The Tide_Dead Ashore

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “I’m hoping Diva and Sean can tell us that by the end of the day. But even so, that’s not what I’m most worried about.” She took a deep breath, trying to sort through the multitude of frightening thoughts swarming her mind. “What I want to know is why the FGL would be developing new strains of the Oni Agent. The original outbreak was incredibly effective. What in the hell do they plan to do with the new bioweapon?”

  -11-

  Dom hovered over Chao’s shoulder as the stormy waves rocked the ship, trying to ignore the undulating muscle pain each time his weight shifted to his injured leg. The innards of the electronics Andris and Meredith had brought back were spread across one of the benches.

  “Where are we at?” Dom asked.

  “I’ve found some butchered information on the flight paths,” Chao said. “I’ve got some dates here as well. We recovered a few flight logs but nothing from today. At least nothing yet.”

  Samantha leaned back in her chair, her arms flexing behind her head. “I don’t think we can dig up anything else on their flight patterns. Data is shot to shit. If there was something to break into, we would’ve broken into it. We found the treasure chest, picked the lock, and there was nothing but a steaming pile of manure in it.”

  “Damn.” Dom’s fingers clenched into fists, but he forced them to relax.

  Meredith and Andris were both recovering in the mess after a checkup with Lauren and Peter. Meredith’s wounds had been relatively minor. The duo had been lucky to come away with no other injuries. Still, Dom hated to think that their efforts had been worthless.

  They were no closer to finding Spitkovsky than they were before the choppers attacked. At least none of the crew had reported any more tracking devices or bugs on their sweep of the ship. Hopefully, Matsumoto’s tag had been the only one on board.

  With the device disabled, Spitkovsky would no longer be able to find them—but Dom was just as incapable of tracking down the FGL.

  “Those flight paths you found—were there any common destinations?” Dom asked. If the transport chopper had visited a location more than once, they could assume that location was relevant to the FGL.

  “Not exactly,” Chao said. “But there is this.” He tapped a button on his keyboard. The multi-paneled screen in front of him showed a map with half a dozen locations marked. “This is why I think the helicopters were from a ship.”

  Dom understood right away. Each of the dots indicated port cities, from Istanbul to Beirut, Tunis to Algiers. There were timestamps next to a couple of the locations. “It looks like this bird was making its way through port cities, going slowly west.”

  “Right,” Chao said, “all the way until they met us. Based on my estimates, which I admit are pretty liberal, the ship those helicopters came from might be anywhere from Lisbon to Casablanca.”

  “That’s a lot of ground to cover,” Dom said. “Anything we can use to narrow it down?”

  Chao shook his head.

  “Damn,” Dom said. Something else bothered him about the data. The ship that helicopter belonged to had been traveling slowly westward for weeks. That meant it had been moving west before they’d even brought Matsumoto aboard. The FGL hadn’t come this way just to intercept the Huntress.

  “What in the hell is the FGL doing all the way out here?”

  “Would’ve been nice if they told us,” Samantha said. “Guess they were too busy trying to kill everybody.”

  “That’s a good question,” Chao said, ignoring Samantha’s sarcasm. “I took the liberty of seeing if any of the cities they’ve visited have major industries in common. Say, pharmaceuticals or weapons manufacturing—you know, things that would be useful for the FGL. But there’s no ready narrative there. Maybe they’re just pirates.”

  “These are all port cities,” Dom said. “Getting ships in and out, delivering goods—that’s what they do.” Something clicked in his mind. “Shit. That’s exactly what they do.”

  Chao cocked his head questioningly.

  “If I were to guess, they’re not raiding these cities for supplies. No, they’re doing something far more sinister. They’re setting up a distribution network.” Dom paced behind Chao’s desk. “Lauren told me the shit that chopper tried to drop on us might be a new biological weapon or at least another strain of the Oni Agent. If that proves to be the case, maybe they’re establishing distribution centers all across the Mediterranean.”

  His fingers curled into a fist again. “For all we know, they might be connecting a shipping network all over the world. Everyone else is too busy trying to deal with the Skulls to notice. The FGL can just traipse into these port cities and set up shop.”

  He let the thought simmer in his mind. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe he was giving Spitkovsky a bit too much credit.

  No, Dom thought, if anything, you aren’t giving him enough credit.

  He’d seen exactly what Spitkovsky was capable of in the Congo.

  Dom surveyed the rest of the equipment piled around the workshop. Maybe they couldn’t get any intel off the devices they’d examined, but he had another idea. He looked at the map of all the possible places the enemy ship might be. His gut told him Spitkovsky wouldn’t be the type to throw a punch and then run. He would be somewhere close.

  He rifled through the pieces of equipment: wires and computers, gauges and all manner of electronics lying across the table. Then he found it. A radio.

  “We should have done this first,” Dom said, holding up the broken radio. “Can’t believe I got so distracted by trying to find out where they’ve been. We need to know where they’re going.”

  Chao and Samantha joined him at the table, studying the radio.

  “Shit,” Samantha said, looking up at Dom. “You’re right. Of course.” She started prying apart the radio. “At least, I hope you’re right.”

  Samantha disassembled the radio. She took a few components back to her desk, but Dom had no idea exactly what she had grabbed. Looking at all the silicon chips and wires was like trying to read a foreign language. She clipped a wire, then another. Then she took part of the radio and hooked it up to the ship’s comms.

  Finally, she looked up from her work. “I got it.”

  Chao scanned all available channels, looking for one with active comms. They had been searching for radio signals from other sources, hoping to find more survivors, especially government and military operations like Lajes Field. But now, with Samantha’s help, they could search for comms on the FGL’s encrypted multiband frequencies.

