Darkside (65 page)

She walked along the narrow passageway that contained the pool piping and the racks of chemicals and chlorine bottles. The air was, as always, humid and warm, and the overhead lights were all encased in steam-tight globes. There was no one about, and her footsteps echoed quietly in the hot, wet air. The hum of machinery was almost comforting.

She reached the storage room, with its broken door. Nothing got fixed quickly at the Academy. She stopped in front of the door and listened for sounds of anyone else down in the basement, but there was only the whine of the filtration pumps. She pulled the door toward her, scraping its bottom edge over the tile. She stopped and listened again. Just to make sure. The light inside the storage room was still on. Some of the tiles were warping up off the floor, and there were hundreds of muddy footprints. Straight ahead was the
three-foot square hole in the wall, with its hingeless metal plate dangling forlornly from its bullet-smashed latch. A faint smell of wet cement seemed to be welling up from the black hole. To her right, along the wall, there was a bank of empty rusted steel lockers, which had obviously not been used for a very long time. She poked her head out the partially opened door to make sure no one was coming down the passageway, then went over to the locker nearest the back of the ruined door. She hesitated and then lifted the rusted latch. The door squeaked open reluctantly on partially frozen hinges.

Inside, there was a mildewed laundry bag on the floor of the foot-square locker. She reached in, picked it up, and pushed the door shut. She took the bag over to the square hole in the back wall and pulled the strings to open it. Inside were all the elements of her Goth rig. The long black slit skirt. Those thigh-high fishnet stockings and black witch clogs. The studded dog collar. A bulging makeup kit. Fake fingernails. The fingerless gloves. The ridiculous wig. The very special video, its cassette broken and the tape pulled out in an unusable tangle.

All of it. She shivered, but now it was over. She felt bad about Dell, because she really should have anticipated how far Dyle might take it. And she felt even worse about what had happened to her father. But she'd warned her father not to provoke Dyle. He hadn't really come to do anything to her. Even that whole scene in the dorm room had been aimed at getting that security officer into the room, so Dyle could boast. The popinjay commandant showing up like that had been gravy. Fucking Dyle. He'd taken her right out to the limits again, but he wouldn't have dropped her. Not Dyle. He'd known, ever since Dell's death, that he'd never make it out of there, never make it to the Marines. The only person Dyle was going to hurt that night at her house was Dyle. But give him that: He'd been a true believer, right to the end. Death before dishonor and semper effing fi, right? He'd only come up the river to find her so she could watch him finally do it. That had been part of
their deal. She had been required to watch, to witness that he was man enough.

She felt another twinge of guilt about what had happened to her father. Her games with Dyle had been her sole, burning secret, the one part of her life that no one, especially not her father, had known about. That was the reason she'd lost it on the pier when Dyle shot her father: they had a deal, all right, but the second part was that no norms were to get seriously hurt. But Dyle had gone increasingly, frighteningly out of control: first Brian Dell, then that agent, and Krill—what had he done with hapless Krill?

She took a deep breath to steady her nerves. No future in this kind of thinking. Their secret game was over. And everything that had happened, well, that had been Dyle driving the train, not her. Which made it okay. Her father was going to recover. And now he had Liz, so he was going to be all right. She had her diploma and her gold bars. As long as everything worked out, then what had gone on before was just—history, that's all. She nodded to herself and took another deep breath. Then she closed the bag and reached through the hole to drop it. She heard it hit somewhere way down below in the shaft with a muddy thump. No one would ever be going back down there. She popped her head into the hole for a moment, but there was nothing to see. Just the strong smell of old wet cement. She backed out, thinking about all that was to come, flight school, her new life as a naval officer, fast exciting men, all the new horizons, and, if she was lucky, really lucky, the feel of a hot jet in her hands and between her knees. Everything lay in front of her. And only a few tingling memories of the walking, talking chaos that had been Dyle Booth fading behind her. Every time with Dyle had been the ultimate highwire act, especially the last time. It was positively amazing how sheer terror could make you feel alive as never before or after. She hoped the jets would be that big a rush. Everyone said they were.

She smiled one last sly smile. A roofie. As if.

“Damn you, Dyle Booth, you crazy bastard,” she whis
pered, remembering still the way that sliver of wood had throbbed in time with Dyle's final heartbeats. “Am I going to miss your zone or what.”

Then she cleared her face, reassembled her midshipman's dutiful mask, no, her ensign's dutiful mask, took a final deep breath, and left the storage room for her new life among the norms. What was done was done. Everyone, even the Dark Side, was ready to get past it. Closure: that's what everyone always wanted, right? But, hell, she thought as she climbed the stairs: everyone says those jet jocks are crazy bastards. Maybe there was hope. Maybe Dyle wasn't the first of his kind to get through here.

All three American military service academies reflect the societies that they exist to serve. That sometimes makes life hard for the officers who run the academies, because they strive daily for perfection in a decidedly imperfect world. To the degree they tell the truth about why they require the things they do from the cadets and midshipmen, the young men and women typically respond by doing the right thing. It's when the senior people succumb to outside pressures and relapse into that “do as I say, but not necessarily as I do,” form of leadership that trouble comes. These are smart kids. Not only can they see right through that sham, but sometimes they play it back to their seniors in very interesting ways.

Mostly I've been factual about the setting, but this is as much a story set
at
the Naval Academy as it is a story
about
the Naval Academy. And because it's wholly fiction, I've taken some liberties in describing the regimen at Annapolis in order to better suit the needs of my story. That's one of the benefits of writing fiction: If you want to, or where you have to, you can just make it up. I've done some of that in this book, with the most obvious example being the timing of when Julie Markham would have been on plebe summer detail. I've also embellished the scope of the underground tunnels—a lot, in fact. The remains of the Civil War–era Fort Severn are undoubtedly submerged in the various land-filled
fields that make up the Yard's waterfront, but I doubt that anyone's been down there for a long time. The degree of public access to the academy grounds since September 11, 2001, is also quite different from what I've described.

I received a great deal of generous help from all sorts of people at the Academy, and at all levels of the organization, including midshipmen. Sometimes I learned more than I wanted to know, but I've found that's not unusual when I'm researching these books. As always, I'll leave it up to the reader to speculate where the boundaries are between fact and fiction, but one thing's clear: Those boundaries rarely remain stationary when you assemble four thousand of the country's best and brightest young people and then presume to teach them something about the issues of leadership, honor, ethics, gender, and personal morality. As one of the characters observes in the book, the problem is that they learn. I'm proud to note that the Naval Academy courageously has chosen to address these issues head-on. That this sometimes has a purgative effect on tradition should not be held against the institution, the Jurassic barks of some aging alumni notwithstanding.

For the record, none of the characters in this book are intended to reflect actual people at the Academy, either currently or previously serving, and any resemblance to actual incidents or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PTD
Georgia, November 2001