Deadlock (23 page)

Holding the self-unloader, I struggled to my knees. A wall of water was pounding the forward gate, ripping panels from it. Great logs spewed into the air and disappeared through the sheets of water which still rose on either side of the ship.

I wanted to shut my eyes, shut out the disaster, but I couldn’t stop staring, horror-stricken. It was like watching through a marijuana high. Pieces of the lock broke off in slow motion. I could see each one, each separate fragment, each drop of water spraying loose, knowing all the time that the scene was moving very quickly.

Just when it seemed that nothing could keep us from diving forward and smashing against the rocks in the rapids below us, a great cry sounded above the roaring, the cry of a million women weeping in anguish, an unearthly screaming. The deck cracked in front of me.

People were trying to shout at each other to hold on, but no one could be heard over those screams as the beams wrenched and tore and the ship broke in two. The geysers of water rising above us shut off abruptly. We fell again
into the lock, falling forward and down at a great jolting speed, ramming the forward gates and the bottom with a bone-jarring impact. A hatch cover popped free and knocked over one of the crewmen. Wet barley poured out, covering everyone in the middle of the ship with pale gold mud. The deck slanted sharply down toward the crack and I grabbed the self-unloader to keep from being hurled into the center. The broken giant lay still.

The air was blessedly quiet following the roar of the explosion and the screams of the ship; all other sounds carried through it. People yelling, both on the
Lucella
and on land. In the distance we could hear sirens beginning to wail. Every few seconds another piece of the deck broke and clattered down the inclined plane toward the gash in the middle.

My legs were shaking. I let go of the self-unloader’s side and massaged the aching muscles in my left shoulder. Bledsoe still stood next to me, his eyes glassy, his face gray. I wanted to say something to him, but no words came. An explosion. Someone blew up a sixty-thousand-ton ship. Sixty thousand tons. Sixty thousand tons. The words beat meaninglessly in my brain.

The deck swam up and down in front of me; I thought it was starting to rise again. My trembling legs buckled and I collapsed. I fainted for a few seconds only, but lay on the deck until the swimming in my head passed, then forced myself to my feet. Bledsoe was still standing near me.

to the port side of the ship. I could hear him retching behind me.

“Martin. Our ship. Our ship. What happened?” That was Bemis.

“Someone planted explosives on your hull, Captain.” The words came from far away. Bemis was looking at me strangely: I realized it was I who was talking.

He shook his head, a jack-in-the-box on a spring; he couldn’t stop shaking it. “No. Not my ship. It must have been in the lock.”

“Couldn’t have been.” I started to argue with him but my brain felt flaccid. I wanted to sleep. Disjointed images floated in the gray mist of my mind. The geysers of water towering over the ship. The water changing color as the
Lucella
cut through it. The troughs of water dug by the screws as we left Thunder Bay. A dark figure in a wet suit climbing out of the water.

The figure in the wet suit. That meant something. I forced myself to focus on it. That was the person who planted the charges. It was done yesterday. In Thunder Bay.

I opened my mouth to blurt it out, then swallowed the words. No one was in any state to deal with such news.

Keith Winstein made his way over to us. His face was streaked with tears and mud. “Karpansky and Bittenberg. They’re both—both dead, sir. They were down on the bank with the cables. They must’ve—must’ve been—smashed into the side.” He gulped and shuddered.

“Who else?” Bemis demanded.

“Anna. She fell over the side. She—she was crushed. She never had a chance. Vergil fell into the hold. Oh, Jesus! He fell into the hold and suffocated in the barley.” He started laughing and crying wildly. “Drowned in barley. Oh, Christ!” he screamed. “Drowned in barley.”

Focus and energy returned to the captain’s face. He straightened and took Winstein by the shoulders, shaking
him hard. “Listen, Mate. The ones left are still your responsibility. Get them together. See who needs medical care. Radio the Coast Guard for a helicopter.”

The first mate nodded. He stopped sobbing, gave a few last shuddering breaths, and turned to the dazed crew.

