Plague Ship

by Clive Cussler

  “Will we be able to get out,” Janni asked breathlessly.

  “No problem.” Eddie smiled to reassure her. “Once the inside and outside pressure equalize, we’ll be able to swim away. And the beauty of it is, our suits will keep us afloat.”

  “I’ll go downstairs and close off the door we came through,” Julia said, understanding that, in order for Eddie’s plan to work, the boat garage had to be isolated from the rest of the ship or water would just keep pouring in.

  “Thanks,” Eddie said. He positioned Jannike away from the door and up against a railing so she could hold on as the room flooded.

  The door was operated by a small electric winch but had a mechanical handle to crank it up or down in case power was ever lost. When Hux returned and was standing next to Janni to help hold her in place, Eddie bent and grabbed the handle. As soon as he put pressure on it, the door crept up a quarter inch and water started to enter the chamber in a flat rush. He was off to the side of the door but could still feel water sweeping by his lower legs as he cranked it higher.

  The sea cascaded through the opening in the floor in a thundering waterfall.

  Eddie had the door a quarter of the way open when the handle jammed. He pulled on it harder but couldn’t get it to budge. He looked at the door and saw what had happened. The force of water pressing against it had buckled the metal near the bottom and popped the guide wheels off their tracks. Even as he watched, the door distorted further, bending in the middle, as though it was being shoved by a giant hand.

  He shouted a warning to Janni and Julia that was lost in the roar of water as the door failed completely. It tore free from its mounts and was tossed across the room as though it were a piece of paper. Free of the constraint, the ocean exploded through the opening in a green wall.

  Julia and Janni were far enough to the side to be spared the brunt of the onslaught, but, as the room instantly filled, they were pummeled by the back surge of water. Had it not been for Hux’s presence, Jannike Dahl would have been lost in the tumult.

  Shock waves continued to reverberate through the water, sending debris, including a Jet Ski, floating dangerously by. It was only when the water settled that Eddie was able to let go of the stanchion he’d been clutching. He immediately started floating for the ceiling. Like a cat in reverse, he flipped himself around as he sailed upward, to land on the roof on his hands and knees, his flashlight still gripped in his hand. He adjusted the airflow into the hazmat suit to reduce the pressure, and, thus, his buoyancy. Otherwise, he’d remain stuck to the ceiling and immobilized.

  He worked the light to spot Julia and their young charge, hanging on to a railing with their feet pointing up, the air in the suits ballooning the fabric around their legs. He crawled over to them and gently touched Hux’s leg, urging her to let go and float free. She did and rose up to join him. He did the same for Janni, and turned down the airflow from the tanks. He started crawling across to the open door but felt Julia resisting his help. She tapped him on the shoulder and pressed her visor to his.

  “I lost the sample case,” she shouted, the vibration of her voice transferring through the plastic so he could hear the words. “We have to find it.”

  Eddie looked at the mass of clutter swirling inside the garage: towels, life jackets, notebooks, bottles of sunscreen and water, coolers. It could take hours to find the case, and if it had been sucked back out the door it was already falling to the seafloor, some ten thousand feet below the ship.

  “No time,” he said back to her.

  “Eddie, we need those tissue samples.”

  His answer was to take her hand and start toward the beckoning door.

  The sudden influx of water that swamped the boat garage had shifted the Golden Dawn’s center of gravity, and the vessel began to list more heavily. The stresses on her hull were pushing to the breaking point, and, deep along her keel, the steel began to tear. The sound of her death knell echoed over the ocean, as haunting as a whale song or funeral dirge.

  Julia and Eddie towed Jannike through the opening. As soon as they were free of the ship, Eddie added air to his suit and shot for the surface.

  Nearby, the Oregon was ablaze with lights. Searchlights pierced the darkness and roamed across the Dawn’s deck and along her waterline. The Zodiac inflatable that had been tied off near the garage bobbed nearby, its painter pulled taut and its bow submerged by the draw of the sinking cruise liner. As Eddie untied the line from an eyebolt welded to the ship’s hull, one of the searchlights stabbing out from the Oregon swept past them and then returned, bathing them in a pool of incandescence. Julia and Jannike waved furiously. The light blinked in acknowledgment.

