Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight

by Randy Wayne White

  He resembled a trapped animal. As if chained to a post, Geness paced the deck, back and forth, indifferent to the autopilot’s course, peering out from the sinking boat that had become his cage.

  The analogy was disturbing. It caused me to admit I might be wrong in at least one of my assumptions. The twins were cowards, they’d proven it over and over. Which is why I’d been so sure they would either surrender or run once we got them stopped. But trapped animals can’t run. So they fight… and keep fighting until they escape or they die.

  Geness Neinabor, even with all the bullying he’d endured in his life, had never experienced a more suffocating trap than now. The man was armed, he was desperate. There was a very good chance he would fight—or, at the very least, try to take a lot of people with him when died.

  The realization caused me to wonder if it might be wiser to back off, apply loose cover and hope the chopper could make contact with the twin by VHF radio. Get a hostage negotiator on the line, maybe, and pipe his voice through the aircraft’s booming PA system. As crazy as Geness was, maybe he would believe it was the voice of God.

  A nice idea but not practical. Trouble was, it was now ten till three and Odus had told us very little that was useful about their homemade explosive. The bomb did exist and it was aboard the yacht. He and Genesis had made the thing in California, packed it in a waterproof bag, and they had carried it onto the island in a backpack Odus had used since childhood.

  “A Super Mario backpack!” he had told us. “My brother and I kicked ass at all the Mario tournaments when the game first came out. Not Mario One—that version sucked. The classic Mario Two, I’m talking about.”

  We had to have more details, but Odus’s self-obsessive rambling was driving me crazy.

  I had been standing at the wheel but now sat and put my hand on the twin’s shoulder. Not hard, not threatening. I wanted to create a physical connection. Odus shrugged my hand away, though, and snapped, “Hands off! I hate when people touch me!”

  I stayed calm, kept my eyes on Geness and decided to use the interrogation strategy that had worked earlier—and also employ a familiar word Odus might find disarming. “I won’t ask you to snitch on your brothers. But I want to save those sturgeon, too. So don’t talk, just nod—or shake your head. You’re not actually telling me anything.”

  Ahead, Genesis was using the binoculars again, focusing on the chopper, as I asked, “The bomb—did you wire it with a redundancy detonator system?”

  Odus gave me a sharp look, surprised I understood anything about explosives. It took him a second, then he finally nodded.

  That was encouraging.

  I asked, “Has the clock detonator been disengaged? It’s almost three. Not much time to save those sturgeon—or your brother.”

  The twin shrugged and spoke. “The dolphin slavers, Abraham hates them, too. So maybe he’ll use the”—Odus took a look at the lights of Bare Key Regency, only a mile away, then finished—“Yeah, at the speed we’re going, he’ll probably use the remote.”

  Until then, I hadn’t noticed the subtle change in course. The yacht’s autopilot had turned it a few degrees southwest and it was making for the hotel’s marina basin and floating casino. The gambling boat was a carnival of lights—violet, pink, tangerine—a hundred-foot-long party craft that was as garish as a South Beach limousine.

  I checked my watch and decided Odus might be wrong about disengaging the clock. Traveling at ten knots, the Dragos would smash into the docks a minute or two before three. It would be close.

  I had one more question; a simple question, but an answer would reveal a great deal about the content and potency of what was hidden in that ridiculous bag. Because Geness suddenly disappeared inside the cabin, though, I stood for a moment, but then forced myself to sit and appear unruffled. I said to Odus, “The explosive you made, would it detonate if you threw it into a fire? Shake your head or nod, no need to talk.”

  The twin’s reaction was as unexpected as his answer. He began to cry again as he shook his head—No—which was the opposite of what I hoped. Low-grade explosives are ignited by combustion. Commercial-, or military-, grade explosives require a sudden shock, such as a blasting cap.

  I didn’t have to ask details because Odus was already confessing. “Geness did it! He bought nitrate powder, almost six kilograms. We mixed it into a slurry, with motor oil and a binder—”

  I interrupted because I was horrified. “He didn’t use RDX powder? Just tell me the truth. Shake your head to confirm he didn’t.”

