In the Shadow of Falcon's Wings

CHAPTER 2 SKY CHASE

The city was particularly beautiful from above. The midmorning sun gleamed off the white dome of the Capitol to his right, and was a blinding fiery dance on the surface of the Reflecting Pool to his left. Dodge had never flown in an airplane or zeppelin, so the aerial view of the city was a completely new experience. As glorious as it was though, the sudden realization that he was now soaring through the skies, with absolutely no safety net — literal or otherwise — sent a jolt through his veins that was easily the equal of anything produced by the invaders’ weapons. The pyramid-shaped capstone of the Washington monument appeared beneath his feet; he knew the monument to be over five hundred and fifty feet tall, which meant his current altitude had to be more than six hundred feet, and they were still ascending. Dodge clutched the man’s legs as if the Grim Reaper’s scythe were slicing the air beneath him.

Strangely, the scarred man had done nothing to shake off his stowaway. When this realization filtered through the primal panic confounding Dodge’s thinking process, he tore his gaze from the metropolitan landscape below to assess the situation above.

The man’s arms were stretched out away from his torso, raised over his head with hands pointing to the sky. Even his head was tilted back, nose pointed in the direction of travel, as if completely unaware that he had picked up a hitchhiker. Only his eyes, glaring down at an impossibly awkward angle, revealed both his awareness of and irritation at Dodge’s desperate heroics. The significance of this slowly filtered through the mental chaos.

Dodge thought about the way the flying raider had prepared to depart — bending at the knees as if to jump — and his current posture; every move mimicked the behavior of a creature capable of unaided flight. It was nothing like an airplane, where the controls were levers, pedals and switches; the apparatus that enabled this villain to move through the air was controlled by the movements of his body. The position of the man’s arms and legs, even the orientation of his head, were all integrated into the control mechanism. The scarred air pirate couldn’t do anything about his passenger because doing so would send them both spinning uncontrollably through the sky. It was the ultimate standoff, but Dodge knew that as long as his foe controlled their destination, he would wind up on the short end of the rope. All the man would have to do was rejoin his confederates and let them deal with the unarmed stowaway.

As if reading his thoughts, the man lowered one arm slightly, and banked to the south. The rest of the raiding party swarmed around the airship, following the course of the Potomac River, barely visible in the distance.

Dodge winced as they began to pick up speed. There was no breeze against his face — the force field evidently deflected the air mass as easily as it did bullets — but the sudden motion in three dimensions sent a fresh wave of vertigo rolling through his gut. Of course it didn’t help that he was now rushing toward what would almost certainly be his doom.

He couldn’t help thinking about the decision that had landed him in this mess; he should have known better than to try to imitate a man who existed only as ink on news pulp. Captain Falcon was going to get him killed. Behind the web of accusations, panic and self-pity however, was another voice defending his decision, or perhaps simply exonerating his fictional creation. You asked what Falcon would do, it said. He wouldn’t just hold on and wait for the end to come.

He glanced up at the raider, trying to read the situation through Falcon’s eyes, and immediately saw the only course of action. “Nope,” he whispered. “I can’t do that.”

As they drew closer to the retreating airship however, he realized that a better solution wasn’t going to appear out of thin air. His choice was simple; wait for the axe to fall, or die trying to do something. Let’s be smart about this, he told himself. If I slug this guy, we both go down.

He shook his head, trying to banish the voices of doubt. The only chance he had was putting his trust in uncertain luck; indecision would guarantee that all his luck would be bad. Without further deliberation, he relaxed the grip of his left arm and reached up for the rigid belt of the exoskeleton.

The scarred man saw the movement and immediately divined his intention. He brought his arms together in front of his chest in a downward arc, and suddenly Dodge’s world turned upside down.

If the man had hoped to shake him loose, he was disappointed. Their constant acceleration was more than enough to compensate for the inexorable pull of gravity. Dodge instinctively pulled himself higher and wrapped all of his limbs around the raider’s legs. The more they looped and swooped the tighter Dodge held, all the while advancing whenever a momentary opportunity presented itself. The struggle wasn’t much different than Dodge’s school wrestling matches, and he had always excelled on the mat.

In a few short seconds, he snaked his way behind the raider, finding a better grip on the metal rods of the exoskeleton than on the man’s clothes or extremities. He knew his foe was worried; the man hurled imprecations back at him in a foreign tongue — Dodge thought it sounded a little like German but couldn’t be sure — and had even slipped one of his hands free from the gauntlets in a futile attempt to pry loose his opponent’s grip.

