The Marines didn’t hesitate. All four bolted for the widening gap between the door and the concrete ramp, hitting the floor like paratroopers and rolling under the gap as if it were concertina wire. One minute they were there, the next minute they were gone and down the road. Or at least up the ramp.
“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled at Moira, because I knew what would happen next-they’d shut that door as soon as they knew their Marines were safe. If left open, that door would create a firestorm. I could already feel the blast of cool night air headed in to help with the fire.
We scrambled the rest of the way up the wall, then went sideways along the top to the front section of the cage, heedless now of the ragged edges of hardware cloth at the top. Over the top, drop to the floor, and run like hell for that ramp, pursued now by the heavy cloud of thick black smoke that was coiling along the ceiling like an angry incubus. I took one breath of some truly noxious gases of combustion from wiring, pipe lagging, and cardboard boxes, which put me momentarily on my knees. We were forced to get down to all fours as we arrived at the ramp, just in time to hear that horn go off again.
It was harder rolling up the ramp than it would have been rolling down, but we had plenty of motivation coming down the passageway after us in the form of a flame front. The door slammed down onto the concrete just as Moira made it through, and the air began shrieking under it as the fire demanded more and more oxygen.
We huddled at the bottom of the ramp to get our bearings. I was almost afraid to look up the ramp, expecting to see a four-pack of smiling Marines waiting for us. But they were gone. What we could see was that every light in the building above us was on, which probably meant that there was a full-scale evacuation in progress. We’d wanted a diversion, and by God, we had one.
We crawled up the ramp on our bellies to the sidewalk from which the exercise pens extended into the foggy night. Still no guards in sight. The interior gates to the exercise pens had latches but no locks, as there were always guards out on the sidewalk when the detainees were in the pens. I quickly counted to the third gate, and we went through, closing it behind us. We could hear a commotion of voices growing on the other side of the building, but no sirens yet. The fire in the basement was invisible behind all that concrete, but we could still hear it sucking a shrieking gale of air under the steel ramp doors.
We trotted out the length of the pen through wet grass, and the building grew indistinct behind us as the fog closed in. By the time we got to the far end and the dreaded white line, all that remained was a yellow-white glow behind us and some muffled sounds of emergency personnel. We pressed up against the chain-link of the perimeter fence and stopped to listen for signs of guards. Or dogs. Moira looked back into the gloom.
“Suppose the whole place will go up?” she asked quietly.
“It’s old, but it’s mostly concrete and brick, so maybe not,” I said. “They should have time to get everyone out.”
We finally heard distant sirens in the fog, which should mean that this would be the best time to make our run for it, before the guard force was relieved by EMS people and could come looking.
I dropped down to my knees against the fence and tried to lift the bottom. It didn’t move.
What the fuck! Had they found it and fixed it? Or were we in the wrong pen?
“What?” Moira asked, seeing me look up. I explained the problem. She swore and immediately began climbing the side fence. She flopped over the top and dropped to the ground, checked the perimeter fence, and hissed a “here” at me. We’d miscounted.
I went over the side fence to find her already sliding under the pushed-out skirt of the perimeter fence. I dropped to my back, pulled myself under, and got back on my feet.
“Good thing you don’t have tits,” Moira said with a grin, but then we heard that goddamned trapdoor bang behind us in the fog.
I don’t know where they kept that dog, but, apparently, it had not been in the basement. We didn’t waste time: We ran straight away from the fence and the lights, hurtling out into the fog as fast as we could go, and hoping like hell we weren’t running in a big circle right back to an unpleasant canine rendezvous.
We couldn’t see a thing out ahead of us, so after what seemed like the length of an entire football field, we stopped to listen. Moira was breathing really hard and went down on one knee to catch her breath. I tried to orient myself in the fog, but of course there was nothing to navigate by except our own trail through the wet grass. It looked pretty straight, but I knew we could still be way off course. The sirens were louder behind us, but the fog distorted sound direction.
The big question, besides navigation, was whether or not my rescuers were out there in the woods. There was one way to find out: I let go a short, sharp whistle. Moira made a face as if asking if I were nuts, but then I heard something coming through the grass. An animal something, not human. The new question of the moment: my dogs or theirs?
“Ready Mace,” I whispered, and put us in a back-to-back stance, each with a Mace canister pointed and ready. The sirens had stopped, and now the fog had completely enveloped the building and the fire. I could feel Moira’s legs trembling against mine.
We waited.
A full minute passed, then another.
Then there was a low, rumbling growl out there in the fog. I felt Moira tense up. I wanted to point the canister in the right direction, but there was no way to tell in that fog. Little beads of cold moisture were forming on my face that had nothing to do with the weather.
A second growl, seemingly closer, but from a different direction. I tried desperately to think of something we could do, but we were blind. I think it would have been better if we’d also been deaf.
If it was the rottie, he was circling us. He knew there was human prey out there, but not how many, and, once he left our scent trail, he was operating blind, too. Our scent wouldn’t go anywhere in this fog.
More sounds of something moving in the grass, but not necessarily closer. The grass crunching quietly, low panting.
