Storm Surge (24 page)

“He knows what
we were going to do,” Moon said.

Blake saw it
then. “And he knew we’d concentrate our forces to do it.”

“Which means,”
Moon said, “that he’s heading somewhere else.”

“The
lighthouse,” Blake said. “It’s the only explanation. And we can’t use the radio
to warn Phillips. Go,” he said, but Moon was already gone as if he’d never been
there.

***

They walked under the deceptive and
beautiful sky though a scene of devastation. The water hadn’t risen to cover
this part of the island, at least not yet, but the berserker wind had wreaked
its own damage. Snarls of vegetation, limbs,
even
entire trees blocked the road in spots. Here and there were piles of lumber and
metal where the storm had clawed away parts of houses. One tree lying in the
road was festooned with bits of furry pink insulation and silver foil draped
over it like party decorations playfully hung on a passed-out drunk. Something
loomed out of the darkness before them.

“Jesus,”
Bohler
said.

It was an entire roof, miraculously
intact, as if it had been part of a dollhouse picked up and set down in the
road by a forgetful child. They skirted around the edges of it. “Look,” Sharon
said, and pointed at one of the gables.

Sticking out of the slanted surface
was a massive squared off log, like a railroad tie, possibly part of a bulkhead
or retaining wall. It must have weighed a hundred pounds or more. The wind had
picked it up and driven it through the roof like a spear.

“Is there going to be any place left
for us to stay?” Glory wondered.

“No way to tell,” said
Bohler
. “Next house may not even be touched. That’s how
these things work.”

Mercer was standing, looking at the roof
and the huge javelin impaling it. “God laughs,” he said.

“What?” Sharon said.

Mercer looked at her. “Something an
old lady I once lived with used to say. Some kind of awful random shit would
happen to somebody, and she’d just nod like it was something she expected all
along and say “Man plans, boy, and God laughs.”

“She sounds like a lot of fun,” Glory
said.

Mercer said nothing, just turned away.
Glory looked at Sharon, who just shrugged and walked after him.

A little further on, Mercer stopped
again. They almost ran into him in the darkness. He was looking up to where the
lighthouse
rose
, darker black against the gloom of the
sky. He seemed to be studying it.

“Do you see
anything?” Sharon asked.

Mercer shook
his head. “But somebody’s up there,” he said.
“Doesn’t make
any sense any other way.
We need to get off the road this close to the
lighthouse.”

“He wouldn’t
be able to see us,”
Bohler
said. “Dark as it is.”

“Unless he’s
got
NVG’s
,” Mercer answered.
“In
which case he may be drawing a bead on us right now.”

Sharon and
Glory were already moving toward the right hand side of the road. “Hey,” Glory
said. “There’s a driveway here.”

They walked
over. There were large chunks of stone scattered in the road where two
decorative pillars had stood on either side of the drive, but there was a
definite pathway leading through the trees. They clambered over the rocks and
then a couple of other fallen branches until the house came into view. It was a
massive Spanish style building with a low-pitched, tiled roof. A few of the
clay tiles had come loose and shards were scattered over the yard, and the
concrete fountain in front yard had toppled over and shattered, but the place
seemed mostly intact. “This’ll do for the moment,” he said. They followed him
across the yard to the front door. It was an impregnable looking thing of thick
boards and iron straps.

“How do you
expect to get past that?” Sharon said.

Mercer rubbed
his chin. He raised the machine gun and pointed it at the lock.

“Wait,” Glory
said. She was over to one side of the arcaded porch, her hand down inside a
large concrete planter. After a moment, she came up with a key. “Here you go.”
She started towards the door,
then
stopped at the look
on her mother’s face. “This, ah, place, belongs to, ah, a friend of mine,” she
said slowly.

“Would this be
Graeme?” her mother asked frostily.

“Oh, no,”
Glory said. “It’s Jenna’s.”

“And are
Jenna’s parents aware that you know where the spare key is?”

“Oh, they
haven’t been here in a while,” Glory said.

