Zodiac Read online

  Maybe Tom had been trying to tell me there were two mines. That would make sense. Two divers, two mines. I swam back and found another one under the engine room, this one made from the bottom of a plastic garbage can and a couple of big old industrial magnets.

  To pry it off and find the wires leading to the digital timer was easy enough. I clipped them off with the wirecutter and let this piece of junk sink to the bottom.

  Now for the second. I swam back for a closer look and noticed a new fact: it was right in between a couple of vents in the bottom of the hull. Probably vents for toxic waste. This mine had been planted by a Basco diver, in protective gear because he knew the water was poisoned. They were sending their evidence to the bottom.

  Laughlin was a goddamn evil genius. Poison the Harbor, kill the bugs, blow up the evidence, get rid of a rusty old tank, collect the insurance, blame it on wicked terrorists.

  I tried to yank it off, but it wasn’t going to come peacefully. Its magnets were bigger and more powerful than Smirnoff’s. Bart’s prybar got under it, but as Archimedes pointed out, the lever’s no good without a place to stand. I had to invert myself and put my feet against the bottom of the hull. There were three divers down here tonight—The Three Stooges Stop Pollution—two of us were dead, and that left me to handle the slapstick comedy. That’s probably what it looked like. But eventually the mine came loose and dropped to the bottom.

  Next question: how much damage could it do from there? As my last major suicide attempt of the night, I swam down there and dragged it across the bottom until it was off to the side, maybe forty feet away from the ship. If it went off there, that was just too bad. The Basco Explorer would just have to take it like the sturdy old bucket she was.

  When I paddled wearily away from that mine, I allowed myself to hear again, and what I heard was diesels. Immense diesels. Didn’t need to break the water to know what it was. I swam under the ship, emerged under the Basco pier, climbed up a ways into the pilings, and lobbed one bottle of putrescine up there.

  Bart’s signal was the sound of projectile vomiting from the security guards on the pier. He came in fast and loud on the Zodiac, kept the Basco Explorer between him and the guards, and got his assistants to lob the rest of the putrescine up onto the ship. He was pretty good at this; maybe GEE should hire him as my replacement.

  I’d always wanted to bomb a toxic waste ship, or a factory, with this stuff. If you really soaked it, the target would become worthless. You’d have to tow it out to sea and burn every last bit. That was going to be the Basco Explorers fate, but not immediately.

  All I could see was the side of the ship and the underside of the decking on the pier. I had to follow the action by noises. An awesome mixture of putrescine and vomit was dripping down through the cracks, raining down around me, and about the time Bart and company made their attack, I could hear some thudding and clomping as one of the guards staggered off the pier in the direction of an adjacent building.

  There were guards on deck, too, and they didn’t last long. The trick was going to be getting the putrescine belowdecks. The crew was probably out carousing somewhere, but Laughlin might be downstairs arranging the evidence.

  An alarm bell went off. The guards were asking for help. It was time to get the hell out of here. I’d already kicked off my flippers and now I worked my way over to a ladder and climbed up to where I could look out over the surface of the pier.

  Three of the guards were doubled over on their sides, writhing around.

  Did this count as violence? Assaulting the senses with something unendurably disgusting?

  How about the strobe light on top of the U-Haul, back there in Buffalo? Same deal. A bunch of security guards had been assigned to look out for us and we had made life miserable for them.

  I guess it all came under the heading of “obnoxious behavior, creative forms of.” One of these days I’d have to work it all out. Someday, when I had a little free time.

  It seemed like these guys weren’t going to be shooting at me, but to make sure I picked up their submachine guns. They looked like Bart’s UZI-replica water pistols but they were much heavier. I spun them off into the river. Then I ran for the gangplank, carrying my last bottle of putrescine like a grenade. “Gangplank” is a primitive word; it was an aluminum footbridge, complete with safety railings and a nonslip surface. And I was right in the middle of it when the hatch opened up, right in front of me, and Laughlin stepped out.

  The jumbo chrome-plated revolver—the one he’d bought to protect himself from terrorists—looked a little tacky so close to his gold Rolex, but that’s in the nature of a revolver. He was carrying a briefcase in his other hand, an executive to the fucking end. And when he saw me blocking the gangplank, he did a funny thing. He held it up between me and him, like a shield, and peeked at me over the top. I got a couple of steps closer. Then he dropped the briefcase.

  Which didn’t help me a bit. I wasn’t here to subpoena the bastard. I kept moving, trying to decide when I was going to chicken out and jump off into the water.

  Movement on a ship ain’t easy. The stairs are narrowed and steep, the hatches weigh a lot and you have to step over a big ledge when you go through them. Laughlin was centered in the hatchway, but his right shoulder, the one attached to the revolver, was interfered with by the doorframe. When he tried to bring his arm up, he twitched against the trigger—already had the thing cocked, the guy was a born killer—and fired off a shot underneath the pier.

