The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “The difference,” said Tarc, patiently, “is concentration. We want the stuff contained by the walls of the canals. The river current flows west, yes, but it’s slow, and it wanders all over Illinois, mainly at no more than five or six miles an hour. We want the effect to be as strong as it can be.”

  Jakki gave the answer some thought.

  “I’ll tell them. Another thing. We want to get paid now.”

  “You get paid when we’re alongside the berth and moored.”

  “That wasn’t the deal. The deal was we got off at Manitoulin. This is not a request, Emil. We want to get paid out now. That’s how it is.”

  “Fine,” said Tarc, angry. “Tell them to get their gear—”

  “We’re already packed. We want the cash. Now.”

  “Okay. It’s in the safe. Tell your people to go to the wardroom, have some coffee. I’ll come down in a few minutes and we’ll share out.”

  “You’ll come down in five minutes.”

  “Yes. Okay. In five.”

  Jakki sent Majiic a look, turned and walked away. For a heavy man wearing cowboy boots, he moved like a cat, soundless and supple. Tarc watched him walk away with an unreadable expression on his face. Once the door had closed, and they could hear Jakki’s boots clanking on the metal stairs as he went back to the crew deck, Tarc picked up the binoculars again and focused them on the three black insectlike shapes that were floating along the waterline, less than two miles away. As he watched, they flared in a tight formation, rose up, reversed direction, and headed back up the shore toward the downtown core.

  Tarc took the binoculars away, handed them to Majiic, and said: “Keep an eye on those birds. We’re about four miles out of Calumet. Radio Port Control, and tell them we’re the Maersk Empire and we’re coming in for our berth on schedule. We’re not booked to off-load until the morning. See they remember that. I’ll be right back.”

  Vigo watched him go, verified the Autohelm, and stepped back out onto the wing deck to clear his mind and settle his nerves. A thousand yards away, inside the pilothouse of a small Coast Guard cutter running with only her navigation lights on, a surveillance technician watched through a tripod-mounted telescope as Majiic stepped to the ship’s rail, took out a cigarette, and lit it. They were shadowing the ship, had been ever since it had come inside the Tactical Perimeter Boundary that Homeland Security had set for all Seawaymax-class tankers bound for the Port of Chicago. This ship, the Maersk Empire, had already been boarded three times, according to the Operations computer in the Port Authority office down at Lake Calumet, and its papers had been verified by the International Marine Registry in Marseilles. It was carrying a load of condensed soy milk and was en route to a berth that had been duly booked with the Harbor Master two weeks before.

  So, no real urgency with the Maersk Empire, but it was a Seawaymax-class boat, and the technician had been present in the Ready Room when a CIA agent, with something of the crocodile about him, had stood up in front of a roomful of Homeland Security guys, FBI agents, Coast Guard sailors, Port Authority cops, and assorted spooks from what the FBI was calling OGOs—Other Governmental Organizations—and when he filled them in on the Seawaymax threat the tech sat up straight and listened hard.

  He had the lens, and the guy with the cigarette, so he snapped a shot with the attached digital camera—ran off a string, as the guy took a few quick puffs; he looked nervous, even at a thousand yards— and downloaded the shots to a disk, which he handed to his partner, a serious young blond woman who was the captain of the cruiser. She slipped the disk into her MDT and e-mailed it to the Collections Data clerk at the Port Authority office in Lake Calumet, who uploaded the shots and posted them on the large LCD display in the center of the room, where the movement of every ship in southern Lake Michigan was being monitored in pretty much the same way as airplanes are monitored at O’Hare. The shot, a digitally enhanced telephoto, was tagged:

  UNKNOWN SHIP’S OFFICER

  Bridge of Maersk Empire

  Registry # MDE2665-DWT60-SWMX 2036

  Back on the wing bridge of the Maersk Empire, Vigo Majiic finished his cigarette and went back into the wheelhouse. He was on the radio to the Harbor Master a few minutes later, giving the clerk their ETA, when Tarc came back on deck. He walked over to the wheel, looked down at the bearing. His face, lit up from below by the greenish glow of the compass screen, had what looked like freckles all over the left side.

