Without remorse - Tom Clancy [304]
'Let's check it out.' The stick went right and down a little as he brought the Jet Ranger down. 'Yeah, I got a boat by those three.'
'Check it out,' the paramedic ordered with a grin.
'You got it.' It would be a chance to do some real flying. A former Huey driver from the 1st Air Cav, he loved being able to play with his aircraft. Anyone could fly straight and level, after all. He circled the place first, checking winds, then lowered his collective a little, easing the chopper down to about two hundred feet.
'Call it an eighteen-footer,' Freeland said, and they could see the white nylon line that held it fast to the remains of the ship.
'Lower,' the Captain commanded. In a few seconds they were fifty feet over the deck of the derelict. The boat was empty. There was a beer cooler, and some other stuff piled up in the back, but nothing else. The aircraft jerked as a couple of birds flew out of the ruined superstructure of the ship. The pilot instinctively maneuvered to avoid them. One crow sucked into his engine intake could make them a permanent part of this man-made swamp.
'Whoever owns that boat sure isn't real interested in us,' he said over the intercom. In the back, Freeland mimed three shots with his hand. The Captain nodded.
'I think you may be right, Ben.' To the pilot: 'Can you mark the exact position on a map?'
'Right.' He considered the possibility of going into a low hover and dropping them off on the deck. Simple enough if they had been back in the Cav, it looked too dangerous for this situation. The paramedic pulled out a chart and made the appropriate notations. 'Seen what you need?'
'Yeah, head back.'
Twenty minutes later, Captain Joy was on the phone.
'Coast Guard, Thomas Point.'
'This is Captain Joy, State Police. We need a little help,' He explained on for a few minutes.
'Take about ninety minutes,' Warrant Officer English told him.
'That'd be fine.'
Kelly called a Yellow Cab, which picked him up at the marina entrance. Hie first stop of the day was a rather disreputable business establishment called Kolonel Klunker, where he rented a 1959 Volkswagen, prepaying it for a month, with no mileage charge.
'Tnank you, Mr Aiello,' the man said to a smiling Kelly, who was using the ID from a man who no longer needed it. He drove the car back to the marina and started unloading the things he needed. Nobody paid much attention, and in fifteen minutes the Beetle was gone.
Kelly took the opportunity to drive through the area he'd be hunting, checking traffic patterns. It was agreeably vacant, a part of the city he'd never visited before, off a bleak industrial thoroughfare called O'Donnell Street, a place where nobody lived and few would want to. The air was laden with the smells of various chemicals, few of them pleasant. Not as busy as it once had been, many of the buildings in the district looked unused. More to the point, there was much open ground here, many buildings separated from one another by flat areas of bare dirt which trucks used for a convenient place to reverse direction. No kids playing sandlot ball, not a single house in sight, and because of that, not a single police car to be seen. Rather a clever ploy on the part of his enemies, Kelly thought, at least from one perspective. The place he was interested in was a single freestanding building with a half-destroyed sign over the entrance. The back of it was just a blank wall. There were only three doors, and though they were on two different walls, all could be observed from a single point, and to Kelly's rear was another vacant building, a tall concrete structure with plenty of broken windows. His initial reconnaissance complete, Kelly headed north.
Oreza was heading south. He'd already been partway there, conducting a routine patrol and wondering why the hell the Coast Guard didn't start up a ministration farther down on the Eastern Shore, or maybe by Cove Point Light, where there was an existing station for the guys who spent their waking hours, if any, making sure the light bulb at the top of the tower worked.