“So what does this have to do with OUTLOOK?”
“They’re on a promontory next to Puerto Ferro.” Jason looked at Nancy and Nolan. “Ferro and Bahía Mosquito are bioluminescent bays—at least, Mosquito is. Ferro used to be, but it’s in decline from pollution. We think OUTLOOK is partly to blame.”
“You’ve lost me,” Nolan cut in. “You mean these bays glow in the dark?”
“Sort of,” Pete replied. “They’ll full of microorganisms called dinoflagellates. Pyrodinium bahamense, to be exact. They live on vitamin b12 runoff from the mangrove trees, decaying leaves, shit like that. The two bays are real shallow, and they’ve got pretty narrow outlets to the sea, so the b12 builds up, the Pyrodinium clusters, and pretty soon you’ve got bays that glow in the dark when something moves. Fish leave glowing trails, the wake of your boat is a bright blue, it’s pretty amazing stuff. Big tourist draw, of course. We run two excursions on Mosquito Bay every night. Eighteen bucks a head! So you’ll understand when I say that we’ve got a stake in this tree-hugger shit.”
“And OUTLOOK?” James prompted.
“OUTLOOK’s got this waste pipe that empties into the ocean near the inlet to Puerto Ferro. They don’t use it often, and there’s no schedule we’ve been able to figure out, but whatever they’re dumping can’t be good. They’ve got an incinerator that runs once a week, and if they’re dumping shit they don’t dare burn . . . well, you see what I mean. But they’re part of Camp Garcia, the USMC, and protests just get shrugged off.”
“How big is this waste pipe?”
“Exactly. You could get up in there. It’s got bars, though. You’d need to cut them. And I can’t vouch for what you’ll find at the other end. But it’s doable. No harder than Montenegro was.”
James sat back and thought for a moment. He looked at Nancy and Nolan.
“I’m guessing you two don’t know a regulator from a radiator.”
“Huh?” said Nolan.
“SCUBA gear. You do any diving?”
Both shook their heads.
“All right. Nolan, you’re on getaway detail. But Nancy, you and me are gonna have to get wet.”
He looked at his friends. “You guys think we can get her ready for tomorrow night?”
Pete frowned. “Shit, man, you know better than that.”
Jason raised a hand. “Hang on, now. That pipe’s not more than fifteen feet down. Ferro doesn’t get much past twelve. Pressure’s not a problem, and there’s jack-all for current. Hell, she could snorkel it until it’s time to go in the pipe. But we’re still looking at a night dive. You scare easy, little lady?”
Nancy glared. James laughed. “Jason, my man, you may not believe this but she’s got more notches on her knife than you do.”
Jason made a face. “Ah, that’s bullshit!”
James shook his head and held up his right hand. “I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Nancy’s the most badass psycho chick I ever met.” He smiled at her and she smiled back, while Nolan grinned and sipped his beer.
Jason shrugged. “If you say so, man. We’ll go down to Sun Bay tonight and get a little wet. But tomorrow, my dear, is crash day. If you aren’t ready by sundown, you guys will have to postpone your little job until you are.”
“She’ll be ready,” James said.
“Damn straight,” Nancy replied.
After dinner they went back up to the Sea Gate and piled into the Explorer. Pete drove them south to Esperanza, where the Dive Center was. James’ cargo crate was waiting in a back storeroom. He checked it quickly to make sure it hadn’t been searched, and found all was in order.
They spent the next couple hours at the center, picking out gear to fit Nancy and James and showing Nancy how it worked. Just after sunset, they drove down to Sun Bay. Jason watched as Nancy put her gear on over a swimsuit—a BC, tank, dive computer, and regulator—to make sure she made all the connections correctly. Then he and James led her into the water of the shallow bay. They brought some heavy-duty underwater lights and got them set up so Nancy could find her way back to shore if she got separated, then they went under. Nancy practiced equalizing and clearing her mask, then struggled with the trickiness of maintaining proper buoyancy at ten to twelve feet under.
