The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  Fyke got on the radio to the Duty Desk at Langley and filled them in on the theoretical threat posed by the Mingo Dubai. Langley got everything they had to give in a few short exchanges, rang off, and contacted the Director, who got on to Homeland Security and the President, and the massive grinding machinery of the United States security system lurched into inexorable motion over the next forty minutes.

  Dalton had the plane on the ground in Guam, sixteen hundred miles east of Manado, a little over three hours later. They refueled, took on some supplies and a change of clothes—this time U.S. Air Force Special Forces blues—and covered the 2,194 miles from Wake to Wheeler Air Force Base, on Honolulu, in a little under six hours. A two-hour overlay at Wheeler for a refit and an engine check, and then another twenty-six hundred miles to Fort Lewis, Washington, where an Agency Gulfstream was waiting on the tarmac.

  It had been fitted out with cots and came equipped with a shower. Dalton and Fyke were shaved and shining and sound asleep by the time the Gulfstream was at twenty thousand feet over the Rockies and the Great Plains were opening up under its wings like a broad green carpet. It was a little before midday mountain time and they had covered eighty-three hundred miles, from Manado in the Celebes to the cold blue sky far above Butte, Montana, in a little less than eighteen hours. It was eighteen hundred miles from Butte to Washington, D.C. The jet was at thirty thousand feet over La Crosse, Wisconsin, when the pilot got a patch-through call from Langley. Deacon Cather was on the phone.

  “They’re asleep, sir,” said the pilot.

  “I know,” said Cather. “I’m afraid it will be necessary to wake them.”

  “Certainly, sir. Captain Dalton or Sergeant Fyke?”

  “Captain Dalton, if you would.”

  In a few moments, Dalton was on the line.

  “Mr. Cather?”

  “Micah, I have a person on hold here. I think it would be useful if you were to talk to her yourself?”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  “I’ll stay on the line, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Thank you. Go ahead, Maryland.”

  “Captain Dalton?” A woman’s voice, young, a little nervous.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Nikki Turrin. I’m with the NSA?”

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Turrin. How can I help?”

  “Well, it’s complicated.”

  “I have nothing but time.”

  “First I have to give you a message from a Major Brancati, of the Carabinieri. He’s been trying to reach you for several hours.”

  Grief is coming.

  “Did he say why?”

  “Yes. He said to tell you that Cora Vasari woke up yesterday. That she’s going to be fine. That she was asking about you.”

  Dalton found that he was staring through the porthole at the eastern part of the United States—a field of lights and water—while an immense fatigue settled over him, a wave of relief that was almost hypnotic. He closed his eyes, pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly.

  “Thank you, Miss Turrin. You have no idea how happy I am to hear that news. How did you meet Major Brancati? Is this the complicated part?”

  “Yes it is.”

  Nikki gathered herself, told the story of 2654 Salina Muggia Vecchia, from the YouTube video all the way to the incident at the villa and the death of a man named Stefan Groz.

  “Groz is dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything on Branco Gospic yet?”

  “Only that Major Brancati says the two were connected. Mr. Cather tells me that you’ve been hunting for a tanker?”

  “Yes. We still are.”

  “Well, we’ve put a lot of things together—my boss and I and the analysts at the NSA, and then with Mr. Cather—and we think that what happened at the pool and the missing tanker might be connected.”

  “They are. Through Branco Gospic.”

  “Yes. Of course. But what concerns us is the bacteria we found at the villa in Muggia. As I said, it was a strain of Vibrio vulnificus. It usually only grows in host tissue, like shellfish, oysters.”

  “So far, I think I’m following you.”

  “Well, we found some traces of this bacteria in the decking around the pool, probably splashed up when the people were dying. The thing is, it was still active. Still multiplying.”

  “But I thought it couldn’t grow without a host?”

  “Yes. That’s true. But this strain seems to be different. It seems to be able to replicate in water. It may not need anything else.”

  “How fast does it grow?”

