New Year Island (69 page)

JT looked at Juan through the goggles, thinking of their confrontation a few days ago. His bruises still ached, especially his ribs. The blows from the lead-weighted dive belt had maybe cracked one—it sent a spike of pain through his side every time he took a deep breath.

Juan’s wet suit looked dark through the goggles, but his face was bright green. His pupils were huge, reflective black marbles trying to penetrate the darkness around them. JT knew he could see almost nothing. He could kill Juan easily right now. One quick blow in the darkness, to the temple or the throat, was all it would take.

But the dive captain was not his enemy.

Juan reached over and laid a hand on his shoulder. He pointed down the right-hand corridor. Then he tapped his own chest and pointed along the left hand side.

JT nodded. Flanking maneuver. But it still left the two central corridors for the enemy to maneuver in without being seen. The machinery was bolted to concrete pads on the floor, and was too heavy to knock over in any case. They couldn’t deny the enemy mobility that way.

This would be tricky.

Juan raised the speargun and moved off to the left.

JT entered the corridor on the right and lost sight of him. The pipes and valves projected into the narrow passageway, forcing him to turn sideways in order to edge forward. A cluster of pipes crossed the corridor at head height. He ducked under it, grateful for the clear, green-lit view of the space around him. It would be much harder for Juan, he knew, groping through the blackness. The loss of his eye was maddening, though—a real handicap that narrowed his field of view and made his left side vulnerable. He turned to check his six, scanning around and behind him. Nothing moved.

A secondary corridor cut through the rows of machinery, perpendicular to the corridor he now sidled through, multiplying the possibilities for Brent to slip around behind them. As he passed, he looked down the side corridor, hands tensing on the chain. He was glad to see Juan at the far end, moving parallel to him.

Juan swiveled his head from side to side like a blind man, trying to penetrate the darkness with his ears. Seen through the NVDs, his wide pupils glowed like a raccoon’s at night. It was clear he couldn’t see JT. He probed the air around him with the tip of the speargun, but JT was gratified to see him angle it downward whenever it swung in his direction—the risk of friendly fire was high enough as it was.

JT moved beyond the side corridor, the wall of machinery on his right hiding Juan from sight once again. They had covered about a third of the building’s length. He could see the rear wall now.

So far, there was no sign of Brent.

Something small lay on the floor ahead. JT paused. Wary of his own vulnerability, he knelt down for a closer look at the object: a crushed hypodermic syringe, leaking fluid. As he inspected it, a brief stuttering of light flashed bright green up ahead, accompanied by a crackling noise. JT jerked upright to scan the corridor ahead. The crackle sounded again, and green light flickered across the ground at the next intersection, where a side corridor intersected his. Then it faded to darkness again.

JT checked his six again, making sure no one lurked behind him. Then he cautiously moved forward. He peeked around the corner, muscles loose and ready, the chain held ready to swing.

Someone was coming toward him, striding fast through the narrow side corridor from Juan’s side of the building.

JT tensed for action, raising the chain for a low swing to take his opponent’s legs out from under him. Then he relaxed in relief. A bundle of pipes crossing at head height hid the face of the approaching figure, but the black neoprene wet suit and catlike panther gait were unmistakable.

He lowered the chain.

Oddly, Juan’s speargun looked shorter than before. It now ended in two metal points instead of one. Without breaking stride, Juan raised his free hand to grip the cross-pipe and ducked underneath to stand directly in front of him.

Too late, alarm surged through JT’s body. Juan’s face was concealed beneath a pair of night-vision goggles similar to his own, but with a triangle of three lenses instead of just two. JT knew the additional lens was an infrared light source.

The long cylinder in Juan’s hand was not a speargun. It swung up to connect with JT’s neck before he could react. He felt every muscle in his body contract as his world disappeared in a crackling flash of bright white light.

C
amilla stared into the space beyond the doorway. The brief flashes of light she had glimpsed had faded. The darkness was absolute again. Her heart pounded in her chest. Raising the can of bear spray, she repositioned herself so she wouldn’t catch Dmitry in the crossfire.

He nodded, hefting the length of pipe like a baseball bat.

