by Chuck Dixon
Who said?
Lou entered his office to find the guest chairs empty and some guy seated behind his desk, tapping the keys on his Dell, a slim guy in a dark suit and no tie. And gloves. The guy was wearing thin leather gloves. Did he know it was hot out? The guy would be skinny but for broad shoulders that Lou could tell owed nothing to the suit. He wore his jet-black hair slicked back above a broad forehead. He didn’t look up when Lou walked in.
“Can I help you?” Lou said. Now he knew he didn’t have a ten o’clock.
The guy looked up at him with unmoving eyes that were a pale green like aged copper.
“You sold a house at 164 Pioneer Road?”
“Um...” Lou said. Was this guy a cop? He had that cop feel about him. Or something else. All at once, the gloves took on a sinister significance.
The guy gestured Lou around the desk and stood to allow Lou to take his own chair. When he straightened up the guy towered over Lou who always considered himself average height.
“This place,” the guy said.
On the screen was a listing for what realtors called a “farm home.” Nothing special. Nothing memorable. He sold a property like this at least twice a month.
“Remember it now?”
“Yeah. Single guy. Paid cash. I figured he was divorced.”
“The listing says Dolan Carter.” The guy leaned over Lou, and one of his long fingers touched the screen where it said, Buyer: CARTER, DOLAN JAMES.
“Right. He said he drove trucks. Over-the-road hauler. Did he do something wrong?” Lou wondered if he should ask to see a badge.
“Did he ever mention anyone named Hammond?”
“I don’t recall anything like that. He was just another buyer, nothing special.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know him. He bought the place a month ago. The last I saw of him was at the title company when we settled.”
“Where was that?”
“Eagle Abstract on West State.”
The guy stepped around the front of the desk. Lou was relieved not to have the guy looming over him.
“Write down this number. If he contacts you for any reason, you’ll call me.”
Lou nodded that he would. He wrote the number the guy recited on the appointments calendar on his desk.
“That’s too many numbers,” Lou said.
“No. It’s not.”
“Um...what name do I put down?”
“You don’t need a name.”
“I have to put something down to remind me what the number goes with.”
“That’s up to you,” the guy said and left the office.
Lou was damned glad when he left the office. He wrote “Scary Guy” above the weird number on his calendar.
You are in a world of shit, Dolan James Carter, whoever you are.
22
Shakedown
“I’m going along,” Caroline said.
“You are not going along,” Dwayne said.
They were alone in their cabin, enjoying the restored AC and privacy. The bed was blanketed in charts. Caroline lay prone in cutoffs and a tank top and studied them. Dwayne sat at a table mounted to the bulkhead, stripping and cleaning the M4 he planned to take along. He wore oil-stained khaki shorts and nothing else.
“I speak the language,” she said.
“Ancient Greek? You told me you knew a little of the language. Like enough to find a bathroom.”
“I’ve been taking a course.”
“When?” he said. “Where?”
“Since we’ve been on the Raj. It’s online. I’ve learned enough.”
“But you and Morris keep telling me there won’t be anyone on the island when we get there. It was uninhabited back then. We’re just going back to observe, remember?”
“Exactly. So how much trouble could I get in?” she said.
“Are you shitting me? You really want to go back into all that? You want to drop into the middle of a clusterfuck like last time? We don’t know what we’ll run into.”
“All the research—”
“All the research is bullshit. You went back last time expecting a hike in the woods. All your fucking research didn’t mention a fucking nation of cannibal midgets,” he said. “We could step out and find the island covered in man-eating unicorns or some shit.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“This whole thing is fucking ridiculous!”
“Then why are you here?” She sat on the edge of the bed and met his eyes.
“For the same reason I won’t let you go back with me,” he said and looked away.
“Because you care about me,” she said in a low voice.
“Yeah. I do.”
“Well, then stop caring about me, because I’m going!” Her voice rose to a shout.
“You’re crazy.”
