Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  • • •

  Xavier was stretched out flat on the rubberized deck, his body pointed straight back and away from the Seahawk’s right tire, trying to keep himself as narrow as his cover. The tire was shredded from gunfire, but the rim and the landing gear strut—though bullet scarred—had kept him safe for the hours he’d been hiding here, pinned down and unable to move in either direction. Ten feet behind him was a sheer bulkhead with no exits, and nothing to hide behind. To his left was fifty feet of open space he’d never be able to make it across before he’d reach the cover of a forklift, and to his right was a twenty-foot gap between this and another parked helicopter. He didn’t know if there were any exit hatches in that direction, either.

  Every time he tried to move, rifles cracked, bullets tearing up the decking around him, banging into the tire rim or hitting the helicopter above. They knew where he was but didn’t dare advance; there was too much open ground between the crate behind which they were hiding and Xavier’s position. They also knew he wasn’t afraid to shoot back. Empty twelve-gauge hulls littered the deck around him. He didn’t know if he’d hit anyone.

  He couldn’t move, they couldn’t move. A stalemate. But Xavier didn’t have time to wait them out. Every hour that slid by meant the other boarders were moving deeper through the ship, causing more destruction, taking more lives. He had to do something.

  They’re counting on that, aren’t they? Waiting for you to do something stupid. He forced himself to remain still, peeking around the edge of what remained of the tire, concealed in the shadows under the helicopter’s belly. The hangar bay was well lit, and he had a good view of the splintered crate that was their hiding place. Every now and then a face would poke out from one side or the other, then duck back out of sight, nothing at which he could shoot. Xavier was certain one of those faces belonged to the man who’d introduced himself as Charlie.

  • • •

  This had gone on far longer than Charlie expected; hours, in fact. The son of a bitch was patient. During that time, the hippie he’d killed earlier turned and rose, but instead of wandering off to make trouble for other people, it had come straight for Charlie. He’d had to finish it with a head shot.

  Now he checked his watch. Almost showtime. Charlie looked at the auxiliary deputy. “Kid, listen up. I want you to make a run at him.”

  The young man’s eyes widened.

  Chick gave him an encouraging smile. “Don’t be scared. I’m going to lay down so much cover fire he won’t dare lift his head. You swing wide, haul ass for that forklift. Then we’ll have him flanked, and we’ll finish it.”

  The deputy looked at the distance, the wide open space, then back at Charlie.

  Charlie game him a charming grin. “Trust me.”

  A moment later, Chick popped up and started squeezing off bursts at the tire where the priest was hiding, the heavy bullets tearing apart rubber and decking and blowing metal panels off the side of the chopper’s cockpit. The deputy bolted from behind the crates and started running.

  Xavier cut him down with a shotgun blast that opened the boy’s chest.

  “Dammit,” Charlie growled, firing his magazine dry, then dropping back down and quickly inserting another one. Patient son of a bitch.

  THIRTY-ONE

  January 12—Adventure Galley

  The red numbers of a digital clock mounted above the cutter’s bridge windows read 23:55:03. Elizabeth keyed the mic on her handheld radio. “Boarding Two, this is Command.”

  “Go, Command,” Lt. Riggs answered.

  “Five minutes to launch.” Liz received a double click as acknowledgment. Right now Riggs would have his team fully loaded aboard the motorized lifeboat, still tethered to the stern and waiting to cast off. On her command, Liz’s second boarding party would begin their run at the carrier. The prize had now drifted vaguely northwest, with land positioned an almost equal distance around it in every direction.

  When they departed, Liz would be left with Mr. Waite and a helmsman, Mr. Vargas in the combat center, Castellano the rescue swimmer, two men in the engine room, and the civilian contractors. Everyone else would be en route with the assault group. It was an all-or-nothing gamble as she couldn’t possibly operate the cutter for any length of time with only eleven people, but she was confident they would prevail.

