Plague Ship (16 page)

Unlike the hundreds of other engine rooms Juan had been in, he didn’t feel the palpable power, the sense of strength and endurance that these engines were capable of. Here, he felt nothing but the chill of a crypt. He knew if Max was with him, his engineer’s pride would require him to refire the diesels, just to give them life again.

He tried his radio, calling to Hux, then Mark, and finally the
Oregon
, but interference returned nothing but static. Juan quickened his pace, training his light over the equipment for any sign of something out of the ordinary. He passed through another watertight door and found himself at the ship’s sewage treatment plant. He moved on. Beyond was another set of idle generators and the
Dawn
’s desalinators. Using a technique called reverse osmosis, the water treatment system drew in seawater and extracted almost one hundred percent of the salt, rendering it safe enough to drink. This one machine provided water to the galleys, the laundry, and every bathroom aboard the vessel. Of the two places he could think to introduce a deadly virus and make certain it affected everyone aboard, this was number one. He would search for the second—the vessel’s air-conditioning units—later.

Cabrillo spent ten minutes examining the desalinator, borrowing a tool kit from a nearby workbench to unbolt inspection ports and peer inside. He saw no evidence of tampering or recent maintenance. The bolts were all stiff, and the grease felt gritty, even through his protective gloves. There was nothing at all to indicate that a foreign object, like a bunch of vials of toxin, had been injected into the plant.

The explosion came without warning. It rumbled someplace aft of the engine room and sounded deeper within the ship. And even as the sound faded, another blast rocked the
Golden Dawn
. Cabrillo stood, immediately trying to raise his team on the radio net, when a third explosive charge detonated.

One second, Juan was standing over the desalinator and, the next, he was halfway across the room, his back a flaming sheet of pain from being slammed into a bulkhead. He fell to the deck as another rumbling detonation hit the ship. The blast was well forward of his position, and, yet, he could feel the overpressure wave sluice through the engine room and press him to the floor. He staggered to his feet to retrieve his flashlight, which had been flung ten yards away. As soon as his fingers curled around the light, some sixth sense made him turn. There was motion behind him. Even without electricity, the ship’s gravity-powered watertight doors functioned flawlessly. The thick metal plates began to slide down from the ceiling to cover the open hatchways.

A new sound struck the Chairman, and he whirled in time to see a wall of white water erupt from under the deck through grates that gave access to bilge spaces below the engine room.

A fourth explosion rocked the
Golden Dawn
and made the entire ship rattle.

As he ran for the descending watertight door, Juan knew that whoever had poisoned the passengers and crew had placed scuttling charges to hide the evidence of their crime. There was something significant in that, but now wasn’t the time to worry about it.

The water welling up from below was already to his ankles when he ducked under the first door, with four feet to spare. Hampered by the protective suit, he ran as best he could across the next room, passing the sewage plant without a glance, his feet splashing through the rising water. His breathing wheezed in his ears and taxed the suit’s filters.

The next door was already a mere two feet from slamming into the deck. Juan put on a burst of speed and dove flat, sliding through the water so it foamed over his faceplate. His helmet hit the bottom lip of the door. He twisted under it, pressing himself flat as he moved, wriggling to get by without ripping the suit. He could feel the weight of the door pressing down and he lurched as hard as he could, pulling his chest and upper legs through. He tried to roll away, but the solid gate continued to drop. In a desperate gamble, he cocked one leg and wedged his foot between the door and the sill.

The door weighed at least a ton, so Cabrillo’s artificial foot delayed its descent for only a second but it bought him enough time to yank his other leg clear.

The pulverized limb remained jammed under the door and allowed a curtain of water to surge into the main engine room unchecked. It also held Juan helplessly pinned, because, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t free the prosthesis.

Cabrillo was trapped in the engine room of a doomed ship, and, no matter how he fiddled with his radio dials, he got nothing but static.

