Blood in the Water

by Jack Flynn

  * * * * *

  ‘They’re headed south,’ Cormack said. Buddy and Cicero were in the office with him, and he looked out the window. Off in the distance, he could see a trawler headed past Deer Island, just south of the airport. ‘That must be them,’ he said pointing. It was a nondescript boat, but at the moment, it was the only thing on the water of any interest to Cormack. They would have a visual for another minute or two, but then the boat would round the corner at Castle Island and be gone. He had to know where the boat was going.

  ‘You have others out there?’ Cicero asked.

  Cormack nodded. ‘I’ve got a network at the ready that can see them wherever they go without attracting attention.’

  ‘Who’s up next?’

  ‘Based on where they’re headed, they should be off Spectacle Island in a moment. I’ve got Romero out there working on the pilings off the south pier.’ He picked up the radio handset on the desk and tuned it to a particular frequency. ‘Romero, you there?’

  The answer was instantaneous. ‘Yeah, Boss,’ Sal Romero’s voice came through the radio.

  ‘The Lucy Dunovan is headed your way. I need eyes on her.’

  ‘You got it, Boss.’

  ‘Let me know when you’ve got contact.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Cormack put the radio down. ‘If they get to Quincy Bay, Mel Costa’s there. He’s got lobster traps lined up all the way down to Hull, so he can keep an eye on them without looking suspicious. If they head east toward the outer islands, I’ve got two boats running supplies out to Little Brewster. Between those, I think we should have him covered.’

  ‘Should,’ Buddy said quietly.

  ‘It’s the best we can do. Soh was clear that if he sees anyone following him or his men, he’ll kill her. I’m not letting that happen. Any eyes we have on that boat have to stay low and look normal.’

  ‘What if it’s not enough? What if your people lose sight of that boat?’

  ‘We’ll figure that out if that happens. Right now, this is our best option.’

  The radio crackled. ‘Cormack, it’s Romero, you there?’

  Cormack grabbed the radio handset. ‘Yeah, Romero, I’m here. You got something?’

  ‘Yeah, the Lucy Dunovan just passed me.’

  ‘She still headed south?’

  ‘It’s not clear. She wrapped around the southern tip of Spectacle and she might be headed out toward the Atlantic.’

  ‘Outer islands?’ Cicero asked.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Cormack responded. ‘Was she running full steam?’ he asked Romero.

  ‘Tough to tell, but she wasn’t idling. I’ve still got a good look at her. I’ll keep watching until I can’t see her anymore.’ There was a pause for a moment, then Romero spoke again. There was an edge of excitement in his voice. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘It looks like she’s slowing down.’

  ‘In the middle of the harbor?’ Cormack asked. ‘Is it possible that they made you?’ He couldn’t understand why else the Lucy Dunovan would be slowing down.

  ‘She’s turning due south again,’ Romero reported. ‘Looks like they’re pulling in to Long Island.’

  Cormack frowned. ‘East side or west side?’ he asked.

  ‘East side,’ Romero replied. ‘The pier on the northeast end. They’re definitely pulling in now. I’ve got two getting off the boat, walking toward the land. Looks like they’re leaving the boat on the pier.’

  ‘OK. Thanks, Romero. Stay there and let me know if anyone comes or goes, you got it?’

  ‘Yeah, Cormack, I got it.’

  Cormack put the radio handset down and looked at the chart in front of him, zeroing in on Long Island.

  ‘They shut the island down a couple years ago,’ Cicero commented. ‘Tore down the bridge and left everything there to rot.’

  ‘They did,’ Cormack agreed. ‘That’s why it makes sense. There’s no one to bother them.’ Cormack pulled out another chart that showed Long Island in more detail. He pointed to the northeast end. ‘Fort Strong,’ he said. ‘It was abandoned in the seventies, and there’s only a couple of ways in. That’s where they are if they let him off on the east end.’

  ‘Tough place to attack,’ Cicero commented.

  ‘That’s why they chose it.’

