At that moment, there was a loud clicking noise as all the lights out in the main corridor went off, followed a moment later by the lights in the switchboard room. The PWC watch officer, who had been monitoring the tactical net, came up and announced that the tunnel lighting breakers had been thrown in the vicinity of the dogleg turn.
Branner had her flashlight out, pointed into a tight white cone at her feet so as not to reveal their position to anyone out in the passageway.
“Where exactly is that breaker box?” Jim asked.
The PWC watch officer described the location, and Jim pointed down to the diagram. “The lights indicate he’s here, but that breaker is behind that position. Two of them?”
Before Branner could answer, they both felt a movement in the air, and the door to their vault swung open on silent hinges. The air moved again, as if a pressure differential had been created somewhere down the tunnel.
“Team four,” Jim ordered. “Enter your grating, head toward the river and turn left up under Stribling now. Possible contact a hundred feet in from your entry position. Team six, stand by.”
“Four, roger, coming in now.”
“Six, standing by.”
“Let’s go,” Jim said to Branner. “Whatever’s coming up the tunnel’s only a hundred and fifty feet away.”
“Suits me,” she said, getting to her feet and checking her stun gun. They’d elected to equip each team with the stun guns, rather than take chances with ricocheting bullets down in the maze of concrete tunnels. Given some of the things the runner had already done, however, everyone still had a sidearm.
Jim pulled the shoulder mike into his left hand and kept his Maglite in his right hand. Branner could cover both of them if there were shooting to be done. That station eight business was still nibbling at the edge of his mind. ‘Lots of contacts’? Then he had a thought: Was it him? Had their runner broken into the tactical net?
They stepped out the opened door and felt a definite movement of air in their faces. Almost a draft, not too strong, but coming toward them. Why? Where was the air coming from? Jim tried to review the tunnel layout in his mind, but the darkness had his attention. They stood just outside the telephone switchboard vault, and the light board down on the floor was still visible. He glanced back and saw yet another light blink on. Whatever was coming up the tunnel was closer by fifty feet.
“This is zero, what’s happening, three?”
“This is three; stand by,” Jim said, and then nudged Branner. “Lights,” he said, and they both shot bright white beams down the main tunnel in the direction of what was coming. What they saw startled them both. It looked like a huge metal sphere. It filled the tunnel and was rolling right toward them. Their flashlights reflected off the smooth surface as if it were glass, but it was definitely moving.
“We have a metal sphere coming down the tunnel right at us,” Jim announced to the net, wondering why the sphere wasn’t making any noise.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Branner whispered, pointing her stun gun even as she realized it would be useless. The huge sphere kept coming, not too fast, but not slowing down, either, rolling right at them. Jim felt the weight of the concrete ceiling bearing down on him as he just stood there watching this thing.
“Three, this is team four; where are you?”
“Standing just outside our hidey-hole. There’s this thing going up the tunnel. Where are you?”
“Right behind it, three,” the other voice said. “It’s a big metal ball of some kind. Rolling all by itself.”
“I’m gonna shoot it,” Branner growled, reaching for her Glock.
“Negative,” Jim shouted, batting her hand down. “Four’s right behind it. I know what that is-it’s a balloon! It’s a Mylar weather balloon. That’s why we can’t hear it.” He called out on the net that the thing was a weather balloon. When it reached them, Jim put his hand out. His finger pressed into it, and then the huge sphere bounced off his hand and stopped rolling.
“If I can’t shoot it, I’m gonna pop it,” Branner said, angry now that someone had been screwing around with them. She pulled a knife and jabbed at the balloon, which popped with a dull bang and then deflated. They were left facing the flashlights of team four, two Yard cops who were staring down at the puddle of metallic plastic between them.
“Okay,” one of them said. “What’s up with this shit?”
At that moment, the radio went off. “Hey there, boys and girls,” the station eight voice said. “Are we having fun yet?” This was followed by laughter, and then silence. Then the lights flashed back on in the main tunnel. Jim looked down at the mike in his hand and swore.
The teams convened back at the naval station police building thirty minutes later for a debrief. Branner kicked things off.
“It’s obvious those tunnels belong to this guy as much as they belong to PWC,” she said. “He was into the retransmitter freq from the git-go.”
“It almost sounds like he has a closed-circuit TV system down there,” the chief offered. “I mean, it’s like he could see what was happening, where people were.”
“How the hell did he control the lights?” one of the cops asked.
“The lights are on lighting transformers,” the PWC engineer said. “They’re set out in blocks along the tunnels, so you don’t lose all the lights if one fixture has a ground or other problem. It’s marked LIGHTING TRANSFORMER right on the box.”
“Did you guys have lights when you came down?” Jim asked the men on team four.
“Yeah. It only got dark when we came around the corner. We were confused when our lights reflected off that balloon thing.”
Jim looked at Branner. “I think I want to go back down there,” he said. “I want to see where the lighting transformers are that control the passageway lights near where we were holed up.”
The chief, conscious of his overtime budget, asked if the rest of the cops were done for the night. Jim said yes, and the meeting broke up.
