I fought off exhaustion. Up until now, adrenaline and fear had kept me alert, but now even that was wearing off. As we drew closer to downtown I wondered if I’d ever get enough sleep to make up for this past week. The bones in my neck were brittle; my skin seemed to crawl.
We broke through a patch of fog and into clear air. The bridge loomed over us; we were almost there. Lonnie yelled above the engine noise. I turned. He motioned me back. I scooted back across the crowded boat, dodging boxes and packs.
“When we get there, you tie us up. But don’t get out of the boat yet.”
I shook my head. As we passed under the bridge Lonnie pulled a spotlight out of its holder on the side and flicked the halogen beam on. It crackled as it lit, the narrow tube of blinding bright light scanning the bank. Then he stopped. Ahead of us, a mass of tangled driftwood and fallen trees looked to me to be the finest potential nesting place for water moccasins I’d ever seen.
He throttled the engine down to idle as we approached. I crawled out onto the farthest point of the bow, a line in my hand. I just hoped that whatever happened, I didn’t screw up.
I snagged a branch with my bare hand and felt skin being stripped out of my palm. Lonnie cut the engine and immediately the current began pulling us away. I tightened my grip and pulled as hard as I could, and gradually, the boat nestled into the snarl of decayed wood. I tied the line onto a thick branch of a fallen tree and managed to secure us.
Lonnie came forward. “Good job. We’ll get squared away here, then walk that tree to the bank. Once there, we can pull the boat all the way in.”
“Okay,” I said, panting.
Lonnie handed me a pack, then passed me two fifty-foot coils of nylon rope, a Swiss army knife, a heavy-duty flashlight, a two-foot-long Khyber knife, four smoke grenades, and a pair of bolt cutters. We inventoried the packs a second time.
“What time is it?” he asked.
I hit a button on my watch. “One forty-five,” I answered.
“When did you tell them to open the door?”
“Two. If we’re not there yet, they’ll check every couple of minutes. Marsha said she’d look for the key to the gate on the chain fence, so maybe we won’t have to cut through it.”
“We’ll each carry cutters anyway.”
I reached down and picked up a ten-inch-long black baton with a trigger and a safety ring on the side. “What’s this?”
“Jeez, be careful,” he hissed, then yanked it out of my hand. “If we get in a jam and can’t get to the top, this is a spring-loaded grappling hook. Attach the nylon rope here, pull this pin, point it up, keep your head down, and stand back. It’ll shoot a grappling hook about a hundred feet straight up the bluff.”
“Why don’t you carry that one?” I suggested.
“Good move. It’s a mean mother.”
Lonnie stood up, pulled on his pack, attached the baton to a hook on his belt, and looked down at me.
“You ready?”
“No,” I said, standing up and throwing the pack on. “But let’s go anyway.”
I had on the hiking boots that Marsha’d talked me into buying, along with a pair of jeans and a checked black-and-white flannel shirt. I figured that was about as much commando as I could stand.
Lonnie, on the other hand, looked like something out of Ninja Rambos from Hell: shiny black nylon pants, black long-sleeved T-shirt, black leather gloves. And to top it all off, as he’d navigated us down the Cumberland, he’d smeared lampblack all over his face.
A wall of undergrowth, trees, vines, snakes, critters, and only God knew what else lay ahead of us. Lonnie pulled out his sealed beam and flicked it on as we made our way across the fallen tree and retied the boat. To random boat traffic, we’d look like a couple of night fishermen. And we were tucked in the bluff far enough forward to be unseen by anyone who might be wandering around above.
I still wasn’t sure this was really happening, but then I gritted my teeth, pulled out the Khyber knife, and started climbing.
Halfway up the slope, I thought my lungs would finally, and mercifully, give out.
I stopped for a moment, panting. “If we even make it to the top, how the hell are we going to get them down?”
Lonnie was a half a body length ahead of me, his boots kicking mud and clumps of rotting gunk down on me. He turned, his face shiny, sweaty black in the dim light.
“This is the worst of it. It levels off near the top.”
“I’m not worried about Marsha,” I said, “but Kay Delacorte’s a middle-aged bureaucrat.”
“She’s a middle-aged bureaucrat who wants to go home very badly.”
I dug my toes into the soft earth, grabbed another hunk of vines, and pulled myself up. Thornbushes had whipped scratches across my face that would be scarlet and on fire by morning. Maybe fifty yards lay behind us, and the boat was only a tiny speck bobbing in the water, hidden from view by the twisted debris of dead vegetation.
There was a rustle to our right; we’d disturbed something that I hoped would head away, rather than toward us. We climbed on, yanking and gashing our way through the undergrowth. Lonnie was right, though, and the last few yards were actually a gentle slope upward to a line of trees, the bases of which were buried in thick vines.
Lonnie stopped. “We’ll have a time hacking through that,” he said. “But I don’t see a way around it.”
Off to our right, a TVA high-tension tower jutted into the black sky. “Are we even in the right place?” I asked.
“I think so,” he whispered. “There’s the brick smokestack at General Hospital. It looks to be in the right place.”
Once we stepped into the bed of vines, we sank in up to our waists. I wasn’t meant for this sort of thing. Lonnie was loving it, though. He hacked away, ripping vines and working his way upward. I followed him as best I could, driven to stay close by fear as much as anything else.
We got to a little rise on the slope, just below the trees that marked the back of the morgue property. He dropped down, flicked off his flashlight, and motioned me to follow him. I turned my light off, and we crept forward.
“Damn,” he stage-whispered.
“What is it?” I came up behind him. His fingers were wrapped in the wire spiderweb of a chain-link fence.
“Okay,” I said, “we cut through it.”
“Did you see the good news?”
I shook my head. He grabbed a fistful of vines and pulled them back. Beyond the fence, the brown brick of the Nashville morgue stared back at us, not twenty feet away. For the first time, I let loose with a grin.
“Nice shooting, cowboy,” I whispered.
I pulled the bolt cutters out of his knapsack, and he got mine.
“Be careful not to make any noise,” he said.
He started on the left; I took the right. We cut slowly, carefully, quietly upward, then curved toward each other and met in the middle. It took about five minutes, and when we finished, we pulled back a piece of fence in the shape of a four-foot mouse hole.
“What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Two-thirty.”