Claws

by Russell James

  “You were still lucky. That was a rough storm, strong enough to snap that kayak.”

  “The storm didn’t do that. Something else did. I mean, the wind was whipping rain and seawater in my face, and the waves were pretty tall, but something else sliced that boat in half. I didn’t get much of a look at it, since it was a few inches from my face, but it was like a big pair of scissors came up on both sides of the boat, snapped shut, and cut it in two. If I hadn’t been kneeling, it would have severed my legs.”

  The first thing Nathan’s mind went to were the crab stories from the old man in the cabin cruiser, but no way was that possible.

  “So if that trawler sank, whatever you were working on sank with it.”

  “No, there was a helicopter there before the boat sank. It retrieved the emitters. The only reason I got away was because the crew had abandoned ship.”

  From outside came the sound of a helicopter.

  “Damn,” Nathan said. “The last thing we need are more reinforcements for these fake DHS agents. I’m going to stick my head outside the fort and see what’s going on. Stay here and stay out of sight. You can change out of those clothes into anything of mine you can find that fits. Lock the door. Don’t open it for anyone else.”

  “No problem there. And thank you.” She gave him a brief hug. “I was sure I was about to die a dozen times in the last day.”

  “Well, Kathy and I will keep you alive. I mean, what’s safer than a military fort, right?”

  She managed a small smile. He declared that a victory and headed out. She locked the door behind him.

  Nathan went to the second level of the bastion. He knelt in the shadows and looked through an embrasure to the east beach. Valadez and the bald black man were near the crates dropped off that morning. Larsson was nowhere to be seen. In the distance, he saw the big twin-rotor helicopter approaching for a second delivery.

  He lit a flicker of wishful thinking that perhaps the helicopter was coming to take the island’s unwelcome visitors away. Reality snuffed the flame.

  Chapter 20

  Valadez and Wilson stood by the crates of supplies at the beach. Rotors pounded the air in the distance. The speck of the CH-47 appeared, and then grew as it closed on the key. Underneath, an oversized pallet hung from four cargo straps. Crates filled the pallet.

  “Well, that’s a welcome sight,” Wilson said.

  “All the firepower we need for a dinner of cracked crab,” Valadez said.

  He moved to where the helicopter had landed earlier. From there, he and Wilson wouldn’t have to drag the Zodiac very far to get it to the water.

  The helicopter came in low over the sea, under any area radar. The pallet skimmed the wave tops. Valadez slung his rifle across his back and raised both hands over his head in the military signal for “assume guidance.” The helicopter’s landing light flashed in acknowledgment. It slowed and angled for Valadez.

  “How much butter you think we’d need to eat a crab that big?” Wilson said. “I’m thinking fifty-five-gallon drum.”

  The helicopter closed to within a hundred yards of the beach. Two pilots in flight helmets with smoked visors stared out from the outer two of the cockpit’s three windows. One pilot cracked a wide smile. Valadez waved the aircraft forward.

  Two huge claws burst from the water on either side of the pallet. They clamped onto the front cargo straps and pulled.

  The pallet dove into the sea. The helicopter jerked down and sideways. Engines screamed as the pilots fought to regain control. They brought the helicopter level, but then two more claws surfaced and grabbed the other two cargo straps. The pallet plunged beneath the waves and pulled the helicopter sideways after it.

  The rotors struck the water first. The aircraft shuddered as the blades shattered into a thousand pieces. Then the fuselage slammed into the water.

  Cold water hit superheated alloys and the turbine engines exploded with two ear-splitting booms. Then a deeper, louder explosion came from underwater. The earth shook under Valadez’s feet. A mushroom of white water rose ten meters in the air where the chopper had gone down. Chunks of metal rocketed out in all directions.

  Valadez and Wilson hit the sand and covered their heads. Debris rained all around them. A shard of sharp steel grazed Valadez’s leg and left a hot slice in its trail.

  When the hail from Hell stopped, Valadez checked his leg. A gash ran down his thigh. Seeping blood, not shooting. He’d seen worse. Hell, he’d had worse. He pressed his hand against the wound.

