First You Make a Stone of Your Heart, Part 3 -- Shadows of Shadows Passing
3.1
Amaranth slipped away from her Navy escort at Norfolk under cover of darkness; she followed the main shipping channel northbound up Chesapeake Bay for another 70 nautical miles the next morning. Chief Turner was pushing the 120 foot Nordhavn's twin 965 HP MTU diesel engines to 2100 rpm, just ten percent below their max sustained rating. Admiral Spudz MacKenzie, USN retired, shook his head in mild despair when he thought of the prodigious quantities of fuel flowing to each engine at this speed, now most grateful that the DOD was footing the bill for the duration of this operation. He grabbed his Steiner binoculars and left the bridge, stepping out onto the exposed Portuguese bridge deck to scan for the red channel buoy '64' marking the entrance to the Potomac River, just off the Little Wicomico River; his practiced eye quickly spotted the mid-channel marker so he looked at Turner and pointed.
Of course, the marker buoy was clearly displayed on each of the four chartplotters on Amaranth's bridge, and both of the long range open array radars picked them up as well, but Turner nodded and shot his admiral a grinning thumb's-up. Turner noted their depth was 68 to 79 feet here in the main ship channel, but both the north and south sides of the channel were rimmed with extremely shallow and very rocky shoals, with those just off Cornfield Harbor on the north shoreline less than three feet deep at low tide. Even in mid channel, there were areas of rapid shoaling -- especially around the Point Lookout light near the river's entrance -- and they were going to hit an ebb tide, so they would be working upriver against a.44 knot tidal flow, further increasing their fuel burn.
But at least, Turner said to himself, the orcas had disappeared.
What he'd seen when he plucked the admiral from the sea the day before had left him speechless. A half dozen or more of the beasties swimming around MacKenzie and one of those women, and the smell! As he grabbed the admiral under the arms and pulled him aboard the Zodiac, the old man had smelled like the seediest Bangkok brothel he'd ever been in. Worst of all, the old man's torso had been covered with white, slimy stuff, and it hadn't taken a rocket scientist to figure out that MacKenzie had been covered from head to toe in whale splooge. And a lot of it, too.
Then to top it all, one of those women telling the old man that she was pregnant -- and that he, the admiral, was the father! Hah! Turner had wanted to pick them both up and pitch them into their wake, but he had wisely chosen not to. Not yet. Still, the old man had retreated to his cabin in a funk, and now everyone was walking around on the bridge on tenterhooks...
And then there they'd been, northbound off Cape Hatteras later that night being followed by an aircraft carrier and its battle group, and he swore he could hear the bridge crew up on the Truman's bridge snickering at the yacht going flat-out at 12 knots, when the carrier routinely made passages at three times that speed, and could sprint more than that when launching a strike. He'd soon been thankful that another layer of dense fog had settled just over Hampton Roads when the strike group turned into Norfolk, leaving Amaranth alone to puddle along slowly northward.
Sara came up from the galley with bowls of crab bisque and some kind of grilled sandwiches -- panini, she called them -- and he had to admit the girl could cook. She carried a bowlful out to Spudz, and Turner had wished he could have heard what passed between them out there.
Because after she left him standing out there with his lunch, MacKenzie had put the plate down and pulled an encrypted Sat-phone from his jacket and made a call. He spoke on the phone for a good half hour, watching all the while as Turner entered the Potomac, heading northwest now for Washington, D.C.
No one, not even Chief Turner, saw the lone male orca following in their wake.
+++++
Fog clung to the Potomac as Amaranth approached the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and Spudz throttled the engines back as he made for the marked channel under the 70 foot tall span. With visibility down to just a few yards he was relying primarily on radar, but Amaranth was also equipped with infrared cameras up on the radar mast that painted a clear picture of the piers and spans now only a hundred yards ahead. Sara stood beside him, watching everything he did, every move he made, and when she didn't understand something she asked.
"How high are we here on the upper bridge, and what about the radomes on top?" she asked.
"With the tower, we're 68 feet total height, but there's one VHF antenna up there that hits 75 feet," Spudz sighed as he centered Amaranth in the narrow channel.
"So...?"
"It's fiberglass and has a flexible mounting plate designed to give a little under a low speed impact like that. It should just drag along the underside of the span." A gust of wind out of the north caught the bow and began pushing the yacht to port, so Spudz countered by cutting back the starboard engine a fraction, then he used the bow thruster to make an even bigger correction, and with a little counter rudder she straightened up again; once the bow was clear of the bridge he slowly added power until the ship's speed indicated four knots. He checked their depth again, too: displays were showing 26 feet, the chart indicated 27 but shoaled quickly ahead as the main channel returned to the center of the river. But the river got tricky up ahead, too, as the channel passing Goose Island shoaled rapidly to four feet -- or less -- before the real fun started. The channel narrowed considerably after passing the Alexandria Channel buoy, and water depths in several places outside the deep but narrow channel were often measured in inches.
