P Deutermann - The Moonpool

But now we were really lost. We no longer had our own tracks away from the facility to guide on.

Screw it, I thought, and whistled again, this time louder. This time I was rewarded by a familiar woof, and we moved in that general direction. I started calling them, as quietly as I could, and pretty soon first one and then a second fuzzy friend showed up, all excited at being reunited. I told them to quiet down, and then we followed their tracks back through the dewy grass. They hadn’t exactly come in a straight line, but it was better than nothing. Somewhere out there in the fog we heard a muffled, thumping explosion, and then another one. There was a brief orange glow, which quickly faded, and then the sounds of more sirens.

We literally collided with the trees, and I got a face full of pine needles. We stopped to listen for any signs of pursuit, but there was nothing out there but the fog and the sounds of my shepherds panting. I turned to start swatting through all the low-hanging pine branches when something black came out of the fog from my side and launched itself at my face.

A branch saved me. The rottie clamped hard but got a mouthful of tree limb instead of my throat, and we both crashed backward onto the ground. Moira screamed in surprise as I tried to roll out from under that monster, but then I found myself underneath the dogfight from hell, and all I could do was cover my head with my arms, get as small as possible, and practice some strenuous bladder control. It was loud and messy and scary, with three roaring, snapping, growling, slobbering, heavy dogs going at it over my inert form as I tried hard to find that fabled direct route through the earth to China.

The shepherds finally won, and I lunged out from under that writhing furball, my ears ringing and my clothes covered in spittle, among other things. Frack had a death grip on the rottweiler’s windpipe from the front, while Frick had a similar grip on one of its hind legs, pulling its stumpy body taut while Frack slowly strangled it. Moira was backed up against a tree with her hands to her wide-eyed face. I sat up in the carpet of pine needles and began wiping myself off.

“Are you…?”

“Yeah,” I said, getting up carefully while I checked for holes. “It was mostly noisy. But, as usual, I’m awfully glad they were here.”

The rottie gave up the ghost in one hard spasm, struggling to the end, and I called my guys off. I felt sorry for the dog, who’d only been doing his assigned duty, much like the Marines.

Marines. We both heard vehicle noises out there in the fog at the same time. Somewhere in the direction of the facility.

“There’s no way they can track us,” Moira said. “Not in this fog.”

I was looking at the rottie’s bloody throat, where there was a leather collar with a small metal object dangling from it.

“Oh, yes, they can,” I said. I turned to my two shepherds and told them to go find it. Frack gave me his usual blank look, but Frick understood and took off through the trees, with us in hot pursuit. We ran into Tony and Pardee a minute later when we popped out of the trees and met them coming inland from the river bank to see what had happened to the shepherds.

“About damn time,” I said.

They both grinned back. “We watched you out there in that yard for two days before you bothered to look up,” Pardee said. He frowned when he heard the vehicles out in the fog. “We got hostiles inbound?”

“We do,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “This is Mad Moira. She helped me escape. Tell me we have a boat.”

I had many questions on the ride down the river toward Wilmington, with the biggest one being how they had known where to find me. It seems that I had none other than Colonel Trask to thank for that. Pardee told me they got a call back at the Triboro office from Quartermain’s slinky-toy assistant one day after I’d gone off the grid, with a request to come retrieve the shepherds.

“That seemed a little strange,” Pardee said. “But then, we knew there were places in that plant you might not want to take the dogs.”

“How’d Trask get into it?”

“We came down and made sure the shepherds were okay. Then we waited at the beach house a couple more days, but we still couldn’t raise you. So I called Samantha. She told me you and Mr. Q. had gone to an ‘unspecified location’ as part of your investigation. She said you’d left instructions that you’d be in touch when circumstances permitted.”

I watched Tony driving the boat with his face stuck into the radar display cone. We were definitely IFR tonight; the fog out on the river was, if anything, thicker than on shore. We could hear some buoy bells ringing as our wake set them to rocking, but I never did actually see one. Moira sat in one of the two padded chairs in front of the pilothouse, trying not to look afraid.

Pardee went on to explain that, after all the radio silence on my part, he’d called Trask to see what he knew about my sudden disappearance and this so-called unspecified location.

“Trask said it was news to him, and that he’d seen Quartermain at a meeting that morning.”

“Did he tell you that the lovely Samantha is an undercover FBI agent?”

Pardee looked at me in total surprise. “No-o-o, he did not. What the hell, over?”

I told him what had happened, and all about the delightful federal spa and rest camp that I hoped was going up in flames as we spoke. I also speculated about the possible reaction from the Bureau when they found out we had escaped, and how.

“Damn,” Pardee said. “They’re holding U.S. citizens? Right there in plain sight?”

“Not so plain sight, when you think about it,” I said. “You drive by that place, it looks like a state penitentiary for the criminally insane. Not the kind of place where you’d want to go in and take a tour. It’s not run by the FBI, either. Those guards were all military types.”

“That would make for an interesting story in the New York Times,” Pardee said.

“Yes, it would. But I’ll bet that all the remaining detainees and their Marines will be out of there in DHS vans before dawn. They’ll probably let that building burn right to the ground. How’d you actually find me?”

“Trask again. He gives us a call. Says a guy at the bar had seen someone who looked like you having a friendly discussion in the parking lot with what looked like a bunch of feds. Then everybody drove off together. Trask asked him what kind of vehicles, and figures the guy’s right.”

“Okay, and the asylum?”

“Trask has connections with local law, so he checks the jails and the hospitals, just to make sure. Then a guy in the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office tells him the feds have a ‘research center’ up on the Charing River-that’s the river we’re on now. It feeds into the Cape Fear. Supposedly this place had to do with AIDS research. Some big NIH grant. Old state facility for the insane; low security, really sick people, rumors of biohazards, et cetera, et cetera. Local no-go area.”

“And Trask, being ex-military, would figure out that that could be a cover?”

“He got a little coy about that, but I’m guessing from what he said that he went up there, cased the place, and recognized jungle bunnies. You don’t use Marines to guard AIDS victims. He calls, says he thinks he knows where you might be.”

Trask the helpful herpetologist, I thought. He’d never wanted us in his plant. I should think he’d have been delighted at the possibility that I’d been swept up in some kind of Homeland Security net. “I wonder what prompted all his sudden concern?”

“Good question, boss,” Pardee said, staring out into the fog. “And did Quartermain know? I mean, who told Samantha to make that call, her boss or her bosses?”