  “You okay, Chief?” Wilson said.

  “Yeah.” Valadez winced as the pain caught up with him. “It’s nothing.”

  “So’s all our demolitions.”

  Valadez looked out at the water, now so calm you could have thought that nothing had happened. The wrecked helicopter lay at an angle in several feet of water.

  He hoped Larsson had a Plan B.

  ***

  Nathan stared, dumbfounded at what he’d just witnessed from the embrasure. A giant crab had just destroyed a helicopter. Gianna’s story made complete sense, and the old man in the cabin cruiser knew what he was talking about. Beneath Nathan, Larsson ran out of the main gate toward the crash site. Nathan saw his chance to get back to his apartment undetected.

  He raced down the stairs and first stopped at Kathy’s. Was she ever going to be shocked to see that the Cuban Crab Invasion tale was true. He pounded and called. No answer. Worry blotted out his excitement. She should have been back by now.

  He hurried to his own apartment before Larsson or any of the others returned. He entered using his key and saw Gianna had showered and changed into a pair of his cargo shorts and a souvenir Dry Tortugas National Park T-shirt Nathan was going to send back to his parents. She lay asleep on his bed. He wondered if until now she’d slept at all since the trawler sank two days ago.

  Some of the inconsistencies he’d uncovered in the fort’s history began to fit together. What he’d first blamed on pirates, could it really have been…?

  He looked out his window. Larsson and Valadez were closing and barring the main gate doors. He opened his laptop and pulled up his history database.

  Giant crabs changed everything.

  Chapter 21

  The first rays of sunlight to cross the terreplein came through the window and warmed Nathan awake. He’d fallen asleep on the floor sometime late last night in the midst of his research. He rolled over and looked to his bed. Gianna sat upright and looked down at him.

  “I didn’t want to wake you up,” she said.

  Nathan sat up and stretched. “I thought the same thing about you yesterday evening.”

  “Sorry, once I was clean, dry, and safe, I collapsed.” She patted the chest of her souvenir T-shirt. “And I appreciate the clothes. But one question…”

  She went to his closet and pulled out a pair of gray, woolen Civil War drawers. “What are these.”

  Nathan’s face went red with embarrassment. He jumped to his feet, dashed over, and grabbed the shorts. He wadded them in a ball.

  “Whoa, hey, uh, it’s a thing I do. Little experiments in period living. That’s Civil War-era underwear.”

  “Seems uncomfortable.”

  “So I found.” He shoved the underwear under his mattress. “You missed the afternoon excitement. You won’t believe it, but a giant crab attacked Larsson’s men.”

  “What? How giant?”

  “Giant enough to pull a helicopter out of the sky off the east beach.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Totally unreal. But Kathy had an old man on a boat tell her a story about a CIA plot to use giant crabs as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. We both thought he was whacked, but now…”

  “Maybe my kidnapping does make sense. That explains why I was building underwater sonic emitters for these people. Maybe some kind of crab defense?”

  “Given the caliber of Larsson and his goons, no way you were making something defensive. They wouldn’t have to hide in the sha
dows if they were doing that. The whole thing prompted me to do more research last night, and this fort gets totally weirder with everything I read.”

  “Because it was built in the middle of the ocean?”

  “For starters. And that it was armed with four hundred and fifty heavy naval guns. Fort Sumter, defending Charleston Harbor, was only designed for one hundred and thirty guns. Fort McHenry defended the city of Baltimore with only fifty. This place being slammed full of cannons makes no military sense.”

  “That is strange.”

  “Then there’s the staffing. Initially, a military artillery unit was assigned here, but not their doctor. That dude was reassigned, and the first doctor was Joseph Basset Holder. But he was a doctor in name only, not a general practitioner, but a scientist. He arrived before the Civil War. And while other units rotated through during the war, he stayed until the war ended. On this miserable flyspeck of an island. When he finally left, he didn’t continue in a medical practice. He ended up at the American Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.”

  Nathan stood and paced the room.

