“It’s not surprising,” Dr. Huxley said. “The mind has defensive mechanisms that act to protect us from trauma.”
The captain spoke. “After your ship was attacked, the pirates scuttled it. We happened along before it sank too deeply for us to rescue you.”
“It was a near thing,” Max Hanley added. “A couple of days had passed since the attack. Your vessel was held steady in a highly saline band of water.”
“Days?” Tory exclaimed.
“Think of yourself as Jonah,” Juan Cabrillo said with a warm smile. “Only we had to rescue you from the whale’s belly.”
Tory’s eyes widened. “I remember you now! I saw you in my porthole. You swam down to get me.”
Cabrillo made a self-deprecating gesture as if to say it was no big deal.
“It was you who told me to go to the aft hatchway and close the watertight doors. And it must have been you who drilled holes into the hatch. I thought you were going to kill me, and I almost ran back to my cabin before I realized you had to equalize the pressure so you could get me out. That was the worst. The water level rising inch by inch. I climbed the steps up to the bridge deck to stay out of it for as long as I could, but then there was no place to go.” She paused as if feeling the agony of the freezing water all over again. “I waded in when it was already up to my chest. It took forever. God, I’ve never been so cold in my life. I’m surprised my teeth didn’t shatter from chattering so hard.” She looked up at the trio standing around her bed. “The next thing I knew was just now, waking up here.”
“Your ship began to sink much faster, and it tilted in the water as the bow section flooded. You must have been tossed against a railing or pipe and hit your head. When I finally got the door open, you weren’t breathing, and you had a gash in your scalp.”
Tory touched for the spot on her head and felt a thick bandage.
“We’ve already contacted the Royal Geographic Society,” Cabrillo went on, “and I’m sure they’ve told your family that you’re okay. A charter helicopter is standing by in Japan to get you to a proper hospital as soon as we’re in range. Are you sure you don’t remember anything else about your attack? It’s very important.”
Tory’s face scrunched with concentration. “No, I’m sorry, I don’t.” She looked to Julia. “I think you’re right. My brain has blocked it all out.”
“Last night when you were brought aboard you spoke to the ship’s third officer. Her name is Linda Ross. Do you remember talking to her?”
“No,” Tory replied a little testily. “I must have been delirious.”
Cabrillo went on despite a warning glance from Julia. “You told her your name and said you were a researcher. You went on to talk about the attack and said one of the pirates searched your cabin while you were hiding. You told Linda he wore a black uniform and black combat boots.”
“If you say so.”
“You also told her that you saw two other ships nearby. You said that you thought one of them was an island at first because it was so big. You described it as being perfectly rectangular. The other ship was smaller, and it appeared the two were going to collide.”
“If I don’t remember being trapped on the Avalon for four days, I certainly don’t remember what happened minutes after the attack. I’m sorry.” She turned to Julia. “Doctor, I think I’d like to rest now.”
“Of course,” Julia said. “My office is just outside your room. Call if you need anything.”
“Thank you.” Tory gave Juan an odd look. It passed quickly, and she said, “And thank you for saving my life.”
He touched her shoulder again. “You’re very welcome.”
“Helluva looker,” Max remarked when he and Cabrillo were in the corridor outside the medical bay.
“Helluva liar,” Juan said.
“She’s that, too.” Max tapped his pipe stem against his big teeth.
“Why, do you think?”
“That she’s a good liar or that she lied to us at all?”
“Both.”
“Haven’t a clue,” Max said. “I’m just glad Linda had the foresight to debrief Miss Ballinger last night.”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it,” Juan admitted.
“The shape you were in, I’m amazed you even found your cabin.”
“Linda said the way Tory described the ships and the pirates’ uniforms made her think our passenger might have some military training.”
“Or she’s a researcher, just as she and the Royal Geographic Society claim, and she applies her scientific observation skills to everything she encounters.”
“Then why lie and say she doesn’t remember what happened to her when she was trapped on the Avalon?” Juan’s gaze turned somber. “No one told her how long she was down there, and yet she knew exactly how many days. There’s something more to her than she’s letting on.”
“We can’t force her to tell us, and we can’t hold her. The chopper that the RGS chartered is going to be here in a few hours.”
Juan went on as if he hadn’t heard Hanley’s comment. “And uniforms. She said her pirates wore black uniforms. The guys we tangled with last night wore mostly jeans, shorts, and T-shirts. None of this adds up.”
They entered the operations center. Linda Ross was the officer on duty. She was seated at the command station munching on a bagel sandwich. “How’d it go?” she asked around a mouthful of food, realized the gaffe, and tried to cover her mouth with a napkin. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“Put yourself down for employee of the month,” Juan said. “Talking to Tory last night was a stroke of genius. Today she claims she doesn’t remember anything, not the ships, not the uniforms, not even how she passed the time after the Avalon sank. Which reminds me, she didn’t get a good look at the moon pool, did she?”
“No, Julia was quick with a hot towel to wrap her face as soon as she was lifted from the water. She really didn’t start talking until we were in medical and Hux had started to warm her up. She was still the color of a blue jay and shaking like a leaf, but she was pretty damned sure about what she saw. She made me repeat that the big ship had a rectangular silhouette. Now she doesn’t recall any of it?”
