Crawlers (4 page)

“
I
remember you,” Adair said. “What up, Deputy Dawg.”

Mason shot her a
Be cool, I’m holding!
look.

But Deputy Sprague smiled at her. “Hey, I remember—you were the one calling me that. Where was it, over at Quiebra High, right? How those Cougars doing?”

“They suck.”

“That’s what I heard. Listen, you kids need to get on home. Nothing cool going to happen now, we all just waitin’ around till they can get a salvage rig out here, and that’s going to take hours—”

“
Nothing cool,
he says!” Waylon blurted. “Deputy, a
black helicopter
just landed and some spooky guys just got out. I mean, they’re probably military intelligence—so like, what?”

Deputy Sprague chuckled and shook his head. “Son—” “Waylon’s sort of excitable about stuff like that,” Adair said, and instantly regretted it when Waylon shot her a look.

“What I think is interesting,” Gunderston said, “is that they must’ve been tracking this thing, but there was nothing about it on TV, the Internet—nothing. When that other satellite fell in the ocean near Australia, the whole world was watching.”

“
Exactly,
dude!” Waylon said. “And those guys in the black chopper—they’re like secret operatives and shit—”

“I got it on the radio, son,” Deputy Sprague said, chuckling. “They’re Air Force guys who’ve been tracking this thing, is all. That’s not a black chopper, that’s dark green. And it probably wasn’t on TV because it caught them by surprise, too. It fell with no damn warning.” He went into more of a cop mode, his body language changing to emanate authority as he raised his hands palms outward. “Now, ya’ll move on out—they’re not even letting the Channel Five people down here. Everybody got to go—that’s all of you folks!”

Adair looked closer at the helicopter, its rotors still whirling. “Okay, it’s dark green.”

Waylon whispered to her, “We should try to get around the cops, get closer—”

But then it hit her. Salvage!

“Deputy Sprague, my dad does commercial diving and salvage— and he’s only a mile from here!”

“If he gets his rig out here . . . I mean, hon, I can’t guarantee—”

“Mason! We gotta go! Now! I gotta tell my dad!”

“Whatever,” Mason said agreeably.

“Okay,” Waylon said, as they trotted back to the van, “but I’m going to get out at the top of the road and circle back through the brush up there. I’m gonna watch this thing.”

“Whoa,” Mason said. “You are insane in the fucking membrane, cuz, ya kna’mean?”

Dad was in his pajamas, in his open bathrobe, in his slippers, and in a funk of depression—he’d probably gone off his meds again—leaving his personal imprint on the living room sofa. He was hunched, scowling, over an old, scratched-up acoustic guitar. “I can’t remember the chords anymore,” he muttered as Adair came in.

Dad’s long face and long nose seemed longer when he was depressed, because his head was ducked. His dark eyes seemed more like a lost bloodhound’s.

She wondered for a moment if he was going to have another breakdown. There’d been only that one time; he’d just sort of frozen up, like a computer running too many programs, and wouldn’t speak for two days, shook his head. He’d hung around in his pajamas a lot before that, too.

But she remembered, then, going to work on the boat with him when she was little: how proud she’d been seeing him in his diving gear, grinning at her, giving her a thumbs-up as he went over the side.

More than once he’d saved lives. People stuck belowdecks in boats run aground, the hold slowly filling.

It was hard to remember that guy, looking at him now.

“Dad, there’s a salvage job! Right this minute!”

He struck a sour chord and shook his head mournfully. “Now? They have to contract with me—”

“Nick?”

Mom came from the kitchen, a sponge in her hand, shaking her head with that practiced expression of disgusted amazement she had. “You need
work
? Hel-
lo
? Sometimes you have to
go where the
work is
?” She looked at Adair. Her sharp features, those forever-down-turned lips, seemed skeptical, disbelieving anytime she looked at Adair. “Where’s the job, Adair? And why are you jumping up and down, like there’s ants in your drawers?”

“I’m trying to tell you that—that there was
a crash
!” She didn’t want to say that it was a satellite. Explaining would just mean more delay.

“A car? Someone run off a pier?”

“No, it’s a—an aircraft or something. A small craft kind of thing. Dad, there’s government guys out there. It’s at the end of Norton Slough Road—where that old dock was, on Suisun Bay?”

Mom looked interested. Government checks could be pretty big, for divers. She walked across to her husband on her quick, small feet and firmly took the guitar from his hands. He didn’t react except with his usual slumped appearance of passive hurt, which was, Adair knew dimly, some indirect form of aggression.

