Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries)

by James W. Hall

  Sometime later he found himself slouched on the wooden bench. Leslie and Flynn stood nearby, watching him as if he might tip over. She set the lantern on the grass.

  Then Leslie dropped Flynn’s phone on the ground in front of Thorn. Raising the heel of her hiking shoe, she crushed it, splintering the glass face. Then she lifted her foot again and stomped on the phone and stomped a final time on the broken remains.

  With the tip of his tongue, Thorn was exploring his mouth, going from tooth to tooth, touching the jagged edges. Three so far, a molar loose, a rip inside his cheek.

  “Can I trust you, Thorn?”

  He looked at Leslie. Her face a blurry shadow. He said nothing.

  Flynn said, “He can barely keep his eyes open. Can’t this wait?”

  “I need to know where he stands. No, it can’t wait.” She took a seat beside Thorn on the bench, brought her face close. “You’re still not with us, are you? You haven’t committed.”

  “What choice is there? I’m with you, damn it.” A second molar loose.

  “I want to trust you, Thorn. I want to believe you.”

  “Maybe we should close up shop,” Flynn said. “Get the hell away from here. Reschedule the whole thing.”

  “No,” Leslie said. “We’re on track. We’re fine. As long as you’re telling me the truth about Sheffield.” She kept looking at Thorn, trying to read him.

  “It’s the truth,” Flynn said. “Sheffield’s in the dark.”

  When Thorn was able to stand, the three of them walked back to the barracks tent. Somewhere along the way, Thorn laid a hand on Flynn’s shoulder to steady himself and as a gesture of gratitude for Flynn’s attempt to help. Flynn didn’t shrug his hand off, which Thorn took as progress.

  Around them the breeze was picking up, stirring the fronds, heaving waves against the mangrove roots and the rocky shoreline. Out in the Atlantic a bright branch of lightning lit the blackness briefly. Then a single ragged shaft struck the waters closer to Prince Key. Thorn waited for the thunder but it didn’t come. No further sign of the approaching storm except for the rising wind that trembled the walls of the tent as one by one the three of them stepped inside and Leslie shut the flap.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  SUNDAY NIGHT, JUST AFTER 10:00 P.M., all their gear was prepared and the assault plan had been laid out for both teams, critiqued, tweaked, and agreed upon. Both groups assembled at Black Point Marina. Sheffield’s guys and the NCIS bunch. Everyone seemed more uneasy about the weather than raiding Prince Key.

  After stewing for a couple of days in the overheated waters south of the Bahamas, tropical storm Juanita had become a Category 1 hurricane. Tonight one of her outer bands was whipping in from the southeast, and even the mile-long protected channel that led from the marina out to Biscayne Bay had a three-foot chop.

  The bay itself was a wall of six-foot swells with whitecaps that blew away like seedpods exploding in the darkness. Small-craft warnings. Not the night for a five-mile cruise in electric-powered inflatable rafts.

  Magnuson raised the possibility of a weather delay, but Frank said no. He was spooked. That video clip of the reinforced-concrete wall obliterated by the experimental explosive had become in his imagination the walls of a containment dome at Turkey Point. Frank was picturing a catastrophic rupture releasing a radioactive cloud so toxic the city that was his lifelong home and where he planned to live out his days would be changed forever. Magnuson was focused on Chee. Frank was thinking about a few million of his neighbors.

  The ten SWAT guys were huddled inside the marina’s enormous storage barn, an indoor boatyard where five-story racks of powerboats towered behind them. An employee from the county had been summoned to open up the facility for their use, and he stood fifty yards away across the vast cement floor smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling as if expecting it to be peeled off by the heavy winds.

  “The storm’s turning south,” Frank said. “Half an hour it’s out of here.”

  “Not according to the Weather Service.” Magnuson, like the rest of his men, was suited in a black rain suit, his Kevlar body armor underneath.

  “My info’s better,” Sheffield said. “She’s being sheared, about to take a hard left, get torn up by the Sierra Maestra mountains in Cuba. Thirty minutes this wind’ll die down, an hour at the most. If we head out now, it’ll be sloppy, but by the time we reach Prince Key, wind should be down to fifteen to twenty. Rough sailing, but also damn good cover.”

