“Straight ahead,” he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead was. “Sure looks different from up here,” Freeland said, a boy’s wonder in his voice. “I fish around there. From the surface it just looks like marshes.”
But it didn’t now. From a thousand feet it looked like islands at first, connected by silt and grass, but islands for all that. As they got closer, the islands took on regular shapes, lozengelike at first, and then with the fine lines of ships, grown over, surrounded by grass and reeds.
“Jeez, there’s a bunch of ’em,” the pilot observed. He’d rarely flown down here, and then mostly at night with accident cases.
“World War One,” the Captain said. “My father said they’re leftovers from the war, the ones the Germans didn’t get.”
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“Not sure, maybe a boat. We picked up a druggie yesterday,” the Captain explained. “Said there was a lab in there, and three dead people.”
“No shit? A drug lab in there?”
“That’s what the lady said,” Freeland confirmed, learning something else. As forbidding as it looked from the surface, there were channels in here. Probably a hell of a good place to go crabbing. From the deck of his fishing boat, it looked like one massive island, but not from up here. Wasn’t that interesting?
“Got a flash down this way.” The paramedic pointed the pilot over to the right. “Off glass or something.”
“Let’s check it out.” The stick went right and down a little as he brought the Jet Ranger down. “Yeah, I got a boat by those three.”
“Check it out,” the paramedic ordered with a grin.
“You got it.” It would be a chance to do some real flying. A former Huey driver from the 1st Air Cav, he loved being able to play with his aircraft. Anyone could fly straight and level, after all. He circled the place first, checking winds, then lowered his collective a little, easing the chopper down to about two hundred feet.
“Call it an eighteen-footer,” Freeland said, and they could see the white nylon line that held it fast to the remains of the ship.
“Lower,” the Captain commanded. In a few seconds they were fifty feet over the deck of the derelict. The boat was empty. There was a beer cooler, and some other stuff piled up in the back, but nothing else. The aircraft jerked as a couple of birds flew out of the ruined superstructure of the ship. The pilot instinctively maneuvered to avoid them. One crow sucked into his engine intake could make them a permanent part of this man-made swamp.
“Whoever owns that boat sure isn’t real interested in us,” he said over the intercom. In the back, Freeland mimed three shots with his hand. The Captain nodded.
“I think you may be right, Ben.” To the pilot: “Can you mark the exact position on a map?”
“Right.” He considered the possibility of going into a low hover and dropping them off on the deck. Simple enough if they had been back in the Cav, it looked too dangerous for this situation. The paramedic pulled out a chart and made the appropriate notations. “Seen what you need?”
“Yeah, head back.”
Twenty minutes later, Captain Joy was on the phone.
“Coast Guard, Thomas Point.”
“This is Captain Joy, State Police. We need a little help.” He explained on for a few minutes.
“Take about ninety minutes,” Warrant Officer English told him.
“That’d be fine.”
Kelly called a Yellow Cab, which picked him up at the marina entrance. His first stop of the day was a rather disreputable business establishment called Kolonel Klunker, where he rented a 1959 Volkswagen, prepaying it for a month, with no mileage charge.
“Thank you, Mr. Aiello,” the man said to a smiling Kelly, who was using the ID from a man who no longer needed it. He drove the car back to the marina and started unloading the things he needed. Nobody paid much attention, and in fifteen minutes the Beetle was gone.
Kelly took the opportunity to drive through the area he’d be hunting, checking traffic patterns. It was agreeably vacant, a part of the city he’d never visited before, off a bleak industrial thoroughfare called O’Donnell Street, a place where nobody lived and few would want to. The air was laden with the smells of various chemicals, few of them pleasant. Not as busy as it once had been, many of the buildings in the district looked unused. More to the point, there was much open ground here, many buildings separated from one another by flat areas of bare dirt which trucks used for a convenient place to reverse direction. No kids playing sandlot ball, not a single house in sight, and because of that, not a single police car to be seen. Rather a clever ploy on the part of his enemies, Kelly thought, at least from one perspective. The place he was interested in was a single freestanding building with a half-destroyed sign over the entrance. The back of it was just a blank wall. There were only three doors, and though they were on two different walls, all could be observed from a single point, and to Kelly’s rear was another vacant building, a tall concrete structure with plenty of broken windows. His initial reconnaissance complete, Kelly headed north.
Oreza was heading south. He’d already been partway there, conducting a routine patrol and wondering why the hell the Coast Guard didn’t start up a ministation farther down on the Eastern Shore, or maybe by Cove Point Light, where there was an existing station for the guys who spent their waking hours, if any, making sure the light bulb at the top of the tower worked. That wasn’t especially demanding duty to Oreza’s mind. though it was probably all right for the kid who ran the place. His wife had just delivered twins, after all, and the Coast Guard was a family-oriented branch of the military.
He was letting one of his junior seamen do the driving, enjoying the morning, standing outside the cramped wheelhouse, drinking some of his home-brewed coffee.
“Radio,” one of the crewmen said.
Oreza went inside and took the microphone. “Four-One Alfa here.”
