First I just found the bottom and nosed around some. In front of me was a CSO that had littered the bottom with condoms, toilet paper and other sewage for at least half a mile out. Behind me, I suspected, was a huge PCB spill. In between was total confusion: lobsters saturated with poison, bottom sludge that was utterly clean, clean-looking lobsters that gave massive doses of chloracne to the people who ate them.
There was a lobster crawling on an old oil drum right in front of me. I gave the drum a poke with my knife and it crumbled; there couldn't be anything in there. Then the lobster and I did hand-to-hand combat. I pretended it was Laughlin. Couldn't smell it or taste it, but I had enough time to chop it open and find its liver.
It had no liver, just sacs of oil, like the one Tanya had found. I scooped its viscera into a jar and took it with me. Maybe it was PCBs, maybe something completely different. So I swam into the shallow water and mucked around a little, breaking the water every so often to get my bearings, until I'd located the CSO pipe. Thank God it wasn't raining.
Having taken a good jarful of sludge from right under the pipe, I surfaced, trod water and studied the shoreline. I needed to know which CSO I was dealing with here, triangulating off the positions of U. Mass, South Boston High, Summer Street, and other landmarks. When I was convinced I could pin this place down on a map, I decided to call it a day.
While I was heading for the Zodiac I heard a propeller, or maybe more than one, and that bothered me because when I broke the water earlier, I hadn't been able to see any running lights. Somebody was nearby, using the fog to hide, and I had to guess he was hiding from me.
So I started one very slow orbit, and that's how I found the Cigarette. Sitting there with its motor idling, just far enough away that I couldn't see it from the Zode. It could see me because it was running dark. But the lights on my boat would splash against the surrounding fog and make it impossible for me to see them.
What now? I could try to get a close look at them. But they might have a negative attitude about that. Somehow I didn't relish my chances if they decided to chase me down. Besides, I was running out of air, and I couldn't stay underwater that much longer.
I could abandon the Zode and swim to shore on the surface, but why abandon ten thousand bucks worth of GEE equipment? These guys were just watching me. And they'd been watching me for a long time. I'd even provoked them once before, and all they did was run away. I didn't burn down my house when the FBI bugged it, did I?
So the only sensible idea was to go back to the Zode and proceed normally. But that's exactly what they were expecting me to do. It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected. But when you run out of air, you run out of air.
The best tactic was stealth. I swam back under the surface, broke the water on the far side of the Zode, in case they were using infrared, and started to take my stuff off while remaining in the water. My one concession to paranoia was dropping some gear: I just let the empty tank sink to the bottom because hauling it up into the Zode would be noisy and time consuming. Same with the clanky weight belt. It was just some chunks of lead and a nylon strap.
The problem was that I had to haul myself up into the boat. I weighed more than all that other crap together. Getting over the side of the Zode wasn't like hopping over a fence. It was more like sumo wrestling in a pool filled with Crisco.
So I tried to be quiet about it until I accidentally made a godawful amount of noise, and then I just tried to be quick about it. And at about the same time, I heard the Cigarette's engines rev up, heard it being thrown into gear. That scared the shit out of me and I waddled to the back of the Zode and began hauling on the ripcord, trying to start up the outboard. I hauled on it like a maniac about three times, felt something pop in my back, and then the Cigarette materialized like a ghost, shiny and blue and slippery, and I finally got to look at the owners. They were wearing ski masks. One of them was driving and the other was staring at me through unnaturally large binoculars. These were high-tech, Route 128 thugs: they had me on infrared. The driver's eyes glinted pale blue; Kleinhoffer or Dietrich. The other one set his binocs down and aimed a gun at me.
I remembered having tried to pistol-shoot at Jim Grandfather's, noticing how hard it actually was, after having watched TV and movies my whole life, to actually hit something with a handgun. These guys were on a small boat and so was I. I didn't figure they were going to nail me with one shot. Which didn't prevent me from being scared shitless; when I saw the gun, I fell back on my ass, tipping the whole Zode up. The Cigarette overshot me and had to turn around for another pass.
That gave me time to notice a little surprise they'd left behind: a pair of small darts stuck into the side of my Zodiac, and they were sputtering at me, throwing off a transparent bluish light. I'd heard about this from Dolmacher. It was a Tazer. If I hadn't fallen back, those darts would be stuck in my skin and that electrical charge would be running through my nervous system. And I'd be unconscious, or wishing I was, long enough for them to rev up and run over me in their Cigarette at about eighty miles an hour. Sorry, officer, it was foggy.
The wake of the Cigarette was throwing the Zode around like a teeter-totter. Something heavy smashed into my foot. It was our big nautical strobe light. So when the Cigarette cruised by me for the second attempt, I turned the strobe on, held it over my head like a basketball, and made a three-point jump shot right into their cockpit.
“Nice second effort, boys!” I hollered. The light had half-blinded me, too, but I didn't need perfect vision to start the motor. They needed it to take a shot at me.
Time for another try at the motor. This time I did it right: set the throttle on START and choked it. Three more hauls on the ripcord and it started.