  Magnuson looked around at his men as if taking their silent vote.

  “Your choice, guys,” Frank said. “Stay here, stay dry, or come with me and costar in the movie.”

  Frank was drenched, cold, and fighting back shivers by the time they made it to the end of the channel and faced the howling bay, thinking maybe this was a mistake. Nicole kept her head bowed against the wind, the hood of her rain gear cinched so tight only a small oval of her face showed. The pretty parts: her mouth, nose, those Garbo, high-voltage eyes.

  Their night-vision equipment was useless. Between the pelting rain and the lightning, they were better off with their naked eyes.

  Frank led the armada out of the choppy water of the channel, and once they entered the bay, they were plastered from every direction by swells, their rafts pitching high over crests, then wallowing for a moment before hammering into the troughs. Hard as hell to hold a heading, but Frank outwrestled the wheel and managed to keep the GPS arrow pointing due east toward the island.

  Buffeted by headwinds, the two Black Hawks skimmed low overhead, then split apart, moving into position. One would hover a few miles north, and the other a few miles south, of Prince Key. Out of range of hearing, but near enough to swoop in when the five teams came ashore.

  Twenty minutes into it, everyone was still fanned out on either side of Sheffield. With each lightning stroke, he caught their silhouettes. Every minute or two his radio squawked, but Frank made out only a few garbled words.

  An hour into the crossing his GPS said they had a mile to go before they reached Prince Key, a mile for his forecast to come true.

  As the water shallowed, they fell into the lee of the island and the wailing dropped to a moan. Spitting rain speckled the water that sloshed around the floor of the raft, and small waves jostled them as they worked to shore. By God, the storm had made its hard turn to the south. Once again his friend Matt White, the lychee-nut farmer, had nailed it.

  Nicole loosened her rain hood and released her terror grip on the bench seat. She stretched her neck and reached inside her black rain suit and withdrew her handgun, a compact nine-millimeter Sig P229.

  In a hushed voice, Sheffield told her she wasn’t going to need that.

  “Bet me,” she said.

  Because he was piloting the lead Zodiac, Sheffield’s role was to await the radio signal from Magnuson indicating all teams were in place around the island. Meantime, hold his position just offshore, spend the time looking for an entry spot among the dense mangrove roots. Five minutes max.

  The radio squawked a couple of times, more static. Sheffield kept it close to his ear, waiting for the green light, one intelligible word that everyone was set. Five minutes became ten, then fifteen, and Frank, growing anxious, was moving the mike to his lips to whisper a query when the gunfire erupted.

  He dropped the mike, hit the throttle, rammed the nose of the raft into an opening between two large black mangroves. Scrambling over the bow, he dropped into muck to his knees and held his hand out for Nicole. She had other ideas. Male assistance not required. From the starboard side she jumped onto a shelf of roots and branches, slipped, then hauled herself upright, drew her weapon, and pushed off into the dense cross-hatching of flora.

  Frank lashed the raft’s bowline to a tree trunk and slogged up the bank as another burst of automatic fire sounded. He tried to hail Nicole but she’d already bulled ahead into the darkness. Shit, shit, shit.

  Branches snatched at his shirt and stabbed his flesh as Frank haul
ed ass in the direction of the shooting. It was coming from straight ahead, which put it around the larger of the two tents.

  He would be approaching the tents from the rear while Magnuson’s team and the other two in the NCIS group would have landed fifty yards closer, coming from each flank.

  Sheffield’s guys had been assigned the eastern shore, all the way on the other side of the island, which meant they’d be approaching across an open field, moving past the obstacle course, and heading toward the tent’s front opening—the longest distance to travel. And the most exposed.

  Frank drew his Glock.

  Everyone was supposed to move on Magnuson’s signal, a simultaneous landing, then proceed in unison toward the barracks tent. They’d set up a perimeter around the barracks tent, but no one was to approach the tent, no one would do any damn thing on his own until everyone was in place. Fire if you’re fired upon, only then.

