The walls of the slot reared up around him, coarse-grained, weathered stone scattered with palm-sized splotches of orange and gray-green lichen. He spotted a single gouge left by a quarryman's chisel, and a patch of discolored mortar that plugged a hole. The cliff face dropped straight down into the water, and he guessed there would be at least ten feet of channel at dead low tide. The smell of gas and marijuana grew stronger.
He sculled around to line up with the cave, keying his transmitter again with a Morse code "285" for the bearing on his deck compass. His earphone hissed "Roger" in reply, the growing static on the FM warning him the stone was shielding his signal. So the radio might not be much use. But then, his little hand-held always talked better than it listened.
A single bright scrape marred the entry; someone had gotten careless with a boat hook, fending off. The shadows closed around Daniel, into the total darkness of a cave at night. He dug into his gear-bag, pulled out a headlamp, and put it on. He hated showing light, but infrared goggles gave too coarse a picture for this job, and light amplifiers would need some light to amplify.
The beam cut into the darkness, leaving a white shaft of fog like a thin pale ghost questing to right and left. The inside of the cave was rougher stone, chisel gouges and the half-tunnels of blasting holes standing out clearly in the light. This work had been done after gunpowder and iron came to the coast, but before there were enough people to care about the noise.
Daniel crept along, sculling gently while he scanned for alarms. The tunnel curved slowly north — a turn easy enough for any boat that had business being there, but sufficient to shield direct light from the outside. The water lay as still as a millpond, and he heard his quietest paddle-strokes whispering in the silence.
The radio spat static at him, with "distance" barely coming above the squelch. He sent his guess back and received another burst of noise. It sounded as loud as a chainsaw in the stillness, and he killed the volume. From now on, he'd be transmitting blind.
His light swept over a slot in the cave roof and walls, and he studied the bright metal edge it showed. Storm gate, he guessed, stainless steel, something to keep heavy swells out when the Gulf of Maine started getting frisky. He paused just beyond it, thinking about traps. Up to this point, nothing he'd seen could stop him from just sneaking right back out again.
The tunnel opened up into a chamber as wide and high as a barn. The walls seemed smoother here, and natural, as if some troll had blown a bubble in the granite while it was cooling. Water splashed from a spring high up to one side, flowing gently down the rock and into the quiet tide below.
He backed water a yard or two, nerves on edge as his headlamp bounced light across rusted iron overhead. He brought the beam back and steadied it, lighting up an ancient hoist and wooden catwalk high along the wall. Judging by the rotted holes in the wood, nobody had used that for fifty years or more. Probably rumrunners and Prohibition. Newer light fixtures also hung from the rock, though, connected by a spider-web of conduit.
Then dark shadows formed into a boat and floating dock, low in the water, new and well-tended. Curiosity sucked him deeper into the cave.
The boat was fiberglass, flat black, long and sleek like an arrow, and bore no name or registration numbers. Very interesting. Outside of GPS and radar antennas and a single VHF radio whip, it showed no metal. If the engines sat below waterline, it would have no more radar signature than a chunk of driftwood.
Daniel sculled quietly along it, estimating length and beam and capacity in bales of marijuana or kilos of cocaine. A man could support a very comfortable lifestyle with a boat like that.
Assuming the right connections, of course. Which the Pratts would have. Daniel had seen enough. He spun the kayak with two dips of the paddle and keyed his transceiver again with the code for "leaving."
Lights blazed, blinding him.
He dug his paddle into the water, thrashing through the glare towards his memory of the exit. Machinery whined, and he heard the rumble of the storm gate closing.
The damned thing would be slow. He still might make it.
A door slammed behind him, and then a single shot blasted and echoed, deafening in the enclosed space. His paddle jerked in his hands. The kayak slewed around and he lost his bearings. He rammed into something, hard and grating on the bow, and that was it. He dropped the paddle and raised his hands.
More from James A. Hetley...
THE WILDWOOD SERIES
About The Summer Country:
Maureen Pierce works the night shift in a convenience store, carries a .38 Smith & Wesson in her pocket, and talks to trees. She knows enough clinical psychology to think that when the trees answer, it proves she's crazy. She can live with that.
She manages to get by in a world where she doesn't really fit, until the truth reaches out to touch her as she slogs home through the slushy midnight sidewalks of a February sleet storm. That truth offers a seductive promise of warmth and sun, green growing things and trees that really do answer when she talks to them. It tells her that she isn't truly human.
Now her blood heritage drags her from Maine into ancient myth three
