The following excerpt is from Out of Due Season: The First Transit, which was released on February 8, 2022.
CHAPTER TWO
“Suit up!”
The call came from the divemaster standing outside the command tent. The sun had not yet crested the horizon, but there was enough twilight available to get everything in order. Tied to a weather-beaten dock, the Zodiac was filled with marker buoys, sonar detectors, gear bags and whatever else might fit while leaving room for the four divers and their personal equipment. The Zodiac would deploy with the first two pairs while Clarke, acting as the beachmaster, would direct the team from the shore and the other two pairs would ready themselves for the second trip out. Stuart would be the divemaster in the water for the first trip, the man in charge and also the indisputable champion of body recovery—if there was such a thing.
The first four divers quickly donned their dry suits. They had all eaten their share of calories the day before, hydrated as they needed to, and were ready to go. If the atmosphere could be called anything, however, it would be tense. Cold, too.
“Remember that silt is the biggest problem in search operations.” Stuart walked around each of the divers, closing their back-mounted zippers and looking over regulators, inflator hoses, neck and wrist seals, and other equipment. “Avoid contact with the bottom. Try not to use fins when close to or vertical to the bottom. If you remember your anti-silting swim techniques—head down, feet up—I can go home a happy man. Maintain control of your buoyancy and don’t you dare let any of your equipment drag the bottom. Clear?”
The three other divers responded in unison. “Clear!” While this was a memorized speech, the team gave Stuart their full attention.
“We are going in a circular pivot with a buddy line. The visibility is this side of non-existent, so you must use feel more than sight. Each one of you will be equipped with ten LED markers attached to a hundred-foot spool. Clip the line to a piece of your target that isn’t going to dislodge, twist the marker and snap the CO2 cartridge. I don’t think you’ll use more than ten, but we have a good supply if you need more. Clear?”
“Clear!”
“This is not textbook, people. As you all saw yesterday, the flesh is not rigidly attached to the body. If anyone gets ill, gets nervous, loses yesterday’s veggies, wonders if you’re going to die down there, or feels trapped, give the tether line four quick pulls and surface. Willingness to stop, people. Have it. Clear?”
“Clear!”
Stuart stopped circling the other divers and stood in front of them. He nodded, gave a thumbs up to Clarke standing to the side, and cracked a crooked smile. “Thirty minutes, rotate. We have four dives each. Then we can let the other four slackers have at it. Let’s go.”
Zachary Miller lifted his fins and scuba tank and turned toward the dock. Stuart, likewise, suited up, fell in step with the youngest member of the team and put a reassuring hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Ready for this?”
Zachary said nothing but looked toward the Zodiac and past to the markers which bobbed on the water in the middle of the lake.
“Listen,” Stuart said, “there’s a fine line between being ready and being scared, and it’s natural to jump over to the scared side when faced with this. I can understand if you’ve got thoughts.”
“Thoughts?”
“You know, thoughts. We all saw the body pulled out yesterday, and I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t a pretty sight. That’s not to say the rest of them will look the same.”
Zachary nodded.
“Keep to the plan, do things by the numbers. You’ve got a tether to the Zodiac and I’ll tie off with you. I have the light, as much help as that will be. When we find the target, you can clip the marker and let it go.”
“Clip it where?”
“That will come to you. The other bodies were encased in weighted shoes, so you’ll probably find a spot there. My guess is that there will be some article of clothing if you can’t find a suitable place on the shoes.”
They both stepped onto the dock. The boards creaked with the combined weight of all four divers and their gear. The sun had yet to break the horizon, but it was closer, and the black rubber of the Zodiac glowed wet as it bobbed up and down. The pike pole was stowed portside in case a body dislodged and floated to the surface. There would be another time to recover the bodies once the survey was complete, and the team knew what they faced.
Stuart was right: to call this a textbook operation was a misnomer. While it seemed that way at first, the discoveries of the other bodies the day before had all but destroyed the idea that this was just going to be another mission played out step by step. Stuart had a lot of experience recovering bodies, and he did so with the confidence and respect he earned. A body was a body and whether you pulled it from a mountain or a river or lodged between two rocks in an ice cave, it was still a textbook operation.
This was not one of those.
There were no procedures for this.
“Just do me a favor,” Stuart said as he patted Zachary once on the back and pushed him toward the watercraft. “Don’t panic down there and don’t touch anything that might cloud the water.”
“You mean the bodies, right?”
