The Last Family (46 page)

“Shadowfax!”
an amplified voice boomed. “Cut your engines immediately!”

Erin could make out the shapes of men moving on the deck of the cabin cruiser. She started to swim in that direction but decided to make for the yacht club a hundred yards away. She could see someone standing in the
Shadowfax’s
cockpit, shielding his eyes from the bright light.

Then, as Erin treaded water, it was if the world were ending in a brilliant finale.

The harbor went white several times in rapid succession at different locations. There was a deafening thud, and the Coast Guard boat was replaced by an orange fireball surrounded by water vapor. Then a boathouse across the way went up, and the cabin cruiser that she had started to swim for evaporated. The harbor was filled with debris flying into the air and raining down all over. Several pieces of fiberglass and metal clattered against the deck of the
Shadowfax
, then splashed all around her. Several boats moored near the Hatteras were burning. She watched as the
Shadowfax
pulled away from
the pier and began running for the harbor’s mouth, illuminated by the fiery maelstrom. The siren aboard the
Shadowfax
stopped blaring, and the only noise was the crackling of fire and voices yelling.

Within seconds Erin heard new sirens. Police cars on the outside perimeter had started in toward the devastation. Diesel fuel and gasoline from ruptured tanks caught, and the flames rolled across the harbor out toward the other fingerlike piers, where scores of boats waited to be added to the catastrophe.

As Erin swam for the nearest boat, something rolled under her hands, a form moved, and Tom Nelson’s face turned upward into hers. His lifeless eyes were open far too wide. Then his clothes released the air trapped inside, and he sank slowly into the dark water. Erin screamed, but the sound was covered by newly exploding boats. Then she climbed onto the pier and ran, stepping over debris as best she could. Her teeth chattered loudly, the violence of the muscle spasms blurring her vision as she ran toward the lights of the yacht club, her nightgown clinging to her like wrinkled skin.

50

T
HE
F
ALCON LANDED SUCCESSFULLY THOUGH VERY HARD, DUE TO A
sudden downdraft. The engines reversed with a loud whine, and the pilot taxied off the runway as soon as he could, stopping just off it in a perpendicular attitude. Emergency and security vehicles were coming down the runways and taxiways, washing the mirror of wet asphalt with their yellow and red flashing lights. The vehicles rolled up to the Falcon and stopped in a semicircle, halting the airplane’s forward progress. Men climbed down from the fire truck and out of the other vehicles. Paul dialed a number and put his phone to his ear.

“Thorne, where the hell are you?”

“Coming from the terminal. A taxiway, I believe,” Thorne Greer said, sounding out of breath.

“Well, hurry. This is looking like a lynching party.”

Paul stood and moved to the door with the cane pinned to his stomach by his left wrist. He held the telephone
in his right hand like a weapon. He slapped the pilot on the shoulder and noticed sweat running down the faces of the two men in the cockpit. “Damned good landing, boys,” he said. “You’ll get a big bonus for this.”

The pilot looked at Paul through his red-ringed crystalline eyes. “You’ll go to jail for this,” he mumbled, his hands still trembling. “You’re fuckin’ insane. What you did was air piracy, and I’ll make sure …”

Paul frowned. “Let me do the talking, and maybe I can save your licenses.”

Rainey opened the door, and he and Paul stepped down onto the taxiway’s pavement. Thorne Greer’s car pulled up in front of the men who had advanced on the two passengers. Thorne jumped out and ran to Paul.

A large man in a cheap suit who was sopping wet held up a badge. “National Transportation Safety Board,” he growled. “What the fuck’s going on here? You nuts? You were warned off … you could have made several alternate fields that are open. You’ve put a lot of innocent lives in jeopardy.” Paul assumed he was referring to people in the homes around the airport, certainly not theirs.

Paul held up his own badge. “DEA. We have a national emergency, and I don’t have time to explain it to you. Don’t speak to my crew, or you’ll all be in debriefing for weeks.”

“DEA, so fuckin’ what? I never heard of anything that would allow you—”

“National emergency, I said!” Paul yelled to be heard by all in earshot. “We’re operating on direct orders from—”

The necessity for Paul’s explanation ended when the western sky suddenly turned a brilliant red-orange once and then almost immediately three more times. When the sound arrived, it was as if lightning had struck a few feet distant. Boom! BaBoom, boom, boom. The shock wave was a wash of air pushing through, which fluttered the men’s wet clothes like flags. “Holy fuck!” the NTSB inspector said, his fat face orange, his mouth like a crater.