  Liz would have preferred if the cloud cover held instead of breaking up. An assault in darkness was better, but now the moonlight was illuminating the bay, the carrier, and her cutter, and would reveal her assault craft. No matter, she thought, lifting binoculars. They were past the point of no return, and the odds were heavily in her favor. A little over three miles away, the lopsided shape of Nimitz drifted across choppy waters. It looked like a weary, wounded elephant. She and her crew were the lions that would bring it down.

  Liz had briefly considered striking the American flag flying on the radar mast high above and replacing it with the skull and crossbones Charlie had found on the booze cruise ship in Brookings. She’d rejected the idea as a bit over the top, but that didn’t change who she was. Watching her prize in the distance, Liz decided that of the two versions of William Kidd’s life—the unlucky man of honor trying to clear his name while others betrayed him, and the ruthless, clever buccaneer who’d buried fortunes still hunted for in modern times—she preferred the latter. It was stronger, more fitting of the Kidd name. Her name.

  “Prepare to be boarded,” she whispered. Liz turned to her quartermaster. “Mr. Waite, report.”

  The man didn’t look up from his scope. “Our heading is one-four-five at seven knots. Target’s position is at three-one-five on a five-knot current, three and a quarter miles to port. Surface winds at eleven knots, south-southeast.”

  “Very well.” She picked up the handset beside the helmsman. “Mr. Vargas, how does our air look?”

  “The system comes and goes,” he said, “but the skies look clear, Captain.”

  Good, she thought. The missing Black Hawk was a concern, and she certainly didn’t need it showing up and complicating her attack. “Air defense status?”

  “System is in the green,” Vargas reported.

  Liz nodded. The close-in weapon system would ruin that Black Hawk’s day if it showed up, just as it had with the Navy bird up in Richmond. The digital bridge clock ticked over to midnight, and the captain keyed her handheld radio.

  “Boarding Two, Command. Launch. Launch.”

  Lt. Riggs acknowledged, and Liz looked out the windows until she saw the motorized lifeboat pulling away from the cutter, leaving a wake of white chop behind it. “Mr. Vargas,” she said, calling the combat center. “Stand by to provide cover for the boarding party.” Then to her quartermaster she said, “Mr. Waite, bring us bow-on to target.”

  As the cutter wheeled to port, turning until it faced the aircraft carrier, the remote-operated fifty-seven-millimeter Bofors deck gun whined into position. The barrel stopped moving once it was centered on the wounded flattop.

  “Steady now,” Liz said, standing beside the young helmsman. She wasn’t sure if the words were intended for him or herself. As she watched the MLB race toward the prize, Elizabeth wondered about her brother and whether he was still alive. She pushed the thought roughly aside. No time for that. Right now there was only the deadly business of surface warfare.

  • • •

  L t. Riggs stood beside the helmsman who was running the launch fast at the sheer wall that was the carrier’s stern. Every deck surface around him, as well as the MLB’s belowdecks, was packed beyond capacity with bodies and equipment. Everyone had a rifle and a sidearm; each was laden with bags and bandoliers of magazines. All of them carried either coils of rope with hooks fashioned in the cutter’s machine shop, pry bars, or acetylene torches for locked hatches.

  They were terribly overloaded, almost thirty people aboard, traveling on a choppy night sea at high speed. Complet
ely unsafe. It was a short ride, Riggs told himself, and besides, this was combat. The normal rules didn’t apply. His heart was pumping fast at the prospect of battle, not with fear but with exhilaration. He and his crew were going to storm an aircraft carrier! How many men in history could claim to have done that?

  Only minutes to go now.

  As the mass of USS Nimitz loomed before them, Lt. Riggs stood a little taller and started to grin.

  THIRTY-TWO

  January 13—12:05 a.m.—San Francisco Bay Area

  It was a long-feared nightmare and the subject of scientific speculation and Hollywood fantasy: a 10.0-plus magnitude earthquake along one of California’s many fault lines. A killer of epic proportions. Many wondered, but few could imagine the destructive power contained within a megaquake of this size.