  I was hoping to hell Odus shook his head because RDX is not only a potent explosive, its fumes produce poisonous gas. If the twins had used six kilograms—about thirteen pounds of the stuff—the residual fumes alone could kill us, everyone in the hotel and even the crew of the chopper that was now closing on us at more than a hundred knots.

  Instead of answering, Odus started to say, “We made blasting caps, too—” but I stopped listening because Geness had returned to the railing outside the cabin. We had closed within thirty yards of the vessel’s stern, close enough for me to see that he carried a bag in one hand and, in the other hand, a… what?

  I stood and touched the magnification button on the thermal unit, then yelled, “Tomlinson, he’s got a rifle!” At the same instant, I saw Geness taunt me with his middle finger, then shoulder the weapon.

  It was Trapper’s junk rifle, presumably, the one with Russian night vision and a homemade silencer. Junk or not, hitting a moving target is markedly easier when the target is traveling a straight line, directly behind the shooting platform. So I hollered a warning, then turned hard to starboard. Seconds later, rather than risk the yacht’s wake again, I turned hard to port while I watched the rifle recoil against Geness’s shoulder and heard a faint popping sound.

  He wasn’t firing at us, I realized. He was trying to hit the helicopter, its searchlight a dazzling starburst two hundred yards off his stern.

  I was gauging my next turn as Neinabor worked the bolt and fired again, but this time the report was absorbed by the turbine roar of the helicopter as it rocketed past us, so low I felt the shear off its articulated blades. The chopper tilted bow-high, slowing, then circled back toward the stern of the Dragos. Unaware, apparently, his ship was taking fire, the pilot then settled into a slow observation pursuit a hundred yards behind.

  Tomlinson was on his feet, waving his arms at the chopper, yelling, “Get away, get away!” which is why he didn’t hear me tell him, “Grab something!” and then almost backpedaled overboard when I turned to starboard, continuing to zigzag behind the Dragos.

  Beside me, Odus was disintegrating emotionally. Hands over his ears, he was babbling and sobbing and stomping his feet like a child. Even so, as a precaution, I took the pistol from the console and was sliding it into the waistband of my shorts but then stopped. Geness had placed the rifle on the deck and had picked up the bag. I had assumed the bag contained what little ammunition that remained or even the binoculars. At a distance, it looked half the size of a child’s backpack—too small to contain explosives.

  Now, though, a chilling suspicion came into my mind, so I used the TAM-14 to check the thing for heat. Commercial explosives require a detonating device that, in turn, requires an energy source, often a six-volt battery. Nitrate powders, whatever the proportion, also radiate heat as the mixture fulminates.

  Steering the boat with one hand, I had the other on the TAM’s pressure switches, hurrying to adjust contrast and magnification, yet the bag remained a dull entity. No sign of heat or chemical glow. Reassuring, but I still wasn’t convinced.

  Tomlinson was kneeling on the cooler, facing me. “Here they come,” he said, then stood and began waving his arms again, yelling, “He’s got a gun, you idiots!”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see that the helicopter was now approaching cautiously. Then a woman’s voice boomed from the aircraft’s PA speakers, “Stop your vessels immediately! This is the United States Coast Guard ordering you to
stop! Turn off the engines, let us see your hands. Let us see your hands now!”

  My eyes swung to the yacht, expecting to see Geness taking careful aim with the rifle. At this distance, there was a fair chance he’d hit the chopper. But, no, maybe he was finally out of ammunition because he was still clutching the bag. No longer in a panic, either, because he took the time to flip us the bird once again.

  Was he grinning at me?

  I increased magnification. Yes, it wasn’t my imagination. Through thermal vision, the man’s teeth were clenched in a skeletal grin, then his mandible bones opened wide as if howling—and that’s when he swung the bag in a lazy loop off the stern into the water.

  I grabbed Tomlinson’s shoulder and pulled as I shouted, “Get down!” then buried my weight on the throttle. We had already crossed the Dragos’s stern, and its wake lay ahead in cresting, rolling peaks. Normally, I would have slowed and dealt with each wave individually, accelerating up the backside, then slowing before our bow buried itself in the next.

