by Jon Land
“No. I’ll bet they don’t.”
“When I was younger, I mean. Was this a fun storm to watch?”
“Oh yeah. Lots of lightning in the sky, the kind that looks like thin fingers.”
“And how many nights ago would it have been?”
“I don’t know.”
“Five or six maybe?”
“Yeah. That’s right. I saw the monster first when the lightning came. It was black. I saw it swimming toward shore. I thought I’d better call for help but my mom wasn’t home. I tried to use the phone but it didn’t work.”
“What did the monster do?”
Alice regarded him suspiciously. “You said it was a sub-ma-rine.”
“Tell me what you saw and then we’ll know.”
“It came up to the dock and then the dock had people on it. Lots and lots of people getting wet in the rain. I saw them best when the lightning came. I guess they came because of the sub-ma-ronster,” she said, proud of herself for combining the words as well as the thoughts.
“Lots and lots,” Kimberlain repeated. “Did you count?”
She looked down. “No.”
“They left the dock.”
“And went toward the trucks. I saw them, too. Only they didn’t have their lights on, so it was tough.”
“And the sub-ma-ronster?”
“It was big and black. Long, too. But I think it might be coming back. I’m not gonna shoot it. I just want to talk to it. Do you think it’s coming back?”
“Maybe. But only if it comes by tomorrow.”
Alice seemed to remember something. “Somebody wrote on it. Somebody wrote on the sub-ma-ronster.”
“A word you mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“Can you spell it?”
“I can try.” Her face squeezed itself taut. “M-a-r-l-i-n.”
“Marlin?”
“Yeah, mar-lin. Is that how you say it?”
“That’s perfect, Alice.”
The woman-child beamed and rolled her head proudly. “Do all sub-mar-ronsters have names, Jared?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So we can find them, Alice, when they get lost.”
Captain Seven said he needed an hour to research the Marlin, so Kimberlain called back from the same general store in Bloomfield Cove sixty minutes later. The Ferryman knew that Seven’s computer was tied into virtually every major data bank in the nation. The captain had the access codes and passwords for all of them. And what he didn’t have, he could get.
“Okay,” Captain Seven opened, “here’s what I came up with. The Marlin was sold to Spain off the military down list in 1962, where as far as I can tell it has remained ever since.”
“Until now.”
“Whoever got it back here knew how to cover their tracks.”
“And where might they have covered the Marlin?”
“Thought you’d never ask. Got a couple possibilities there. First they could moor it on the surface somewhere under some pretty heavy camouflage.”
“Too much risk when all they’d really have to do was sink it.”
“Bad idea, boss. Have to use explosives to do the job right, and that would have drawn the attention of the various search parties.”
“Okay, so what did they do with it?”
“How about hiding it in one of the five biggest scrap yards in the whole country, which just happens to be located in Oswego, New York?”
“Across the lake from where I’m standing now …”
“Almost. See, they dock it the same night after depositing the passengers. Spend the rest of the night with some underwater cutting tools, and by morning it’s in pieces hidden all over the yard.”
“Meaning someone at this or some other scrap yard would have had to be involved with Leeds.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
“You’ve outdone yourself again.”
“Just getting started. Got something else you might be interested in.” Captain Seven paused long enough to call up a new screen on his computer. “Fact that Donald Dwares who tried to waste you in Providence was supposed to be dead got me thinking. I ran a check on maximum-security prisons going back five years to his supposed execution. Lots of inmates conveniently got sick and died. Seemed to afflict only the most violent; lifers, a few on death row.”
“You got a list?”
“Growing by the minute. Damn unsavory bunch, specialists in brutal violence, lots of it random like with Dwares. Plenty of the names will be familiar to you.”
“How many?”
“Sixty-five already. Whoops, make that sixty-four; I forgot to cross off Dwares.”
“Sounds like an army.”
“Not far from it.”
“I go after Leeds, Dwares comes after me,” Kimberlain said, thinking it out for himself. “Meanwhile, Leeds springs eighty-three more to add to the list.”
“An army, Ferryman, just like you said.”
“The question is, what is Leeds planning to do with it?”
“Don’t know,” Captain Seven said. “Maybe the Marlin can help us find out.”
Chapter 18
KIMBERLAIN WAITED UNTIL WELL after dark before approaching the Gerabaldi Scrap Yard in Oswego, New York. He figured a more clandestine approach was called for on the chance that someone at Gerabaldi was connected to Leeds. The scrap yard turned out to be a massive place located on the outskirts of the small city, off Route 104 four miles from Lake Ontario. The acres and acres of junk stretched farther than the eye could see. Finding no sign of guard dogs, he sliced through the chain link with his razor knife and entered the yard.
Directly before him, the corpses of home appliances rose in columns between twenty and thirty feet high. Many of the machines sat with their innards exposed, disemboweled for parts and left to rot. There were washers and dryers, rusting and brown, cursed by curled and warped metal. There were refrigerators with doors either missing or chained, seeming to make them prisoners of their own demise. There were stoves, the oldest of which might have dated back a generation.
