Killer Waves

by Brendan DuBois

  Off in the distance, the faint sounds of thunder approaching. "Maybe something will happen between now and then. Paula Quinn might find something else to report about, something that will bump your story into the dead file."

  Now she smiled. "You still trying to do the best for your friends, aren't you?"

  "Always."

  She looked at her watch. "Time to get going, my friend.

  Look, let's get together in a couple of days for lunch or something. Maybe you could give me some advice on how to market my skills.”

  I smiled at her, still cooling my heels. “Lunch sounds good, and don’t be so quick about worrying to market anything, okay?”

  Diane didn't reply, just waved a hand in my direction as she trudged back up the hill to the parking lot. I waited a decent interval of about a second or two before I went into my house.

  Inside, as I was taking my coat off, I had about the third or fourth coronary of the day as that damn cell phone started ringing again, making me drop the coat on the floor. I got down on my knees and pulled the phone free. "Hello?"

  "Yeah," said the male voice on the other end. "Is Tony there?"

  "Who?"

  "Tony."

  Jesus, of all the times... "Sorry, there's nobody here by that name."

  "'Kay," said the voice. "Sorry."

  I snapped the phone shut so hard that I was sure I had broken it --- and wouldn't Felix be displeased --- and then I went over to my own phone and the answering machine that glowed steady with a solitary "1." I hit "play" and Laura Reeves's voice filled my living room: "Lewis? It's Laura. Understand that you're trying to get a hold of me, but in about ten minutes I'm going to be in a helicopter and fairly unreachable. Look, talk to Gus. He can handle anything you've got. That's what he's there for. All right? Talk to you when I get back on the ground."

  I stopped the answering machine and went into the kitchen, realizing I was starved but also wasn't very hungry. An odd combination, I realized, but there you go. I had a banana and a Granny Smith apple, and a large glass of water. I felt constricted, closed in. Opening the sliding glass doors, I went out onto the deck, looking out to the ocean and to the wooded hills of Samson Point. This was where it had all started just a few days ago, when I had been out here in the middle of the night to see a space shuttle go overhead. I wondered how the mission was going, and I had a feeling it was going much better than Laura's.

  I looked out to the ocean, but for some reason my gaze returned to Samson Point. Storm clouds were moving in again, after the rain showers of this morning. The wind was stronger, making me shiver, and I rubbed at my arms and kept looking at the nature preserve. That's where it had started. Right there, with the Libyan agent being found dead in the parking lot.

  A battery room, that's what Keith Emerson had said to me. A battery room.

  A. Battery. Room.

  I rubbed at my eyes and looked at the trees and the low hills, hiding the bunkers and gun emplacements and tunnels and ---

  I turned and went back into the house, and upstairs to my office. My fingers flew across the bookshelves until I found a slender volume that I remembered reading a couple of years ago. Back downstairs, I went to my phone and dialed for across the way, and Gus Turner came back on the line. "Yes, what is it?"

  "Gus, it's Lewis Cole," I said. "Is Laura there?"

  A slow sigh. "No, she's not. She's on another reconnaissance mission. Look, what do you have? I'm pretty busy over here."

  I couldn't help it, I was smiling. "How does this sound? I know who Whizzer is, and I know where the uranium's hidden. Is that good enough for you?"

  A pause, making me wonder if the phone line had suddenly broken, and then he whispered, "You better not be joking."

  "I'm not. I guess I should come over there, right?"

  "Jesus, you better believe it."

  I hung up and grabbed my coat and looked at my Beretta and the shoulder holster hanging in the closet. I shrugged, took my weapon and holster, and pulled it over my shoulders. As I was getting my coat on, my phone rang. I looked over and thought for a moment, and then waited a few more rings, until the answering machine clicked on. As my outgoing message did what it was supposed to do, I walked over to the machine, to see if it was a hang-up, my threatening caller, Laura Reeves or Gus, or just someone trying to get me to change my long-distance carrier.

  Click. A woman’s voice. “Lewis? Are you there? Pick up, will you?”