  Not now. I ran the boat wide open, and I didn’t look back, either, because I didn’t want to witness what happened next. I knew what was in that Super Mario bag just as I also knew that Geness would wait until the helicopter was over the thing—and he was safely out of range—before pressing the remote detonator.

  The first wave launched us skyward and we ski jumped onto the next wave, the weight of the Whaler crushing through the breaker yet the cresting face nearly flipped us end over end. I steered to the right, trying a surfer’s cutback, and reduced throttle until I felt our speed sync with the velocity of the wave. When the comber had jettisoned us into the next wave, I angled left, toward the yacht, and rode the trough until I saw an opening and finally punched through the last breaker, ski jumping again into flat water.

  Odus had bounced out of his seat and lay in a fetal position, helpless as a rag doll, bawling on the deck. Tomlinson had battled his way aft and now sat beside me, his body turned toward the helicopter. I don’t know if he realized that Geness had set a trap for the helicopter or not, but the man’s eyes were opened wide enough to reflect the glare of the fireball before I heard the explosion.

  I tried to yell a warning but the sonic pressure sucked the air out of me. Then a wall of heat consumed us and seemed to slingshot our boat forward before releasing us finally into the benign warmth of a June morning.

  “Jesus Christ, she’s going down!”

  In the shock of those microseconds, I couldn’t be sure if it was Tomlinson’s voice that had yelled those words or my own. No… it was Tomlinson, because my first reaction was to look at the yacht, which I expected to be sinking.

  It wasn’t. The vessel was listing dangerously to starboard but the autopilot continued to steer it inexorably toward the lights of the casino and the dolphin pens that lay somewhere beyond.

  Feeling nauseated, I forced myself to look behind us, where the copter’s fuselage was spinning on the axis of its own propeller, descending like a bird with a broken wing, yet it still somehow managed to stay aloft.

  “No! She’s going to make it!” Tomlinson’s voice again. “She’ll make the beach!”

  I wasn’t so sure. For the next seconds, I watched, transfixed, as the chopper autorotated downward but also westward, where, half a mile away, a shoal of curving sand glistened. Without realizing it, I had already turned toward the crash site and was gaining speed when the pilot somehow levitated the craft over the last hundred yards of water, avoided the bridge, then augered the fuselage onto the sand so hard I heard the impact from five hundred yards away. Instantly, the aircraft’s doors opened, but the crew remained inside while the pilot powered down, running lights still strobing.

  The procedural deliberateness told me they probably weren’t hurt.

  Tomlinson was grinning as he combed nervous fingers through his hair. “A magic pilot, brother! She made it, they’re okay!”

  I was smiling, too, because of the helicopter, but also because I realized we had survived the explosion’s shock wave, which meant the fumes weren’t poisonous. Finally, I’d gotten my answer—the bomb hadn’t been made of RDX powder.

  But then my mood changed when Odus Neinabor, on his knees, peering at the downed aircraft, said, “I wish those asswipes woulda crashed and burned to death. Woulda served them right for trying to stop my brothers.”

  Touching the throttle, I turned sharply toward the Dragos, then lowered my voice to tell Tomlinson, “He’ll be so busy watching the chopper, he won’t see us if we pull alongside.”

  I meant Geness.

  “Christ, Doc, you’re not going to ram her again. I mean, it was exciting and all, but—”

  “I’m getting off,” I told him. “You’re taking the wheel. And if that little son of a bitch even tries to touch that”—I nodded toward the rifle lying at our feet—“you push him overboard. Promise me. You’ve got to swear you’ll do it.”

  When my friend didn’t respond instantly, I knelt, picked up the rifle and tossed it over the side.

  I wasn’t smiling anymore.

  29

  The Dragos Voyager was only six hundred yards from the Regency Hotel marina when I finally steered the Whaler into position along the yacht’s starboard side where, earlier, we had punched a hole in its glistening skin. Now, though, the hole had disappeared beneath the waterline, which told me the vessel was sinking fast.