  I wound up and tossed a kind of weak Bob Stanley palm-ball in the general direction of his face. The jar described a neat stinky parabola through space, bounced off the top of his head and exploded behind him. He fired again and drilled a hole in the Basco factory. I was scared enough to fall down on my face. Hard to run with an oxygen tank on your back, damn hard.

  He had to be wading through a putrescine sea by now anyway, but he didn’t notice. A good yuppie has no sense of smell. Laughlin’s next shot hit a railing support right next to me and drilled a few metal splinters in my direction. Some of them stuck in my flesh and one shattered the face plate on my Darth Vader mask. Laughlin closed in for a closer shot, made the mistake of stepping through the hatchway and then Boone nailed him in the ear with the output of a CO2 fire extinguisher.

  I fucked up my hand trying to rip all those little triangles of glass out of my facemask. Managed to smear a nice gob of blood and putrescine directly on the bridge of my nose. I could still breathe bottled air, fortunately.

  Several barfing blue-collar gnomes came up from below, stumbled over the writhing Laughlin and headed toward me, which is to say they tried to get the fuck out of there. Boone had grabbed Laughlin’s revolver and that scared the shit out of them.

  I grabbed the mask and pulled it away from my mouth. “Take him!” I shouted, pointing at Laughlin. “Get that fucker out of here. Take him with you.”

  If we stole the ship with them on board, it’d be kidnapping: a serious charge. We had to get Laughlin off. But if we dragged him off, that might be kidnapping too.

  They grabbed Laughlin and dragged him down the gangplank. The ship was empty. Boone had put on an oxygen mask, he’d stolen from a fire box somewhere.

  He was pointing at Laughlin’s briefcase. He gave it a kick so it slid a few feet away, then brought the revolver down and fired at it. The bullet dug a crater in the fine Moroccan leather, then stopped. Kevlar-lined. Anti-terrorist luggage for the paranoid executive.

  For the first time, I got a chance to look down the river, toward the Mystic River and the open sea. The megatug, Extra Stout, was crawling toward us through the blue predawn light, looking like a power plant on a toboggan, plugging the entire river, kicking out a galaxy of black smoke. It was atonement time for Clan Gallagher. 21,000 horses of Irish diesel proceeded ass-backwards, shaking the earth and the water, rattling the windows of the factory. It almost drowned out the meaty splash made when we deposited the gangplank into the Everett River.

  We had to
get this damn ship disconnected from the pier. That was the whole objective. It was connected by a bow line, a stern line, and two spring lines: four lines. Something big and heavy slapped into my hand. Boone had gotten me a fire ax. He had one of his own.

  “This is your only warning,” said a voice over some loudspeakers. “Put your hands in the air now or we will be forced to shoot.”

  One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to bitts back there.

  Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don’t get anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both techniques on the spring line, and I didn’t chop it through, but I reduced it to a few shreds of yarn that could be relied on to break. Bone severed the stern line in about four strokes.

  The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn’t see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.

  Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the oxygen mask and splashed it.

  By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin’s briefcase in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was going to take it out to Extra Stout, now about fifty feet away; they’d attach it to a hawser, and we’d haul that up here and attach it to the Basco Explorer. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.

  I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.

  Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant crack-crack-crack.

  “M-16s,” Boone said, “or AR-15s, actually.”

  I slid the briefcase over to him. “I’m done with my part,” he explained, and kicked it back to me.

  Sawdust flew and a narrow trench appeared in the deck about four feet away from me. At this range, the rounds from the rifles had picked up a vicious tumbling action that would cause them to chew around inside your body like some kind of parasite from outer space.

  My air tank exploded and I felt myself being stabbed in the back. There was continuing noise; I was hollering but that wasn’t just me. It was the Extra Stout’s boathorn, giving us the signal to pull. Boone was going to need help so I got the briefcase in between my face and the water tower and crawled forward, toward the hawse-hole.

  I found the rope and started pulling on it. Boone didn’t seem to be helping any. There was a lot of slack and then it started pulling back.

  Joe Gallagher had told me to look for the towing bitts—sturdy posts sticking out of the deck. If I looped the hawser onto anything else, the Extra Stout would just rip it loose. I found the bitts and rolled their way, trying to keep that briefcase with me, hauling on that rope. If I kept hauling, I’d find Gallagher’s hawser. A Kevlar towing line. Kevlar—a wonder material, doubly useful tonight. A product of America’s chemical industry. Helping to keep our nation strong. But it was heavy. I put a turn of the rope around the bitt so that it wouldn’t slide back on me, and kept pulling on the fucker.

  The briefcase jumped into the air as it soaked up a few high-velocity rounds and landed on the deck, out of my reach. I was judging the distance to it when everything was drowned out by sound and light. Maybe they’d thrown up some star flares and started artillery bombardment. This was deep-shit industrial noise, loud enough to cause kidney failure, and fulgurating light, brighter than the sun.

