Shadow Watch (1999)

by Tom - Power Plays 03 Clancy

  Ricci glanced at his instruments again, noted that he had plenty of air left in his cylinder, and went back to filling the tote, in no particular hurry to get done.

  He’d chosen to play a game of Wait and See, and intended to stick it out. Whatever the hell that meant for him.

  Dex had planned to wait until Ricci’s exhaust stopped bubbling at the surface before turning the skiff hard about—no more bubbles equaling no more breathing and a dead man underwater. But it had got to where the tenseness in him was making his stomach hurt as if he’d swallowed a handful of thumbtacks, and he just couldn’t stand there watching anymore.

  Besides, what did it matter? he thought. He’d fixed the needle of Ricci’s air gauge to read like his tank was filled higher than it really was—higher by more’n a thousand psi, a quarter of its total hold—then figured the outside time Ricci could stay at the bottom an’ make it back up alive, bein’ generous about the amount of air he’d have used by now under the best dive conditions, which was anythin’ but what the water was offerin’ today, given them funnels an’ crosscurrents Dex had been seein’ from the get-go. Takin’ things combined, Ricci didn’t stand a chance. Was pitiful thinkin’ how he was gonna check out, his insides goin’ all to jelly. Goddamn pitiful. But there was nothin’ to do about it, an’ Dex guessed that by havin’ kept from gettin’ the shakes, he could count himself as holdin’ together okay. Better than okay, under the circumstances. That standin’ an’ watchin’, though. The waitin’ for no more bubbles on the top ... Jesus, that was too much.

  His hand clenched tightly around the stick, his long hair whipping back from under his knit cap, Dex kept on at full throttle, as if by doing so he could leave his guilt behind him, washed away in the white wake of foam trailing the skiff as it planed upwind toward his meeting point with Cobbs.

  His binoculars raised to his eyes, Cobbs squatted in the weeds and bushes behind the strand and watched the skiff approach from his right, northward, Dex driving the little boat so hard that it almost seemed it would take off into the air like a rocket.

  He took a deep breath of ocean-and-pine-scented air, wanting to remember the moment in detail, to impress its every sight and sound upon his brain so that he could call them up at whim even when he was old and feebleminded and unable to recall his own name. For several minutes before the skiff had appeared, Cobbs had heard the loud revving of its engine from out on the water, but had tried to curb his expectation until he’d actually spotted it through his lenses. And when he did, when he’d seen Dex was alone, well, Cobbs had felt almost like he was going to lift off into the stratosphere himself. Only at that moment, when the suspense had finally ended, had he realized the true fervor with which he’d hated Ricci. Only then too had he learned the whole of his capacity for murder without remorse or fear of punishment, without anything in his heart but gleeful satisfaction.

  Now the skiff veered to starboard and came on dead ahead toward shore, its bow riding up high over the chop, the roar of its engine reaching a crescendo that appropriately matched the joy swelling up inside Cobbs as he imagined how Tom Ricci must have suffered in his last, struggling moments of life.

  Within seconds after Ricci got his first hint that something might be wrong with his air supply, it became apparent that he had a serious problem. Before a full minute had passed, that problem escalated to a full-blown crisis.

  The breath that triggered the warning seemed slightly harder to draw from his regulator than normal, and while it could have been attributable to minor overexertion—he’d been working steadily against strong currents for over an hour—a skeptical voice in his head dispelled that idea outright. He was an experienced diver, and pacing himself underwater was second nature.

  He took another inhalation, another. Each came with greater effort than the last, and gave that inner voice an edge of added urgency.

  Ricci snapped a glance down at his psi gauge. Its dial told him the cylinder had over 1,000 psi left in it—a full twenty-five percent of its capacity—but his mind and body were telling him something else. Although he had stopped all movement, put himself at rest in the water, his tank was barely complying with his demand for oxygen.

  The dial was wrong.

  The dial was lying to him.

  Ricci cast aside his questions about how that could be, and bore in on his essential predicament. He was running out of air. Running out, and would very possibly exhaust what the tank had left in it within moments.

  His heart pounded. He felt panic hatching inside him, and chased it off. He had to hang on and stay calm, take things one small step at a time. If he couldn’t think straight, it was time to get somebody to blow taps, because he was good as dead.

  He pulled the regulator away from his mouth and reached into the satchel that contained his reserve canister, making sure to exhale into the water as he did so. At his present depth he’d be under almost four atmospheres of pressure, and with the scant volume of air in his lungs, would put far too much squeeze on them by holding his breath.

  Quickly placing the flange of its snorkel mouthpiece between his lips and gums, he twisted open the valve and breathed.

  Nothing flowed from it.

  Somehow he was not at all surprised.

  Hang on. Small steps. One at a time.

  The thing he needed to do now was to get outside the hollow. No, wait, check that. First he had to get rid of whatever encumbrances he didn’t absolutely need to be carrying.

  Ricci released his bulging tote and, given the extremity of his circumstances, was surprised by the keen pang of regret he felt over having to part with his unprecedented take. He almost tossed the spare oxygen tank as well, but caught himself at the last instant, pulled off its J-shaped snorkel attachment, and put it back into his satchel before letting go of the useless canister. Then he put both hands on the rocky floor of the hollow—an area he had just moments ago picked clean of urchins—and thrust backward and out through its entrance.

