the hell was going on? she thought.
She watched it a second time. She had the odd urge to wipe her hand on her uniform shirt after she finally handed back the phone.
“You tell anybody you have this?” she said.
“Just my buddy Matt. The guy I was talking to when you spoke to us last night.”
“The deck ape?” Ruby said.
Steve laughed.
“That’s Matt,” he said.
“Okay, Steve. Listen to me. Don’t tell anybody else about this video, okay? And tell your buddy Matt to shut the hell up about it, too. Keep it to yourself.”
“Why?” he said.
Ruby turned back to the gray boat looming there. The dividers up there on the deck. The big stone-faced petty officer guarding the rail.
“Silence is golden,” she finally said.
15
An hour and a half later, a Chevy Cobalt drove out of the base without incident. Then a Nissan Altima came in. Then a Kia Soul headed out, and the guards by the fence came out of their shack and stopped it.
On the side of the guardhouse were two signs: POSITIVE ID REQUIRED and RESTRICTED AREA AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—KEEP OUT.
Keep out? Ruby thought. “With pleasure,” she mumbled from where she stood beside a brick barracks two hundred feet to the gate’s south. Hell, I didn’t even want to come in here in the first place.
Her decision to leave after seeing the video had been a no-brainer. It was obvious they were all being detained because of the mystery plane. Some upper-echelon ass-coverer had probably gotten word that the plane had something to do with some classified horseshit and had frozen everyone in place until he figured out which was the best ass to kiss next.
Under normal circumstances, she could put up with the government and the navy’s top-down bureaucratic bullshit about things. But these weren’t exactly normal circumstances, were they?
Plane or no plane, she was technically on leave now, and if she didn’t get back to Florida this afternoon, her little sister, Lori, would have to give birth by herself.
What she needed to do now was get on a plane. She’d learned there was a commercial airport that was actually within walking distance of the base, but the question was, would they let her off?
She didn’t know. She certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone. She’d been in the navy long enough to know that if you wanted to get something done, you just went for it. It was far easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Ruby was still squinting at the gate that she needed to get past a minute later when a white Ford Focus drove onto the base. Its driver showed something to the guard. As it came up the road, Ruby smiled and shook her head when she saw the familiar smiling Asian face behind the wheel.
“Hey, sailor. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” said her Naval Safety coworker Mark Thanh with a wink as he rolled down his window.
Ruby grabbed her bag and ran over, beaming.
“Mark! Am I glad to see you,” Ruby said, chucking her bag into the back of his rental. “I thought everybody died. What the heck took you so long?”
“I just got back from leave and wasn’t a minute into the office when El Jefe turned me right around to come down and relieve you. Your sister still hasn’t had that baby yet, right?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Ruby said, glancing at the guard shack. “You need to get me to the civilian airport double time.”
They made the U-turn. As they approached the checkpoint, she stifled a groan as the big sergeant-at-arms at the gate held up a hand for a second.
He peered at Ruby’s face, confused. But then he saw Mark’s face again and realized he’d just seen him, and then he tentatively waved them on.
As they came out onto the base road, Ruby turned around and looked back. The guard hadn’t moved from the spot. He was looking at her again with the same confused look.
Ruby felt weird then, sort of guilty and suddenly and oddly quite afraid.
“Rube, you all right?” Mark said.
“I’m fine. Just worried about my sister,” she lied as the gate and the white buildings of the base behind them got smaller and smaller under the hot blue sky.
16
The steel diamond-plate steps rang loudly against Reyland’s shoe heels as he came down the steep flight from the top deck of the USS Recover.
He was going to need to get some polo shirts or something, Reyland thought, unbuttoning his suit jacket in the Caribbean heat as he reached the bottom of the steel steps. It had actually been snowing at Bolling Air Force Base in DC when he took off two and a half hours before.
He glanced at his encrypted phone as it buzzed in his pocket. London again. Screw them. They’d have to wait. Everybody would have to just back the hell up for five seconds.
“Watch the chrome dome, boss,” his tactical team head, Thomas Ruiz, called out as he led Reyland to the right down the hot dim corridor.
Reyland smiled at Ruiz as he ducked under a sharply jutting electrical box.