  Frank smacked into another branch, almost put out an eye, and knew with even more certainty that things were fucked as some idiot up ahead fired his automatic weapon. Sounded like he’d held down the trigger till the clip was empty. Nothing disciplined about it. No way that could be a SWAT member. No way. It had to be an ELF guy. Goddamn, had to be.

  Lights blazed to his left and he cut that way, staying in a crouch. Ahead, maybe twenty yards, flashlights were mingled with the bright blue flash of the barf beamer.

  That’s the name Pipes, one of the NCIS guys, had used back at the marina, showing it off to the FBI team. Sheffield had heard of it, never seen one. An incapacitator. It used light-emitting diodes to shoot superbright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths. Supposed to disorient its subject, bring on nausea.

  What the hell use it would serve in an operation such as this he had no idea, but he didn’t want to get into the weeds with Magnuson, so he hadn’t squawked. Another check mark against him.

  Sheffield yanked aside the bushes, plowed through the dense brush, no longer concerned with the noise he was making, even drawing out his flashlight and switching it on. Pistol in one hand, flashlight in the other, backhanding the branches. Ten yards ahead was open ground, stray voices, someone barking commands. Loud, angry, though Frank couldn’t make out the words, blocked by his own heaving breath, his rush through the scrub.

  Breaking through the last of the undergrowth, Frank lurched onto a field, grassy and wide open, flashlights dancing up ahead, and the barf beamer holding steady on the side of the tent. All weapons aimed at the cone of light where the tent’s fabric was shredded, pocked with dozens of bullet holes.

  No way to tell if they were incoming or outgoing.

  “Hold your goddamn fire!” Frank hustled toward the others.

  He aimed his flashlight at his own face and slashed a hand across his throat to call them off.

  Thirty feet from the tent, Magnuson stood at the rear of his three men, all kneeling in shooting position. Sheffield’s crew was still arriving, out of breath, automatic weapons raking across the patches of darkness surrounding them.

  Inside the tent a single lightbulb swung from a cord. The torn fabric rippled in the wind. From inside the tent the shadow of a man rose from a squat to a standing position. One hand appeared to be raised above his head. Maybe surrendering or, hell, who could tell, maybe he was about to toss a grenade. The men on Magnuson’s team tightened their aims.

  “I said stand down.”

  Then Frank called out for the man to drop his weapon and do it now.

  But the shadow stayed put, one arm raised, the man beginning to turn in what appeared to be a circle, a sluggish pirouette.

  “Area’s clear, Frank,” his team leader, Dinkins, hissed in his ear. “We did the grid search, found no one. No boats at the beach. Nobody’s here. The shitheads jumped ship.”

  “Except for that individual,” Magnuson said.

  “Are the choppers in play?” Sheffield asked Dinkins.

  “They’re working the quadrants, sir. Seen nothing yet.”

  “Who fired their weapon?”

  Agent Pipes raised his hand, then reset it on his AR-15. His barf beamer was propped between two rocks two yards away from him. If the light drew fire, he was distanced.

  “Why’d you shoot?”

  “Because of him,” the agent said, nodding at the tent.

  The shadow Man made more noises. Babbling something.

  “Agent Pipes, is this man armed? Did he fire on you?”

  “He was holding a weapon. What looked like a weapon.”

  Shadow Man was speaking in a hoarse, incoherent stream.

  “I believe that’s one of ours, sir,” Agent Dinkins said.

  “One of ours?”

  “Billy Dean Reynolds, sir. I think it’s him in there.”

  Frank flashed his light around the group, searching for Reynolds.

  “When we landed Billy went ahead,” Dinkins said. “Running point.”

  Frank did a quick head count, and, yes, Billy Dean was not present.

  “Agent Reynolds!” Frank shouted at the shadow man. “Is that you? You inside that tent, Billy Dean?”

  The man in the tent spoke again, doing another slow circle, one arm in the air, the other clutched around his midsection as if he were dancing with himself. Then his knees buckled and he collapsed.

  Frank made it through the tent flap behind Agent Hale, who fell to his knees over Billy Dean and stripped open the fallen man’s rain gear. Shining his light directly on the wound.