After a little under half an hour, Jason called time and they waded ashore, where Nolan was lying on his back watching the stars. They had an hour to kill before they’d go back in the water, as a safety measure against pressure problems, and Jason left them on the beach to go see how Pete was doing with a tourist run into one of the bio bays. Nancy and James plopped down next to Nolan.
“It’s gorgeous out here,” Nolan said peacefully. “You don’t get this kinda sky in D.C.”
James gazed up into the dark above. A feeling of déjà vu crept over him. Two years ago, his last night of relative freedom, he’d been on a beach like this, under a starry sky like this. Stephanie had been there, too. It was the conclusion of the Roscoe op, the moment at which she had put a wall between them. That wall was gone now—but so was Stephanie. He wondered what she was doing right now, if she was suffering at OUTLOOK’s hands. If she was even still alive.
“What’s your story, Darren?” Nancy asked after a while, interrupting his melancholy reverie. “Why are you here, anyway?”
He folded his arms across his chest and sighed. “Something my dad said once, a long time ago. If a house is burning and there are good people inside, it doesn’t matter whose house it is or how it caught fire. You just go in there and you get them out.”
She turned her head to look at him. “So it’s nothing personal?”
He smiled slightly and continued staring into the night. “Everything’s personal.”
They lay in silence a while longer until Jason came back from his trip, then they got wet again. This time they left the big lights off and practiced night swimming. James held onto the shoulder strap of Nancy’s BC as they moved around the bay, paddling with their fins, finding their way with a flashlight. When they returned to the bach, Jason said class was over for the night. “You did good, babe.”
They hauled their gear back to the Dive Center. Pete had held them slots on the evening’s second excursion to Bahía Mosquito, and they joined a bunch of tourists on a Caribbean Blue motor launch.
The bay was eerily dark and beautiful. As the boat pulled out into the middle of the calm water, Pete pointed out the bright blue glow in the churning wake. A school of darting sardines passed by, slender silver fish leaving bright trails behind as they swam. The effect was wondrously bizarre, like a strange childhood dream you somehow never forgot. Jason pulled a bucket of water out of the bay and turned off the lights for a couple minutes, passing the bucket around for the tourists to put their hands in and splash around. The sudden glow was stunning, a myriad of sparkling lights.
Several tourists decided to hop in the water for a few minutes and the agents followed, prompted by Jason. The water was warm and still, but as they jumped in it exploded with light. Nolan treaded water in his life jacket, smiling and pointing at a school of snapper fleeing the intruders, streaks of blue marking their passing. Nancy marveled at the beauty of the effect while James dove under, his body outlined in a glorious shimmer. When they all climbed back into the boat, their swimsuits glittered and sparkled for a few moments. It was magical.
Finally the boat returned to shore. Pete drove James and Cell N back to the Sea Gate and they immediately went to bed, exhausted from the day. Nancy was racked with terrible cravings, and she had a strange, extended dream of a shipwreck, the pale bodies of drowned Spanish sailors drifting in the bay, outlined in brilliant azure, lost forever to the surface world of light and life. In her dream she swam in her true flesh, a predator in a dim land feasting on the haloed dead.
Wednesday they rose early, awakened by Pete’s insistent knocking at the door. They got ready and accompanied him back to Sun Bay. They spent the day there, Nancy learning the ropes of shallow diving while Nolan relaxed on shore, getting a tan and
studying Nancy’s maps of OUTLOOK. In the afternoon he left to rent a getaway vehicle and then drove all around the public part of the island, venturing into the accessible areas of Camp Garcia to scout routes to and from OUTLOOK. The roads were a mixed lot, ranging from two-lane paved highways to narrow dirt tracks.
Meanwhile, the dive team relocated to Puerto Ferro after taking a break for a late lunch and a rest. Nancy and James swam all through the bay and out into the ocean, learning the terrain. They decided to scout the approach to the waste pipe, and Pete led them on the excursion.
The pipe was just a hundred yards or so from the inlet to Ferro. It was about four feet in diameter, a tight fit. When they went in, they’d have to push their tanks in front of them. There were three metal bars welded to the interior of the pipe to prevent access. They examined the bars, and Pete and James talked in hand signals about the time it would take to cut through them with an underwater blowtorch. Nancy swum up to the entrance and grabbed a bar, bracing her feet on the bottom lip of the pipe. She started pulling. Pete and James looked at her, and then Pete tapped James on the shoulder and shook his head. There was no way they could just break the bars loose.