  “So you want to know my theory? The Army sent a scientist to do science. And he was here doing science on giant crabs. And the guns weren’t here to keep pirate ships at bay. They were here to keep crabs in the sea.”

  “If I’d heard a park ranger tell me that story last week,” Gianna said, “I would have said he’d spent too much time watching monster movies. But with crabs attacking helicopters outside the walls, I’m a lot less skeptical.”

  “The fort design validates it even further. The place has a moat. The fort practically covers the key and already has the Gulf of Mexico as a moat. Moats are built to keep enemy soldiers from scaling the walls. These moats were built to keep crabs at a distance and under the cannon barrels.

  “And one prisoner here, Dr. Samuel Mudd, even reported that he’d seen giant crabs. His stories were totally dismissed as lunatic rantings, but now, you know, maybe not. Then add in that casualty reports from the fort are sky high in that time period after the Civil War, all attributed to yellow fever. How do you get yellow fever?”

  Gianna thought for a moment. “Mosquitos?”

  “Nailed it! And where do mosquitoes breed?”

  “Standing fresh water.”

  “Where in the hell is there standing fresh water on this sand bar?”

  Gianna raised an eyebrow. “So you think yellow fever was some code for crab casualties?”

  “You bet it was. And there’s more. You saw all the rotting pilings and concrete ruins where you came ashore?”

  “Sure.”

  “The site was nominally a coaling station for naval ships. Those are the remains of the docks and bins. But would you risk bringing ships to a site filled with prisoners and ravaged by yellow fever? No. That’s why they didn’t. The dock records show no coal deliveries ever made, and no ships ever arrived for coal. It was all a cover story.”

  “But to keep such a secret for so many decades…”

  “There was no internet, no radio, not even national newspapers. It was much easier to keep things quiet back then. But not by the start of the 20th century. And that’s where one more coincidence comes to light. And in history, there are no coincidences.

  “There was a record of one ship coming here for a coaling stop. The battleship U.S.S. Maine in February 1898. Then it steamed into Havana harbor in Cuba and blew up. I’m going to guess that she came here to suppress a crab attack. Why else have the nation’s newest battleship coal here when other stations were along the route to Cuba? Did damage in a battle with crabs later doom her, or did a crab hitch a ride on, or in, the hull to Cuba? I don’t know what sank her, but somehow, neither did several boards of inquiry. Each came to differing conclusions.”

  “I’d call that a conspiracy-theory-stretch,” Gianna said. “If it wasn’t for the giant crabs outside.”

  Someone banged on the door. “Toland, get out here!” Larsson bellowed.

  Nathan motioned for Gianna to get in the closet. She zipped in and closed the door behind her. Nathan opened the main door. Larsson looked tired and angry. He held a pistol in his hand.

  “Who were you talking to?” he said.

  “Huh? Oh, myself. Talking through a history hypothesis.”

  “You sounded ridiculous.”

  “That’s why I don’t listen when I do it.”

  Larsson squeezed the grip of his pistol, irked. “Come on. Work to do.”

  Nathan stepped out and shut the door behind him. He looked around. He didn’t see Kathy and realized she’d never checked in with him last night. “Where’s Kathy?”

  “Out of the picture.”

  “Whoa, what does that mean?”

  “It means you need to forget about her and do what I’m telling you to.”

  Nathan’s heart sank as he imagined the worst. “If you hurt her—”

  “You’ll do nothing, because we have the guns and you have a park ranger badge.” He poked the pistol into Nathan’s ribs so hard that Nathan groaned. “Now get to the beach and help salvage some cargo.”

  “Out in the water? With the crabs?”

  Larsson’s brow knit. “You saw that?”

  “Who could miss it?”

  “Then yeah, you’re going in the water with the crabs. Right alongside me and Valadez and Wilson. And everything you pull out just might save your life against those crabs, so slacking off might get you killed by something bigger than this.” He gave Nathan another jab with the pistol.

