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1.
San Diego Today--Jimmy Mendez lived in a little house on a side street in the Grantville neighborhood of San Diego with his mom, who was a housewife, and his dad, who was often away at sea.
Jimmy was nine years old and would be starting fourth grade in the fall. That seemed like a long way off to him. At the moment he was still in Third Grade, but that would be over in a few weeks. That too seemed like a long way off. More importantly, Jimmy had just gotten brand-new tires on his Christmas bicycle, and as soon as he delivered the horror mask to his mom, he ran out to the back patio to see how the bike rode.
"Thanks, Jimmy," his mom called fondly from the kitchen. A heavy, dark-haired woman with pleasantly dimpled cheeks and loving eyes, she raised the mask over her face and said "Boo!" It was a face Jimmy had cut out from a pattern. It was on a kind of round piece of gray construction paper, and glued to a popsicle stick with white office glue. "What is it?" mom called out as she looked through eye-holes cut into a puffy gray shape.
"A mushroom," Jimmy said as he lifted the bike.
"Were you studying mushrooms today?"
"Oh, yeah. Funguses. Fungi." Remembering a school assignment, he dug in his back pocket and extracted a crumpled sheet of paper. He unfolded it carefully on the table. "See these lines here?" He pointed to a beautifully symmetrical pattern of fine spokes radiating from a central blank spot. "Those are mushroom spores. We cut the head off one and put it on a white paper under a glass jar. In a couple of hours it made these lines." He added proudly. "A mushroom puts out two million spores a minute."
"That's very interesting." Mom cleaned a few last dishes.
Jimmy forgot about kindergarten and gripped his bicycle. He hefted it by the handlebars. The tires felt nice and fat and hard. "Yeah, this is going to be great. It'll probably be a lot easier to pedal. Thanks, mom!" He rode out on the sidewalk, raced up and down the dips of driveways.
"Jimmy!" his mother called from their driveway a few minutes later, when he had reached the far street corner, and was thinking of crossing even though he knew he wasn't supposed to.
"What?" he shouted back. He turned and rode toward her with the big old Schwinn wheels twirling. Their spokes reflected sunlight. Patches of shade and light alternated on Jimmy's upper torso as he sped along.
"Watch the driveways! Car could come out any second."
"I am!"
"I'll call you the minute daddy calls to say he's home."
* * * *
Lima Voyager, a nondescript cargo ship under Peruvian flag, approached San Diego harbor one cloudless, sunny morning. The ship came crawling over the sea and slunk toward land like a dark, furtive animal that hoped not to be noticed. The few who noticed her, particularly members of law enforcement agencies on duty around the clock to protect the American shorelines, got the creepy feeling that something was wrong about her—something undefinable and deeply troubling.
She was a boxy looking antique—27,000 tons, small, strangely high in the water as if her cargo holds were empty, and a smell of decay about her like the fungus rot of the jungle. A cluster of strangely reticent crewmen stared down from the rails above her flaking black hull. They regarded the U.S. shore with hollow eyes and open mouths, as if speechless at some impending and unstoppable doom that, so far, only they knew about. In the lolling seas outside the harbor mouth between Point Cabrillo and North Island, Lima Voyager was challenged for a routine U.S. Coast Guard inspection.
The boxy freighter hove to with foul orange-colored water spouting from her bilges. She rocked on the splashing sea, showing rust streaming down from dirty black upper hull down to her flaking red Plimsoll line. A Coast Guard cutter sent a team of inspectors on board. A Coast Guard chopper circled above to provide cover. U.S. Navy SEALs and other crack police and military units were within a few minutes' call—after all, eight nuclear submarines were berthed just within the dark, brooding arms of Point Cabrillo with its centuries-old fortifications and Ft. Rosecrans cemetery. A harbor master's pilot approached Lima Voyager on a launch and boarded at about the same time. Lima Voyager's last port of call had been Peru, which was one of the Treasury Department's red flags for drug searches. The T-Men of the Coast Guard took a drug-sniffing dog on board. Unlike the military services like the Navy, the Coast Guard are a U.S. law enforcement agency with powers of search, seizure, and arrest like any other police jurisdiction, and Naval patrols in offshore waters are usually accompanied by a Coast Guard officer to lead arrests.