“Four-One Alfa, this is English at Thomas Base. Your pickup is at a dock at Dame’s Choice. You’ll see cop cars there. Got an ETA?”
“Call it twenty or twenty-five, Mr. E.”
“Roger that. Out.”
“Come left,” Oreza said, looking at his chart. The water looked plenty deep. “One-six-five.”
“One-six-five, aye.”
Xantha was more or less sober, though weak. Her dark skin had a gray pallor to it, and she complained of a splitting headache that analgesics had scarcely touched. She was aware that she was under arrest now, and that her rap sheet had arrived on teletype. She was also canny enough to have requested the presence of a lawyer. Strangely, this had not bothered the police very much.
“My client,” the attorney said, “is willing to cooperate.” The agreement had taken all of ten minutes to strike. If she was telling the truth, and if she was not involved in a major felony, the possession charge against her would be dropped, subject to her enrollment in a treatment program. It was as good a deal as anyone had offered Xantha Matthews in some years. It was immediately apparent why this was true.
“They was gonna kill me!” she said, remembering it all now that she was outside the influence of the barbiturates, and now that her attorney gave her permission to speak.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Captain Joy asked.
“They dead. He killed ‘em. the white boy, shot ’em dead. An’ he left the drugs, whole shitload of ’em.”
“Tell us about the white man,” Joy asked, with a look to Freeland that ought to have been disbelieving but was not.
“Big dude, like him”—she pointed to Freeland—“but he face all green like a leaf. He blindfold me af‘er he took me down, then he put me on that pier an’ tol’ me to catch a bus or somethin’.”
“How do you know he was white?”
“Wrists was white. Hands was green, but not up here, like,” she said, indicating on her own arms. “He wear green clothes with stripes on ’em, like a soldier, carry a big .45. I was as
leep when he shoot, that wake me up, see? Make me get dress, take me away, drop me off, he boat just go away.”
“What kind of boat?”
“Big white one, tall, like, big, like thirty feet Ion’.”
“Xantha, how do you know they were going to kill you?”
“White boy say so, he show me the things in the boat, the little one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fishnet shit, like, and cement blocks. He say they tell him they do it before.”
The lawyer decided it was his turn to speak. “Gentlemen, my client has information about what may be a major criminal operation. She may require protection, and in return for her assistance, we would like to have state funding for her treatment.”
“Counselor,” Joy replied quietly, “if this is what it sounds like, I’ll fund it out of my own budget. May I suggest, sir, that we keep her in our lockup for the time being? For her own safety, the need for which seems quite apparent, sir.” The State Police captain had been negotiating with lawyers for years, and had started sounding like one, Freeland thought.
“The food here is fo’ shit!” Xantha said, her eyes closed in pain.
“We’ll take care of that, too,” Joy promised her.
“I think she needs some medical help,” the lawyer noted. “How can she get it here?”
“Doctor Paige will be here right after lunch to see her. Counselor, your client is in no condition to look after herself now. All charges against her are dropped pending verification of her story. You’ll get everything you want, in return for her cooperation. I can’t do any more than that.”
“My client agrees to your conditions and suggestions,” the lawyer said without consulting her. The county would even pay his fee. Besides, he felt as though he might be doing the world a good deed. It was quite a change from getting drunk drivers off.
“There’s a shower that way. Why not get her cleaned up? You may also wish to get her some decent things to wear. Give us the bill.”
“A pleasure doing business with you, Captain Joy,” he said as the barracks commander left for Freeland’s car.
“Ben, you really fell into something. You handled her real nice. I won’t forget. Now show me how fast this beast goes.”
“You got it, Cap’n.” Freeland engaged the lights before passing seventy. They made it to the dock just as the Coast Guard turned out of the main channel.
The man wore lieutenant’s bars—though he called himself a captain—and Oreza saluted him as he came aboard. Both police officers were given life jackets to wear because Coast Guard regulations required them on small boats, and then Joy showed him the chart.
“Think you can get in there?”
“No, but our launch can. What gives?”
“A possible triple homicide, possible drug involvement. We overflew the area this morning. There’s a fishing boat right here.”
Oreza nodded as impassively as possible and took the wheel himself, pushing the throttles to the stops. It was a bare five miles to the graveyard—that was how Oreza thought of it—and he plotted his approach as carefully as possible.
“No closer? The tide’s in,” Freeland said.
“That’s the problem. Place like this, you go it at low water so’s in case you beach you can float off. From here on we use the launch.” Wheels were turning in his mind while his crewmen got the fourteen-foot launch deployed. Months earlier, that stormy night with Lieutenant Charon from Baltimore, a possible drug deal that he’d expected to take place somewhere on the Bay. Some real serious guys, he’d told Portagee. Oreza already wondered if there might be a connection.