Jim and Branner went back over to the Yard, and down into the main tunnel from the Stribling Walk grating entrance. They retraced their steps to the telephone vault, then looked around to see if they could find the control box for the passageway’s overhead lights. Just past a point where the main tunnel did a small zigzag, they found the nearest electrical panel marked LIGHTING TRANSFORMER and opened the front cover. They found a surprise inside-a message written in black grease pencil on the inside of the box cover. HMC: YOU SAID ONE-ON-ONE – READY 4 THAT ANYTIME. The message was signed with a smaller version of the shark logo from the big tag down the passageway.
“And this means something to you, right?” asked Branner.
“Yup. And he had to have been right here, outside the vault door. These switches look like local control to me.”
“He knew where we were, and he was able to get down here, kill the lights, set that big balloon in motion, and be gone by the time we came out and those other cops came down here looking for us,” Branner said.
Jim looked around the empty tunnel. “If he was gone,” he said. “Hell, he may have been hiding in one of these utility rooms the whole time. None of us searched the place after that balloon thing.”
“So how come the motion-detector string didn’t tag him if he was moving around out here?”
“Good question,” he said. “I asked the chief to leave all those things in place and just take the control box back with him. Let’s see, the nearest detector set should be down there, where the flap doors for that big storm drain are.”
They walked down the tunnel in the direction of Bancroft Hall. The tunnel expanded into a vestibule area next to the storm drain access, the flaps of which sloped down from the floor at a forty-five-degree angle. The flaps, hinged and spring-loaded, would open with water pressure on the tunnel side, but otherwise they’d remain closed to any access from the drain itself. They searched the cableways, lighting fixtures, and electrical junction boxes until they found the diminutive detector-trans
ceiver. It was taped to the underside of a telephone system amplifier and pointed out into the main passageway. The mirror was in place directly across from it. There did not appear to be anything amiss with the installation-the wires were in place and the box was intact, its tiny laser aperture pointing correctly across the passageway at the receiver.
“This thing should have worked if he came up the tunnel this way from Bancroft,” Jim said.
“But if he knew where it was, couldn’t he have simply crawled under it?” Branner asked.
“Yeah, but these lasers are not in the visible light range. It’s not like he could see little beams of light shining across the tunnel. Unless he had a detector of his own. And there’s no way he could have that.”
Branner shook her head. “ I’ve got one,” she said. “On the dash of my car.”
Jim thought about it. “You mean like a police radar detector? But he’d still have to be in the beam to get a detection.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “That thing shoots a laser beam across the tunnel. The mirror here reflects it back. Something intrudes, the detector sends an alarm. But there has to be some scattering of the refracted light. Down here in a concrete tunnel, that would go everywhere. All he’d have to do is carry a laser detector in his hand to know that these things were down here. Then he could go looking for them.”
“And getting on our tactical freq-all that would take is a police-band scanner. It wasn’t as if we were encrypted.”
“Right. Not much magic to it, once you think about it.”
“But at least some familiarity with electronics. So we’re looking for some whiz kid in the double-E lab.”
“Got any of those here at the Naval Academy?” she asked.
“Only a couple hundred,” he said. “And the thing is, he’s had time, lots of time, to rig his own shit down here if he wanted to. For all we know, he’s got a motion-detector net of his own. These mids have access to real radars, advanced computer networks, acoustic transducers, video-based fire-control systems-you name it, they’re taught it.”
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “This place is giving me the creeps.”
Jim had been thinking the same thing. The silence, the strange-smelling atmosphere, the feeling of being pressed in by all the bare concrete, and a mental image of that vampire face had been working on him ever since they had come back down. That and a feeling of helplessness when confronted by the fact that their quarry could just as easily be their hunter.
Once back outside, they both took a moment to breathe in some fresh air. The night was clear and almost warm, with a small breeze carrying a hint of salt air in from the bay. Bancroft Hall was lighted up as usual as the midweek press of the regular academic load and the impending approach of exams kept the midnight oil burning.
“So how’d he do the balloon?”
“Inflated it in the tunnel-they use a cylinder of helium. Not very big. And then he wedged a grating door open to create a pressure gradient toward us. It wasn’t rocket science.”
“This guy’s defeating us,” Branner said.
“There’s still one window open,” Jim replied, heading for his truck. “That one-on-one challenge. I started that with a mark on his tag. He replied that night when he sent that tennis ball down the passageway. Now he’s come back with it.”
“What’s the HMC bit?”
“I put that over his tag-Hall-Man-Chu. HMC. Tagger bullshit.”
“You’re not seriously thinking of going down there alone, are you?”
“I’m seriously thinking of making it look like I’m down there alone.” He grinned at her. “You up for an adventure?”
“I’m up for getting him down there and then filling the tunnels full of carbon monoxide,” she growled.
“He’s probably got a detector for that, too. Wal-Mart sells them, as I remember. Where’s your Bronco?”
“Out by the Maryland Avenue gate. Assuming the locals haven’t boosted it.”
“My ride’s right over here, in front of the supe’s quarters. Want to come back to the boat for a nightcap?”