  In the seismology world, the notion was derided almost completely. Experts thought the energy release would be the equivalent of detonating one trillion tons of TNT, and the earth simply couldn’t produce that type of energy. While a few claimed that it was not only possible but inevitable, others stated with confidence that there were no known fault lines long enough to even be capable of producing a 10.0 magnitude event.

  The Pacific and North American plates, grinding together deep beneath the earth’s crust, cared nothing for scientific speculation about what they could and could not do. They were, and had been for some time, hung up on one another under the Hayward Fault, able to expel small bits of energy, but unable to truly “clear their throat.”

  The fault was longer than it appeared as it connected to a network of lesser faults in the Hayward group and merged with the Calaveras Fault in the south. These connections multiplied its destructive potential well beyond any existing predictive model. With the exception of the small tremors last fall and the foreshock only hours ago, the Hayward Fault had gone through a long “quiet period” of inactivity. This was especially ominous to seismologists, who had—correctly—interpreted this as a time of steadily building pressure.

  They were right about the pressure.

  They were wrong about how bad it would be.

  The San Francisco earthquake of 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake, originated sixty miles south-southeast of the city. It lasted from eight to fifteen seconds and registered a maximum intensity of 7.1. It was a truly terrifying and destructive monster.

  By comparison, the Alameda earthquake that struck on January 13 at five minutes past midnight was a 10.6 magnitude event that lasted four full minutes. Its epicenter was beneath the former naval air station at Alameda, right in the middle of the Bay Area.

  The trigger was much like a finger snap and when enough stress was applied, there was a sudden movement, a release of energy, and a snap. As the stress finally built to intolerable levels under Alameda, the Pacific and North American plates experienced their own finger snap, letting off a burst of energy the planet hadn’t experienced in millions of years.

  Seismic waves traveled outward from the point of origin in expanding, concentric rings, creating S-waves that caused repeating, oscillating ripples in the earth similar to snapping a bedsheet over and over. In this case, the bedsheet would be made of glass, rigid and fragile—like the thin surface of the earth. What came next was the stuff of bad dreams.

  • • •

  Several places around the Bay Area were built upon soft mud fill and silt beds, including the island of Alameda, the industrial and petrochemical areas of Richmond, and Treasure Island, a former Navy base turned trendy community and the location of the Bay Bridge’s central support. The intensity and duration of the shaking liquefied the mud and silt beds within a minute. Much of waterfront Richmond and all of Alameda immediately sank, the bay rushing in at once to cover structures and communities. Ten thousand of the walking dead on Alameda were consumed in a broiling cauldron of mud, seawater, and masonry.

  Treasure Island sank as well, dropping the Bay Bridge’s central support. The span was already bucking and hurling sections of roadway into the bay, and now the plunging central support pulled both the east and west stretches down with it amid an endless screech of twisting steel. Abandoned automobiles and thousands of walking corpses tumbled into the churning water with it. After the initial fall, all that remained was the land-side approaches at the San Francisco and Oakland ends, frayed ends of metal and asphalt poking out over the water.

  They wouldn’t be there for long.

  As the earth’s surface rippled and jumped, the massive cables of the Golden Gate Bridge snapped and the framework went next, twisting and falling away, deforming the towering red supports at each end. The southern tower crashed into the Pacific. At the north, only the Sausalito support would survive, with its approach roadway leading to it and then abruptly dropping away to nothing.

  • • •

  Under the bay, the oscillation of S-waves caused the buried BART tubes to burst through the earth, wriggling like wet pasta. In moments they fractured, flooded, and disintegrated. Corpses that once stalked these dark tubes, shambling past stranded trains that last summer echoed with the screams of trapped commuters, now whirled through the deep waters of the bay by the thousands. Had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like vast clouds of underwater gnats.