  The Robinson helicopter swooped over from the far side of the cruise ship. George Adams held it steady over them long enough to see they were all right before moving off again to spare them the hurricane force of the rotor’s downwash.

  Eddie rolled over the Zodiac’s side and hoisted Julia and Janni aboard. In seconds, he had the motor running and the little boat skipping across the waves toward the Oregon. The door over the tramp freighter’s amidships boat garage was open and a team in protective gear was standing by with spray bottles of concentrated bleach solution to decontaminate their suits.

  Eddie idled the Zodiac just off the ship. With the radios shorted by prolonged immersion in the water, he couldn’t communicate with the orderlies, but everyone knew his duty. They threw over a couple of scrub brushes to the Zodiac and turned on the powerful jets of bleach. Eddie and Julia first scrubbed Jannike and then each other, making certain every square inch of their hazmat suits had been decontaminated thoroughly. Six inches of bleach sloshed across the Zodiac’s floorboards before they were done.

  When Julia was satisfied they had killed any infection that might be clinging to the suits, she ripped away the duct tape over the zipper and freed herself of the claustrophobic garment. The warm, humid air was the freshest she’d ever tasted. “God, that feels good.”

  “Amen to that,” Eddie said, peeling off his suit and leaving it in the boat.

  He guided a still-suited Jannike onto the Teflon-coated ramp they used to launch the SEAL assault boat. Julia took charge of her. She would take her down to the medical bay and run a battery of tests in the isolation ward to determine if the young woman was infected. Only then would Janni be allowed to interact with the crew.

  Max Hanley arrived just as Eddie was preparing to sink the Zodiac. His face told Eddie that everything hadn’t gone as well for the others as it had for him and Julia. “What happened?”

  “Mark is safe aboard the Robinson, but we lost contact with the Chairman.”

  “Damnit. I’m going back. He’s someplace in the engineering section.”

  “Look for yourself.” Max pointed to the sinking cruise ship. When her keel had split, the volume of water flooding her hull had quadrupled. “There isn’t time.”

  “Max, it’s the Chairman, for God’s sake!”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Hanley had a tenuous grip on his emotions.

  Across the gulf of water, the Golden Dawn was in her final moments. The rows of portholes that ran along her length below her main deck were all submerged, and, with her back broken, she was settling deeper in the middle than at her bow or stern. The two men watched silently as the ship continued to disappear.

  Air trapped within the hull started to vent explosively. Windows shattered and doors were torn from their hinges by the tremendous pressure. The sea washed over her railing and began to climb her upper decks amid erupting geysers of froth. From where they stood, it looked as though the Golden Dawn was surrounded by boiling water.

  When the ocean reached the level of the Dawn’s bridge, it shattered the tempered glass. Debris started floating free of the hulk—deck chairs, mostly, but one of her lifeboats had also broken free of its davits and drifted away upside down.

  Max wiped at his eyes when the top of the bridge vanished and all that remained above the water were the
ship’s communications masts and her funnel. Gushes of air roiled the surface as the sea consumed more and more of the vessel.

  Eric Stone was in the Op Center, controlling the searchlights from the weapons station. He left the ship’s most powerful light focused on the Dawn’s smokestack, outlining the gold coins painted on it. The sea bubbled like a thermal hot spring while the Robinson hovered overhead.

  Max whispered Juan’s name and crossed himself when the top of the funnel was a foot from disappearing completely. A blast of air suddenly belched from the stack, ejecting a yellow object as if from a cannon. It rose twenty feet, flapping in the air like a bird trying to take flight.

  “Holy sh—” He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  The yellow object was one of their biohazard suits and the flapping was Cabrillo’s arms windmilling and his legs bicycling. Juan’s trajectory carried him from the smokestack and over the railing before he crashed back into the sea. The impact must have stunned him, because he lay still for a couple of seconds before starting to swim away from the sinking vessel. Eric tracked him with the searchlight as Juan swam to the overturned lifeboat. He heaved himself onto its back, faced the Oregon on his knees, and made a deep, theatrical bow.