“Then I’m crazy. But I’m going with you.”
“The hell you are,” Dwayne growled and left the room. He meant to slam the hatch behind him, but it only swung slowly closed on squealing hinges.
Jimbo met Dwayne coming up the ladder from the passenger deck. “I was coming to get you. We’re trying out the Zodiacs,” Jimbo said. He was wearing baggy trunks and surf shoes.
Dwayne welcomed the distraction. He followed Jimbo aft to an open hull door below decks. Boats and a few of the crewmen were standing by a stack of hard plastic cases piled on the deck.
The cases contained self-inflating Zodiac Ever-safes; the tough eight-seat rafts they were going to use for insertion back to The Then. The Rangers needed a shakedown on the gear to get used to using it. Familiarity was the key to any equipment. Work with it hard and work with it often until you can use it automatically, and without thought. The sea was like rippled glass right now, but there was no way to anticipate what it would be like when they arrived in the ancient Aegean.
Boats gave them an intro to how the Zodiac worked. It was a simple pull cord. Yank it hard and the boat inflated.
“You soldiers ready to get wet?” Boats grinned. Dwayne stepped to the coaming and looked out at the sea gently slapping the hull twenty feet below. “Any sharks in this water?” Dwayne said.
“Why is it the first thing every pogue thinks of is sharks? There’s at least a thousand things that’ll kill you at sea before a shark does,” Boats said. He pitched one of the cases overboard. It landed with a smack and bobbed in the deep green water.
Jimbo took a running leap off the deck and came up sputtering. He paddled after the drifting case and pulled the line. Dwayne followed him in. The water was warm and still. By the time Dwayne reached Jimbo, the Zodiac was fully inflated. Jimbo took a handhold and pulled himself aboard. He offered Dwayne a hand. Dwayne shook his head.
“Gotta learn to get on by myself.” Dwayne was treading water by the tubular hull. He reached for a handhold and levered himself over.
The Zodiac was roomy enough. The aluminum deck gave it a sense of stability. Dwayne was able to stand and look at the flat sea around them, featureless to the horizon. Some cirrus clouds to the north hung in a dome of azure sky. He was surprised to see that they’d already drifted about fifty yards from the Raj. The distance was growing between the little raft and the big ship though he couldn’t sense any current beneath them.
“Paddle back!” Boats’ bullhorn voice reached them.
Jimbo found the oars and handed one to Dwayne.
They knelt and began stroking powerfully for the hull of the container ship and the big bearded bastard hollering at them from the aft hatch. It didn’t feel like they were making progress. The Raj got no closer. The bow of the raft kept slewing to the right, and Dwayne paddled harder to compensate only to make the point of the bow go too far left.
“Dumb pogue shits! You look like two turds in a toilet!” Boats’ voice reached them. They could see him gesturing from the opening in the hull. The silhouetted shapes of crewmen lined the stern rails, watching the Rangers splashing around.
“This looked
so easy,” Jimbo said, stroking furiously.
“Thought you Indians were good at paddling,” Dwayne said.
“We don’t have too many canoes in the desert.” Dwayne spared a look at the Raj. No closer. But Boats was no longer reaming them out. In fact, he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he gave up on them.
They tried coordinating their efforts but only managed to turn the prow of the raft completely away from the Raj. Dwayne’s shoulders were burning from the effort. This was a workout, no lie.
Both Rangers were startled by a hand coming over the side to grip a cleat. Boats exploded from the water and tumbled over the side into the raft between them. He was in tighty-whities and nothing else.
“Dumbass pogues. You’re paddling around like two homos at a waterpark!” He wrenched the paddle from Dwayne’s hands. “What the fuck would you do in a real fucking sea instead of this bathtub we’re in right now?”
Dwayne began to protest, and Boats shoved him back into the stern.
“Man the tiller!” Boats called and threw the oar to the deck. “Turn the rudder port to go starboard and starboard to go port.”