  There was another indicator she was going down: the vessel was heeling to starboard, and two scuppers forward of the midship line were jettisoning leakage with the force of fire hoses. Tomlinson noticed, too, as he got ready to take the wheel. It told us the yacht’s multiple bilge pumps were fighting a losing battle, and that water had now risen near the forward cabin. Until that moment, I hadn’t given the welfare of the sturgeon much thought, despite what I’d told Odus. Now I did.

  The word “fingerling” is an inexact term when applied to fish, but the age of Kazlov’s sturgeon—if they were still alive—was suddenly important. Sturgeon are an anadromous species, which means that, at a certain stage, they migrate to sea when not spawning. For many sturgeon, the transitional age is two years or older. Until then, their physiology requires fresh water. If the Russian truly had transported finger-length beluga to Florida, the flooding salt water would probably kill the fish even if I managed to take control of the yacht.

  “It’s two minutes until three,” Tomlinson reminded me as we changed places. Apparently, he, too, was worried there might be another explosive aboard the vessel. It wouldn’t be the first time Odus had lied to us.

  I nodded, but then gestured toward the hotel, where we could see the miniature silhouettes of late-night stragglers and what were probably maintenance staff on the casino boat’s upper deck. We didn’t have time to stand off and wait for the deadline to pass, I was telling him. If I was going to surprise Geness, I had to act now.

  Odus, sitting in front of the steering console, had slipped into catatonia, or so I believed. And he remained motionless when I hurried onto the Whaler’s casting platform and motioned to Tomlinson to swing us closer… closer… until the two vessels were nearly bumping, our speeds in sync, traveling at less than ten knots.

  From experience, I knew how difficult it was to keep the boat in position while also contending with wind and volatile updrafts of displaced water. Tomlinson couldn’t hold us there long, so I didn’t hesitate when the yacht’s safety railing descended within reach. Almost within reaching distance, anyway, because at the last instant I had to jump and grab the lowest rail with my right hand, which kicked the bow of the Whaler out from under me.

  It was then that Odus sprung into action. As I hung there, fighting to pull myself up, a pair of hands grabbed me around the waist. Then I felt the full weight of the little man as he wrapped his legs around mine. Odus buried his fingernails into my belly and began screaming, “Don’t let me go! I can’t swim! You know I can’t swim!”

  My first thought was, The little bastard’s going to shake t
he pistol free, because I’d stuffed the weapon into the back of my shorts. There, even if it was dislodged, my underwear would catch it like a safety net—not an ideal place to carry a pistol that has a round chambered yet it was the only place that would leave my hands free.

  With a glance, I saw that Tomlinson was helpless. If he abandoned the wheel to grab the twin, the outboard’s propeller would automatically kick the boat into a sharp left turn. If that happened, he not only couldn’t pull Odus off me, he’d probably be flung overboard.

  I don’t know what my pal did after that because I had to muster every bit of strength to steady myself and fill my lungs with air. Then, with the twin still screaming, I attempted an impossible one-handed pull-up. Most days of my life, I do pull-ups. Thirty-three without stopping is my personal best, and I commonly do two hundred in descending sets, starting at twenty. But I’ve never successfully used only one arm—not backhanded, anyway. I didn’t succeed this time, either, but I did manage to lift us enough to get my left hand on the boat’s deck, then hung there for a moment, aware that Odus was now screaming, “Shoot him, Genesis! Help me, then shoot this fucker!”

  Above us, I sensed rather than saw the cabin lights click on. Then I heard the sizzle of a halogen spotlight, which gave me the adrenaline charge necessary to ladder my left hand onto the railing, which was beginning to buckle beneath our weight. After another moment’s rest, I kicked free of Odus’s legs and got an ankle hooked around a stanchion.

  I don’t know what the man expected when he jumped on my back to stop me. Because he was a poor swimmer, maybe he assumed I would put his welfare ahead of my own objective or even pity him—an assumption that a sociopath, secure in his preeminence, might make.

  If so, Odus had badly confused Tomlinson’s kindheartedness with my chillier attitude toward moral cripples, obnoxious assholes and other conveyors of dead-end genetics.