Dodge meanwhile was paying close attention to how the man’s movements affected their flight. His confidence was increasing, but holding the advantage was different than winning. Victory would require the ultimate leap of faith. He endured another dizzying series of aerobatic maneuvers, and then when the raider leveled out to assess the results of his effort, he delivered a single closed-fisted blow to the base of the man’s neck. It was a blow worthy of Falcon himself.

The man jerked reflexively, curling his limbs and sending them into a corkscrew dive. Dodge could barely make out the river looming below; the details were lost in a blur of motion. He tore his gaze away from the spinning landscape and focused on the next part of his desperate plan.

Following the knockout punch, the raider had gone limp in the flying rig. Dodge on the other hand felt as though someone had replaced the blood in his veins with liquid lead; the uncontrolled spiral made every movement seem like the labors of Hercules.

With his legs locked around the man’s waist, he struggled against centripetal force and managed to straighten the man’s arms. The spin immediately ceased, and when he levered his foe’s arms to shoulder height, the headlong dive began to level out.

Dodge heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s better.”

Although his body had stopped turning, it took a few moments for his head to catch up. Only when the waves of nausea subsided did he attempt to take stock of his situation.

He was still over the river and easily located the Washington Monument. The white obelisk was the highest landmark on his horizon and an easy reference point to judge both elevation and distance. The mid-air struggle had brought him nearly back to the point from which his journey had begun. It would take a little gentle experimentation, but he felt reasonably certain he could make his way back to the White House with his captive.

He turned his head to see if the airship carrying the President was still there. He found it, a barely visible speck winging south above the Potomac, but his eyes barely registered the fact. His attention was fixed on the four other flying shapes racing toward him.

If he had any doubts about their intentions, they were put to rest when a bolt of lightning suddenly lit up the clear blue sky. The searing arc crackled dangerously close; close enough that Dodge felt his hair stand on end. Another followed, and another, in rapid-fire succession from the approaching swarm.

Dodge’s understanding of the rudimentary controls was sufficient to turn his slow crawl across the sky into a steep climb that wove back and forth in front of the sun — the best strategy he could devise on the spur of the moment — but every action was made doubly difficult because he wasn’t simply steering the flying rig but also manipulating the unconscious villain who wore it. As a lattice of electrical bolts scorched the air near his feet, he realized he was going to have to address that liability.

He knew what he had to do, yet the implications of that course of action stopped him in his tracks. If he unbuckled the belt and let the scarred raider fall, the man would most certainly perish. Dodge had never faced a situation where someone’s fate rested in his hands; he had never even sat for jury duty. He didn’t doubt what the other man would do if their roles were reversed, but that thought brought him no comfort. A host of rationales clamored against his equivocating conscience. These men were killers, death was what they deserved. Worse, they had abducted the President of the United States. Whether they were agents of a hostile foreign power, or simply audacious criminals, their actions were tantamount to a declaration of war, and bad things happened in wars; ordinary men had to make hard decisions that no civilized person should have to make.

Dodge had learned this lesson well during the time spent chronicling the adventures of Captain Falcon. Falcon was always walking that fine line between acting decisively and keeping his humanity intact. When Dodge wrote those stories, he always found a way for his pulp hero to resolve that dilemma. That was the great thing about fiction.

His fingers found the belt clasp. I guess I’m going to find out what it’s really like to kill someone.

As Dodge opened the buckle, there was a strange audible disturbance. It wasn’t a sound, but rather the end of it; the abrupt termination of a pervasive humming noise he had been unaware of during his struggles. It reminded him of a high voltage electrical light being switched off.

He realized his mistake in the same instant that his upward motion ceased. Whether it was dread at his fatal error or simply the sudden free fall, Dodge’s stomach rolled over. The earlier moral struggle was swept away by the cold wind blasting against his face as he and his still unconscious opponent plummeted uncontrollably. Almost without thinking, he relaxed the grip of his legs and gave the man a hard shove. Rather than dropping away however, the man simply drifted at arm’s length, tumbling in the updraft at exactly the same rate of fall.

Dodge now found himself holding the impossibly light exoskeleton. His left hand was curled tenaciously around the upright shaft that connected the hump-like back piece to the arm branches. It was difficult to make out any details about the device through eyes squinted into slits, the only defense against the rush of air as he fell, but it seemed simple enough; if opening the belt clasp turned the thing off, then logically, closing it would turn it back on.

