Gideon’s Sword gc-1 Page 24

  The officer hesitated. “They are coffins.”

  “What is this, some kind of burial ground?”

  “Yeah. It’s the public burial ground for New York City. Potter’s field.”

  “Potter’s field?”

  “When someone dies in the city, and they don’t have any family or money to pay for a burial, they get buried here. We got Rikers Island inmates doing the work, so we can’t have visitors landing in boats, you understand?”

  “Yeah? How many bodies are there?”

  “Over a million,” said the guard, with no little touch of pride.

  “Holy cow.”

  “Largest burial ground in the world. Been going since the Civil War.”

  “That’s incredible. And you give them all a Christian burial?”

  “Interfaith. We got all kinds of religious figures coming here blessing the dead — priests, ministers, rabbis, imams. Every religion gets its turn.”

  They walked past the old power plant. The ruined Dynamo Room loomed above the tangled vegetation, adjacent to a broad field.

  “Where’s your boat?” asked the guard, peering across the field toward shore.

  “It’s down on the beach over there beyond that seawall.”

  Instead of walking straight across the field, the guard walked north along the road, making a loop.

  “Why are we going this way?”

  “That field’s off-limits,” said the guard.

  “What for?”

  “Don’t know. There’s a lot of places on the island that are dangerous.”

  “Oh really? How do you know where they are?”

  “We got a map, shows the no-go areas.”

  “On you?”

  The guard pulled it out. “We’re required to carry it.”

  Gideon took the map and scrutinized it for as long as he dared before the guard folded it up and put it away. After making a broad detour around the field, they arrived at the beach and walked over to the boat.

  “Um,” said Gideon, “can I have my stuff back?”

  “Guess it isn’t a problem,” the guard said, pulling the map, notebook, and other papers from his pocket, handing them over.

  “Is Davids Island open to the public?” Gideon asked.

  The guard laughed. “It’s a park but, ah, if I were you I wouldn’t go digging holes over there.” He hesitated. “Mind if I give you a little advice?”

  “Please.”

  “That map you bought? It’s fake.”

  “Fake? How do you know?”

  “Canal Street? You see all those Rolexes, Vuitton bags, Chanel perfume, and Prada shit they’re selling down there? That’s counterfeit central. Although I got to admit a fake treasure map is taking it to another level.” He issued a not unkindly laugh, laying a friendly hand on Gideon’s shoulder. “I’d hate to see you waste your time and get into trouble. Trust me, that’s no treasure map.”

  Gideon put on his most crestfallen face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m sorry we’ve got so many scumbags in New York City ripping off the tourists.” The guard glanced up at the sky, which had grown almost black with roiling clouds. The wind was gusting, and the bay was covered with whitecaps. “If I were you, I’d forget Davids Island and get my ass off the Sound. We get some serious riptides and shit around here when there’s a storm, and there’s a big one coming in.”

  63

  At ten o’clock that evening, Gideon, dressed as a college-aged backpacker, loitered on City Island Avenue, observing Murphy’s at a distance. In his backpack he carried the two illegal firearms, boxes of extra rounds, a knife, a headlamp, a flashlight, a folding shovel, folding pick, rope, Mace, bolt cutters, two pairs of night-vision goggles, maps, and the notebook. The gusts of wind coming off the Sound set Murphy’s old wooden sign swinging back and forth on creaky hinges. The air smelled of salt water and seaweed. The southern horizon was alive with distant flashes of lightning, blooming inside towering thunderheads, approaching fast.

  He could see no sign of Mindy. It was a few minutes past their rendezvous time, but he assumed she had arrived early and was probably hanging back somewhere, waiting for him to show.

  And as if on cue, he heard her low voice from the darkness of the small park behind him. “Hello, Gideon.”

  She stepped out, looking trim and athletic, carrying her own backpack, a woolen beret worn jauntily on her head, her short hair stirred by the wind. She greeted him with an affectionate kiss.

