by Tom Clancy
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, rough 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 gr
anite 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 held 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.
“Don’t forget your spare O2,” Dex said. He took from the well an aluminum canister/snorkel assembly about the size of a bicycle pump, put it into a waterproof satchel, and carried it over to Ricci.
Ricci hung the satchel around his shoulders.
“Okay,” he said. “Ready to go.”
Dex cocked a thumb into the air.
“If you can’t send me up some whore’s pussy, I’ll settle for the eggs she been droppin’,” he said, and grinned as if he’d gotten off a sharp witticism.
Ricci went over the side with a backward roll, swam over to his floating tank, slipped it on, and attached the BC’s narrow low-pressure inflator tube, which would draw air from the tank through a twist valve within reach of his hand. For backup — and lesser, more incremental adjustments in buoyancy than this method easily allowed — his BC also had over its right shoulder strap an oral-inflation assembly consisting of a large-diameter air hose much like that of a vacuum cleaner or automobile carburetor, with a mouthpiece that could be actuated at the touch of a simple button-and-spring mechanism.
The last thing Ricci did before going under was check the submersible instrument console attached to a port atop his scuba tank by yet another rubber hose. On the console were two gauges — a digital readout for measuring depth and temperature, and an analog PSI air gauge below it. The air gauge showed the tank to be at its maxrated 4,000-psi working pressure, with the standard ten-percent safety overfill.
Glancing topside, he saw Dex lean forward over the rail, still grinning and poking his thumb skyward.
Ricci kicked away from the hull of the skiff, dumped air from his BC, and submerged.
* * *
Dex’s smile lasted only as long as it took for Ricci’s outline to disappear underwater. Then it, too, vanished. His eyes narrow, his mouth a thin line of tension, he stood at the gunwale watching the bubbles from Ricci’s exhalations reach the surface, the words they’d exchanged earlier that morning suddenly echoing in his mind.
“Regular as you are ’bout where an’ when you dive, buggers ought to have you figured by now,” he’d said to Ricci, before going on with some nonsense about the urchins moving out of town or some such. Just kind of wanting to break the silence between them.
“Can’t figure anything unless you have brains to speak of, ” Ricci had answered. “And they don’t. ”
Well, Dex thought, maybe the urchins didn’t have brains bigger than tiny specks of sand in their heads, didn’t even have heads that Dex could see, but he had smarts enough to do some figurin’ of his own. Not that God had made him a genius; if that was the case he wouldn’t have to be tendin’ boat every winter season, when the bitter mornin’ cold was like to shrivel your balls up into your stomach an’ turn the drip from your nose to icicles. But he knew for sure that Ricci would be thinkin’ about what happened with Cobbs an’ Phipps, and gettin’ to wonder about him bein’ in on the shake-down too. Was maybe even holdin’ onto some suspicions about that already, to guess from how he’d been quieter than usual this mornin’-not that he was any kind of chatterbox in what you might call his sunniest moods.
Still, Dex couldn’t afford to wait for Ricci to go the distance from bein’ suspicious of him to reachin’ any right conclusions, short a hop as that was. Maybe he didn’t run off at the mouth about himself like so many flatlanders did, telling you everythin’ about their lives from A through Z within five minutes of makin’ your acquaintance, but once in a while Ricci would mention something about when he was a police detective down in Beantown, an’ furthermore, Dex’s buddy Hugh Temple, whose girlfriend’s sister Alice worked at the real estate office in town, said she’d heard from her boy-friend worked at the Key Bank that Ricci used to be in some hotshit military outfit like the Rangers or Navy SEALs or maybe the Boy Commandos — whatever the fuck — before his cops-and-robbers days. That particular bit a’ scuttlebutt hadn’t surprised Dex, ’cause there was times when all you had to do was look in his eyes to see that he could be one dangerous son of a bitch to anybody who got on his wrong side.
Dex shook a cigarette from the pack in the breast pocket of his mackinaw
, shoved it between his lips, and cupped a hand over its tip as he fired up his Bic lighter. He stood there smoking at the gunwale, his eyes following Ricci’s stream of bubbles. Truth was, he’d got on okay with Ricci, who always gave him an even shake as far as business went, and never treated anybody as if he was their better, the way a lot of folks from out of town did as a matter of course, especially the summer people with their kayaks, canoes, an’ mountain bikes on the roof racks of their whale-sized, showroom-new 4 x 4 wagons.
Those people, they’d stand around the middle of town in bunches of five, six, an’ more, wearin’ white shorts an’ sneakers that matched their perfect white teeth, never movin’ aside to let you pass, talkin’ so loud you’d think every one of ’em was deaf as a board. Cloggin’ the sidewalk as if they owned it, an’ couldn’t damn well see themselves sharin’ the street with anybody, like they was on some kinda movie set that was laid out just for them on Memorial Day, an’ got packed away into storage after they headed south come September, gatherin’ dust an’ cobwebs until the next summer of fun rolled round.
No, Dex hadn’t held any ill feelings for Ricci, not the other day when he’d taken off on him with that bullshit story about havin’ to mind the kids, not even now, after havin’ done his bit of tinkerin’ with Ricci’s air gauge last night, an’ preparin’ to leave him for a goner. But what choice did he have? Way he felt, it was kinda like goin’ to war an’ bein’ forced to shoot somebody you bore no personal grudge against, somebody you might even think was an okay fella if you got to know him over a frosty glass of suds, all because of circumstances that you could no more control than the turnin’ of the world. Havin’ been a soldier, Ricci would prob’ly understand that.
What Ricci could never understand, though, comin’ from away, was the kind of pressure he, Dex, had been under to cut a separate deal with Cobbs. How could he have refused that prick without jammin’ himself up big-time? Cobbs was in so tight with the sheriff an’ town managers, he’d see to it that Dex got cited for some kinda safety violation whenever he turned on the heat in his double-wide, an’ was pulled over, breathalyzed, an’ tossed in the drunk tank every time he drove his pickup home after havin’ put down one or two at the bar.