Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Will do. See you shortly.”

  At ten that evening, Pardee, the shepherds, and I climbed through the tattered chain-link fence on the landward side of the container junkyard. No longer having a boat, we’d driven across into Wilmington and parked in an industrial area behind an abandoned elementary school. I’d sandwiched the Suburban between two semitrailers that looked as if they’d grown roots into the trash-littered concrete.

  We’d ended up with two choices on the timing of our get-together with Trask. We could go early, find a decent tactical position out there in the junkyard, and wait for Trask, or we could go much later, making Trask do the waiting, while ceding to him a good ambush position. Pardee had suggested a third option: Don’t go at all. Ask the Bureau to scour the junkyard at the appointed time and see what they came up with.

  The problem was that my Bureau had never called back. Creeps either didn’t get the message, or did and failed to care. Or he’d been told to stay out of it by his adult supervision. Unknowns abounded. I’d been about to chide Pardee for his lack of interest in a good fight, but then remembered the tension we’d experienced the last time he and Tony backed out.

  We’d also talked about calling the port security people, but, as Pardee pointed out, we had no standing with them, and their domain probably did not extend to the junkyard. If we ran into the undercover ICE agent, he’d know who we were, but otherwise we were as unauthorized as Trask. My objective was to lay eyes and possibly a tire iron on Carl Trask, and find out if his little comment about Allie Gardner was real or just an enticement. We had new cell phones with all the appropriate numbers programmed into speed dial, guns, dogs, and a personal invitation. All we had to do now was find him, and hopefully not from the focal point of his kill zone.

  We had a map, of sorts. Pardee had gone online to one of those satellite photography Web sites and bought a direct overhead picture of the entire container port area, zoomed close enough to make out individual features of the container junkyard. He’d printed out two copies, and we’d traced a route that should take us through the campfire area. From there we’d do an expanding square search. The plan was for the shepherds and me to go in and for Pardee to follow about five minutes behind in case I stepped in something.

  If we didn’t encounter Trask, we’d join forces at the gap in the fence, look for a place to hole up out there, and then I’d see if I could flush him out. It wasn’t a very complicated plan, but then it wasn’t a very complicated mission. In my experience you could plan all day, but, as the military guys say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, so you might as well keep it simple.

  We set our cell phones on vibrate, and I went through the fence and down a steep embankment into the jumble of wrecked containers. The night was clear and not all that cold for a change. There was plenty of light looming into the sky from the main container yard, but the junkyard was not lighted at all. I had to pick my way carefully through the shadowy pile while not showing any light of my own. After a few clumsy minutes of this, I found a piece of steel pipe I could use as a walking stick, which made things easier. I was wearing SWAT cammies and a tactical belt with holster, one spare clip, a small first aid pouch, and a military survival knife.

  Our overhead photography showed that the area where we’d run into the derelicts was about two hundred yards in from the warehouse side of the junkyard. Beyond that was the creek inlet where we’d anchored when we still had a boat. I’d explained the mission to the shepherds, who’d been vitally interested for a good five seconds. Still, now they seemed to understand that we were walking into Injun country. Frick walked ahead of me, picking her footing carefully and stopping to sniff the ground frequently. I could only imagine how strong the scent quilt must be to that supersensitive nose. Frack walked behind me, stepping where I did, as if he suspected there were land mines in here.

  I slowed it down, placing each step tentatively on the litter underfoot before putting my weight on it. Trask knew we couldn’t come by water this time, so our way in would have to be through the container yard itself or the warehouse blocks on the landward side. That three-container tunnel was just too good a place for an ambush, which was why we’d come in from the Wilmington side. I leaned against the rusting sides of a fractured container and tried to think of what I would do if I were Trask. Would he simply want to finish the job, or did he really want to talk a little? Was he expecting just me or all three of us? Or was he out on his boat somewhere, having a Scotch and laughing at the thought of us poking around in the junkyard? If he was in here somewhere, had he ever wired his private concrete jungle for sound and night vision lights? The farther in I went, the better Pardee’s option three sounded.

  I had stopped in a sort of canyon of discarded shipping containers. I’d been keeping to the left side of the passage through all the containers because it seemed darker on that side, as well as less cluttered with debris. There was a strong smell of diesel oil in the air now, but I couldn’t tell if I was standing in a puddle of it or it was just the rusting steel barrels oozing into the night air. It was nearly complete darkness where I was standing, but I could see a dim light flickering around the edges of the ten-foot-high steel boxes ahead.

  Flickering?

  Had I reached the hobo campfire already? It seemed too soon, but it was easy to become disoriented here in the darkness amid the jumble of industrial trash, wrecked containers, and other debris. The dogs had their ears up and appeared to be listening to something ahead of us. I tried to listen, too, but heard nothing but the low hum of the city behind me and the whine of semi tires out on Shipyard Boulevard. If that was the campfire area, the way to it was straight ahead on what was obviously a well-used path.

  Too well used. It felt wrong.