  “We don’t know. We only have a tiny sample, and that’s degraded. But if it were healthy, our people at the labs estimate that the growth rate could be exponential. All it would need to thrive would be fresh water.”

  “Exponential? Means exactly what?”

  “I mean—well, the lab people think it could infest an entire water system within a few weeks. It could find hosts in freshwater fish. If it were able to survive in ordinary water, it might even infect people who used the source for drinking water. Our main concern is, what if Branco Gospic has found a way to keep this culture alive in something like a tanker ship?”

  Sixty thousand metric tons.

  “You’re saying you think the Mingo Dubai might be carrying this vibrio culture?”

  “Yes. All you’d have to do would be to take on fresh water and then introduce the bacteria. It would take several days, but, if this theory is correct, then by the time the tanker got to a U.S. port it could literally be full of active Vibrio vulnifucus in this mutated form. If it were to be introduced into a body of fresh water, the results could be . . . severe.”

  “What kills it, if anything?”

  “Salt water.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Of course. Bleach, that sort of thing. But mainly salt water. Have you been able to find this tanker yet?”

  “Not yet. But we’ve just started looking.”

  “Micah, this is Cather.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you got any timeline on this ship at all?”

  “Yes, sir. It was moored in a cut on an island one hundred miles east of Sulawesi two weeks ago.”

  “I think we can add some detail to that. An RAF Orion spotted an open boat adrift nine hundred miles west of Diego Garcia. They sent out a Search and Rescue plane and got a survivor off the boat. At the time, he was still alive. He died a few hours later. He was unable to talk—actually, by the time they found him he was very likely insane—I won’t go into why—but there were papers in his pocket that appeared to have come from the Mingo Dubai. They were old records, a cargo manifest dated several years back, but somehow they ended up in the shirt pocket of a Somali adrift in the Indian Ocean. So I think we can, for our purposes, infer that the Mingo Dubai has already passed through the Suez. NATO and the Italians are looking at all similar ships in the Med, but so far no hits. I mean, they all have legitimate papers. And I am afraid we can assume this ship, in its new incarnation, will also have a perfectly convincing pedigree. We don’t have the resources to stop and check the cargo of every tanker making calls in American ports. We get over forty thousand port calls every day. How fast can these tankers move, Micah?”

  “Fyke says, with a light load and good engines, and in calm weather, the Mingo Dubai could do forty nautical miles an hour.”

  “Multiplied by twenty-four hours a day—”

  “They can cover nine hundred miles—”

  “So, in two weeks, that ship could travel . . . ?”

  “Nearly twelve thousand miles, sir.”

  “It’s about five thousand miles from Sulawesi to the Suez—”

  “That’s five days and some, sir. Another four to get through the Med.”

  “How far from Gibraltar to our eastern ports?”

  “I can answer that,” said Nikki. “About thirty-six hundred miles.”

  “Which means
, it might be closing in on one of our ports right now.”

  “We should stop all tankers inside our two-hundred-mile limit, sir.”

  “Which we cannot contemplate, Micah. The effect on our economywould be disastrous. Not to mention lawsuits from shipowning firms, suppliers whose cargo is delayed, international outrage. We’re already the most unpopular nation on the earth—”

  “Only with our enemies, sir—”

  “We need to narrow down the search parameters. We simply can’t check every tanker—”

  “What are we going to do, sir? Wait until one tanker does something hairy and then jump on it?”

  “Effectively, yes. We monitor all tankers of this type approaching any of our ports, especially the large ones: Long Beach, Houston, New York and New Jersey, Corpus Christi, Mobile. My God . . . the logistics—”

  Nikki Turrin broke in.

  “Excuse me, but I think we can ignore all those ports, sir.”

  “We can?” said Cather. “I’m riveted, Miss Turrin. Please go on.”

  “I mean, we can ignore them only on the basis of the scenario we’ve come up with. A tanker filled with a mutated form of vibrio—”

  “Because,” said Dalton. “Salt water kills it. All of our ocean ports are saltwater ports. Including New York, Hampton Roads, Long Beach, Corpus Christi . . .”

