If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right under the big diesels, amidships. Even if it didn't sink the ship, this would do the most damage.
The docking facilities here weren't huge. Basco owned the end of the Everett River. That's how rivers worked around Boston Harbor-ran inland for a mile and then just ceased to exist, fed underground by sewers and culverts. Basco surrounded the river in a U shape. On one side of it they had a pier, and the other side was just undeveloped, basically a siding for a railway spur that ran up into Everett. If they had guards, they'd be on the side with the pier. So I stayed on the right, the eastern half of the river, and started to slide on up the hull of the Basco Explorer.
For the first few yards, feeling my way over the sonar dome at the bottom of the prow, I had my head above water. Then I had to face the fact that if I stayed up here, the SEAL could come from below and gut me like a tuna. Either way, I was in his element. But if I tried to be half-assed about it, I was in double trouble.
So I dove. I swam straight down to the bottom, which was only about ten feet below the bottom of the Basco Explorer's hull. I could almost stand on the bottom and touch the ship with one outstretched hand. They'd probably dredged this channel out to the Explorer's dimensions.
Then I realized that we were dealing with small volumes of water. I was used to the open Harbor. This was a lot more claustrophobic. I was in a space about the size of a couple of mobile homes, and if the SEAL was still here, he was sharing my space.
The water transmitted a powerful metallic clang. Impossible to tell direction, but obviously something had struck the ship's hull. Possibly the magnets on Smirnoff's mine. If I hunkered down, pretended to be a chunk of toxic waste and waited, the driver would swim away and I could clip the wires. But I wondered: what was the time delay on the sucker? It had to be fairly long. The diver had to get away, the water-hammer effect could kill you from a distance. This was reassuring.
From using up the compressed air, I'd become slightly buoyant, a little lighter than the water, and it was hard to stay on the bottom. So I relaxed and let myself float upwards until I was spread-eagled against "the bottom of the hull, facing down. I made sure I was a little east of the keel, so my bubbles skimmed off to the right, following the ship's curve, and came out on the unwatched side.
Another clang, very close, so close that I felt the vibrations through my tank and into my back. Then there was a light, coming toward me. You couldn't see a light more than a few feet in this shitty water. Then the light disappeared. Whoever owned it had shut it off.
Then another damn light, in front of and below me, almost on the bottom, cut into thick rays of shadow by the limbs of a diver.
Two divers. One swimming up where I was, his tank clanging against the hull. The second, the one with the light, heavier, using his weight to kick his way along the bottom. The one at my level had shut off his light so he couldn't be seen. The other was chasing him.
The prey almost got face-to-face with me and our masks looked at each other for just a second, amazed. He was wearing an underwater moonsuit, like mine, made for diving in a toxic environment.
Why? Smirnoff wouldn't know about the poison coming out of the Basco Explorer. He'd been planning this action for months. But this diver knew about it. Working for Basco?
He sank away from me because the other diver, below him, had grabbed him by the ankle and was pulling him down. He was kicking and thrashing but that's hard when you're underwater, and maybe a little tired of running. Steel glinted, and then the light was shining through a crimson thunderhead.
What was I going to do? All I could hope was that this killer with the knife hadn't seen me. I wasn't about to out swim him. If one of these guys was a SEAL, I had to figure it was the live one.
The light had gotten kicked by the victim, flailing around in his own blood, and the beam was slowly rotating as it
sank. It spun by the killer's head and I saw a bare white face, long brown hair, blue eyes.
Tom Akers was working for Smirnoff. Which meant the dead guy was fiasco's. So maybe Tom wouldn't decide to cut me up. I pushed off against the hull and began sinking down into his level. He grabbed the light and nailed me with the beam, paralyzing me, getting a look at who I was. It was all up to him.
Through my eyelids I saw the light diminish as he pointed it somewhere else. When I could see again, I wished I couldn't. Tom was curled into a fetal position in the water, vomiting, groping around for his mouthpiece.
I was able to get over to him and shove the mouthpiece toward him again, but he just shot it out on a yellow jet of bile. SLUD. He was quivering in my arms and I saw him suck in a big bellyful of that awful black water and swallow it down. Then he looked up into my eyes-his pupils were dilated so there wasn't any iris left-and held up two fingers. Which could have meant two, or peace, or victory.
By the time I'd wrestled him up to the east side of the ship, he was dead. I left him bobbing there, face down, and swam back underneath to look for the mine.
And I found it-it was easy to look when I didn't have to worry about other divers-but it wasn't what I was looking for. This was a real mine, not a homemade one. An honest-to-god chunk of official U.S. Navy ordnance, stuck to the bottom of the hull, not exactly in the right place, a dozen yards forward of the engine room.
Maybe Tom had been trying to tell me there were two mines. That would make sense. Two divers, two mines. I swam back and found another one under the engine room, this one made from the bottom of a plastic garbage can and a couple of big old industrial magnets.
To pry it off and find the wires leading to the digital timer was easy enough. I clipped them off with the wirecutter and let this piece of junk sink to the bottom.
Now for the second. I swam back for a closer look and noticed a new fact: it was right in between a couple of vents in the bottom of the hull. Probably vents for toxic waste. This mine had been planted by a fiasco diver, in protective gear because he knew the water was poisoned. They were sending their evidence to the bottom.
Laughlin was a goddamn evil genius. Poison the Harbor, kill the bugs, blow up the evidence, get rid of a rusty old tank, collect the insurance, blame it on wicked terrorists.
I tried to yank it off, but it wasn't going to come peacefully. Its magnets were bigger and more powerful than Smirnoff's. Bart's prybar got under it, but as Archimedes pointed out, the lever's no good without a place to stand. I had to invert myself and put my feet against the bottom of the hull. There were three divers down here tonight-The Three Stooges Stop Pollution-two of us were dead, and that left me to handle the slapstick comedy. That's probably what it looked like. But eventually the mine came loose and dropped to the bottom.
Next question: how much damage could it do from there? As my last major suicide attempt of the night, I swam down there and dragged it across the bottom until it was off to the side, maybe forty feet away from the ship. If it went off there, that was just too bad. The Bosco Explorer would just have to take it like the sturdy old bucket she was.
When I paddled wearily away from that mine, I allowed myself to hear again, and what I heard was diesels. Immense diesels. Didn't need to break the water to know what it was. I swam under the ship, emerged under the Basco pier, climbed up a ways into the pilings, and lobbed one bottle of putrescine up there.
Bart's signal was the sound of projectile vomiting from the security guards on the pier. He came in fast and loud on the Zodiac, kept the Basco Explorer between him and the guards, and got his assistants to lob the rest of the putrescine up onto the ship. He was pretty good at this; maybe GEE should hire him as my replacement.