Watching over the scene stood a trio of man-operated loaders Kimberlain knew were called two-tonners after their maximum payload. All of nine feet tall, the machines had the look of massive steel skeletons. All three possessed the arm and leg extremities of a man, with slots for an operator to wedge his hands and feet into to control them in maneuvering the ancient appliances about. The arms were especially impressive, fitted with pincer apparatuses for hands. The orange-colored things stood naked and ominous, like guards over a treasure of rusted brown steel. Kimberlain noticed they were named after the Three Stooges.
Passing out of the appliance graveyard, Kimberlain found himself swallowed by mountains of brown steel drums. He smelled oil and figured that was what they had once contained. Now they were bleeding it from their bottoms, and the ground was soaking it up. They rose silent and defiant, stacked to fifteen feet tall, rows and rows of drum towers stretching for the sky.
The Ferryman continued on. The next section, containing the yard’s huge cache of junked cars and trucks, was much larger than the previous two sections. Cars flattened in the crusher had been piled atop each other like playing cards. Those still reasonably whole lay squeezed together as if in some bizarre parking lot. Worn out tires were stacked in a mountain. Hubcaps were piled in a bulging, square heap.
Squeezed amid the clutter were the machines of the trade. Kimberlain noted a pair of massive black steel front loaders. He passed by the man-sized tires of one and noted the lighter rusted color of its six-foot prongs. The rust, Kimberlain thought, might have been blood collected from its snared victims.
His stomach rumbled slightly, and he pressed on past a loader with oscillating arms for agile manipulations of its payloads. It was smaller than its cousins and was colored a deep, shiny red. Kimberlain saw that scrawled in black letters across the loader’s side was the word SCARLETT.
Squeezed ominously against the
fence further back, detached and indifferent, was the portable crushing apparatus. The loaders would deliver the wrecks into the open slot and back off while the crusher flattened the heap for easier storage. Kimberlain imagined the sound of popping glass and tearing steel.
The scrap car piles stretched on for over an acre, but none of the mounds of junked cars seemed the right place to hide the severed pieces of the Marlin. That task would be better served in Gerabaldi’s last and largest section, which was lined with piles of commercial scrap and salvage. Moving closer, the Ferryman could see a massive stack of disassembled rides from an amusement park. A huge clown’s head peeked out from near the middle. The standards of what had once been a roller coaster leaned against the pile and towered above it.
An equally large mound of steel salvaged from demolished and burned out buildings lay directly across the way. There was no real order here in this section as there had been in the others. Instead, everything just seemed to have been heaped up. Much of the steel was twisted or scorched black. It seemed to be hoping for a second life, but by the rusted, worn out look of things that had already been long in coming.
Beyond the steel refuse, past a yellow loader even more massive and ominous than the black ones back in the auto yard, lay the boat scrap. Some looked reasonably whole, while little enough remained of others even to distinguish what they had been. There were tops with no hulls and hulls with no tops. Chunks of decks and gunwales. If someone at Gerabaldi had wanted to hide the remains of the Marlin, this was where it would be. Hidden from sight, though, probably within another mound that might show evidence of being shuffled about.
The Ferryman made his way toward a wide, haphazard stack of junked smaller craft. He could pick out the remains of pontoons and speedboats, cabin cruisers and outboards. They had been lost to accident, neglect, or simply to age. With no value left they had ended up here. Kimberlain could picture the monstrous pronged payloader he had just passed shoveling away huge masses of the pile to make room for the Marlin’s remains and then sealing the hole up again.
When a scan from the ground gained nothing, he located firm footing and began to scale the mound. It was much like rock climbing, only with steel that bit into your flesh and footholds that wobbled beneath you. Halfway up, Kimberlain’s foot slid down a slope of curved steel. He grabbed hold of the remains of a foredeck to halt his plunge and steadied himself, breathing deeply. He gazed upward.
The fragment that had almost sent him plummeting was black and narrowed down to a thick point at the end. It was almost like what a bullet might look like if it had been cut into segments and then sliced in half.
A bullet or a submarine.
The Ferryman pulled out his flashlight and inspected the black steel more closely. He shoved the empty hull of a speedboat aside far enough to give his head and shoulders room to pry through. His flashlight illuminated a series of numbers, white outlines jumping out from the black surrounding them. Kimberlain felt his neck prick with excitement; they were the last three numbers in the Marlin’s register. He peered further into the pile with his light but found nothing else. No matter; he had what he came for, a link that might help take him all the way to Andrew Harrison Leeds. Someone at Gerabaldi would know something. His next task, tomorrow, was to find out who and what.
He retreated down the mound and had placed his foot on an upside-down cruiser hull just above the ground when the lights snapped on directly before him. Kimberlain threw up a hand to shade himself from being blinded and heard a powerful engine roaring to life. He realized it was the monstrous yellow loader bearing down, and he readjusted his balance to leap from its path.
The loader slammed into the hull he had been standing on. Its powerful prongs cut steel like butter. The loader pulled back from the wreck with the sounds of grinding and twisting metal marking the path of its withdrawing prongs. Kimberlain was moving away now, staying close to the line of boats. The loader turned his way and started coming after him.
The Ferryman quickened his pace, but the yellow loader’s driver had chosen an approach angle that cut him off. Its prongs reached for him, and Kimberlain desperately scaled the pile of boat wrecks.
