Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “You’re thinking the same thing that I am, then?” I said. “Trask had to be a part of getting that guy in, whoever he is?”

  He ran his fingers over his shining bald head. “There are no indications that the security system failed in the physical or electronic sense. Ergo, yes, someone with access and clearance had to be involved.”

  “Trask, or a helper?”

  “That’s my problem: If we can’t find out how the floater got in there, then the default assumption has to be that the system failed.”

  “And they’re interviewing everybody? That Russian, for instance, and her people, the operating engineers?”

  “Oh, hell, yes, three times a day. We’re going to be sitting down with lie detectors shortly. The company’s sending down a battalion of lawyers, which made the Bureau really happy.”

  Pardee showed up with sandwiches and iced tea. I could see that Ari wasn’t really hungry, but he ate anyway. We chewed through lunch in silence, and then he looked at his watch again. I told him we’d get back to him first thing, either late tonight or in the morning, when we had something. He thanked us for lunch and then pushed back his chair.

  “If it’s him, you tell that crazy bastard to get back in,” he said. “I don’t care what or who else he’s screwing around with—we need him back at Helios, now.”

  At eleven that night, Tony and I arrived at the designated rendezvous point, which was a point just to seaward of where the Cape Fear River poured out into the Atlantic. The night was dark and cold, with a steady fifteen-knot breeze kicking up some small whitecaps around us. Tony had noted that the rendezvous time would coincide with slack water following an ebb tide, which would minimize the current coming across the bar. Otherwise, we’d have had a tough time staying in the lat-long position designated in the note. To the north the lights of Kure Beach twinkled over the dunes; to our west were Southport and the Oak Island pilots’ station. The actual rendezvous position was nearly alongside the so-called sea buoy, the first buoy that a ship entering the Cape Fear estuary encountered. The buoys had all looked small from a distance, but this thing was big, some fifteen feet high. It was festooned with barnacles, radar reflectors, bird manure, the blinking light, and a crowd of sleeping pelicans.

  Tony kept checking the radar for any contacts, especially one of those huge container ships. There were some big blobs on the scope up near the container port, but they were most likely tied up to the pier. The layout of the river entrance and the shorelines of the estuary stood out in sharp green lines on the radarscope display. The boat had been bouncing around quite a bit when we stopped, so Tony put us on a two-mile racetrack pattern, which kept the motion to a minimum as we idled around, waiting for Trask. I’d left Pardee back at the house so we’d have a base of communications ashore, and I’d briefed Tony on the way out to the rendezvous. He’d had some questions.

  “If Trask is working undercover for Homeland Security, how come the Bureau doesn’t know that? I mean, aren’t they supposed to be talking to each other these days?”

  “That’s the theory,” I said, “but, remember, out of all those alphabets, the FBI is the one that is not inside the Homeland Security mantle. My guess is they both hold back from each other.”

  He turned the wheel to go back downwind and looked again into the radarscope cone. “But why would they do that? Wasn’t that the point of those so-called intel fusion centers? So everybody knew what everybody else was doing? So they could stop stepping on each other’s toes?”

  “It’s a Washington thing,” I said. “I think it’s about budget money. The agency with the biggest budget has the most power. You bare your bureaucratic soul to an outfit that competes for budget money with you, you make yourself vulnerable. We played those games back in the sheriff’s office, remember? Major Crimes versus Patrol, Patrol versus Community Relations? Same deal, bigger honeypot.”

  “We’ve got a contact,” he announced, pointing down into the radarscope cone. I looked. There was a tiny green blip down in the direction of Oak Island. Tony turned on the leaders function, which put a green line on the blip. The length of the line represented the contact’s speed, and the direction of the line indicated its course. This one was coming our way.

  “It could be a pilot boat,” I said.

  “Then we’d expect a contact to seaward—an inbound ship.” He flipped the range scale out to twenty-five miles, but there was nothing coming from seaward. He dropped the scale back down to ten miles, and the contact continued to close us. Whoever it was, he was coming out of the estuary.