They motored in, powered by a ten-horse outboard. The quartermaster took note of the tidal flow, following what appeared to be a channel that meandered generally in the direction indicated by their marked-up chart. It was quiet in here, and Oreza remembered his tour of duty for Operation MARKET TIME, the Coast Guard’s effort to assist the Navy in Vietnam. He’d spent time with the brown-water guys, running Swift boats manufactured right in Annapolis by the Trumpy Yard. It was so similar, the tall grass that could, and often did, conceal people with guns. He wondered if they might be facing something similar soon. The cops were fingering their revolvers, and Oreza asked himself, too late, why he hadn’t brought a Colt with him. Not that he knew how to use it. His next thought was that this would have been a good place to have Kelly with him. He wasn’t quite sure what the story was on Kelly, but he suspected the man was one of the SEALs, with whom he’d worked briefly in the Mekong Delta. Sure as hell he’d gotten that Navy Cross for something, and the tattoo on his arm wasn’t there by accident.
“Well, damn,” Oreza breathed. “Looks like a Starcraft sixteen ... no, more like eighteen.” He lifted his portable radio. “Four-One Alpha, this is Oreza.”
“Reading you, Portagee.”
“We got the boat, right where they said. Stand by.”
“Roger.”
Suddenly things got very tense indeed. The two cops exchanged a look, wondering why they hadn’t brought more people out. Oreza eased his launch right up to the Starcraft. The cops got aboard gingerly.
Freeland pointed to the back. Joy nodded. There were six cement blocks and a rolled-up section of nylon netting. Xantha hadn’t lied about that. There was also a rope ladder going up. Joy went first, his revolver in his right hand. Oreza just watched as Freeland followed. Once they got to the deck, the men wrapped both hands around their handguns and headed for the superstructure, disappearing from view for what seemed like an hour, but in reality was only four minutes. Some birds scattered aloft. When Joy came back, his revolver wasn’t visible.
“We have three bodies up here, and a hell of a large quantity of what looks like heroin. Call your boat, have them tell my barracks that we need crime lab. Sailor, you just started running a ferry service.”
“Sir, fish-and-game has better boats for this. Want me to call them to support you?”
“Good idea. You might want to circle around this area some. The water looks pretty clear, and she told us that they’ve dumped some bodies hereabouts. See the stuff in the fishing boat?” Oreza looked, noticing the fishnet and blocks for the first time.
Jesus. “That’s how you do it. Okay, I’ll motor around.” Which he did, after making his radio call.
“Hi, Sandy.”
“John! Where are you?”
“My place in town.”
“There was a policeman in to see us yesterday. They’re looking for you.”
“Oh?” Kelly’s eyes narrowed as he chewed on his sandwich.
“He said you should come in and talk to him, that it’s better if you do it right away.”
“That’s nice of him,” Kelly observed with a chuckle.
“What are you going to do?”
“You don’t want to know, Sandy.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Please, John, please think it through.”
“I have, Sandy. Honest. It’ll be okay. Thanks for the information.”
“Something wrong?” another nurse asked after she hung up.
“No,” Sandy replied, and her friend knew it was a lie.
Hmm. Kelly finished off his Coke. That confirmed his suspicion about Oreza’s little visit. So things were getting complicated now, but they’d been pretty complicated the week before, too. He headed off to the bedroom, almost there when there came a knock at the door. That startled him rather badly, but he had to answer it. He’d opened windows to air the apartment out, and it was plain that someone was here. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
“Wondered where you were, Mr. Murphy,” the manager said, much to Kelly’s relief.
“Well, two weeks of work in the Midwest and a week’s vacation down in Florida.” he lied with a relaxed smile.
“You didn’t get much of a tan.”
An embarrassed grin. “Spent a lot of my time inside.” The manager thought that was pretty good.
>
“Good for you, well, just wanted to see if everything was okay.”
“No problems here,” Kelly assured the man, closing the door before he could ask anything else. He needed a nap. It seemed that all of his work was at night. It was like being on the other side of the world, Kelly told himself, lying down on his lumpy bed.
It was a hot day at the zoo. Better to have met in the panda enclosure. It was crowded with people who wanted to gawk at this wonderful goodwill gift from the People’s Republic of China—Chinese Communists to Ritter. The place was air conditioned and comfortable, but intelligence officers usually were uncomfortable in places like that, and so today he was strolling by the remarkably large area that contained the Galapagos tortoises, or turtles—Ritter didn’t know the difference, if there was one. Why they needed so large an area, he didn’t know either. Certainly it seemed expansive for a creature that moved at roughly the speed of a glacier.
“Hello, Bob.” “Charles” was now an unnecessary subterfuge, though Voloshin had initiated the call—right to Ritter’s desk. to show how clever he was. It worked both ways in the intelligence business. In the case of a call initiated by the Russians, the code name was “Bill.”
“Hello, Sergey.” Ritter pointed to the reptiles. “Kind of reminds you of the way our governments work, doesn’t it?”
“Not my part of it.” The Russian sipped at his soft drink. “Nor yours.”
“Okay, what’s the word from Moscow?”
“You forgot to tell me something.”
“What’s that?”
“That you have a Vietnamese officer also.”
“Why should that concern you?” Ritter asked lightly, clearly concealing his annoyance that Voloshin knew this, as his interlocutor could see.
“It is a complication. Moscow doesn’t know yet.”