Nancy strained, and suddenly the bar snapped free of the weld. She kept pulling until it was poking out at a right angle. Pete was incredulous. James held up his hands and shrugged, as if to say I told you so.
It took another few minutes, but soon enough Nancy had all three bars bent out, and three more located a few feet inside. The way was open.
James made more hand signals to Pete, and then took some preparatory breaths. The pipe was too narrow to get the tank in on his back and he didn’t want to fool with pushing it ahead of him at the moment, so he’d decided to leave it behind for a quick look inside. When he was ready, Pete helped him take the tank off. James took one last gulp of air and removed the mouthpiece, then shot into the pipe.
A couple minutes went by. Nancy gave Pete a worried look, but Pete just shook his head.
James blew out of the pipe and took the mouthpiece from Pete. He breathed for a few moments, and then Pete helped him get the tank back on. James pointed at the inlet to the bay and they swum back into Puerto Ferro. They emerged on the beach a few minutes later.
“It’s good,” James said as they sat down on the warm sand. “Goes about fifty yards inland on an upward gradient, then it makes a turn straight up. When you get above sea level there’s open air. I think it’s another twenty yards from there to the top, but we can scale that. I could see a little light from above. There’s some kind of hatch, but I don’t think it’s anything we can’t get through. This’ll work.”
“You sure?” Pete asked warily.
“Sure as I can be for now. We’ll try it tonight and bail if we can’t get through the hatch.”
“This is the end of the road for me and Jason,” Pete said. “I’m sorry, man, but you’re on your own tonight. We can’t be getting into this shit.”
“I know,” James said. “Don’t worry.” He looked at Nancy reassuringly. “We can handle it.”
The sun was low in the west. The mangrove trees cast long shadows on the sand. Across the bay, a vacationing couple with two young children splashed in the waves, their laughter dancing over the water.
It was a beautiful, beautiful day.
An hour after sunset, they were ready. Nolan parked the Range Rover he’d rented at Red Beach, a public area within the confines of Camp Garcia. From there he was three minutes from OUTLOOK. When James and Nancy were ready, they’d send up a flare and Nolan would come, hell-bent for leather—unless shooting started outside before the flare, in which case Nolan would come anyway. He expected that his weeks at the FBI’s tactical-driving school would pay off when he made the treacherous run on OUTLOOK’s concentric gates. He had two compact Italian M-4 Spectre 9mm submachine guns with fifty-round magazines, night-vision goggles with flash suppression, a Swiss SIG-Sauer SSG2000 bolt-action sniper rifle that took .300 Weatherby Magnum rounds and was equipped with an 8.0 scope, and his personal Colt Delta Elite 10mm handgun. He wore a full tac suit with body armor. The floor was littered with extra magazines for the M-4s and the Colt, and an open shoebox with twenty Weatherby rounds sat in the passenger seat.
Despite the weaponry, Nolan had never been more afraid. He’d come to Puerto Rico because Nancy was his responsibility; truth be told, he was more than a little bit in love with her. He still found her true appearance disconcerting, but over the last year he’d learned to look behind her strange form and see the talented, driven woman within. She was extraordinary, in every sense of the word, and he’d die before he let harm come to her.
But looking at OUTLOOK and weighing their chances of making it out alive, his chivalrous confidence had drained away. This was ugly, desperate business. They were undermanned and underprepared. But James insisted they had to go, and go now, before whatever was going on at OUTLOOK got worse.
Nolan took deep breaths and steadied himself. He was determined not to let Nancy down.
At Puerto Ferro, Nancy and James walked to the southeast edge of the bay, just at the start of the outlet to the sea. Besides their SCUBA gear, each carried a bulky waterproof bag with equipment for once they got inside. They got geared up and James led Nancy into the water.