Another minute of aching silence, then a third growl-much closer. I leaned out, pointed my can down low, and fired a burst in that direction. I got a satisfying little whimper out of the fog and the sounds of some frantic pawing in the grass.
I reached behind me and grabbed Moira’s belt, and then we advanced in the direction I’d fired until I could see a darker shape low on the ground. It saw me at about the same time, and this time the growl was more like a roar. I fired again, and the roar changed to a prolonged yipping. The rottie backed away into the fog, and I did, too, dragging Moira with me to make damned sure we didn’t get separated.
We’d solved our rottweiler problem, for the moment, anyway, unless we managed to step on him out there in the fog. He shouldn’t be able to smell anything for a week if I’d managed to get any of that spray onto his face.
But now we were really lost. We no longer had our own tracks away from the facility to guide on.
Screw it, I thought, and whistled again, this time louder. This time I was rewarded by a familiar woof, and we moved in that general direction. I started calling them, as quietly as I could, and pretty soon first one and then a second fuzzy friend showed up, all excited at being reunited. I told them to quiet down, and then we followed their tracks back through the dewy grass. They hadn’t exactly come in a straight line, but it was better than nothing. Somewhere out there in the fog we heard a muffled, thumping explosion, and then another one. There was a brief orange glow, which quickly faded, and then the sounds of more sirens.
We literally collided with the trees, and I got a face full of pine needles. We stopped to listen for any signs of pursuit, but there was nothing out there but the fog and the sounds of my shepherds panting. I turned to start swatting through all the low-hanging pine branches when something black came out of the fog from my side and launched itself at my face.
A branch saved me. The rottie clamped hard but got a mouthful of tree limb instead of my throat, and
we both crashed backward onto the ground. Moira screamed in surprise as I tried to roll out from under that monster, but then I found myself underneath the dogfight from hell, and all I could do was cover my head with my arms, get as small as possible, and practice some strenuous bladder control. It was loud and messy and scary, with three roaring, snapping, growling, slobbering, heavy dogs going at it over my inert form as I tried hard to find that fabled direct route through the earth to China.
The shepherds finally won, and I lunged out from under that writhing furball, my ears ringing and my clothes covered in spittle, among other things. Frack had a death grip on the rottweiler’s windpipe from the front, while Frick had a similar grip on one of its hind legs, pulling its stumpy body taut while Frack slowly strangled it. Moira was backed up against a tree with her hands to her wide-eyed face. I sat up in the carpet of pine needles and began wiping myself off.
“Are you…?”
“Yeah,” I said, getting up carefully while I checked for holes. “It was mostly noisy. But, as usual, I’m awfully glad they were here.”
The rottie gave up the ghost in one hard spasm, struggling to the end, and I called my guys off. I felt sorry for the dog, who’d only been doing his assigned duty, much like the Marines.
Marines. We both heard vehicle noises out there in the fog at the same time. Somewhere in the direction of the facility.
“There’s no way they can track us,” Moira said. “Not in this fog.”
I was looking at the rottie’s bloody throat, where there was a leather collar with a small metal object dangling from it.
“Oh, yes, they can,” I said. I turned to my two shepherds and told them to go find it. Frack gave me his usual blank look, but Frick understood and took off through the trees, with us in hot pursuit. We ran into Tony and Pardee a minute later when we popped out of the trees and met them coming inland from the river bank to see what had happened to the shepherds.
“About damn time,” I said.
They both grinned back. “We watched you out there in that yard for two days before you bothered to look up,” Pardee said. He frowned when he heard the vehicles out in the fog. “We got hostiles inbound?”
“We do,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “This is Mad Moira. She helped me escape. Tell me we have a boat.”
I had many questions on the ride down the river toward Wilmington, with the biggest one being how they had known where to find me. It seems that I had none other than Colonel Trask to thank for that. Pardee told me they got a call back at the Triboro office from Quartermain’s slinky-toy assistant one day after I’d gone off the grid, with a request to come retrieve the shepherds.
“That seemed a little strange,” Pardee said. “But then, we knew there were places in that plant you might not want to take the dogs.”
“How’d Trask get into it?”
“We came down and made sure the shepherds were okay. Then we waited at the beach house a couple more days, but we still couldn’t raise you. So I called Samantha. She told me you and Mr. Q. had gone to an ‘unspecified location’ as part of your investigation. She said you’d left instructions that you’d be in touch when circumstances permitted.”
I watched Tony driving the boat with his face stuck into the radar display cone. We were definitely IFR tonight; the fog out on the river was, if anything, thicker than on shore. We could hear some buoy bells ringing as our wake set them to rocking, but I never did actually see one. Moira sat in one of the two padded chairs in front of the pilothouse, trying not to look afraid.
Pardee went on to explain that, after all the radio silence on my part, he’d called Trask to see what he knew about my sudden disappearance and this so-called unspecified location.
“Trask said it was news to him, and that he’d seen Quartermain at a meeting that morning.”
“Did he tell you that the lovely Samantha is an undercover FBI agent?”
Pardee looked at me in total surprise. “No-o-o, he did not. What the hell, over?”