“She stays
here by herself?”

“Mom, can we
talk about this some other time?”

Sharon nodded
grimly. “Count on it.”

Inside, they
were able to use their lights. There didn’t seem to be any damage to the
interior until they got to the living room that faced the ocean. The picture
windows had been covered with sheets of plywood nailed to the exterior.
Shattered glass glittered on the floor beneath two of the windows where large
pieces of driftwood driven by the wind had pierced the plywood. One lay in the
middle of the floor; the other hung in the hole it had created.

“Stay out of
this room,” Mercer said. He turned to Glory. “I guess you know the layout of
the place?”

She nodded.
“Jenna’s bedroom’s on the back side of the house. Or wait, maybe that’s the
front. Anyway, it’s the side away from the ocean.”

“Okay,” he
said. “Hole up there. Don’t use any light that can be seen from the road.
They’re going to have someone out looking. We’re going to clear the
lighthouse.”

“How will we
know whether or not you made it?” Sharon demanded. “Am I just supposed to sit
here and worry?”

“No,” Mercer
said, “you’re supposed to sit here and look after your daughter.”

“I don’t need
you to...” she fell silent. He was right, but she didn’t have to like it.

“I’ll send
Bohler
back to get you once we’ve cleared the place.”

“You seem
pretty confident,”
Bohler
said.

Mercer
grinned. “Hey, like you say, I’m a cold-blooded killer. You’re a highly trained
law enforcement officer. How can we fail?”

“Listen,”
Glory said.

They all fell
silent, straining to hear. In the quiet, they could barely make out a thin
wailing, like a baby crying far away.

“Oh my God,”
Sharon said, but Mercer was already moving.
Bohler
fell in behind him. The wailing got louder as they approached the front door.
Mercer had the machine gun up and at the ready. There was a bumping and
scratching at the door. Mercer relaxed. He walked up and yanked the door open.
An orange blur streaked past him at ankle level and into the house. The cat was
almost to the hallway when it skidded to a stop on the tile floor of the
entryway. It turned, looked at Mercer,
then
yowled
again, an unmistakable note of indignation in its voice.

“Hello to you,
too, shithead,” Mercer said.

CHAPTER SIXTY

Phillips was
entranced. He had come back up into the lantern room when he heard the wind
die,
then
out onto the catwalk that surrounded the
glass cage. From his perch, he could see the towering majesty of the eye wall,
the circle of thunderheads seemingly reaching into the stratosphere all around,
lit from within by the constant lightning. More bolts of lightning danced below
the clouds. But when he looked up, he saw nothing but clear, dry air and the
untroubled stars above.

The strangest
thing was that the wall of clouds actually curved. There was a distinct
majestic arc to them, bending around the island. No clouds strayed into that
great bow. It gave him a true sense of the scale of the thing that had them in
its grasp, the immensity of the circle which they were now in the center of.
Phillips had looked up at the stars from half a dozen wildernesses, and yet he
had never felt as small and insignificant as he had at that moment.

“Gorgeous”, he
said aloud, and laughed to himself. It wouldn’t be so pretty, he knew, when the
storm hit again, trapping them here until it had expended its fury. This
mission was totally fucked, he knew, for all Blake’s optimism that they could
get back on track and recover whatever the hell it was in that safe. The plan,
he saw, had been fatally fragile from the beginning. All it took was some woman
and her daughter to send the whole thing sideways.
And, of
course, the mystery man.
Mercer.

He raised the
binoculars from where they hung from the strap around his neck and scanned the
area around the lighthouse. The cleared area around the lighthouse was littered
with limbs and debris. It no longer formed the perfect killing zone he’d
counted on.

