Darkside (2002), page 35
“The diagrams of the active utility tunnels are correct,” the engineer said. “The Fort Severn stuff goes back over a century and a half. I’m not surprised it’s been displaced. Someone was probably supposed to survey it, and got scared.”
“And then faked it,” Jim said.
“Yeah, probably. Can’t blame him.”
They entered the eighth wing through the doors beneath the sixth wing–eighth wing overpass bridge. There were dozens of doors in the eighth wing’s basement. They led to storage rooms, utility bays, extracurricular club rooms, and laundry and trash collection areas. “Hell,” Jim said, “This’ll take a week to search.”
“We don’t have to search this,” the chief said. “All we gotta do is catch the sumbitch coming out of that oak door into the modern tunnels. Do we really care how he gets into the Fort Severn tunnels? Now that we know it’s probably feasible?”
“You’re right,” Jim said. “We don’t. Let’s go.”
Using the access grate near Dahlgren Hall, they went down into the main utility tunnel and examined the oak doors again. They were still locked, and there were no further signs of anyone using a key or a jimmy to work the locks.
“I’ve got my surveillance team setting up motion detectors throughout the tunnel complex,” the chief said. “We’ll set one here, pointed at this door. They’re low-level lasers. Break the beam, it sends an alert and its location number to a central station. Size of a pack of cigarettes. We can track him through the tunnels, take him where we want to.”
“How will these things communicate with the outside?”
“They don’t; so we’ll need a comms node underground. I’ll cover all that at the briefing.”
“All right, I guess we’re done here,” Jim said. He turned to the engineer. “We need this whole op to stay hush-hush, so please ensure that there’s nothing about it on your internal LAN, okay?”
“Gotcha covered,” the engineer said. “The Public Works officer knows about it, but that’s it.”
“Good. Chief, I’m going back to my office. I’ll bring Agent Branner over with me at sixteen-thirty. See you at the briefing.”
Ev didn’t get through to Liz until just before five o’clock. He told her about his run-in with the commandant.
“Did he directly threaten to do something to Julie?”
“Yes,” Ev said. “He threatened to delay her commissioning. That would put her date of rank permanently behind her entire class. I’d call that a threat.”
“Because he thinks she’s withholding information?”
“I think someone’s telling him that, yes.”
Liz didn’t say anything for a moment.
“I mean, I don’t know what the hell to do about this. Julie’s not listening to either one of us.”
“That’s the problem,” Liz said. “Maybe I’ll have another go at that security officer, Jim Hall.”
“You think he’ll talk to you?”
“Maybe. He’s a graduate. He might be sympathetic to Julie’s situation.”
“This is really frustrating,” Ev said. “You should have seen Robbins. One minute all sweetness and light in front of my colleagues, presenting me this stupid award certificate, the next acting like some sort of gestapo director.”
“They’re under a ton of pressure,” Liz said. “Media, congressional, the Secretary of the Navy, probably. Let me see if I can talk to Hall. Want to get together later tonight?”
“I’d probably be lousy company,” he said. “I want to smack somebody.”
“Go for a long run. Or take your boat out. Push it hard. I have to go out to a chamber of commerce dinner. I’ll be back by ten. If you’re still all stressed out by then, we’ll figure something out.”
Smiling in spite of the tension he felt, Ev promised her he’d be there. He hung up and thought about how direct she was. He couldn’t imagine Joanne being so forward. And bedtime with Liz was also very different, although, to be fair, he and Joanne had been married for a long time. But Liz was exciting, direct, challenging without being threatening. He couldn’t imagine being in the mood for sex right now, given everything that was going on with Julie. But Liz was right: Go beat up your body, bleed all this stress into the river, and then go see her. As long as Julie was being obstinate, there wasn’t anything he could do to help her. So he’d go do something about his situation. With Liz. There, he thought. That wasn’t even hard, was it?
By 10:00 P.M., the entire team was in place. The topside surveillance people were set up at all the Yard grates and were up on a tactical radio net. Jim and Branner were down under Stribling Walk in the main tunnel complex, set up in a telephone switchboard vault. The motion-detector string was in place, ready to transmit alerts via a separate radio frequency, which would be detectable underground. The chief and one radio operator were set up in a mobile CP in the radio van they’d borrowed from the Annapolis cops. The van was hardwired to the retransmitter underground.
The switchboard vault was ten feet by ten feet and filled with equipment cabinets, which kept the room at a humming ninety degrees despite the air-conditioning. Branner was in her NCIS tactical field gear, and Jim was similarly outfitted. Both wore shoulder transceiver mikes provided by the chief. There were no chairs in the switchboard vault and very little room to move around, so Jim and Branner sat shoulder-to-shoulder against one of the equipment racks. The door to the main tunnel was almost closed, but open enough to show a slit of light from the main tunnel.
“This is cozy,” Jim said. “But kind of a boring date.”
“If you and I ever go on a date, that’s a word you’ll never use,” she replied, looking at her watch for the umpteenth time. Jim wondered if she’d get the ballpoint out pretty soon and start tapping again.
“It’s after twenty-two hundred. Did Midshipman Hays ever get back to you?” he asked.