  Tony made sure the VHF radio was tuned to channel 16, which was the standard channel for ship-to-ship comms in restricted waters. Trask probably wasn’t going to initiate voice communications, in case the Coast Guard had been alerted to watch for his boat. I still wondered if a Bureau team had put an RFID tracer on the boat. If they thought Trask was dead, though, why would they care about his boat? Even if they did know that Trask had been working undercover for the government, the boat’s whereabouts still shouldn’t matter.

  “He’s coming right for us,” Tony said. “Or at least for that buoy.”

  “Our nav lights are on, right?” I asked.

  He nodded and picked up binoculars to search the night ahead of us. The flashing light from the sea buoy wasn’t helping with our night vision. The seas were confused, and I guessed that the tide had turned. When the sea began to flow back into the estuary, it collided with the outbound river current, creating a crazy patchwork of waves and whorls in the water. Tony was having to work to keep the boat on course as the currents opposed each other over the bar.

  I checked my cell phone and found coverage. I called Pardee back at the house.

  “We’ve got a contact headed our way,” I said. “We’ll call again after we have our meeting, or in one hour, whichever is sooner.”

  “And if you don’t?” he asked. “Where are you?”

  “We’re loitering about something called the sea buoy,” I said. “Where the seaward end of the channel into the Cape Fear River begins.”

  “Roger that,” he said. “One hour, and then I call the Coast Guard.”

  I agreed and hung up.

  “Five miles and closing,” Tony said. “We’re right in the main shipping channel. Want to go meet him?”

  The water around the sea buoy was getting rougher and rougher. “Might be a little flatter inside,” I said. I wasn’t getting seasick so much as having trouble staying upright as our small boat bounced and pitched in the confused chop. I was glad I hadn’t brought the shepherds.

  Tony kicked it up a few knots, and we pointed into the estuary. When the sea buoy was a half mile or so behind us, channel 16 suddenly came to life.

  “Hold your position,” a voice said. No call signs, no identification numbers or names, just a voice. It sounded like Trask, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  “Roger,” Tony replied, also leaving out any identifying information. It was totally incorrect procedure, but it worked, and anyone listening would be clueless as to who was talking or why. Tony slowed and tried to find a stable course, but the water was still pretty rough. The current seemed to be pushing us into the estuary, although it was hard to tell in the dark.

  “Two miles,” Tony said, staring out into the night. He kept checking the radar to see where the other boat should be. I kept looking for lights but didn’t see any.

  “Shouldn’t we be able to see his running lights?” I asked. “That’s a big boat.”

  “You’d think so,” he said. “Unless he’s turned them off. That thing had radar, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Tony switched the range scale down to five miles, and the blip became larger, halfway in from the edge of the screen. The electronic leader pointed right at the center of our scope, where the rising chop had created a bloom of green sea return on the display.

  Tony kept looking out with the binoculars, while I switched the range scale down to two miles. The con
tact was still visible, but it was getting perilously close to the edge of the blob from the sea return, which now covered the inner one-third of the display. At some point, the radar would become useless. That point was just about now.

  “Cam,” Tony said.

  I looked up to see Tony staring ahead, no longer using his binoculars. I tried to get my eyes to work, night-blind from having been staring down into that radar screen. I was about to ask, “What?” when I saw the bows of what looked like the Keeper dead ahead, close, very close, and pushing up a huge wave. Tony reached for the controls, but a moment later, she crashed into us and I was spinning underwater in a coil of noise, roiling seawater, shattering fiberglass, and the thrum of two large propellers pulsing the water right in front of my face.

  We both popped to the surface at the same time. Our boat was gone except for what looked like the front one-third, which was upside down and bobbing around in a debris field of fiberglass bits, flotation foam, and gasoline. Tony was gagging on a mouthful of gasoline and saltwater; I wasn’t yet in the fuel slick, but the stink was strong. I paddled backward away from the smell and looked for the Keeper, but there was no sign of her, just a muffled rumble of engines disappearing. Then a small wave broke over me from behind, and when I went under, I realized that my clothes were really heavy. It took me several seconds to get my head above water again, and even though I was a strong swimmer, I felt a moment of panic in that black water. That cold, black water.

