“Let’s hear it,” said Mindy from the bottom of the boat.
“I’m going to drop you off at the southern end of the island. I’ll land midway on the island and make my own way to where the burial ground is. On foot, you’ll follow the map I’ve sketched for you. Stick to the route I’ve drawn — the island’s a veritable death trap. By the time I reach the burial ground you’ll already be in position in the trees, covering me. I go in, find the limb, cut out the wire, we split.”
“What about Nodding Crane?”
“He’s going to show, no way to predict when. The field around the burial site is wide open — there’s no way for him to cross it without you seeing him. When he appears, shoot him dead. Don’t mess around.”
“Not very sporting.”
“The hell with sporting. Got a problem with shooting a man in the back?’’
“Not a man like him.”
He nodded at her backpack. “You got a good sniper rifle in there like I said?”
“It’s not a sniper rifle but it’ll do, a Kel-Tec SUB-2000 nine-millimeter semi-automatic. Kevlar vest, too. What about you?”
“Two handguns, body armor — I’m ready.” Gideon pulled out a map enclosed in a ziplock bag. “You won’t have any problem finding your way, but as I said, the whole island’s an accident waiting to happen, so follow the route I marked on this map — no shortcuts. There’s a timetable here, too. Stick to it.”
“What if he’s already waiting for you in the burial trench? You step out in the field and he guns you down?”
“I’m going to cross the field in a backhoe. Two are parked in a shed beside the field, and they’re built like tanks.”
The boat puttered along, nearing the City Island Bridge and the opening to the Sound. The wind howled, whipping the relatively calm channel water into whitecaps.
“Tell me about the island.”
“The place started out as a POW camp for Civil War soldiers. A lot of them died and were buried there. New York City bought it for a public burial ground in 1869. But that only took up about half the island. The rest was used for other things at various times: a women’s lunatic asylum, boys’ workhouse, tubercularium, yellow fever quarantine, prison. During the 1950s the military used it as a base for a battery of Nike Ajax missiles, stored in silos. Now it’s uninhabited and just used for burials. But nothing’s been removed or boarded up, it was all just left to disintegrate.”
“And the burials?”
“They lay them in two parallel trenches, one for amputated limbs, the other for the, ah, complete corpses. The limbs are buried at a rate of, I figured, about seven to ten a day. Each box has two numbers: the medical file number and a sequential number added by the inmates as they bury them, so they can be located again if necessary. The body part is also tagged inside the box with the identifying information. It’s been about a week since Wu’s legs were amputated, so I figure we need to go about sixty, maybe seventy boxes back. The boxes are stacked in the trench four across and eight high, thirty-two in a row, so I figure it’ll be in the second or third row deep.”
“And then?”
Gideon patted his backpack. “I’ve got the X-rays with me. We’ll have to do a little dirty work to get the wire out.”
“When do you expect Nodding Crane to appear?”
“He’s going to be unpredictable. That’s why you’ll remain hidden throughout and only appear when he shows himself or the fight is joined. Maximize your element of surprise. You understand?”
“Perfectly. And you’ve got a plan B?”
“And C and D. The very unpredictability of the island works to our advantage.” Gideon smiled grimly. “Nodding Crane behaves like a chess player. We’re going to give him a craps game instead.”
64
As the boat entered the broad Sound, the storm hit them with a blast, raising a vicious chop that battered the hull and slopped into the boat. The lightning front was closing in, the distant booms rolling across the water like artillery.
Gideon steered the boat into the wind. “Start bailing.”
Keeping low, Mindy picked up an old Clorox-bottle bailer in the bow and began scooping up water and tossing it out. As she did so, a large wave slammed the gunwale and shoved the boat sideways, drenching them.
“My God,” Mindy said as she bailed. “This boat is like a bathtub.”
The lights of City Island wavered on the horizon, but ahead all was blackness. Gideon pulled a compass from his pocket, took a bearing, corrected course. While the chop was bad, the swell was worse, surprisingly strong for protected waters. The engine sputtered and hiccupped; if it quit, they’d be finished.
But it did not quit, and the boat pushed on through the gale, Mindy bailing almost continuously. It was not a long crossing — half a mile — but the boat was heading into the wind, moving at a crawl, and a strong current was sweeping the boat northward, past the island and out to sea.
If they missed the island, their next stop would be Execution Rocks.
Gideon took another reading and compensated for the current by heading farther south. Another wave slammed into their flank, throwing them to one side and almost swamping the small vessel. The weak engine coughed as Gideon struggled to bring the boat back into the wind.
“We’re going to drown before we even get there,” said Mindy.
But even as she spoke, the faintest outline of the island began to materialize in the dark, fringed by a dim line of breaking water. Gideon angled in toward the southern end. They were on the lee side of the island, and as they approached the dangerous swell subsided.
“Be ready to jump,” he said in a low voice, pulling a pair of night-vision goggles from his backpack and handing them to her. “Use these. No lights. Follow the timetable I laid out. Be in position at the appointed time. And for God’s sake, wait for your opportunity.”
“I’ve been at this a lot longer than you,” she said as she fitted the goggles to her head.
The surf loomed up, the chop boiling up onto a strand of large cobbles.
“Now,” he murmured.
She jumped into the surf and Gideon slammed the shift into reverse, the propeller shaft almost bucking out of the water with the effort. In a moment she had vanished into the darkness. Gideon turned back into the gale, making a loop far from shore where the boat couldn’t be seen or heard from the island. He struggled to bail and steer at the same time, the rain coming down hard, the waves smacking into the boat.
Navigating by dead reckoning, he turned northward, paralleling the eastern shore of the island, and then angled in when he felt he was nearing the island’s midpoint. As he neared the shore, he could just see the outline of the giant smokestack against the dim sky — his landmark. He picked his spot along the shore, the location of the small salt marsh, and ran the boat full speed up on the beach. He hopped out and pulled the boat into the dense marsh grass.
Crouching in the cover, he prepared himself for the trek up-island, fitting on his night-vision goggles, checking his sidearms, and giving his own map a final look. To decrease predictability, he had chosen an unlikely and inefficient route, one that went through the most dangerous and unstable areas of the ruins.
Nodding Crane would have arrived early, scouted around, and taken up position — the spider waiting for the fly. And Gideon believed, although he had not mentioned it to Mindy, that he knew exactly where that position was. There was one place on the island he himself would have chosen: a superior vantage point in all respects. If he understood Nodding Crane — and he believed he did — the man would not be able to resist occupying the strongest offensive position.