The Gamma Option (21 page)

“Loading what?”

“Cannisters. One at a time. Real careful they were.”

“Describe these cannisters.”

“I don’t know, ’bout the size of scuba tanks I guess. All silver-gray and smooth, marked with some kind of symbol.”

“What kind of symbol?”

“Looked like a funny kind of
v
. Yeah, I think it was the Greek letter gamma.”

“Get back to those people you preferred not to recognize… .”

“Hey, I had good reason. One of them walked with canes in both hands. Even drunk, that’s something you can’t forget. He looked like he was supervising everything, but I’ve never seen a more miserable face in my life. I didn’t see it again until a couple years later, and I don’t mean on no baseball card, either.”

“Go on.”

“His picture was on the front page of the paper. Story was about Nazis, infamous Nazis still at large.”

“Who did the story say he was?” Blaine asked after a long pause.

“A scientist. Went by the name of Bechman. Don’t know anything else about him, ’sides the obvious. We musta needed him for something real big, and whatever it was I figure got placed on the
Indy
next to the bombs.”

“So you kept your mouth shut.”

“Damn straight. I was plenty scared, too. Here it was we all thought we’d loaded the most dangerous weapon man had ever come up with only to come back at night to see something else being loaded in secret. Shit, at least we knew what the A-bombs were supposed to do. Had no idea what the shit in those cannisters was capable of, and none of us were about to let on we had any idea they were on board. I was the only one knew about the cannisters who made it out of the water alive and I still never told, even after …”

“After what, Bart?”

“I’ve said enough.”

“Not nearly.”

The man’s oversized jowls puckered with fear. He leaned farther over the table and lowered his voice.

“You gotta understand nobody would’ve ever believed me. I had no proof.”

“Go on.”

“Thing was, in the water we got ourselves all linked together in tight circles. Could fall asleep and not drift off that way. We kept regular watch for the sharks. I was right next to the captain himself, dragged him into our circle with my own two hands. A few minutes later the moon pops out and his eyes go all kind of funny. We were facing the same direction so I could see the same thing he did: a conning tower, Mr. Spook, from a submarine.”

“The
Indianapolis
was sunk by a sub.”

“Sure. Only this one was one of ours.”

Chapter 18

“DO I HAVE TO
spell it out for you?” Bart Joyce was saying, the floodgates fully open now with his secret released at last. “Fucking American sub sunk our ship. Coulda been an accident, except she surfaced and still left us there. They wanted the lot of us dead, Mr. Spook, and they did everything they could to make sure that was the only way we’d be found. Our
own
sub, damn it, our
own government
…”

Joyce’s voice tailed off and Blaine’s mind raced ahead. He was stunned but somehow not surprised. Joyce had supplied the missing piece to his puzzle, and out of the madness came the sense. The
Indianapolis
had indeed sailed from San Francisco with something other than A-bombs: cannisters only a select few knew about, marked by the Greek letter gamma. Obviously the intention was to unload them at Tinian in addition to, perhaps instead of, the bombs. But equally obvious was the fact that something had happened en route that required a change in strategy. The cannisters had never been unloaded and the
Indianapolis
had been sunk to conceal their existence.

But why?

The key was Bechman. Joyce remembered him as a Nazi scientist, and it was common knowledge the Nazis were advanced far beyond the allies from a weapons standpoint. The end of the war, in fact, became a battle between the Russians and Americans to gain their services. But with Bechman the Americans must have had reason to jump the gun, and that reason could only have been the gamma cannisters. Whatever they were, their very existence had called for all traces of the
Indianapolis
and her final mission to be buried forever.

“I never told anyone,” Bart Joyce was saying, “I never—”

Joyce’s head snapped backward suddenly, and a red circle appeared in the center of his forehead. He toppled over as if someone had yanked the chair out from under him. Blaine’s dive took him to the ground ahead of Joyce’s corpse, and ahead of the next burst which shattered the empty glasses on the table top. Blaine brought the table down over him to use for cover while those patrons nearest him scattered screaming. Traveling on a regular flight from Washington with no luggage had made bringing a gun along impossible without attracting undue attention to himself. He had never felt more helpless.