  Paula Quinn. Damn. I looked at my watch and imagined again that carrier task force moving into position, getting ready to launch death in a half dozen ways.

  "Lewis? Pick up, will you? I really need to talk to you. Really." I looked down at the book I had in my hand, A History of Samson Point Coast Artillery Station, and then turned on my heel and walked out the door. As I closed the door behind me, I heard her quiet voice, "Oh, okay, please call me, okay?"

  Sure, I thought, walking up my dirt driveway. Soon as I can.

  Honest.

  One of the NEST guards, Clem, was standing inside the hotel room with the door barely ajar, probably to make sure I wasn't abducted as I made my way down the hallway. He opened the door wider and called out, "He's here, Gus."

  I went in, wrinkled my nose again at the smell. When these folks moved out of here in a day or two, the staff of the Lafayette House was going to have their hands full. They'd probably have to borrow some decontamination gear from the nuclear power plant at Falconer down the coast.

  Gus looked up at me from his chair at the long conference room table, a nervous smile on his face. "I got a call into Laura and she said, 'Congratulations, Lewis, and I owe you dinner.' She'll be back here in about a half hour, but she told me to get right on it. And another thing she told me, too."

  "What's that?" I said, pulling a chair out and sitting at the table.

  He motioned to Clem standing by the door, his large hands

  clasped in front of him. "She also told me that if you were playing games with us, that I should have Clem kill you and dump your weighted body in the ocean. And I don't think she was kidding."

  "And I don't care if she was or wasn't," I said. "Because I got the real deal. Look. Whizzer was one Keith Emerson. His dad is the curator of the submarine museum up in Porter. I went there to check on any leads he might have about Navy Yard retirees who might have been around when the U-boat was brought into Porter Harbor.”

  Gus said, “We jumped on those retirees, first thing we did when we set up shop here. Why did you go to that museum? Why not the retiree's association?"

  I thought about the hesitation I had before, decided it didn't make any sense anymore. "Well, there was one other thing, too."

  Gus was writing furiously on a yellow legal pad. "And what was that?"

  "Remember the first time you met me, Gus?"

  He looked up from his scribbling. "Sure. The night the operative's body was found."

  I nodded. "Besides the two cops and the EMTs, I was one of the first ones there. I looked at the body in the front seat of the car. The guy was wearing a button on the lapel of his suit coat. I didn't think much of it, and later, when Laura showed me the photos you guys took there, the button was missing. I guess it had fallen off or been removed."

  "Go on," Gus said. "I wasn't in charge of removing and ID'ing the body, so I can't help you there."

  "Well, I found out later that the button is used to control admission at the Porter Submarine Museum. And the curator remembered someone matching the description of the Libyan visiting there, the day he arrived here and later got killed. So obviously he was there to meet somebody --- the curator's son. Gus, the son, was a Marine aviator a few years back, before being medically discharged. His call sign was Whizzer."

  That seemed to get even Clem's attention, for he seemed to be leaning his large bulk closer into the room to hear better. "Whizzer," Gus said, his eyes bright with excitement. "After all these weeks... where is he now?"

  "He's dead."

  Gus blinked
hard. "He's what?"

  "He's dead. I went to meet him this morning, because he told me last night he knew where the uranium was hidden, even what it looks like. And before I got there to meet him, somebody took a knife to his neck. But he managed to tell me something before he lost consciousness. He said what caused everything was a battery room.”

  "Hold on," he said, sitting up straighter in his chair. "You were meeting with someone who said he knew where the uranium was, and didn't tell Laura or anybody else here?"

  I shot back, "We can discuss my investigatory techniques later, Gus. The thing is, he said a battery room. That's what caused it. A battery room."

  He glared at me. "That doesn't make sense."

  "No, it doesn't," I agreed. "Because I was hearing him wrong. He wasn't saying 'a battery room.' He was trying to say, 'Battery A room.'"

  I slid the book across to him. "Look at pages fifty and fifty-one. A schematic design of a gun emplacement at the Samson Point nature preserve, which was once a coast artillery station. One of the batteries was known as Battery A. Your Libyan was killed within a hundred yards of that gun emplacement. That's a hell of a coincidence, isn't it?"

