Shadow Watch (1999)

by Tom - Power Plays 03 Clancy

  The fluorescents above them suddenly blinked on. Alyssa had no idea why—maybe one of the pint-sized monsters behind her had gotten up and fiddled with the switch. In which case, she was thinking she really ought to be grateful, since it had at least shut Enzio up for the moment.

  The thing she didn’t get, though, was why the lights were so bright. And what was that weird humming noise they were making?

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the three girls were all in their seats, looking this way and that in surprise along with the rest of the car’s passengers.

  Well, almost all of us, she thought, noticing that Enzio was still staring adoringly at his goddamned cook-your-dinner-screw-your-significant-other-for-you Dick Tracy Superwatch, seemingly oblivious to everything around him.

  “Enzio,” she said. “Do you know what’s going on—”

  “Shhh!” he said. “Not now!”

  Surprised by his unusual curtness—Enzio might be a royal pain in the ass, but he was always a polite one—Alyssa looked at him and realized that he was no longer admiring the watch, but frowning at it. Whatever he saw on its face was making him upset. Very upset actually.

  She leaned over to check it out for herself, then raised her eyebrows, the reason for his distress becoming evident.

  The display no longer showed the time, but was covered with rows of tiny, blinking ones and zeroes. Also, the watch’s alert tones all seemed to be sounding at once. Chirps, beeps, blips, trilly fragments of simple melody. She supposed she might have noticed it right away if her attention hadn’t been diverted by the buzzing lights and the confused, edgy vibe running through the car.

  Even before the first jarring bump, she got the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong.

  Then the train seemed to bounce off the track and she clutched her seat for support.

  “Enz—?”

  She stopped herself. He was just staring at the watch, shaking his head dolefully, concerned with nothing but the watch. Looking like his best friend in the world had just had a fatal stroke right in front of him.

  The train was shaking and rattling now, swinging wildly back and forth on the track, the air horn emitting deafening blasts. A few people were screaming, the little girls behind her starting to cry, asking the woman who was sitting with them what was happening.

  Allysa’s last coherent thought before the front of the car behind her smashed into the rear of the one she was sitting in, ramming it forward into the locomotive, crunching it between them like a wad of aluminum foil in an angry fist, was that those brats, those poor little helpless brats, were going to get hurt.

  In the proverbial perfect world filled with perfect human beings, Julio Salles might have been able to reduce the loss of life that occurred that night. Though the fifty-five miles per hour that Salles was doing while still nearly two miles from the disabled “slow” signal fell within the limit of his authorized speed, it did so just barely, and slower would have been wiser on a downhill grade. Though he had been alert at his post and looking out for the signal, and had no reason to suspect anything might be wrong with the signal, it would have been an intelligent precaution to use geographic landmarks as he neared the place where the track looped around the hillside in the unlikely event that it did fail.

  But there can be such a thing as overfamiliarity with a route, particularly in country where the terrain rolls along with a dulling sameness, one stretch of track bleeding into the next. Anybody who regularly drives to work in a rural area knows this; after taking the same roads day in and day out for several months or years, you begin to ignore the scenery and depend on a general sense of your bearings rather than its specific features, until coming to a sign or stoplight that marks a necessary turn. The building, brook, farmyard, radio tower, or cherry ’63 Mustang in someone’s driveway that once caught the eye on every trip will be passed unnoticed along the way. You feel free to straddle the speed limit, and perhaps even slightly exceed it without risking a traffic stop, knowing the police will in most instances tolerate a person going, say, sixty-eight or seventy in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour speed zone.

  Salles had been driving railroad trains for three decades, and made the Sao Paulo-Rio run over five hundred times in the two years since it had been assigned to him. Never in his career had he come close to having a mishap. The night of the derailment, he was watching in anticipation of a signal that had ceased to function, and relying on equipment that no one had thought to harden against the sort of destructive black technology with which it was targeted. He was performing his job in compliance with the rules, and his response to the first indications of a problem was rapid. If blame had been apportioned by a judge possessing complete, objective knowledge of the facts, Salles’s slice of it would have been truly inappreciable. Moreover, his public and courtroom accounts of the incident were, from his available perspective, a hundred percent candid and faithful to the truth.

