Ben swam blind into the dark well of the caisson, worked the mesh bag through the hatchway, then clawed upwards. His head broke the surface into the chamber. Foul entombed air ripped through Ben’s teeth into his starved lungs. He was in the wet sub-basement of the lighthouse. The waves outside thundered against the iron.
As Ben treaded water, he bumped into something floating in the dark with him. He reached into a cargo pocket of his wetsuit for a small light. Turning it on, he found as expected that he was in a circular crypt. Like the bottom of a big water tank.
Ben swung the light. He was treading water with Hiram Harris. His friend was blanched, dead. He slumped at the surface in the life vest he kept on the Palestrina. The body undulated up and down in Ben’s wavelets making Hiram appear to nod. Ben felt his stomach turn. Another friend gone. What had they done to LuAnna?
Ben tested the first dry rungs of the rusted interior ladder running down to the submerged hatch. They held, so far. He climbed up to the next hatch that gave access into the basement level above. One hard push and it rose. It was unlocked, and nobody waited to blow his brains out. That’s one break, anyway.
Ben played the light across the five-hundred-gallon tanks. Four of them. Good. Still there as he remembered. He rolled over the hatch coaming onto the cement floor, and pulled the mesh bag up after him. Two of the tanks were cisterns that held the former keeper’s water supply, collected from rainfall.
The other two tanks held kerosene. Fuel for the big navigation beacon. Though the light was automated and converted to electricity, the kerosene system had been preserved as a backup in case of a power failure.
Ben got to work with the two cases of aerosol bug bombs. Popped them all as fast as he could. A poisonous fog began filling the space.
Ben opened the stiff purge valves at the bottom of the kerosene tanks. Fuel gushed from the taps and ran across the cement floor. Fortunately, the hatch coaming in the floor was five inches high. There would be plenty of kerosene and volatile vapor loose in the airspace before anything overflowed into the sub-basement.
He gathered up the bag, and climbed another ladder. Pushed on the last hatch leading into the first floor. He would suffocate in the fumes if this one turned out to be locked. The hatch gave. Now he had access to the living quarters above the iron caisson. The kitchen and sitting room formed a continuous open space around the central spiral stair.
He peered around the room as best he could. The hatch itself blocked his view directly behind him. The noise of the storm covered the sounds of his invasion. No one in sight. He rose out of the floor into the brick walled space.
He lowered the hatch and saw LuAnna.
What was left of her.
Her fragile nakedness cut him to the bone. Her body bled from lacerations and scrapes. The only sign she was alive was her near convulsive shivering. A large welted bruise swelled from her forehead.
There was a terrible avulsion on her hip, as if a huge chunk of her flesh was torn out. She must have fought this bravely. Fought everything they had tried to do to her.
Her helplessness provoked a choking spasm of shame in Ben’s chest. Facing facts, there was nothing he could do for her here, nor was there time for self-recrimination now. If he was going to save LuAnna, hate him as she rightfully might, she had one more ordeal to endure. It would be the worst by far.
Someone moved overhead.
Ben planned to carefully lower LuAnna with the sling and tether into Miss Dotsy with Ellis’s help, but now there was no time. He fitted the inflatable life jacket around her, and buckled it in place. He listened.
Whoever was up there was coming down the central stair. There was no time to surprise and subdue this man as he had Tug Parnell. Ben scooped LuAnna in his arms ran through the door leading out to the deck. Without stopping, he made straight for the railing.
“Hey! You!” A man’s footsteps in pursuit. Then gunshots.
Ben threw one leg over the rail, and hurled himself backward into space with LuAnna embraced in his arms, bullets flying past them.
Ben lost hold of her when they struck the water. His mask flew off his face, and he was blinded in the murk. All that was left in his hand was the rope, the mesh bag, and the plastic pull-toggle for the CO2 cartridge on LuAnna’s life vest. He surfaced long enough to see a man with a gun looking down from the lighthouse deck.
Then bullets rang off the deck’s rail. Ellis was covering. Chalk’s man disappeared into the lighthouse firing blind over his shoulder.
Ben dived for LuAnna. The water was liquid ice. LuAnna would be dead in seconds if he couldn’t find her, drag her up, get her warm. He had lost her.
He surfaced again, and saw her adrift next to the Palestrina. Her life vest had inflated. He swam toward her. Suddenly there was a buzz of machine gun fire from above. Ben braced for bullets to tear into him. Little geysers erupted in the water. The shooter in the lighthouse shifted his aim to something else, fired three times.
Ben had to keep LuAnna out of sight in the water. He towed her under the far side of the bow of the Palestrina for cover. LuAnna was still unconscious.
The gunfire ceased. Seconds passed. Ben held LuAnna close. His mind froze. He had her in his arms, but had no idea what to do next.
Miss Dotsy’s bow knifed into sight over the crest of a wave. Ellis leaned over her washboards, snaffled LuAnna by the back of the life vest, and plucked her from the water. Ben grabbed a mooring cleat on Miss Dotsy’s stern as it careened by. He hung on, completely unable to pull himself aboard.
Again Ben felt Ellis’s crushing grip on his arm, and he was back on the familiar deck. Ellis set the steering tiller for a heading away from the lighthouse. Then as gently as he could, he hauled LuAnna into the cuddy cabin, and wrapped her in a blanket. Ben followed close crawling on all fours.
Ellis put his head out of the cabin door. “You got this shot?”
Ben said, “Hell yes. Gimme.”
Instead of producing the sniper rifle, Ellis handed Ben an ancient Webley and Scott break-action signal pistol with a wood stock, vintage 1917. Ben’s great-grandfather’s flare gun. Not like Ben’s sniper rifle by any means, but from shooting it on many Independence Days as a kid, he knew the piece as intimately as any deadly weapon.
Ben marshaled his last strength, and crouched on the heaving deck. Didn’t brace himself at all. He let Miss Dotsy roll naturally under his feet as she had for so many years. He took aim at the nearest lighthouse window on the lower brick level, and compensated for wave and wind. “Shooter ready.”
Ellis smiled. “Send it.”
Pulled the trigger. A wet popping sound, a dull flash and smoky puff, and nothing else. A short round. The ammo was so old.
Ben broke the signal gun open. Plucked out the hot dud, slapped the last flare in the barrel and snapped it shut. He took aim again, now compensating with a negative lead for the distance Miss Dotsy had just traveled.
Ben muttered, “Shooter ready,”
From the cuddy cabin, LuAnna’s voice feebly croaked, “Send it.”
Ben pulled the trigger.
The gun kicked. The blazing red flare arced through the storm pretty and true, the smoke plume dissipating fast downwind. The little meteor disappeared through a thin glass window in the lighthouse.
For an instant, nothing changed. Then the flare ignited the bug-bomb aerosol. That touched off the kerosene flood in the basement.
The lighthouse disintegrated. The iron caisson acted like a mortar tube, directing all the blast force upward into the masonry and wooden frame structure. A white-orange column of flame. The lighthouse beacon flew up wildly into the clouds like an anti-aircraft searchlight. Then it winked out. A man cartwheeled in a high trajectory through the storm-wracked sky, a scarecrow burning alive.
Ben mumbled, “For Hiram and Charlene. Down payment.” He yelled to Ellis, “Now let’s get LuAnna home.”