He clumsily twisted the flying rig around and plunged his right hand into the corresponding gauntlet. The metallic shell wasn’t articulated like a glove, but rather resembled the basket hilt of a dueling epee. Dodge’s fingers briefly explored the handgrip inside, but found nothing resembling a trigger for the lightning weapon. He decided to worry about figuring that out if he survived.

It had taken only a few seconds for him to reach terminal velocity, almost two hundred miles per hour straight down, and he knew it would take only a few more seconds before he came to a very sudden, and very permanent, stop. He hastily wriggled into the exoskeleton, found the stirrups on the footpads and hooked his shoes under the bar, then secured the left-hand gauntlet. Still, he fell.

The belt!

He was reluctant — terrified, really — to let go of both his handholds, but he knew the ferocity of his grip would count for little on impact. He flexed his ankles against the footpad stays, and cautiously let go with his hands, one at a time, transferring his fingers to the belt. As he slid the halves of the catch together, he sneaked a glance at the approaching landscape, an action he instantly regretted. It was so close….

The belt clasped together with a satisfying click and Dodge both felt and heard the comforting hum of an electrical current. The rush of wind immediately abated allowing him to open his eyes.

The scarred raider still tumbled through the air a few yards away. Panic obliterated any sense of triumph as Dodge realized he was still falling. He tried moving the arms, but there was no change in his descent. The force field was functioning; why wasn’t he flying? I turned it on, he thought angrily. What else do I have to do?

His mind flashed back to the moment when the invaders had retreated from their attack in the Rose Garden. They had bent their legs as if preparing to jump…It’s worth a shot.

Extending his arms fully as he had seen the raiders do, he did his best to simulate a jump in freefall, coiling his legs, then unleashing like a spring with his toes pointed straight out. It worked… sort of.

Instead of falling uncontrollably through the air, he was now shooting toward the river at breakaway speed. There was no time to think, not even time to say a quick prayer that the exoskeleton’s force field would cushion the impact. All he could do was curl into a fetal ball and wait for the inevitable.

For what seemed an eternity, all he could hear was the roar of blood in his ears, syncopated to the allegro tempo of his pounding pulse. Finally, when his heart had hammered a few hundred beats, he risked opening his eyes.

His vision was filled with brown — the murky, polluted water of the Potomac River. Still curled up like a frightened hedgehog, Dodge hung in midair only a few feet above the surface. Had he been so inclined, he could have reached out and dipped his hand in the water.

A sickening slap broke his momentary reverie, followed by a geyser of water and an almost simultaneous eruption of blue sparks against Dodge’s skin. He grimaced involuntarily as a score of electrical shocks bloomed all over his body. The force field crackled angrily as the water droplets threatened to short it out completely, but stabilized a few moments later. When he looked again, there was a gory oil slick, like the effluent of an abattoir, spreading below. Dodge knew what had caused the bloody splashdown, but strangely felt no remorse. That could have been me, he thought, shuddering. Splattered on the river or electrocuted by his own force field; he had escaped both fates by a hair’s breadth.

With the tedious caution of someone who knows he’s used up a year’s supply of luck in a single throw of the dice, Dodge extended his limbs, mimicking the motions of a swimmer trying to roll over in a pool. Evidently it was the right thing to do, because his attitude shifted and he began to gently rise once more toward the sky.

I think I’m getting the hang of this.

His elation was once more short-lived. The four raiders that had doubled back to intercept him were organizing into a loose formation and following him from above, evidently biding their time. With the demise of their comrade, there was no longer any reason for them to hold back.

Remembering the adage about a good offense being the best defense, Dodge tried rolling over onto his back. He kept his movements slow and cautious, lest an inadvertent arm swing send him plunging into the river. The maneuver worked as planned; the controls of the exoskeleton responded intuitively to his body, almost as if it was meant to be an extension of his own musculature. Not bad, he thought. Now let’s try something a little more spectacular.

He extended one metallic fist toward the quartet of flying villains and experimentally squeezed the handgrip. Nothing happened. He tried stabbing his hand at skyward, as if throwing a punch….

A blinding flash leaped from his hand and arced into the sky. He let go, more as a reflex than from any conscious intent, and the lightning bolt vanished. A dark ribbon lingered on his retina, partially obscuring his vision, but beyond it, he could see the four flyers still aloft. He lined up another target, and squinted in preparation for a two-fisted attack.