Stuart winked. “Exactly.”
—
The roar of the Yamaha two-stroke, twenty-five horsepower short shaft portable outboard engine disrupted the serenity of dawn on the lake. The sun crested the hills to the east just as the mooring line was cast off and the Zodiac, all of fifteen and a half feet long and filled with divers and gear, pulled away toward its destination. Clarke watched from a folding chair on the shore and absently rubbed his bald head. The temperature, typically coldest within eight minutes of sunrise, had dropped to the mid-thirties overnight. It was expected to jump into the fifties by noon, but cloud cover—a near constant on the peninsula—would keep it from climbing any higher.
Holding a tin cup of coffee, Allen unfolded a second chair and sat down next to Clarke. For a moment, the two merely watched as the Zodiac made a slow trek toward the existing markers. A lack of sleep was not unusual, but today the caffeine had yet to perform as advertised. He would sleep well once the relief showed up and a new incident commander took over.
“Any word from Seattle?” Allen asked, with a loud sip of his coffee.
“Maybe by sunset. They’re pulling a team of seven off the riots and remobilizing.” Clarke paused. “Or so they said. I really don’t think they care.”
Allen nodded. “All the crap going on in the world, it makes sitting on the edge of a lake filled with dead bodies feel serene.”
“Good news, though,” Clarke said. “We have a satellite uplink and Talbert has a lead on our Henry Backmon. Seems he went missing from Iowa about six months ago. Left behind a wife, two kids, a BMW, and a mortgage.”
“Iowa? Seems like a long way to come for a swim.”
“Cedar Rapids. Electrical engineer working for a firm that develops electronics and communications technology for things that fly. Talbert pulled a few articles from the local rag and some other finds.” Clarke handed a tablet to Allen. “Got him looking for more, but you’ll appreciate the first one. It’s a blog article Backmon wrote praising some parts of the Unabomber’s Manifesto.”
Allen took the tablet. The screen showed the referenced article with a picture of a moose and the title “Uncle Ted was Right: The Industrial Revolution as Cancer.” Allen squinted his eyes at the small print, a recent habit for old eyes. “Did you read this?”
Clarke shook his head. “He lost me after the first line. I don’t think engineers were made to wax poetic. I have a thriller in the tent if I want literature.”
“You and your thrillers.”
“Everything is nonfiction, you know.”
“So you’ve said.”
The sound of the Zodiac’s motor cut off and both Allen and Clarke looked up. The dive team had reached the marker buoys and moved about with purpose. Allen placed the tablet on the ground with his coffee cup. He picked up a pair of binoculars. The first two divers were hard to make out, but judging by the way one of them pointed, he assumed that one was Stuart, which meant the other was the rookie. They were checking each other over, tightening belts and picking up the LED markers. It was a quiet operation from the shore, but he imagined the bustle of activity sounded different where the action was.
Allen was a diver who had pulled his share of dead bodies from the water over the past decade, but he had made a choice a few months ago that he would be more effective as an incident commander if he remained nearby and in contact with other authorities rather than in the water. It did not help that his vision had been degrading and he now felt his joints where before they just worked. Age sneaks up, pops you in the head and takes your lunch money. His team was comprised of mostly younger people, with the sole exception of Stuart, who was pushing sixty-five next month. It was demotivating for Allen to think of how fit the old guy was, and he tried to put it out of his mind frequently. Seeing him on the water now, however, did not help.
Allen put the binoculars on the ground and picked up his coffee cup again. “So, we have a guy who runs off to join a cult, lives in a commune with other cult hippies lorded over by some guy they call ‘The One’ who likes to record things on archaic reel-to-reel tapes while rallying against technology and change.”
Clarke picked up his radio. “Recovery One, report.”
Stuart’s voice crackled through the two-way: “On scene, ready to dive. Alpha team in the water in one minute.”
“Roger. Out.” Clarke put the radio on his lap. “I follow you so far.”
“Fearing some FBI investigation and supposed manhunt, this ‘One’ says it’s time to go. With no real fuss—according to the tape, anyway—Backmon and friends take a raft or canoe or something up the river to this lake, put on weighted shoes, and say goodbye to a cruel, cruel world.”
“Sounds reasonable. Not logical, but reasonable.”
Allen looked toward the mouth of the river, then back to the marker buoys. “So, if they all jumped into the middle of the lake, where’s the boat?”
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All text copyright 2022, Benjamin X. Wretlind