The steel ends sliced effortlessly through steel just beneath his dangling feet, then drew back for another try. The driver raised the prongs and angled them upward, then threw the machine forward once more. Kimberlain managed to dodge to the side this time; his legs kicked furiously while his hands clung to the frame of an ancient Bayliner. The loader drew backward once more and pulled part of the mound directly beneath him with it. Kimberlain was left dangling.
The loader charged again, and Kimberlain swept his lower body away from its thrust, swinging with one arm above the up-angled prongs. The prongs shredded steel and then crunched back out. The loader didn’t draw back much at all this time, just came straight forward and sliced through rusted steel boat hulls when Kimberlain twisted away again. He saw the loader buckle a bit as it tried to back away, the monstrous tires spewing a cloud of junkyard dirt behind them as the prongs refused to give up their hold. Looking upward, he got his first clear view into the cab.
It was empty. The loader had no driver.
The immediate ramifications of that struck him hard. His gun would do him no good now. This was a machine he was fighting, seven or eight tons probably and all of it steel. But someone was controlling it.
Andrew Harrison Leeds must have been anticipating his every move, lying in wait for him, toying with him from the time he left the note stuck to his cabin door… .
With the robotized loader still struggling to free itself, the Ferryman seized the offensive. He pried a shard of twisted steel free from above him, then pushed off and dropped onto the loader’s right prong. The machine pulled free at last and continued backing up as if unaware of his presence, then started to raise the assembly to force him off. Kimberlain turned the resulting momentum to his advantage, sliding down the prong onto the top of the loader’s hood section.
He raised the piece of rusted metal he still held high overhead and thrust it downward with all his strength, denting the loader’s massive engine grill. He slammed the steel shard down again, then a third time, and a fourth. At last the grill gave, exposing the rear section of the engine.
The machine lunged forward madly, gears whining as if to protest the invader atop it. Kimberlain braced for the collision he knew was coming by pressing himself as close to the loader’s empty cab as possible. Its freshly straightened prongs stabbed the pile of boat wrecks and continued forward until its engine section was flush against it. When this maneuver failed to dislodge the Ferryman, it backed off and slammed forward again.
He was jarred loose from his precarious perch and might have tumbled off if the loader had tried the move a third time. Instead, it retreated only slightly and began to raise its prongs upward, attempting to bring a section of the boat wrecks up and over to crush him.
Turning toward the cab again, Kimberlain’s hands swept into the exposed engine section. He swiped and jabbed with the steel shard to no avail. The piece was too thick to permit enough access and maneuverability. So he abandoned it and jammed his bare hands inside the loader’s turning insides.
The prongs were coming up with a collection of wrecks, shedding a few to the sides while the rest buckled and settled against each other. This was his chance, here and now.
The Ferryman felt about the hot, revving engine, as the heap behind him continued to rise skyward. He knew that if he grazed a churning belt he would lose a finger or hand. Touch the wrong spot and he’d be burned horribly. His hands closed on rubber that felt like spark plug wires, and he pulled them free.
The loader sputtered, engine grinding, but its prongs had almost reached a forty-five-degree angle and were still coming. Kimberlain’s hands found what felt like a fan belt. He pulled out his right hand and grasped the steel shard once more. He guided it into the hole in the hood and jammed it hard against the fan belt, producing a squealing sound
. The smell of burning oil reached his nostrils an instant before smoke began to pour up all around him. The loader’s engine died. The prongs stopped moving, a rusted outboard dangling from their grasp.
Kimberlain slid off the loader’s hood and eased himself to the ground. He stood there with shoulders against its black steel.
It was Leeds! Leeds had done it all!
He wondered how the madman had pulled it off, but nothing should have surprised him when Leeds was involved. Best to get out of the yard now while he had the chance. He had what he came for; Leeds couldn’t take that away from him.
Kimberlain jogged away from the loader’s corpse. He would retrace his steps and be gone from here before the madman could throw any more tricks at him. He passed back into the auto yard and heard the rumbling an instant before the lights caught him. The rumbling turned into a roar of two monstrous engines, as the twin black loaders advanced toward him.
Chapter 19
KIMBERLAIN KNEW HE could not outrun the loaders, and if he tried to dodge them, they would alter their routes and trap him anyway. So he stood his ground, wondering what the loaders would think of that if they could see.
But someone could see, someone controlling them from afar.
Leeds …
“Try this, you sons of bitches… .”
With the loaders all but upon him, Kimberlain hit the ground where he had been standing. His move came at the last possible instant before the loaders would have crushed him, too late for the driverless machines to react. They smashed into each other, sparks flying as their prong assemblies smacked together. Flat on his stomach, on the ground between the monstrous tires, Kimberlain heard the gears screaming in protest. He crawled out from beneath the rear loader and scampered away.
The twin iron monsters hit reverse simultaneously to pull back from the collision. But their prongs locked, providing the Ferryman with time to escape. A grinding sound made him turn their way again, and he watched as the loaders separated at last. They spun toward him side by side.
There would be no escaping until they were incapacitated. He needed a weapon, but what?