“I hear something,” he whispered, barely audible over the slamming of her heart.

The seconds ticked by, stretching into a minute… then two.

Something moved in the darkness ahead. Camilla could make out a dim shape approaching. Her finger tensed on the trigger of the bear spray. Then she realized it was Juan.

He backed toward them, his attention focused on something deeper in the building. Raising a hand in warning, he eased into the room, passing between her and Dmitry. She saw that Juan was wearing something new: a black plastic backpack with thick corrugated rubber tubes that looped over his shoulders. His shoulders appeared broader than before, his body thicker. He turned toward her, and she noticed he was wearing JT’s night-vision goggles. Her finger tightened of its own volition, sending a continuous blast of orange bear spray into the insect-eyed face before she could make a conscious decision to act.

Only then did her mind scream the wet suit-clad intruder’s true identity.

Brent.

The bear spray filled the room with a stinging, acrid cloud. She sneezed violently and tears flowed from her eyes. Coughing, she staggered back, still spraying the caustic stream at Brent’s face.

Dmitry also coughed violently and fell back, wiping at his own face. She had sprayed him, too, by mistake.

Red-orange foam dripped from Brent’s nose, mouth, and jaw. To her horror, he grinned. The spray turned his teeth orange, too.

“Doesn’t really do much for me.” He chuckled. “It does taste nasty, though.”

The spray was supposed to stop
grizzly bears
; why did it have no effect on him? The goggles protected his eyes, but she had coated the rest of his face with it. Herself choking and gagging, with her stinging eyes half-closed, Camilla triggered another spray.

Brent let it wash over his grinning mouth again. Then he lifted his shoulders in an eerily perfect imitation of Juan’s shrug.

Behind him, Dmitry swung the steel pipe.

The concrete plug caught Brent across the upper arm and shoulder, but he barely registered the blow. He spun with surprising speed to grab Dmitry’s face one-handed and thrust him away. Dmitry flew back to slam against the wall, then slid to the floor, unmoving.

Brent turned back to Camilla. “All right, enough of that,” he rumbled.

Streaming tears, she fearfully took her finger off the spray trigger and doubled over in a coughing fit.

Brent smiled and wagged a finger at her, like an admonishing parent. Then he stepped to the outer doorway and was gone.

T
he bulky wet-suited figure emerged from the science station buildings, exiting through the same doorway the others had entered. It was clearly Brent. He scanned the area surrounding the buildings, then headed downslope toward the breakwater, coming closer. Reaching the seawall, he looked back one last time toward the station. No one had followed him. He smiled, moonlight glinting from the lenses of his night vision goggles and his teeth.

He continued toward the seawall, walking with the easy, bouncing strides of a man decades younger. Reaching over his shoulder, he turned a valve on a black plastic backpack—a high-end scuba rebreather, probably—and fitted the regulator mouthpiece to his lips. He was no doubt headed for the safety of the dark water that lay just ahead.

Hidden behind the eight-foot seawall, watching him approach, Mason grinned.

As Brent passed the corner, Mason stretched an arm to touch the stun gun to the back of his neck, and pressed the trigger. Brent was driven to his hands and knees. He dropped the long cylinder he was carrying: a high-voltage cattle prod, much larger than the stun gun Mason had just used on him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mason said. “Did
I
just do that? How clumsy of me.” He limped closer, dragging his bad leg.

Brent looked up at him, his face dazed and uncomprehending.

“Here, let me give you a hand.” Mason reached down to hold the prongs of the small stun gun against Brent’s neck and tilted his head, grinning into his face.

“You’ve got some unhappy patients here. I hope your malpractice insurance is paid up.”

He triggered the stun gun again.

Brent collapsed face-first onto the ground. Mason slid his bad leg along the dirt, dropping into a seated position next to Brent’s prone form. He peeled away Brent’s night-vision goggles and tossed them aside. Then he thumbed one of his eyes open. Only the white showed.

“Clear!”

Mason laughed and jolted the doctor a third time.

Camilla staggered down the slope toward them, still coughing.

“Clear!” He jolted Brent a fourth time, making his limbs flop bonelessly against the ground.

Camilla tucked her hair behind her ear and crouched beside him.