“Nick, we need the money. No matter what you and I decide to do—the money’s going to be necessary. Get up and get over there. Don’t even go to the boat, your gear’s ready in the truck.”

“I don’t think I could right now—”

“Nick!”

He twitched at the sharp, barking syllable, rather more than he needed to, and sighed deeply, got up, grunting with apparent effort, and went into the bedroom to change. Adair wondered if Dad had already decided to go, but he’d forced Mom to yell at him so he could make her look like a bitch again.

A guitar stand stood beside the sofa in the cluttered, untidy living room. Adair thought there was almost an affection, a wistfulness, when Mom walked over and put the guitar on the stand. The way you put an urn with the ashes of the dead on a mantel.

“Mom, what’d you mean?”

Silkie, their Siamese cat, jumped up onto the little lamp table beside Adair, exactly where she wasn’t supposed to be. An old cat, with kinked tail and patchy fur. Instead of pushing her off the table, Adair gave her what she’d come up there for, a scratch behind the ears, a rub on the top of the head. “Silkie silk, you old silkie silk.” Silkie looked up at her with cloudy eyes and gave out a gravelly noise of response. But Adair was still waiting for her mom to reply.

Mom ran her chewed-up nails through her wispy hair. “What’d I mean about what?”

“You said something to Dad just now about ‘no matter what you and I decide to do.’ ”

“Nothing in particular.” Mom turned to go back to the kitchen.

Cal was there suddenly, in the doorway to the hall that led to his bedroom. “She meant the divorce. They’re talking about getting a divorce.”

“Cal?” Mom didn’t look at him as she spoke. She went into the kitchen, saying, “Don’t talk when you don’t know what you’re talking about. I realize that’s hard, when you’re almost a grand total of nineteen years old, but just don’t.” The rest of it half-muted, coming from the next room. “—just try.”

Cal was taller than Dad or Mom, with a head that seemed slightly too big for his body. He’d let his hair find its own destiny with thick brown dreadlocks. He wore horn-rim glasses, precisely because they were ugly, and cutoff oversize army pants, a camouflage jacket, a Rodney Mullen T-shirt stained with pizza sauce. His pale, heavy-jawed face wasn’t particularly reminiscent of Mom or Dad, which elicited, from time to time, the usual “should’ve kept an eye on the cable guy” jokes. Jokes that made Mom laugh nervously, Adair had noticed.

Cal looked at Adair, then tilted his head toward the backyard and went down the hall to the back door. She knew what that meant. She went out the front way—holding the front door open for Silkie to go out, too—and walked around the house through grass a month overdue for cutting. Silkie vanished into the shadows.

Adair met Cal beside the rain-warped glider in the backyard; the yard with its high grass and small lemon tree. Even in November, there were dewy lemons in it. She couldn’t remember why they’d started meeting in the backyard that way. It started about the time they felt their parents were listening in on them.

“You’re full of shit,” she said as she walked up to him. “They’re, all, scowly and mean twenty-four/seven, it’s been like that for years. Nothing’s any worse than before. They’re not breaking up.”

“That’s funny you saying I’m full of shit—when you’re steaming it from the ears. Beyond that, of course, you suck.”

“You suck, moron,” she answered, as expected.

“You suck, retard-o-girl.” Then in his world-weary explaining-things-to-the-little-sister voice, he said, “But
no
, uh-uh, that’s totally what they’re talking about—divorce. Dad’s all stressed out about money and they just . . . hate each other.”

His voice broke, just barely, when he said those last three words.

“They
don’t
. Oh, hey, you should see what happened over at Suisun Bay. I didn’t want to say it, they wouldn’t believe me. The cop there said it’s a crashed satellite! What if Dad could be their salvage guy? That would be, all, national TV news and shit. He could get some big-ass work from that.”

His eyes widened. He looked at her with his head tilted. “Now you’re really full of shit. Satellite!”

“No, it is! And there’s like military choppers and stuff. Just ask Mason, he was there!”

“ ’Kay, I’m gonna go check this out. But you better be right about the job. There goes Dad in his truck.”

She sat down on the glider swing, which was broken; she could sit on it, but it didn’t glide anymore. She shook her head.

“They chased us out, though, Cal. They won’t even let the TV news van in there now.” Something occurred to her then, and she looked anxiously after Dad’s truck. “I dunno, that thing down there could be radioactive. They’ll give Dad a protective suit or something, won’t they?”