But they were fast approaching Hains Point junction, where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers split in the heart of Washington, D.C., and here the charted depth shoaled to just 9.5 feet -- mere inches deeper than Amaranth's keel. As he approached the Green 9 buoy, Spudz dropped his speed to just maintain "steerage way," moving just fast enough through the water to keep the rudders effective, and then he shifted focus to the forward scanning sonar, literally "seeing" the bottom just ahead as Amaranth approached the entrance to the Washington Channel. The channel widened a little here, just as soon as the bow passed the buoy marking the shallow entrance, and then the depth dropped back down to 15 feet, so Spudz bumped up their speed to two knots, making for the Capital Yacht Club just beyond the Gangplank marina on the right side of the channel.
Despite the early hour, four men were waiting dockside as MacKenzie brought Amaranth's starboard rail to the club's transient dock, and moments later a gray US Navy fueling boat pulled alongside and began pumping diesel into her tanks. Fresh food was waiting on the dock, most packed on ice and waiting to be loaded, and Spudz left the bridge after Turner relieved him, going to his cabin to dress for the short ride over to the main State Department building on 21st Street. When Ralph Richardson and his group were ready, Spudz walked them up the docks and through the yacht club and then out to Sutton Square, where three black Suburbans idled, waiting for them. There was little traffic out at three in the morning, but guards met them at the fortified basement entrance on the east side of the main building, and after their drivers produced the necessary passes and ermits, the Suburbans were escorted to the basement entrance.
Eve and Devlin/Sara were fingerprinted and photographed, their previously completed passport applications now complete, and a half hour later their passports were produced and delivered to MacKenzie. The motorcade returned to the yacht club, dropping off everyone but Richardson, Spudz and Devlin, who were then driven through the waking city to the VIP lounge at Andrews Air Force Base. MacKenzie checked in with the control tower, received an updated arrival time for the inbound Air Force C-37B, a hardened version of the Gulfstream 550 used by the Air Force for VIP transport.
A lounge steward produced coffee and Spudz took the offered cup and walked over to the wall of windows overlooking the VIP ramp, noting that Air Force Two was being fueled and provisioned a couple of hundred yards from the lounge. Air Police and their K-9 companions were walking the ramps, making their early morning perimeter sweeps as the sun began to make its daily appearance, but just then Spudz heard control tower chatter coming through a speaker in the dispatch office that told him the C-37B was turning onto final.
Sara stood beside Richardson, then sitting in his motorized wheelchair while he nursed a cup of coffee, and MacKenzie looked at the two of them -- not yet really understanding the nature of their relationship. Was Richardson her father, or her creator? Or, as Spudz was beginning to suspect, was Richardson merely a facilitator? An intermediary? But if that was true, who were the other parties involved? After spending two nights with Sara, one of those nights more intimate than the other, he had come to the conclusion that she was anything but human. Her body was anatomically correct in every respect, but she was hard in places where women were soft, and he'd yet to see her eat or go to the restroom. He had seen her in Richardson's stateroom sitting in a chair with her feet resting on a stainless steel plate, and he felt certain she had been recharging power cells of some sort.
Yet in other ways she seemed almost too human. She longed for companionship and positively glowed when he complimented her, even if he simply expressed any kind of approval when she cooked. She was almost childlike at times, then in an instant could turn sultrily provocative, and he'd found that juxtaposition of contrary emotions morally troubling, enough so that for now he'd decided to pull back from her a little -- at least until he could get some kind of emotional clarity. He'd had to admit to himself that the idea she was pregnant concerned him most of all, because what had happened in the water with all those damned orcas had been anything but consensual sex. And just how the hell had she known so quickly that she was with child? And perhaps most troubling of all, just what kind of child had been conceived? If she wasn't human....?
MacKenzie watched the Gulfstream touch down on Runway 0-1 Left and, after its thrust reversers roared briefly the little jet turned to the left and taxied to the VIP ramp located near the southwest corner of the airfield. An airman with red tipped wands guided the pilots to a parking place near the terminal and Spudz heard the engines shut down, then saw the passenger door open and the airstairs extend from the fuselage under the door. One of the pilots walked down the stairs carrying a small duffel, then an old man appeared in the doorway, and MacKenzie studied this man as he emerged.
Tall, his back ramrod straight, white hair a little on the long side, Spudz grimaced as he watched the old man start down the stairs. Khaki pants, madras button down shirt under a navy blue windbreaker, and to top it all off he wore ratty old boat shoes, yet he noted the man came down the steep steps without too much difficulty, not with the usual stiff gait of your typical 93 year old white guy with a bum leg. The old man sat down beside the pilot in an electric golf cart and they quickly scooted over to the terminal, and the old man thanked the pilot before walking into the building.
As he walked inside, the old man reacted to Richardson first, growling something unintelligible under his breath, before he saw Sara and stopped dead in his tracks.
And then Sara walked over to the old man, her right hand extended.
"Devlin?" the old man asked, clearly unnerved by her presence here.
"Hello, Harry," Sara said to him, taking his hand in hers.
Harry Callahan looked troubled, and he squinted into her eyes. "What happened...no, who...?" he stammered. "But this can't...I don't understand...I haven't...I haven't seen you in fifty years."
