Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

"Yeah. Evidence that fights back."

Once we made damn sure there were no tripwires, we lowered ourselves down there. Then we squatted and investigated the heap of junk from a distance, saw the grenades, clustered around the pipe like coconuts on a tree, saw the wires.

Someone landed on my back. I turned my head a little so that when my face smashed into the floor, I was leading with my cheek and not my teeth. Whoever had jumped me was drunk and we ended up lying there, nestled like spoons for an instant, and then I just rolled over on top because it felt like he or she wasn't as heavy as I was.

I was right. But the second person, standing above me, astride my body, holding the ceremonial knife in his hands-he was heavy. He was obese, in fact. His floor-length leather cape spread way out, like Batman's.

There wasn't much I could do because I still didn't have my breath back. I gasped and moaned, getting my lungs push-started, but this didn't do anything about the guy with the knife.

Boone, over in the opposite corner, was giving a better account of himself. Someone had started by breaking a bottle over his head. She'd seen a lot of TV shows and thought that this would knock him out. Instead, Boone got pissed off and punched out her front teeth. Now she was shrieking like a bad set of air brakes, spinning and bouncing around the compartment like a top. A guy had gotten Boone in a bear hug from behind and lifted his feet off the floor, allowing him to kick with both feet-which isn't normally possible-and so he inflicted a bit of internal bleeding on a third attacker. I heard the ribs snap. But he didn't even notice. The person who was holding him off the ground spun him around and methodically rammed his face against a rusty wall about half a dozen times. The guy with the broken ribs was jumping up and down, shouting without using any words, stabbing at the air with his knife.

I happened to be looking at that person when he got about half his brains blown against the compartment wall. The obese guy standing above me stood up straight and I kicked him in the nads. Then I got showered with blood as he took a bullet in the middle of his back.

He staggered sideways into the shrine, rammed it like a tractor hitting a Christmas tree, and in the aftermath I heard a little tink-tink-tink that was probably the sound of a grenade pin bouncing around on the floor.

When I went over the top of the wall, I ran into Bart and took him with me; we landed hard on the floor of the next compartment. I was just starting to think about pain when the blast of the grenade came through like one beat of a heavy-metal tom-tom. The shrapnel hit the wall with an overwhelming pulse of static and then I could hardly hear anything.

Boone was above us, wiping blood out of his face and trying to get ungrogged. His head had already taken a lot of abuse. Bart was waving his revolver dangerously. "You better take this gun," he suggested. "I'm incredibly drunk."

"Lucky it wasn't a Claymore," Boone said, "or we wouldn't have had the time delay."

"That one seemed like about thirty seconds," I said.

"More like five."

The fragged compartment looked about the way I expected it to. The silver pipe had been severed halfway up. A golden fluid was welling calmly out the top, running down to the floor of the compartment. It wasn't necessary to run an analysis.

We weren't clear about what to do with the dead guys. If it came down to it, we could certainly defend ourselves in court. But you're supposed to bury corpses, or put sheets over them or something, not leave them sitting in a barge compartment that's slowly filling up with toxic waste.

"On the other hand, why not?" Bart said. "For them, this is like dying in church."

"That's good enough for me," Boone said, and jogged away down the catwalk. After about a nanosecond of careful thought, I followed him.

We came down on the opposite side of the barge, in case the Satanists had decided to bring in reinforcements. Once we hit the ground, I waded out into the water a little ways, sweeping my flashlight back and forth across my path. Just before Boone had discovered the shrine, I'd been starting to put a suspicion together in my mind.

The odor we'd noticed on our way over wasn't coming from Spectacle Island. It was coming from the water. But we hadn't noticed it in other parts of the Harbor. Only the part right north of Spectacle Island-where the Bosco Explorer was anchored.

I scooped half a dozen dead fish out of the surf and tossed them up onto the land. We squatted around them and checked them over.

If the odor came from the dying of Boston Harbor-if these fish had died from infection with the PCB bug-they would have died at different times. Some would be decomposed, some would be fresh. But if I may be excused another disgusting thought, these fish all looked good enough to eat. They had died within the last couple of hours.

"There's something new in the Harbor," I said. "Something that stinks real bad, and is incredibly toxic. And it stinks worst around the Basco Explorer." "They must do something," Boone said. "We didn't see any dumping."

"Sure. Years ago, when we started taking movies of them dropping barrels into the water, they got really shy and came up with a new system. They've got tanks in there that can be filled from the top and then drained out the bottom of the hull while the ship is in motion."

"What did Fleshy say to you this morning?" "Make my day!" Bart said. "It was in the Herald." "That's what he said," Boone said. "Go ahead. Test the Harbor for PCB-eating bugs. Test the sewers. Make my day. You won't find anything."

"Say they filled those hidden tanks with some kind of massively toxic, concentrated stuff, probably an organophosphate, and dumped it into the Harbor tonight. They'd want to anchor near Spectacle Island-the center of the infection. They'd dump it into the water. Everything in the water would die. No one would find it remarkable that fish were dying-remember, the Herald called it the Harbor of Death. But at the microscopic level, all those PCB bugs are dying too."

"Just like Kelvin said," Boone said. "If it gets real bad, we might have to nuke the Harbor."

"Jesus," Bart said, "Isn't that a little overkillish?"

"Not at all. Look. Twenty-four hours ago, these guys were dead. They had illegally put a genetically engineered bug into the environment and it was creating a toxic catastrophe. They'd rigged up a scapegoat-Dolmacher-but he'd gotten wise. A loose waste barrel on the deck.

"Now that's all different. Basco's dropping the bomb. Murdering the Harbor. Shit, the sewers too. The drums they were offloading into the Boston Whaler? Probably full of the same stuff. They're probably dumping it into the gutters right now. Exterminating the bug, covering up their traces." "Kind of blatant," Bart said.

"Not at all," said Boone. "Shit, fiasco's back on its home territory here. They're old hands at poisoning the water and getting away with it."

"It can't be traced to the ship, and it can't be traced through the gutters," I said.

"The bastards are getting off scot free," Boone said. He was just breathing the words, he was almost inaudible. "Kind of looks that way," Bart said. "We have to get onto that ship." Boone was in outer space now, in a kind of trance, staring at the incantations on the barge. "Before they get rid of the evidence. We have to board the ship and find the tanks they used."

"What would you do then," Bart asked. "Just getting on board wouldn't prove anything."

"We'd have to get the media on board," Boone said. "No way to do that until they tie up somewhere," I said. "The ship is going to be moored on Basco property, and you can bet they'll have intense security. We can't even get within striking distance without trespassing on their property and getting popped."