It was warm and welcoming. Although Ferro wasn’t nearly as bioluminescent as Bahía Mosquito, they could still see little specks of light here and there, a reminder of the toll civilization had taken on this place. James and Nancy hung close together, James holding onto her shoulder strap as they swam towards the inlet. Although she was new to SCUBA gear, Nancy felt confident as hell. She was ready to feed, and she knew OUTLOOK would be full of fresh meat. They both had small diving lights with blue gels over them, resembling the glow of Pyrodinium to casual observers on shore. Within twenty minutes they reached the pipe.
By mutual agreement, Nancy went in first. With her inhuman strength and build she could quickly and silently scale the dry shaft at the end of the pipe and, hopefully, get the hatch open. James helped her take her tank off and she lay it in the mouth of the pipe. She and James shook hands, and then she was in.
The pipe seemed terribly narrow as Nancy swam forward slowly, pushing her tank as she went. But somehow she felt right at home in this subterranean space. Vague inklings of memory teased at her thoughts, telling her that this was where she belonged, underground, in the dark. She shrugged off the murmurings of her strange inner voice and pressed on. Soon she reached the bend where the pipe turned upward.
Here she left her tank and regulator behind and pushed up with her powerful legs. She broke the surface and took a breath, then looked up. There was some light here, as James had said, shining through in a tight but broken circle from the top of the shaft around the hatch. Nancy pulled her watertight bag up to her chest and tightened the cord to hold it there. Then she waited.
A few moments later, James tapped on her ankle from below, signaling his arrival. Then he tapped again. It was time to go.
Nancy reached out and braced her arms across the width of the pipe, then lifted herself up. When her feet were clear she braced her legs, then moved her hands higher. After doing this twice it became second nature, and she scurried up the rest of the shaft in half a minute. Then she was below the hatch.
Keeping herself braced in the shaft, she reached one hand up and pressed against the hatch. It lifted slightly and then stopped. There was some sort of catch keeping it shut.
Nancy paused for a moment. She could hear James beginning to make the climb up the shaft, but she focused and blocked out the sounds he was making. She was interested in what was on the other side of the hatch.
Gradually she could make out a low, rustling hum, and she could detect a faint odor of gas. The incinerator, she thought gratefully. From her acquired knowledge of OUTLOOK’s floorplan, she’d guessed that this pipe probably came from the incinerator room, where they disposed of their medical waste. Now she was sure she was right. She was
sure of something else, too, thanks to the scents she was picking up through the hatch. No one was in the incinerator room.
She clicked her tongue twice. James answered in kind. Now.
Nancy braced herself more tightly, got into position, and then slammed the heel of her palm against the underside of the hatch with all of her strength. The force snapped through the catch and the hatch flew open, pivoting back on its hinges until it clanged against the pipe. By the time the sound came Nancy had propelled herself up and out, tucking her legs in and then tumbling to the ground, landing in a feral crouch, one hand raised to strike if she was wrong. The small incinerator room was unoccupied, hot from the heat of the furnace. She looked at the single door. Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared.
The door opened. An NRO DELTA agent in Wackenhut apparel stood there with his MP5 at the ready. He let loose a burst on the dripping blond woman crouched on the floor, but by the time the trigger was depressed she had leapt through the air and tackled him, his shots spraying the ceiling of the room. Nancy twisted his head around backwards and pulled him into the room, closing the door behind them.
James emerged from the pipe, his commando knife in one hand and a hard look in his eyes. The sight before him stopped him cold.
Nancy was feeding. She had her face buried in the guard’s innards, devouring his flesh and organs, grunting with satisfaction. It had been days since she’d fed, and she couldn’t contain her hunger any longer.
James stepped free of the pipe and gingerly hurried around the pair on the floor. He put his shoulder against the door and listened. He heard footsteps. He sheathed his knife and grabbed the guard’s MP5, then held it at the door while he opened the waterproof bag hanging from his shoulder with his other hand. From within he pulled an m-4 Spectre with a stubby fifty-round magazine. He swapped the submachine guns and stood to one side, crouching by the door.
The door flew open. James shoved the MP5 in his left hand against the guard’s side and tore his insides apart with a ten-round burst. The guard toppled, squeezing off shots that struck the incinerator, and then hit the floor.
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 32