  This is how he recalled it in deposition:

  His train was proceeding normally along a series of climbs and dips in the large, undulating hills that are crossed by the Sao-Paulo-to-Rio intercity railway. The forested countryside east of Taubate being exceptionally dark and repetitive in its features, Salles had always relied on his instruments and track signals rather than terrain landmarks as visual aids. On his descent along the slope where the derailment took place, he had approximated that he was about five miles west of a blind curve that required the train to slow to between eight and ten miles per hour, his discretional latitude based upon factors such as weather conditions or the presence of another train on the opposing track. His usual practice was to begin gradually applying his brakes two miles west of the curve, where the continuously lighted yellow “slow” signal came into view, and he had been keeping his eyes open for it since starting along the decline. But Salles’s estimate of his position was off by three miles. He had already passed the signal without knowing it—and without being able to know it because its light had given out.

  In the pitch darkness, the curve seemed to come up out of nowhere. Salles had spotted it in the arc of his headlamps from a distance of perhaps thirty yards and immediately glanced at his Doppler indicator for a speed check, but its digital readout was flashing double zeros and an error code. This first sign of a problem with the electronic systems whose reliability Salles would later challenge was accompanied by a peripheral awareness of the lights in his cab brightening as if with a sudden flood of voltage. Forced to guess his speed, Salles decided he was moving at about fifty-five miles per hour, and immediately took emergency measures to decelerate and warn any oncoming train of his approach, sounding the air horn and attempting to initiate his brakes. But the high-tech braking system—which used a network of sensors and microprocessors to emulate the function of conventional pneumatic control valves, and had been retrofitted into the train a year earlier—didn’t engage. Like the Doppler speedometer, the flat-screen display of its head-end control unit was flashing an error condition.

  Salles was not only racing toward the curve at break-neck speed, but nearing it with his electronic brakes out of commission.

  He knew right away that things were going to be very bad. The fail-safe mechanism designed to automatically vent the brake cylinder in the event of a power loss or hardware crash would deprive him of any ability to graduate the release of air pressure and smooth the stop. And at his accelerated rate of motion, descending from the summit of a large and rugged hill on a sharp bend, the hard, shaky jerks that would result from the train coming to a dead stop would make derailment a certainty. It was the worst circumstance imaginable and he was helpless to avert it. He was at the helm of a runaway train that was about to turn into a slaughterhouse.

  It was just as Salles was reaching for the public-address switch to warn his passengers of the impending derailment that the train reached the curve. The fail-safe penalty stop initiated at that same instant. Before his hand could find the switch there was a sudden, roug
h jolt that threw him off his seat. He slammed into the window in front of him like a projectile fired from a giant slingshot. His last memory of what happened that night was his painful impact with that window, and the sound of glass shattering around him.

  Upon regaining consciousness some hours afterward, Salles would learn the forward momentum that had propelled him into the window was also what had saved his life, for it had been powerful enough to plunge him through the window and onto the brow of the hill, with relatively minor physical injuries as the result—a concussion, a fractured wrist, a patchwork of bruises and lacerations. These would be easily detected and treated by his doctors.

  Not so, however, the psychological wounds that would drive him to suicide two years later.

  The rest of the crew and passengers were less fortunate than Salles. As their wheels locked up and derailed, the cars in which they were riding smashed into each other in a pileup that turned three of them into compacted wreckage even before they plunged off the tracks to go tumbling end-over-end into the valley hundreds of feet below. One of the coaches broke apart into several sections that were strewn across the slope to intermingle with a grisly litter of human bodies and body parts. Bursting into flame as its fuel lines ruptured and ignited, the locomotive slammed into the dining car to engulf it in an explosion that incinerated every living soul aboard.

