Plague Ship

by Clive Cussler

  “Who are you?”

  Juan said nothing while he fitted Kerikov’s wrists with a pair of FlexiCuffs.

  “Even though you speak my language, you are CIA, I think, and not FSB. I must congratulate you. When I did my research on Ibn al-Asim, his background was unimpeachable. You went a very long way in establishing his bona fides. A great many trusted people assured me he was legitimate.”

  “I’m not Ibn al-Asim,” Juan said.

  Kerikov smirked. “Obviously not.”

  “He’s back at the casino, in a trash can near the loading dock. He should regain consciousness in another couple hours.”

  Kerikov’s eyes narrowed as he tried to get his mind around the situation.

  Juan let him dangle a moment longer. “As far as I know, you and al-Asim are old college roommates in Monte Carlo having a few laughs together. I don’t care what you two are scheming. I’m here about something you stole from your former employers.”

  “I stole a great deal from them,” Kerikov said with unabashed pride.

  Juan had done enough research on the Russian arms dealer to want to put a bullet through his brain and rid the world of one less dirtbag. It took effort not to pull the trigger.

  “I want the codes for Stalin’s Fist.”

  The fact that he had mentioned the weapon only a short while ago to al-Asim wasn’t lost on Kerikov. He again asked who Juan was.

  “Your assassin, if you don’t give me what I want.”

  “You’ve had me under surveillance, haven’t you?”

  “My organization has been watching you for some time,” Juan told him, which wasn’t exactly a lie. “We are only interested in the codes for the Orbital Ballistic Projectile satellite. Give me what I want and you and al-Asim can continue your arms deal without interference. Otherwise, you die tonight.”

  When Juan had cleared this operation through Langston Overholt, the CIA man had insisted that it in no way jeopardized their long-term plan to turn al-Asim.

  Cabrillo cocked his pistol to punctuate the statement.

  Kerikov tried to stare him down, and didn’t blink when he saw Juan’s finger beginning to squeeze the trigger.

  “Pull that trigger and my security team will be in here in twenty seconds,” he warned.

  “My soul is prepared for martyrdom,” Juan retorted, clouding his role by making it sound he was on a religious quest. “Is yours?”

  Kerikov blew out a heavy sigh. “God, I miss the Cold War. You’re Chechen, aren’t you?”

  “If it appeases whatever remains of your conscience, I am not Chechen, and the weapon won’t be used anywhere within the former Soviet Union.” He could almost see Kerikov thinking that the weapon wouldn’t be used at all.

  “The codes are locked in the safe behind that painting.” He nodded toward a nude hanging on one wall.

  Juan used the barrel of his pistol to swing the painting back on its long hinge in case it was booby-trapped. The safe was about two feet square, with a ten-digit electronic pad. “Combination?”

  “Two-five, one-zero, one-nine-one-seven.”

  It took Juan a second to recognize the numbers, because Europeans put days ahead of months when giving dates. “The date of Russia’s October Revolution. Nice touch.”

  He punched in the numbers, and made Kerikov stand directly in front of the safe when he threw the handle. Juan had recognized the safe model, and knew if an incorrect code had been entered a stun grenade would detonate. The code was legitimate.

  Inside were stacks of currency, a pistol, which Juan stuffed in his pocket, and countless folders and files.

  “Should be near the bottom.” Kerikov offered, to get this ordeal over with quicker.

  Juan scanned some of the documents as he searched. The Russian was involved in some heavy deals, including arming Saddam Hussein before the U.S. invasion, and a triangle trade of Afghan opium for Russian weapons for African conflict diamonds.

  Near the bottom was a file with the label November Sky in Cyrillic. Juan leafed through a couple of pages, satisfying himself that it was what he was after. Once the computer aboard the Oregon translated it into English, he assumed Eric and Hali could understand the technical jargon.

  He slid the document into a waterproof bag and turned to Kerikov. As much as he wanted to tell Kerikov what he thought of him, Juan held his tongue. “When you find al-Asim, tell him what happened tonight is unrelated to your business together. Tell him it is a piece of your past coming back to haunt you, but the situation is now resolved. Now please turn around and drop to your knees.”

