The steel diamond-plate steps rang loudly against Reyland’s shoe heels as he came down the steep flight from the top deck of the USS Recover.
He was going to need to get some polo shirts or something, Reyland thought, unbuttoning his suit jacket in the Caribbean heat as he reached the bottom of the steel steps. It had actually been snowing at Bolling Air Force Base in DC when he took off two and a half hours before.
He glanced at his encrypted phone as it buzzed in his pocket. London again. Screw them. They’d have to wait. Everybody would have to just back the hell up for five seconds.
“Watch the chrome dome, boss,” his tactical team head, Thomas Ruiz, called out as he led Reyland to the right down the hot dim corridor.
Reyland smiled at Ruiz as he ducked under a sharply jutting electrical box.
The short and stocky former Delta Force sergeant didn’t walk so much as barrel through the world with a rooster-like strut.
The below-deck corridor was lined tight on both sides with cables and massive pipes and water hoses. They stopped at the end of it, and Ruiz knocked twice on a closed bulkhead door. The metal door squeaked and then opened inward like a bank vault. Just inside stood a very muscular black man wearing sunglasses in the same buff-colored tactical uniform as Ruiz.
The formidable man snapped his heels together as he gave them an ironically formal salute.
“Knock it off, Shepard,” Ruiz said, elbowing the man out of the way as they walked past.
The low warehouse-like hold they entered was roofed with steel beams. The bodies were laid out in the middle of it on a blue tarp, two by two. They were in dark green plastic body bags, and as Reyland came closer, over the boiler room smell of the ship’s machine oil, he caught the first fecal whiff of their rot.
Ruiz stopped before them and nodded at Shepard, who knelt at the first body bag. The rest of Ruiz’s men, a half-dozen veteran professional operators, sat a ways off in a dim corner of the hold. Aloof. Yawning. Not even looking at them. Some standing, some squatting, all in complete monk-like silence. They weren’t even talking to each other.
As the bags were zipped open, Reyland watched Ruiz take a cigar from his pocket. The Zippo he lit it up with had an ace of spades engraved in the side.
“Here,” Ruiz said as he offered the stogie to Reyland, soggy end first. “You’re going to need this.”
They went over to the first one.
Reyland let out a breath as he looked down.
His boss, Arthur Dunning himself. Holy Toledo.
Even in death, his boss had an austere bearing. Even now his standing expression was that of a crafty old coach about to throw a chair across a basketball court.
A memory came suddenly. Dunning, competitive in all things, was a scratch golfer, and they would play twice a month. He remembered the time he had almost beaten him a few years before on the course out on Griffin Island. He’d been up one on the last tee. Then right in the middle of his back swing, the sly old bastard had actually coughed. Reyland remembered slicing it, burying it in the woods good and deep.
“Shit happens,” Dunning had said, giving him a smug little smile.
Reyland fought off the strange desire to smile a little smugly himself as he looked down at his dead mentor laid out on the beat-up below-deck windowless room like a bunch of garbage in a split-open Hefty.
Sure does, boss, he thought, nodding. It surely does.
Reyland looked at the other dead men.
“How’d the plane go wonky? The cabin pressure like they said?”
“No clue,” Ruiz said, blinking at him. “I’d expect it’s something like that because of the blue patches on their faces there. Looks like they suffocated. But there’s no way to tell unless we bring in the mechanics and experts. I’m no structural engineer, boss.”
“Now tell me, Tommy,” Reyland said, looking the hardcase commando in the eye, “we’re the only ones to see this abortion, correct? Our team and the coast guard diver and a few coast guard people?”
“Well, actually,” Ruiz said, raising a brow.
“Actually what?”
Ruiz folded his stocky forearms.
“They sent an investigator from Naval Safety before we got the call. The cutter captain has an uncle in the navy and went VFR direct to him, jumped the chain.”
“No!” Reyland cried.
Ruiz nodded.
“They even flew her out to the cutter. But as far as I know, she didn’t see this or anything else. The cutter was ordered away before she could see any of the wreckage. She actually left the base. There’s another investigator now. Some navy fool who keeps asking to get on the ship.”
“Why bring her up?”
“No reason. I know how thorough you like to be. Especially in a situation of this, um, magnitude. I thought you might want to make a note of who’s coming and going.”
Reyland nodded at his tough little security man. Ruiz was as sharp as he was ruthless. He never missed a trick.
“Okay, good, Tommy. Noted. Now, where are the packages?”
“Ah, the packages,” Ruiz said, gesturing with his chin.
Reyland followed him into the corner of the hold opposite his resting men.
As they arrived, Ruiz kicked at a silver hard-pack suitcase with his tactical boot, sending it spinning. Reyland looked at it. It was open and empty.
“What’s this?”
“We found this at the site in some coral thirty feet from the plane,” Ruiz said. “Empty just like this.”
“No!” Reyland said, staring at the empty case. “You have got to be putting me on. Someone is playing games, huh? Did a little five-finger salvage job? One of the coasties? Or maybe the navy inspector who left?”
Ruiz shrugged.
“Not her. We watched video of her leaving the base. She only took her kit bag.”
Reyland pulled his phone out and called Emerson topside on the Recover’s deck.
“Yes, boss?”
“Plan B. Call HQ. I want full intelligence jackets on everybody on that coast guard tub from the captain to the guy who scrubs the urinals. Also, tell that peckerhead base commander who drove us in here we need some rooms to conduct interviews.”
“On it,” Emerson said.
Reyland looked at Ruiz in the dimness of the hold, looked at the empty suitcase. A bead of sweat rolled down his hairless head and neck into the back of his starched shirt collar as he tucked his phone away.
“Looks like we’re doing this the hard way, Tommy,” he said.