P Deutermann - The Moonpool

The plywood held and the knife came back down with me, showering me with more wood bits.

I tried again, with the same results, except this time I felt the plywood move just a little. I rested for a minute, and then took another stab at it, moving the aim point to one side of where I thought the latch should be. Definite movement, but apparently there was enough of the latch still there to hold the ramp. I got out the SIG again and used up two more rounds in the center of the hole already there. It was getting hard to breathe with all the smoke.

I rested again for a minute or so and talked to the dogs. Their sensitive ears wouldn’t work for a week after this. Neither would mine, probably. I was really thirsty and beginning to wonder if we were ever going to get out of here. I kept hoping Pardee had recovered and was probing the boxes outside looking for the source of all the gunfire. Unfortunately, I was eight feet or more below ground level. If the upper box doors were closed, he could be right outside and unable to hear anything.

I stared up at the mess on the ceiling. If I’d learned anything in my life, it was that persistence was everything if you were in a jam. Maybe if I could use the knife to pry the seam down and get a hand in there, I might be able to hang, dead weight this time, and pull the whole thing down with just my body weight. The thought of jamming my unprotected fingers into the splintered hole up there made me wince, but I had to try something. The air was filling with CO 2 and there was no air supply that I could see except for the snake hole. The shepherds were lying down and panting heavily.

I put away the SIG, stretched my thigh muscles again, and tried my previous trick of jamming the knife. This time the center of the plywood panel bellied out a little, but it didn’t come down before the knife pulled out again. So I took a deep breath, moved forward a few inches, and jumped again, jabbing at the crack with the knife in my right hand while grabbing for a fingerhold with my left. It would have worked except for the fact that my left arm, injured in a tussle with a mountain lion a few years back, let me down, literally. So I switched hands-the knife in my left hand and my right hand going for the gold.

It hurt. Splinters under the fingernails always do. But I managed to get four fingers jammed into that crack tight enough that I could hang there, extract the knife, and then jam it into the crack and turn it sideways.

Now I had two handholds. The one on the left hurt my upper arm, but the one on the right made my fingers feel like they were on fire. I began to bounce, trying to set up a rhythmic pull on that panel, and finally, with a loud tearing noise, down it came. It happened so unexpectedly that I forgot to hold on, and back it went, slapping into the ceiling with a mocking crack as I tumbled down onto the floor. My snakebite reminded me that it was still there.

I yelled in frustration, but then noticed that the whole panel was drooping an inch or so below the ceiling above. No more latch, so its own weight was working for me this time. One more straight-arm knife jump and I was able to pull it down to face level and, this time, hold on to the damned thing. The air became instantly fresher. I stared up into perfect darkness, though. No lighted aperture in the upper container. Who cared.

Using the knife in a series of sticks, I pulled myself up the ramp and to the base of the exterior doors. The dogs tried to follow but couldn’t gain any traction. I told them to hang on and went looking for those latch plates Houston of the ICE had told me about. I had to do it all by feel, and then remembered the penlight. It still had a tiny spark of power left, and this allowed me to find the safety release lever. I pulled that, and the sockets for the locking lugs came off.

I pushed on the door in front of me. The bottom moved; the top did not. Persistence, I reminded myself. Almost there. A few more minutes of humping and thumping and I found and released the top latches. Now: Were they locked from the outside or just shut? Time to find out.

This time when I pushed, and to my vast relief, the door opened, and I rolled out onto the dirt of the junkyard path. I looked around for bad guys, but it was just me in the semidarkness. The fresh air felt wonderful, but the shepherds became frantic when I rolled out of sight, so I went back to the container doorway to reassure them-and found that the ramp, with my weight gone, had come back up, leaving them in their subterranean prison. They were audibly not pleased with that result.

It took another fifteen minutes of wedging and hauling to get them out of there, and their frantic efforts to “help” had just the opposite effect. I swore at them, and they undoubtedly returned the favor, but finally all three of us were outside the dreaded snake pit and gratefully breathing in the smells of rotting junkyard debris, diesel oil, rust, and ancient grease. It smelled wonderful.

Now to find Pardee. And that bastard Trask.

Ari Quartermain joined me in the ER at a little past one in the morning. He looked like he hadn’t been to bed in a couple of days, and that gray tinge I usually associated with cardiology patients was back in his face. I was sporting a bandage the full length of my right forearm and several new injection puncture wounds from an enthusiastic if not very competent male nurse.

The ER docs had been visibly disturbed when they saw the scale of the teeth marks on my forearm. It was obvious to anyone who looked at them that I’d been bitten by at least an alligator, except for the fact that the individual tooth marks were much too small, and far too numerous. The. 45 had laid down a quarter-inch-deep gouge right through the middle of the bite area, but none of the docs had picked up on the fact that it was a bullet wound. That, in turn, meant no police report was necessary. For the moment, anyway; one of the docs had mentioned he was studying to be a tropical medicine specialist and wanted to talk to me later. I mumbled some promises I didn’t intend to keep and then closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as he tended to the wound with some kind of liquid fire.

Pardee, on the other hand, was in trouble. Center stage, ICU trouble. Whatever Trask had gassed him with was still in control. The docs said that he smelled like ether, and that in the hands of a non-anesthesiologist, ether could be highly toxic and there was a chance of brain damage, or worse, if he didn’t come out of it in the next few days.

I’d put a call in to Bernie Price and asked him if he could bird-dog Pardee’s police report for us. I preferred to have someone who knew both of us working with the admissions staff, who had all sorts of interesting questions about how Pardee came to inhale ether.

“You’re sure this was Trask’s doing?” Ari asked.

“Once again, I never saw him, but it sure sounded like him, and we had prior indication that he was doing stuff over there in the container port.”

“Stuff.”

“You don’t actually want to know,” I told him, “but he was allegedly working with the government, so it’s not a criminal enterprise. How’s Helios?”

“You don’t actually want to know,” he parroted back to me with a wry grin. “The DNA comparison didn’t work, probably because of all the radiation exposure. The coroner’s office is freaking out because the body is not decomposing. Remember all that news about irradiating meat to prevent spoilage? Apparently it works.”

“Lovely,” I said. “Look: Whatever Trask is planning, he has inside help, and it may be as soon as tonight.”

He looked at his watch. “Tonight is over,” he said wearily. “It’s tomorrow already. Who’s the inside help, and what is the it?”

“I like the Russian’s deputy, that Dr. Thomason, but I don’t have any firm evidence. Is he competent to create some kind of incident?”