First I swam across and checked out the opposite bank. Definite tracks in the muck here. Big, triangular, flipper-shaped tracks. I started swimming toward the Basco Explorer.
Technically I was swimming upstream here, but the speed of the current was zero. There had been a mild smell of the poison, not nearly as bad as earlier tonight. But I had to figure they were poisoning this river too, since it led straight to Basco Central and they wouldn't want any trail of PCB bugs leading in here from the Harbor.
Sometimes I couldn't believe the shit I did for this job. But if I could pull something off here, I'd have a good excuse for taking a couple of days off. Debbie and I could climb into a waterbed somewhere and recuperate together, not get out of bed for about a week. If she'd have me. Go out to Buffalo, maybe, get back into that honeymoon suite, buy a shitload of donuts and a Sunday L.A. Times...
About ten seconds of those thoughts and I had got an erection and felt really drowsy and stupid. Hadn't taken enough speed. I checked the valve on the tank to make sure I was getting plenty of oxygen. Oxygen, oxygen, the ultimate addiction, better even than nitrous oxide. Tonight I needed lots. Had to keep alert, had to watch out for that SEAL. But it was such a boring trip, swimming through blackness and murk without a light. Easy to get scared, natural to fall into paranoia and despair. Every so often I broke the surface to check my direction and to see how close I was to the prow of the Basco Explorer. At first it was too far away, then, suddenly, it was much too close.
If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right under the big diesels, amidships. Even if it didn't sink the ship, this would do the most damage.
The docking facilities here weren't huge. Basco owned the end of the Everett River. That's how rivers worked around Boston Harbor - ran inland for a mile and then just ceased to exist, fed underground by sewers and culverts. Basco surrounded the river in a U shape. On one side of it they had a pier, and the other side was just undeveloped, basically a siding for a railway spur that ran up into Everett. If they had guards, they'd be on the side with the pier. So I stayed on the right, the eastern half of the river, and started to slide on up the hull of the Basco Explorer.
For the first few yards, feeling my way over the sonar dome at the bottom of the prow, I had my head above water. Then I had to face the fact that if I stayed up here, the SEAL could come from below and gut me like a tuna. Either way, I was in his element. But if I tried to be half-assed about it, I was in double trouble.
So I dove. I swam straight down to the bottom, which was only about ten feet below the bottom of the Basco Explorer's hull. I could almost stand on the bottom and touch the ship with one outstretched hand. They'd probably dredged this channel out to the Explorer's dimensions.
Then I realized that we were dealing with small volumes of water. I was used to the open Harbor. This was a lot more claustrophobic. I was in a space about the size of a couple of mobile homes, and if the SEAL was still here, he was sharing my space.
The water transmitted a powerful metallic clang. Impossible to tell direction, but obviously something had struck the ship's hull. Possibly the magnets on Smirnoff's mine. If I hunkered down, pretended to be a chunk of toxic waste and waited, the diver would swim away and I could clip the wires. But I wondered: what was the time delay on the sucker? It had to be fairly long. The diver had to get away, the water-hammer effect could kill you from a distance. This was reassuring.
From using up the compressed air, I'd become slightly buoyant, a little lighter than the water, and it was hard to stay on the bottom. So I relaxed and let myself float upwards until I was spread-eagled against "the bottom of the hull, facing down. I made sure I was a little east of the keel, so my bubbles skimmed off to the right, following the ship's curve, and came out on the unwatched side.
Another clang, very close, so close that I felt the vibrations through my tank and into my back. Then there was a light, coming toward me. You couldn't see a light more than a few feet in this shitty water. Then the light disappeared. Whoever owned it had shut it off.
Then another damn light, in front of and below me, almost on the bottom, cut into thick rays of shadow by the limbs of a diver.
Two divers. One swimming up where I was, his tank clanging against the hull. The second, the one with the light, heavier, using his weight to kick his way along the bottom. The one at my level had shut off his light so he couldn't be seen. The other was chasing him.
The prey almost got face-to-face with me and our masks looked at each other for just a second, amazed. He was wearing an underwater moonsuit, like mine, made for diving in a toxic environment.
Why? Smirnoff wouldn't know about the poison coming out of the Basco Explorer. He'd been planning this action for months. But this diver knew about it. Working for Basco?
He sank away from me because the other diver, below him, had grabbed him by the ankle and was pulling him down. He was kicking and thrashing but that's hard when you're underwater, and maybe a little tired of running. Steel glinted, and then the light was shining through a crimson thunderhead.
What was I going to do? All I could hope was that this killer with the knife hadn't seen me. I wasn't about to out swim him. If one of these guys was a SEAL, I had to figure it was the live one.
The light had gotten kicked by the victim, flailing around in his own blood, and the beam was slowly rotating as it sank. It spun by the killer's head and I saw a bare white face, long brown hair, blue eyes.