Darkside (41 page)

“Okay,” Branner said evenly. “Then we're looking for who did throw Dell off the roof. Assuming someone did. Our target is not Markham, unless we see evidence—hard evidence—that she did something to Dell.”

The midshipman nodded, then exhaled. “Got it,” he said. “I've got to talk to some people. And exams start this week. Makes it harder.”

“Call this number,” Branner said, handing him a card. “And remember those pictures.”

“Yes, ma'am. Serious shit. And ma'am?”

“What?”

“The officers are always saying not to confuse the Academy with the fleet, the real world? You shouldn't confuse the mids with the officers, either, okay?”

Branner looked at Jim, who nodded. “Got it,” he said.

“Yes indeed,” Branner added.

Hays nodded, squared his shoulders, and walked away.

“And thank you,” Branner called after him, her voice echoing in the rotunda. She turned to Jim. “That was interesting,” she said. “So they do know something?”

“I think
he
does.”

“Then why the hell hasn't he come forward before this?”

“Because they're so close to getting out of here. So close to achieving what they've all worked their asses off for these past one thousand four hundred and sixty days, and they do count them, every day. And up to now, they probably thought the investigation would find the answer.”

“So what's changed?”

“Maybe now they're sensing a cover-up in the making?”

“Why would the firsties care?”

“Because Dell, even if he was only a plebe, was a mid. One of them. Remember what I told you about the rules of the game here. This is going to get very interesting.”

 

By 3:30, Jim and the chief, accompanied by an elderly PWC engineer, were walking the ground behind the tennis courts, trying to match the tunnel maps with a possible location for the top end of the shaft that led down into the old ammunition storage room. Branner had gone back to her office to update her case file with her notes from their meeting with Captain Rogers and the midshipmen. Jim had scheduled a briefing for the entire tunnel surveillance team, including Branner, for 4:30 at the Academy police building over at the naval station.

“There's nothing that we're using that would go down that far,” the PWC engineer said. “This whole area was recovered from the river forty years ago and filled in. That ammo bunker's gotta be thirty feet down.”

“Well, there was a ladder going up, but I couldn't see how high, and I wasn't going to climb up in there by myself.”

“Shit,” the engineer said, looking at the diagrams. “I won't go down there at all. That old brickwork's like marzipan. One good vibration, the whole damn thing would come down.”

“Well, there's nothing around here that looks like a ventilator shaft or storm drain or any other thing,” the chief said. “I wonder if it connects underground to something that goes into Bancroft Hall.”

They studied the diagrams. There were no utility tunnels or even lines anywhere near where they were standing. There were only the eighty-foot-high light towers, which illuminated the courts at night.

“Okay, I give up,” Jim said. “That whole ammunition bunker complex should be beyond the eighth wing's foundations. If that shaft comes up, it has to be around here somewhere.”

“Hold on a minute,” the engineer said. “The eighth wing is built entirely on landfill. The original Bancroft had six wings, and a street between the end of the fifth and sixth wings and the seawall. I was here in 1956. The seventh and eighth wings weren't here, nor was the land they're built on.”

“Which means this diagram's wrong,” Jim said. “Fort Severn couldn't have been where this diagram shows it. It would have had to be back alongside the—what, sixth wing, right?”

The PWC engineer nodded. The chief was confused by the wing numbering. Jim explained that the wings were numbered second, fourth, sixth, and eighth on one side of Bancroft, and first, third, fifth, and seventh on the other side. “Like channel buoys used to be—right side were even numbers, left side were odd numbers. Naval tradition stuff.”

“Okay, then, if Fort Severn was back here,” he said, pointing on the map to the building right behind the eighth wing, “then that vent shaft would be coming up…very near the eighth wing. Not out here in the tennis courts. So we need to get into the basement of the eighth wing.”

They folded up the maps and walked back toward the eighth wing. “I wonder how many other errors there are in these diagrams,” Jim said.

“The diagrams of the active utility tunnels are correct,” the engineer said. “The Fort Severn stuff goes back over a century and a half. I'm not surprised it's been displaced.
Someone was probably supposed to survey it, and got scared.”

“And then faked it,” Jim said.

“Yeah, probably. Can't blame him.”

They entered the eighth wing through the doors beneath the sixth wing–eighth wing overpass bridge. There were dozens of doors in the eighth wing's basement. They led to storage rooms, utility bays, extracurricular club rooms, and laundry and trash collection areas. “Hell,” Jim said, “This'll take a week to search.”

“We don't have to search this,” the chief said. “All we gotta do is catch the sumbitch coming out of that oak door into the modern tunnels. Do we really care how he gets into the Fort Severn tunnels? Now that we know it's probably feasible?”

“You're right,” Jim said. “We don't. Let's go.”

Using the access grate near Dahlgren Hall, they went down into the main utility tunnel and examined the oak doors again. They were still locked, and there were no further signs of anyone using a key or a jimmy to work the locks.

“I've got my surveillance team setting up motion detectors throughout the tunnel complex,” the chief said. “We'll set one here, pointed at this door. They're low-level lasers. Break the beam, it sends an alert and its location number to a central station. Size of a pack of cigarettes. We can track him through the tunnels, take him where we want to.”

“How will these things communicate with the outside?”

“They don't; so we'll need a comms node underground. I'll cover all that at the briefing.”

“All right, I guess we're done here,” Jim said. He turned to the engineer. “We need this whole op to stay hush-hush, so please ensure that there's nothing about it on your internal LAN, okay?”