“I don’t know. Most likely.” His voice was husky with excitement as he gazed off toward the bay. “Suisun Bay . . .”

She chewed her lip, thinking about Dad down there. “It’s the access road to that closed-down restaurant, where there used to be a dock—”

“Oh,
hell
yeah!” He snapped his fingers, on his left and right hands at once, the way DJ MixLord did when he was about to scratch some old vinyl. “I know that place! We used to go to that dock at night to smoke pot and listen to our boxes. Fuck it—I’m gonna check it out, too. So they chase me off, so what.”

“I did see a guy with a Geiger counter.”

“Radiation. Yeah, right. It’s a chunk of metal that fell in a hole. I mean, come on, bee-atch? How dangerous could it be?”

3

November 19, night

Nick knew at a glance he’d have to bluff his way past the U.S. Marines standing on the other side of the yellow tape. But they looked as puzzled as everyone else about all the hubbub that surrounded the ruins of the dock. Sometimes, clueless people were a way in.

“Boys,” Nick said, approaching, carrying his light diving gear. Taking in the soldiers, the Coast Guard, the chopper; feeling excitement rise in him. “I’m the salvage crew, at least for starters. I’ve got to have a look before I decide if I need to bring in the rest of my people.” Sure, like he had employees anymore.

He glanced past them. A couple of guys in white lab coats, one with a Geiger counter, stood at the stoved-in dock.

Where were the local cops? Left, already? The Feds must’ve chased them off.

A few coastguardsmen stood by the dock wreckage, a few more watching, leaning on the rail of the white boat chugging in idle, just offshore. He might be too late; the coasties had their own divers.

The taller of the two young jarheads scratched his crew cut and put his helmet back on. His friend had a big, slightly crooked nose. Both of them had carbines slung over their shoulders on straps. “I’ll have to get that cleared through channels. This is DIA territory now—NSA, the whole route.”

The shorter marine, a stocky guy with a self-important expression, turned the other a stern look. “Yo, bud, can that
DIA
talk— that’s need-to-know shit, man.”

Nick thought,
DIA? The Defense Intelligence Agency. That’s the
military’s CIA. And they’re keeping it quiet.

“Anyway,” the taller marine said, irritated with his pal’s reproach, “I’ll have to run it by Sergeant Dirkowski. They put him in charge till—”

Nick snapped his fingers just as if he really recognized the name. “Dirkowski! That’s who I’m supposed to talk to.” Nick patted his pockets. “Shit! I’ve got a fax here somewhere. Maybe I left it on my desk.”

A stocky man in a Green Beret uniform—ruddy-faced guy with pale blue eyes, pig-shaven under the beret—strode over to them, looking sharply at Nick as he came. A sergeant, Nick noticed. He took a chance, and said, “Ah, Sergeant Dirkowski!” The sergeant carried something that seemed a cross between a little walkie-talkie and a cell phone. Plunging ahead with his bluff, Nick went on briskly, “I’m your salvage diver.” And handed him a card.

Dirkowski looked at the card. His thin lips flickered a smile. “You are, huh. Well, Mr. Leverton? I’m afraid this is a government operation.”

Nick wasn’t going to give up easily. This thing looked like a decent payday. He needed to show his family he could do something right again. Hell, he needed to show
himself
. “Sergeant, I do government contracting all the time. They don’t have enough trained deep-water guys. Now this looks shallow to me, here, but I’m still your best man—”

“Sorry—” Dirkowski broke off as a voice crackled from the small walkie-talkie thing in his hand—a new model to Nick. He gestured “wait” and put the little instrument to his ear. “Dirkowski. Yeah, do tell. What do you mean, am I surprised? Never surprised by snafu, just surprised when there isn’t one. Well, two hours is no good. Waitaminnut, I might have something else here.” He lowered the walkie-talkie and looked appraisingly at Nick. “So you’re a salvage diver? We don’t have a diver on the boat we have here, and the boat coming with a diver doesn’t have working grapples—not that’ll work on something heavy as a satellite. How soon could you get down there?”

“I, uh . . .” Nick cleared his throat, playing for time till he could think this out.
A satellite?
“You sure there’s anything left to pull up? I mean, if it came from space—and hit a dock . . .”