* * * *
Lt. Linsey Simon, of the uniformed Harbor Police Division, watched the proceedings from a small police patrol boat within her jurisdiction inside San Diego Bay. With binoculars, standing on the canvas-topped bridge as the small patrol boat heaved lightly in calm channel currents inside the gyre near Ballast Point, she looked out to sea. Linsey Simon was a trim, 30ish woman wearing a dark blue uniform and baseball capt of her police service. She looked swallowed up by a red life vest and belt full of equipment, including a 9 mm Glock and extra clips. The swallowed-up look was deceptive, and her small, wiry body was like a steel spring curled up in all that gear. She was one of the fastest runners and strongest swimmers on the force. With a black belt in Judo, she was known for good instincts and making good critical decisions on the run. Her husband—Jack Simon, locally well-known and tough-talking journalist—had ample respect for Linsey's determination and capabilities, and enjoyed her attractive feminine side. Her associates respected her, and at the moment her partner Cleveland "Cleve" Bartlett and two other uniformed officers looked relaxed as they waited on the main deck below for her leadership. The three men—wearing the same dark uniforms, orange vests, and armaments as Linsey—comfortably eyeballed their leader and the decisions she was making about the strange ship clanking slowly toward the harbor mouth. Cleve wasn't actually Linsey's partner anymore, not since she'd made rank, but he was the colleague she always took with her when she went in the field and needed a backup person in the car or boat, wherever her duties took her. Recently, she'd been doing plain clothes laison work uptown with a Federal task force, and that was taking her ever more away from being grounded in her chosen profession. But it was all interesting.
As she watched Lima Voyager chugging in on the tide, Linsey thought there was something painfully strange about the ugly ship that was about to enter the harbor and tie up at a private pier within the 32nd Street Naval Yard. Maybe it was the ship's tawdry appearance versus the clean Coast Guard and Harbor Pilot vessels surrounding her. In Linsey's business, you looked hard—real hard—for the hidden drug deal, the approaching terrorist, the bomber, the smuggler. It was something every peace officer took deadly seriously, because the nation was under constant threat of attack from those who fanatically hated her, and the slightest slip or oversight could mean the death of thousands. So what was it about this clattering tub? Some corporation was paying top dollar for this piece of scrap to float into an expensive berth. What was that all about? Lt. Linsey Simon had a funny idea she wasn't seeing the last of this cargo tramp. Drugs? That was the likely profile, but something about this vessel didn't quite jibe.
* * * *
As Coast Guard and harbor pilot boarded, Lima Voyager's captain and first officer stood on the bridge with their hands on the railing. With hooded, inscrutable eyes, they watched as the Americans fanned out and checked the usual spots in such a ship. The inspection took an hour and resulted in a broadband burst of routine web form reports. Finding nothing obviously amiss, the inspectors and their dog rejoined the cutter. Several would later remark on the chill feelings they'd gotten on board. Nobody could put their finger on what might be amiss, but they all had a bad feeling—starting with the odd, unpleasant smell of earth with something dead in it. And yet—the small cargo of machine parts, lumber, wine, and gourmet mushrooms seemed properly tagged and invoiced, and neatly stacked in the holds in wooden crates secured with chains. The Coast Guard vessel roared off north toward Torrey Pines State Beach to join a surf rescue, and Lima Voyager chugged at one quarter speed through the channel entrance into San Diego Harbor.
To hear the dog handler tell it weeks later, the dog had not picked up any drug or blood scents—but it had begun acting skittish. The dog had sidled against its handler's dark blue uniform leg as if spooked, even frightened. This was a courageous dog, which on previous occasions had attacked on command, even under gunfire, to bring down violent suspects. The same big-hearted dog had refused to go near any of the dark-eyed crew or officers of Lima Voyager—and, to hear talk in a dockside tavern around 32nd Street—oddly, not a single crew member or officer had so much as offered to pet the animal. They had stared at the German shepherd, which had its hackles up and a low growl never leaving its throat, with an unfathomable discomfort—as if it were a species of animal with whom their kind had never before bonded.
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