“Nurse, fifty cee-cee’s of epinephrine, stat!” He jolted Brent a fifth time.

“Mason, stop it.” She grabbed his arm. “That’s enough.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Better safe than sorry.”

She shook her head as a series of gagging coughs convulsed her. Then she wiped her streaming eyes and put a hand on his shoulder. “Dmitry’s unconscious, and I don’t know what Brent did to Juan and JT. We have to go find them.”

• • •

Juan, JT, and Dmitry lay side by side on the floor of the factory building, like patients in a wartime hospital triage unit. Mason watched Camilla flit from patient to patient—laying her hand on Dmitry’s forehead, checking JT’s pulse, brushing Juan’s hair lightly with her fingers. All three remained unconscious. The flickering orange light from dozens of candles lit their faces with soft light.

Mason sat nearby with his bad leg extended before him. When they had found Juan and JT, Camilla was so relieved that they were still breathing, she hugged Mason, squeezing him until he staggered and pointed at his knee. Together, they had dragged the three limp bodies into the open floor area where the rows of machinery began. Moving them had been difficult, but not as tough as hauling Brent’s bulk.

Camilla had improvised pillows: torn blankets, a wet-suit hood, Jacob’s bloodstained sweatshirt. She looked frustrated by her powerlessness and lack of medical knowledge.

“Give them some time,” Mason said. “They’ll be fine.”

Juan coughed without waking, and a trickle of blood ran from his mouth.

Or maybe not.

The candles glowed from the machinery all around them. She had planted them in blobs of dried wax on valves, ducts, and motor housings. In the flickering light, black shadows from the surrounding pipes and machinery bobbed and danced on the walls and ceiling.

A larger shadow flickered on the wall above them: the silhouette of a human form, arms extended out to the sides, framed within a circular wagon-wheel outline.

Vitruvian man
.

Mason grinned at the thought. If Brent were awake, he would probably have appreciated the irony, since Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic image of the spread-armed man within a circle frequently graced the covers of medical texts.

Brent’s wrists had been chained to the sides of the six-foot wagon-wheel valve. He hung from the front of the largest block of machinery. His lower legs sagged, chained to the bottom of the wheel. Chains also wrapped his torso—they weren’t taking any chances. Eyes closed, head drooping onto his chest, his face was slack but still looked severe in the candlelight.

Camilla sat cross-legged by Juan’s head. Mason grinned at her.

“Look at you. Florence Nightingale.”

“Where did you get the stun gun?” she asked.

He pulled it out, turned it over in his hands.

“Natalie’s, I think. It was lying in the sand, outside the cave Juan found her in. Brent must have tossed this toy, seeing as how he already had the heavy-duty version.” He nodded toward the two-foot cylinder lying against the wall nearby: Brent’s electric cattle prod.

Camilla looked at Brent, hanging from the wheel, and her features distorted into a sad grimace. “None of this makes sense. I mean, he must have had some sort of rationale for doing this.”

Mason smiled grimly. “I have to admit I’m more than a little curious, too. For a doctor who likes to quote Hippocrates, he sure forgot the ‘first, do no harm’ part.”

C
amilla brushed Juan’s hair away from his forehead. A couple of hours had gone by. He was still unconscious, and she didn’t like the way he was breathing. It sounded shallow, and every few inhalations, she could hear a faint liquid gurgle. The candles had shrunk to about half their length. Mason sat nearby, thumbing through a stack of yellowed papers.

Sensing a change in the room, she looked up to find Brent’s eyes open. They fixed on her with a glittery blue serenity, and her heart gave a nasty thump. He didn’t say anything. She stared back at him, forcing her heart to slow.

“Why, Brent?”

He regarded her steadily for a moment. Then he cleared his throat.

“One of the downsides of my particular situation is that I can’t just stop taking my meds. I’ll need more fentanyl soon, or the convulsions will very likely be fatal.” He tipped his chin forward, peering down at his chest. “Can you grab my small medical kit, please? It’s in the chest pocket of my wet suit.”

Mason chuckled.

“Nice try, Brent. I don’t think so. But perhaps you can shed some light on a few things for us.”