The automatic fire continued to dig chasms out of the table, causing pandemonium through the restaurant and in the cobblestone walkway beyond it. Whoever the shooter was, he was good. He knew enough to keep his concentration on his target through everything. His mistake had been not going for McCracken first.

The bullets ceased thudding into the wood over him, and Blaine stayed low at the feet of the panicked crowd that was rushing everywhere at once. Find the origin of the shots and he would find the shooter. The pyramid-shaped roof of the South Market thirty yards across the cobblestones was the only possible location. Blaine climbed to his feet and scanned the roof-line but found no sign of anyone perched there.

The gunman would be on his way down then, to attempt an escape or perhaps another try at Blaine. McCracken’s eyes swept across the scene at store level and encountered the shape of a small man emerging rather calmly from one of the shops. A second glance told him it was a woman wearing a boyish haircut, tight jeans, and a leather jacket. She seemed unfazed by the panic swarming around her.

Blaine picked up his pace through the crowd, intending to cut the woman off. Sirens were already screaming as she walked briskly toward the Congress Street side of the marketplace. She never so much as gazed back, so Blaine had no chance to meet her eyes as he fought his way through the surging crowd.

So intent was his focus on this woman that he almost missed the second. His first glimpse was of a figure in black rising out of nowhere and the crowd suddenly spreading before her twenty-five yards from the street. He saw the machine pistol next and dove headlong behind a steel divider as the
rat-tat-tat
split the air. The bullets clanged and ricocheted wildly. Glass from a nearby flower shop shattered and sprayed the air. The panicked crowd charged everywhere in search of escape. McCracken ran low to the ground as he tried to close the gap between himself and the shooter.

A pair of police cars spun to a halt on Congress Street, and the officers lunged out with guns drawn.

“
Stop! Police!
”

McCracken heard that command just before the woman turned and emptied the rest of her clip in their direction. One of the cops was blown backward instantly, while the other managed a single shot before his chest was shredded. McCracken was back on his feet now, slithering forward behind what meager cover he could find. The taller woman tossed the machine pistol aside as another police car screeched to a halt before her. The officers had barely started to jump out when the smaller of the women yanked a nine-millimeter automatic from inside her leather jacket. She lunged forward, firing repeatedly, even after the policemen had fallen. She stopped only when she drew even with her much larger companion.

The big one turned and Blaine fixed his stare on her. She was decked out in black leather and had blond stubble for hair. She was huge, maybe a couple inches under seven feet if you included her boots.

McCracken thought of the killers of John Neville and Henri Dejourner and went cold.

These two! It had to be!

They must have read his expression, because before Blaine could get near them, the huge one with spiked hair led the other toward the closest abandoned police car and lunged inside. These women had orchestrated this entire murderous episode, and had earlier killed a pair of men he liked. What’s more, they had kidnapped Matthew and might thus be his only chance of finding the boy if Evira had failed to recover him from Rasin’s clutches.

The women in the police car headed into traffic on Congress Street, bearing onto North Street even as McCracken stood there. He began to sprint futilely in their direction. A vehicle was what he needed, and the perfect one for the job loomed directly before him.

Godzilla
bucked and thumped like a horse restrained for too long. A driver who’d been about to ease it onto a nearby carrier had abandoned the monster truck with the gunshots and left the door open. A deft leap brought Blaine into the cab and he slammed the door behind him. The cockpit looked not much different from an ordinary pickup truck, except for a series of additional gauges mounted upon the dashboard. What was new to him was the notion of driving from a vantage point over a dozen feet off the ground.

McCracken shoved
Godzilla
into reverse, and the monster truck’s long-idling engine greeted the move with a huge thrust backward that threw him toward the dashboard. After fastening the shoulder harness, Blaine spun the wheel for North Street, intending to veer directly across Congress in pursuit of the police car comandeered by the two women. He shifted into drive and gave the monster truck some gas.