  Time to surrender. I scooted away from the cleat, waving my hands. I writhed loose from the remains of the air tank, but it still felt like someone was standing on my back in hockey skates. That allowed me to roll over, belly up like every fish in the Harbor, and stare into the unpolluted heavens. But there was something in the way. Fifty feet above me, a symbolic eyeball looked down from a halogen tornado: a chopper from CBS News.

  They wouldn’t blow us away on national TV, would they? Highly mediapathic. If they were still shooting, they were missing. I started pulling on the rope again. Boone wasn’t helping me because he’d been pretty badly shot.

  It went on forever. CBS News would have to edit. The viewing public was sitting around and watching as I endlessly hauled on a fucking rope. On and on and on. CBS watched, the snipers and the guards watched, Gallagher’s crew watched, Boone kind of watched through unblinking eyes. No one said anything.

  And finally I was holding a big, fat eye splice in my hands, a loop at the end of the Kevlar line, thick as my wrist. The end of the rope. The one that’s supposed to go over the bitt. Sailors call it the bitter end. So I tossed it over the bitt, crawled way up to the prow, pulled myself up to my knees, and gave the Extra Stout the thumbs up.

  The navy mine exploded and sent up a waterspout and a shock wave that nearly swatted the chopper out of the air. Pretty soon the ship started to list—or was that me? I looked up to wave goodbye to the snipers, but the water tower wasn’t there anymore. The Everett River Bridge was above me. The derelicts were down there raising a couple of McDonald’s pseudoshakes, toasting my health, cheering me on. Brothers in arms.

  37

  Joe Gallagher hauled us down the river into a sprawling media dawn. Everyone had come out. Tanya was the first on board; she and Bart climbed up on top of the bridge and hoisted the Toxic Jolly Roger. Tanya was perfect because she was a victim, she knew some things about chemistry, and she was pissed. The putrescine was a definite problem, but journalists who knew how to hold their noses could get down into the belly of the Basco Explorer and find incredible things.

  It was all tremendously illegal, the evidence would have been useless in court—if we had been cops. We weren’t. And if a noncop gets some evidence, even through a criminal act, you can use it to prosecute.

  Of course, even when you have legally correct evidence, corporations rarely suffer in this country. Look at any big government contractor for the Pentagon or NASA. They can get away with murder.

  In the media, it’s a different story. Three hundred years ago, in Massachusetts, criminals were put in stocks in the public square and mocked. Today, we can’t send those executives to jail, but we can kick them out of civilized society, put them through unendurable emotional stress, and that’s just as effective. So Pleshy and Laughlin were being kicked out of civilized society while Boone and I were being taken to the trauma center on a chopped ambulance.

  I was suffering from several pissant flesh wounds. Dr. J. gave me that disappointing news. Boone had a sucking chest wound, which I hadn’t noticed because I couldn’t hear it, and because I was distracted by other things. He’d been able to roll onto his back and press the forearm of his rubber suit against the wound, lubricating the seal with his own blood. That didn’t seal it completely but it got a little more air into that lung, kept him from passing out. He had to have half his lung and a good chunk of his liver taken out. No big deal, livers grow back if you don’t booze them to death.

  When I woke up, Debbie was sitting there in a bathrobe, holding my hand. Yes, we were talking guilt. Guilt and happiness. She was doing pretty well. Organophosphates are not bioaccumulative. If you survive the dose, they go away and you’re back to normal.

  The explosion of the mine threw Tom Akers way over to the far side of the railway and they didn’t find him until the next day. They did an autopsy, because there were so many possible causes of death, and discovered that he was riddled with cancer. We got in touch with his doctor in Seattle and found out that he’d known of the problem for a couple of months; long enough, I guess, to build up a pretty intense hatred for Alvin Pleshy.

  Now we’re into the part where we sort out all the legal responsibility. Maybe I
’ll go to jail, who knows. Basco would have to spend lost of money on lawyers to really nail me, and they just declared bankruptcy.

  Which sounds kind of satisfying, but it isn’t, because bankruptcy is just another ploy, a way to get out of their union contracts and reorganize the company into a lean, mean, litigating machine. I’ve bought a lot of BMWs for a lot of corporate lawyers.

  On the other hand, they’re in huge trouble and eventually they really are going to pay. Dolmacher’s evidence was suppressed for a few days but now it’s out, and it’s the mediapathic goods. The attorney general announced that any corporate execs who participated in the contamination of Dolmacher’s body are going to be charged with attempted murder. I hear they have lots of weight machines at the State Penitentiary.

  Eventually, Basco’s going to eat shit and die. So, when they let me out of the hospital, I picked up a magic marker at an office supply store, went down to the yacht club and drew Basco’s logo onto the nose of our new Zodiac. This one was donated by the employees of a software company on Route 128.

  Then I went for a spin around the Harbor. On my way out of the club, I blew by a nice fifty-foot yacht that was going out for an afternoon cruise. All the well-dressed people grinned, pointed, raised their glasses. I smiled, gave them the finger, and throttled her up.