The short and stocky former Delta Force sergeant didn’t walk so much as barrel through the world with a rooste
r-like strut.
The below-deck corridor was lined tight on both sides with cables and massive pipes and water hoses. They stopped at the end of it, and Ruiz knocked twice on a closed bulkhead door. The metal door squeaked and then opened inward like a bank vault. Just inside stood a very muscular black man wearing sunglasses in the same buff-colored tactical uniform as Ruiz.
The formidable man snapped his heels together as he gave them an ironically formal salute.
“Knock it off, Shepard,” Ruiz said, elbowing the man out of the way as they walked past.
The low warehouse-like hold they entered was roofed with steel beams. The bodies were laid out in the middle of it on a blue tarp, two by two. They were in dark green plastic body bags, and as Reyland came closer, over the boiler room smell of the ship’s machine oil, he caught the first fecal whiff of their rot.
Ruiz stopped before them and nodded at Shepard, who knelt at the first body bag. The rest of Ruiz’s men, a half-dozen veteran professional operators, sat a ways off in a dim corner of the hold. Aloof. Yawning. Not even looking at them. Some standing, some squatting, all in complete monk-like silence. They weren’t even talking to each other.
As the bags were zipped open, Reyland watched Ruiz take a cigar from his pocket. The Zippo he lit it up with had an ace of spades engraved in the side.
“Here,” Ruiz said as he offered the stogie to Reyland, soggy end first. “You’re going to need this.”
They went over to the first one.
Reyland let out a breath as he looked down.
His boss, Arthur Dunning himself. Holy Toledo.
Even in death, his boss had an austere bearing. Even now his standing expression was that of a crafty old coach about to throw a chair across a basketball court.
A memory came suddenly. Dunning, competitive in all things, was a scratch golfer, and they would play twice a month. He remembered the time he had almost beaten him a few years before on the course out on Griffin Island. He’d been up one on the last tee. Then right in the middle of his back swing, the sly old bastard had actually coughed. Reyland remembered slicing it, burying it in the woods good and deep.
“Shit happens,” Dunning had said, giving him a smug little smile.
Reyland fought off the strange desire to smile a little smugly himself as he looked down at his dead mentor laid out on the beat-up below-deck windowless room like a bunch of garbage in a split-open Hefty.
Sure does, boss, he thought, nodding. It surely does.
Reyland looked at the other dead men.
“How’d the plane go wonky? The cabin pressure like they said?”
“No clue,” Ruiz said, blinking at him. “I’d expect it’s something like that because of the blue patches on their faces there. Looks like they suffocated. But there’s no way to tell unless we bring in the mechanics and experts. I’m no structural engineer, boss.”
“Now tell me, Tommy,” Reyland said, looking the hardcase commando in the eye, “we’re the only ones to see this abortion, correct? Our team and the coast guard diver and a few coast guard people?”
“Well, actually,” Ruiz said, raising a brow.
“Actually what?”
Ruiz folded his stocky forearms.
“They sent an investigator from Naval Safety before we got the call. The cutter captain has an uncle in the navy and went VFR direct to him, jumped the chain.”
“No!” Reyland cried.
Ruiz nodded.
“They even flew her out to the cutter. But as far as I know, she didn’t see this or anything else. The cutter was ordered away before she could see any of the wreckage. She actually left the base. There’s another investigator now. Some navy fool who keeps asking to get on the ship.”
“Why bring her up?”
“No reason. I know how thorough you like to be. Especially in a situation of this, um, magnitude. I thought you might want to make a note of who’s coming and going.”
Reyland nodded at his tough little security man. Ruiz was as sharp as he was ruthless. He never missed a trick.
“Okay, good, Tommy. Noted. Now, where are the packages?”
“Ah, the packages,” Ruiz said, gesturing with his chin.
Reyland followed him into the corner of the hold opposite his resting men.
As they arrived, Ruiz kicked at a silver hard-pack suitcase with his tactical boot, sending it spinning. Reyland looked at it. It was open and empty.
“What’s this?”
“We found this at the site in some coral thirty feet from the plane,” Ruiz said. “Empty just like this.”
“No!” Reyland said, staring at the empty case. “You have got to be putting me on. Someone is playing games, huh? Did a little five-finger salvage job? One of the coasties? Or maybe the navy inspector who left?”