  “You’ve got something on your face,” said Majiic.

  Tarc put a hand up, touched his cheek, looked at his fingertip.

  “Oh. Thanks,” he said, taking a cloth from the tool drawer and wiping his face off. Majiic realized that what had looked like freckles had actually been blood spray.

  “How did it go with Jakki?” he asked.

  Tarc gave him a look.

  “How do you think it went?”

  Majiic looked out to the lake again, his chest tightening.

  “What are you going to do, Emil?”

  Tarc walked over to the navigation table, picked up the Google Earth shot, spread it out on the console in front of them.

  “This is the harbor mouth here. There’s a tall steel bridge that crosses the canal. That’s not our problem, because it’s a real high bridge and we can go under it at speed. Here’s the problem. It’s eleven hundred meters from the harbor mouth to a swing bridge, where a street called South Ewing crosses the canal. You see it here, the road marked 41. It’s too low to get under, just a lift bridge; comes up in two sections, so we’ll have to have enough headway to crash right through it if we need to. We’re expected, so it should be open, but when they see us coming in so fast—I figure thirty-five knots will do it, but more is better—they may drop the bridge to try and stop us.”

  Tarc’s attention was on the photo, so he wasn’t seeing the look on Vigo Majiic’s face. Tarc’s eyes were wide, a kind of heat was coming off him. His voice was high, tight, his breathing short and rapid. Majiic thought about how far it was to the Very flare gun in the signals cupboard. If he could get to that and fire a rocket right into Tarc’s chest . . . ?

  “So, you’ll have to have her moving at forty knots when we enter the mouth of the canal, Vigo. As soon as we’re in the canal, I’ll start venting the holding tanks. Then—you see here, where the canal turns to port?—we have to keep up our headway, even as we swing around this bend. No matter what, Vigo, I’ll be counting on you. We have to be at full speed, and you need to take that curve at speed. And you’ll have only another five hundred meters before we hit the second lift bridge right here, where East Ninety-fifth Street crosses over . . . We have to take that out, if they won’t open it, and we have to assume they won’t. There’s a rail bridge up next, but it’s a high bridge, too, so all we have to do is cover the five hundred meters from the Ninety-fifth Street bridge to the Chicago Skyway, where Interstate 90 crosses over the river. Our only problem, then, is to bring the ship to a complete stop under the Skyway—we set her on fire and she blows, the bridge is gone. You’ll have to go full astern as soon as we’ve taken out the bridge. It might be a problem—”

  “Why do I have a problem at all?” asked Majiic, who was miles ahead of Tarc and busily figuring out how to jump ship at the first opportunity. “Why are you even thinking about this? This is fucking nuts!”

  “Look, Vigo, for this whole thing to work we have to make an impression. We can’t just steam gently into Calumet Harbor and quietly piss ourselves empty like some fucking cockapoo. We need to make some real noise. Otherwise, the Americans will just spin some bullshit story about red tide or algae bloom, and nobody will know we’ve hit them hard.”

  “I thought Gospic was taking care of that.”

  “Sure. But the U.S. will just say it’s typical terrorist bullshit. How serious is anybody taking that fairy bin Laden these days? No, we need to hit them and be seen to hit them. A big event that Gospic can point to. So—”

  “You saw those Apaches up the shore? If you
do what I think you’re going to do, they’ll come in and light us up like it was New Year’s.”

  “Which is an event, then, isn’t it? The boat blows, the cargo gets dumped into the river. Mission accomplished.”

  “We’ll fucking die!”

  Tarc took out his little MP5, laid it on the counter beside the Google shot.

  “You might die later or you will die now, Vigo. I told you all about this back on Maju Island, didn’t I? Achilles? Flame-capped? It was always going to come to this. You want to burn out or fade away, Vigo?”

  “I want to get old and die in some pretty girl’s bed.”

  “Well, you may yet. Look at it this way. This is America. You live through it, they’ll give you some celebrity lawyer, take ten years to try you, get a hung jury, and you sell the film rights to Columbia Pictures. There are the buoys and that string of lights is the bridge over Calumet Harbor. Now, fire her up and turn her into shore. I’ll be right here beside you”—he lifted the MP5 and pointed it at Majiic’s head—“so let’s make this happen.”