His barrage failed to strike a target, but he certainly had his foes’ attention. One of the men, after banking to avoid a blast, lowered his gauntlet and took aim at Dodge. Before the latter could take any kind of evasive action, a bolt of blue lightning seared toward him.

The electrical discharge missed him by a few yards — close enough for him to again feel the creeping cobwebs of static on his skin — but then something unusual happened. A second lightning bolt, inextricably intertwined with the first, raced back to the source. The shooter was enveloped in a coruscating field of sparks, and then the light abruptly blinked out. Dodge saw a dark smudge in the sky around the man, which became a trail of black smoke as the scorched figure lazily heeled over and began to plummet.

In a leap of comprehension, Dodge realized that his foes were not the professionals he had first imagined them to be. Their grasp of the limitations of the strange technology they employed seemed little better than his. He knew from writing the Falcon adventures that bellicose foreign warmongers always tested their new devices and extensively trained their soldiers on the correct use of those weapons before sending them out on some audacious enterprise, but at least one of the sky pirates had either forgotten that striking water might cause the lightning to feedback on its source, or had never known it to begin with.

I might actually have a chance here, thought Dodge. But a chance to do what?

He stabbed another bolt skyward, then rolled over and straightened himself into streamlined arrow, no more than a hundred feet above the river. No longer did the Capitol skyline dominate his horizon, though. Instead, he followed the watercourse, straining for even a glimpse of the strange disc-shaped airship that held the most precious hostage in America. It was impossible to gauge his speed, but he estimated that he was moving about as fast as an automobile could travel — forty or fifty miles per hour. Alexandria flashed by on the west bank of the River and he could make out George Washington’s historic home on the Mount Vernon plantation. There was however, no sign of the airship.

The three remaining raiders had learned from their comrade’s deadly mistake. They withheld their lightning bolts and chose instead to bring the fight down to his level. Dodge kept a wary eye on the group, pondering the strategic options at hand. There weren’t many.

He made a few exploratory feints, rising and swooping to see if he could provoke another lethal misstep, but his opponents did not take the bait. Instead, they matched his speed and kept low.

So they mean to run me down. Well, then, let’s bring the battle to their doorstep.

The fact that the escaping airship had kept to the river course was not lost on Dodge. It was an easy navigational reference, especially for someone unfamiliar with either the city or the vagaries of aerial navigation. It was time, he decided, to gamble. After another feint, he angled his body upward, and shot into the blue. This time, the raiders bought his ploy, and were left behind as he angled toward the west bank of the river.

Dodge continued to climb, rising high enough to increase his line of sight by several miles. The circular shape of the airship, still following the river as it wound to the right and began a long southward journey toward Chesapeake Bay, was barely visible but nonetheless unmistakable. He didn’t linger to enjoy the view, but immediately angled toward this new destination and started giving up altitude.

The trio of pursuers had adapted to his latest gambit and was closing fast. Lightning burst below him, right in his path, forcing him to veer off. Another burst sizzled in front of him. The raiders were learning quickly.

Dodge resisted the nearly overwhelming urge to veer away from the electrical charge. He knew that they were waiting for him to do exactly that. Instead, he steered almost head on into the ribbon of energy. He passed so close that his force field crackled angrily. He felt a tooth-rattling shock shoot through one arm, but then he was past, momentarily out of harm’s way.

“They don’t call me Dodge for nothing!” he shouted, with more enthusiasm than he actually felt.

More electrical discharges passed through the air below him, too far off the mark to be attributed merely to bad aim. Unable to hit him directly, his enemies were trying instead to keep him from reaching the relative safety of the river. Fortunately, his foes had no idea what his real goal was.

The airship continued apace and banked to the right, past Mason Neck, the boot-shaped hook of land beyond which the river began to broaden to more than three miles across in some places. The airship stayed in the center of the waterway like a hound following a scent, leading Dodge to speculate on its ultimate destination. Even with their astonishing technology, the kidnappers would have to know that watchful eyes on the ground would be following their progress across the sky. Even now, he reckoned, the police broadcast net must have been humming with activity, alerting patrolmen to follow the strange object over the river. If the raiders were as clever as he thought, they would be looking for a place to ditch their wings in favor of a less conspicuous mode of travel.