Ruiz shrugged.
“Not her. We watched video of her leaving the base. She only took her kit bag.”
Reyland pulled his phone out and called Emerson topside on the Recover’s deck.
“Yes, boss?”
“Plan B. Call HQ. I want full intelligence jackets on everybody on that coast guard tub from the captain to the guy who scrubs the urinals. Also, tell that peckerhead base commander who drove us in here we need some rooms to conduct interviews.”
“On it,” Emerson said.
Reyland looked at Ruiz in the dimness of the hold, looked at the empty suitcase. A bead of sweat rolled down his hairless head and neck into the back of his starched shirt collar as he tucked his phone away.
“Looks like we’re doing this the hard way, Tommy,” he said.
17
Late Tuesday afternoon just before sunset, Gannon was at his bungalow in Tarpum Head.
In his favorite pair of camo cargo cutoff shorts and the last of his clean button-down shirts, he was out on his covered back porch, lying back on a plastic chaise.
There was a warm bottle of beer in his hand, and he took a sip of it, looking out on things. On his backyard. On the thorny brush that edged it. On the blue glitter of the Caribbean to the south.
He’d come home around dawn and wolfed down the entire half tray of lasagna he had made two days before and proceeded to sleep like the dead. He’d woken up around three in the afternoon and had to call a resort he had just started working for to apologize for the diving appointment that he had missed.
“If this happens one more time, you’re fired,” the manager had screamed at him.
“You got it,” Gannon had said pleasantly before he hung up. “Goodbye now.”
He was freed up now, wasn’t he? he thought, smiling, as he put his hands behind his head in the warm breeze.
Freed up in a whole entirely new way.
He yawned and listened to the birds chirp in the warmth of the evening. He had just taken a shower, and his hair was still wet. He thought about bringing out the little Bluetooth speaker to get some tunes going, but he was too comfortable.
He looked out across the crabgrass. Alongside the edge of his yard were three chewed-up tennis balls he had forgotten to throw away. They had belonged to his late-departed boxer, Buster, who had died of old age two months before.
For the twentieth time, he told himself that he needed to find a new dog. Fishing, especially, had always been so much finer with Buster beside him. But something always seemed to come up.
He lifted his beer again.
It was probably because his good old Buster was so awesome, Gannon thought. He didn’t want to replace him yet. That was it.
He sipped his beer and nodded.
It was out of respect.
He closed his eyes and thought about all the problems he could erase now. The loan on the boat, the one on the house, the costly leak in the line between the Rambler’s tank and the fuel pump he was ignoring. Wipe those pesky critters away with one swipe.
He smiled. What was especially delicious was the secret of the whole thing. He had nothing to do with the local area of Little Abaco. He knew no one up there. There was no way to know that he had been there.
Besides, even if they surmised that the money had been picked up by someone, there were what? Five thousand fishing and pleasure boats in the Bahamas? Ten?
It made him giddy how free and clear he was.
18
He was finishing his beer and thinking about walking on down the beach road to his local watering hole to procure an actually cold one when his phone rang.
He smiled as he looked at the caller ID. His son usually took a minimum of twenty-four hours to text him back.
But in this case apparently, he was making an exception.
“Dad? What’s going on?” Declan said, sounding stunned. “I just read your text. What are you talking about? You’re joking, right?”
Gannon smiled as he sat up under the rusty awning.
“Hi, son. It’s no joke. Pack your stuff. When opportunity knocks, you have to answer the door.”
“But, Dad, I told you Larry won’t give me the time off. He can’t. We’re already down a guy. He’ll go ballistic. I’ll lose my job.”
“Don’t worry about that, son,” Gannon said. “You’re going, and that’s final. Actually, scratch that. We’re going. I’m heading over to go with you.”
Declan had been an outstanding pitcher ever since Little League, but he’d broken his arm skateboarding in his junior year, and they thought that was that.
But about six months ago, he’d started rehabbing as a goof after work with one of his buddies who’d played a little minor-league ball, and now like some returned gift from on high, he was apparently hitting the midnineties with ease. His friend had arranged a meet with a scout and just like that Declan had actually been invited to a tryout for the Brewers.