  “You hurt, boss?” Tony called from somewhere in the darkness. I tried to spot him, but the dark out there was absolute, except for the regular pulsing of the sea buoy light.

  The sea buoy.

  If we could get up on that thing, we might not freeze to death quite so quickly.

  “I’m okay, I think,” I shouted back. “How about you?”

  “Got a cut on my arm, but I don’t think anything’s busted,” he called back.

  “Tell it not to bleed,” I called. I didn’t have to tell him why.

  “Where are you?”

  “Over here,” I called, raising my right arm, which promptly caused me to submerge under the next wave.

  “I’m hanging on to the bow,” he shouted. He sounded farther away, which wasn’t a good sign. “Here. Over here.”

  I tried to pop up out of the water, but my clothes weighed me down. I did, however, catch a glimpse of something white over to my right, so I began swimming in that direction. The seas were rising and smacking me from every direction, but I knew I had to get going before hypothermia worked its deadly spell on my shivering body.

  Five minutes of thrashing brought me up next to the floating bow section. Tony was holding on with his left arm to a big crack in the fiberglass, and I thought I could see black rivulets running down his hand. He reached out with his right and pulled me alongside. I was more tired than I should have been, but the weight of my clothes had been a real surprise. The gasoline smell was gone now.

  “Why’s this part still afloat?” I asked.

  “Unsinkable, remember?” he said. “It’ll float until it gets waterlogged.”

  “How long’s that?”

  “We’ll be dead of hypothermia long before that happens,” he said with a crazy grin. Leave it to Tony to feel this was just another adventure.

  “Try for that buoy?” I asked.

  “What buoy?”

  I looked around and realized I could no longer see the flashes of light.

  “It’s anchored,” Tony said. “We’re not. Tide’s coming in, so we’re drifting away from that thing.” He spat out some water and rubbed the gash on his arm. “I think we’re fucked.”

  “Well, at least we know who the bad guy is,” I said, and then realized that, no, we really didn’t. I couldn’t prove that it had been Trask driving that boat. I tried to get my bearings, but the waves were just high enough to block our view. I was getting really tired now, and my arms and legs were beginning to numb up a little. My running shoes felt like a couple of bricks. I remembered seeing one of those time-versus-temperature life-expectancy tables for people adrift in cold water, and quickly put it out of my mind.

  “Whoa,” Tony said, looking over my shoulder. “I think that’s a ship.”

  I turned around, wiped the saltwater out of my eyes, and looked where he was looking. At first I didn’t see anything, then I did: two white lights, one over the other. It looked to be a long, long way away, though, up in the direction of the container port.

  “She’s coming right at us,” Tony said. “Those are the masthead and range lights. I can’t see running lights.”

  “Too far,” I gulped, bouncing in the water to see over the hump of the shattered bow section. My fingers were like ice.

  “Or she’s really big and not far off,” Tony said. “Oh, fuck!”

  He was right and I was wrong. She was really, really big and she was right here. We could hear the crashing of the bow wave and feel the engine vibrations thumping through the water. It had to be one of those giant container ships, which looked big enough alongside the pier. When you get face-to-face with one in the water and can count rivets, big doesn’t begin to describe it. With our own radar at short range, we’d missed it.

  Then we were lifting out of the water as the pressure swell from the bulbous bow thrust us aside like two fleas and deposited us and our bow fragment right alongside the towering black steel wall of her port side, which hissed past us in the darkness. I thought about yelling for help, but it would have been like hollering up at an iceberg, with about as much effect. I wanted to swim away from those massive steel plates, vividly mindful of some very big propellers that were coming our way, but neither of us could really move. Our tiny wreck bounced along the side of the ship, spinning gently each time we bumped up against the sliding hull, and it was all we could do to hang on. Twice we were hit in the face by hot water coming from overboard discharges.

  Finally the slope of the moving steel mountain changed to an overhang as her stern came up on us. We both instinctively looked up into the white light of her stern light, above which we saw a lone face looking down into the wake. And directly at us.