  ‘So what now?’ Buddy asked.

  ‘Now we come up with a plan,’ Cormack said. ‘We’ll have to go in at night. It would be suicide to try to go in when it’s daylight.’

  ‘Seems like it’ll be suicide either way,’ Cicero pointed out.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cormack said.

  ‘I’m going,’ Buddy said.

  Cormack nodded, knowing that there was no chance the young man would agree to stay behind. He looked at Cicero. ‘You can beg off if you want. You’ll get no argument from me. Like you said, it may be suicide no matter when we go.’

  Cicero shook his head. ‘If Soh takes control of the harbor, that’s suicide for me. I won’t survive in that world. Besides, I like bucking the odds.’

  Forty-Eight

  Kit Steele sat across the table from Vincente Carpio, staring into his cold, dark eyes, absorbing the hatred from them, and returning it in kind. Joshua Brooks was in the room as well, sitting next to his client. ‘You asked for this meeting,’ he said in a bored voice. ‘What is it that you wanted to talk about?’

  Kit Steele didn’t look at Brooks. She continued to stare at Carpio. ‘I wanted to know why he does it.’

  ‘OK, we’re done,’ Brooks said. He stood up and tapped his client on the shoulder. It took a moment to realize that the chains had to be unlocked before his client could stand up. ‘Guard!’ he called.

  Carpio didn’t move. He continued to stare back at Steele.

  ‘What is it that you hope to accomplish?’ Steele continued. ‘I just want to understand.’

  ‘Enough,’ Brooks said. ‘You think this kind of stunt is cute? I have other clients and other business. I don’t need to make the trip all the way out here for this kind of shit, Agent Steele.’

  ‘Do you enjoy it?’ Steele asked Carpio. ‘When you kill them, does it bring you pleasure? Joy, even?’

  ‘Don’t answer that!’ Brooks barked at his client. Carpio’s gaze seemed to intensify, and the shadow of a smile crossed his lips.

  ‘You must take some satisfaction from it, right?’ she said. ‘You’ve done it often enough.’

  ‘Would you take joy from killing me?’ Carpio asked.

  It was a fair question, she supposed. She considered it for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Probably,’ she admitted after a second thought. ‘But that’s not the way we do things. We have systems in place to protect the accused. We have punishments that are more humane. We try to rehabilitate criminals here.’

  ‘You live in a dream world, Special Agent,’ Brooks said. ‘Come on, we’re done here. Guard!’ Again, though, Carpio made no move to suggest that he was interested in leaving.

  Steele took out a folder and lined the images of the dead up on the table. There were seventeen of them in all. Each one displayed in some grotesque fashion. Carpio had acquired greater skill and creativity as he’d progressed from killing to killing, and it showed in the images. He looked at the pictures without any change in his expression.

  ‘What was it like the first time?’ Steele asked. She pointed to one of the pictures. ‘It was this one, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You think these are the first people I have killed?’ For a moment, she thought he might actually smile at the notion.

  ‘Don’t say another word!’ Brooks hollered.

  ‘In my country, death and killing is everywhere,’ Carpio said with quiet intensity.

  ‘That was war,’ Steele pointed out.

  ‘This is war. It is the same war. America can pretend that it is not, but that does not change the facts.’

  ‘Agent Steele, I am ordering you to end this interrogation!’ Brooks demanded.

  ‘I’m not forcing him to talk to me,’ Steele said. Sh
e looked back at Carpio. ‘I think he wants to talk to me. I think he needs to talk to me.’

  ‘This is not a war that we started,’ Carpio continued. ‘It is a war that you started. My people only wanted to live in peace. America came to El Salvador. So I came to America. You should understand that more than anyone. You are the hunter. Why do you hunt?’

  ‘We’re done now,’ Brooks said. He put a hand under Carpio’s armpit and tried to lift him up, but the chains held.

  ‘You will never get out of here,’ Steele said. ‘I promise you that.’

