Plague Ship

  “Take it easy,” Mark had backed up a couple of paces. “We have a work order for a busted clothes press.”

  “Show me your ID badges.”

  Mark plucked his ID from the front of his overalls. Kevin Nixon hadn’t known the exact design the Golden Line used for their employee identification cards, but it was a good fake, and he doubted Kovac’s henchmen would know the difference. “See. Right here. I’m Mark Murphy.”

  Kovac suddenly appeared, his bulky body practically filling the doorframe.

  “What is this?”

  “These two claim to be here to fix something.”

  The Serb pulled an automatic from inside his windbreaker. “I gave the captain express orders that no one other than the laundry workers are to enter this room. Who are you?”

  “It’s finished, Kovac,” Linda said, her girlish voice icy hard. She could tell using his name had startled him. “We know all about the virus and how you spread it using the washing machines on cruise ships. As we speak, your people are being rounded up on ships all over the world. The devices are being removed. Give it up now and you might see the outside of a prison again.”

  “I doubt that very much, young lady. Kovac is not my real name.” He mentioned another, one that had been all over the news during the Yugoslav war. It was the name of one of the worst mass murderers to ever come out of the conflict. “So you see, I don’t believe I would ever be allowed out of prison.”

  “Are you totally out of your mind?” Mark asked. “You’re willing to die for this stupid cause of yours? I was aboard the Golden Dawn. I saw what your virus does to people. You’re a freak.”

  “If that’s what you think, then you don’t know everything. In fact, I think the two of you are bluffing. The virus loaded in those”—he swept his hand to indicate the massive washing machines—“isn’t the same I used on the Golden Dawn. It was created from the same strain, but this one isn’t deadly. We are not monsters.”

  “You just admitted killing almost eight hundred people and you say you’re not a monster?”

  Kovac actually smiled. “Very well. Dr. Lydell Cooper isn’t a monster. The virus we are about to release will cause nothing more than a bad fever, only there is one small side effect. Sterility. In a few months, half of the world’s population is going to discover that it can’t have children.”

  Linda felt like she was going to throw up. Mark actually swayed on his feet when he grasped the insidious nature of their plot. Responsivists were always going on about how the planet was doomed because of overpopulation. Now they were planning on doing something about it.

  “You can’t do this,” Linda cried.

  Kovac leaned his face in inches from hers. “It is already done.”

  THE GUARDS SEARCHING Eos Island stopped their work and gazed heavenward. What at first looked like a particularly bright star quickly grew in size and intensity until it seemed to fill the entire sky. And what started as mild unease quickly exploded into panic, as the object plunging from space appeared to be aimed at the island. They ran, for when faced with danger it is what instinct compels humans to do, but it made no difference. There was no escape.

  Down in the transmitter room, Thom Severance tapped his foot impatiently against a table leg as the display in front of him showed the agonizingly slow pace of the ELF signal being sent around the globe. In few minutes, it would be done. The first of the virus would flood out of its vacuum-sealed containers and into the washing machines where it would contaminate the sheets, towels, and napkins. That precise amount of virus would be released into each load of laundry, thereafter, until the dewars were emptied.

  A faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

  The tungsten projectile hit Eos island almost dead center, three miles from the subterranean base. Its tremendous speed and weight turned the potential energy of falling two hundred miles into the kinetic energy of a massive explosion.

  The center of the island blinked out of existence. The rock was torn apart at the molecular level, so there remained virtually no trace of it at all. As the blast rippled outward, it sent a shock wave through the island that heaved hundreds of tons of rubble into the air. Much of the rock was melted into glowing globules of lava that snapped and hissed when they plunged into the cool sea.

  The panicked guards were carbonized, their ashes mixing with the dust and debris.

  When the shock wave hit the facility, the hardened ferroconcrete used in its construction cracked like fine porcelain. The building didn’t collapse but rather was uprooted and thrown out of the ground. Walls, ceilings, and floors pancaked on themselves, crushing everyone inside. The destruction was absolute. The miles of thick copper wire that was the ELF antenna were ripped from the earth and melted into streams of liquid metal that poured into the ocean.

