P Deutermann - Darkside

Jim squatted down. Bagger was right. He pushed on the door. The lock held. He looked at his key collection, but he didn’t have a key to this door. They checked the other door, but there were no signs of recent entry.

“Where are we?” Bagger asked. “In relation to what’s on the surface?”

Jim stood up and studied the map. The lights in this branch of the tunnel were yellow and weak, so he had to use his small Maglite. The map showed that the two doors led to separate tunnels. The left one branched toward Bancroft Hall. The right one branched more toward the entrance to Annapolis harbor. “I’d say we were just to the right of the second wing. The right-front side of Bancroft Hall if you were standing out in Tecumseh Court and watching the noon meal formation. The supe’s quarters are back over our shoulder that way, maybe a hundred yards.”

“And where does this tunnel go?” Bagger asked, pointing to where the concrete tunnel picked up again.

“There’s a service tunnel to the captains’ quarters along Porter Road. Eventually, it doglegs down at the end of the row and goes out into town, to the eastern King George Street utility vaults. Double steel doors. I’ve got keys.”

Using his own flashlight, Bagger studied the map. Somewhere back down the tunnel, there was a soft clang of metal, followed by a sustained hiss of either steam or compressed air, which shut off after ten seconds. They looked at each other.

“Company?” Bagger asked softly.

They stood there and listened. Indistinct sounds bounced down the concrete walls, but there was no way to tell how far away they were. Or what they were. They both switched off their flashlights and listened.

Another soft clang of metal, then a sound they couldn’t identify. Because of the S-turn, they couldn’t see back down the main tunnel, and every sound was being distorted by the background hum of power lines and water pipes. Jim thought he felt a slight change in the air pressure. Bagger had his eyes closed, listening.

Another noise, unrecognizable. Then a sputtering sound. Jim tried to place it. Sputtering. Like a…fuse? Bagger heard it, too, and was looking at Jim, who mouthed the word fuse, saw Bagger comprehend it, and then there was an explosive roar from the main tunnel, a roar that was approaching very quickly.

Before they had time to react, a red glow lighted up the tunnel and the roar doubled in volume as a rocket of some kind came around the corner, ricocheting low off the walls and then blasting right at them, spinning wildly, chest-high. They barely had time to dive to the deck plates before the thing went blasting over their heads, screaming down the tunnel, where it slammed into the flat concrete wall of the next turn, some fifty feet beyond them. There was a flash of bright green light and a loud bang when it hit. The tunnel disappeared in a cloud of dense white smoke that stank of sulfur, and they had to stay down on the deck plates just to find breathable air. From somewhere behind them in all the smoke, they heard a nasty laugh echoing through the smoke and then the pronounced clang of a metal door.

“What the fuck!” Bagger muttered, trying not to cough as the dense trail of smoke drifted down toward the deck plates.

Jim had pulled his Glock. He crouched just beneath the thick layer of smoke, waving it out of his face. “Fireworks,” he said. “Some fucker set off a Fourth of July rocket and sent it down the tunnel.”

There was definitely a change in the air pressure now, a sudden feeling of release, and, amazingly, the smoke began to retreat, almost as if it were alive, back down the tunnel from which the rocket had come, like a film being run in reverse. Jim saw a blinking red light pulsing through the smoke from just around the corner.

“Smoke detector,” he said. “The smoke-evac system’s fired up. We’re gonna have firefighters next.”

They stood up as the smoke shrank back around the corner like a fleeing ghost. They followed it. Just beyond the three-way junction, an exhaust fan in the ceiling was running noisily at high speed, sucking the air from the tunnel and now beginning to squeeze their ears. Another red light was flashing on a sensor panel high in the tunnel ceiling.

“Let’s go get the rocket,” Bagger said. “Before the firemen show up.”

They turned around and went down to the end of the passageway. The rocket body was crumpled up against the door of a telephone equipment vault. It appeared to be made of thick cardboard, two and a half feet long and two inches in diameter, with badly charred fins at the back. The lower part of the rocket body was blackened, and what was left of the front end was smashed flat and also burned. The stink of sulfur was almost overpowering. Jim picked it up and promptly dropped it.

“Yow! Hot motor scooter,” he said, waving his hand in the air. “Gunpowder?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen these. Commercial fireworks. You saw that green flash.”

“Still do,” Jim said. “Every time I blink.”

“How do midshipmen get their hands on commercial fireworks?”

“Brigade activities committee maybe. You know, for football games. They’ve got that touchdown cannon. I don’t know, though. First spray paint, now this. That thing would go right through someone, going like that.”

“No shit,” Bagger said, examining the simmering tube. “I think we’ve flushed our sick puppy.”

“I’d prefer the vampire scene to being impaled by that damned thing. I think I hear the fire brigade. Let’s go tell ’em what happened.”

“You better put that away,” Bagger said, pointing with his chin at Jim’s Glock. “Unless you think Drac’s still back there somewhere.”

“He’d better not be,” Jim growled.

A single fire truck had shown up on the street above the grate in front of Mahan Hall, and a team of three respirator-clad firemen came down into the main tunnel. Most of the smoke had been evacuated by then. Jim identified himself and explained that someone had set off some fireworks in the tunnel. He produced the still-smoldering rocket tube. The firemen, used to midshipman antics, secured the alarm system and took the tube with them to add to their collection of crazy mid memorabilia.

Jim then took Bagger back down the main tunnel and out to the King George Street utility vaults closest to St. John’s College. On the way, they passed the original shark tag Jim had defaced with his own pictogram and the words Hall-Man-Chu. At first, Jim thought it was unchanged, until he saw the addition of two small black letters to his own signature: Hall-Man-Chu-mp.

“Our boy offends easily,” he said.

“Not bad work for an ex-Jar-head,” Bagger said, examining Jim’s tag.

“I cheated; got it from a tattoo parlor downtown. There’s a bigger one closer to the King George Street doors.”

The second tag remained unchanged. Bagger studied it for a long time.

“The shark motif is consistent,” Jim said. “That fish with serious teeth. I don’t know who WD is, or why the shark is about to bite him.”

“This is a white guy,” Bagger said.

“How can you tell that?”

Bagger just looked at him. “Trust me. This is a white guy,” he repeated. “This the way out to town?”

Jim took him to the utility interchange with the city’s vaults. He showed Bagger where they were in relation to the Academy’s steam plant across Dorsey Creek. “I’ve even been under your building,” he said, pointing to the location of the old postgraduate school building on the map. “Those are some old tunnels. Date back to the 1920s. Still in use, though.”

They stood in front of the steel doors as a large truck rumbled overhead out on King George Street. The tunnel walls were all smooth concrete, but the lightbulbs trembled in their sockets and the steel pipe hangers rattled with the vibration of the passing truck.