  For the first time since Juan had pulled the gun on him, Kerikov showed fear. It was in his eyes, though he managed to keep it out of his voice. “You got what you wanted.”

  “I am not going to kill you.” Juan withdrew the hypodermic case and removed one of the needles. “It’s the same drug I gave al-Asim. You’ll be out for a few hours. Nothing more.”

  “I hate needles. I’d rather have you hit me over the head.”

  Juan smashed his FN into Kerikov’s temple so hard that a pound or two of extra force would have shattered the bone and killed him. He collapsed like an imploded building. “Suit yourself,” Juan said, and jabbed the needle home anyway.

  The outside wall of Kerikov’s office was curved glass that bowed out from the hull in a shallow arc. Juan opened one of the windows and peered upward. There was no one hanging over the railing above him. He stripped out of his tux jacket, shirt, and the fat suit. Beneath it, he wore a skintight black T-shirt with long sleeves. After stuffing the waterproof bag under the shirt and tossing Kerikov’s pistol out the window, he kicked off his shoes and eased himself into the water.

  So long as he remained silent and didn’t look up, so his face wouldn’t show, his black wig made him blend in with the inky Mediterranean. He swam forward along the Matryoshka’s hull until he came to the anchor chain. There, he dove under the surface, crawling link by link down the chain until he came to the diving equipment Eddie and Franklin had cached earlier.

  He donned the Draeger rebreather, weight belt, fins, and mask, and took a bearing off the luminous compass they had left for him. The Oregon was only a mile away, and, with the slack tide, his going would be even easier.

  As he swam, he made a silent vow that this wouldn’t be the last time he paid a visit to Ivan Kerikov, and that the Russian wouldn’t fare so well in their next meeting.

  CHAPTER 31

  IT HADN’T BEEN TOO DIFFICULT FOR MARK AND Linda to hide the fact they didn’t have an assigned cabin. They purchased clothing and toiletries from the shops, and could shower in the locker rooms adjacent to the ship’s fitness facility. They slept in shifts on poolside deck chairs during the afternoon and spent their nights in the casino. With his photographic memory, Murph was an expert card counter, and had turned the four hundred dollars they brought with them into a sizable pot. He could have made a fortune, had he wanted to, but they needed to maintain their anonymity so he kept his winnings reasonable.

  That all changed on the second day.

  To the other passengers, the closing of the ship-to-shore communications room was mostly just an inconvenience. A few businesspeople grumbled, but most people either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Mark and Linda knew otherwise. And there were other subtle signs as well. They saw more crewmen roaming the decks, ostensibly to perform maintenance. However, they spent a great deal of time watching the passengers. No one was asking to see room keys yet, but Linda and Murph knew it was only a matter of time.

  It was clear that the word was out that there were stowaways on the Golden Sky, and the cruise line was determined to find them.

  More troubling than this information were the sniffles.

  On the morning of their second day aboard ship, a number of passengers and crew had runny noses and suffered occasional bouts of sneezing. By listening to people talking near the pool and around the dining room, the two pieced together that everyone had felt fine t
he night before but that the ones who were sick had all gone to the midnight buffet, and that the waitstaff and cooks who’d worked the buffet shift were ill as well.

  “It has to be a test,” Mark surmised.

  “How can you be so sure?” They were just finishing breakfast in a secluded corner of the cavernous dining room.

  “Two reasons. Most natural shipboard viral outbreaks are of a gastrointestinal nature. This is presenting like a rhinovirus. Second, if this was the main attack, we’d all be dead.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Although her appetite was legendary, Linda only picked at her food.

  “Don’t shake anyone’s hand, don’t touch any handrails, do not—and this is critical—do not touch your eyes. It’s a cold’s favorite way of entering the body. We wash our hands every half hour, and immediately if we break any of the other rules. And, last, we find out how the hell they are going to release the deadly virus they used to hit the Golden Dawn.”