  “What a charming surprise.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” she said with an arch smile. “That’s part of the cover — just two college kids on a summer trip — like you said, right?”

  “Right.”

  They crossed the street. Next to the boat rental was a marine yard surrounded by a high chain-link fence, which blocked access to the piers. Gideon looked up and down the street, satisfied himself it was empty, then scaled the fence and dropped down on the other side. Mindy landed softly beside him. They scooted across the yard, scaled another fence, and ended up on the pier leading to the floating docks.

  “The outboards are kept in here,” Gideon said, indicating a locked shed. He attacked the lock with the pair of bolt cutters, and in a moment they had hauled out a six-horsepower Evinrude with a full gas can, fuel lines, and a pair of oars. They jumped into a boat; Gideon bolted the engine to the stern and connected the fuel lines while Mindy untied and pushed off.

  Gideon started rowing. In a few minutes they’d moved out of the protective slip and into the teeth of the rising wind.

  Mindy shielded herself from the blowing spume. “You got a plan yet?”

  “Of course. Nodding Crane is already on the island. It’s essential for him to think I’m coming alone. So get down and stay down while I explain.”

  “Sure thing, boss.” She curled up below the gunwale.

  Beyond the docks, Gideon lowered the engine, fired it up, and headed down the protected channel toward the dark outline of the City Island Bridge. Beyond lay the open water of Long Island Sound. Even in the darkness, he could make out the whitecaps. It was going to be a rough crossing.

  “Let’s hear it,” said Mindy from the bottom of the boat.

  “I’m going to drop you off at the southern end of the island. I’ll land midway on the island and make my own way to where the burial ground is. On foot, you’ll follow the map I’ve sketched for you. Stick to the route I’ve drawn — the island’s a veritable death trap. By the time I reach the burial ground you’ll already be in position in the trees, covering me. I go in, find the limb, cut out the wire, we split.”

  “What about Nodding Crane?”

  “He’s going to show, no way to predict when. The field around the burial site is wide open — there’s no way for him to cross it without you seeing him. When he appears, shoot him dead. Don’t mess around.”

  “Not very sporting.”

  “The hell with sporting. Got a problem with shooting a man in the back?’’

  “Not a man like him.”

  He nodded at her backpack. “You got a good sniper rifle in there like I said?”

  “It’s not a sniper rifle but it’ll do, a Kel-Tec SUB-2000 nine-millimeter semi-automatic. Kevlar vest, too. What about you?”

  “Two handguns, body armor — I’m ready.” Gideon pulled out a map enclosed in a ziplock bag. “You won’t have any problem finding your way, but as I said, the whole island’s an accident waiting to happen, so follow the route I marked on this map — no shortcuts. There’s a timetable here, too. Stick to it.”

  “What if he’s already waiting for you in the burial trench? You step out in the field and he guns you down?”

  “I’m going to cross the field in a backhoe. Two are parked in a shed beside the field, and they’re built like tanks.”

  The boat puttered along, nearing the City Island Bridge and the opening to the Sound. The wind howled, whipping the relatively calm channel water into whitecaps.

  “
Tell me about the island.”

  “The place started out as a POW camp for Civil War soldiers. A lot of them died and were buried there. New York City bought it for a public burial ground in 1869. But that only took up about half the island. The rest was used for other things at various times: a women’s lunatic asylum, boys’ workhouse, tubercularium, yellow fever quarantine, prison. During the 1950s the military used it as a base for a battery of Nike Ajax missiles, stored in silos. Now it’s uninhabited and just used for burials. But nothing’s been removed or boarded up, it was all just left to disintegrate.”

  “And the burials?”

  “They lay them in two parallel trenches, one for amputated limbs, the other for the, ah, complete corpses. The limbs are buried at a rate of, I figured, about seven to ten a day. Each box has two numbers: the medical file number and a sequential number added by the inmates as they bury them, so they can be located again if necessary. The body part is also tagged inside the box with the identifying information. It’s been about a week since Wu’s legs were amputated, so I figure we need to go about sixty, maybe seventy boxes back. The boxes are stacked in the trench four across and eight high, thirty-two in a row, so I figure it’ll be in the second or third row deep.”