  Other than Salles, only two of the 194 people who had been riding the train survived the catastrophe—an attendant named Maria Lunes, who suffered a severed spine and was left paralyzed from the neck down, and a ten-year-old girl, Daniella Costas, whose two sisters and nanny perished in the tragedy, and was herself found miraculously unharmed, wrapped in the arms of a young Australian fashion model identified as Alyssa Harding.

  According to the child’s subsequent testimony, Harding had sprung from her seat two rows in front of the girl moments after the train hurtled from the track, and shielded Daniella from the collapsing roof of their car with her own body as it rolled down the hillside.

  It was an act of selfless, spontaneous heroism that had eliminated any chance Harding would have had at survival.

  FOURTEEN

  EASTERN MAINE APRIL 22, 2001

  THE OPEN FIBERGLASS SKIFF LEFT THE PIER JUST BEFORE 7:00 A.M., Ricci amidship on the bench, Dex at the stern after having started up the Mercury outboard with a couple of hard pulls. The oxygen tanks and portable compressor were in the well near his feet.

  “Gonna be a honey of a day, looks like to me,” he said, and yawned. His eyes were slightly puffed. “We ought to do all right, don’t you think?”

  Ricci was gazing out past the bow, his gear bags on the deck in front of him.

  “Depends whether we get lucky,” he said.

  Dex worked the tiller handle, guiding the boat into the channel. A tall, rangy man in his mid-thirties with a full reddish-blond beard, he wore a navy blue watch cap over his shoulder-length hair, a plaid mackinaw, heavy dungarees, and rubber waders. He had a fair complexion that was typical of his French-Canadian bloodstock, and the parts of his face and neck not covered by the beard were chafed from repeated exposure to the biting salt air.

  “Don’t see what luck’s got to do with it,” he said. “You told me yourself there were plenty of urchins left down deep after that last haul, and it ain’t as if they do anythin’ but stick to whatever they’re stuck to till somebody comes along and plucks ’em off.” He made a chuckling sound. “Regular as you are about where an’ when you dive, the buggers should have you figured by now. Plan on movin’ to a safer neighborhood, or leastways makin’ themselves scarce between seven an’ three every other day.”

  Ricci shrugged. “Can’t figure anything unless you’ve got brains to speak of,” he said, glancing over at him. “And they don’t.”

  He turned back toward the front of the boat and stared straight ahead, hands in the pockets of his hooded pullover jacket. Despite the stiff breeze, it was indeed a decent spring morning, with a flood of five or six knots and plenty of sunshine in the mackerel sky. The vapor was thin enough for Ricci to easily read the numbers on the nuns and cans as the channel widened out and Dex goosed the throttle to get them moving faster against the tide.

  The light sixteen-footer accelerated with a roar, its props churning up a fine, cold spray. Ricci estimated the water temperature would be about forty degrees, and was wearing a black-and-silver neoprene dry suit and Thinsulate undergarment to retain body heat during his dive.

  Soon they were well beyond the channel buoys and red-and-black markers indicating the spot where the shoal at the harbor entrance presented a concealed hazard to low-slung craft, lurking just below the waterline at high tide. All along the surface of the bay Ricci could see patches resembling rippled glass insets on an otherwise smooth mirror, signs that the gusty, variable wind had stirred up circular eddies where salt water and unsettled bottom sediment had mixed with the lighter freshwater flow. He made a mental note to be careful of them later on. As a rule, the current’s westward drift became gentler at the lower fathoms, but the upswellings could exert a strong, sudden pull on a diver, and the phytoplankton that tended to generate in them could severely reduce underwater visibility.

  The two men buzzed across the water in their skiff, neither of them speaking above the engine noise for the half hour it took to reach the island where Ricci had found his urchin colony. Not quite an acre in size, it was shaped like a cloven hoof, the split on its northeastern side forming a cove that plunged to a depth of at least a hundred fathoms and was densely forested with eelgrass along its inshore ledges.

