The Celtic Mirror Page 2

  It was an entirely malevolent presence, its black and white body glistening in the noon sunlight. The slash mouth opened and closed like a hideous trapdoor, meshing and unmeshing great, tearing teeth. It clicked to its minions, and the attack ceased for a moment. Only the inexorable circling continued. The familiar, undulating swim of the smaller cetaceans would be forever robbed of the spirit of play in Morgan’s eyes. These are disciplined soldiers, he recognized, more than half inclined to panic.

  The huge orca then spoke to Morgan, not clicking, but in the speech of men! He didn’t recognize the language but the message was clear. Le Fay was to be sunk. Morgan was to die!

  “Like hell!” Morgan screamed aloud, searching for a way he could prevent the inevitable.

  The commander issued another series of clicks and whistles; the attack resumed.

  Morgan would not die easily. He refused to die. Instead, he called upon his less peaceful past, and it rushed back to aid him as if eager to fill some vacuum in his soul. The naked man coldly reached for the only weapon available to him, the flare pistol clipped to the bulkhead inside Le Fay’s companionway. He broke it open and inserted a white phosphorus 20-gauge flare into the wide breach. Timing became the most important factor for Morgan. He would not have many chances.

  Boom! The savaging resumed.

  Morgan waited, a great calm settling over him, a calm that had once brought others’ nightmares to life.

  Boom!

  A charging orca broke surface fifteen meters from the battered hull and gave an open-mouthed grin at Morgan who stood braced against the cockpit coaming, watching destruction rush at his boat. He squeezed the trigger.

  The hissing projectile entered the grinning mouth, and seawater washed the flaming appetizer the remaining distance down the creature’s throat.

  The attack halted as if a switch had been thrown.

  The expanding gasses from the long-burning flare started to bloat and distort the stricken orca’s body. It shortly became a horrible caricature while a ghastly mixture of smoke and fuming, bubbling froth issued from the wide mouth and bleeding blowhole. Thrashing and screaming in a pitch that tortured Morgan’s ears, the killer whale rolled and writhed, unable to dive, trailing pink foam, emitting a brimstone stench, then abruptly became still, a floating obscenity on the surface.

  Morgan broke the flare gun open once again to reload. Instantly, the transfixed marine mammals resumed orbit around Le Fay.

  Boom! The orca chief whistled encouragement. Boom! Three times more, Morgan fired and reloaded, but the highly intelligent attackers avoided the mistakes made by their dead comrade and crashed massively into the hull, closemouthed. Three missiles scored direct hits on three black-and-white monsters, only to bounce off tough hides and fall, hissing harmlessly into the sea where they guttered out like Morgan’s hopes. Still, the flare gun was his only weapon, the man-creature’s final chance to live.

  When the last on-deck flare rebounded, ineffectively, into the water, Morgan stoically admitted the possibility of defeat. Boom, boom. The attack continued unrelentingly, and the crashes against the hull sounded like dull cannon reports, but he realized that the sound had become subtly altered. The reverberations had become muffled. Angry, Morgan realized that Le Fay’s fibers were failing in the impact area. Yelling a defiance he knew his enemies could not understand, he turned his back and dropped below to gather the remaining flares from his emergency locker. Then he stopped, hand curled around the lifeless Mirror frame, ignoring even the crashing blows that were splintering his lifeline.

  Rolling with the movement of the swells that passed under the boat, gathering and reflecting light from the open hatchway, a single brass cartridge lay, new, uncorroded, inexplicable. Morgan stooped to touch the enigma, noticing as he did, that a square of interior paneling had sprung open under the battering. He tore a fingernail below the quick, wrenching the panel open still further, and a cascade of familiar brass spilled at his feet. Ignoring the pain in his finger, he lifted one of the cylinders to his eyes. He had carried the even then obsolete M-16 for too many months to ever forget.

  “How in hell did you sneak aboard?” he whispered in awe to the NATO rounds. At that moment, the question was academic. They were there! With a triumphant cry, he clawed a screwdriver from the tool locker and attacked an adjacent square of cherry wood paneling.