  The earth shook so fiercely that huge slabs of cliff face sheared away, and cracks spidering out from the impact’s epicenter split the island into seven smaller ones.

  A massive tidal wave surged off Eos in the direction the Orbital Ballistic Projectile had been traveling. Unlike a tsunami, which travels below the surface and grows in height only as it shoals, this was a solid wall of water with a frothing crest that seemed to curl forever. It roared as though the gates of hell had been thrown open and raced across the sea at astronomical speeds. The wave wouldn’t last. Friction would eventually reduce its size until it wasn’t even a ripple, but, for as long as it lasted, it was the most destructive force on the planet.

  Forty miles away, the Oregon was racing with everything she had. All her hatches had been doubly secured. Her two submersibles had been lowered into their cradles and lashed down. Every loose object the crew could think of had been stuffed into closets and drawers. They knew they weren’t going to get out of this without some damage, but they wanted to keep it to a minimum.

  “Time till impact?’ Juan asked.

  “I estimate five minutes,” the helmsman reported.

  Juan hit the button for the shipwide PA system. “This is the Chairman. Everyone hold on tight. We’re in for a wild ride. Five minutes.”

  The mast-mounted camera was turned aft and switched to night vision mode so they could watch the wave coming at them. It filled the sea from horizon to horizon, impenetrable, implacable. Its face was veined with emerald lines of phosphorus, and its crest looked like green fire.

  “I have the conn,” Juan said suddenly, and took command of his ship.

  He had noticed they were running from the wave at a slight angle and gave the Oregon a bit of rudder by way of correction. If they were going to ride this out, they needed to take the hit directly on the stern. Any deviation and the five-hundred-foot ship would auger into the wave and roll a dozen times before being released from its grip.

  “Here we go!”

  It was like an express elevator. The stern came up so fast that, for a moment, there was no water under her middle. The sound of the hull’s moaning was lost in the savage roar of the wave. The bow plunged into the sea. Juan cut power to keep her from burying her prow, and then the entire ship was dragged up the face of the wave. The acceleration sent everyone lurching forward. The ship climbed the wave, her bow pointing down at a dizzying angle. Juan glanced at their speed through the water, which was down to four knots, but their speed over bottom was nearly seventy miles an hour.

  The stern burst through the wave’s crest in an explosion of froth that swamped the decks. Water sluiced from the scuppers in sheets and blasted from the drive tubes in solid white jets. Thirty, forty, fifty feet of Oregon’s stern hung suspended over the back of the wave before she began to tip. And then she went over, falling faster than when she’d been plucked off the surface.

  Cabrillo fire-walled the engines, asking his ship to give him everything she had. When they hit the bottom of the wave, her stern would knife through the surface, and if the Oregon didn’t have enough power she would simply keep going until the ocean closed over her bow.

  With the ship at an
almost sixty-degree angle, the fantail splashed into the rough water in the wave’s trailing edge, and vanished. The sea climbed over the rearmost cargo hatch, and, had it not been for the thick rubber seals, the helicopter hangar under it would have swamped.

  “Come on, girl,” Juan cajoled, watching the water claim more and more of his ship. “You can do it.”

  The angle began to flatten out as the bow came off the wave, and Oregon’s plunge into the abyss seemed in check. For a long moment, she neither sank nor rose out of the water. The vessel shuddered with the strain of her engines trying to deadlift eleven thousand tons from the sea’s crushing embrace. And slowly, so slowly at first that Juan wasn’t sure he was seeing it right on the monitors, the deck began to clear. The leading edge of the stern hatch appeared as the magnetohydrodynamics thrust her out of what should have been her watery grave.

  Cabrillo finally joined the chorus of whistles and cheers when he saw the sodden Iranian flag hanging off her jack staff. He eased off the power and turned control back over to the helmsman.