“Tell you something I don’t want to hear repeated—it hit the water out there first, at an angle, almost like you’d skip a rock. It went under, came up again—one of the orbital control rockets must have refired—and smashed down here from about, maybe, a hundred yards up. So, could be it’s partly intact.”

Nick stared. Was that possible? For it to hit the water and then jump up and—

“Well?” Dirkowski snapped, looking at his watch. “Can you do the job or not?”

“Uh, yeah! Anytime you want. In a hot minute. Once I’ve got my boat here, I mean—” Except for the uniform, Dirkowski looked more like a hungry plainsman than a spit-and-polish Green Beret. “I—I have to do that, if you don’t have a crane with salvage grapples. I’ve got a small crane, the hooks, everything you need but—”

Dirkowski shook his head. “No time. I’m going to have to—who the hell is that?”

The Green Beret was glaring toward a converted fishing trawler easing up to the remains of the dock. The coastguardsmen were shouting, waving for it to move off. But the boat, with only two running lights, came on anyway.

Nick knew the boat by its silhouette. “Actually, that’s my boat,
Skirmisher
. My son’s at the wheel, I expect. The kid’s thinking ahead.”

He smiled at Dirkowski, who nodded. “Okay, I’ll call Washington, authorize your craft.”

Nick ducked under the yellow tape, thinking,
All this security.
What the hell is down there?

“I should be pissed off, Cal,” Nick was saying as he adjusted his mask, preparing to step backwards off the deck of the
Skirmisher
.

Shooting some lube into the winch, Cal grinned at him. “Hey, Dad, I got here when you needed me here. I got the instincts, man. I got skills.”

They were on the deck of
Skirmisher
and Nick was feeling too good about getting this job to give the boy hell for running his boat behind his back. It had worked out, and it felt good to be on a deck with Cal again. Last two years, Cal hadn’t shown much interest in anything except DJ culture and raves.

“Yeah, well, you’re never again to run my boat without asking me. This time it worked out. But listen, you don’t talk about this shit. You signed that paper, too, Cal. You’re eighteen now, you swore, when you signed that paper, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. Nondisclosure. It’s not that big a deal, it’s not like the public doesn’t know but—they take it seriously.” He gestured toward the sergeant.

“Dad? I’ll be frosty.”

“All right, get that winch going. I want to take the hook down with me, in case it’s an easy rig-up—which isn’t likely, but—the hell with it. Here goes.”

And with that, he stepped off backwards and dropped into the water, his head tilted so the water pressure didn’t pop his mask off.

Cool darkness closed over Nick, shutting off the surface sounds. Now there was just the sound of his exhalations bubbling, the background rumble of two idling boat engines.

Then there was the light, shoreward, maybe twenty yards off, where the coasties’ searchlight sliced the water under the smashed dock.

He’d been a little stunned when Dirkowski had confirmed the thing was a satellite. It could’ve hit all that ocean, all that bay— even his own house.

But it had hit this little dock, right in the middle. Like it wanted something to break its fall at the end; something near the shore.

Funny how inanimate things seemed to take on a life and destiny of their own. When you were in salvage, hoisting safes and barrels and classic cars up out of the water, you thought about those things.

He looked up expectantly and there they were: Above, in black silhouette, hung the three big, blunt-point, jointed metal hooks on the line lowering toward him like some sea creature reaching down.

He took a small flashlight from his belt, switched it on, grabbed the nearest hook, and swam, towing it behind him, toward the crash site.

He angled himself downward, almost burrowing into the old familiar pressure, till he was a few yards over the bottom. A kind of foul gray glaze of processed sewage and boat-spew clung to things down there, making the sand striations on the bottom aluminum-washboard colored, sealing a sunken tumble of old truck tires into the muck. Even a living crab, sidling out from under some drunken boater’s sunken beer cooler, was coated with the drab fuzz—like the bay’s bottom was moldy.

That was Suisun Bay. It made him want to get out to the Channel Islands with Cal again, where the water, at least, was honest seawater.

He was a few yards from the leaning pylons that stood like damaged church pillars, with those lights shining down from above.

He shivered in his wetsuit. A ruined church? Odd, the thoughts he was having. Like some part of his mind, equally submerged, was trying to tell him something.

Closer . . . He reminded himself to try not to touch the pylons and beams leaning over the crashed thing; the wood had been cracked, smashed open, and he could see the yellow wood bright beside a tarry black coating. The beams had to be precarious. This was a lot more dangerous than he’d let on to Cal and Dirkowski. But risk was why he got paid pretty well—when he could get the work.