  Dex simultaneously shifted to port and throttled down as they came in close, then steered them around toward the cove. Ricci sat near the starboard gunwale, scanning the cobbled edge of the shore and the parallel band of trees and brush just yards further inland.

  Seconds before Dex maneuvered the skiff into the cove, Ricci thought he noticed a twinkle of reflected sunlight in the shrubbery near a large granite outcropping. He momentarily focused his eyes on that spot, saw the starry glint of light again, and committed the features of the little slice of beach to memory. As an added reference, he glanced at his wrist-mounted diving compass for its coordinates. The reflection could have been from some shards of glass that had washed ashore, or a beer can or bottle discarded by a fisherman who had stopped on the island for a solitary lunch. But just in case it wasn’t, the big hunk of rock made as perfect a landmark as he could have wanted.

  After lowering anchor, and paying out rope until it was fast and the skiff was head to wind, Dex yawned, stretched, then reached into the well for his thermos.

  “Guess the kids must’ve worn you out,” Ricci said. He was staring out across the bow again.

  “Huh?” Dex unscrewed the thermos lid. “What do you mean?”

  Ricci turned to face him.

  “Way you’ve been trying to catch flies with your mouth all morning,” he said. “I figured it was from filling in for your wife after school the other day. Either that or you haven’t been getting enough sleep.”

  Dex looked down, pouring himself some coffee.

  “Been sleeping fine,” he said, and sipped. “But it’s true the brats wouldn’t stay off my back for a second.”

  Ricci watched him.

  “Nancy climbed into bed that night feelin’ randy as a catamount under a full moon, and it’s me was holdin’ out the red flag for a change,” Dex said. “Don’t know if it was the boys got me down, so to speak, or thinkin’ about that awful shit Phipps an’ Cobbs pulled on you while I was playin’ nursemaid.” He scrubbed a hand down over his beard. “Suppose it was mostly the second. I mean, them tryin’ to make off with our catch. Talk about luck, me not bein’ there with you was a bad piece, hey?”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Ricci said, still watching him. “They got what they had coming.”

  “Should’ve been around to help you give it to ‘em, is all I’m sayin’.” Dex drank a little more coffee from the thermos lid, then h
eld it out to him. “Want some a’ this mud the ol’ lady brewed?”

  Ricci shook his head.

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” he said, then shrugged out of his pullover. “I want to get started while the water’s still halfway calm.”

  Dex nodded, set down the lid, and went to work. He hoisted the metal dive flag, then reached down into the well for one of the scuba tanks, rose from the cockpit, and put the tank overboard on a rope line.

  Meanwhile, Ricci bent over one of his gear bags, unzipped it, and began to extract his scuba apparatus and arrange it on the deck in front of him. He put on his diving hood, then slid his arms into his vestlike buoyancy compensator—the double bladders of which would draw their air from his tank—and fastened the quick-release buckles of its cummerbund around his waist. He had four twelve-pound weights evenly arranged on his nylon-webbing weight belt, and an additional two pounds each on ankle bands to help keep him balanced and relieve tension on his spine. Although the total fifty-two pounds would be excessive under average diving conditions, Ricci had often found that he needed it to remain at the depths inhabited by the urchins in the powerful, spiraling undercurrents.

  After donning the belt, Ricci put on his mask, gloves, and fins, then reached into the bag again for his two dive knives and their harnesses. His chisel-tipped urchin knife went into a scabbard secured to his thigh, a pointed titanium backup blade into a similar rig on his left inner arm. Finally he used an elasticized lanyard to hang an underwater halogen light from his wrist.

  Once suited up, he opened his second gear bag and extracted three nylon mesh totes, all of which had been packed in long, neat rolls that were held snug with bungee cords. He clipped their float lines to snaplinks on his buoyancy compensator, then raised himself onto the gunwale and sat with his back to the water.