  Max sidled up to his chair. “And I thought you were crazy jumping an ATV off a dock. Any other ship would have turtled on a wave like that.”

  “This isn’t any other ship,” Juan said, and patted Max’s arm. “Or any other crew, for that matter.”

  “Thank you,” Max said simply.

  “I’ve got one of my wayward children home. It’s time to get the other two.”

  CHAPTER 39

  KOVAC KNEW THERE WAS TROUBLE WHEN HE TRIED TO reach Thom Severance from the Golden Sky’s radio room and got no response. He didn’t even get a ring.

  With the radios switched off, on Kovac’s orders, it wasn’t until twenty minutes later that word reached the ship from a satellite-news broadcast. A meteor had been spotted streaking across southern Europe. Estimated at weighing a ton, it had hit an island off the coast of Turkey. A tsunami alert had been issued, but there was only one report from a Greek ferry about a wave, and it was said to be only a few feet high and presented no danger.

  He knew it was no meteor. It had to have been an atomic bomb. His two prisoners hadn’t been lying at all. The American authorities knew about their plan and had authorized a nuclear strike. The light people had seen streaking southward across Europe must have been from the cruise missile that delivered the warhead.

  Kovac hit the MUTE button on the television remote to cut out the anchorwoman’s speculative blather. He had to consider his options. If they had sent operatives to the Golden Sky, they must have known he was on the ship. No, that logic wasn’t right. He was here because he suspected they were aboard first. So they didn’t know where he was. His solution, then, was simple: kill his two captives and leave the ship when it made its scheduled call on Iraklion, the Cretan capital.

  “But they’ll be waiting,” he muttered.

  Whoever sent the two Americans—the CIA, most likely, but what did it matter—would have operatives at the port to meet the ship. He wondered if he could slip through their dragnet. Then he wondered if it was worth the risk. Better to simply stop the cruise ship and escape in one of the lifeboats. There were thousands of islands in the Aegean to hide on until he planned his next move.

  That still left the question of the prisoners. Should he kill them or take them as hostages? He wasn’t concerned about controlling the man, who looked like a stoner to Kovac. But there was something about the woman that told him she could be dangerous. Better to kill them both than worry about them trying to get away.

  That left one last detail. The virus.

  It lived only for a couple of weeks in its sealed canister, so it wouldn’t do him much good after his escape. Releasing it would infect the thousand or so people on the ship, and, with a little luck, they would spread it when they returned to their homes. But he didn’t think there was much chance of that. The ship would be quarantined and the passengers held in isolation until they were no longer infectious.

  It was better than nothing.

  Kovac got up from his chair and walked onto the bridge. Night had fully descended, and the only illumination came from the consoles and radar repeaters. There were two officers on watch and two helmsmen. Kovac’s assistant, Laird Bergman, was outside on the flying bridge, enjoying a cigarette under the stars.

  “I want you to go down to the laundry and release the virus manually,” Kovac told him.

  “Did something happen to the transmitter?”

  “Nothing that concerns you right now. Just get down to the laundry and do what I say. Then find Rolph and report back up here. We’re getting off this ship.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Trust me on this. We’re going to be arrested as soon as we reach Crete. This is the only way.”

  One of the officers suddenly shouted, “Where the hell did he come from and what does he think he’s playing? Call the captain up here and sound the collision alarm.” He rushed out to the opposite flying bridge.

  “Stay with me,” Kovac said, and he and Bergman jogged after the ship’s officer. A huge freighter was coming straight at the Golden Sky. She looked like a ghostship with all her running lamps extinguished, but she was cutting through the water at a good twenty knots.

  The officer shouted back to the others on the bridge. “Didn’t you see him on radar?”

  “He was ten miles away, last time I checked,” the junior officer replied. “And that was only a few minutes ago, I swear.”

  “Hit the alarms.”

