P Deutermann - Darkside

They folded up the maps and walked back toward the eighth wing. “I wonder how many other errors there are in these diagrams,” Jim said.

“The diagrams of the active utility tunnels are correct,” the engineer said. “The Fort Severn stuff goes back over a century and a half. I’m not surprised it’s been displaced. Someone was probably supposed to survey it, and got scared.”

“And then faked it,” Jim said.

“Yeah, probably. Can’t blame him.”

They entered the eighth wing through the doors beneath the sixth wing-eighth wing overpass bridge. There were dozens of doors in the eighth wing’s basement. They led to storage rooms, utility bays, extracurricular club rooms, and laundry and trash collection areas. “Hell,” Jim said, “This’ll take a week to search.”

“We don’t have to search this,” the chief said. “All we gotta do is catch the sumbitch coming out of that oak door into the modern tunnels. Do we really care how he gets into the Fort Severn tunnels? Now that we know it’s probably feasible?”

“You’re right,” Jim said. “We don’t. Let’s go.”

Using the access grate near Dahlgren Hall, they went down into the main utility tunnel and examined the oak doors again. They were still locked, and there were no further signs of anyone using a key or a jimmy to work the locks.

“I’ve got my surveillance team setting up motion detectors throughout the tunnel complex,” the chief said. “We’ll set one here, pointed at this door. They’re low-level lasers. Break the beam, it sends an alert and its location number to a central station. Size of a pack of cigarettes. We can track him through the tunnels, take him where we want to.”

“How will these things communicate with the outside?”

“They don’t; so we’ll need a comms node underground. I’ll cover all that at the briefing.”

“All right, I guess we’re done here,” Jim said. He turned to the engineer. “We need this whole op to stay hush-hush, so please ensure that there’s nothing about it on your internal LAN, okay?”

“Gotcha covered,” the engineer said. “The Public Works officer knows about it, but that’s it.”

“Good. Chief, I’m going back to my office. I’ll bring Agent Branner over with me at sixteen-thirty. See you at the briefing.”

Ev didn’t get through to Liz until just before five o’clock. He told her about his run-in with the commandant.

“Did he directly threaten to do something to Julie?”

“Yes,” Ev said. “He threatened to delay her commissioning. That would put her date of rank permanently behind her entire class. I’d call that a threat.”

“Because he thinks she’s withholding information?”

“I think someone’s telling him that, yes.”

Liz didn’t say anything for a moment.

“I mean, I don’t know what the hell to do about this. Julie’s not listening to either one of us.”

“That’s the problem,” Liz said. “Maybe I’ll have another go at that security officer, Jim Hall.”

“You think he’ll talk to you?”

“Maybe. He’s a graduate. He might be sympathetic to Julie’s situation.”

“This is really frustrating,” Ev said. “You should have seen Robbins. One minute all sweetness and light in front of my colleagues, presenting me this stupid award certificate, the next acting like some sort of gestapo director.”

“They’re under a ton of pressure,” Liz said. “Media, congressional, the Secretary of the Navy, probably. Let me see if I can talk to Hall. Want to get together later tonight?”

“I’d probably be lousy company,” he said. “I want to smack somebody.”

“Go for a long run. Or take your boat out. Push it hard. I have to go out to a chamber of commerce dinner. I’ll be back by ten. If you’re still all stressed out by then, we’ll figure something out.”

Smiling in spite of the tension he felt, Ev promised her he’d be there. He hung up and thought about how direct she was. He couldn’t imagine Joanne being so forward. And bedtime with Liz was also very different, although, to be fair, he and Joanne had been married for a long time. But Liz was exciting, direct, challenging without being threatening. He couldn’t imagine being in the mood for sex right now, given everything that was going on with Julie. But Liz was right: Go beat up your body, bleed all this stress into the river, and then go see her. As long as Julie was being obstinate, there wasn’t anything he could do to help her. So he’d go do something about his situation. With Liz. There, he thought. That wasn’t even hard, was it?

By 10:00 P.M., the entire team was in place. The topside surveillance people were set up at all the Yard grates and were up on a tactical radio net. Jim and Branner were down under Stribling Walk in the main tunnel complex, set up in a telephone switchboard vault. The motion-detector string was in place, ready to transmit alerts via a separate radio frequency, which would be detectable underground. The chief and one radio operator were set up in a mobile CP in the radio van they’d borrowed from the Annapolis cops. The van was hardwired to the retransmitter underground.

The switchboard vault was ten feet by ten feet and filled with equipment cabinets, which kept the room at a humming ninety degrees despite the air-conditioning. Branner was in her NCIS tactical field gear, and Jim was similarly outfitted. Both wore shoulder transceiver mikes provided by the chief. There were no chairs in the switchboard vault and very little room to move around, so Jim and Branner sat shoulder-to-shoulder against one of the equipment racks. The door to the main tunnel was almost closed, but open enough to show a slit of light from the main tunnel.

“This is cozy,” Jim said. “But kind of a boring date.”

“If you and I ever go on a date, that’s a word you’ll never use,” she replied, looking at her watch for the umpteenth time. Jim wondered if she’d get the ballpoint out pretty soon and start tapping again.

“It’s after twenty-two hundred. Did Midshipman Hays ever get back to you?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said. “You think our vampire’s going to make his move tonight?”

“It’s a Wednesday. They’re not allowed off the reservation on Wednesdays-sort of a reminder of who grants them liberty. The rest of the time, he could just walk out the gate after evening meal.”

“The Annapolis cops said there hadn’t been another vampire mugging since Bagger,” she said. “So maybe he got scared.”

Jim remembered the brief look he’d had into the guy’s face. “I don’t think scared ’s in his lexicon,” he said. “This is one big game to him; the more danger, the bigger the thrill. Plus, the fact that Bagger died isn’t common knowledge here at the Academy.”

“Maybe we ought to announce it,” she said. “Let the fucker know what he did.”

“If anything would force him into deep cover, that would certainly do it. We need him to keep doing this.”

She didn’t say anything, just looked at her watch again. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. “You pretty confident Hays will give us something?” she asked.

“It might take a little longer than he thought. At some point, he has to talk to Markham. She may go ballistic, or just clam up. But, yeah, he’ll come back with something. He wasn’t exactly ambivalent about the whole thing.”

They waited some more. Then the radio squawked quietly in their shoulder mikes. It was the chief, making a comms check. There were seven teams in place, including themselves and the team out on the St. John’s campus. The chief’s call sign was team zero. Each team responded with its number. Branner answered for both of them. “Team three, in position, no contact.”