The Black Bullet

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

O’Brien looked at his watch as he pulled off the shoulder of the road near Matanzas Inlet. It was a few minutes past nine. He parked, slid his Glock under his belt, and got out of his Jeep, the engine ticking as it cooled, and waves breaking on the beach to his right. The moon rose above the Atlantic Ocean, the light giving form to a shadowy mist rising from the Matanzas River, which silently rushed through the inlet into the sea. The moving water in the pass delivered the night smells of a changing tide, wet barnacles, mangrove roots, and baitfish. He remembered fishing here twenty years earlier.

O’Brien stepped down the embankment under the Matanzas Pass Bridge, A1A now above him. A car passed. He stopped and listened, the sound of the car growing faint in the distance. He walked under the bridge to the water’s edge, following the shoreline a few feet until he had cleared the bridge above him.

A nighthawk called out as O’Brien knelt down and lowered his hand into the wide stream, the current pulling toward the sea, a receding tide. Vapor rose from the brackish river like a conga line of ghosts riding a silent night train-the river, flowing around the dark mangrove islands. O’Brien thought about what Glenda and Abby had said-history of the inlet, the bloodshed and the fact that where he stood was a back door into the New World. It was a clandestine place that gave the Spanish dominance after the slaughter of 250 French settlers.

As O’Brien moved farther toward the west, it appeared. A wink of light in the distance. To the northeast. Then it was gone. O’Brien waited and the light reappeared, the rotation of the lamp in the St. Augustine lighthouse took twenty seconds. He looked toward the northwest, the direction of the old Spanish fort. When the wind blew and the mist vanished, the coquina shell fortress was an outline in the moonlight. Its watchtower was a silent sentry, the block fortress still making an imposing statement.

The distant beam from the lighthouse took on a diffused look when the haze returned, drifting above the water, becoming lost in the dark. Then, suddenly, like a flock of startled birds in the wind, the apparitions were gone. The silent stone sentinel remained, the edges of the coquina blocks worn, resembling stooped shoulders in a halo of revolving light.

The light rotated in its 360-degree arch behind the old fort. Nothing punched through an opening in the watchtower. O’Brien kept walking in a westward direction, glancing up at the fort each time the light swept it. Nothing. He slapped the sand fleas biting the back of his neck.

Looking toward the fort, he waited for the rotation of the light. As it swept behind the fort, the turret was dark and ominous. O’Brien studied the stream and a large sandbar just beneath the surface that straddled almost the distance of the stream. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his pants and stepped into the water. It was cool, and he felt minnows nibbling at his ankles. O’Brien sloshed through the water glancing up at the fort each sweep of the light, walking toward Rattlesnake Island.

He dropped, water covering his head. It was as if a wool blanket was tossed over him. He knew he’d stepped into a hole. Water rushed around his body, sucking him downstream. A rip current pulled his clothes, his pants and shirt felt like dead weight.

O’Brien kicked through the current and soon found the sandbar again. He stood and regained his balance, water dripping from his face, hungry mosquitoes orbiting his head with bloodthirsty whines.

Rattlesnake Island had a strip of sandy beach, but fifty feet into the interior, it turned to mangroves and gnarled trees, bent like old men stooping in a field under the moonlight. O’Brien stepped across the sand a few feet to the west, wondering how the inlet, the island, and the topography had changed since Billy Lawson stood somewhere near. When he looked up toward the fort, he stopped in his tracks. In the direction of the lighthouse, it looked as if someone was signaling with a lantern from the watchtower, the window glowed for a second.

O’Brien was motionless, ignoring the mosquitoes. He watched for the light to return and the dark opening in the tower to shine for a moment. Again it was there. He stepped twenty feet toward the west and stopped. When the beam returned it wasn’t visible from the opening in the tower. He retraced his steps.

“Show me the light,” he said as the lighthouse winked in the distance, sending light through an opening on the tower’s north face to a stone window on the south side.

O’Brien looked at his bare feet and wondered if he might be standing on top of the U-235. Eight canisters of the stuff could turn everything from here to the lighthouse, a distance of fourteen miles, into ashes. He used his right foot to mark an X in the sand and then found a large rock and lifted it onto the center of the X. He fished the cell phone out of his wet pocket and tried to call Dave. The phone was dead.