  “Did we screw up by staying on this ship?” Linda asked, wiping her mouth and setting her napkin next to her plate.

  “No, because we are going to find out how they are releasing it before the main attack.”

  “Be reasonable. We’ve checked the water system, the air intakes, the air-conditioning plant, hell, even the ice makers. If we haven’t found it yet, what are the odds we will?”

  “They get better every time we check off another vector source from our list,” Mark replied. “Have you ever wondered why, when you lose something, you always find it in the last place you look?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you stop looking when you find it. Therefore, it is invariably in the last place you searched.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “We haven’t checked the proverbial last place yet.”

  Even through the insulation of the dining room’s walls, they heard the distinctive beat of a helicopter’s rotor. They got up from the table and made their way aft. There was a swimming pool at the Golden Sky’s fantail. A hard cover had been placed over its aqua waters, and deckhands had cordoned off the area with rope to keep passengers well clear.

  The chopper was a Bell JetRanger, with POSEIDON TOURS emblazoned on its flank. From several decks up, Mark and Linda could see the pilot and three passengers in the cabin.

  “This can’t be good,” Linda said over the growing din.

  “You think they’re here for us?”

  “People rarely die on cruise ships, so when one of his followers was killed in Istanbul Thom Severance must have acted fast. I wonder how he got the cruise line to agree to this. Gomez Adams makes it look easy, but landing a helo on a moving ship is dangerous.”

  “They’ve got deep pockets.”

  The chopper flared in over the jack staff, the downwash kicking up a little spray from where crewmen had washed the deck of grit. It hung poised like a hovering insect, as the pilot judged speed and windage before lowering the craft toward the pool cover. He kept the power on, so the skids barely put any pressure on the cover, and three doors opened at the same time. The men jumped from the chopper, with nylon packs over their shoulders. The pilot needed to make a quick power adjustment to account for the sudden drop in weight. As soon as the doors were closed, the chopper lifted clean and peeled away from the ship.

  “Eddie said something about Zelimir Kovac looking like Boris Karloff on a bad day.” Mark pointed with his chin.

  “The big guy in the middle?”

  “It’s got to be him.”

  The three men were greeted by a ship’s officer but made no move to shake hands. They somehow managed to make their casual clothes—khakis, polo shirts, and light windbreakers—look like military uniforms. It was the matching backpacks, Linda thought.

  “What do you think is in those bags?” she asked.

  “Change of underwear, fresh socks, a razor. Oh, and guns.”

  Before now, they had only risked being placed in whatever passed as a brig aboard the Golden Sky and having a lot of explaining to do when they reached shore. That had changed. Kovac and his two henchmen were coming for them, and there wasn’t any doubt what would happen if they caught them. Mark and Linda’s only advantage was, Kovac didn’t know how many people were hunting for the virus. However, with the ship’s officers and crew acting more vigilant about possible stowaways, the two of them could be flushed out at a moment’s notice.

  “Something just occurred to me,” Mark said as they turned away from the rail.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Would Kovac risk being aboard this ship if they are going to hit it with the virus they used to kill everyone on the Golden Dawn?”

  “He would if he’d been vaccinated.”

  By noon, three-quarters of the people on the ship were suffering coldlike symptoms, and, despite precautions, Mark and Linda were included in that group.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE HIGH DESERT WIND SHRIEKED ACROSS THE AIRFIELD, throwing up towering clouds of dust that threatened to block out the sky. The pilot of the chartered Citation jet came in on the runway fully thirty feet to the left, to account for the cross-wind hammering the fuselage.

  The gear came down with a mechanical whine and thump, and flaps were extended. The turbojets roared to keep the aircraft aloft for a few more seconds.

  The sole passenger seated in the cabin paid no attention to the weather conditions or the dangerous landing. Since catching a commercial flight from Nice to London, and then on to Dallas, where the leased executive jet was waiting, he sat with his laptop open and his fingers dancing across the keys.