  Vigo Majiic stared into the muzzle of the MP5 and only saw a black hole large enough to eat the sun. He spun the wheel around, the huge ship heeled over, white water curled from her port side, the compass swung madly around, the old hull creaking and groaning like the iron gates of an ancient castle. In the hull, sixty thousand metric tons of condensed soy milk shifted in fifteen separate holding tanks. The lights of Calumet Harbor moved from the starboard side to the starboard bow and slowly came into line with the white bow light on its standard, five hundred feet away from the wheelhouse.

  Vigo Majiic pushed the throttles forward and the entire ship’s frame shuddered as the prop dug into the cold waters of Lake Michigan. White water began to curl back from the steep prow, feathering out into a widening wake. Five hundred feet of steel and iron and liquid, driven by eight huge diesel engines, pushed forward by a massive steel prop that stood thirty feet high and weighed a hundred tons, came up to speed and aimed itself at the mouth of Calumet Harbor. They had three miles to cover. At forty miles an hour, they’d be in the canal in less than five minutes. The Mingo Dubai was on the last three miles of her long career.

  In the Port Authority office three miles away, right next to the tall steel gateway that marked the entrance to Calumet Harbor, Ray Fyke came back from a long cigarette break and looked around the room, crowded with agents and sailors, saw Micah Dalton, leaning back in a chair, staring back at him, smiling, sipping a cup of steaming black coffee.

  On the situation screen behind Dalton, Fyke saw the listed details of the next Seawaymax-class tanker scheduled to arrive—the Maersk Empire, carrying a load of condensed soy; she was the ninth Seawaymax-class tanker they had marked for surveillance today, and the twenty-fourth since they had set up shop in Calumet—and, besideit, he saw a telephoto shot of a man with an underslung jaw and shaggy black hair. He was leaning on the wing deck railing and smoking a cigarette. He looked worried.

  He fooking well should be, thought Fyke.

  “Mikey,” he said, quietly, “that’s Vigo Majiic.”

  Then the radio set beeped. It was the Coast Guard surveillance craft they had tasked to shadow the Maersk Empire, discreetly, into the harbor.

  “Port, this is Whiskey 6. We have a problem here.”

  THEY WERE ALL gathered around the radar screen. It was easy to pick out the incoming tanker. She was moving faster than any other tagged blip on the screen. She was now a half mile out. She’d hit the canal entrance in four minutes. The Harbor Master had seen to it that the South Ewing bridge and the Ninety-fifth Street bridge were down and locked. Armed cops had taken a position on the decks of the bridges, and more men were on the rooftops of the buildings that lined the canal. The Harbor Master turned to the Homeland Security man next to him, tapped the screen, and said:

  “Bring in those Apaches!”

  “No,” said the Homeland chief. “You can’t blow the hull.”

  “Well, we better do something fast,” said the Harbor Master.

  “We are,” said the man from Homeland.

  THERE WAS SILENCE on the bridge. The ship was vibrating like a church organ, a deep, thrumming energy that seemed to rise up from the deck plates and pour out from the bulkhead walls. The lights of the harbor were sharp and clear through the windshield, less than a mile away and getting larger by the second. Vigo had set the course and locked it in. There was little to do now but to brace himself against the wheel and hope to survive the impact with the South Ewing bridge.

  If he was still standing after that, if they hadn’t blown the ship out of the water with one of those Apache gunships, he’d try to swing the ship to port and get her bow around in time to take the Ninety-fifth Street bridge. Five hundred feet of iron moving at thirty, maybe forty knots. He didn’t have a chance. But if he didn’t try, or if he grazed her bow or hung her up in the bend, Tarc would kill him.

  Tarc was standing by the wheel, his attention fixed and rigid, his mouth half open, a witch light in his black eyes. He was paying no attention at all to Vigo Majiic. He had his hand on the VENT switch.

  Gospic had given instructions that all fifteen holding tanks could be vented from below the waterline. Venting sixty thousand metric tons of condensed soy would take quite a while. But, once it had started, the process could not be stopped. Mainly because, once he pressed that VENT button, he was going to shoot the console to pieces. The wheelhouse was suddenly filled with the klaxon sound of an alarm.