“We’re pretty sure she remembers all right, only she’s not telling,” Max said.
“Why not?”
Juan checked a duty roster clipboard. “That’s the million dollar question. Answer it, and you’ll get an employee parking spot.”
“Nice perk except my car’s about ten thousand miles away at a garage in Richmond.” Linda turned serious. “Like I told you when we spoke this morning, I got the sense that Tory was trying to brief me as though I were her case officer.”
Juan didn’t question her assessment. With her background in naval intelligence, Linda had been in on many such debriefings and would recognize the situation. “She wasn’t sure if she was going to live, so she had to tell someone what she knew.”
Linda nodded. “That’s what it felt like.”
“And now she knows she’s going to be okay, so she clams up. Sounds to me like Miss Ballinger is much more than a humble marine researcher.”
“Which would explain how she managed to survive her ordeal without losing her mind,” Max added.
Far from a simple operation to rid the Sea of Japan of piracy, Juan realized they were in the middle of something far larger. If Tory was to be believed, and there wasn’t anything much more sincere than a deathbed confession, there were two sets of pirates in these waters: those that belonged to the ragtag band they’d engaged the night before and the men in the black uniforms who had assaulted the Avalon. Tory had told Linda they had been systematic and quick. That made them sound more like commandos than the undisciplined thugs who’d tried to overwhelm the Oregon. Then there were the mystery ships Tory spotted at the moment of her attack. He didn’t know their role in all of this. And what of the hapless Chinese immigrants locked in the cargo container? Had they paid the ultimate price for being in the wrong place at the
wrong time, or were they somehow involved?
He couldn’t understand why Tory refused to cooperate. If she was as lucid during her rescue as he thought she was, then she’d remember what he’d written on the dive slate. He’d told her he was part of a security firm tasked to combat piracy. Did that agenda somehow interfere with whatever she was doing? It didn’t seem likely, but how could he not consider it? None of it made sense.
He decided it was best that they get her off the Oregon as soon as possible so they could resume the hunt on their own. He had every confidence that his people would unravel this mystery and get to the bottom of what was really happening.
Mark Murphy wasn’t on watch, but Cabrillo was glad to see him at the weapons station. Today he wore a concert shirt from a band called Puking Muses. Given Mark’s taste in music, Juan wasn’t surprised he’d never heard of them and was again thankful his cabin was nowhere near that of the young weapons specialist. Juan caught his eye. Murph took off his headphones, and even from across the room Cabrillo could hear his music, some techno-industrial sound played at a volume that could crack plaster.
“Up for a little research, Murph?”
“Sure thing. What have you got?”
“I’m looking for a ship that’s large enough to be mistaken for an island and has a completely rectangular silhouette.”
“That it?” Murphy was clearly looking for something a little more to go on.
“It would have been in this area four days ago.”
Cabrillo misunderstood Murphy’s disappointment. He wanted more of a challenge. “So I’m looking for either a big container ship, a supertanker, or perhaps an aircraft carrier.”
“I doubt it’s a carrier, but punch it into the search parameters anyway.”
Any station on the bridge had access to the Oregon’s mainframe computer, so Mark remained at his seat as he pulled up a maritime database for tracking shipping in the Sea of Japan. He remained hunched over his keyboard, his foot tapping the rhythm of the music pouring in over his headphones.
“What’s the status on the chopper from Japan?”
“ETA is three hours,” Linda answered. Because there was so much traffic in the area — five ships were within the Oregon’s one hundred mile radar — they couldn’t risk exposing themselves by fully exploiting her mammoth engines. The tramp steamer was only making twenty-two knots, delaying the rendezvous with the chartered helicopter.
“Okay, I’m going back to my cabin to inform Hiro Katsui that his consortium owes us two million bucks. Call me if Mark gets a hit or when the chopper’s ten miles out.”
“Aye, Chairman.”
The screen saver had been pinging geometric shapes across the liquid crystal screen for an hour and a half as Juan sat at his desk, staring sightlessly at his computer. So far he had written exactly eleven words of his report to Hiro. Even discounting Tory’s reticence, nothing fit the way Juan expected. Had a commando team attacked the Avalon, and if so, why? The most likely answer was to prevent the crew from seeing what was taking place on the other two ships. Could Mark be right about an aircraft carrier, and this was a government operation?
The problem was the only naval force in the area that had any carriers was the United States. China wanted to buy an old Russian flattop, but as far as Juan knew, they were still negotiating, and there was no way pirates could have gotten their hands on one. He was sure it was some other type of vessel that Tory saw. He didn’t discount the possibility that her ship was attacked by trained commandos, only he had no idea how they fit with the pirates Hiro had hired the Corporation to wipe out. Were they working together?
His intercom buzzed. “Juan, it’s Julia. Can you come down to my office?”
Thankful to escape the answerless questions swirling round and round in his head, he left his cabin and made his way down to medical.
He found her in the trauma bay, an equipment-packed room as modern as any level-one ER. The temperature was a cool sixty-five. A sheet-draped body lay on a gurney under brilliant lights. Julia wore green surgical scrubs. Her gloved hands were smeared with blood. Powerful ventilators prevented odors from building up inside the room, yet Juan could still sense the lingering smell of decay.