  “And then?”

  Gideon patted his backpack. “I’ve got the X-rays with me. We’ll have to do a little dirty work to get the wire out.”

  “When do you expect Nodding Crane to appear?”

  “He’s going to be unpredictable. That’s why you’ll remain hidden throughout and only appear when he shows himself or the fight is joined. Maximize your element of surprise. You understand?”

  “Perfectly. And you’ve got a plan B?”

  “And C and D. The very unpredictability of the island works to our advantage.” Gideon smiled grimly. “Nodding Crane behaves like a chess player. We’re going to give him a craps game instead.”

  64

  As the boat entered the broad Sound, the storm hit them with a blast, raising a vicious chop that battered the hull and slopped into the boat. The lightning front was closing in, the distant booms rolling across the water like artillery.

  Gideon steered the boat into the wind. “Start bailing.”

  Keeping low, Mindy picked up an old Clorox-bottle bailer in the bow and began scooping up water and tossing it out. As she did so, a large wave slammed the gunwale and shoved the boat sideways, drenching them.

  “My God,” Mindy said as she bailed. “This boat is like a bathtub.”

  The lights of City Island wavered on the horizon, but ahead all was blackness. Gideon pulled a compass from his pocket, took a bearing, corrected course. While the chop was bad, the swell was worse, surprisingly strong for protected waters. The engine sputtered and hiccupped; if it quit, they’d be finished.

  But it did not quit, and the boat pushed on through the gale, Mindy bailing almost continuously. It was not a long crossing — half a mile — but the boat was heading into the wind, moving at a crawl, and a strong current was sweeping the boat northward, past the island and out to sea.

  If they missed the island, their next stop would be Execution Rocks.

  Gideon took another reading and compensated for the current by heading farther south. Another wave slammed into their flank, throwing them to one side and almost swamping the small vessel. The weak engine coughed as Gideon struggled to bring the boat back into the wind.

  “We’re going to drown before we even get there,” said Mindy.

  But even as she spoke, the faintest outline of the island began to materialize in the dark, fringed by a dim line of breaking water. Gideon angled in toward the southern end. They were on the lee side of the island, and as they approached the dangerous swell subsided.

  “Be ready to jump,” he said in a low voice, pulling a pair of night-vision goggles from his backpack and handing them to her. “Use these. No lights. Follow the timetable I laid out. Be in position at the appointed time. And for God’s sake, wait for your opportunity.”

  “I’ve been at this a lot longer than you,” she said as she fitted the goggles to her head.

  The surf loomed up, the chop boiling up onto a strand of large cobbles.

  “Now,” he murmured.

  She jumped into the surf and Gideon slammed the shift into reverse, the propeller shaft almost bucking out of the water with the effort. In a moment she had vanished into the darkness. Gideon turned back into the gale, making a loop far from shore where the boat couldn’t be seen or heard from the island. He struggled to bail and steer at the same time, the rain coming down hard, the waves smacking into the boat.

  Navigating by dead reckoning, he turned northward, paralleling the eastern shore of the island, and then angled in when he felt he was nearing the island’s midpoint. As he neared the shore, he could just see the outline of the giant smokestack against the dim sky — his landmark. He picked his spot along the shore, the location of the small salt marsh, and ran the boat full speed up on the beach. He hopped out and pulled the boat into the dense marsh grass.

  Crouching in the cover, he prepared himself for the trek up-island, fitting on his night-vision goggles, checking his sidearms, and giving his own map a final look. To decrease predictability, he had chosen an unlikely and inefficient route, one that went through the most dangerous and unstable areas of the ruins.