For a second,
he thought he saw something moving in the jumble, but when he tried to focus,
it was gone, maybe just an errant breeze stirring a downed limb…

No. There.
Something was moving down there. He saw a flash of white in the darkness. A
branch had definitely moved, more than could be explained by the few vagrant
breezes that still stirred in the eye. He wondered briefly of it could be Moon,
or Blake, or Montrose, finally giving up on the safe, or realizing that the
house was no longer viable, and coming to take refuge. He realized that all he
had with him on the balcony was his sidearm. He needed the machine gun; the
huge Destroyer was too awkward a weapon to use as this range against a swiftly
moving target. He cursed and bolted back inside. Once through the door, he
stopped, listening. Whoever or whatever was out there might be trying to get
in. Slowly, as quietly as he could, he inched toward where the machine gun was
propped against the low inside wall, below the glass. He stopped as he heard
what sounded like rustling below. There was definitely something moving down
there. He moved more swiftly and snatched up the machine gun. He crept towards
the darkened hole in the center of the room. The space above the old watch room
was an impenetrable blackness. He remembered a scrap of poetry from his
childhood:
Black as the Pit from Pole to Pole…
The rustling was louder
now. Phillips braced the stock of the gun against his shoulder, aimed at where
he heard the rustling, and opened fire.

The sudden
illumination from the barrel of the machine gun briefly lit up a few scurrying
brown figures on the floor of the watch room. There was a squeal of agony as
one of the bullets hit home. Phillips almost fired again, but realization
stayed his hand.

Rats.

There were
rats in the lighthouse, no doubt driven by the rising water to higher and
higher points on the island, seeking the shelter of any structure they could
find. Maybe some deep seated racial memory passed down through generations of
island rats had hardwired into the rodents’ tiny brains an instinct that the
tower at the end of the island was the only refuge when the high wind and water
came.

No. That was
absurd. Phillips set his back against the wall and laughed, the tension
dissipating slightly with the sound. He needed to get a grip on himself. They
were just stupid animals, driven mad by fear and impelled to get higher and
higher, even if it meant climbing the staircase. Phillips looked over at the
hole in the floor from which he’d come up into the lantern room and thanked God
for the ladder. He didn’t think they could climb ladders. At least he hoped
not. If they could, he was going to have a lot of unwelcome company. He drummed
his fingers on his thigh, pondering what to do. The little bastards could give
him trouble if they were frightened enough.
Or hungry enough.
He grimaced.
Think.
Then he remembered the flares in his backpack, to be
used to signal the boat that was going to be sent to pick them up. Every member
of the team had them, in tacit but unspoken recognition that any single member
might be the only one left to signal for pickup. There were gun-fired flares as
well as handheld, each one designed to blast a sun-bright ball of light that
could be seen for miles. He knew rats feared open flame, and he didn’t think
they’d much enjoy a flare in their furry little vermin faces. The only problem
was
,
the backpack was down in the watch room. Phillips
sighed. Okay. He’d just have to go down there and hope their natural fear of
man trumped their fear of water and their hunger. At least he still had the
electric torch. He went and fetched it. At the top of the ladder, he hesitated.
There was still that movement he’d seen outside. There was still the
possibility that someone was trying to get in. Or, he realized, that someone
was already in. Whoever he saw moving outside could have entered the lighthouse
while he was distracted by the rats. Phillips cursed under his breath. He was
going to have to go down that ladder, not sure what was at the bottom.
Other than the rats, of course.
He remembered stories of
American soldiers in Vietnam who had had to clear Vietnamese tunnel complexes,
of how some men, going down the ladders into the tunnels, had been stabbed in
the legs by ambushers waiting below
who
then held the
struggling
mens
’ legs so they couldn’t climb out of
the holes until they
bled
out. And now it was him,
going down into the unknown darkness, with an unknown enemy below. He
considered taking the torch and doing a circuit of the rim, looking down, but
the light would make him an easy target. Another thought made him pause. It
was, he considered, about fourteen to fifteen feet to the floor below. A bit of
a drop, but no worse an impact than he’d had back in parachute training, in his
other life in Her Majesty’s much lower-paying service. As quietly as he could,
he slung the machine gun on his back. He took the torch in one hand, his pistol
in the other. He crouched at the rim of the hole near the ladder, took a deep
breath, and jumped into the darkness.