  The last thing Nathan wanted was to do a little personal combat with a giant crab. But he also wanted to redirect Larsson from the ranger quarters as quickly as he could, before Larsson decided he needed to wander around in there and check the closet. Nathan headed for the main gate. One of the doors had been reopened.

  On the way, he passed several military-style crates on the parade ground that someone had already repositioned into the fort. One had a marking for 5.56 mm ammunition. Another had a stencil reading “Hand Grenades, M67.”

  He wondered if any of that would be effective against the biggest crabs in the world. In 1898, the Navy had sent a battleship.

  Chapter 22

  Kathy’s watch indicated it was past dawn.

  She’d never have known. The windowless former hideout for the CIA was like an isolation tank. No light, and with the thick walls, no sound. Even when she’d climbed the stairs and sat under the trap door, she’d heard nothing, though whether that was because the door was solid or because the powder magazine was empty, she could not tell. Every time the situation reminded her of a pharaoh’s tomb, she tried hard to press the similarities back into her subconscious.

  After the first half-hour of searching the room with her penlight, she’d stopped to conserve the battery. It was hard to not feel hopeless. The room had no power to get any of the archaic communication technology up and running, and she doubted that anything relying on vacuum tubes would still work anyway. The concrete block walls were shoddy, but they were sturdy. She wasn’t going to chip through one and then dig herself out like in some POW escape movie. And Nathan wasn’t going to find her. He didn’t know this room existed and could look straight at the trap door and not see it. Hell, she had for over a year.

  She might have slept some through the night; it was hard to tell. If she had, it was more fits of being overcome by exhaustion than restful sleep. Anxiety had kept her mind racing and by now the humid air had grown increasingly stale.

  A realization dawned on her. Between heated vacuum tubes and human respiration, this room would have needed ventilation, and a lot of it. But she hadn’t seen a vent.

  She jumped to her feet and snapped on her flashlight. A quick play around the walls revealed only one thing hanging there, the new nautical map that Larsson had duct taped to the concrete. She pulled it down and revealed a rusting three-by-two foot air vent. She raised her palm against it and a faint puff of air tickled her fingertips.

  The
vent hung loose in the mounts. She wedged her fingertips into the gap and pulled. The rusted heads of the retaining screws popped off and the cover fell away. She shined her flashlight inside.

  A seemingly endless, rusting, rectangular shaft. Gauzy veils of spider webs hung like multiple sets of curtains. About as inviting as a haunted house.

  But when she clicked off her flashlight, she saw confirmation the journey would be worth it. At the far end shone the unmistakable glow of daylight.

  “Tetanus and spider venom,” she muttered. “Every girl’s dream come true.”

  She stepped up on the desk and went shoulders deep into the shaft. Claustrophobia had always been her weak point. If the room had felt like a tomb, this thing felt like a casket. Her shoulders touched the sides, but if she canted her body and stuck her arms out ahead of her, she could fit. There just wouldn’t be room for the spiders.

  She climbed in and began to inch her way forward in the darkness. The sides of the shaft were so close to her face that she could feel her breath reflected back with every exhalation. Each push forward draped another set of sticky spider webs across her head. Panic swelled as the certainty that the walls were closing in manifested. She could practically feel the shaft tighten around her chest and compress her lungs.

  She paused, pushed the fear aside, concentrated on the ever-strengthening current of fresh air beckoning from further up the shaft, and then pushed on.

  The shaft made a right angle turn upward just ahead. The smell of salt and the sea replaced the stink of rust and decay.

  At the angle, she had to force herself forward and up. Her spine screamed in protest at the contortion. She scraped her face against the shaft and felt blood seep onto her cheek. She inched upward. Daylight beckoned.

  Her hips wedged in the angle.

  The flush of panic she’d felt earlier returned as a full-on rush. This would be worse than dying in the CIA dungeon. Trapped here starving while spiders and who knew what else crawled over her withering body.

  Terror raced through her. Her feet flailed to find purchase in the shaft, but they just slipped against the surface. Her heart beat so hard it seemed to flex the shaft’s confining walls. The daylight overhead mocked her from behind a set of bars. A few feet up, but impossibly far away.