  When Eric had come up with his plan to fire the Russian ballistic projectile weapon, it had been the barest outline of an idea. He hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of data he needed to make it work. Orbital speeds, vectors, the rotation of the earth, the mass of the tungsten rods, and a hundred other elements—all had to be factored into his computations.

  With his naval background, he was more than confident he could do the mathematics, although he would have liked Murph’s help. Mark had an innate grasp of trigonometry and calculus that would have made this so much easier. But, then, he would have insisted on taking command, and the Chairman would have rightly given him the slot. Mark was simply more qualified to do this than Eric.

  Because this broke down to a communications exercise between the satellite and the computer, Hali Kasim would have been the next logical choice. The only problem was that Hali got sick on carnival rides and wouldn’t have been able to do the work.

  Eric got tapped to do what only a handful of people had ever done. He would allow himself to get excited about it later, but, for now, he had to work the numbers. He had told Jannike Dahl about needing to do this, embellishing the danger, while not spelling out the reason. And with Mark trapped on the Golden Sky, he had stepped up his pursuit of the beautiful young Norwegian. He was already up to the eighth item on his courtship checklist and almost pushed it to number nine by trying to hold her hand when he explained why he had to leave the ship. He wished he knew what it meant when she had cocked her head and parted her lips just before he left her in the infirmary.

  He should have asked Dr. Huxley.

  The plane touched down, swaying dangerously on two wheels for a moment before the pilot could kick in the rudder to even her out again. They taxied a long way—the airstrip was over three miles long—and finally came to a massive hangar next to another unmarked executive jet. Above the hangar door was the name of a long-defunct airline. The engines spooled to silence, and the copilot emerged from the cockpit.

  “Sorry, Mr. Stone, but we can’t taxi into the hangar in this sandstorm. But, don’t worry. It’s going to die down by tonight.”

  Eric had already checked a dozen weather sites on the Internet and knew to the minute when this cold front would move on. By midnight, there wouldn’t even be a breeze.

  He closed up his laptop and grabbed his suitcase, an old Navy duffel that had followed
him from Annapolis.

  The copilot opened the door and Eric fought his way down the stairs, slitting his eyes against the sand blowing across the tarmac. There was a man near a small door set into the larger hangar door waving him over. Eric jogged the forty feet to the door and ducked through. The stranger immediately closed it. There was a large aircraft in the center of the hangar covered in canvas tarps. Its shape was hard to make out, but it was unlike anything else in the world.

  “Damned dust plays havoc on the planes,” the man griped. “You must be Eric Stone. I’m Jack Taggart.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Colonel.” Eric said with a touch of hero-worship. “I read about you when I was a kid.”

  Taggart was in his sixties, with a leathery weather-beaten face and clear blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome, like an idealized figure of a cowboy, with a firm jaw and a day’s worth of silver stubble. He wore chinos, a flight uniform shirt, and a bomber jacket despite the heat. His handshake was like iron, and his baseball cap had the logo for one of the early Space Shuttle missions. He had been its pilot.

  “You ready for the ride of your life?” Taggart asked, leading him to an office in one corner of the hangar. His voice had a West Texas twang.

  Eric grinned. “Yes, sir, I am.”

  There were two men in the office. Eric recognized one of them right away by his thick muttonchop sideburns. It was legendary aircraft designer Rick Butterfield. The other was a tall, patrician figure with a shock of white hair. He wore a banker’s three-piece suit, with the chain of a Phi Beta Kappa key arcing across his waistcoat. Eric put his age on the high side of seventy.

  “Mr. Stone,” he said, extending a hand. “I so rarely get to meet members of Juan’s team.”

  “Are you Langston Overholt?” Eric asked with awe.

  “I am, my boy, I am. Although you have never, and most likely will never, meet me. Do you understand?”

  Eric nodded.

  “I really shouldn’t have come at all. This is a private deal between the Corporation and Mr. Butterfield’s company, after all.”

  “That I wouldn’t have agreed to if you hadn’t threatened to gum up my certification applications with the FAA and NASA.” Butterfield had a high-pitched voice.