  So I retraced my steps until I came to the edge of a container, which I could feel more than see, and turned right to work my way around to a different approach. I’d be off the route Pardee and I had agreed upon, but I should have time to get to the margins of the campfire area before he came along behind me. Ten quietly crunching steps into almost total darkness and I bumped into the steel walls of another container that was blocking the way.

  I was in a box canyon, literally. There were steel walls rising ten feet over my head in three directions.

  There was a crack between the corners of the two boxes, through which I could now definitely make out the glow of a small fire reflecting off a two-high stack of ruined containers. I could see a few hunched shapes of the homeless guys silhouetted against the fire. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the shepherds were waiting for me back where I’d made the wrong turn. Lot of help there, I thought.

  Then they both looked over their shoulders and disappeared.

  I blinked and looked again. No dogs.

  Keeping my back to one of the containers, I slid my way back to the entrance of my little detour, all by feel. I still had the steel pipe, but I laid this down in order to extract my .45 and a high-intensity penlight from my coat pocket.

  When I got back to the entrance to my dead end, there were still no shepherds. What in the hell had they gone after? Hopefully not a rat. The wolf genes in any German shepherd might not be able to resist a fleeing rat. Discipline would eventually intrude, but the reflexive reaction would be a snapping lunge. I should have put them on a down, but that would have involved speaking the command in the darkness.

  I waited by the edge of the container. I could feel sharp edges of ripped metal digging into my coat. How long had I been stopped? Would Pardee come around the corner in a minute? I tried to visualize our planned route in. I’d diverted into the dead end, but now I was back at the edge of the way we’d planned. Maybe the thing to do was to wait for Pardee before approaching those huddled figures out by the fire.

  Except my scouts had gone missing. I felt like Lee at Gettysburg.

  I waited and listened some more. The air had gotten colder the deeper I’d gone into the tangle. I was hoping for any sound I could recog
nize that might tell me where they’d run off to. It wasn’t like them to leave me in the dark like this.

  There was a solid wall of containers on the other side of the rough path. Firelight illuminated the very top edges. I stared at the containers, trying to make out what was different, and then figured it out. These were intact. Rusty, spray-painted with all sorts of hip-hop tags, dented and scratched, but otherwise intact. The three straight lift rods on the backs indicated working double doors. Three in a row, end on to the path, and sitting fairly upright, unlike the majority of the containers, which sprawled at all angles in the darkness. Everything around them was wrecked, but these three containers were definitely not wrecked. I decided to wait some more, hoping that Pardee would come creeping down the alley between the other containers. I had an increasingly urgent sense that I badly needed my backup, or what was left of it. Where were the damned dogs?

  After another two minutes of just standing there, I got out my cell phone and keyed Pardee’s number.

  It wasn’t Pardee who answered. It was Trask.

  “Hi there, Lieutenant,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “Let me talk to him,” I said.

  “Afraid he’s somewhat indisposed just now, Lieutenant. Not harmed, mind you, but not available for phone-cons. Sleeping. In your Suburban.”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Yup. A little whiff of ether and down he went. It’s a lot more efficient than whacking somebody on the back of the head. You never know what will happen then. Ready to palaver?”

  “I suppose I am,” I said, looking around again. I had the sense that he could see me.

  “Right in front of you are three containers,” he said, confirming my worst suspicions. “The middle door is the one you want. Watch your step.”

  He broke the connection. Well, shit, I thought. We did agree to meet him in his jungle, not ours. We should have figured a way to come by boat. I put my .45 away and slipped across the open space between my detour and the middle container. There were no locks on the operating handles, so I undid the latches and shoved the two halves open.

  I flipped on my penlight. The container was empty, just a blank cube of space that smelled faintly of some kind of exotic animal dung. I tried to remember where I’d smelled that before. The deck of the container was about a foot above the ground level outside, so I stepped up and into the container, keeping an eye on those doors. If there was someone waiting outside to lock me in, I thought I’d have a shot at keeping one of the door halves open long enough to deal with him.

  I stood there and searched the interior with the penlight again. I thought I heard a faint whimpering sound—the shepherds? I saw what looked like a big floor seam halfway down the container. Maybe there was a trapdoor of some kind? I took one more step in that direction and felt the floor sag under my feet. In the next instant, before I could step back, the half that I was standing on dropped down to a forty-five-degree angle and I went sliding down the plywood floor into serious darkness. The moment I hit bottom, the floor panel snapped back up behind me with a loud bang.

  I’d managed to hold on to the penlight, which I quickly shone around into the darkness. Instantly two fuzzy shepherd faces pushed into view and then into my own face. While I was fending off an incipient love-in, lights came on in the ceiling. One of the dogs knocked the tiny light out of my hand, but I no longer needed it. The lights were bright enough to make me blink.

  I found myself sitting on a dirt floor in an underground chamber. Actually, I realized, it was another container, submerged ninety percent under the surface level of the junkyard. For that matter, this might be the true surface level of the junkyard, depending on how old the place was. The walls and ceiling were made of what looked like aluminum or light steel; the only thing missing was a plywood floor. The air was dry and musty, but the ground smelled of damp. There were four small lights embedded in the ceiling, and an even smaller hole, maybe two inches square, at one end of the container, high up on the wall. It looked like there was a glass cover on that aperture. High on one side wall was a black circle about a foot and a half in diameter, which I assumed was an air hole. That was not a good sign.