  He opened the book up and looked at the drawings, looked at me, and then went back to the book. "An underground vault, covered with yards of concrete and dirt... no wonder none of our detection equipment could spot it." He closed the book. "This Keith Emerson. Did you report it to the police?"

  "No," I said.

  That really got his attention. "Why the hell not?"

  "Because I didn't do it, and about the only lead I could give the Porter cops was the possibility that another Libyan agent in country did it. And if I started talking to the cops, I wouldn't be here, letting you in on what I just found out. And that wouldn't help you guys get the uranium to beat the deadline, would it."

  He whistled. "Jesus, you're a cold one."

  "Only when the circumstances count. Plus, there's the matter of Keith's dad."

  "The museum curator? What about him?"

  "He's missing. The museum's closed up and he's not home."

  Gus looked over at Clem as if seeking reassurance. “It sounds like the Libyans are here and are definitely playing for keeps.”

  I said, "Look, shouldn't we saddle up and get going? The nature preserve is all of a ten-minute drive away."

  Gus slowly slid the book back to me. "Procedurally, we shouldn't. We should wait for Laura to get back, to get more reinforcements along the way. We should have a meeting, design our options, our game plan, and draw a map so that everybody knows what they're doing."

  I stared at Gus's tired eyes. "So what are you telling me?"

  He grinned. "Fuck procedures. Let's get the hell out there."

  Clem and I went out first, and as we walked down the hallway to the elevator, Gus called out after us, saying, "One more call. I'll meet you at the car."

  Inside the elevator I looked over at Clem, who was standing as if he were all alone, hands clasped in front of him, eyes looking straight ahead. I said, "Clem, have I ticked you off lately, or in some previous life?"

  "What do you mean?" he said, thereby doubling the number of words he had ever said to me.

  "You don't talk, you don't smile, you don't do much of anything when I'm around," I said. "I'm just curious what's going on."

  He didn't move. "I do lots of things. I spotted that you were carrying the moment you came in the room. I heard every word you and Gus Turner said. I also kept watch on the door. That's what I do. It's my job. Besides... "

  Now he looked over at me, and his face seemed to soften.

  "It's just a job, all right? I'm tired of being cooped up here all day and all week long... I miss my wife and kids and grandkids. I'm retired Marine Corps, put my thirty in, and I still can't make it with my pension. So here I am. I'm doing my job, and in a year or two, when we've socked away enough money, it's back home to Pensacola and I'll never go anywhere again. You satisfied now?"

  “Luckily, by then the elevator had stopped and we were out in the lobby of the Lafayette House. “Not a question of being satisfied. Just wanting to know.”

  “Well, all what I want to know is when I can get home again.”

  "Soon," I said. "If what I think is going to happen is going to happen, it'll be soon."

  As promised, Gus caught up with us in the parking lot, as we made our way to a dark blue Ford LTD, parked in the area behind the hotel usually reserved for employees. He had on a dark leather coat that looked warm enough for the cooling weather that was heading our way.

  "Okay, procedures or not, I made another call," he said, tossing a set of car keys to Clem. "We've got a crew of FBI agents coming down from Porter. They should get there about five minutes after we do. Just in case our friendly Libyans are having a cookout in the parking lot, I don't want to be outnumbered."

  "Sounds good," I said, climbing into the backseat of the LTD. Gus sat up forward and Clem got behind the wheel of the car, and in a matter of seconds we were heading north.

  Along the way Gus tossed some more questions back at me, and I did my best to answer them. "Samson Point started off as government property back in the eighteen hundreds. They had a Lifeboat Rescue Station there, which served ships coming in and out of Porter Harbor. Lots of sinkings took place out there over the years. Then, during the Spanish-American War, the government got concerned that the big naval yard at Porter and the harbor were vulnerable to attack. So they started building the coastal artillery base here, and at other places up the coast and in Maine, to guard the harbor and its approaches."

  "So, did the Spanish ever get here?"