“Gotcha covered,” the engineer said. “The Public Works officer knows about it, but that's it.”

“Good. Chief, I'm going back to my office. I'll bring Agent Branner over with me at sixteen-thirty. See you at the briefing.”

Ev didn't get through to Liz until just before five o'clock. He told her about his run-in with the commandant.

“Did he directly threaten to do something to Julie?”

“Yes,” Ev said. “He threatened to delay her commissioning. That would put her date of rank permanently behind her entire class. I'd call that a threat.”

“Because he thinks she's withholding information?”

“I think someone's telling him that, yes.”

Liz didn't say anything for a moment.

“I mean, I don't know what the hell to do about this. Julie's not listening to either one of us.”

“That's the problem,” Liz said. “Maybe I'll have another go at that security officer, Jim Hall.”

“You think he'll talk to you?”

“Maybe. He's a graduate. He might be sympathetic to Julie's situation.”

“This is really frustrating,” Ev said. “You should have seen Robbins. One minute all sweetness and light in front of my colleagues, presenting me this stupid award certificate, the next acting like some sort of gestapo director.”

“They're under a ton of pressure,” Liz said. “Media, congressional, the Secretary of the Navy, probably. Let me see if I can talk to Hall. Want to get together later tonight?”

“I'd probably be lousy company,” he said. “I want to smack somebody.”

“Go for a long run. Or take your boat out. Push it hard. I have to go out to a chamber of commerce dinner. I'll be back by ten. If you're still all stressed out by then, we'll figure something out.”

Smiling in spite of the tension he felt, Ev promised her he'd be there. He hung up and thought about how direct she was. He couldn't imagine Joanne being so forward. And bedtime with Liz was also very different, although, to be fair, he and Joanne had been married for a long time. But Liz was exciting, direct, challenging without being threatening. He couldn't imagine being in the mood for sex right now,
given everything that was going on with Julie. But Liz was right: Go beat up your body, bleed all this stress into the river, and then go see her. As long as Julie was being obstinate, there wasn't anything he could do to help her. So he'd go do something about his situation. With Liz. There, he thought. That wasn't even hard, was it?

 

By 10:00
P.M
., the entire team was in place. The topside surveillance people were set up at all the Yard grates and were up on a tactical radio net. Jim and Branner were down under Stribling Walk in the main tunnel complex, set up in a telephone switchboard vault. The motion-detector string was in place, ready to transmit alerts via a separate radio frequency, which would be detectable underground. The chief and one radio operator were set up in a mobile CP in the radio van they'd borrowed from the Annapolis cops. The van was hardwired to the retransmitter underground.

The switchboard vault was ten feet by ten feet and filled with equipment cabinets, which kept the room at a humming ninety degrees despite the air-conditioning. Branner was in her NCIS tactical field gear, and Jim was similarly outfitted. Both wore shoulder transceiver mikes provided by the chief. There were no chairs in the switchboard vault and very little room to move around, so Jim and Branner sat shoulder-to-shoulder against one of the equipment racks. The door to the main tunnel was almost closed, but open enough to show a slit of light from the main tunnel.

“This is cozy,” Jim said. “But kind of a boring date.”

“If you and I ever go on a date, that's a word you'll never use,” she replied, looking at her watch for the umpteenth time. Jim wondered if she'd get the ballpoint out pretty soon and start tapping again.

“It's after twenty-two hundred. Did Midshipman Hays ever get back to you?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “You think our vampire's going to make his move tonight?”

“It's a Wednesday. They're not allowed off the reserva
tion on Wednesdays—sort of a reminder of who grants them liberty. The rest of the time, he could just walk out the gate after evening meal.”

“The Annapolis cops said there hadn't been another vampire mugging since Bagger,” she said. “So maybe he got scared.”

Jim remembered the brief look he'd had into the guy's face. “I don't think
scared
's in his lexicon,” he said. “This is one big game to him; the more danger, the bigger the thrill. Plus, the fact that Bagger died isn't common knowledge here at the Academy.”

“Maybe we ought to announce it,” she said. “Let the fucker know what he did.”

“If anything would force him into deep cover, that would certainly do it. We need him to keep doing this.”

She didn't say anything, just looked at her watch again. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. “You pretty confident Hays will give us something?” she asked.

“It might take a little longer than he thought. At some point, he has to talk to Markham. She may go ballistic, or just clam up. But, yeah, he'll come back with something. He wasn't exactly ambivalent about the whole thing.”

They waited some more. Then the radio squawked quietly in their shoulder mikes. It was the chief, making a comms check. There were seven teams in place, including themselves and the team out on the St. John's campus. The chief's call sign was team zero. Each team responded with its number. Branner answered for both of them. “Team three, in position, no contact.”

“Team four, no contact.”

“Team five, no contact.”

“Team six, no contact, no nothing.”

“Team seven, no contact, no vampires.”

“Okay, people,” the chief came up. “Remember, this is surveillance. No contact just means the game hasn't started yet.”

There was an instant of silence, and then a new voice
came up on the circuit. “This is station eight. I've got lots of contacts.”

Another moment of silence, and then the chief was back on. “Who's fucking around?” he called.

No one answered. Jim looked at Branner.
Station
eight? Not team eight? Neither had recognized that voice as being one they'd heard on previous comms checks. Then the motion detector board lighted up.