Dwayne found the jointed aluminum tiller with a rubber grip on the end. It worked a pair of rudders at the stern. He turned it hard to port as Jimbo paddled. The prow moved around to point back at the hull of the container ship, now a hundred yards away. Boats sat on the deck, lounging against the hull, and offered obscenity-laced criticism and encouragement.
“Cut the water, you pogue! You’re splashing like a fucking duck! Cut and scoop! Not with your arms! Put your shoulders into it, goddamn it! Don’t turn into the oar! Keep your eyes on the boat, you prick! You’ll bring us up on a fucking beach somewhere! Focus, you lazy fucker! Pretend it’s pussy, and pretend you’re not queer!”
The Raj grew steadily closer until they were bumping against the hull. The crew lowered a ladder and Boats grabbed hold of it.
“I’m going aboard for a beer,” he announced as he put a bare foot in a rung. “You two girls are going to make your way three-sixty around this tub, and you will not come aboard until you can make fast below the dive board.”
“For how long?” Dwayne called to him.
“That’s up to you, pogue!” Boats hollered back and disappeared over the gunwale.
The Rangers switched off on the oar and tiller as each became more and more exhausted. They thought they were in shape. Hell, they were in shape. But this was a task they were unaccustomed to and working muscles they didn’t know they had. The crew followed them around, leaning over and watching from the railings without speaking. At least they’re not laughing, Dwayne thought. There was probably wagering involved.
It was three full revolutions around the three-hundred-meter ship before they came alongside below the bulwark hatch again. The ladder was lowered, and Dwayne wasn’t sure he could even raise his arms to use it. Both he and Jimbo hugged the ladder and pushed with their legs to finally reach the dive board, where they were helped through the bulwark door by the crew.
Boats wore cutoffs and a “Sailors Do It Wetter” t-shirt. He held a pump shotgun in his fists. A fleeting thought crossed Dwayne’s mind that Boats was going to summarily execute them for being fuck-ups. Boats shouldered past them with a sad shake of the head and pumped three rounds of buck down into the free-floating Zodiac to sink it. Practice over.
“Put her out of her misery.” Boats turned away, handing the pump off to a crew member and made his way to the bridge.
Caroline was there grinning wide.
“You see all that?” Dwayne said.
“I saw enough,” she said and raised her eyebrows. “You still want to go to sea?”
“Not with you as skipper.”
23
Electric Avenue
It was time for a test.
The reactor was running cool. It supplied the initial charge to the Tube down in its concealed chamber in the hold. The temperature in the container was already dropping as the first layer of ice formed on the titanium rings of the Tube array.
They went for a nighttime test. Boats assured them there were no craft anywhere near on his radar. The shipping and cruise lanes were far away over the horizon. Whatever happened on the Raj stayed on the Raj.
All electronic devices were collected from the crew and locked in a Faraday Box on the bridge until the test was over. It was to shield the cell phones and game devices from the coming EMP flash that would render them useless. Dwayne also wanted anything that might take video of what was to come next out of the hands of witnesses. No YouTube, thank you.
Any of the crew who were not on duty took up seats along the weather deck to watch Dwayne and Jimbo make the connections to inflate the balloon from the hydrogen tanks. They worked under lights with Morris Tauber directing. The balloon envelope filled, and the black shell expanded to capacity to describe a globe ten feet across. It rose slowly, trailing the nano-carbon cable that played out from the loop stacked on the deck. Dwayne held the cable free of the loop and let it run skyward through his gloved hands.
Jimbo, Morris, and Caroline moved around the deck, dropping weighted nano lines into the water around the prow. They plunged into the black water to port and starboard. The dry ends of submerged lines were joined at the shielded junction box as was the long cable leading to the balloon now stationary in the sky five hundred feet above the Raj’s bow.
Dwayne keyed a hand radio.
“Boats, you better tell your crew to clear the deck.” Boats appeared on the weather deck and shouted over the rail.