She stopped and looked around at the Yard. Globed streetlights shone through the spidery branches of black trees. Down along the river, the big academic buildings were still fully illuminated. Behind them the looming silhouette of the chapel blacked out an entire chunk of the night horizon. “I feel really shitty about what happened to Bagger,” she said finally. “I should go back to the office. Check voice mail, messages. The thing is, I don’t much want to go back to the office. Or to my apartment tonight.”
“There are two guest cabins on the boat,” he said. “C’mon back with me. You can take your pick. We’ll get some wine, sit up on deck until the dew gets too heavy.”
She gave him a brief, weary smile. “Why not?” she said. “Can’t dance.”
“Follow me,” he said, suddenly happy for her company. “I’ll give you a lift to the main gate.”
An hour later, they sat watching the lights across the harbor from the cockpit of his boat. It turned out she kept an overnight kit in her Bronco, and she’d changed into a loose-fitting workout suit. He’d given her a sweater and a ball cap, and he’d changed into jeans and a sweater. Jupiter was in his cage, partially covered against the night breeze coming in from the bay. Jim had some single malt; Branner had opted for wine.
“Where are you from originally?” he asked.
“Omaha,” she said. “My parents were both cops. He was a detective before he retired, and she worked for Internal Affairs.”
“If she’s was as good-looking as you are, she must have been downright lethal.”
“Thank you, sir. And she was. Lethal, I mean. She could drink any man under the table and they’d tell her anything. Not that we had a big police corruption problem in dear old Omaha.”
“You do college?”
“Creighton, right there in town. Jesuit school. Took a prelaw curriculum.”
“Wow. So what happened?”
“Met too many lawyers,” she said. “Even married one, just for grins. Big mistake. All fixed now, though.”
He decided not to ask what “all fixed” meant. He told her about growing up in Pensacola at his father’s boatyard. He admitted to her that he didn’t really enjoy going very far out into the Gulf.
“Truth be told, I’m prone to seasickness,” he said. “Which is why I don’t take this beauty out on the bay, either.”
“I’m with you,” she said. “Being from Omaha, the ocean was just about the biggest damned thing I’d ever seen. And then a marine biologist told me one day at the beach that they called the first two hundred yards out into the water ‘the feeding zone.’ So now I just look at it.”
“I’m sure there’s plenty of sharks out there in the bay,” he said. “But the big threat around here are the damned jellyfish.”
“There you go,” she said, settling into the sweater, which she had thrown loosely over her shoulders. “Another reason to stay on nice dry land. I don’t like the water, and I don’t like confined spaces, either.”
“Like tunnels.”
“Exactly.”
He was a little surprised. After all that redhead bluster, Branner was actually scared of a couple things. Although, he had to admit, she’d gone right down there with him.
“You date much around here?” he asked.
“Nope. Mostly work. I was seeing this guy up in D.C. for a while, but he faded. A couple of Sunday nights getting home on Route Fifty during beach season took the fun right out of it. How about you?”
“Nobody special. The female mids are too young, and most of the tourists are too old. I party with the marina people once in awhile, but that’s a pretty wet-drunk scene after about eleven at night. Occasionally, things work out.”
“Never married?”
“Nope. Not against it, mind you, but…”
“It’s overrated,” she said, but did not elaborate. She looked smaller now, all tucked into his big cabl
e-knit sweater, her legs curled under her in the soft deck chair. If he closed his eyes, he could still visualize those legs when she was decked out for business. Copper hair, green eyes, small, almost pug nose, pale white skin with a few freckles. In-your-face sexy.
“Where’d you go, cowboy?” she asked, and he opened his eyes and saw that she was smiling at him. It dramatically softened her face.
“I was thinking,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” she said. The challenge was back in her voice.
“Yeah. Of how pretty you are, sitting over there. And how tough and hard-boiled you are in your day job. I was going to say, how tough and hard you try to be, but the fact is, I think it’s not an act. I was wondering why?”
“Simple,” she said with a small sigh. “I’m a redhead.”
“Uh, yeah?”
“What do think of when you see a redhead?”
He thought about being diplomatic. Nah. “Trouble?” he said.
“There you go. Men expect nothing but trouble from a redhead. So I oblige ’em. That way, they think they have me figured out, and when the occasion calls for it, I can surprise them.”
“Is all that necessary?” he asked. “In the NCIS business, I mean?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Most male agents meet a reasonably attractive female agent, or any government professional, they get hung up on the reasonably attractive parts.”
“Go on.”
“You meet another guy, you put a pleasant expression on your face and you shake hands, and that’s that, right? Guys meet me, they check out my face, legs, my front and back, legs again, and then ask, after I’ve already told them, what I do. It takes everything I’ve got not to tell them I’m a nine-hundred-dollar hooker, just to see what they’d do.”
“I think I might hit the ATM machine myself.”
She laughed out loud. “Studly guy like you?” she said. “Tell me you’ve never paid for it.”
“Only as a Marine in WestPac, and of course, over there, as we all know, it doesn’t count.”
She laughed again and sipped some wine.
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