  "Only as POWs," I said. "War was over by the time the first concrete was poured. But the place expanded during World War One and World War Two. They had some of the largest guns in the world emplaced up there. Story is, whenever they test-fired the cannon, windows would shatter in houses up and down the seacoast."

  "What happened after the war?" Gus asked, as Clem kept on heading us north. The clouds were thicker, making the sky look as if it were ten minutes away from dusk . Clem put the wipers on intermittent to clear the windshield as we got closer to the park entrance. To our left marshland stretched out to a line of woods in the west, and to our right the ocean view was mostly blocked by a berm of rocks and earth.

  "Eventually the military decided that threats weren't going to come from raiding warships, but from aircraft. The cannons were taken away and the place was turned into an early-warning radar station, looking for Soviet bombers. But when ICBMs started getting deployed in the sixties, the place was finally closed down, and then eventually was turned over to the state as a park. The cannons and barracks are gone, but there are still heavy concrete emplacements, and the underground service rooms and tunnels to service them."

  Gus turned in the seat, admiration in his voice. "Man, you do know this place. I know Laura has mentioned having you join us as a consultant when this gig is up. You interested?"

  I folded my arms. "Not today, thank you."

  Gus laughed and flipped through the small book I had brought over. "What do you think happened, then, that the uranium ended up there?"

  ''The war was over in Europe," I said. "People around here, they had worked long hours and weekends turning out submarines and other weapons to fight the Germans. Then it seemed like peace was at hand. I read that when those four U-boats were brought in here after they surrendered, the yard workers stripped every imaginable souvenir item from them, anything that could be unbolted and taken off. Sure, there was tight security, but you had thousands of workers there, most of whom knew that they'd be out of a job once Japan surrendered. Things might have gotten loose. Who knows. The uranium itself disappeared and the government, to cover up such an embarrassment, did just that. How it got resurrected all these years later... who knows."

  Clem slowed the LTD down and made a right into the park entrance. A large wooden beam that served as a gate was across the entrance. WINTER HOURS. P
ARK OPEN FROM 9 A.M. TO 4 P.M. I checked my watch. It was four-oh-five. Gus said in disbelief, "Winter hours? Hell, it's spring!"

  "State parks around here have just two seasons. Summer and winter."

  "Maybe so," Gus said, "but the federal government has its own idea on timekeeping. Clem, think you can work some magic?"

  Clem eased his large bulk out of the car. "Back in a minute."

  The ex-Marine went up to the gate and pulled a small leather case from his coat pocket and went to work on the lock and chain holding the gate closed. Gus said admiringly, "That guy hardly ever talks about what he's done and where he's gone, but I can tell you one thing. I'm sure as hell glad he's on our side."

  Clem undid the chain and swung open the gate, and Gus slid over to the driver's side and moved the car in a few yards. The gate swung shut and I noted how Clem just looped the chain around it and didn't relock it. Good stuff, leaving the place unlocked for the backup FBI crew, which was heading south from Porter.

  Back into the car Clem came, Gus slid back to his side of the car and we went past the closed gatehouse and into the empty parking lot. I shivered for a moment, remembering how empty the place had looked just a few days ago, when I had walked over here and came across the crime scene. I wondered how the North Tyler cops who had been here were doing, and if they ever whispered to each other on a night shift about the strange things that had happened here.

  Gus said, "Clem, why don't you pull over to the left, as close as you can get. From the map in this book, it looks like this is where the emplacements are located."

  Clem did just that and we pulled into the farthest spot to the left and switched off the engine. Seagulls were overhead, looking as if they were seeking shelter from the approaching storm. There was a grumble of thunder. To the right was the large empty lot, and then a field with picnic tables scattered around, and near the edge of the ocean was the park visitors’ center. Before it was an artificial hill, built by Army engineers decades ago. Up top was a concrete cube marking a spotting station for artillery observers, and before us, set in a concrete revetment, a metal door that looked as if it had been welded shut. Small saplings and grass covered the hill, and to the left of the hill was a gravel path leading farther into the park, where there were similar hills and structures.