His intercept course cut the airship’s lead by nearly half. He was still a few miles off, but he was able to distinguish the dark shape of the lone man who had stayed with the vessel. Braving the random bolts of lightning that still scoured the air below, Dodge angled downward, putting himself between the receding craft and the pursuit. The lightning had no range limit and once his enemies realized that their attacks could very well hit their cohorts, the electrical storm abated.

Now it’s just a race. But what if I win? Indeed, what would he do if he caught up to the airship?

The chase continued, wending past the Quantico Marine Corp base and the historic battlefields of Fredericksburg, and then the airship turned east as the Potomac rounded Maryland Point. From here, the river grew increasingly brackish as it mingled with tidewater from the bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. A Brooklyn native, Dodge didn’t know the geography of area that well, but he did know one basic fact: rivers always lead to the sea.

Are they meeting a ship?

Even the fastest ship would not be able to elude pursuit for long; US Naval warships, using spotter aircraft would eventually hunt them down, and even if the military stayed their hand for fear of harming the President, there would be no place to hide, no port where the ship would be safe. A U-boat maybe?

The river turned south again, allowing Dodge a chance to gain a few hundred yards by cutting the corner above the Dahlgren US Naval Proving Grounds. He could make out rows of sailors lining the docks and the decks of ships moored in the river, but it was plainly obvious that none of the vessels were being marshaled to join in the chase. He turned his attention back to airship and hastened toward open water.

More than ten miles of river separated Virginia from Maryland. There were a few commercial freighters sitting at anchor along the watercourse and a handful of pleasure craft enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon, but Dodge’s gaze was drawn to a pair of oblong vessels out in the middle of the current, directly in the path of the strange aircraft.

One vessel was easily identifiable by its rectangular configuration and flat, low riding hull — a barge — but the other looked like no boat he had ever seen; its long cigar-shaped hull was crossed with a pair of extensions that looked exactly like…

“Wings? It’s a plane!”

Dodge could make out a lone figure standing motionless on the cargo vessel, near the makeshift ramp that connected it to the enormous amphibious plane. The man’s face was obscured by a heavy black cowl, like the cassock of a monk, and in his right hand he held a long rod. The airship and its lone escort came to an abrupt halt in mid-air directly above the barge and settled feather-light onto its open deck. As soon as the flying disc was down, a pie-shaped section opened in its smooth skin and the occupants were disgorged. The President, still held bodily by two men wearing the exoskeleton rigs, was hastened onto the waiting airplane. In the time it took them to make the transfer, Dodge reached the barge.

His approach had not gone unnoticed by the hooded figure. Before he could land, an arc of violet energy burst from the tip of the man’s staff. At point blank range, he couldn’t miss.

Dodge’s force field bore the brunt of the discharge, shrieking angrily as his form was enveloped in a blinding blaze of energies in conflict. Without the shield, the bolt would have vaporized him. Instead, it felt merely like a slap from the hand of mighty Zeus. He almost blacked out as pain wracked every extremity, but the sweet release of unconsciousness was denied. The force of the blast knocked him back into the sky, spinning crazily in response to the involuntary spasms of his electrified musculature. Through the haze of pain, he remembered what had saved him earlier, and struggled to curl into a protective ball lest his uncontrolled flight plunge him into the river.

After a few moments, the agony subsided enough for him to first take a breath, and then to orient himself on the vessels floating two hundred feet below. The hooded figure paid him no heed, but rather had his attention fixed on the flying disc. He gestured with the long rod, like a bishop offering a benediction, and then the unimaginable happened.

The things he had seen and experienced, beginning with the assault on the White House Rose Garden, had left Dodge believing that nothing could surprise him. He was mistaken. His mind had no frame of reference for what he now saw.

The flying disc started shrinking. Every second that passed saw it reduced by halves; from a diameter of about thirty feet, it contracted steadily down to almost nothing. When it was only about as large as pizza pie plate it began to drift toward its cloaked master’s outstretched left hand, and by the time it arrived, it was too small for Dodge to see from his aerial vantage. The disc that settled into the gloved palm was no larger than a silver dollar. The man closed his fist over the metal shape, then wheeled and stalked across the ramp, into the waiting airplane.

Dodge shook his head to banish the paralysis of incredulity and was about to make another run at the barge when he realized he was not alone in the sky. One of the three raiders that had pursued him almost from the start appeared below him; close enough that Dodge could see the man’s rough countenance split by a grin of triumph, while his comrades pulled up on either side. They had him surrounded; worse, he couldn’t use the lightning weapon because he would almost certainly strike the water. The grinning man raised his gauntlets and took aim.