“Yacht basin. Must be fuel tanks,” someone said.

“Bombs,” Rainey yelled in alarm. “It’s going down!”

Paul, Rainey, and Thorne jumped into the car, leaving everybody standing beside the plane, staring off at the red pulsing sky. The DEA Chrysler fishtailed off silently and, when the tires caught purchase, shot straight down the center of runway eighteen, leaving a crowd of confused personnel standing with their mouths agape, sharp shadows dancing behind them, and the light of the great fire reflecting in their eyes.

51

W
HEN
P
AUL
, T
HORNE
, R
AINEY, AND THE OTHER AGENTS GOT TO
the pier, the
Shadowfax
was gone and the yacht harbor was a disaster site of astounding proportions. Flames reached like fingers high into the blackness, and the base of the clouds was stained bright red for miles. The heat was blistering, evaporating the rain. In the distance fire engines were racing in from all over, and the basin’s parking lot was filling with emergency vehicles, ambulances, cars, and trucks. There were onlookers from the boathouses and condominiums nearby, emergency personnel and uniforms moving about in the light and smoke like frightened animals.

Paul and Thorne made the end of the pier where the
Shadowfax
had been moored. Thorne lifted a cleanly severed mooring rope. It was here. He waved his hand where forty boats locked to a pier were creating a wall of flame two hundred feet high. “The Hatteras with a
SWAT sniper and his spotter was out there. That section of boathouses was where another SWAT guy was stationed. See—over there.” Thorne bit his bottom lip in anguish as he pointed to a burning boathouse. “Sean was over there—and there was a Coast Guard vessel anchored right out there.”

“Come on,” Paul said, authority filling his voice. “Let’s see if we can get some information.” They ran down the pier. Paul, Thorne, and Rainey joined a flow of uniforms into the building.

“Who’s in charge in here?” Thorne yelled as they entered.

A police sergeant, his face blackened from the smoke, recognized Thorne and rushed over. “Mr. Greer! There’s a girl from the boat in the bar there. I’m trying to coordinate …” He stared out the window where the world burned.

Erin was in the club’s bar, wrapped in a blanket and surrounded by a ring of policemen. There was an emergency medical team attending her as cops fired questions at her. She looked like a feeble old woman who’d been rescued from a flood. Paul pushed a policeman roughly aside. “What the hell …,” a uniform yelled, and grabbed Paul’s jacket and twisted it. Paul whirled and put his cane against the man’s throat, pressing the shocked cop against a wall. Two other uniforms grabbed Paul from behind. Thorne moved in and flashed his badge. “Everybody back,” he yelled. “He’s ranking here!” Paul knelt and looked directly into his daughter’s face.

“Daddy?” She blinked and seemed to come out of her trance. Her eyes flooded and her lip quivered.

“Erin, it’s all right, it’ll be okay.” Paul sat beside her and put his right arm around her shivering shoulders, drawing her against him. “It’s gonna be fine.”

“Daddy. He has them. I saw him. It was him driving the boat away.”

“We have to know who was on the boat and exactly where they were.”

“Mama and Reb are in the V berth. Reid and Woody
 … I don’t know. Woody was in the lounge, I think. Reid in the aft berth. Mama and Reb were going to get out, too, but the man was … the man came and …” She hugged him desperately and buried her face in his chest. “It was horrible! People were on those boats and they died—didn’t they? They just weren’t there anymore. Why, Daddy?” she asked. “He took Mama and Reb … help them. Please, please help them. He’ll kill them.”

“No, Erin,” he lied. “He wants them alive. We’ll get them.” Paul turned his head. “Get a chopper here,” Paul said curtly to the soot-faced officer now standing near the tight group.

“We have one,” Thorne said. “All-weather giant parked on the quadrangle.”

“We found a policeman dead near the fence and Agent Vance beside a sailboat in the lot,” a policeman said. “A German shepherd was huddled against a fence near him.”

“Wolf. It’s our dog,” Erin said tearfully.