  Eric saluted him with a blast from the ship’s horn.

  CHAPTER 9

  DR. HUXLEY WAS CONCENTRATING SO HARD THAT she didn’t hear Mark Murphy and Eric Stone rush into the lab adjacent to the medical bay. Her mind was immersed in the minute realm revealed by her powerful microscope, and it wasn’t until Murph cleared his throat that she looked up from her computer screen. There was a frown on her face from being disturbed, but seeing the two men’s grins she thrust aside her irritation.

  Behind them, her patient lay in isolation, shut off from the rest of the ship by a sterile glass enclosure whose air was pumped through sophisticated purifiers and into a thousand-degree furnace before being allowed to leave the ship. Juan slouched in a chair by Janni’s bed, still wearing his yellow biohazard suit. Until Julia knew if his brief exposure to the water in the engine room had infected him with whatever pathogen had killed the men and women aboard the Golden Dawn, she had to treat him as though he were a carrier. Her microscope, with its potentially infectious samples, was also in the isolation ward, and she could view them only by either wearing a bulky suit or through a dedicated computer feed.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “We ran the numbers,” Murph said breathlessly. Like Julia, he had gone straight to work and wore the same sweaty clothes he’d had on underneath his discarded biohazard suit. His longish hair lay limp and oily against his scalp. “There’s no way the Chairman or the girl are infected.”

  This time Julia didn’t suppress her annoyance. “What are you talking about?”

  He and Eric noticed Jannike Dahl for the first time. “Whoa!” Stone said as he eyed the young woman asleep in the isolation ward, her black hair fanned out around her pale oval face. “What a babe!”

  “Forget it, Stoney,” Murphy said quickly. “I was in on her rescue, so I get to ask her out first.”

  “You didn’t even leave the bridge,” Stone protested. “I have as much right as you.”

  “Gentlemen,” Julia said sharply. “Please check your under-exercised libidos at the door and tell me why exactly you are here.”

  “Oh, sorry, Doc,” Murph said sheepishly, but not without a last glance at Janni. “Eric and I gamed the scenario, and we know that neither of them could have possibly been infected. We knew about twenty minutes ago about the Chairman’s results, but the girl’s numbers just came back.”

  “Do I need to remind you that this is about science—biology, in particular—and not some computer program spitting out mathematical gibberish?”

  Both men looked hurt.

  Eric said, “But you, most of all, should know all science is mathematics. Biology is nothing more than the application of organic chemistry, while chemistry is nothing more than applied physics, using the strong and weak nuclear forces to create atoms. And physics is mathematics writ in the real world.”

  He spoke so earnestly that Julia knew her young patient had nothing to fear from him. Eric wasn’t bad looking, but he was such a geek she couldn’t imagine him screwing up enough courage to even talk to her. And behind Mark Murphy’s skater-punk façade and scraggly beard beat the heart of the consummate computer nerd.

  “Have you found any trace of a virus or toxin anywhere in the samples you’ve taken?” Murph asked.

  “No,” Hux admitted.

  “And you won’t, because neither was infected. The only way to kill an entire shipload of people without causing a mass panic, as some succumb quicker than others, is food poisoning.” He held up his hand and ticked off his fingers as he made his case. “An airborne pathogen wouldn’t hit people who were out on the decks when it was released. Poisoning the water supply is even less likely, because not everyone is going to drink at the same time, unless you hit first thing in the morning when people are brushing their teeth.”

  Eric interrupted. “People with weaker immune systems would have died throughout the day, and, as we saw, everyone was dressed to party.”

  “Same thing if a poison was applied to surfaces around the ship like handrails and doorknobs,” Murph concluded. “The killer couldn’t guarantee that they would get to everyone.”

  “So you think it was the food?” Julia asked, unable to find fault in their logic.