I told him what had happened, and all about the delightful federal spa and rest camp that I hoped was going up in flames as we spoke. I also speculated about the possible reaction from the Bureau when they found out we had escaped, and how.
“Damn,” Pardee said. “They’re holding U.S. citizens? Right there in plain sight?”
“Not so plain sight, when you think about it,” I said. “You drive by that place, it looks like a state penitentiary for the criminally insane. Not the kind of place where you’d want to go in and take a tour. It’s not run by the FBI, either. Those guards were all military types.”
“That would make for an interesting story in the New York Times,” Pardee said.
“Yes, it would. But I’ll bet that all the remaining detainees and their Marines will be out of there in DHS vans before dawn. They’ll probably let that building burn right to the ground. How’d you actually find me?”
“Trask again. He gives us a call. Says a guy at the bar had seen someone who looked like you having a friendly discussion in the parking lot with what looked like a bunch of feds. Then everybody drove off together. Trask asked him what kind of vehicles, and figures the guy’s right.”
“Okay, and the asylum?”
“Trask has connections with local law, so he checks the jails and the hospitals, just to make sure. Then a guy in the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office tells him the feds have a ‘research center’ up on the Charing River-that’s the river we’re on now. It feeds into the Cape Fear. Supposedly this place had to do with AIDS research. Some big NIH grant. Old state facility for the insane; low security, really sick people, rumors of biohazards, et cetera, et cetera. Local no-go area.”
“And Trask, being ex-military, would figure out that that could be a cover?”
“He got a little coy about that, but I’m guessing from what he said that he went up there, cased the place, and recognized jungle bunnies. You don’t use Marines to guard AIDS victims. He calls, says he thinks he knows where you might be.”
Trask the helpful herpetologist, I thought. He’d never wanted us in his plant. I should think he’d have been delighted at the possibility that I’d been swept up in some kind of Homeland Security net. “I wonder what prompted all his sudden concern?”
“Good question, boss,” Pardee said, staring out into the fog. “And did Quartermain know? I mean, who told Samantha to make that call, her boss or her bosses?”
“Creeps, I suspect,” I said. But, of course, Quartermain might have been in on it.
The shepherds were sleeping in the front of the boat, curled around Mad Moira’s legs. She was dozing, too. Pardee went into the bow locker and got a blanket, which he wrapped around Moira’s shoulders. She gave him a smile, which made him sigh as he came back to where I was perched against the steering console. Tony still hadn’t taken his face out of the radarscope cone.
“I’m also wondering why Quartermain didn’t come looking, too,” I said.
“Well, I’d guess he was embarrassed to ask Colonel Trask where his ace investigator had wandered off to. And Special Agent Samantha was probably telling him all sorts of lies.”
That made some sense, but the whole episode was still pretty bizarre. Except for the fact that Moira was sitting in the front of the boat, it wouldn’t be that hard to doubt that I’d seen what I’d seen.
Half an hour later Tony executed a slow, sweeping turn to the left, and then the curtain of fog began to lift. His face finally emerged from the cone. We had joined the Cape Fear River, and the lights of Wilmington were visible in the distance on the port side.
“I guess I better get up with Quartermain first,” I said, grateful to be able to see again. “Where are we going, by the way?”
Pardee grinned in the darkness. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said.
An hour later, Tony maneuvered the boat carefully alongside a floating pontoon dock that was made up alongside a boathouse. Ari Quartermain stood on the bobbing platform to take our bo
at’s mooring lines. He was unshaven and dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a bulky sweatshirt. Behind him was a large brick house that overlooked the Cape Fear River and the distant lights of Fort Fisher Park across the water. The first faint indications of dawn were thinning out the darkness over the far Atlantic.
Tony shut it down, and I went to wake Moira and her two sleeping foot-warmers. I introduced her to Ari, leaving out the other half of her first name, for the moment, anyway, and then we all walked up to the house and went into the kitchen, my mutts included. Ari pushed the button on an ancient-looking coffee percolator.
It was a relief to sit down and stretch in a warm room. Helios must pay very well, I thought, when I saw the inside of the house. Ari plopped a box of doughnuts on the table and joined the rest of us. Frick, who loves doughnuts, sat pointedly at the edge of the table, begging hard. Moira asked if she could please spoil the doggie, and I reluctantly agreed. I made her cut it in half and share with Frack. Shepherds on a sugar high are not a pretty sight, and Moira being all cute with the dogs was scaring me a little.
“Mr. Investigator,” Ari said, raising his coffee cup in a mock salute, “your guys do really good work. Where in the world have you been?”
“The latest incarnation of Club Fed, I think,” I said. I told him the whole story, including Moira’s role in our escape, and revealed his admin assistant’s federal sideline. He nodded at that, as if the news solved a minor mystery for him.
“I’ve always wondered why Judy-she was Samantha’s predecessor-up and quit like that,” he said. “I guess now I know.”
“Our Bureau works in mysterious ways,” I said. “The larger question is why. Why do they think it operationally necessary to have someone undercover at that plant, and specifically in your office?”
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