Godzilla
shot forward as a pair of police cars from opposite directions spun into screeching skids that brought them hood to hood directly before him. Blaine was in no mood or position to change his course at that point. The murderous women already had a headstart on him. Blaine simply kept the champion car crusher going toward the pair of police cars.

He felt only a brief jolt as the crusher’s Alaskan tundra tires rolled upward onto the hoods, one tire for each. Then Blaine felt a settling and heard the sound of twisting, collapsing metal.
Godzilla
’s
progress never stopped. Its back tires finished the job its front ones had started before the stunned police could even draw their guns. He managed a glance in the rearview mirror and saw the police cars compressed into neat rectangles in the center of Congress Street as he steamed down North Street.

Faneuil Hall was on his right and the modern Bostonian Hotel on his left as he started his pursuit of the murderous women. Where there was no room in the pulled-over traffic to maneuver, Blaine created it. Fenders, doors, even entire front or rear ends were destroyed as a result. McCracken for his part barely felt a single impact, and only occasional glances in
Godzilla
’s
rearview mirror revealed the carnage left in his wake.

He turned right onto Surface Road beneath the Route 93 overpass and was caught instantly in a hopeless snarl of traffic. Frustration had just started to set in when he noticed a single police car in the midst of it, the only squad car that was heading away from the chaos instead of toward it.

The women! It had to be!

He had them now. No reason to rush or be too bold. Just lay back and make his move once traffic started going again.

Who was he kidding? He was behind the wheel of a towering monster the women had certainly noticed by now. They would know it was him. They would know because they were professionals.

As he formed that very thought, traffic started flowing again and the police car veered instantly right onto Central Street at the very rear of the marketplace.

“Come on!” Blaine urged the traffic before him, losing his patience at the last second and forcing a pair of cars into a wild spin when he cut between them to continue his pursuit.

He caught a glimpse of the squad car as it grazed the rear of a delivery van that had backed up blindly. The driver had just lunged out, arms raised, when
Godzilla
slammed his van sideways from its path. The vehicle rocked as if weightless and McCracken continued on his way after the women, who had turned onto Milk Street from Central.

Milk Street was strangely free of traffic, but India Street adjacent to it was jammed. The women had at last activated their siren to clear their path, which was much too narrow for
Godzilla
to manage without endangering the lives of dozens of motorists by crushing their vehicles. That left him with only one option.

Blaine spun
Godzilla
to the right and drove the tires on its driver’s side up onto the row of cars parked bumper to bumper along the street, while his passenger-side tires balanced precariously on the sidewalk. Parking meters toppled like twigs before him. Water sprayed from a ruined fire hydrant, and McCracken reached for the windshield wiper switch. He kept the fleeing police car in sight as best he could as it passed back beneath the Route 93 overpass en route to Surface Road once more.

A ramp leading onto the expressway was dead ahead. The women were heading toward it now, knowing full well there was no way he could catch them on the open road. No way at all. Blaine did the best he could to give chase, honking his horn to keep Surface Road passable and alert unsuspecting drivers to what was coming.

It seemed futile. The squad car was gone up the ramp by the time McCracken pushed
Godzilla
through a red light after it. Expressway pace would provide the women the advantage they needed, with the monster truck’s size and poor visibility certain to cause chain collisions that would create a hopeless snarl. Still Blaine gave it gas and reached the head of the ramp. Frustration simmered within him, and he was about to pound the windshield when the greatest sight ever greeted his eyes:

Traffic, enough to keep the squad car from getting up speed. Already the women were opting for an immediate exit ramp labeled “South Station.” Blaine felt recharged.
Godzilla
filled out the width of an entire lane, but that was plenty enough to keep him on the trail. Cars before him blindly tried for lane changes left and right, and the monster truck claimed their vacated spots and rolled on to take whatever else it wanted. He motored onto the exit ramp with the squad car dead ahead, heading toward an area of heavy construction with a right down Summer Street.