  “Has to be. Juan didn’t eat anything while he was on board, and I bet she didn’t eat tonight either.” Murphy jerked his head at the glass partition separating the lab from isolation.

  “To be on the safe side,” Eric said, “we also ran some numbers in case there was an airborne toxin trapped in the engine room. Even if the air was saturated, the volume of water pouring in when Juan cut his suit would have cut the viral load or toxicity levels down from parts per million to parts per hundreds of billions.”

  Murph crossed his arms. “Besides, it’s been five hours since the Chairman’s exposure. From what Eddie related about your brief interrogation of your patient aboard the ship, her friends visited her just an hour or two before they were hit. Juan and the hottie are fine.”

  Julia had already come to the same conclusion concerning Juan, but she wasn’t convinced these two were right about Jannike. Diagnosis was about dogged research, checking and double-checking lab results, until you knew what you were faced with. Just because she hadn’t found a virus in Janni’s blood, spinal fluid, saliva, or urine didn’t mean it wasn’t lurking in her kidney or liver or some other tissue Julia hadn’t tested yet, waiting silently to explode out and overwhelm Janni’s immune system and then move on to its next potential victims, the Oregon’s crew.

  She shook her head, “Sorry, boys, but that’s not good enough for me. I think you’re right about Juan, but Jannike stays in isolation until I am one hundred percent certain she isn’t infected.”

  “You’re the doctor, Doc, but it’s a waste of time. She isn’t.”

  “It’s my time to waste, Mark.” She pushed back on her wheeled lab stool and rolled across the tiled floor to an intercom mounted on the wall. She hit the button. “Juan, can you hear me?”

  Inside the ward, Cabrillo jerked upright in the chair. Rather then dwell on the fact his body could be harboring a deadly infection, he’d fallen asleep. He stood and threw Julia a thumbs-up and then waved at Murph and Stone. He gathered up the spare batteries used to keep his hazmat suit functioning for so long.

  “You’re cleared,” Julia said. “You can head into the air lock for a decontamination shower. Go ahead and leave the suit inside. I’ll dispose of it later.”

  It took fifteen minutes to cycle the air lock to the isolation ward and for Juan to stand under a thundering shower of bleach and antiviral agents before it was safe for him to hop into the lab.

  “Wow, you’re a mite gamey,” Julia said, wrinkling her nose.

  “You spend that much time sweati
ng in one of those damned suits and see how you smell.”

  Julia had already taken the precaution of having one of Cabrillo’s artificial limbs sent down from his cabin. She handed it over, and he settled it onto the stump below his right knee. He gave it a few experimental flexes, then lowered his trouser cuff. “There,” he said, standing. “Nothing a long shower and a good bottle of Scotch won’t cure.” He turned to Eric and Mark, who still crowded near the lab’s entrance. “How’d you make out, Murph?” With his suit’s radio damaged during the engine-room flood, the Chairman had been out of the loop since being brought aboard.

  “I salvaged about thirty percent of the ship’s computer archives, including everything about her last voyage.” He held up a hand to forestall Cabrillo’s next question. “I haven’t gone through anything yet. Eric and I were helping figure out if you and that piece of eye candy in there had been infected.”

  Juan nodded, although he didn’t think he and their guest should have been their top priority. “Going through those logs is now job one for you two. I want to know everything that took place aboard that ship since this voyage began. I don’t care how trivial.”

  “I saw you talking to our patient earlier,” Julia interrupted. “How is she doing?”

  “Tired and scared,” Juan replied. “She has no idea what happened to everyone, and I didn’t really want to press the issue. Her emotional state is pretty fragile. She did tell me something that might be pertinent. The ship was on a charter for a group called the Responsivists.”

  “What’s this about Responsivists?” This came from Max Hanley. He strode into the lab like a bull in a china shop. Before anyone could answer, he crossed to Juan and shook his hand. “Scuttlebutt around the ship says you were out of isolation. How are you doing?”

  It never ceased to amaze Cabrillo how quickly information passed through the crew, even at—he glanced at his watch—four-thirty in the morning. “Glad to be alive,” he said warmly.