A Deadly Shade of Rose by Douglas Hirt

Author:Douglas Hirt [Hirt, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781647340391
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2020-06-16T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MORNING WAS PRETTY much history by time I entered the administration building. A clock visible through an open office door said it was five to twelve. Marcie was going to have to settle for lunch, I mused as I hurried along the long, low-ceiling corridor. The place looked as old on the inside as it did from the outside. Overhead, the building’s plumbing hung naked from the ceiling. Utilities were simpler back when they built the place. Open the windows on hot summer days, close them in the winter. Rap on the pipes and you got steam, if you were lucky. And air conditioning? Hey, this was Colorado at 6000 feet elevation. Who needed air conditioning? It was only much later that man became more season conscious. Maybe the weather was milder fifty years ago?

When modern heating and cooling needed to be retrofitted, the most expedient course was to hang the plumbing from the ceiling where it was out of the way. The result being an even lower ceiling, which lent a cluttered appearance overhead but was no real inconvenience except perhaps to the occasional basketball star visiting the Office of the Registrar.

The low ceiling with its spaghetti network of exposed pipes painted the same color as the walls reminded me of another set of narrow passageways. They were tighter, with lots of up and down via iron-rung ladders, but the sameness was enough to bring a knot to my stomach. I recalled the constant rumble of pumps and whooshing of ventilation fans, and unlike the nice white paint everything wore here, those passages were painted navy gray.

It had been my first and only time inside a submarine; a hectic seven hours of squeezing down narrow passageways, of waiting in a pretty well-equipped messroom, drinking coffee, listening to soft chatter from the sailors on break, trying to ignore the persistent background noise of one of the more complicated machines ever built. Eventually the brain learned to block most of it out, but at first, after the chopper had lowered us aboard somewhere in the Sea of Japan, the noise, the hiss of compressed air rushing through the pipes overhead, that was all that I was aware of.

By time I started getting used to it, we were breaking surface under a moonless sky. The coast was black and rose and fell as the vessel beneath us rode the waves. The inflatable dinghy was black too and looked like a wet seal. There was barely enough room in it for my partner and me, our gear including the long, hermetically sealed aluminum rifle case, and the two sailors from the boat who rowed us ashore.

I’d never worked with Randall Potter before then—they seldom let operatives get that familiar with each other—but the man made me a little nervous. Randall seemed to be the sort who lived every second as if he had a lit stick of dynamite shoved up his rear end and no idea how much longer the fuse had to burn.

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