  “So, where is it headed?” asked Cather. “Where would it go to do the most damage to the United States of America?”

  A silence. The jet shuddered through some turbulence, the muted roar of her engines a soothing murmur. The lights along the eastern seaboard were coming on as night swept westward out of the North Atlantic.

  “My boss and I have talked this over with the analysts—”

  “Who’s your boss?” asked Cather.

  “The AD of RA, sir?”

  “Ah yes. I knew him before he . . . Well, never mind. How is he?”

  “He’s worried, sir.”

  “Of course. I’m wandering. And your conclusions?”

  “That there was only one U.S. port where a ship like this could do the most irreparable damage to the heartland. If the bacteria behaves the way—”

  “And what port is that?” Cather asked, cutting her short.

  43

  The Port of Chicago, southern Lake Michigan

  The city filled the entire starboard horizon, a shimmering curtain wall of towers and spires, glowing with financial energy and all the arrogance of an imperial global power. It was early evening, the sun was going down behind the center of the city, setting the western sky on fire. The ship was steaming slowly south, slipping past the downtown shoreline, heading for the Port of Chicago harbor at Lake Calumet, twelve miles down the shore. For literally miles and miles, they had churned their way along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and, for all that way, there was nothing but city lights.

  The metropolis and its suburbs stretched far into the distance to the south, curving around the southern end of Lake Michigan into an indigo haze, a necklace of glittering beads that went all the way around the Indiana shoreline and gradually faded into the darkness. To Vigo Majiic, who was cursed with imagination, it reminded him of the scene in Close Encounters, when Richard Dreyfuss walks up the ramp into the starship, looks up and sees a universe of lights, an entire city, inside the ship’s sphere.

  Sailing the Mingo Dubai— now reborn as the Maersk Empire— with a Russian flag on her staff, into the heartland of America like this was, Vigo had to admit, a great achievement, although his participation in it had been generally reluctant, frequently grudging, occasionally craven. But they had done it, largely thanks to Emil Tarc’s fanatical determination. They had come many thousands of miles, from the Strait of Malacca halfway around the world to the Port of Chicago. All that remained was to finish it and go home.

  He watched as the downtown core of Chicago moved slowly by on the starboard side, its scintillating mirror image reflected in the placid waters of the lake. It was a lovely night, starlit, calm, with a bite in the air that carried just a breath of the hard Midwestern winter that was already gathering itself up in Minnesota and along the Canadian Rockies.

  They had been stopped three times by ICE boats and once by a Coast Guard cutter. They had been boarded and inspected for contraband and explosives, but all they were carrying was fifty thousand metric tons of condensed soy milk, bound for a processing plant in Gary, Indiana. They had papers to prove it, and the processing plant was actually expecting their shipment. They had even opened some of the liquid holds for a visual inspection. Condensed soy milk; it would have been hard to find a more innocuous and wholesome cargo. The inspectors left shortly afterward, almost visibly bored.

  Other than these routine stops, the trip had gone by without incident. They had loaded their soy—it really was soy milk—at Jakarta, where soy milk was a major industry, crossed the Indian Ocean, amused themselves with some Somali pirates, sailed up the Suez to Port Said, where they took on a thousand fifty-gallon drums, sealed and welded shut, which had been shipped there from Gospic’s bottlingplant in Budva. The drums had been marked RAPESEED OIL and loaded on the ship by dockworkers who had no idea what they were handling. Once out into the North Atlantic, they had—carefully—introduced the vibrio bacteria into the tanks containing the soy milk, and then they sealed the hatches, leaving the bacteria to do its work as they crossed the Atlantic and came down the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

  By the time they reached Chicago, according to Gospic, the bacteria should have multiplied exponentially. When it was released into the waters of the Port of Chicago, at the head of the Little Calumet River, it would bloom like a terrible, invisible tide, spreading from the Little Calumet to the Calumet, intersecting with the Chicago River Ship Canal, and, from there, within a few days and weeks, it would spread down to the Illinois River, and from the Illinois to the Mississippi, infecting, if all went well, almost every river system in the American Midwest. When word of the contamination reached the global public—and Gospic was going to make sure it did—the consequences to the American agricultural and industrial life along the Mississippi, and throughout the heartland, would be . . . immensely satisfying.