CHAPTER 8

MAX HANLEY DIDN’T NEED HALI’S FRANTIC CRY TO tell him a series of explosions had struck the
Golden Dawn
. He could see the bursts of white water erupting in sequence along the cruise ship’s side on the
Oregon
’s main monitor. It looked like she’d been struck by torpedoes, but he knew that was impossible. The radar scopes were clear, and sonar would have detected the launches.

As the smoke cleared, Eric zoomed the low-light camera in on one of the damaged areas. The hole was easily big enough for a person to walk through, and seawater was cascading into the breach at a staggering rate. With four identical punctures along her waterline, there were too many compartments flooding to save the ship, especially without power going to her bilge pumps. He estimated that she would founder in less than an hour.

Max tapped his communications console. “George, get your butt back in the whirlybird and get over to the
Dawn
. A series of scuttling charges just went off, and our people are in trouble.”

“Copy that,” Gomez Adams replied instantly. “Do you want me to land over there?”

“Negative. Hover on standby and await further orders.” Max changed channels. “
Oregon
to Cabrillo. Come in, Juan.” Static filled the Op Center. Hali fine-tuned the transceiver, searching in vain for the Chairman’s signal, but he couldn’t find it. “Julia, are you there? Eddie?”

“I’m here,” a voice suddenly boomed over the loudspeakers. It was Mark Murphy. He was still in the
Golden Dawn
’s wheelhouse and had better reception. “What just happened? It sounded like explosions.”

“It was,” Max replied. “Someone’s trying to sink the ship, and, from what we can tell over here, they’re going to succeed.”

“I’ve barely started on the downloads.”

“Pack it in, son. Gomez is on his way to you. Hightail it out of there as soon as you can.”

“What about Juan and the others?” Murph asked.

“Have you been able to reach them on the radio?”

“No. Juan cut out about twenty minutes ago when he went down to the engine room.”

Hanley suppressed a curse. That was about the worst location to be when the explosives went off. “What about Eddie and Hux?”

“They fell off the net a couple minutes later. I’ll tell you one thing, Max, the radios in these suits are getting upgraded as soon as we’re back.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Max said, although he’d been thinking the exact same thing. He studied the image relayed to the monitor and saw that the
Dawn
was settling fast. Her lowest row of portholes was less than three feet from going under, and the ship had developed a slight list to starboard. If he sent Murph out to search for the rest of the team, there was a good chance the weapons specialist would become trapped in the vessel. She was sinking pretty evenly now, but he knew the ship could lurch downward at any second. He would just have to trust that the others would make their own way out.

“Mark,” he called, “get aboard the chopper as soon as you’re able. We’ll have you stay on station, searching over the ship for when the rest reach the upper deck.”

“Roger that, but I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I, lad, neither do I.”

AFTER ONLY A QUICK GLANCE at a ship’s schematic, Eddie Seng led Julia unerringly to the
Golden Dawn
’s small hospital, located on level DD, well below the main deck. With his help, she had gathered blood and tissue samples from a number of victims on the way.

“You’re holding up pretty well for someone who isn’t a medico,” Hux had told Eddie when she was working on the first of the victims.

“I’ve seen how Chinese interrogators leave their prisoners after extracting whatever information they think the person had,” Eddie had said in an emotionless monotone. “After that, nothing much bothers me.”

Julia knew of Seng’s deep-cover forays into China on behalf of the CIA and didn’t doubt he’d seen horrors far worse than anything she could imagine.

As she had suspected, there was a trail of bodies leading down the corridor toward the dispensary, men and women who had had just enough time after falling ill to go to the one place they thought they could find help. She took samples here as well, thinking that something in their physiology gave them a few minutes other victims had been denied by the pathogen. It could be an important clue at finding the cause of the outbreak, since she was holding little hope of finding any survivors.

The hospital door was open when they arrived. She stepped over a man wearing a tuxedo lying across the threshold and entered the windowless antechamber. Her flashlight revealed a pair of desks and some storage cabinets. On the walls were travel posters, a sign reminding everyone that handwashing was a crucial step in reducing infections aboard ship, and a plaque stating that Dr. Howard Passman had received his medical degree from the University of Leeds.

