Darkside (57 page)

He was closer, but not quite close enough. But then he realized he could probably do what she had done, for that short a distance. He positioned himself and began to back-walk up the shaft. His clothes felt heavy as his body came out of the water. He had put the Maglite into his shirt pocket to free his hands, and it was bobbing its feeble beam everywhere.

“Got it,” he said, grabbing the bottom rung of the ladder. The bottom, which had been hanging vertically, pulled out at an angle as he grabbed it, reminding him of the tower jump ladder back in the Nat.

“Okay,” she said. “Let me get off it; then you climb up.”

He waited while she maneuvered above him, and then she told him to come on up. He climbed the ladder, first with his arms and then with both feet and arms, showering water back down into the shaft. When he reached the top, he stopped, puffing with the exertion of breathing the warm, wet air. From this position, he was able to shine the fading beam down onto the bottom of the flap door. There were eight rivet heads out in the middle of the bottom part of the door. He kicked out at the flap. Predictably, it hurt his foot. Whatever it was, it was solid. He could hear the sound of air whistling past some obstacle above the door.

“Look above it,” she said, and he raised the light. He saw the familiar sight of ancient brickwork, the mortar between the joints eroded a half inch into the joints, the bricks uneven in shape and alignment. He climbed a little higher on the ladder and felt the bricks, placing himself face-to-hip with Branner's hunched body. He pushed on the bricks. They didn't move.

“I don't know,” he said wearily. “There are probably several courses there. Feels pretty solid to me.”

“Pull, don't push,” she said, adjusting her position. Her legs were wedged across the shaft and her head was right up at the top of it.

Jim took a deep breath and got very little out of it. The air seemed denser, more moisture than oxygen. He pulled at the most exposed brick. He couldn't be positive, but he thought it did move this time.

“We sure could use a pry bar,” he said. Although not exactly an echo, his voice came right back at him. “I've got a knife, but it's much too small.”

He eased himself back down the ladder two rungs to look at that latch area again and then noticed that his feet were wet. No, not wet—submerged. He pointed the light down,
looked, and swore. The water had risen all the way up the ladder. As he stared, the black water rose above his ankles and onto his shins. Branner saw it, too.

“What do we do!” she wailed.

“Plug the airhole again,
quick
!”

As she reached across to stuff the sleeve back into the crack, the ladder shifted and she lost her perch against the wall. She fell clumsily past the ladder and down into the water, nearly knocking Jim right off the ladder. The rag patch disappeared. Jim swung sideways to avoid being hit and then went upside down on the ladder before he could regain his balance. While Branner thrashed around in the water below him, he scrambled back to the right side of the ladder and climbed back to face the flap door. The flashlight was barely putting out a yellow glow.

He looked down. The water seemed to be coming up faster now, and the whistling noise was louder. Branner was rising with it, hanging on to the ladder but not getting on it. In a few moments, the water would rise all the way to the top of the shaft and would snuff them out. Desperate now, he reached out from the side of the ladder and kicked the flap door with all his strength. It clanged in the darkness, but the latch, or whatever it was, held. The water was up to his hips now, and he could see Branner's face only as a gray blob just beneath his hip.

“Get underwater!” he shouted. “Take a deep breath and go deep. Do it!
Now!
”

He heard her take a huge breath and then the blob disappeared from sight. He pulled the Glock out of his waistband holster, shook it to clear any water out of the barrel, then swung aside and opened fire on the back of the latch. The noise was punishing as he emptied the gun at the back plate of the latch, which was almost submerged. Squinting his eyes and leaning as far out to one side as he could, he fired again and again, shutting his eyes each time a bullet blasted back at him or went spanging around the brickwork. Twice, he felt a lash of burning pain on his upper back, but he kept firing. The last two rounds blew water everywhere as the
level came up past the back plate, and then he was squeezing on empty. He dropped the Glock and lunged again with his right leg, smashing it against the flap once, twice, three times. Branner surfaced alongside him, gasping for air. She realized what he was doing and joined in, kicking with all her might at the flap door as the water rose completely over its top. And then it let go.