  Carpio stopped even as Brooks tried to pull him along. He stared evenly at Steele, his red tattooed eyes boring into her. ‘Agent Steele, you should stop making promises you can’t keep.’

  Forty-Nine

  Wednesday 6 February

  Long Island was a narrow spit of land in the middle of Boston Harbor, roughly a mile and a half long and a quarter mile wide at its widest spot. It ran south to north and had once been connected to the mainland by a rickety two-lane steel bridge that traversed the half-mile of harbor between its southern tip and the northern end of Moon Island.

  The island was owned by the City of Boston, and the southern two-thirds had been used for nearly a century as a dumping ground for society’s less desirable elements. Beginning in the 1820s, the city constructed an almshouse and shipped its poorest and most helpless residents out to work a small farm on the island in exchange for a bed and enough food to sustain themselves.

  Over time, the public offenses warranting removal from the public’s dismay to Long Island swayed with the mores of the day. The facilities were used, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as housing for unwed mothers, as a chronic disease hospital and as an orphanage. By the early twenty-first century, the island’s facilities, which included 1,000 beds, were used primarily to house a combination of drug addicts and homeless men. In 2014, however, the city’s Corps of Engineers condemned the bridge that connected Long Island to the mainland, and residents were given three hours to gather their belongings so that they could be bussed one last time off the island. The bridge was subsequently demolished, and the island was left deserted.

  The northern third of Long Island had been given back to nature much earlier. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the bulbous northern outcropping had housed Fort Strong, an installation dedicated to the defense of Boston Harbor. The twenty-five acre area, separated from the rest of the island by a low, narrow strip of beach and field, had been commandeered by the federal government in the 1880s, and a major construction project was begun to create an elaborate warren of cement caves and rooms in the hillside. By the 1950s, the fort was home to a Nike Missile system, a massive post-World War II air-defense project involving line-of-sight anti-aircraft missiles developed by Bell Labs.

  By the late 1960s, though, the threat of nuclear annihilation had eclipsed any fear of an air-to-ground attack, and Fort Strong was decommissioned. In the half century since the fort was abandoned, the cement compound had been swallowed by vegetation. The gun blocks were still visible from the air, but from the water and from the land it was difficult to discern the outlines of the man-made fortress.

  It was after two o’clock in the morning as the Citacea idled by the northern end of Long Island. She was a Viking sport-fishing rig, fifty-two feet in length with a flying bridge and a carbon fiber composite hull sharpened at the bow to cut through rough seas. She had a luxurious salon and three state rooms to keep her inhabitants swaddled in comfort when not manning the heavy rods.

  The time of day for the journey was not unusual – serious sport fishermen often headed out east in the wee hours to be fishing by early morning off the outer limits of Stellwagon Bank, a kidney-shaped underwater plateau between Cape Ann and Cape Cod where the waters teamed with marine life. The time of year might raise an eyebrow, particularly in the current cold snap, but there were enough wealthy dilettantes of questionable sanity who would relish the tales to tell of big game fishing in the most inhospitable conditions. Enough to dampen the suspicions of anyone who might take notice as the boat turned toward the northeast and headed out to sea.

  The Citacea was piloted by Skip Oleny, a charter captain who was forever in Cormack O’Connell’s debt. Two years before, Skip’s twenty-year-old son had been caught running ten kilograms of cocaine into Chelsea, and Cormack had interceded to keep the lad out of prison.

  Cormack, Cicero and Buddy searched Long Island’s northern shore as the boat passed by. It was a bright, clear night, and a full moon cast enough light to make out the pier and the lighthouse built into the hillside.

  ‘There,’ Cormack said. ‘Just to the left of the lighthouse.’ The other men strained to see a dim rectangular outline partially obscured by the snow-covered trees. ‘That’s the northern entrance.’ For a moment, he thought he could see the flicker of light around twenty yards to the west of the entryway.

  ‘Not the way we want to go in,’ Cicero commented.

  ‘No,’ Cormack agreed. ‘There’s another entrance on the east side of the hill.’