  We saw the man’s head snap up and his slanted eyes go wide when he spotted us, but then we disappeared out of the stern light as the monster spat us out into her broad, smooth wake. The wash from her propellers coiled the water like a field of hissing snakes. Then we heard a wonderful sound: the deep, booming groan of her ship’s whistle. Three blasts, which Tony said meant she was backing down. With any luck at all, we were now unfucked, and just in time, too. The remains of the wake were dissipating, and we could see glinting, finny figures darting through the disturbed water, hunting for delicacies stirred up by the giant ship’s passage. Out on the margins of all the activity were a couple of really big fins, moving slowly, biding their time. Through chattering teeth, I prayed they were porpoises.

  Forty-five freezing minutes later, we were huddled in the ship’s motorboat under two soggy blankets each, as the coxswain maneuvered under the boat falls dangling down from the darkness above. I’ve been cold before, but never like this. My bones felt like rubber, and I wanted desperately to sleep. None of the boat crew spoke a word of English, but they were expert seamen, and they’d been directed back to our position in the dark by someone who knew what he was doing, too.

  Once on board we stumbled across acres and acres of steel deck to the massive superstructure amidships. They indicated we needed to climb the interior stairways, but I simply couldn’t do it, and Tony slid down to the deck and hung his head on his chest. When they saw the blood leaking down his wrist, there was more excited radio chatter. Apparently the damned ship was so big they used radios to communicate inside as well as outside. A few minutes later, a medical team arrived and we were carried on stretchers to the ship’s sick bay. They stripped off our wet clothes and rolled us up into yet more blankets, which produced about twenty minutes’ worth of chattering teeth. A cup of hot tea, loaded with sugar, helped a lot,
while the medical attendant worked on Tony’s forearm. Then a ruddy-faced, bearded Englishman stuck his head into the sick bay and welcomed us aboard his ship.

  “Right, then,” he said approvingly. “We’ve got one of your Coast Guard helicopters en route. Drink up, we’ll get you some dry coveralls, and then we’ll see how well the pilot does with our landing spot.” He looked slyly over at the medical guy doing his thing with Tony’s arm, whipped out a flask, and dropped a wee dram of something wonderful into my tea.

  “Thank you,” I croaked. “For everything.”

  “You’re most welcome. Made for an excellent drill before we got out to sea. You were lucky in more than one respect: This was the after-lookout’s very first watch, so he was actually doing his job. Normally, the chances of your being seen down there were those famous twins.”

  I knew those twins: Slim and None. “I’d like to express my appreciation to him, then, if I may.”

  He whipped out a business card. “Send me a check. His name is Hassam Selim. I’ll see that he gets it.”

  I thanked him again, and then we were rounded up for the approaching helicopter ride.

  Once at the Wilmington Coast Guard station, we had to endure an interview about what had happened and fill out a dozen or so forms. On the ride over from the ship, I’d thought about how much to reveal. I decided to mostly tell the truth, under the theory that, if questioned again, it would be easier to remember. The young Coast Guard lieutenant listened to my story about going out to sea to meet the Keeper and getting run over instead. He frowned when I was finished, and then asked if we would mind hanging around for a few minutes.

  I put a landline call in to Pardee at the beach house and told him what had happened. He said he’d drive up right away. I asked him to notify the marina and to tell them there’d be a Coast Guard incident report to follow. He confirmed that we had purchased full replacement insurance on the boat, so the marina ought not to be too excited. He asked if we should call Quartermain, but I told him to hold off. Then the lieutenant came back into the conference room, accompanied this time by an older officer wearing the stripes of a lieutenant commander. He introduced himself as the station’s operations officer. He had one question: Did we think this was an accident or an intentional crash? I looked at Tony and then told the ops boss that it had to have been intentional. We’d exchanged radio calls, he’d told us to maintain our position, indicating he knew where we were, and we’d watched him come straight toward us on the radar. He’d arrived at the intercept point going full bore, plus, he had to have known he’d hit something, and yet he’d kept on going.