P Deutermann - Darkside

“From what Liz told me, you did well today. Especially by refusing that lie-detector test. You knew the old rule about those, did you?”

“Yep. I watch TV, too, Dad.”

He laughed. “Have to admit, that’s where I heard it. Okay. Let me know if anything else pops up.”

“Is she there now, Dad? Liz?”

None of your damn business, he thought. “Good night, Julie,” he said, and hung up. He went back out to the porch.

“Why’d she call?” Liz asked.

“To find out what I was doing on your boat yesterday, unchaperoned.”

“Ah,” she said. “You know what?”

“What?”

“Seems to me,” she said softly, setting her glass down, “that we’re unchaperoned right now.”

Monday night and all’s well. Sort of. That security dink’s been poking around in my tunnels again, and, guess what? This time he issued a challenge. Like, I think he wants a duel. Mano a mano. As if. Hasn’t he been keeping score? So far, he’s had his face painted, a singular chance to become a rocket man, and a steam bath. All courtesy of yours truly. And, as you know, he’s even been scoping out the Goth scene in town at our favorite public watering hole. As opposed to our favorite private watering hole, where we tend to get everything wet, don’t we.

I think it’s time this nosy bastard has himself a near-death experience. Those are my tunnels. I see all and hear all. This dimwit puts up listening devices and motion detectors and I don’t know what, and thinks I can’t see those, either. I can. I can even make them do things I want them to do, if I put my mind to it. Except time is short, for both of us, really. If we had a year, I could make his little toys light up his life, so to speak. Connect one of his little transmitter cases to a six-hundred-volt line. Make it malfunction. Get him to check it out. To handle it. Just for one night-wouldn’t want to hurt any of the permanent tunnel rats from Public Works. You should see what a couple of those guys do down there after hours. My, my. Big strong men like that-you’d think they’d like girls.

So maybe I’ll up the ante, even if time is short. He’s been creeping around, going into places that aren’t safe. I’m sure Public Works has told him those places aren’t safe. And they really aren’t, because I’ve already been there, and I’ve made some arrangements. I could make him just flat disappear, you know that? I can make anyone here disappear. Except you, of course. I can’t make you disappear. And don’t want to, not yet anyway. But I can make your life increasingly-what’s the word? Interesting. You spin your little tales; I’ll spin mine. In the meantime, HMC needs to watch his back. Or front. Haven’t made up my mind yet, but either one will do, when the time comes.

On Tuesday morning, Jim met Mike Carrick, the PWC utilities manager, at the Stribling Walk down ramp into the main tunnels. He’d asked the manager to bring along the keys to the Fort Severn tunnels. Above them, the sky was darkening fast with the approach of a spring thunderstorm. They hurried down the concrete steps and into the main tunnel just as the rain began. When they got down to the descending alcove leading to the big oak doors, Jim found a small crew already there. They had the left-hand door open. A battery of portable air handlers was doing a fresh-air exchange into the normally sealed tunnels.

“Gas-free engineering,” Carrick shouted above the roar of the Red Devil blowers. “No telling how much oxygen’s down there. Or how little.”

“How much longer?” Jim said.

As if they’d heard him, the crews switched off the blowers and began retrieving several feet of bulky air hose from the tunnels.

“They’ve given it thirty minutes of air exchange,” Carrick said. “Let them do their tests, and then you can go in.”

“Not coming with me?”

“Not on your life,” Carrick said. He stepped forward and tapped the top of the brick arch nearest to the doorway. A fine snowfall of masonry dust wafted down. “You want to go down there, be our guest. But I’ll require that you pull an air line with you for when it caves in.”

“ When? Is it really that bad?” Jim asked, eyeing the moldering brickwork.

“It might be, although we haven’t had a cave-in since the eastern gun gallery tunnel collapsed. But that was some years ago. Arches are Roman engineering. Pretty strong. But those are basically mud bricks, well over a hundred years old.”

The test engineer went into the left-hand tunnel for a distance of about thirty feet and tested the air for free oxygen and any explosive gases with his instruments. Then he backed out. “You want us to do the right-hand tunnel?”

Jim shook his head. “The map shows it’s a mirror image of the left-hand side. Is that correct?”

Carrick nodded, looking at his diagrams. “It ends up in a magazine that’s right under the front walls of Lejeune Hall,” he said. “The map doesn’t show it, but I think there’s a connector tunnel between the two branches. Probably caved in by now.”

“I’m only interested in this left-hand side,” Jim said.

“How come?” Carrick asked.

“I think some mids have been into it,” he said. “Can I have your site map?”

“Right here. Layout’s pretty simple. Two tunnels, parallel for two hundred feet. Then they branch left and right, respectively, into the magazine vaults. That’s where I think that cross tunnel is, but, like I said, it isn’t on the map.”

“Okay,” Jim said.

“From the magazines, there were two tunnels that kept going out to where the gun pits were. That would be under the landfill now, and they’ve collapsed. Sealed them with cement-block walls. The main tunnels are one level below where we’re standing right now. The magazines are one level below the main tunnels. Steel doors, no locks. Oh, and the left magazine is flooded, by the way. Okay so far?”

“Yep.”

“There’s no lights, no power down there. The air exchange may not have reached the magazine alcoves. You start getting dizzy, have trouble breathing, you back out.”

“Okay.”

“There’s a liquid manometer outside the main magazine chamber. If there’s water visible in the manometer, then that’s the level of the water in the magazine. Don’t open the doors.”

“Big magazines?”

“Big enough: fifty by fifty, arched dome, twenty-foot ceilings.”

“No ammo or guns, I take it?”

Carrick laughed. “Long gone. If there was powder down there, it would be marvelously unstable. No matches or flames down there, by the way-there could be methane. That Maglite is okay.”

“I’m having serious second thoughts,” Jim said.

“You want to quit now, no hard feelings.”

Jim took a deep breath, wondering if it was going to be his last. But he had to go. Those scratches on the lock had been deliberately obscured. Had to be a reason for that. Even if the magazine itself was flooded. He shook his head. “No, I have to take a look.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll have two guys stand by while you’re down there. They hear a rumble, they’ll start air into the hose and get the recovery crew in. Here’s your air hose, and here are those spare keys you requested.”

He handed Jim the antique iron keys, the tunnel diagrams, and the end of a reinforced air hose, which had a tiny sound-powered telephone wire wrapped around the outside. “The hose is graduated,” Carrick said. “If you get a cave-in, it’ll tell us how far into the tunnel you are. That there is a microphone where we can talk back and forth, assuming you survive it.”

Nobody was smirking, Jim realized. These guys were obviously taking the possibility of a cave-in seriously. “Don’t bother to bring the air hose out when you come back; we’ll use the cable reel to retrieve it. How long you going to be in there?”