  My cell phone began to vibrate.

  “Lieutenant,” Trask said, when I opened it. “Glad you could drop by.”

  “How’d you get the dogs down here?” I asked.

  “Dragged a rat on a string in front of them and into the double doors,” he said. “Which were open when you made your little detour there, in case you didn’t notice, and I don’t think you did.”

  “Got me there,” I said. I told the dogs to sit. I was trying to be really stern with them, but I was very glad to see them back. They sat, but they weren’t happy.

  “I’ve got you here, actually,” he said, “and we’re going to have some fun, presently. But first: I’m curious. What is it you think we’re going to do at Helios?”

  “I think you’re going to create some kind of fake terrorist incident. That wake-up call you were ranting about. Something to do with moonpool water.”

  “You’re close,” he said. “Perhaps wrong about the fake aspects.”

  “So why knock us off?” I asked, examining the space again. I didn’t like the sound of that have-some-fun comment, and I wanted out of here. Obviously I’d need to pull that plywood ramp back down, but I couldn’t see a seam anymore.

  “Because you’re getting in the damned way,” he said. “I don’t have time for any more of your interference. We have a plan, and a window of opportunity, which is upon us, so to speak. I need you out of the way, which is where you are.”

  “You keep saying ‘we.’ ”

  “Some like-minded people in the nuclear power industry,” he said.

  “What did you do to my partner out there?”

  “Put him to sleep,” he said. “Temporarily, I hope. He’s going to be medium useless when he does wake up, though.”

  “I told the Bureau you’re alive and kicking,” I said, “and where I was going tonight.”

  He laughed. “Nice try,” he said, “but the Bureau is shortly going to be much too busy to worry about you.”

  “Going to turn some more of your aliens loose in the container yard?”

  “My aliens?”

  “We ran into an ICE guy the last time we came over here. He told us he’s undercover over here in the junkyard, and that you’re part of an alien immigration surveillance program.”

  “My, my, how some people do run their mouths,” he said. “But I’m not worried about the Bureau. Their only interest in me right now is that I’m not their vic in the moonpool. Where’s the little Italian wise-ass?”

  “Out there somewhere,” I said.

  “Or back in Triboro,” he countered. “That’s what my sources tell me, anyway. Back home doing some homework. Something to do with the Helios visitor logs. You don’t have any idea why your Ms. Gardner overran her sell-by date down here, do you?”

  “You said you were going to enlighten me.”

  “I did say that, didn’t I. But I don’t know—you’re a pretty resourceful fella. You might yet get out of that hole you’re in. As long as you don’t manage that in the next twenty-four hours or so, I won’t care, of course.”

  I wondered if that meant tonight was the big night. “So give me a hint,” I said.

  “Okay, I will: What was her maiden name?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” I said. “I guess I just assumed Gardner was her maiden name, after two divorces.”

  “Therein lies the tale, Lieutenant. Now: I have things to do, people to see. Some spectacular incidents to precipitate. That .45 loaded?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you still have that baby penlight you were flashing around all over the place outside?”

  I did, even if the single AA battery was running down. I realized then that it had stayed on when I dropped it. The tiny spot of white light was now yellow.

  “Okay,” he said. “If it were m
e, I wouldn’t go shooting that hand-cannon of yours down there. Steel walls over hard-packed earth, sides and floor. What goes around will almost certainly come back around, if you follow me.”

  “Why would I be shooting?” I asked.

  “Because something’s coming for dinner,” he said.

  The phone connection switched off. I put the thing in my pocket, retrieved and switched off the penlight, and then walked around the confines of the chamber. I tapped the side walls, and, although they seemed to be made of metal, there was obviously hard-packed earth behind them. They felt like brick walls. He was right about the .45—there’d be ricochets forever. The dogs just sat there watching me, panting a little, and waiting for orders. I wished I had some for them, but this looked like a modern version of an oubliette. Then the shepherds both looked up at that black hole high up on the left side.

  A soft sound, like grain coming down a silo chute, began to fill the air, and then an enormous snake head came into view, its black tongue flickering urgently. The triangular head was pale white and the size of a partially flattened regulation-size football. The snake looked around, saw me, and then saw the shepherds, who were raising hackles and backing up. Locking on to the dogs, the snake continued to emerge from the hole. The body was proportionally smaller than it should have been right behind that enormous head, but then began to swell as the thing reached the floor and began to spread across it.

  I backed up right along with the dogs. Time began to slow down as more and more snake kept coming, the body getting thicker and thicker before finally slimming down to a vigorously switching tail, itself the size of a full-grown rattler. The cell phone began to vibrate in my pocket.

  “Isn’t she a beauty?” Trask said when I picked up. “Albino Burmese python.”

  “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” I said, pulling out the .45. Ricochets be damned, I wasn’t going to let that thing get a whole lot closer.

  “Yeah, I get that,” he said. “She’s almost six meters, and did I mention that she’s hungry? She just loves a good dog for dinner.”