  • • •

  In every community, any masonry structure not built of steel-reinforced concrete was instantly destroyed; homes, apartment complexes, warehouses, and historical landmarks were reduced to rubble in seconds, dust rising into the night in vast clouds. Buildings designed to resist earthquakes had never been intended to survive violence of this magnitude and followed soon after. Skyscrapers leaned and toppled, or dropped straight down into billowing clouds.

  The city of Oakland, so close to the epicenter at Alameda, was shaken flat, leaving only skeletons of soot-covered I-beams among the rubble. Even that would soon be gone.

  • • •

  Even as the city above toppled, the bedrock that made up San Francisco’s peninsula rolled and vibrated until it shattered like a china plate. From Daly City north, the peninsula gave a great heave upward, then crashed back down below sea level in fragments.

  The Pacific reacted at once to fill the void, rolling in as a frothing beast, the city’s remains beneath its surging waves. Only the Transamerica Pyramid survived, a white spear jutting a mere fifty feet above the ocean’s surface, waves crashing against its sides. It lingered through several more S-waves, then sank.

  Not far away, the buildings of Alcatraz were shaken into gravel. Like San Francisco, the bedrock here shattered as well, and the island vanished.

  • • •

  Act Two began ninety seconds into the quake.

  • • •

  At not quite seven minutes past midnight, the earth started cracking, a fast-moving and violent event, creating a fissure running the entire length of the Hayward Fault. In thirty seconds, every city in the fissure’s path shattered, from Richmond down to San Jose.

  The planet seemed to growl as, with a terrestrial thunder, the fissure became a crevasse, the earth’s crust yawning open along the fault’s length. The waters of the San Francisco Bay poured into this opening, the charging Pacific following.

  USNS Comfort, the former supertanker turned hospital ship, and the vessel that had lured Calvin’s Family and Evan to the Bay Area, was no longer tethered to a pier. Oakland Middle Harbor was beneath the waves now. The long white ship, still teeming with hundreds of the undead, executed three-quarters of a rotation before tipping over the edge of the crevasse and disappearing.

  On the bay, where swells were now climbing to thirty feet and more, the Pacific was being sucked east into the crevasse, moving fast and with unthinkable force. A black Coast Guard cutter went to flank speed and took the waves with its razored bow, pointing west and fighting to keep from being pulled back into a void that was swallowing sea and land alike. A listing aircraft
carrier, without propulsion or a way to steer itself, helplessly rode the wild sea as it was drawn inexorably toward the plunge.

  A forty-seven-foot motorized lifeboat, loaded beyond safe capacity, was caught by a thirty-five-foot-high wall of water and flung end over end through the night. Bodies spun away into the sea, and those belowdecks were battered against steel bulkheads. Most of the boarding party trapped below were already dead when the tiny craft was sucked over the falls and plunged into the abyss.

  Nimitz turned broadside to the angry Pacific and was instantly punished for it, the surging water tipping it on a forty-five-degree angle and pushing it closer to the edge of the crevasse. By now, the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay had taken on the look of the white waters approaching the drop-off at Niagara Falls, except this waterfall was more than fifty miles long. The aircraft carrier righted itself for a moment as the sea surged beneath its keel. The next wave would push it into oblivion.

  • • •

  The nightmare’s third act occurred at three minutes and thirty seconds into the event. In a terrifying demonstration of the planet’s power and brutality, the earth’s crust west of the crevasse heaved upward for an instant, then crashed back down, sinking an additional fifty feet lower than the previous sea bottom, creating a vast, momentary water pocket. Simultaneously, the land east of the crevasse was thrust up in a hundred-foot-high, gray-black wall of rock running the length of the fault.

  This geological drop and thrust pinched the new crevasse shut, and the sudden offset in the ocean floor created a massive displacement in the water. The roaring Pacific filling the water pocket now hurled itself against this new cliff face and was thrown back toward the open sea in waves climbing as high as fifty feet.

  A sleek black warship attempted to come about as the deadly tide reversed itself and was lost behind a towering wave.