  Nodding Crane would have arrived early, scouted around, and taken up position — the spider waiting for the fly. And Gideon believed, although he had not mentioned it to Mindy, that he knew exactly where that position was. There was one place on the island he himself would have chosen: a superior vantage point in all respects. If he understood Nodding Crane — and he believed he did — the man would not be able to resist occupying the strongest offensive position.

  The rain was now lashing down in sheets, the booms of thunder following hard on the flashes of lightning. Another stochastic element in his favor. He checked his watch: ten thirty. He had another twenty minutes before Mindy was in position.

  He crept through the sodden grass and into some heavy bayberry bushes, the goggles displaying his surroundings in a sickly green light, the rain blurring and obscuring the outline of the trees and bushes. It was like moving, half blind, through a ghostscape.

  He worked his way through the heaviest brush until he came up behind a ruined building: the boys’ workhouse complex. He slipped through a broken window frame into the moldy interior, water pouring down from holes in the upper floors and the roof. The boys’ primary task had been to make shoes, and old pairs lay everywhere, thousands of them, curled up like autumn leaves, scattered about among broken glass, tools, iron shoe stands, and rotting wooden forms. He moved along the edge of the wall, gun at the ready, taking care not to step on glass.

  In a moment he was in the long, echoing central corridor of the workhouse. The muffled sounds of the storm penetrated the walls.

  Down the corridor, he came to the rear door, which was hanging on a single hinge. From the door, he made a quick dash through weeds into the workhouse dormitory. Passing rows of rusting iron bedsteads and graffiti-scratched walls, he paused to let an especially intense barrage of lightning and thunder pass. Each flash illuminated the interior in spectral light, the rusting bed frames casting flickering shadows onto the walls, a single graffito scratched in large letters above one bed: I WANT TO DIE.

  He hurried on. At the far end of the building, he passed several small rooms heaped with broken filing cabinets, burst cardboard boxes, bundled records and file folders, soaked and rotting. A large rat, sitting on top of a heap of paper, watched him pass by.

  He was soon back out in the storm, the rain harder than ever. He had gotten past the ruins and into the oldest section of burial grounds, now returned to forest. As he made his way through the densest stand of trees, he came across old grave markers sunken in leaves and vegetation, row upon row of them, delineating ancient mass graves. Here and there, bones peeped from the leaf litter and tangles of ground cover.<
br />
  Keeping to the woods, he approached at last the back of the shed in which the two backhoes were stored. On his previous foray to the island, he’d noted they were almost brand-new Caterpillar 450E backhoe loaders. Earlier in the day, he’d studied how to hotwire and operate this particular model, but he’d hoped to find the keys in the ignition.

  He waited, well hidden, listening and looking. Each flash of lightning allowed him a hard-edged glimpse of his surroundings, and there was no sign of Nodding Crane. Which meant nothing. He knew in his gut the man was close.

  Now Gideon slowly circled the shed, keeping hidden in the surrounding cover, moving with infinite caution, examining the edge of the roof as he did so. It was made of timbers laid onto the old brick walls, and covered with corrugated tin sheets screwed to sleepers laid across the rafters. Everything was rotting, but not yet to the point of collapse.

  It confirmed a key fact: the roof would support the weight of a man.

  He approached the back corner of the shed, where the bricks had tumbled, leaving a hole. One quick darting move and he was through the hole, inside the shed. The two loaders glowed bright green in his goggles.

  Keeping flat against the rear wall, he crept up to the closest Cat, reached up and eased open the cab door, which had been left ajar. With one quick movement he swung himself up and ducked inside, silently closing the door.

  The key was in the ignition.

  He checked his watch: Mindy had now been in place for at least ten minutes.

  Time for round one. He set the controls, placed his hand on the key, and turned the ignition.

  The machine sprang to life with a deep-throated rumble. Very good. It had an easy joystick control that almost any idiot could use, or so the literature claimed. He quickly lowered the stabilizers and raised the loader bucket into a vertical position, above the cab, as protection against what was about to happen. Then he activated the backhoe joystick controller and took a deep breath.