In one small tidal wave, they both were swept into the hole where the flap had been, but then their hips got jammed in the ladder rungs and neither of them could get through.

“Wait,
wait
!” Jim shouted. “Let the water get out!” Even as he said it, he had to summon all his strength not to keep scrambling to get out. He grabbed the side wall to keep the flap from coming back down and cutting off their hands, and then they waited for another minute as the water subsided to a steady waterfall over the coaming of the flap. Then Jim disentangled his legs from the ladder and dropped out onto a tiled floor. He turned around and helped a trembling, white-faced Branner out. Her eyes were huge with fright and she held on to him with a desperate grip as they sank down onto the floor. There was light in the room, light that was coming from under a door. He could see a maze of pipes and valves along one wall. There was a wall of old lockers on the opposite wall.

Branner gulped down fresh air and then removed her hands, looking at them. They were darkened with something. “You're bleeding,” she said. “Let me see.”

“Ricochets,” he said. “Doesn't feel like anything went in.” He bent his head while she surveyed his upper back and arms.

“You've got three tears in your shirt; I need more light to see how deep they are.” She wiped her hands off on his shirt. “Another fucking door! Where the hell are we now?”

“Out of that goddamned shaft, and that's all I care about. This is modern construction. Try the door.”

The water kept coming up and over the lower sill of the flap door, which was hanging back down in position. It pud
dled on the floor and then ran under the room's door. He could see the flap's latch assembly in the half-light, the metal torn to pieces by the gunfire. Thank God that thing was old metal, designed to give way, he thought. Branner crawled on her hands and knees to the doorway and reached for the handle.

“If this thing's locked, I'm going to do some serious screaming,” she said.

But it wasn't. She pulled it open and the room was fully illuminated by a battery-operated fire-safety light. They could see a basement corridor outside, filled with more pipes and pumping machinery. The smell of chlorine wafted through the door, and Jim began to laugh.

“What?” she said, eyeing him suspiciously, obviously suspecting hysteria. She was still down on her hands and knees, her hair hanging over her forehead.

“I know where we are,” he said. “We're in the basement of Lejeune Hall. That far wall with all the pipes? That's the foundation of the swimming pool. We're down beneath the fucking swimming pool!”

She tried to pull her soaked clothes away from her body for a moment but then gave up. She looked like a drowned puppy. “After all that, you bring me to a swimming pool?” she asked.

“Can't dance,” he said weakly.

 

An hour later, Jim and Branner were sitting on the stone wall running along the portico of the second wing of Bancroft Hall, watching the circus. The entire Yard seemed to be filled with red and blue flashing lights as emergency crews worked to remove the water from the utility tunnels. Each of the major gratings was surrounded by firemen, police, and PWC workers, most of whom were standing around and looking down into the water-filled pits that had been the grating entrances. Jim was being careful not to lean back on anything. His tattered and bloody shirt covered a mass of
bandages, which in turn covered the three grazing wounds he'd received from the ricocheting rounds in the air shaft. In the light of the emergency light stands set up around the Yard grates, they could also see a knot of white uniforms up on the superintendent's front porch, where the supe, the diminutive commandant, and several Academy staff officers were conferring with the commanding officer of the Public Works Center. Directly above them, dozens of curious faces peered out of darkened windows in Bancroft Hall.

“Regular Lebanese goat grab,” Jim said to Branner. She was talking quietly on her cell phone to NCIS headquarters, giving an initial report of the evening's developments. The chief's police truck swung into the road in front of the second wing. Leaving his headlights on, Bustamente got out and came up the marble steps. The lights shone right on them.

“I guess this all seemed like a good idea at the time,” he observed, waving his hand at all the emergency lights strobing away in the unusually dark Yard.

“They get that river drain open?” Jim asked, trying not to move his back too much. The EMT had whistled out loud when he'd seen Jim's back for the first time.