  ‘Won’t they be watching there as well?’ Buddy asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Cormack said. ‘But it’s less likely. The fort was separated into two sections. Two different artillery groups operated independently. The two sides are connected, but if we’re lucky Soh and his men are only using the northern section.’

  ‘What if we’re not lucky?’ Buddy asked. No one answered.

  Skip Olney steered the boat out past Lovells Island so that if anyone was watching them from Fort Strong, they would assume they were headed out to sea. Then he swung the bow around and to the south, around Lovells and Georges Island, then headed back to the west so that the boat could approach Long Island from the southeast, protected from sight by the northern hill.

  Olney cut the engines and the Citacea idled in toward the shallow inlet formed by the low, narrow run of beach and field that separated Fort Strong from the rest of the island. He kept a sharp eye on the depth-finder. The boat was his life, and notwithstanding the debt he would always owe Cormack, he wasn’t eager to risk running aground. Besides, they needed the boat to remain seaworthy – it was their only way off the island in the unlikely event that they were able to get in and get out without getting themselves killed.

  ‘That’s as far as she’ll go,’ Olney said, shifting into neutral and working the controls to maintain the boat’s position. Cormack nodded, and he, Cicero and Buddy left the bridge and headed out to the stern.

  The ten-foot inflatable was loaded with three tactical vests, rope and the weapons they had gathered for the assault. Cormack wished they’d had more time so that he could have found more weapons, but there was no option to wait. As a result, they were going in with two guns and multiple clips each. In addition, Cormack had been able to scrounge up three flash-bangs that had been left at the union office after the last raid police had carried out on a tip from Cormack. They wouldn’t kill anyone, but they could stun people, particularly in close quarters, and Cormack thought they might prove useful.

  They slipped the small vessel over the transom and into the water. The three of them were dressed all in black waterproof SD Combat wet/dry suits, with black neoprene hoods and gloves to help protect them from the cold, but even the high-tech gear could not really keep them warm. They slid from the Citacea’s stern into the inflatable and paddled the twenty yards into shore. The entire way, Cormack scanned the hill on the back side of Fort Strong, expecting at any minute to be engulfed in a hail of gunfire.

  The bullets never came, though, and within a matter of minutes, the three men were pulling the inflatable up onto the beach and lashing it to a large boulder to prevent the incoming tide from taking it out to sea.

  They silently emptied their small raft of the weapons and slipped them into the vests covering their foul-weather suits. Cormack motioned for them to follow him as he crept along the beach, toward the northern end of the island.

  It too
k only two minutes for them to reach the spot at which the southeastern side of the hill met the shoreline. Cormack pointed up the hill, and in the moonlight Cicero and Buddy could see the dim outline of a concrete rectangle, roughly ten feet wide by six feet high, identical to the entryway they had seen from the Citacea on the northern side of the fort. Cormack nodded at them and started up the hill, through the heavy vegetation.

  The progress was slow, as they tried to make as little noise as possible. It was rough going, and the cold cut through their gear, leaving their extremities near frozen. They made their way inexorably up until they were on a small cement ledge outside of the concrete entryway. A heavy metal door clung to its hinges, but there were no locks, and the latch had fallen away. Cormack looked from Cicero to Buddy and back. Then he reached into his vest and pulled out a Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol. Buddy followed Cormack’s lead, and pulled out an identical gun. Cicero pulled out his knife, and motioned for Cormack and Buddy to position themselves so that they could shoot in at the entryway. Cicero then took hold of the door and gave it a pull. It creaked softly, but to the three men it sounded like a screech. The door swung outward on its hinges, and Cormack and Buddy pointed their guns into the dark abyss beyond the entryway, ready to shoot if they sensed any movement.

  They stood there for a moment, barely breathing, listening intently for any indication that someone inside had heard the door open and Soh and his men were coming to cut them down, but there was no noise, and once enough time had passed for them to feel encouraged, Cormack lowered his pistol slightly and stepped through the opening and into the darkness.