Julia played her light around the adjoining examination room and saw it was empty. A door at the far end of the office led to the patients’ rooms, which were little more than curtained-off cubicles, each containing a bed and a simple nightstand. There were two more victims on the floor here, a young woman in a tight black dress and a middle-aged man wearing a bathrobe. Like all the rest, they were covered in their own blood.

“Think that’s the doctor?” Eddie asked.

“That would be my guess. He was probably struck by the virus in his cabin and rushed here as fast as he could.”

“Not fast enough.”

“For this bug, no one is.” Julia cocked her head. “Do you hear that?”

“In this suit, I can’t hear anything but my own breathing.”

“Sounds like a pump or something.” She pulled back one of the curtains surrounding a bed. The blanket and sheets were crisp and flat.

She went to the next. On the floor next to the bed was a battery-powered oxygen machine like those used by people with respiratory problems. The clear-plastic lines snaked under the covers. Julia flashed her light over the bed. Someone was in it, with the blankets pulled up over their head.

She rushed forward. “We’ve got a live one!”

Huxley peeled back the blankets. A young woman was sound asleep, the air tubes feeding directly into her nostrils. Her dark hair was fanned over the pillow, framing a face with pale, delicate features. She was bone thin, with long arms and slender shoulders. Julia could see the outline of her clavicles through her T-shirt. Even in repose, she’d obviously gone through an ordeal that had taken its toll.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she screamed when she saw the two figures in space suits hovering over her bed.

“It’s okay,” Julia said. “I’m a doctor. We’re here to rescue you.”

Julia’s muffled voice did little to calm the woman. Her blue eyes were wide with fear, and she backed up against the head-board, drawing the blankets over herself.

“My name is Julia. This is Eddie. We are going to get you out of here. What’s your name?”

“Who . . . Who are you?” the young woman stammered.

“I’m a doctor from another ship. Do you know what happened?”

“Last night, there was a party.”

When the woman didn’t continue, Julia assumed that she was in shock. She turned to Seng. “Break out another hazmat suit. We can’t take her off the supplemental oxygen until she’s in it.”

“Why’s that?” Eddie asked, tearing open the hazmat suit’s plastic wrap.

“I think it’s why she survived and no one else did. The virus must be airborne. She wasn’t breathing the ambient air but drawing oxygen from the hospital’s oh-two system, and, when that went down, she started using this portable unit here.” Julia looked back at the girl. She estimated her age to be early twenties, either a passenger traveling with her family or a member of the crew. “Can you tell me your name, sweetie?”

“Jannike. Jannike Dahl. My friends call me Janni.”

“May I call you Janni?” Julia asked, seating herself off the bed and holding the flashlight so Janni could see her face through her suit’s faceplate. Jannike nodded. “Good. My name is Julia.”

“You are American?”

Just as Julia opened her mouth to respond, a deep bass sound filled the room. “What was that?”

Eddie didn’t have time to tell her it was an explosion before a second, closer blast echoed through the ship. Jannike screamed again and yanked the covers over her head.

“We have to go,” Eddie said. “Now!”

Two more blasts rocked the
Golden Dawn
. One of them detonated a short distance from the ward, knocking Seng to the floor and forcing Julia to use her body to shield Jannike. A light fixture crashed from the ceiling, its fluorescent bulb shattering with a loud pop.

Eddie got to his feet. “Stay with the girl.” He ran from the room.

“Janni, it’s okay. We’ll get you out,” Julia said, and drew down the blankets again. Tears coursed down Jannike’s smooth cheeks, and her lower lip quivered.

“What is happening?”

“My friend is checking it out. I need you to put this on.” Julia held out the protective hazmat suit. “We have to do it very carefully, though, okay?”

“Am I sick?”

“I don’t think so.” Julia had no idea until she could run some tests, but there was no way she was going to tell the frightened girl that.

“I have asthma,” Janni told her. “That’s why I was here in hospital. It was a bad attack that the doctor couldn’t control.”

“Has it passed?”

“I think so. I have not used my inhaler since . . .” Her voice trailed off.