Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“Before what?”

“Before you shoot?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sean, they’re less than a quarter mile behind us.”

“I know.”

“You gonna just let ‘em run up and blow a hole in my boat?”

“They won’t do that because they probably want what we collected.”

“So, you gonna let ‘em fire at you and me before you shoot? We have two rifles. I’m not an ex-sniper, but if that boat gets much closer, I can sure as hell hit it.”

“I don’t want to see you facing a murder charge.”

“It sure as hell would be self-defense! Them or us, Sean.”

“Closer we get to shore, Nick, the greater our odds are that there’ll be other boats and these guys will just go away”

“In another couple of miles, they gonna be caught up with us. What then?”

“When they get within shotgun range, we’ll cut the engines back to half speed, do a three-sixty move around their boat, and have a little conversation with them on the PA. If they choose to start firing, we’ll do the same. They won’t win.”

Dave Collins keyed his marine radio. “Checking on your ETA. Before I start mixing the pancakes, wanted to know when the kitchen can expect you?”

“Should be about twenty-five minutes,” O’Brien’s voice came over the radio speaker.

“Is the fishing party still with you?”

“Yes.”

“Hanging close?”

No answer.

“How close is close?”

No answer.

“Shit!” Dave keyed the microphone, “Are you okay?”

No answer. Max whined.

O’Brien followed the boat through the night scope. One hundred yards.

“Whatcha gonna do?” Nick yelled. “I don’t feel like getting shot!”

O’Brien was silent. He looked up from the scope for a moment as the boat behind them exploded in a ball of white and orange fire.

“Holly shit!” Nick yelled. The light from the explosion illuminated the dark sea.

“What’s going on?” Dave’s voice came across the radio.

Dave paced his salon. The radio crackled. O’Brien said, “The boat following us just blew up.”

The beam from Ponce Lighthouse punched through a fog stretching a half mile out to sea. O’Brien watched the light pierce the mist while Nick brought his boat toward the inlet. Nick had been quiet since witnessing the explosion.

As they entered Ponce Inlet, swells bounced off the rock jetties and crashed into the boat’s hull from left and right angles. A night heron called out from the blanket of fog, the cry an unseen mariner’s siren, a warning in sync with the rotation of the light.

Along the jetties, the fog wafted in backlit shadows, moving like spirits of Indians crawling down to the water’s edge to spear fish that no longer swam into the river to spawn. On the wind was the smell of a saltwater tide breaking against dry rocks, Australian pines, and a smoldering campfire burping up the taste of charred pine sap. O’Brien looked at his watch: 5:27 a.m. “Almost home, Nick. You okay?”

Nick held the wheel, fighting the turbulent water. “That coulda been us back there. Who killed the men who probably wanted to kill us?”

“I don’t know.” O’Brien looked at the holster and Luger on the bench seat. “Nick, you still pull a few crab traps?”

“Yeah, man. Why?”

“I want a place to park this Luger in its own salty environment until I need it.”

Dave Collins spotted Nick’s running lights through the fog. He sat in Gibraltar’s wheelhouse with Max lying on the bench seat. “Here they come, girl. Your papa and his pal Nick were almost toast out there. And, now, they may be carrying material that could turn cities into toast. I know that gentle creatures like you don’t relate to the concept of absolute power and mass killing. It’s an evil unique to the animal kingdom of man.”

She lifted her head, cocked her ears before Dave could hear the rumble of the diesels coming through the mangroves and onto the docks. “Ahhh, you know that sound, don’t you, girl? Uncle Nicky’s big boat, right?”

Dave carried Max down the steps to the cockpit then placed her on the dock so she could walk with him to Nick’s slip. They watched him work the bow thrusters and reverse the engines, bringing the boat to a perfect stop. Dave fastened the bow rope and stepped aboard with Max.

“You two are a sight for scorched eyes,” O’Brien said, coming down from the bridge, careful to keep his voice low. He petted Max. “Hi, lady.” O’Brien looked at the eastern sky. “Dawn’s coming soon. Let’s go inside. We’ll show you what we found out there.”

Dave watched as Nick and O’Brien gently set the blanket-covered canisters on the galley table and unwrapped them. Dave looked at the labels and released a low whistle. “U-235. Germany had plans in the last days of the war. If it’s the real thing, these two alone are probably enough to make a dirty bomb.”

“That’s what we saw tonight,” Nick said. “A dirty freakin’ bomb.”

“What you saw probably was five pounds of C-4, remotely detonated or wired to explode at a certain time. The stuff on this table would destroy this marina and life within an immediate quarter mile from it.”

O’Brien said, “From our perspective, what Nick and I saw a hundred yards off our stern was very dirty. What’s your chatter tell you now? Who the hell’s behind this?”

“Don’t know. And, unfortunately, this stuff in front of us is highly enriched and highly desired by the world’s most undesirables. As you just witnessed first-hand, they’ll do anything to get it.”

“That narrows it down,” O’Brien said dryly. “We were almost taken out by a bull shark that must have weighed a thousand pounds. Then we were chased forty miles in open sea by some unknown undesirables who were killed by some other unknown undesirables.”

Nick shook his damp, shaggy head and said, “I need a drink.”

“How many hostiles were taken out tonight?” Dave asked.

“I saw two on the boat,” O’Brien said.

Dave inhaled loudly and exhaled slowly, his eyes studying the canisters. “If we knew where the chase boat came from, it’d be easier to check marinas and boat rentals. We now know that there are at least two rivals desperate to get their hands on this stuff. We know that one rival just lost two members. We’ll hide this while we search for the rest of it.”

“What do you mean by the rest of it?” O’Brien asked.

Dave touched the damp barnacles on one of the canisters. “If these are all that were left on the sub, the rest are indeed missing. I’ve done more research. U-boat 234, which was the sub that surrendered a week earlier than the one spotted by Billy Lawson and found by you two, had more than two lead canisters. Inside the canisters, they were lined with gold, and the cake baking in them was more than enough to make a bomb the size of the one that leveled Hiroshima.”

Nick whistled. “So what we pulled out of the sub tonight is only part of it?”

“Correct. I suspect the rest could be still buried somewhere on that beach. The area, Sean, where the old woman and her granddaughter told you about, the place where Billy Lawson saw enough to get him killed.”

“If it’s near Fort Matanzas, that’s been federally protected property. Land left undisturbed. The FBI or OSS must have done a check of the beach in 1945. Who’s to say it was never found? Maybe the two Japanese men that Billy Lawson saw leaving on foot returned for the HEU. The mystery man who met them, maybe he came back for it.”

“And did what with it?” Dave asked.

“The extent of my crime solving was always as a homicide detective. This seems more aligned with your old beat. What happened to the uranium on that other sub, the one that was escorted by Navy destroyers into Portsmouth?”