Dodge whipped his hands from the exoskeleton and held them up in a placating gesture. “I give up!” he shouted.

The unexpected surrender confounded the other man for a moment, but his features hardened just as quickly. “I don’t care,” he replied in strangely accented English.

“I don’t suppose you do.” Dodge managed a grin of his own, and then before the other man could deliver the coup de grace, he released the grips, reached to his waist, unclasped the belt and dropped like a stone. The man’s expression barely had time to register his surprise before Dodge’s feet struck his force field.

While the unexpected maneuver spared him a jolt from the lightning weapon, Dodge’s plan to penetrate the man’s shield and switch off his exoskeleton was quickly thwarted when contact not only brought about a stunning shock but also deflected his attack and sent him ricocheting off into space. Successful or not, he had anticipated a fall into the river. He didn’t try to re-engage his own flying rig, but twisted in mid — air so that his body was as straight as a pike, toes leading the plunge.

It was a long drop, at least a hundred and fifty feet to the river’s surface. The water would probably feel as hard as concrete when he struck, and he might break his legs, if not his neck, but in the two-second-long vertical journey, his greatest concern was the exoskeleton. He was betting his life that the unclasping the belt would suffice to keep him from getting fried when he hit the water. If he was wrong… well, he’d probably never know.

The brown water rushed up impossibly fast. He kept his body tense and rigid, arms tight against his torso, but nothing could adequately prepare him for the impact; a stabbing pain completely unlike the electrical jolts shot through his legs, followed by a hammer blow to his gut. Immediately after entering the river, he tried to throw his limbs out to keep from plunging too deep, but it was impossible to tell if the message reached his extremities. A moment later, a crushing vise of pressure closed over his head.

At least I didn’t get electrocuted.

Grimacing against the pain, he started kicking and stroking toward a blurry light spot overhead. When what seemed like several minutes had passed, and when he felt his lungs convulsing with the urge to draw a fresh breath, he started to get a little worried. His powerful, disciplined swimming techniques became a frantic thrash, as if through sheer panic he might claw his way to the surface. Despite an overwhelming urge to simply give up and take that final liquid breath, he knew he was making progress. His view of the surface cleared, giving him a final burst of motivation, and then he was there, splashing through the choppy, windswept surface.

He discovered the source of the sudden tempest too late to do anything about it. The wind was artificial, generated by four propeller engines mounted to the wings of the enormous flying boat. As Dodge trod water, greedily sucking the air and wincing at the pain that accompanied every movement, the roar of airplane engines grew to deafening proportions and then climaxed. He caught a glimpse of the plane a few seconds later, now several hundred yards further down the river, as it lifted off the surface and rose from behind the derelict barge.

His joy at having survived the plunge was dampened by the realization that he had failed; the raiders had escaped with their hostage, and nothing he had done had made a bit of difference. Dejected, he sidestroked toward the low hull of the barge and paddled until he found a hawser trailing over the side. The flat-bottomed craft was riding high in the water, evidently empty of cargo, and Dodge had to struggle to pull himself over the gunwale. Safe at last, he lay on the deck for a few minutes, staring helplessly up at the clear sky.

He was surprised to discover the exoskeleton still loosely attached to his body. His sodden shoes were still in the footpads and the stiff belt, though unbuckled, hugged his waist. The metal framework was so light and so perfectly articulated that it had not impeded his movements in the water. The technology that made it work would no doubt be of great interest to the nation’s scientists. Well, that’s something, he thought. Maybe the day isn’t a total loss.

He rolled over and got up in degrees; hands and knees first, then a final agonizing stretch to stand erect. His earlier assumptions about the barge were confirmed. It was completely empty. The decks, designed to haul heaps of grain or coal, were bare. The boat had no superstructure, nowhere for anyone to hide. He was the only soul aboard.

Then he noticed something that did look out of place: a pair of long wires that stretched the length of the deck. He followed them with his eyes, trying to figure out why they looked familiar in an environment that was so wholly foreign. There was a twist in the wires every few feet, as if the metal remembered how it had once been coiled around a spool. It wasn’t until he saw the bundle of dynamite in one corner that everything fell into place.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”

There were four bombs in all, each linked to a central nexus near one end of the boat. It was a wind-up alarm clock, rhythmically ticking away, mere seconds from the moment when a lot more than just an alarm would go off.