  He pried three sections jaggedly open before he struck treasure again, pouring more NATO ammunition onto the sole and before he allowed reason to direct the search.

  Water had begun to seep faster through the shredding hull, yet the bilge pump was silent. The blows must have ripped the hasty repair apart! Morgan dropped to his knees in the gathering pool, probing the edges of the planking with the blade of his screwdriver, searching for the tiny flaw he guessed must be there.

  Boom—boom! The water rose steadily, inching perceptibly higher as he worked. Boom—boom. A portion of the flooring rose under the persuasion of the screwdriver and the strength of his desperation. It was as if he had opened the tomb of a long-dead king. Treasure lay beneath the ruined sole planking, awaiting him.

  Boom!

  Then his prize lay at his feet, swathed like a pharaoh’s corpse and as powerful as an ancient curse.

  He tore the waterproof wrapping from the M-16A2 death-dealer, expertly working the action back and forth while his eyes scanned the debris beneath his feet for the weapon’s magazine. Locating a dull, black shape, he reached into the ankle-deep water and snatched it free. He scooped his salt-rimed watch cap from the table and filled it full of the shiny, wet cartridges, prayed to the god of storage batteries, flipped the bilge-pump toggle and climbed back into the battle zone.

  Fingers that had never quite forgotten snapped round after round into the guts of the magazine.

  Boom!

  Once on deck, he peered back down through the hatchway and swore again as the hull bent, and slowly, too slowly, flexed back into place. How much more can she take? Will the battery run the bilge pump long enough? With a snap, the last round nested, he tapped the magazine against the bulkhead and slapped it into the rifle’s receiver. He jacked a round into the chamber, turned the firing selector to full automatic and crouched, braced for the next charging enemy.

  The wait was a short one.

  The orca rushed at Le Fay like a well-aimed torpedo. Morgan gave the beast a short burst. The oversized dolphin never reached the sloop’s hull. It simply sank out of sight without any fanfare, leaking red from three neat holes clustered together in the head area. Reassured about the old weapon’s accuracy, he twisted the selector switch to the semiautomatic position and took advantage of the momentary lull to rip Le Fay’s freon-powered horn from its clip.

  When the next sleek soldier charged the boat, Morgan played a sustained blast on the horn. The orca faltered in its charge and Morgan punched a single high-velocity round through a wide-staring eye.

  “Whale’s eye!” Morgan exulted. “This little bastard still puts ‘em out like it’s supposed to!” His left hand patted the upper hand guard as if it was some faithful old pet. Then he half-turned the weapon and read the inscription stamped on the lower receiver, Hydro-Matic Division, G.M. “Oh, Christ, I’m driving a Chevy!” He snorted, surprised at the laughter that bubbled up in his throat. First sign of the crack-up, he thought, and choked the grim humor back into silence. He topped up the magazine and thrust it home again before the beasts could reform and resume the attack more deeply submerged, which, Morgan knew, would finish him. Angry and still frightened, he couched the weapon against his ribs, switched back to the automatic mode, and emptied the entire magazine into his opposite number in the short three-round bursts allowed by the weapon’s post-Viet Nam modifications, spraying destruction like water from a hose.

  The huge orca seemed to ignore the bright rosettes that blossomed across its streamlined body. It clicked and whistled an unfaltering string of commands, reorganizing his soldiers. They threw themselves at Le Fay with a heigh
tened intensity as if time had become an important factor. Boom, boom, boom! Le Fay staggered under the renewed hammering. Morgan reloaded twice more, killing six more charging orcas. Still they came.

  When the deck began to roll sluggishly beneath his feet, Morgan realized that the electric bilge pump had finally drained the over-taxed battery. He could not fight and operate the hand pump simultaneously. Le Fay was lost, and he would not last ten seconds in the rubber dinghy! He reloaded the magazine for the last time. Nineteen rounds for the enemy. Number twenty has Morgan written on it. He did not believe in suicide, but he would not submit his living body to be ground into hamburger by those hideous, conical teeth.