“Bring the dog,” Paul said, hoping that its presence would help calm her.

Paul spoke calmly even though he was panicking inside. “Erin, tell me everything you can remember.”

“Mama helped me get out of the hatch—I guess Woody and Reid are dead—or they would have …”

“Okay, Erin.” Paul looked at the medical personnel. “Can you give her something? To calm her.”

The attendant nodded and started fumbling through his case.

“We have to set up communication with Martin,” Paul said.

“Woody had a radio on board with him,” Thorne said.

Erin nodded. “He had the thing in his ear to listen.”

Paul turned to the closest policeman. “Can we get a fast boat?”

A Coast Guard ensign, standing beside Rainey, spoke up. “How fast y’all needing ta go?”

52

M
ARTIN HAD CUT THE MOORING UNES AND PILOTED THROUGH THE
walls of flame out into the chop, the
Shadowfax
pitching violently in the swells as it entered the lake. He had set a course for the causeway bridge and in a few minutes drew up alongside it. Then he had set the boat’s autopilot to hold a course parallel to the twin spans, figuring that the bridge would mask the craft’s silhouette from radar detection. The wind was steady from the southwest with gusts to forty knots. The boat listed hard to stern as the rudder worked to maintain the heading toward the north shore some twenty-five miles distant.

Kurt had placed the scuba tanks, masks, and flippers on the deck behind the rear mast. He had also placed a pound of plastique against the gas tank and equipped it with a remote detonator. There were two remote triggers with an effective range of one mile; they were operated by depressing a button and then releasing the pressure,
at which point there was a detonation. The Semtex would convert the boat into confetti, the water for a hundred yards into a vapor cloud. They had used far less on the hulls of the three vessels in the harbor and the boathouses Martin had wanted neutralized. Kurt thought about how he had lain in wait under a pier and had overtaken the Coast Guard diver and killed him silently beneath the murky surface, before taking his place.

So far the plan, hastily put together, was working like a charm. Martin was a true professional, he thought. He could think on the fly, and with less information than people with all the time and field intelligence in the world.

Reid, propped against the wall in the bedroom, heard someone moving in the hallway and placed the gun at his side, out of sight. He was too dizzy to stand and was lying there still naked, wet, and bleeding. He watched as a silhouetted figure filled the open door.

“You’d be who?”

“Reid … Reid Dietrich.”

“Please, I know your name isn’t Dietrich. What is it, really?”

Reid closed his eyes for a few seconds and opened them. “George Spivey.”

“Spivey? Oh, yes. That was your setup on the pier?”

“I planned to have you there.”

Martin laughed. “A nice practice exercise.”

“I underestimated you.”

“So, tell me—you turned Lallo. You had something on him?”

Reid nodded.

“His business partners were his weak spot. He didn’t need that. It was the excitement. I liked him, but because of his disloyalty he died like a pig, squealing in the dark.”

“And you won’t?”

“I’m short on time, so I’ll get to the meat of the matter. You’re a professional. I’m a professional. I won. You lost. Stakes we play for are death.”

“Aren’t you curious? About my mission? Who sent me?”

“Hell, son, you were supposed to kill me. Am I wrong? Like Woody. Why didn’t you join them on the dock? Prior engagement?”

George Spivey nodded.

“Okay, George. Who sent you in?”

George Spivey shook his head, pain filling his eyes.

“Well, George Spivey, in my day the word ‘professional’ meant something. That Woody—now he’s a professional. Him, I had to outflank.”

George Spivey managed to smile.

“Nice boat, George. Solid, seaworthy. Yours or theirs?”

“Rich uncle.”

“Confiscated by the DEA.” He smiled. “I’m gonna blow it up anyway. Your head must hurt. Kurt’s excitable, he thought he’d probably killed you. Frankly, I didn’t expect to find you so alert.”

“My head feels like an asshole that’s had a cherry bomb go off in it.”

Martin laughed again. “Very descriptive. You should have been a comedian. Laughing in the face of impossible odds is an admirable trait.”

Spivey nodded.

“Kurt had to neutralize you because I couldn’t have so dangerous an adversary walking about while I was tidying up and getting under sail.” There was a note of sarcasm in the word “dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Wait until you see what’s coming next.”