“Yeah, I think so,” the chief said, climbing to join them up on the terrace. “The PWC troops had this big circle jerk going, trying to figure out who was gonna be the lucky bastard who got to go up the drain and free the door. You know, which union, how were they gonna do it, maybe use a YP to pull a cable attached to the door out into the river, like that.”

“Lemme guess: They had so many volunteers to hook up the cable, they couldn't make up their minds.”

“Yeah, right. It was starting to look like the XO himself was gonna have to climb down there and do it. Problem was, the drain's several hundred feet long, and they couldn't figure out how to pull the cable all the way up the pipe without some kinda winch. You know, that shit's heavy.”

“And?”

“And while they were going on about this and that, there was this big-ass boom. Came from the storm drain. Every
one there, yours truly included, jumped a half a mile. Then the water came out like some giant was down there doing the green apple two-step. That grate on the seawall? History. Went flying out into the river.”

“So pretty soon, the tunnels will be pumped out.”

“Yeah, although now they gotta get down there, turn off the valves that little prick opened. They got the city water shut off upstream in town, but some other damn thing is still running water down there. Biggest priority is getting power back to Mother B. here. Anyways, they got a night's work ahead of them.”

“So do we, Chief,” Jim said. “We've gotta find this Booth guy.”

“You actually see this little shitbird?”

“Big shitbird, I'm afraid, and no, I never actually laid eyes on him tonight. He pulled me into the storm drain, and he fed Agent Branner here an ether sandwich, but no, we never actually laid eyes on the son of a bitch. But we're going to.”

Branner snapped her phone shut and rejoined them. “How's the back?” she asked, eyeing the ruins of his shirt.

“Hurts,” Jim admitted. “I'm gonna have to be on top for a while.”

Branner flashed him one of her hundred-yard stares while the chief tried to suppress a guffaw. But then she actually grinned. He was relieved to see that she had stopped shaking. “Washington's rousting out reinforcements,” she said. “Our director's suddenly eager to reopen this thing.” She glanced over Jim's shoulder in the direction of the supe's quarters. “Uh-oh,” she muttered. “Incoming.”

Jim turned and saw the commandant and two commanders headed for them. “Should have turned your lights off, Chief,” Jim said.

“Whoops. I think I better go coordinate some shit.”

“Chicken,” Jim said. The chief saluted the commandant as they passed on the steps and then escaped smartly in his police pickup. The portico went back into shadow as he pulled away from the curb.

“Mr. Hall. And Agent Branner,” the commandant said as he reached them. “We're so glad you're safe.”

The two commanders waited discreetly down at the bottom of the steps. Jim didn't recognize either of them. “Sorry about all this, sir,” he said. “Things kinda got out of hand down there tonight.”

“Well, I should say so, Mr. Hall,” Robbins said, giving him an arch look. “The OOD told me you'd been shot? Are you all right?”

“I had to use a gun to blast the latch off the door we escaped through,” Jim said. “It was in an old airshaft. There were some ricochets. Cut up my back, mostly, but apparently nothing too serious. Do you have any idea where Midshipman Booth is?”

Robbins frowned and chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “The OOD gave me a preliminary report. Midshipman Booth is not in his room, and no one knows where he is. Midshipman Markham is signed out into town and has not returned. Any thoughts?”

Jim took in the dant's expression. The usual controlled anger was gone. In its place was something else, something he couldn't read.

“Thoughts? Yes, I have some thoughts. I think this Midshipman Booth either killed Brian Dell or caused it to happen. I think he's also responsible for the beating death of a federal agent, and some other muggings that have been taking place over in Crabtown. He may also be responsible for the disappearance of a student at St. John's. And an attempt on Midshipman Hays's life. Not to mention penetrating the Academy's intranet, filching exam material, destroying government property on a grand fucking scale, and generally running wild for the past three years while nobody, nobody at all, caught on.”

“And you can prove these allegations?”

Ah, Jim thought, here it comes. “We need a little time alone with Mr. Booth. And then we'd want to show you his little underground lab setup, assuming we can still reach it.
But, yes, I think we can. He as much as admitted some of this to us down in the tunnels tonight.”