Kicking down into a deeper, heavier coldness. Bubbles streaming. There, a gleam of metal under the wooden wreckage—an irregular oval in the sand. A few angular projections thrust out of the grimy sediment on one side.

Closer. The exposed part of its curved hull was like a giant cracked metal eggshell, silvery and blackened, mostly buried in the sand, with the pylons and splintery beam ends and depth-muted lights all around it.

He squinted along the beam of his own flashlight. The satellite might be thirty feet long, all told. Nothing much to hook on in the exposed surfaces. Dirkowski had said it was shaped like a cylinder, with communication extrusions and rocket vents. The parts projecting out of the sand looked fragile, like they’d just break off. He was going to have to dig out around it, find something sound to grapple. Maybe have to loop some chain over those pylons first, pull them away from the thing for clearance. He hoped he didn’t have to use a sand sucker. He’d have to borrow one from the Maritime School.

Nick swam closer, into another, heavier fold of water pressure, and into colder water, within reach of the bottom. A single, sickly, hand-size fish darted past his mask.

He thought he saw a bright metallic movement within the jagged crack along the top of the satellite’s hull. His light flashing off its parts, he supposed.

All in all, though, it was surprisingly intact. But from what they’d told him, it’d come down at a shallow angle. Maybe this satellite
had
sort of chosen this place—because he’d heard Dirkowski say something about “firing orbital control rockets” as it came down. And how it hadn’t received orders to do that.

Nick had heard that a lot of the more expensive satellites had small rockets on them, used for correcting orbital position. But from what he’d read, the correctional rockets weren’t designed for atmospheric reentry. Weird that the satellite had “decided” to fire rockets to slow an entry it probably wasn’t designed to make.

Questions rose in his mind like the streams of bubbles around him. Had the DIA themselves fired those rockets remotely, brought it to this spot? Had they slowed its descent so it’d come down intact? Was it even an American satellite, or some kind of stolen Russian bird?

But then he saw the markings. Those weren’t Cyrillic letters. He could make out some of the part that wasn’t hidden by sand and cloudiness:

NATIONAL AERONAUTIC S

Below that:

DEPARTMENT OF DE

And the usual enigmatic array of numbers and letters that must mean something to some bureaucratic bean counter somewhere.

So this is one of those NASA-military collaborations.

As he thought all this he flippered close enough to brush sand away from the edges, looking for a fixture to hook. Just pulling it out of the sand might tear off any part he grappled to, though. Sand liked to hold on to things, once it had them. No, they’d have to dig it out.

He was floating almost upside down, angling his feet upward over the satellite, kicking now and then to keep from being nudged back up by water pressure. The lights from above danced around him, wavering in surface moil and splitting on the sand, on the metal edges of the satellite’s shining fracture.

Dirkowski had said the radiation level was negligible, but best not to touch the thing with his bare hands.

Still, he could save time if he could get the grapple into that crack, grip some of the superstructure under the hull. He reached into the crack.

He felt around. Something . . .

It felt like something was reaching up, in response, from inside the satellite. A string of bubbles, maybe—but like it was feeling around. And its touch stung very slightly. Could be he was feeling some sort of residual electric charge.

The stinging passed. Then he felt something else, almost like a girl touching his palm teasingly with her soft fingers.

Testing, tentative, almost playful.

A second dark helicopter, marked only with D-23, had to wait for the first to take off before it could land. Major Stanner jumped down before the Blackhawk had quite set down, and—instinctively ducking under the whipping blades, one hand securing his hat against the rotor blast—he jogged over to the ruined docks.

Sergeant Dirkowski was there, talking into a cell phone. Stanner knew him from the DIA; he’d gone out on some black ops in Pakistan Stanner had helped plan.

The Green Beret broke the cell phone connection and saluted as Stanner approached. Stanner returned the salute. “Sergeant. That doesn’t look like a Navy SEAL vessel.”

“No, sir, the SEALs couldn’t get a man here with the equipment in time. This man said someone had called him to replace the SEAL diver—”

“What man, where?”

Dirkowski nodded toward the water. “He’s already down there, sir.”

Stanner’s mouth went dry. “Dirkowski . . . you tell this man that there was . . .” He couldn’t remember if Dirkowski had been briefed on this bird. He thought not.

“I warned him there was some radiation danger—not to touch the thing directly.”

Stanner grunted, shaking his head. So he hadn’t been briefed. Great.