Hunting Season Read online

  “They’ve been here two and a half days. Never come into the harbor. Never visit the fort. Something’s up with them.”

  Anna’d not noticed those things. And they were pertinent. Most folks, if they bothered to come to Garden Key, made use of the harbor and at least paid a curiosity visit to the fort.

  “Good eye,” Anna said and meant it. “I’ll keep close to the radio.”

  Bob jumped lightly into the second of DRTO’s five patrol boats. Only four were working. The fifth was beached behind the dock up on blocks. Bob took the Bay Ranger, a twenty-foot aluminum-hulled Sylvan. He seemed to prefer it to the sturdier Boston Whalers. Maybe because it was quieter, had a lower profile. All the better for sneaking up on evildoers.

  Anna shouldered the net bag she used to carry her dive things.

  “Oh,” Bob said as she turned to go. “You got a big box from New York waiting for you. Teddy said if there’s bagels in it, she’ll trade you some of her homemade key lime pie for some.”

  Anna waved Bob off, then stood a moment, habit demanding she do a visual check of an area after an absence of hours. The campground, with space for only a handful of tents and, other than flush toilets on the public dock, no amenities, was quiet. Because there was so little dirt to be had on Garden Key, overnighters were by reservation only. Picnickers sat at tables nursing beers and sunburns, talking among themselves, families for the most part with lots of little kids scratching at mosquito bites, Kool-Aid smiles adding to the clownish colors of beach towels and bathing suits. Even Bob would have a hard time imagining an evil nemesis in the bunch.

  Savoring the fact that she wasn’t in a hurry, that, once again, her work for the National Park Service allowed her to rest her eyes and mind on a wonder most people would never take the time to see, she turned her attention to the fort.

  Bob’s motor’s drone a pleasant burr in her ears, as comforting as the hum of bees in summer blooms, she looked across the moat at Fort Jefferson. More than the skyscrapers of Manhattan, the Golden Gate Bridge or all of Bill Gates’s cyber magic, it impressed her with man’s determination to fight the world to a standstill and then reform it in his own design.

  Seventy miles out in the sea, on the unprepossessing Bush Key, the magnitude of the effort awed her. Jefferson stood three stories high and was topped with earthworks and ammunition bunkers. A coal-black tower, built as a lighthouse but demoted to a harbor light when the taller lighthouse on Loggerhead Key was finished, thrust above the battlements. The black metal of its skin gave it an unearned sinister aspect. A wide moat, meeting the fortress walls on one side and contained by brick and mortar on the other, ran around the two bastions fronting the structure. Beyond was nothing but the Atlantic. At first the moat had amused Anna. Only in the front and along the eastern wall was it bordered by land. On the two other sides its outer wall separated it only from the sea.

  When she’d first seen it, it had struck her as a conceit, the architect slavishly following the classic castle moat theme though this fort was set in a natural saltwater moat thousands of miles on one side and seventy on the other. Duncan, the island’s historian and chief interpreter, had disabused her of that notion. Moats were not merely to keep land troops at bay but ships with malicious intent at their distance.

  Trailing a young couple so in love they didn’t notice it was too hot to be hanging all over each other, Anna crossed the bridge. As she stepped into the imagined cool and welcome dark of the entryway she heard the shivery sound of children giggling and saw a small head vanish into a stone slot. Anna laughed because heat and boredom had yet to diminish the childlike glee the fort engendered in her: “secret” rooms where ammunition had once been stored, dark and twisted caves where arches met and clashed and crossed at the bastions, designed by an architect who must have foreseen the genius of Escher. The formidable structure was now dissolving back into the sea with infinite slowness. Lime dripped out of solution as rain worked its way through ancient mortar. Stalactites formed, growing like teeth in the long, long passages through the casemates. Standing at a corner and looking down arch after arch after arch, perspective skewed. It was easy to feel as if one were falling through time itself.