“GSA, I suppose,” said George. “Where the government shops…”
“From the Army,” said Volont. “Via the NSA development people. Damn.”
Gabriel, as an Army Special Operations soldier, quite likely was familiar with those radios before the FBI even purchased them. Even I knew that much.
“We’d better let the troops know,” said George.
“Wait a second. If he doesn’t know we know…” Volont was up to his old tricks.
“No.” George glared at him. “No games. He’s smart, and he knows. We have to tell our own people.”
Volont came up with the ultimate leader’s cop-out. “Then you tell them.”
George knew it. Hell, George was an MBA. George had had all the “corporate think and manipulate” classes you could name.
He reached in his jacket and pulled out his walkie. “CP to all units. The security on this frequency has been compromised. Repeat, this is no longer a secure frequency.” He replaced his walkie-talkie, and looked out the window toward the boat. “There.”
“Well,” I said, “there goes my chance to say ‘fuck’ on a radio.”
The phone rang. Sally put us on the speaker phone as soon as she realized it was Gabriel.
“Didn’t think you’d have the balls, Agent Volont. I planned for the eventuality, but I really didn’t think you had them.”
“Life,” gritted Volont, “is full of surprises.”
I didn’t think that was a particularly good choice of words, all things considered.
“Oh, it is,” agreed Gabriel. “Indeed. Now, I’d recommend getting your people out of the way of my people, or we’re going to be producing victims.” He paused, and then chuckled. “By the boatload, as it were.”
Volont’s face was several shades lighter than normal, but he stood his ground. “Completely counterproductive. Victims mean bad publicity. Victims mean no money for you. Victims, and your goals are done. Gone. Because with victims, we take out your whole team, and the horses they rode in on.”
Yeah. Me too.
“I think I’ll tell the crew to hand out the life jackets. You have five minutes,” and the line went dead.
“… ‘tell the crew to hand out the jackets,’” said Hester. “He is on the boat.”
Nice.
Volont spoke to James of boat security. “All right. Get all your rescue units up and running. All lifeboats, all rescue craft. We’re going to need them in a very short time.”
James stared, and then barked out a laugh. “All available ‘rescue’ equipment is on that boat, out there. Two thousand PFDs and one sixteen-person inflatable boat.”
“What?! What’s a PFD?”
“Personal flotation device. A little half-assed life jacket that looks like a piece of gym mat with straps. As for ‘units,’ it’s fucking winter, mister. The three rescue launches are in storage, with the oil drained out of the motors. They can’t run on ice, anyway. That’s all we have.”
“My God,” said Volont.
“It’s just a damn riverboat,” said James. “In a river that’s thirty feet deep. We meet all the Coast Guard requirements, and we don’t put out from shore in the winter. What do you expect?”
“We can round up about a half-dozen iceboats,” said Sally. “Maybe ten people each … but it’ll take time …”
“Get on it! Jesus H. Christ, life jackets and a rubber boat!” Volont turned to George. “Get over to that Huey and see what sort of good they can do us in a rescue.”
“You might as well let me give you all the bad news at once,” said James. He did. If a passenger used a life jacket, in the water out there today, they would live about fifteen minutes. That was, if the current didn’t carry them under the ice. If they were to be recovered after ten minutes, since the average gambler was about fifty-eight years old, they would likely still die of exposure. The nearest hospital was in Conception County, across the bridge. They had two ambulances. Frieberg had two ambulances. Our entire county could muster another six. By calling in everything available, and declaring an extreme emergency, we still wouldn’t be able to get more than a dozen ambulances to Frieberg in the first hour.
With twelve ambulances, at eight to ten minutes per trip, into an ER that held six, into six hundred and fifty passengers in the water, meant that more than six hundred of them would be dead in fifteen minutes. But that was assuming they went into the water.
“How deep is it out there?” I wanted to know.
“Winter depth we’ve never really looked at…” said James. “It’s low. Probably lower. That’s for sure.”
I picked up a phone book. “Anybody mind if I call the lock and dam? To get the depth?” Nobody did. I got the lock master, and he had the data in about a second. They could only give me the main channel data, and the general river stage at Frieberg. They said it was fourteen feet.
I motioned James over. “How much does the boat draw? Like, how deep does she sit in the water?”
He thought for a second. “I’d have to check to make sure, but I think it’s seven or eight feet.”
I grinned. “Really … Look at this.” I showed him the figure fourteen, underlined. “That’s the current river stage data from the lock and dam, with the measurement taken by the robot sensors under the bridge, here. So it’s the depth of the water about five hundred feet from the Beauregard.” I thanked the master.
I went over to Volont, who was on the phone to the Coast Guard station in St. Louis. He was quite exasperated, from the tone. He hung the phone up, and almost ran into me as he turned. “What?”
“I might have the first surprise for our side, I think. Look at this.”
“Wait … what?”
“That’s right,” I said. “If the sensors are accurate, if she sinks, she goes down six or seven feet. And stops on the bottom.”
“What’s going on?” asked George.
“If Gabriel blows the bottom out of the boat, the people on the lowest casino deck are just going to get their feet wet.” I handed him the paper.
