P Deutermann - Darkside

Meantime, I think I’ll go sharpen my dress sword. Now there’s a thing of beauty. It doesn’t talk, doesn’t make phone calls, doesn’t send E-mails. It just hangs there in my closet along with my Marine dress blues. I put my gloves on before I handle it. Keeps it nice and shiny. I’ve got one right-hand glove that’s got a dozen cuts across the thumb where I test the blade. It’s not really supposed to be sharp, you know, or maybe you don’t. It’s just for ceremonies. But then, I know some ceremonies that aren’t in the drill manual, if you catch my drift. I can shave with that thing; that’s how sharp it is. Actually, I can’t shave myself-a little awkward. But I can shave somebody else, and I did, just once.

Some little guy. Into occasional high-risk gymnastics. Said he wanted to fly. And so he did.

On Thursday morning, Jim went upstairs to the supe’s office to see the commandant’s schedule for the day. He wanted to back-brief him on the previous day’s events. The commandant, however, had gone to Washington for the day with the superintendent. Admiral McDonald’s executive assistant declined to share with Jim the purpose of the trip. Jim took the horse-holder’s rebuff in stride and went to find some coffee at the mess table. Two junior officers were talking there, so he poured a cup of coffee and then joined them.

“So where are the elephants off to this morning?” he asked no one in particular. One of the JO’s said he’d heard that the supe was briefing SecNav on some personnel issues. “You know, this Dell mess. And something about an NCIS agent getting beat up? Like out in town?”

Jim pretended this was all news to him and headed for his office, where he put a call in to Branner. “You hear from Midshipman Hays yet?” he asked when she picked up.

“There’s a message from him,” she said. “Wants a meet at twelve hundred.”

“Want me there?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “What’s the word from the head shed?”

“Big and not so big are in D.C., briefing the SecNav on ‘personnel issues’ scuttlebutt here is that it’s the Dell case and what happened to Bagger.”

“Really,” she said. “Maybe I better pulse my network again; I called headquarters this morning, but nobody told me that.”

“Maybe that’s the message,” he said. “They’re getting ready to do something. Did you report what happened last night?”

“Not exactly. Left a message for Harry Chang to call me.”

Jim thought for a moment. “If the seance concerns what happened to Bagger, I’m surprised you weren’t pulled in.”

“Probably some of our heavies from the Navy Yard were pulled in. Chang’s out of pocket, and they wouldn’t tell me where. The dant knows what we’re doing, right?”

“I’ve been back-briefing since it started,” he said. “But I can never tell what the hell the real agenda is when I talk to Robbins. We’d better catch some real deal progress at this noon meeting, or I think we’re gonna get sidelined.”

“Meaning they’ll slap a lid on it and declare the thing solved. The Dell thing anyway. Bagger’s case, they’ll probably turn over to the city cops. You know, cop got clipped. Let ’em enjoy a little urban frenzy.”

They were both silent for a moment. “Hey?” he said. “I enjoyed your company last night. It was nice just to talk.”

“It was nice. Even without the gin rummy.”

“If you want to come over again, the access code is four-three-two-one-five, as in four, three, two, one, fire.”

“Four, three, two, one, fire. Got it. See you at noon.”

Jim spent the next half hour on paperwork, then signed out for the Public Works Center and drove over to the power plant to meet with the utility supervisors. They pored over the system maps while Jim made a new map, this one of the grating entrances to the entire underground area. They talked about the fact that the Fort Severn diagrams were wrong, but no one seemed to get too upset about that. It was a no-go area, and that was that. Jim didn’t enlighten them about the fact that the one magazine had been rigged to appear flooded.

“I’ve been asking about the ways into the underground system,” he said. “What about the ways out of it?”

That provoked some blank stares, but then the senior engineer got the sewage-handling and transfer-system maps out. “This is a system that goes out of the underground area, but naturally, it stays sealed.”

“We fervently hope,” offered one of the engineers. Everyone smiled.

“What else-how about smoke evacuation in the case of an underground fire?”

“Big exhaust fans in parallel with each of the grates,” the engineer said. “Depending on where the fire is, we’d try to close some fire doors to isolate it, then exhaust the oxygen supply. But the system’s been added onto for so long, it’s pretty porous.”

“How big are the exhaust ducts?”

“Four by four, but they’re filled with fan blades and vent screens. Nobody could get through one of those.”

“Any other ways out?”

They all thought about it for a moment. “There’s the storm drain,” another engineer said, then pointed it out on the main map. “In case there was flooding, the water would flow down to the river-gravity.”

“Could our guy get in or out that way?”

“Tough,” the chief engineer said. “Permanent, big grating on the seawall. Submerged except at really low tide. Plus, the flaps here open only one way, and only with water pressure on the tunnel side.”

Jim nodded. “So, the sewage system is completely sealed, and there’s just the one storm drain? No direct connections between Bancroft Hall and the utility tunnels?”

“No, sir. Everything going from the tunnel into Bancroft is a pipe or a wireway. Nothing big enough for a human.”

Jim thanked them and took his annotated maps with him. He drove back to the office, where he left the truck. Then he walked down across the Yard from the administration building, passed between Michelson and Chauvenet halls, then crossed the Ingram track field and went out onto the wide expanse of Dewey Field, right along the Severn River. If the diagrams were correct, that storm drain ought to be in the middle of the seawall bounded by Dewey Field.

He was operating under the old Sherlock Holmes principle: When all the other possibilities have been eliminated, the one staring you in the face, however improbable, has to be the answer. They had had teams on all the gratings last night. Assuming his guys hadn’t been asleep at the switch, the runner hadn’t used a grating. He hadn’t flushed himself down a toilet, and he couldn’t morph through the exhaust fans. The route through the old magazine was a possibility, but until he actually found a surface exit, he didn’t know that the thing actually led to the Yard. That left the storm drain.

He walked the entire length of the Dewey Field seawall without finding it, then remembered the engineer’s comment about the tides. The grating was submerged most of the time. He looked over the wall and saw that it was high tide, or very close to it. He watched the water. The streak of flotsam along the seawall seemed to be edging its way out toward the bay. Ebb tide under way? He decided to come back after the meeting with Hays. He went back to the upper end of Dewey Field and carefully paced the distance to where the storm drain should be. It supposedly ran under the walkways that sloped up to the chapel. When he reached the point where his pacing told him the drain ought to be, he looked up and saw that he was lined up with the steps between Michelson and Chauvenet. Perfect. The drain had been run so as to not penetrate either of the two academic buildings. So this was where it should be. There was a metal railing along the seawall. He got out his pocket knife and scratched an X in the railing at the point where he thought the seawall grate should be.