  Tarc looked at Majiic.

  “What’s that?”

  “Proximity alarm. It computes our speed and bearing and combines it with the radar returns. It’s a collision warning.”

  “Can you shut it off?”

  “Emil, we’re gonna be in the canal in thirty seconds. I can try.”

  “Try!”

  Majiic hurried over to the signals console behind Tarc, opened the door, reached down and pulled out a large Very flare gun. He lifted it up and aimed it at Tarc. Tarc was not there. Tarc had seen Majiic’s reflection in the wheelhouse glass.

  He was a few feet to the left. He smiled at Majiic, triggered the MP5, and stitched six holes up Majiic’s belly and into his chest. Majiic went back and down. Tarc stepped over to Majiic’s body, looked down at it, shaking his head. “Poor, dumb—”

  A slamming boom that echoed around the wheelhouse walls and the front of his chest blew outward in a spray of bone and blood. The deck came up like an onrushing steel wall. Tarc hit it hard, rolled over onto his back, staring up at the wheelhouse roof. A face appeared in his rapidly shrinking field of vision, a battered Irish face, missing a few teeth.

  “Raymond Fyke,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Ray,” said Dalton. “How do we stop this thing?”

  Fyke came to the wheel. The entrance to the canal was five hundred yards away. Fyke hit FULL ASTERN and turned the wheel to starboard. The lights of the harbor entrance began to slide slowly—very slowly—from dead ahead to a degree to port; there was a large empty field on the northern side of the canal, and a low stone breakwater. Fyke had the wheel hard over; the entire hull was groaning and creaking, a grinding sound of steel plates bending; the engines were howling, and the prop, reversing now, was churning up a pillar of white water and foam at the stern. Slowing . . . slowing. The canal entrance had slipped a little bit farther to port. The hull was vibrating like a struck gong, the windshield was full of lights, the proximity alarm was braying loud enough to stun. They saw the chopper that had dropped them onto the roof of the wheelhouse rise up and get out of the way; they saw the red-and-blue flickering of police lights all along the canal sides and crossing the South Ewing bridge—

  “Mikey,” said Fyke, standing by the wheel, “you better grab something solid because we are going in.”

  Dalton did. Fifteen seconds later, the Mingo Dubai struck the nine-foot stone breakwater at the northern edge of the Lake Calumet canal, traveling at a speed of approximately sixteen
knots. Her forward stabilizer crumpled like eggshell and broke wide open. Momentumcarried the tall, flaring bow up and over the breakwater wall. With a shrieking, grinding sound, with sparks of steel flaring out across the earth, the steel plates of her hull slammed through the stone wall like boxcars hammering over a railroad crossing. The ship drove on into the field, fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet, slowing, her lights flickering. The area had been cleared of civilians, but the rooftops and canal sides were packed with federal officers and Coast Guard people and they stood in stunned silence, watching this mountain of steel grind its way slowly into the deserted field. And stop. The ship had almost one-third of its length on dry land now. The big prop was still churning in reverse. The hull settled, rocked, and settled some more. There was a long, stunned silence, filled with the sounds of distant sirens and the slow chuffing of the ship’s engines. Fyke killed the engines, and the prop froze in the water. He looked over at Dalton.

  “Jesus, Mikey, that was a—”

  There was a huge, rending sound—steel breaking away, girders popping—the hull gave a final, convulsive shudder, and the Mingo Dubai snapped itself completely in two. Everything that was in the ten holding tanks that were in the part of the hull that was still in the water gushed out in a pale gray torrent. Forty or fifty thousand metric tons of condensed soy milk went into the Calumet harbor canal, and there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it but stand around and watch.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, they were still doing that—standing around and watching—when Dalton’s cell phone rang. It was Mandy Pownall.

  “Mandy, where are you?”

  “In London. They tell me the ship just hit the fan in Chicago.”

  “It did. We’re fucked.”

  “Tony Crane and I have been watching something develop at Burke and Single. In the U.S. commodities market.”

  “Like what?”