Chapter 58
LINGERING IN A RECESSED hatchway of the cargo deck, Pendergast could see the boat was heading southward, traveling in a subsidiary channel and cruising among low islands covered with cordgrass.
As the sun vanished into a pile of distant thunderheads, a reddish glow spread across the landscape, turning the muddy water the color of dark blood.
The steamboat was moving slowly, the rhythmic splashing of the paddle wheel like a watery metronome underlain by the throbbing of the diesel engine.
Ensuring the deck was clear, Pendergast now moved rapidly past a series of doors, halting at one marked STORES. He tested the handle: unlocked. He slipped in and eased the door shut.
A single porthole allowed sufficient light for him to see.
As he’d hoped, this was the boat’s main storeroom.
Everything here was new and meticulously organized.
Large machine parts were stacked on one side, fresh and gleaming, many still packed on pallets.
There were smaller machine parts, wooden trusses, valves, spare rudders, bronze fittings, rods, as well as linkages, paddles, and cams for making repairs to the paddle wheel’s feathering mechanism.
Hawsers were coiled up in a far corner, while racks of tools and equipment occupied the rest of the space.
The air smelled of machine oil and rope lubricant.
Pendergast went over to the tool cabinet.
He scanned the neat labels on each drawer before easing one out.
Inside, packed in foam cutouts, was a row of deburring implements of various sizes and shapes—instruments used to remove metal fragments from the edges of machined steel.
Each had swiveled hooks with blades at one end, wickedly sharp.
He took one and tucked it into the small of his back.
After a moment’s thought, he moved to a second cabinet full of marlin spikes.
After hefting a few, he selected one in six-inch steel, oiled and gleaming.
He slid this up his sleeve, then made a small hole in his cuff and hooked the sharp end to it; this served to hold the spike securely, hidden but instantly available.
He completed supplying himself by selecting a coil of thin rope, a signal flare with a time delay, and a roll of gaffing tape. These all went into a haversack that he slung over his shoulder, silently congratulating Magnus on the diligence with which he was fitting out his boat.
At the farther, darker end of the storeroom was something else he’d been looking for: a metal cabinet emblazoned with hazardous warnings and flammable symbols.
It was locked, but he hunted around for a few shims and pins and had the lock open within minutes.
Inside he found what he’d expected: an array of toxic and flammable chemicals, antifouling paints, MEK, lubricating oil—and the two chemicals he was looking for in particular: acetone, used for degreasing, and spare cartridges of halon 1301 gas used in the vessel’s fire-suppression system.
He took a one-liter can of acetone and a pressurized halon cartridge.
They joined the rest of the equipment in the haversack.
He tucked the lock-picking tools into his jacket pocket.
A large paddle wheel steamer in the nineteenth century normally required a crew of at least twenty-five. This one, he recalled from Magnus’s bragging, needed far fewer—the equivalent of a skeleton crew. But that still meant half a dozen, at least, loyal and complicit.
At least six crew members—a lot of people to kill.
But kill them he would. This situation reminded him of several others he’d been in during his days with the Ghost Company—days not so far in the past that he’d forgotten the pitiless violence, the cold-bloodedness, they had employed to bring those critically important, extremely dangerous missions to quick and successful completion.
After the brutality and sadistic cruelty that his partner, Chambers, had been subjected to, Pendergast planned to even the scales in the manner of the Ghost Company. Nobody would leave the boat alive.
He closed his eyes, taking a long moment to assemble in his mind the likely layout of the steamer and fixing it in his spatial memory.
The engine room would be far aft, containing the new diesel engine powering the paddle wheel.
It would be difficult to get there without being seen, as the deck was open and unobstructed from bow to stern.
But that must nevertheless be his main objective.
He visualized other rooms he would likely have to pass and perhaps hide in.
There would be two cargo holds: one open, the other secure.
There would be a kitchen, crew mess, workshop, stewards’ cabin, laundry room—a cluster normally situated in the rear.
Forward of that would be the boat’s now-disused boilers.
The pipes carrying steam to the engine, and the speaking tubes from the pilothouse to the engine room, had been spared in the renovation, perhaps for historical purposes.
There was plenty of cover for Pendergast to move about, due to the stacks of debris, equipment, and other materials associated with the ongoing reconstruction of the vessel.
Equipped with everything he needed, save a firearm, Pendergast returned to the door of the storeroom and listened.
All was silent. He carefully drew down the door handle, easing it open a quarter of an inch.
Then he waited, once again listening acutely.
Minutes passed—and then he heard a faint footfall approaching on the deck boards.
A single person. He tensed. Using the instincts of stealth combat he could never lose, at just the right moment he flung open the door and, like a trapdoor spider, seized the man around the neck and drove the marlin spike into his voice box.
The spike cut off the man’s incipient scream as Pendergast forced him into the storeroom, swiftly reclosing the door.
The man jerked violently, gurgling hideously as the two twisted around in a gruesome ballet, finally falling to the deck as a hard twist of the spike severed his carotid artery.
Warm, thick spurts of blood struck Pendergast’s face and chest, soaking him before the man’s heart ceased beating.
Rising to his knees and groping around the now-limp body, he found, then pocketed, a handgun.
He pulled out the handkerchief he habitually carried, preparing to wipe his face.
As he did so, shards of glass and a piece of vintage precious metal, winking in the dim light, came along with it—his pocket watch had been ruined in the struggle.
He cursed under his breath. Then, flapping the handkerchief open, he cleaned his face and snorted out the blood that had squirted up his nose.
Hauling the body to the far side of the storeroom, he stowed it behind a coiled mass of hawsers.
Regaining his breath, he took a moment to consider his plan of attack.
He realized his clothes and face, covered in black coal dust from the bunker, had now been decorated further by a great gush of clotted blood.
He must look, he thought, like a monster.
Good.