Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

Abby said, “Years later, the fort was built by the Spanish to keep the British from entering the inlet, coming upriver and attacking the back side of St. Augustine.”

O’Brien said, “A few centuries after that, the Germans enter the inlet and, somewhere on the beach, they bury a deadly cargo. Glenda, who investigated Billy’s murder?”

“Let me see … umm … there was a young man, a FBI agent. His name was Robert Miller. Never forgot him. A nice person. Professional, but he had some sort of anxiousness about him I didn’t quite understand.”

“How do you mean?”

“Each time I asked him about the investigation he became more evasive. Finally, he stopped returning my calls. I never heard from him again. In St. Johns County, Sheriff Walker investigated it. He thought Billy was killed by a highway robber. He couldn’t explain why Billy’s truck was abandoned. Sheriff Walker died about twenty years ago. One of his deputies is still alive, I think. Deputy Brad Ford said he had kept the investigation going as long as he worked in the department, about twenty-five years. However, he never found anyone either.”

O’Brien took a bite of food. “What was the general reaction, both on the federal and local levels, when you told them about Billy’s sighting of the German sub and the burying of something on the beach?”

“They were polite but not really interested in talking with me. I never got the chance to tell them what Billy said about the beam of light from the lighthouse. A few days after my call, I was told the Navy dispatched planes but never saw the submarine. Government men said they dug all around Matanzas Inlet but only found turtle eggs buried in the sand.”

“Sean,” said Abby, “my grandfather said that the Japanese men took off running. Grandma, you never heard if the government caught them or what, right?”

“No, I didn’t, and I never saw anything in the papers. Agent Miller told me the FBI never turned up anyone.”

O’Brien was silent. He asked, “Did they do an autopsy on your husband?”

“Told me they did.”

“The newspaper report you showed me when you came to my house indicated Billy had been shot once and, yet, you said you heard three shots.”

Glenda coughed, her eyes watering. “Yes, and sometimes I still hear them.”

“Did they tell you, or did they know what kind of gun was used to kill Billy?”

“I do remember the FBI telling me it was a.38 caliber bullet that killed him.”

“Would you allow your husband’s body to be exhumed? I’d want to know if he was shot more than once and whether all the bullets were removed from the body.”

Abby bit her lower lip and sipped some wine. Glenda looked beyond the dining room to a framed picture of her husband on the wall. Billy Lawson, dressed in his Army uniform, was smiling. Forever twenty-one. “Okay,” Glenda said. “If you do find evidence of more gunshots, what do we do? What if Billy wasn’t killed by a.38 bullet?”

“Then we find out why Billy’s murder was covered up by the U.S. government.”

The Phoenicia restaurant was crowded for a Thursday evening. Mohammed Sharif liked it that way. Easier to blend in with the people-his people, he felt. The scent of garlic chicken, braised lamb, baklawa, and Turkish coffee drifted over the tables. Sharif and Rashid Aamed sat in a back corner of the restaurant, watched a belly dancer, and spoke Arabic in hushed tones. They ate grape leaves with rice and lamb, hummus, and tabouli, and drank a Chateau Musar white wine grown in the Bekaa Valley.

Sharif said, “The Russian, Yuri Volkow, he already has images of the material on the Internet, offered to select dealers who have been vetted for their lists of private buyers. Our dealer has invited us to bid. The bidding is to begin at ten million U.S. dollars. However, they boast more is expected. The person who offers the highest bid for these two will have an even more exclusive first-bid option for the other canisters.”

“It confirms what the old German told us. But the Russians have yet to produce the rest of the canisters,” Aamed said.

“How would they know where more material is anymore than we might? They must know something. It would be information they could only have received from one of the three men who discovered the submarine.”

“The one who was kidnapped, the younger one. No doubt that Volkow extracted information from him.”

“Perhaps,” said Aamed, biting into a stuffed grape leaf. “So if the younger man knows the possible location of the remaining canisters, then the two other men, the one named Cronus-the Greek guy, and the American, Sean O’Brien, would know the location as well.”

“Indeed. O’Brien, we learned, owns the boat.”

“Your thoughts, Mohammed?”

“Allah will guide us, hamdulillah . I feel we must find O’Brien.”

“If we find the material before the Russians, how shall we deal with them and recover the canisters they have?”

“We become the highest bidders. Upon retrieving the material, Waahid will become a martyr, inshallad, God willing. As the smoke clears, we leave with the material.”

Aamed’s jaw noticeably popped from controlled tension. He smiled just as the reflection of the belly dancer’s supple body moved across his dark eyes, and said, “It would seem the time is approaching to kidnap the girl as well.”

“Not yet, not until we have the material. After that, take her. We have takfir -complete authority. Then her father will come without a sound.”

“Sean, you’re not going up to Rattlesnake Island tonight, are you?” Abby Lawson asked.

“The kidnappers have given Jason forty-eight hours unless we can produce the rest of the HEU. A few hours have passed already. If the stuff is there, I need to find it before they do.”

“HEU?”

“Highly enriched uranium. Maybe I can get my bearings, see the lighthouse beam coming through the fort’s watchtower. If I can find what the Germans buried that night, it will corroborate what your grandfather saw.”

Glenda looked at her watch. “It’s almost 8:00. Billy wasn’t killed until almost midnight. If you are trying to follow the evening as close as it was when he saw the men on that beach, you need to wait a few more hours.”

“I don’t have a few more hours.”

“Please,” said Glenda, touching O’Brien’s arm, “stay for coffee. The caffeine will help your vision on Rattlesnake Island. How do you take it?”

“Black’s fine, thanks.”

“Let’s take our coffee out on the back patio for a few minutes. It’s such a nice evening. I’ll tell you a quick story about Billy.”

O’Brien started to excuse himself to leave, but her face was aglow with trust, her spirit rising above the cancerous tissue and signaling the need to be heard-for Billy to be understood.

“Okay,” O’Brien said.

“Good,” nodded Glenda, holding her coffee cup in two weathered hands and stepping to a door leading into the backyard.

Abby beamed a wide smile. “We’ll join you outside in a moment, Grandma.” The old woman smiled and started humming as she walked slowly to the French doors. “My grandmother is humming, Sean. She only does that when she’s very comfortable. She’s at ease around you. She likes you and believes you can help.”

“She never remarried, right?”

Abby held her eyes on O’Brien, and then she looked at the photograph on the wall for a second before letting her gaze drift back up to O’Brien’s face. “She never found the right man. Not that she would compare every fella to Granddad. She knew what she wanted, what she had, and she didn’t want to compromise or settle for less.”