  The Golden Sky’s bellowing horns had no effect. The freighter continued to aim straight for them, as if it intended to slice the cruise ship in half. Just when it seemed there was no avoiding a collision, the freighter’s bow turned sharper than any ship the officer had ever seen, and she came alongside with only a few dozen feet separating them. It was an incredible piece of ship handling, and had the officer not been so angry he would have been impressed.

  Kovac recalled that there had been reports of a large ship making an illegal passage of the Corinth Canal the night the Hanley kid had been snatched. He had always known that the two incidents were related, and now a freighter makes an appearance on this of all nights. With the feral instincts of a rat, he knew they were here for him.

  He moved back inside and away from the crewmen. Their walkie-talkies didn’t work well around so much steel, but he raised Rolph Strong, the third man who had choppered to the ship with him.

  “Rolph, it’s Kovac. I need you to clear everyone out of the engine room and lock yourself inside. No one is to enter, and kill anyone who resists. Do you understand?”

  Unlike Bergman, Strong never questioned orders. “Clear the engine room and let no one enter. Copy.”

  Kovac pulled his pistol from under his windbreaker and said to Bergman, “Go out and find six or seven women. I don’t care if they’re passengers or crew. Bring them back here as quickly as you can. Also, go to my cabin and bring the rest of our weapons.” Before Bergman could inevitably ask for an explanation, Kovac added: “Thom Severance is dead, the plan is ruined, and the people responsible for it are on that freighter. Go!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The Serb locked the bridge door before threading a silencer onto the end of his automatic and dispassionately shooting the two crewmen and one of the bridge officers. The soft reports were drowned out by the blaring air horns, so the second officer didn’t know what was going on until he stepped in off the flying bridge and saw the bodies. He had time to look to Kovac before two crimson blooms appeared on his starched white uniform shirt. His jaw worked silently for a moment, before he collapsed against a bulkhead and slumped to the deck.

  Suspecting that the operatives on the freighter were going to throw a line onto the cruise ship to send over a boarding party, Kovac stepped up to the controls. There was a dial to order more or less speed from the ship’s engines and a simple joystick to turn the rudder. Maneuvering such a massive vessel was as easy as steering a fishing smack.

  He cranked the t
hrottle to maximum and veered the ship away from the rusted-out freighter. The Golden Sky was only a few years old, and, while she was built for luxury more than speed, he was supremely confident he could outrun the derelict.

  They started to pull ahead, easily outpacing the freighter, but only for a few moments. It, too, put on a burst of speed, and exactly mirrored his turn. Kovac was dismayed that a ship that looked ready to dissolve into a rust stain could move so swiftly. He checked the throttle control and noticed that if he pulled the dial upward, he could draw what was called EMERGENCY POWER.

  He did, and watched their speed continue to increase. Looking across the bridge, he saw the freighter slowly falling back. Kovac grunted with satisfaction. It would take an hour or two to put enough distance between the two ships for them to stop so he could lower a lifeboat, but it didn’t matter.

  As if the freighter were toying with him, the big merchantman inexorably accelerated to match his speed and once again positioned itself no more that thirty feet off the Golden Sky’s beam. A quick glance confirmed the cruise ship was pounding across the flat sea at thirty-six knots. There was no way the freighter should be able to achieve that speed, let alone maintain it.

  Kovac’s frustration quickly morphed into rage. There came a sharp burst of automatic fire from the corridor behind the bridge, followed by a chorus of high-pitched screams. He rushed to the wheelhouse’s sole entrance and threw back the bolt, his pistol at the ready. The ship’s captain lay in a widening pool of blood on the carpeted deck, and four other officers cowered along the passageway. They must have tried to rush Bergman when he returned. Behind them, his assistant had seven women huddled in abject terror.

  “Inside! Now!” Kovac snarled, and gestured with his weapon for the women to enter the bridge.

  They moved in a tight cluster under Bergman’s watchful eye, tears streaming down their cheeks.

  “Stop this at once,” the seniormost officer demanded.

  Kovac shot him in the face and closed the bridge’s thick metal door.