  “He’s torn up bad, sir.”

  “Call in one of the choppers, land in the field, we need to evacuate him now. And get a medical kit in here fast.”

  Hale sprinted off. Sheffield tugged the bloody clothes aside and aimed his light on the shredded flesh, heavy white bones splintered, strands of meat and muscle torn to hell. Several rounds had sneaked past his Kevlar and had ravaged the shoulder joint. Frank had seen enough gunshot wounds to know this would take months to heal, require multiple operations, a long rehab, might even put Billy behind a desk the rest of his career. Assuming he survived.

  Sheffield stripped off his own rain gear, then his blue FBI T-shirt, and folded it into a square and pressed the cotton hard against the wound.

  Hearing the men outside getting into it with each other, his guys yelling, Magnuson’s voice in there, too, trying to quiet the mutiny.

  Billy Dean opened his eyes. With a hazy grin, he looked up at Frank and said quietly, “Did we get the bomber?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  AFTER THE CHOPPER LEFT WITH Billy Dean, both teams did a methodical search of the island. Look, but touch nothing, Sheffield told them.

  Sheffield put on his T-shirt, sticky with Billy Dean’s blood. Nicole watching him, her face slack, a bruised light in her eyes. She looked faint and Frank asked her if she was all right. She nodded that she was. But then kept nodding and nodding, looking even sicker. Frank went to her, guided her to a bench, and sat her down.

  Fifteen minutes later both teams had reassembled outside the barracks tent. Speaking for the group, Dinkins said the area was clear of hostiles.

  “Stay here, right here,” Frank said. “Nobody wanders from this position until I give the okay. Is that clear?”

  “What is it, Frank?”

  “Just stay put.”

  Sheffield walked out into the field and used his cell to call dispatch. He identified himself, gave the agent an update on their mission, and told him to alert the Evidence Response Team, the Bomb Recovery and Analysis group, in case any trace of explosives had been left behind. Sheffield told the young man to notify the commander of Underwater Search and Response. Maybe during their getaway the ELF guys had tossed incriminating materials into the nearby waters. A long shot, but at this point everything was.

  It was Monday morning, a long time till dawn. Everybody would be grumpy as hell, but they’d show up within an hour or two, no questions asked, and they’d work their asses off till the jobs were complete.

  When he disconnecte
d, he said to Dinkins, “No one leaves this spot.”

  “I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.”

  Frank wasn’t sure what put the quiver in his gut. But there it was. A reliable sensation that had saved his life a half dozen times. He hadn’t felt it for years. Thought he was past all that. Quiver-free for good. But no.

  He looked at Dinkins and pointed at the ground. Stay put.

  And Sheffield rejoined Nicole and Magnuson inside the tent.

  Though it was clearly the group’s headquarters, not much had been left behind, and there was little to indicate the nature of the group or their mission. Weights, barbells, six cots, one of them set apart from the others, hidden behind a curtain, a makeshift table, an ice chest with its lid open. Inside it were the remains of Subway sandwiches floating on a bed of melting ice.

  They looked, didn’t touch. Treating it as a crime scene, treading carefully. Nicole was on her feet. Pale, shaky, but coming around.

  Forensics would be arriving soon and county PD. Later on Monday a whole shitstorm of Washington agents—Critical Incident Response Group, the Counterterrorism hotshots, probably CIA, everybody from National Security Branch eager for a junket to Miami—would be flying in. They’d be tramping around Prince Key, taking video, photographs, clicking their ballpoints, asking questions, not liking the answers, talking on phones to their superiors, asking more questions, writing up forms. There’d be an inquiry. Everyone interviewed. It was quiet now, still dark, but in the next few hours, holy Christ.

  “They ran power off that solar panel,” Frank said.

  “For one lightbulb?”

  “Must’ve been running other things.”

  “Like what?” Nicole was sounding queasy again.

  “Like computers, communications, radios, hell, maybe they had a flatscreen out here, watching Oprah and the nature channel.”

  “Why’s the one bed separate, and that screen?”

  “The boss,” Nicole said. “Wanted privacy.”