The phone rang again, and I expected it to be Gabriel. Nope. It was Lamar, for me.
“What the fuck is going on down there?”
I told him, being sure to get in the good news about the water depth.
“I thought you told me this was going to be a simple goddamned bank robbery at five goddamned banks?”
I explained the part about the five locations. How it all fit the information we had. Just in a different way. “Neater ’n shit, Lamar, you think about it…”
“‘Neat’?”
“Well, yeah.” I explained just what we had in as positive a light as I could. Not easy. I also said that we appeared to have Gabriel pretty well bottled up, and with a TAC team and a Huey, it was virtually impossible for him to escape. And this time, we even had his photograph.
He decided to come down.
“Before you do, Lamar, be sure to get a couple of people on Nola’s sister’s place. Linda Grossman’s. If we would miss him, for some reason, that’s where he might go.”
“‘Miss him’?! ‘Miss him’?! If that son of a bitch disappears this time, all of you better disappear right along with him!”
I thought that was a little unfair. But the message certainly was clear.
Volont was apparently encouraged by the river depth. He was on the no longer secure radio. “Alpha Chase, you clear to take out some tires on the stretch van?”
“Roger that.”
“Stand by…” He turned to me. “Come on, Houseman. Let’s go down by the tracks.”
We hurried out of the pavilion, down into the deepest fog I’d ever experienced. We headed due east, and stopped just behind the big fire truck. In the intense light from its big halogen floodlights, we had a pretty good view of the stretch van. Just sitting there, filled with very still shadows. Several of them.
Volont picked up his radio, and gave the order to shoot out the tires on the van. “Do it.”
I’d never se
en that before. It was a bit of a disappointment, really. There was no discernible firing, either visually or audibly. Just a popping sound. The front and rear tires on the right side of the stretch van just went flat. Instantly. I think I might have seen a little bit of dust or something, or maybe just rapidly condensing air as it blew out of the tires. Very unremarkable. But now the little group in the van was totally screwed. Their vehicle was immobile. The only other refuge had been the boat, which was now across about a hundred feet of icy water. The concrete area they were parked on offered no cover whatsoever, for at least twenty yards in any direction.
The first three cop cars came around the bluff from the south, and stopped about fifty yards from the van. Now, I figured, we’d see just how disciplined the boys in the van were. If they fired even one round, they were all as good as dead. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
“Let’s let ’em stew until we have a lot of people here,” said Volont, “and then get ’em out of the van.”
I looked around. We were pretty much alone, with the nearest fireman behind the truck. It was now or never.
“Look,” I said. “This is all out of proportion. Way the hell out. What’s really happening, here?”
I waited a very long ten seconds. Very quiet, except for the muted roar of the fire truck engine.
“Let’s go back over here,” said Volont, pointing to the edge of the bluff about a hundred feet behind the fire truck. “Where we don’t have to shout.”
We stood close to the bluff, and he told me what Gabriel was really doing. Well, that’s what he said. I don’t doubt him.
“I’ve been on Gabriel several years,” he said. “You know that.”
Yeah, I did.
Was I aware of the term “weapons of mass destruction”?
“You mean, like, nuclear, chemical… biological things?”
He did. Apparently, this had all started for Volont when the Soviet Union began to dissolve. “You know what the acronyms ADM, MADM, or SADM stand for?”
No, I didn’t.
“That’s atomic demolition munitions, medium atomic demolition munitions, and small atomic demolition munitions. Know what they are?”
“‘Atomic’ rings a bell,” I said, sarcastically.
“Right. Well, in the U.S. Army, those are small nuclear devices used like land mines. They were developed to block tunnels and things, blow up harbor facilities, to stop the Soviets when they invaded Western Europe. Engineering tools.”
He made them sound like bulldozers.
“The Soviets had the same sort of thing.” He flashed a tight smile. “For when Western Europe invaded them, no doubt.”
“That figures…”
“So, first of all, Gabe resigns his commission, and makes noises like he’s going to start his own little state out west. Fill it with his followers, and declare independence from the U.S.A.” He looked up. “Of course, secession meets with disapproval at the federal level.” He smiled again.
“He’s going to war?” I asked, incredulous. “He’s nuts.”
“Not exactly. Our people on the inside say he puts it this way … The only countries that gain respect from the U.S. government are nuclear powers. Therefore he wants some nuclear weapons. As a deterrent. To ensure his independence.”
“Jesus H. Christ.”
“The devices came on the market after the Soviets went belly up. That’s when I got involved. Back in ‘95, he made inquiries, and was told that it would cost ten million bucks.” He shrugged. “Cheap, but they’re only about five kilotons or so of yield. The higher yields, twenty-plus kilotons or megaton range devices, they go for a hundred million.”
“Nuclear suitcase bombs,” I said. “My God.”
“Well, not ‘suitcase.’ These weigh over one thousand pounds in the packing crates. We would classify them as ADMs, actually.”
“He could deliver them in a pickup truck,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. They’re also designed to work underwater. Lots of possibilities. And much easier to use than missile warheads, for example. No fusing options like impact, proximity, delay…”
“God.”