  Morgan moved the fire selector switch back to semiautomatic to conserve ammunition. He could not risk going below to gather more loose cartridges; the boat would be fatally holed if one more orca reached the damaged area. This is Morgan’s Last Stand. He laughed for the second time, but without humor. And I never felt so much in common with that jerk, Custer, before.

  He raised the plastic stock to his shoulder when the next attack was launched at the boat. Then he glimpsed salvation through the peep sight as he sank another enemy. A sinister, triangular fin cut through the churned waters, circling the circlers. Another appeared as if by magic then a third. After that, Morgan ceased counting. Prionace Glauca, the blue shark, swarmed to the scent of freshly shed blood.

  What Morgan next witnessed created an acre of bloody froth. Gobbets of meat, mammalian and shark, mingled. The man and his stricken boat were abruptly forgotten, and the crippled Le Fay drifted heavily through the Heironymous Bosch sea and into a cleaner purgatory from which Morgan would have to wrench his own deliverance.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It took Morgan over five hours in orca and shark-free waters to patch the damaged hull with underwater epoxy and to make Le Fay watertight and sailable. She was definitely not going to win any prizes for speed, maneuverability or beauty. He had jammed and bolted her spare main boom into the hole left by the mast that had been lost during Le Fay’s unexpected course change out of Morgan’s world, and had fabricated a fitting that allowed him to join a flimsy spinnaker pole to the stubby upright spar. When he stowed his tools back in their locker, the sloop was no longer a directionless hulk. Her wings were severely clipped; she flew a storm jib and a radically cut-down mainsail; her new running and standing rigging was imaginative in concept and ugly to behold; yet, she could be sailed. The question that plagued Morgan was where could she sail? In which direction lay land? He could not begin to guess. He only knew where he was not. “Oh Lord,” he whispered into the emptiness of the ocean, “Let this not be a sea without boundaries!”

  Morgan was, however, not only a veteran of an undeclared war that had left permanent scars upon those who had lived through it; he was also a veteran of nearly three decades upon the sea. As a youth, sailing had been for joy; as a disillusioned adult, it had been for escape. Those years counted for much that day. He squatted on his heels, shielding his pale eyes against the glare of the bloated sun and objectively calculated his chances of survival. He was determined to survive; he had left a long and grim history of survival behind him.

  When he had begun to re-rig Le Fay, only neatly drilled aluminum bolt holes and the hollow, oval tracery of the aluminum mast severed at deck level gave testimony that the 24-foot-long, portion of her, the part that had been uncertainly welded by the Mirror to her unearthly forty-foot otherhull, had ever existed! Neither decking nor mast, neither spars nor original rigging remained aboard. Lights, winches, safety lines and tiller had vanished as surely as had the seven other PacSail 4D24s and their crews. The casualty list kept growing longer; three more names could be added: Kendra’s, Kettelmann’s and Morgan’s.

  The forty-foot deck, rolling beneath his feet, was something he had seen only once before on his drawing board and then, once again, in Connach’s secrecy-shrouded engineering section before Mirror activation. Yard workers brought the two hulls together into the locked shed and then Connach had activated the Mirror. Presto! Only the pocket yacht remained visible—until the owner passed through the Mirror lenses. Below deck lay the impossible. Only Connach knew how that had been done, and Connach had sailed over the edge of the world in his beloved Tanaris. Thank God, Morgan thought, Wiscombe halted 4D production over Ian’s objections. That left only hull number nine, and Wiscombe would never dare sell her now.

  The Mirror and its almost hypnotic qualities had hidden from him and everyone else connected with the project, the most terrible facts surrounding the 4D: half of her did not exist in Morgan’s world; neither did anything below decks after a Mirror stopped generating its field.

  Well, Ian Connach, and for that matter, John Wiscombe as well, can get screwed!