“One of the Chinese immigrants?” he asked, nodding at the shrouded form.
“No, one of the pirates. Want to take a look?”
Juan said nothing as Julia peeled back the sheet. Death never looked more ignoble, especially with the large sutured Y-incision Julia had cut to examine inside the chest and abdomen. The pirate was young, twenty at most, and skinny to the point of starvation. His hair was lank black, and his fingers and the bottoms of his feet were thickly callused. The pair of sneakers he’d worn when boarding the Oregon were probably stolen during a previous raid and were the first he’d ever owned. There was a single neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, an obscene third eye that was puckered around the edges.
Cabrillo couldn’t discount the brutality of what the pirates had done, but he also couldn’t help feeling a little pity as well. He had no idea what circumstances drove the boy to crime, but he felt the kid should have been with his family, not laid out on a slab like a dissected specimen.
“So what have you learned?” he asked after Julia drew the sheet back over the corpse’s head.
“This guy’s dead.”
“Well, since you performed an autopsy, I assumed he would be.”
“What I mean is if he hadn’t taken a shot to the skull, he would have died anyway, probably within the next few months.” She waved him over to a computer workstation. On the screen were spectrograph lines of a sample Julia had run. He had no idea what he was looking for. His puzzled expression prompted an explanation.
“Hair sample run through optical emission spectrometer.” The Corporation had bought the million-dollar piece of equipment not only for Julia’s medical bay but also for analyzing trace evidence. It had been key a year earlier tracking a missing shipment of RDX explosives. “During my exam,” Julia explained, “I noticed some pretty significant symptomatology. For one, he was about to suffer complete renal failure. Also, he’s anemic as hell; his gums are severely inflamed with late-stage gingivitis. I noted lesions all along his digestive tract and bloody crusts in both nostrils. It made me think of something, and the hair sample proved it.”
“What’s that?”
“This guy had had long-term exposure to toxic levels of mercury.”
“Mercury?”
“Yep. Without treatment, the mercury, like other heavy metals, builds up in tissue and hair. It eventually shuts the body down, but not before causing madness as it deteriorates the brain. I bet if you recheck the video of the pirate attack, you’ll see these guys fought with little regard for their own lives. The level of mercury contamination would have impaired this one’s judgment to the point where he’d fight on, no matter what.”
“Some of them tried to escape,” Juan pointed out.
“Not all of them had such elevated or prolonged exposure.”
“What about the Chinese?”
“I only checked one for toxicity, and she came up clean.”
“But this guy’s riddled with mercury?”
“You could fill a couple of thermometers off him. I checked two of his compatriots quickly and found the same thing. I bet they’re all suffering to one degree or another.”
Juan ran a hand across his jaw. “If we find the source of the mercury, we might find the pirates’ lair.”
“Stands to reason,” Julia agreed, stripping off her gloves with a sharp snap. She removed her surgical cap and redid her ponytail with a well-practiced twist. “You can get mercury poisoning by eating contaminated fish, but the risk’s mostly to children and women who want to conceive. But with the levels I’m seeing here, I’d put my money on these guys basing themselves someplace close to a contaminated industrial site or an old mercury mine.”
“Any idea if there are such mines in this area?”
; “Hey, my job’s medical mysteries and patching you cutthroats back together,” Julia teased. “You want geology lessons, call on someone else.”
“How about their ethnic background? That might help narrow the search.”
“Sorry. The fifteen pirates I have on ice are a veritable United Nations. This one looks Thai or Vietnamese. Three others are either Chinese or Korean, two Caucasians, the others are Indonesian, Filipino, and a mix of everything else.”
“Super,” Juan said acidly. “We have the luck to run across a bunch of politically correct pirates who believe in diversity. Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. I need a few more days to finish up everything.”
“How’s your other patient?”
“Sleeping. Or at least pretending to so she doesn’t have to talk to me. I get the feeling she wants off this tub ASAP.”
“Why am I not surprised? Thanks, Hux.”
Juan had only just gotten back to his cabin and ordered a lunch of steak and kidney pie when Mark Murphy knocked at his door. “What do you have, Murph?”
“I think I found her.”
“Have a seat. So is it a bulk carrier of some kind or a container ship?”
“Neither.” Mark handed over a thin file. Inside was a single photograph and a half-page description.
Juan glanced at the picture and gave Murphy a questioning look. “You sure?”
“She’s on her way to Taiwan from Oratu, Japan, where she was used for a refit of a Panamanian tanker that threw a prop during a storm.”
Juan looked at the picture again. The vessel was 800 feet long and 240 feet wide. Just as Tory had described, the ship was completely rectangular, with no rake to her bow or stern and nothing protruding from her deck to alter her flat profile. Juan read what Mark had managed to learn about the odd craft. She was the fourth-largest floating drydock in the world. Built in Russia to service massive Oscar II–class submarines like the ill-fated Kursk, it had been sold to a German salvage firm a year ago but had then been sold again to an Indonesian shipping company who chartered it out like a service station wrecker.
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