CHAPTER 28
Chalk loved God, but he didn’t believe in Him. Rather, Chalk reveled in the enormous cost that religion in general, and a supreme deity in particular, exacted from humankind. All the senseless killing on both sides to protect a divine being that supposedly could look out for Himself just fine. It stoked his heart, and filled his bank accounts. Right now, some of the fallout of religious fanaticism was settling too close to home.
Slagget pulled a semi-conscious Clynch into the middle of the boat. Then he performed a rapid trauma exam worthy of any 68-Whiskey combat medic. Entry wound, but no exit. That surprised Chalk. Maybe the round had come through the skiff’s side and lost some energy before Clynch caught it. It meant Clynch had a bullet knocking around in his large intestines. Slagget stuffed a QuikClot sponge into the wound, and put Clynch’s hand over it. “Press!”
Clynch did his best. At least he held the sponge in place so the hemostatic agents could arrest the bleeding. Next, Slagget zapped Clynch with a green morphine injector pen out of their first aid kit. It was the same delivery system that injects epinephrine for an allergic bee-stung patient crashing in anaphylactic shock. He pushed it hard against Clynch’s thigh. A spring-loaded hypodermic needle pierced the flesh of his leg, and delivered the painkiller. Clynch howled at the new insult. Slagget looked at Chalk, shook his head.
“This is where we like it,” Chalk pronounced suddenly, as if finishing a speech that he had begun in a dark, cobwebbed recess of his brain. “At the edge of chaos is where all the really amazing shit happens! Like surfing! Be the wave, Simon Clynch! You’ve come through worse than this! A gutshot man can hang on for days!”
Which, in Chalk’s view, was a big problem. He met Slagget’s eyes with purpose. He was assessing Slagget’s loyalty to the mission versus his compassion for Clynch. Loyalty and Compassion now lay in opposite pans of a tetanus-ridden scale in Chalk’s mind. Slagget stared back at Chalk, gave a nanosecond’s worth of deliberation for show, and nodded to his boss. He was in.
Chalk was cryptic. “Check up front for something.”
Slagget hunched low, crawled forward to the bow over Hiram’s plastic duck decoys. As he groped along, he stopped to unsnarl his ankles from the lines attaching decoys to their lead anchor weights.
Chalk cooed to Clynch, “It’s like my boy Fred Nietzsche always says, ‘One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.’ Words to live by. Have you dancing in no time! Give that dope a chance to work. Must hurt like a sum-bitch. Hey! Remember that crazy cocksucking Spetsnaz? He bit my hand ’til you cut his throat. Bit me to the bone. You bet that hurt, boyo! Remember that? Still got the scars. Stay with us, buddy. Stay with us.”
Clynch could only reply between moans. “Gut hurts like fire! Fire! Whole mission’s cursed!”
Sadly, Chalk never took luck into account, not for a mission, and not for a man. Performance, utility, a steady gun hand, and a clear eye to aim. And all these things right now; the few criteria for judging a soldier in Chalk’s opinion. Simon Clynch was not measuring up anymore. Not even close.
CHAPTER 29
Ben swam blind into the dark well of the caisson, worked the mesh bag through the hatchway, then clawed upwards. His head broke the surface into the chamber. Foul entombed air ripped through Ben’s teeth into his starved lungs. He was in the wet sub-basement of the lighthouse. The waves outside thundered against the iron.
As Ben treaded water, he bumped into something floating in the dark with him. He reached into a cargo pocket of his wetsuit for a small light. Turning it on, he found as expected that he was in a circular crypt. Like the bottom of a big water tank.
Ben swung the light. He was treading water with Hiram Harris. His friend was blanched, dead. He slumped at the surface in the life vest he kept on the Palestrina. The body undulated up and down in Ben’s wavelets making Hiram appear to nod. Ben felt his stomach turn. Another friend gone. What had they done to LuAnna?
Ben tested the first dry rungs of the rusted interior ladder running down to the submerged hatch. They held, so far. He climbed up to the next hatch that gave access into the basement level above. One hard push and it rose. It was unlocked, and nobody waited to blow his brains out. That’s one break, anyway.
Ben played the light across the five-hundred-gallon tanks. Four of them. Good. Still there as he remembered. He rolled over the hatch coaming onto the cement floor, and pulled the mesh bag up after him. Two of the tanks were cisterns that held the former keeper’s water supply, collected from rainfall.
The other two tanks held kerosene. Fuel for the big navigation beacon. Though the light was automated and converted to electricity, the kerosene system had been preserved as a backup in case of a power failure.
Ben got to work with the two cases of aerosol bug bombs. Popped them all as fast as he could. A poisonous fog began filling the space.
Ben opened the stiff purge valves at the bottom of the kerosene tanks. Fuel gushed from the taps and ran across the cement floor. Fortunately, the hatch coaming in the floor was five inches high. There would be plenty of kerosene and volatile vapor loose in the airspace before anything overflowed into the sub-basement.
He gathered up the bag, and climbed another ladder. Pushed on the last hatch leading into the first floor. He would suffocate in the fumes if this one turned out to be locked. The hatch gave. Now he had access to the living quarters above the iron caisson. The kitchen and sitting room formed a continuous open space around the central spiral stair.
He peered around the room as best he could. The hatch itself blocked his view directly behind him. The noise of the storm covered the sounds of his invasion. No one in sight. He rose out of the floor into the brick walled space.
He lowered the hatch and saw LuAnna.
What was left of her.
Her fragile nakedness cut him to the bone. Her body bled from lacerations and scrapes. The only sign she was alive was her near convulsive shivering. A large welted bruise swelled from her forehead.
There was a terrible avulsion on her hip, as if a huge chunk of her flesh was torn out. She must have fought this bravely. Fought everything they had tried to do to her.
Her helplessness provoked a choking spasm of shame in Ben’s chest. Facing facts, there was nothing he could do for her here, nor was there time for self-recrimination now. If he was going to save LuAnna, hate him as she rightfully might, she had one more ordeal to endure. It would be the worst by far.
Someone moved overhead.
Ben planned to carefully lower LuAnna with the sling and tether into Miss Dotsy with Ellis’s help, but now there was no time. He fitted the inflatable life jacket around her, and buckled it in place. He listened.
Whoever was up there was coming down the central stair. There was no time to surprise and subdue this man as he had Tug Parnell. Ben scooped LuAnna in his arms ran through the door leading out to the deck. Without stopping, he made straight for the railing.
“Hey! You!” A man’s footsteps in pursuit. Then gunshots.
Ben threw one leg over the rail, and hurled himself backward into space with LuAnna embraced in his arms, bullets flying past them.
Ben lost hold of her when they struck the water. His mask flew off his face, and he was blinded in the murk. All that was left in his hand was the rope, the mesh bag, and the plastic pull-toggle for the CO2 cartridge on LuAnna’s life vest. He surfaced long enough to see a man with a gun looking down from the lighthouse deck.