  He tried to wring more air from his primary tank as he emerged into the eelgrass, but could scarcely get enough to fill his chest. It was like trying to inhale through a gag, or a smothering hand clapped over his mouth. Two labored inhalations later, the unit was depleted.

  Ricci again felt desperation skittering around the edges of his thoughts. And again he blocked it out, like someone slamming the shutters against a cold December wind.

  Exhale, he told himself. Nice and slow.

  If he’d learned anything from his underwater survival training with the SEALs, it was that diving was all about balancing pressure. Internal and external, mental and physical. When you ran into trouble in the water, your immediate impulse was to focus solely on getting air into your lungs. It was what made a drowning person climb on the back of a would-be rescuer and inadvertently push him under. And it was usually a fatal error. Unless you were born with gills, you had to learn to modify your instincts. Concentrate on the balance, and the skills you’d acquired for maintaining it through controlled breathing, to maximize any available oxygen resource.

  Assuming you had one.

  His mind raced back to one of the early lessons he’d been taught by his drill instructor, a former UDT man named Rackel who’d seemingly been born in a frog suit. The last-ditch technique for surfacing with no obtainable oxygen was a free ascent. You shed your weights and let your own positive buoyancy take you up, breathing out through your mouth to release air from the lungs, while spread-eagling your body to increase friction between yourself and the water—and slow your upward motion. Air compressed as you dove, expanded as you rose, and there was always some contained in your lungs, however starved for it they might be. Ascend any faster than sixty feet a minute without exhaling, and you risked having them literally inflate until they ruptured.

  The impossible hurdle for Ricci was that he was ninety feet down, and had already been emptying his lungs for several seconds. Seconds that felt like an infinity, and were about all he could tolerate. Regardless of how f
ast he allowed himself to rise, he would have gone past the limit of his ability to exhale long before reaching the surface. Nor could he make his decompression stop ... and that might lead to the bends, a condition with the potential to cause severe brain and nerve damage or even death.

  Never mind that for now. One small step at a time, remember? Get to the surface alive, and then you can worry about what might happen afterward.

  He needed an air source. One that could sustain him for at least part of the ascent.

  And maybe he had one.

  The bladders of his BC were almost entirely deflated, but the physical stresses upon them were identical to those upon his lungs. They too would have retained some compressed oxygen that would expand as he got closer to the surface and the atmospheric pressure on them decreased. And just as the air in his lungs would seek its outlet via the passages leading to his nose, throat, and mouth, so would the air in his BC try to escape through its artificial equivalent—the oral-inflator hose. A thirty- or forty-second supply would bring him up to a level of sixty feet, from which he might be able to exhale the rest of the distance. A long shot, but it was either that or call out the bugler and honor guard. Or dishonor guard, considering how his police career had finished out.

  Abruptly turning faceup in the water, Ricci rolled his body to the left, away from the hose, to bring it up off his shoulder, puffing what little breath he had left into its mouthpiece to clear it of water. The safest way to rise would be on his back with one hand raised, so he could see and deflect himself away from any potential obstacles—and also so the hose would be above his head, allowing the water pressure to bear down upon it, and promote the free flow of air from it.

  But there was no time to lose. His brain reeling, the veins in his neck and temples throbbing, close to suffocating, Ricci placed the mouthpiece over his lips, pushed the button to open its valve, and inhaled greedily as he held it down.

  A thin stream of air entered his lungs. Hardly enough to sate his aching need, but nonetheless precious beyond description.

  He exhaled into the mouthpiece, then breathed from it again, more slowly and evenly this time. The oxygen cleared his head a little.

  Time to lift off.

  Ricci unfastened his weight belt and ankle straps, and they went tumbling down and down into the eelgrass.

  Then the water ripped him away from the bottom and cast him upward in a dizzying rush.

  FIFTEEN

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 22, 2001

  “COMMENT ÇA VA, ROLLIE?”

  “Beautiful woman walks through the door speakin’ French, come all’a way from the States to see me, I gotta be doin’ awright.”

  Megan smiled at Thibodeau and entered the room. He was in a semi-sitting position, the backrest of his hospital bed elevated to help support his weight. She could see a fluid drain in his abdomen, and an IV drip running to his arm from a stand beside the bed’s steel frame.

  He nodded his chin at her brown paper shopping bag as she sat in the chair to his right.

  “Tell me you got some Mardi Gras King Cake in there, or maybe some ’gator sauce piquant, I swear I’m gonna ask you to marry me.”

  “There honestly such a thing as ’gator sauce?”

  “I could eat it every day a’ the week.”

  “Ugh.” She set the bag on the floor next to her chair. “You Cajuns must have iron stomachs.”

  “Darlin’, I’d probably be dead wasn’t for that,” Thibodeau said. “Accordin’ to the docs, slug that hit me would’ve gone straight through my stomach an’ into my aorta if it hadn’t got detoured by my abs. Instead it only cost me part a’ my large intestine an’ my spleen.”

  “Only, huh?” she said.