“Nope,” she said. “You think our vampire’s going to make his move tonight?”
“It’s a Wednesday. They’re not allowed off the reservation on Wednesdays—sort of a reminder of who grants them liberty. The rest of the time, he could just walk out the gate after evening meal.”
“The Annapolis cops said there hadn’t been another vampire mugging since Bagger,” she said. “So maybe he got scared.”
Jim remembered the brief look he’d had into the guy’s face. “I don’t think scared’s in his lexicon,” he said. “This is one big game to him; the more danger, the bigger the thrill. Plus, the fact that Bagger died isn’t common knowledge here at the Academy.”
“Maybe we ought to announce it,” she said. “Let the fucker know what he did.”
“If anything would force him into deep cover, that would certainly do it. We need him to keep doing this.”
She didn’t say anything, just looked at her watch again. Then she leaned back and closed her eyes. “You pretty confident Hays will give us something?” she asked.
“It might take a little longer than he thought. At some point, he has to talk to Markham. She may go ballistic, or just clam up. But, yeah, he’ll come back with something. He wasn’t exactly ambivalent about the whole thing.”
They waited some more. Then the radio squawked quietly in their shoulder mikes. It was the chief, making a comms check. There were seven teams in place, including themselves and the team out on the St. John’s campus. The chief’s call sign was team zero. Each team responded with its number. Branner answered for both of them. “Team three, in position, no contact.”
“Team four, no contact.”
“Team five, no contact.”
“Team six, no contact, no nothing.”
“Team seven, no contact, no vampires.”
“Okay, people,” the chief came up. “Remember, this is surveillance. No contact just means the game hasn’t started yet.”
There was an instant of silence, and then a new voice came up on the circuit. “This is station eight. I’ve got lots of contacts.”
Another moment of silence, and then the chief was back on. “Who’s fucking around?” he called.
No one answered. Jim looked at Branner. Station eight? Not team eight? Neither had recognized that voice as being one they’d heard on previous comms checks. Then the motion detector board lighted up.
“We have motion in the cross tunnel under Buchanan Road,” Jim announced to the net. A second light came up. “Going past the supe’s house. Moving toward Dahlgren.”
Branner leaned down to study the light panel. Using a grease pencil, Jim had drawn a rough diagram of the tunnel complex onto a piece of plywood. He’d put numbers next to X’s on the diagram, indicating where the chief’s team had placed motion detectors. Then he’d coded a map of the streets and major buildings above ground to indicate where each numbered detector was. Each team had a copy of the coded street map.
“Team four, watch your grate,” the chief ordered.
“Team four,” came the laconic acknowledgment. As in, What do you think we’re doing?
“He’s past four’s grate,” Jim announced on the net, still puzzling over the “station eight” call. “Four, you’re now in position to get behind him.”
“Roger that; say when,” four answered.
A third light came on, indicating that something had turned the corner at the dogleg turn and was now headed up the main tunnel.
“He’s going pretty slow for a runner,” Branner said, watching the lights. “And what was that ‘station eight’ bullshit about ‘lots of contacts’?”
“Don’t know,” Jim said, concentrating on the lights. “But when he passes team six, that’ll give us two teams behind him and us in front. That’s when we go.”
At that moment, there was a loud clicking noise as all the lights out in the main corridor went off, followed a moment later by the lights in the switchboard room. The PWC watch officer, who had been monitoring the tactical net, came up and announced that the tunnel lighting breakers had been thrown in the vicinity of the dogleg turn.
Branner had her flashlight out, pointed into a tight white cone at her feet so as not to reveal their position to anyone out in the passageway.
“Where exactly is that breaker box?” Jim asked.
The PWC watch officer described the location, and Jim pointed down to the diagram. “The lights indicate he’s here, but that breaker is behind that position. Two of them?”
Before Branner could answer, they both felt a movement in the air, and the door to their vault swung open on silent hinges. The air moved again, as if a pressure differential had been created somewhere down the tunnel.
“Team four,” Jim ordered. “Enter your grating, head toward the river and turn left up under Stribling now. Possible contact a hundred feet in from your entry position. Team six, stand by.”
“Four, roger, coming in now.”
“Six, standing by.”
“Let’s go,” Jim said to Branner. “Whatever’s coming up the tunnel’s only a hundred and fifty feet away.”
“Suits me,” she said, getting to her feet and checking her stun gun. They’d elected to equip each team with the stun guns, rather than take chances with ricocheting bullets down in the maze of concrete tunnels. Given some of the things the runner had already done, however, everyone still had a sidearm.
Jim pulled the shoulder mike into his left hand and kept his Maglite in his right hand. Branner could cover both of them if there were shooting to be done. That station eight business was still nibbling at the edge of his mind. ‘Lots of contacts’? Then he had a thought: Was it him? Had their runner broken into the tactical net?
They stepped out the opened door and felt a definite movement of air in their faces. Almost a draft, not too strong, but coming toward them. Why? Where was the air coming from? Jim tried to review the tunnel layout in his mind, but the darkness had his attention. They stood just outside the telephone switchboard vault, and the light board down on the floor was still visible. He glanced back and saw yet another light blink on. Whatever was coming up the tunnel was closer by fifty feet.