“You looking to draw down lightning? There’s not a cloud in the sky, dumbass.”
The night sky was clear and black and alive with a skein of stars that was reflected in the dark water all around the ship.
“Just get them into the areas we shielded, okay? And I’d shut down any electronics until we give you the all clear,” Dwayne called up to him.
Boats barked a gruff obscenity and returned to the bridge where he made an all-hands announcement over the loud hailers in Amharic and English. The crew mumbled regrets but moved from their perches to go inside.
“Everything cool?” Jimbo said.
“We’re good to go.” Morris grinned and gave them a thumbs up.
“Where do you need us?” Dwayne said and nodded to Jimbo.
“I need Caroline in the control shed. But you’re wearing rubber soles. You’re free to stay on deck and watch the show. Just don’t touch any metal,” Morris said.
“You mean we could get electrocuted?” Jimbo said.
“The danger of that is minimal. It will be a low-ampere background pulse,” Caroline said. “Nothing will happen beyond your hair standing on end, most likely.”
“Theoretically,” Jimbo added.
Caroline smiled and followed her big brother below decks to their control room.
Parviz and Quebat were suited up in their Tyvek bunny suits down in the reactor control room. They were connected to Morris and Caroline in the Tube chamber by a hard-wired speakerphone.
“We are at half power,” Quebat announced.
“That’s enough for a jolt,” Morris’ voice came through the headset they each wore.
“Activating in three,” Parviz said and worked the mouse at his workstation.
At the count of three, the reactor fired a megajoule charge down the lines leading to the junction box at the bow and down the cables leading to the water and up to the balloon hanging above in the windless sky.
Dwayne sensed a change in the air. He could feel the crackle. There was an invisible molecular reaction going on all around Jimbo and him. The oily odor of ozone filled his nostrils and mouth. He was having second thoughts about being exposed out here.
The balloon’s sheath began to glow all around with a blue-tinged light bright enough to throw shadows across the deck. The glow increased in intensity and fingers of an azure field of static raced down the cable. Worms of coruscating electricity flashed up from the weighted cables. The
twin charges met at the junction box. Dwayne’s short cut hair bristled on his head. Jimbo’s longer hair stood up in an Afro that made Dwayne laugh out loud.
A soundless explosion, with the balloon as its source sheathed the ship in a sudden brilliance from stem to stern. It was gone in the blink of an eye. The frisson that animated the air vanished as the night closed in again.
Down in the Tube chamber, the steel rings were bleeding off billows of frigid air. Caroline stared into the mist with wide eyes. She took a deep breath and could smell the rich tang of salt air coming from somewhere within the Tube. She turned to Morris, and he glanced up from his screens to flash her a broad grin.
They’d done it. Through that chilling fog and down that ice-rimed walkway lay a world that was the same as theirs but so vastly different. It was the world as it was. Before Christ. Before the printed word and before an airplane ever crossed the sky.
“What the fuck is going on?” Boats demanded the next morning.
He stood at a rail on an aft deck of the bridge tower and looked down at Dwayne and Jimbo on the sunken deck. The Rangers were zeroing in rifles and sharing a tub of iced beers. There were plastic barrels bobbing in the creamy wake of the Raj. The ship was underway north for the island of Nisos Anaxos. The barrels were tethered to the stern rail by a couple hundred yards of line. The pair was punching through the heavy plastic with their Winchester Model 70s. The plastic drums were getting heavy with all the water they were taking in through the holes shot in them.
“What’s your point, Boats?” Dwayne called up.
Boats vanished from the rail and reappeared, storming toward them along the port rail.
“The crew’s busy, and it’s just you and me, soldier. What in the name of Jesus was that show last night? My boys are cool as ice in thirty-foot seas, but they nearly took a collective dump when the decks went neon last night.”
“We told you what we were doing,” Dwayne said and wiped sea spray from the Winnie with an oiled cloth.