  Not to mention personally rewarding for Vigo Majiic, who was, to be honest, only in this for the money. Tarc was different. Tarc had been in Kosovo when NATO pilots bombed the Pocket, siding, as he put it, “with those Muslim mongrels in the villages and killing better men than they would ever be.” Clinton had been President then, but the pilots were American, and now Tarc was taking a great deal of pleasure from knowing that America would feel the Serbian blade sinking deep into its underbelly.

  The wind was cutting cold now, and, in spite of the magnificence of the view, Majiic went back inside the wheelhouse. Tarc looked up from a picture laid out on the navigation table, tapped the photo, a Google download. You had to love Americans: if you wanted to plan a terror operation, Google Earth would cheerfully provide the maps.

  “Vigo, where’s Jakki?”

  “In the wardroom, with the rest of the guys.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re talking, Emil.”

  Tarc made a face.

  “Griping, you mean. They’re getting on my nerves.”

  “They thought they’d be getting off the ship at Manitoulin Island in Lake Superior. That was five hundred miles ago.”

  “So they get off in Chicago instead. What’s the difference?”

  “Jakki says Manitoulin Island is in Canada. Chicago is right in the middle of America. It’s a lot easier to avoid a few Nanooks of the North on snowmobiles than the entire United States Homeland Security grid.”

  “And how were we going to moor up at the berth with only you and me on board? We steam in without a crew, you think that wouldn’t get the attention of the Master of the Port?”

  Vigo had no good reply to that.

  Tarc was silent.

  “They going to be a problem?” he asked, after some thought.


  Majiic didn’t answer right away, partly because he had no intention of goading Emil Tarc into a confrontation with Jakki and his razor-blade companions. Tarc would lose, and, without Tarc, Majiic was pretty sure he’d be over the side and in the water, swimming for his life, about a second later. Tarc should have kept his promise and paid Jakki’s men off at Manitoulin.

  “No,” said Majiic, finally. “Jakki has them under control.”

  Tarc was staring out at the city skyline, his face as closed as a fist.

  “You been watching those choppers?” he said.

  Majiic followed Tarc’s gesture, saw the lights of the helicopters, three sharp-nosed black silhouettes low against the lights of the Chicago waterline.

  “No. What are they?”

  “They’re Apaches. Gunships. Chain gun. Hellfire missiles. I’ve been watching them through the binoculars. They’ve been cruising back and forth along the waterfront, all the way from Navy Pier down to Calumet, and then back again.”

  “This is America after nine-eleven,” said Majiic, shrugging it off. Tarc was a paranoid. If the Americans had any idea what the ship was carrying, they’d have sunk her off Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, back at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence.

  “We’ve been boarded and inspected three times, Emil. Let’s just cruise into the harbor, moor up in the turning basin, set the soup a-dumping, and go have some dinner somewhere. Job done. We all go home by different routes, like we planned, and Gospic pays us for work well done. Don’t hunt grief.”

  “Grief?” said Tarc, his tone sharp. “I’m not hunting grief, Vigo. I’m here to make an impression on America. Why are you here?”

  Majiic shrugged.

  “Honestly? The money.”

  Tarc was about to say something when Jakki opened the wheelhouse door and walked over to Tarc. He was dressed in civilian clothes—jeans, a leather jacket, cowboy boots—but he looked like an artillery shell anyway.

  “The guys want me to ask you something.”

  Jakki’s attitude was cold but clear. He was not hostile, but he was close to getting there.

  “Okay. What is it?”

  “They want to know why we have to go inside the port. Why can’t you just cruise along the shore here and open the vents? Lake Michigan flows into the Chicago River, which goes into the Illinois, and the Mississippi. What’s the difference?”