“This is zero, what’s happening, three?”
“This is three; stand by,” Jim said, and then nudged Branner. “Lights,” he said, and they both shot bright white beams down the main tunnel in the direction of what was coming. What they saw startled them both. It looked like a huge metal sphere. It filled the tunnel and was rolling right toward them. Their flashlights reflected off the smooth surface as if it were glass, but it was definitely moving.
“We have a metal sphere coming down the tunnel right at us,” Jim announced to the net, wondering why the sphere wasn’t making any noise.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Branner whispered, pointing her stun gun even as she realized it would be useless. The huge sphere kept coming, not too fast, but not slowing down, either, rolling right at them. Jim felt the weight of the concrete ceiling bearing down on him as he just stood there watching this thing.
“Three, this is team four; where are you?”
“Standing just outside our hidey-hole. There’s this thing going up the tunnel. Where are you?”
“Right behind it, three,” the other voice said. “It’s a big metal ball of some kind. Rolling all by itself.”
“I’m gonna shoot it,” Branner growled, reaching for her Glock.
“Negative,” Jim shouted, batting her hand down. “Four’s right behind it. I know what that is—it’s a balloon! It’s a Mylar weather balloon. That’s why we can’t hear it.” He called out on the net that the thing was a weather balloon. When it reached them, Jim put his hand out. His finger pressed into it, and then the huge sphere bounced off his hand and stopped rolling.
“If I can’t shoot it, I’m gonna pop it,” Branner said, angry now that someone had been screwing around with them. She pulled a knife and jabbed at the balloon, which popped with a dull bang and then deflated. They were left facing the flashlights of team four, two Yard cops who were staring down at the puddle of metallic plastic between them.
“Okay,” one of them said. “What’s up with this shit?”
At that moment, the radio went off. “Hey there, boys and girls,” the station eight voice said. “Are we having fun yet?” This was followed by laughter, and then silence. Then the lights flashed back on in the main tunnel. Jim looked down at the mike in his hand and swore.
The teams convened back at the naval station police building thirty minutes later for a debrief. Branner kicked things off.
“It’s obvious those tunnels belong to this guy as much as they belong to PWC,” she said. “He was into the retransmitter freq from the git-go.”
“It almost sounds like he has a closed-circuit TV system down there,” the chief offered. “I mean, it’s like he could see what was happening, where people were.”
“How the hell did he control the lights?” one of the cops asked.
“The lights are on lighting transformers,” the PWC engineer said. “They’re set out in blocks along the tunnels, so you don’t lose all the lights if one fixture has a ground or other problem. It’s marked LIGHTING TRANSFORMER right on the box.”
“Did you guys have lights when you came down?” Jim asked the men on team four.
“Yeah. It only got dark when we came around the corner. We were confused when our lights reflected off that balloon thing.”
Jim looked at Branner. “I think I want to go back down there,” he said. “I want to see where the lighting transformers are that control the passageway lights near where we were holed up.”
The chief, conscious of his overtime budget, asked if the rest of the cops were done for the night. Jim said yes, and the meeting broke up.
Jim and Branner went back over to the Yard, and down into the main tunnel from the Stribling Walk grating entrance. They retraced their steps to the telephone vault, then looked around to see if they could find the control box for the passageway’s overhead lights. Just past a point where the main tunnel did a small zigzag, they found the nearest electrical panel marked LIGHTING TRANSFORMER and opened the front cover. They found a surprise inside—a message written in black grease pencil on the inside of the box cover. HMC: YOU SAID ONE-ON-ONE—READY 4 THAT ANYTIME. The message was signed with a smaller version of the shark logo from the big tag down the passageway.
“And this means something to you, right?” asked Branner.
“Yup. And he had to have been right here, outside the vault door. These switches look like local control to me.”
“He knew where we were, and he was able to get down here, kill the lights, set that big balloon in motion, and be gone by the time we came out and those other cops came down here looking for us,” Branner said.
Jim looked around the empty tunnel. “If he was gone,” he said. “Hell, he may have been hiding in one of these utility rooms the whole time. None of us searched the place after that balloon thing.”
“So how come the motion-detector string didn’t tag him if he was moving around out here?”
“Good question,” he said. “I asked the chief to leave all those things in place and just take the control box back with him. Let’s see, the nearest detector set should be down there, where the flap doors for that big storm drain are.”
They walked down the tunnel in the direction of Bancroft Hall. The tunnel expanded into a vestibule area next to the storm drain access, the flaps of which sloped down from the floor at a forty-five-degree angle. The flaps, hinged and spring-loaded, would open with water pressure on the tunnel side, but otherwise they’d remain closed to any access from the drain itself. They searched the cableways, lighting fixtures, and electrical junction boxes until they found the diminutive detector-transceiver. It was taped to the underside of a telephone system amplifier and pointed out into the main passageway. The mirror was in place directly across from it. There did not appear to be anything amiss with the installation—the wires were in place and the box was intact, its tiny laser aperture pointing correctly across the passageway at the receiver.
“This thing should have worked if he came up the tunnel this way from Bancroft,” Jim said.