  He gave her a weak shrug. “You gonna get gut-shot, you catch your breaks where you can.”

  “There much pain?”

  “Could be worse,” he said. “White coats say the biggest problem for me could be infection. Say the spleen helps fight off bacteria in the blood. Say the liver an’ my other organs gonna take over for it, but not for a while.”

  Rollie paused, shifted on his pillow. Megan could see that he was trying not to wince.

  “C‘mon, now, enough a’ the gory details,” he said, settling back. “How ’bout we get to what’s in the bag an’ my offer of marriage? Contingent, as I mentioned, on that sauce.”

  Megan smiled again.

  “Both of them in a minute, I promise.” She leaned closer, extending her hand over the rail to touch his arm. “Doctors treating you okay?”

  “I guess,” he said. “Except for their pokin’ and prod-din’.”

  “Which is what they get paid to do,” she said. “You’ve had one hell of a week, Rol.”

  “Least I’m still alive.” His face became serious. “Not everybody here been that lucky.”

  “No, not everyone,” she said. “I’m very sorry for the men you lost.”

  Thibodeau was silent a moment. Then he nodded slowly.

  “Like you said, helluva week, an’ not just for us on this base.” He moistened his lips with his tongue. “You hear ’bout that train wreck near the coast?”

  “It’s been on the news, yes,” she said. “A horrible accident.”

  “Blood’s been spillin’ everywhere round these parts lately,” he said. “All I’m waitin’ for now’s the frogs, gnats, boils, an’ whatever else gonna come down.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’m not religious,” she said. “But the things we’re talking about, I can’t believe they’re caused by the finger of God.”

  Rollie gave her a neutral sort of shrug.

  “‘Less maybe it’s His way a’ givin’ us the finger,” he said. “Them reports you heard mention how that li’l girl’s doin’? You know the kid I mean....”

  “Daniella Costas,” Megan said. “Latest is that she’s fine. With one of her parents, I think.”

  “Bon,” he said. “I was her father, I’d wait till the engineer’s all recuperated, then kill him with my bare hands.”

  “He claims it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Who’s he blamin’?”

  “Not who, what,” she said. “Mechanical failure.”

  Rollie looked thoughtful a moment, then shrugged again.

  “Anyways,” he said. “Ain’t that I could ever mind a visit from you, but I been wonderin’ what this one’s about since they told me you were on your way.”

  “Roger thought I could help out until you’re back on your feet,” Megan said. “But I had my own reasons for wanting to come see you in person, Rollie. And one of them was to give you what’s in this bag.”

  “You sayin’ I really do rate a get-well present?”

  She nodded. “A very special one. Something I know you’d really appreciate.”

  He looked at her in silence. A nurse in a white uniform dress and crepe-soled shoes swished up to the door, poked her head briefly into the room, then continued on down the hall.

  Megan waited until she was gone, then reached into the shopping bag.

  “Pete Nimec told me you’ve been wanting your Stetson,” she said. “And that the doctors won’t let you wear it yet.”

  His shoulders became slightly more erect.

  “You bring it here to me from my quarters?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I’d never go against hospital rules.” She pulled an object in loose wrapping tissue out of the bag and gently placed it on his lap.

  “Whatever it is, it sure’s shaped like a hat,” he said, glancing down at it.

  “Well, they didn’t mention any brand of headware besides a Stetson per se,” she said, and smiled. “Why don’t you go ahead and see if this makes a decent substitute.”

  His brows furrowing, he removed the tissue paper.

  And audibly gasped.

  The acorn-ended campaign hat was old and battered almost to shapelessness, its gray felt balding in spots, its black leather chin strap scuffed and gnarled. But
its gold-and-black intertwined-braid hat cord and the silk ribbon around its crown were almost perfectly intact—as were the crossed gold cavalry sabers pinned to the side of its upturned brim.

  He looked up at her. “Don’ let me make a fool a’ myself by sayin’ what I think it is an’ bein’ wrong.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” she said. “It belonged to my great-grandfather. He was one of Teddy Roosevelt’s First Volunteer Cavalry.”

  “Mon Dieu.” He ran his fingers over the outside of the hat with open awe. “The Rough Riders.”

  She nodded. “ ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither suffer much nor enjoy much—”

  “—‘cause they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat,’ ” Thibodeau finished. “I don’ know what to say about this, Megan. I truly don’t.”

  She smiled.

  “Taylor Breen went from holding a racket on the tennis court to a rifle on Kettle Hill in the space of six months. Joined the unit at TD’s personal request, took a leave of absence of his professorship at Yale to go to war against Spain.” She paused a moment, quietly watching him. “Rollie ... I’ve got my own request goes along with the hat. I won’t pressure you to agree to it. But I’d like your decision now.”

  He met her eyes with his own.

  “This have to do with me fillin’ Max Blackburn’s old job?”

  She gave him another nod.

  “When we discussed the issue a few weeks back, you told me that you needed to think about it, that you weren’t sure you wanted to tackle the responsibility—”

  “Or that Pete Nimec wanted me to,” he said. “My dope was that he had someone else in mind, an’ the two of you were buttin’ heads about it.”