“But that’s why he needs the money. He’s a bit short. That’s why he’s going to try to take even the coins. Time is running out, and he’s afraid somebody else is going to buy the devices.”
“Oh. Well, sure.” A nuclear layaway plan had never occurred to me.
“He was trying for the banks last time. Just didn’t get it done. But he has the plan, he has the volunteers, he has the infrastructure, right here. So he comes back.” He shrugged again. “Nothing personal, but Nation County is easy pickings.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a warrior, with a war, Houseman. He doesn’t want to kill the people on the boat. Really. Would be bad for ‘international relations,’ once his little private country is set up.” He paused, and then, “But he will kill them, all of them, if he has to. For the survival of the state, so to speak.”
“But he doesn’t have them now? The nuclear weapons?”
“No.”
The sense of relief was enormous. “I mean, I thought there was a special unit that worked that sort of thing …”
“There is. They kick in when nuclear weapons are actually in play. Right now, they’re just monitoring things very closely. Right now, it’s our baby.” He stopped. “Until he should get some. Anything you’d like to ask?”
“Any idea what his targets are?” I had a vision of our courthouse under a small mushroom cloud.
“I don’t think he has any. We’re not here to prevent nuclear terrorism, really,” he said. He smiled. “We’re just trying to prevent the great state of Gabriel from becoming the world’s smallest nuclear power.”
I took a deep breath. “So, why are you telling me this?”
“Just so you’ll know, if we end up with six hundred frozen bodies in the Mississippi, that they died for a good cause.” He looked around. “Let’s go back to the office. Don’t tell anybody.” He grinned. “Not that they’d believe you.”
“Carl,” said Sally, “call the office, ten-thirty-three.”
After my chat with Volont, a local “emergency” just seemed to lose its punch.
I called the office. The duty dispatcher said, “I have a female subject on the phone, calling from the gaming boat, and she wants a number for you right away. Says her name is Nancy…”
“Give it to her,” I said, and hung up. “Hey, guys?”
They looked my way. “I think we have a contact on the boat.”
I explained quickly about Nancy and Shamrock. The little deal we’d made. The fact that I’d seen them board the boat early on.
The phone rang. “Command,” said Sally. “Yes, he is. Would this be Nancy?”
She handed me the phone.
“Houseman, you bastard,” said an angry whisper, “if you knew about this, you turkey, I’ll get you for this. You did. Didn’t you?”
“No, none of us did,” I said. “We were as surprised as anybody…”
“Not fuckin’ quite,” she whispered.
“Uh, well, yeah. Yeah. Are you two all right?”
“Just great. Get us out of here.” There was a bit of commotion. “There. We’re in the ladies’ John on the middle deck,” she said.
“Anybody hurt?”
“Not that we saw. What the hell’s going on? Why did we leave the pier? Who are these people?”
I did my very best to explain, and gave her a fast summary, leaving out as much of the negative as I could, just to keep from worrying her unnecessarily about things that were already past. I was concerned for the two of them, but I was also really happy to have a voice on the boat.
“So, what are they doing now?” I mean, since she was there, she might as well be useful.
“They aren’t in here, Houseman.” Dryly. Sarcastically. But she was calming down.
“Nancy, it might help us get you out of that mess if you can tell us what’s going
on …”
“Houseman, you got us in this mess. You get us out.” At least her voice sounded almost normal, now.
“Try to find out how many of the bad guys are still on the boat. And where they are.”
“What, are you nuts?” Reasonable question. She paused. “Well…”
“You gotta admit, it’s a great story,” I said, trying to cheer her up.
“I’m not interested in a posthumous Pulitzer,” she whispered. “I gotta go …” and broke the connection.
“Is anybody hurt?” asked Hester. “Are they going to be able to help?”
“No casualties as far as they know. And, sure, I think they’re going to be able to help a lot.”
Volont decided to crank up the pressure.
“Alpha One and Alpha Two, can you take out some tires on the suspect vehicles at the bank?”
“Alpha One. No problem with the one on my left …” came crackling through the radio.
“Alpha Two can do the one on the river side, but we can’t do the potato chip truck in the middle.”
“Uh … just a sec … and Alpha One might be able to do the right front on the chip truck.” The spotter paused. “Yeah, he can, he can do that one.”
“Take your shots,” said Volont.
We, of course, couldn’t see a thing of the truck tires. Or the trucks. Or even the bank, by now.
“Alpha One has put two grooves in the big truck tire, the one with the lift gate, but just can’t get a good shot. Will change aspect, and try again. The other trucks are disabled.”
“Roger,” said Volont. “Well, so much for the coins. That ought to move things right along.”
With her stern against the ice, and her bow pointing into the slow current, the Beauregard had slowly pointed her bow to the left, toward our side of the shore. We were now able to barely make out about the first seventy-five feet of her bow, just about ten windows back along the deck. It looked strange, the front end just jutting out of the fog.
I heard Hester say, “Come on in …” and a large man of about forty-five entered the room. “This is Captain Olinger, an off-duty captain of the boat,” said Hester.
The Big Thaw Page 31