“Martin needs some help, too,” I said. “Can you get him to sit down?” I needed to get away from the crowd on the deck. Somewhere, just out of reach in my mind, important information hovered. If I could just get away, stay awake, force myself into focus … I started back toward the pilothouse.

On my way I passed the chief engineer. He was covered with mud and oil. He looked like a miner emerging from three weeks in the pit. His blue eyes stared with horror through his mask of black.

“Where’s the captain?” he asked me hoarsely.

“On deck. How are things below?”

“We’ve got a man with a broken leg. That’s the only injury, thank God. But there’s water everywhere. Port engine is gone.… It was a bomb, you know. Depth charges. Must have been planted right on the center beam. Set off by radio signal. But why?”

I shook my head, helplessly, but his words jarred my mind loose. If it was set off by remote signal, it was done by someone along the bank. In the observation deck. The man with bright red hair and a pair of binoculars. Howard Mattingly, the second-string hockey player had hair like that. Boom Boom saw him someplace he shouldn’t be three weeks ago. Now here he was at the observation deck with binoculars when the
Lucella
blew up.

I forgot the ache in my left shoulder. I needed to find Mattingly. Now. Before he got away. I turned abruptly in front of Sheridan and moved back out on deck. My gun. I wasn’t going to tackle Mattingly without the Smith & Wesson. I went back to where I’d left it, to where Bledsoe and the captain were standing.

The bag was gone. I hunted for a few minutes, but I knew it was useless. Two shirts, a sweater, a pair of jeans, and a three-hundred-dollar Smith & Wesson were all lying with Vergil in fifty thousand tons of barley.

“I’m going,” I said to the captain. “I’ve got an idea I need to follow up. Better get one of your junior cooks to get him some hot tea with lots of sugar. He’s not doing too well.” I cocked my thumb in Bledsoe’s direction. I didn’t wait for Bemis’s response but turned to go.

It wasn’t difficult getting off the
Lucella
. She was resting at the bottom of the lock, her deck even with the bank. Clinging to the cables around the side, I swung easily across the two feet between her upraised stern and the side of the lock. As I picked my way up the narrow strip of land separating me from the MacArthur Lock, I passed an emergency crew coming from the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers. Men in green fatigues, medics, a stretcher crew—a solemn procession befitting a major disaster. Bringing up the rear, of course, was a television news team. They were the only ones who took any notice of me. One of them stuck a microphone under my nose and asked whether I was coming from the ship and what I knew about it.

I shrugged my shoulders in embarrassment and said in Italian that I didn’t know any English. Disappointed, the cameramen continued in the wake of the Coast Guard.

The crossway stretched on in front of me, two concrete strips sandwiching a wedge of grass. The wind chilled my sore shoulder. I wanted to run but I couldn’t. My legs were leaden posts and would not race for me. I staggered up to the gates closed in front of the MacArthur Lock and made my way across the narrow path on top of them. Beyond me lay the rocks lining the channel into Lake Huron. We were lucky the gates had held.

A tremendous crowd had gathered at the observation
deck. It took time and energy to force my way through the crush of people. Mattingly was no longer there.

Before elbowing my way out again, I looked for a minute at the
Lucella
. She was an appalling sight. Bow and stern both stuck up from the lock at jagged angles. A number of cables had snapped from the self-unloader and swung meaninglessly above the remains of the deck. Wet barley oozed from the open cargo holds into a yellow smear across the visible parts of the gaping decks. I strained my eyes at the figures on board and decided that Bledsoe must finally have gone inside. A helicopter had landed near the bow, deploying men with stretchers.

The crowd was enjoying the show. Live disasters are wonderful attractions when you’re safe on the other side of them. As we watched, the Coast Guard fished the dead bodies out of the water and a delighted shudder fluttered throughout the observation deck. I turned and shouldered my way down the stairs and across the street to a little coffee shop.

I ordered a cup of hot chocolate. Like Bledsoe and the crew, I’d had a shock and I needed hot liquid and sugar. The chocolate was pretty dismal, made from a powdered mix and water, but it was sweet and the warmth gradually made itself felt inside my numbed fingers and frozen toes.