  He noted the signs of impending landfall long before the dark smudge of shoreline became visible. Fronds of kelp and other bits of floating detritus were parted by Le Fay’s prow, and curious gulls began to follow the progress of the crudely repaired sloop. Since sunrise, Morgan had systematically dismantled every possible place of concealment aboard the boat in a search for additional hidden weaponry, and he had uncovered an impressive armory, fit for any of the small anti-gov groups that had recently proliferated. The tools of his old trade covered the remains of his quarter berth and undamaged cabin sole: ten M-16 rifles; 3,000 rounds of ball and 1,000 rounds of armor-piercing ammunition; forty empty magazines; a case of antipersonnel grenades; one 40 mm. grenade launcher and a box of its deadly fruit; and five fully-charged, disposable hand-held rockets, good for tanks or banks.

  Ian Connach—gunrunner? The proof is here, Morgan puzzled. Is Connach arming the Ultra Republican Committee, the Castroite Democratic Peoples’ Army, or one of the other lunatic survivalist groups that hope for the onset of Armageddon while they hide out in the mountains? Scabby, sanctimonious scavengers! Sure, the system is slow to react to change. But those bastards can’t wait for the votes to be counted. So they hide in the goddamned hills and kidnap somebody now and then—somebody whose only crime is a talent for making money—hit a bank or two to finance their little games. Then the pathological pinheads in the media make heroes of the bloodstained psychopaths, and the game goes on.

  Ian Connach—revolutionary? Somehow it did not fit the man Morgan knew. Then why the arsenal?

  He pondered the problem along with the scope and possible utilization of his booty and wondered why Connach had buried it under Le Fay’s skin. It had to have been Connach. Nobody else had access to the sloop’s otherhull before launching and before Ian’s secretive Mirror activation process. But only the luffing mainsail answered his questions, saying everything and nothing.

  Shortly after midday, thinking he might be hallucinating, he sighted sails on the horizon but took no evasive action even though he felt he might be on the verge of confronting his personal aliens at last. First Contact by an emotionally crippled human on the deck of his physically crippled sailboat! He made a noise that might have been mistaken by a stranger for a laugh, but he stopped laughing as he stacked a portion of his new armory neatly on the gently rolling deck. With that simple act, Le Fay was commissioned a sloop-of-war; She was short-handed perhaps, but well armed for her size.

  The tiny triangles of approaching sail, half hidden from Morgan’s view most of the day by distance and deep ocean rollers, resolved gradually into five sloop-rigged craft, sailing in a rough formation. They were still too far away by hours for him to guess at their type or intentions. He had lost his binoculars along with the Le Fay’s 24-foot upper deck and her human cargo. He was too tense with speculation about the strangers to give more than a flicker of thought to Kendra and Kettelmann, but even that flicker was disturbing, damn them! He rubbed his beard stubble reflectively, wondering whether to dress for the occasion.

  What if the newcomers are sea-going Fem-Firsters? The sight of a naked male might goad them into incredible acts of violence. He laughed with a more genuine humor and ducked below to pull on a
pair of salt-stiff and faded shorts to add to his personal safety.

  As the moment of contact moved inexorably nearer, Morgan marked time by composing bawdy commemorative doggerel verses on his heroism, checked and rechecked his armaments, but like any other soldier facing combat, he mostly waited. A sudden squall moved swiftly across the approaching boats, and, as it passed, the bow of the leading craft emerged through the screen of water a bare kilometer off Le Fay’s port quarter. The other four glided into view moments later, still maintaining formation. They looked like PacSail 40s to Morgan, but their deck structures were markedly different from any boats he recognized.

  Each flew a split-tongued pennant from the masthead, but the distance was still too great for him to make out the designs without his lost binoculars.

  He hoped they would turn out to be yacht club pennants from West Harbor or Del Ray. He hoped that the blow to his head had caused a mild concussion and that his crazy sextant readings were errors, created by a temporary pressure on his brain. He almost believed it, almost.

  Any hopes along medical lines died when he sighted the black and white torpedo that spearheaded the approaching formation. The orca swam in an unhurried manner, which allowed the slow vessels to keep pace. It was then that Morgan decided to treat the newcomers as hostile. A rocket launcher might be just the thing I need to make a point, he reasoned with a shark-like coldness and sighted in on a mid point between the possible enemy boats. No need to sink a potential friend unless I have to.