I ordered another and a hamburger and french fries. Some instinct told me that calories under these circumstances would do me nothing but good. I pressed the plastic mug against my tired forehead. So Mattingly had left already. On his way back to Chicago by car, unless he’d had a private plane waiting for him at Sault Ste. Marie’s little airport.

I ate the hamburger, a greasy, hardened black slab, greedily in a few bites. The best thing for me to do was call Bobby and tell him to look out for Mattingly when he got back to Chicago. After all, I couldn’t chase him.

As soon as I finished the french fries, I went in search of a pay phone. There was one outside the observation booth, but eight people were lined up waiting to use it. I finally found another three blocks down, in front of a burnt-out motel. I called the Sault Ste. Marie airport. The one daily flight for Chicago left in two hours. I booked a seat and found a Sault Ste. Marie taxi company which sent a cab over to take me to the airport.

Sault Ste. Marie is even smaller than Thunder Bay. The airport was a hangar and a hut, both very weather-beaten. A few private planes, Cessnas and the like, stood at the edge of the field. I didn’t see anything that looked like a commercial plane. I didn’t even see any people. Finally, after ten minutes of walking around, peering in corners, I found a man lying on his back under a tiny plane.

He slid out reluctantly in response to my shouts.

“I’m looking for the plane to Chicago.”

He wiped a greasy hand across an already grimy face. “No planes to Chicago here. Just a few private planes use this place.”

“I just called. I just made a reservation.”

He shook his head. “Commercial airport’s twenty miles down the interstate. You’d better get down there.”

My shoulders sagged. I didn’t know where to find the energy to go another twenty miles. I sighed. “You have a phone I could use to call a cab?”

He gestured toward the far end of the dusty building and turned to crawl back under the plane.

A thought occurred to me. “Martin Bledsoe keep his plane here or down at the other place?”

The man glanced back up at me. “It was here. Cappy flew it out about twenty minutes ago.”

“Cappy?”

“His pilot. Some guy came along, said Bledsoe wanted Cappy to fly him to Chicago.”

I was too tired to feel anything—surprise, shock,
anger—my emotions were pushed somewhere far away. “Guy have bright red hair? Scar on the left side of his face?”

The mechanic shrugged. “Don’t know about the scar. He had red hair all right.” Cappy was expecting the guy—Bledsoe had phoned and told him the night before. All the mechanic knew was he’d given Cappy a course to Chicago. Weather still looked clear across Lake Michigan. They should make it in by six or so. He crawled back under the plane.

I staggered across the floor and found a phone, an old black clunker in the style GTE is ashamed to sell nowadays. The cab company agreed to send someone out to meet me.

I crouched on the sidewalk in front of the hanger while I waited, too weary to stand, fighting sleep. I wondered dreamily what I’d do if the taxi couldn’t get me to the other airport on time.

I had a long wait. The cab’s honking horn aroused me from a doze and I got stiffly to my feet. I fell asleep again on the drive south. We made it to the Chippewa County International Airport with ten minutes to spare. Another tiny terminal, where a friendly fat man sold me a ticket and helped me and two other passengers board the propeller plane.

I thought I would sleep out the flight, but I kept churning thoughts around uselessly during the interminable journey. The plane stopped at three little Michigan towns. I endured the flight with the passivity born of too much emotion. Why would Bledsoe have blown up his own ship? What else was Mattingly doing for him? Bledsoe had blandly offered to let me look at his financial papers. And that meant the real documents were hidden someplace else with fake books available for bankers and detectives. But he had really been in shock when the
Lucella
blew up. That gray face wasn’t faked. Well, maybe he just wanted
to incapacitate her slightly, to collect enough insurance to meet his financial obligations. He didn’t want his pride and joy blown to bits, but Mattingly had gotten hold of the wrong kind of explosive. Or too powerful an explosive. Anyway, he’d way exceeded his instructions.