  For several minutes, they waited in silence.

  “Did it work?” Dom asked.

  “Hard to say,” Chao said. “We could always ping them to see if any channels are open. But if we do that, we risk giving away that we’re listening. Right now, we’re just passively scanning, so until they say something, all we can do is wait.”

  And so they did. Chao’s brow was a gorge of wrinkles as he listened. Dom tried to come up with an alternative plan to find where those choppers had come from or where the FGL was hanging out now. But short of visiting each of those port cities himself, he didn’t have any good ideas.

  Damn it, we need a win, he thought.

  A crackle of static sizzled over the speakers. Dom leaned forward, and Samantha and Chao jolted upright in their chairs.

  The static soon turned into a garbled voice, only somewhat intelligible. He strained to listen to what the voice said. As Samantha adjusted the comms, it soon became clear.

  The voice was speaking Russian.

  ***

  Meredith sat at the table in the workshop with Shepherd and Dom. Glenn, their resident polyglot, was working with Chao and Samantha to translate the communications over the encrypted channels they’d uncovered.

  “This is mostly garbage, isn’t it?” she said, looking over the transcripts Chao and Samantha had already provided.

  “Utter shit,” Shepherd said.

  As Glenn translated more of the conversations, assisted by Sam
antha’s natural language processing software, Chao deposited more freshly intercepted communications. Most seemed to be nothing more than bored chatter between pilots. Casual conversations about who was getting laid and who was hungover that morning. Meredith wanted to reach through the comm systems and choke those bastards. They were responsible for destroying most of the known world, and they were going on as though nothing in their miserable lives had changed.

  “When do these assholes say something interesting?” Meredith asked. “I’m tired of hearing about Vladimir’s stick-shift.”

  She balled up one of the many useless conversations and threw it across the room.

  “You don’t think they’re talking in code, do you?” Dom asked. “I know it’s a stretch, but...”

  “No,” Shepherd said. “This is par for the course for the Russians. I had a friend who worked comms on a destroyer near Syria. Russian jets would buzz them like a bunch of arrogant assholes. My buddy said he’d have his comm officers try to hail them on a VHF and UHF guard. Most of the time, the Russians didn’t respond. But when he had a female comm officer, they would almost always reply. It was usually something like, ‘Lady, you have pretty voice.’” Shepherd shook his head. “Those guys were constantly on the verge of causing an international crisis, and that pickup line was the best they could do.”

  “Glenn,” Meredith called to the man, “tell the Russians to give us something useful.”

  Glenn let out a low laugh. “I’m not sure I can do that. I can understand Russian way better than I can speak it. I’d probably tell them to—”

  The comms sparked to life again. Glenn started diligently typing at Chao’s computer. As he listened, his expression changed. He leaned into the speakers, his lips pursed and brow knitted. This time the words didn’t sound Russian to Meredith.

  Arabic, maybe? She thought.

  When the lines went quiet, Glenn rubbed a hand over his buzzed head. “Okay, that one seemed important.”

  The printer station spit out several sheets of paper, and Glenn dropped them at the table with Shepherd, Dom, and Meredith.

  “Please tell me it wasn’t another story about Alexei’s latest rager,” Meredith said.

  “That would be a negative,” Glenn said. “For one thing, it was in Farsi, not Russian. It was a bit cryptic, but they mentioned an escort.”

  “An escort? I thought we were done talking about debauchery,” Meredith said with a raised brow.

  “You got it, sister. We’re talking about a military escort. Now, Farsi isn’t my strongest language, and there was a fair bit of jargon I didn’t understand. The gist of it is that they’ve got a shipment going out.”

  “What kind of shipment?” Dom asked.

  “Not sure. It might have been more than one shipment.”

  Meredith’s stomach sank. At the same time, she saw a glimmer of understanding in Dom’s expression.

  “Goddammit, I was right.” Instead of explaining anything, Dom punched a button on the intraship comms. The intercom at the table buzzed as they waited for a response.

  “Med bay, this is Lauren.”

  “Have you figured out what was in that tank that Meredith and Andris brought back?” Dom asked.

  “Several assays are still running,” Lauren said. “It’s going to be a few hours before we have a full genomic workup. Chromatography data is being analyzed now, but I won’t be able to confirm anything for sure until the gene sequencing is done.”

  “You might not be able to confirm it, but can you give us a guess?”

  “It’s as we expected,” Lauren replied. “Another strain of the Oni Agent. I think it’s slightly different from the original. Without the final results, I can’t say how similar it is to the resistant strain that cropped up on this ship.”

  “You think it’s airborne?”

  “We haven’t done any tests to determine the mode of transmission,” Lauren said, “but I’m not sure we have to. Sean did a little extra digging. The contraption they were about to drop on us was based on a device intended to be used with the Marburg virus developed by the USSR’s Biopreparat. That device delivered aerosolized viruses. So yes, it’s airborne.”

  “Thanks,” Dom said then looked up at Glenn. “Anything in that conversation that aligns with Lauren’s findings?”

  “Something about new batches,” Glenn said.

  “Do we have any idea where these deliveries are coming from?” Meredith asked. “Or where they’re going?”

  “Nothing,” Glenn said. “The best I’ve got is that the ships go out in five days.”

  “Was that ships, as in plural?” Meredith asked.

  “Yes,” Glenn said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Meredith sighed. “Fantastic. Five days until the next stage of the apocalypse.”

  -12-

  The rest of the trip to the Azores Island was nothing like a pleasure cruise. Shepherd spent the stress-filled hours analyzing the intel they had gathered, but there wasn’t much to work with. They had been lucky the first time. Since the Arabic transmission about the shipments, they had overheard a few Russian pilots making observations about what the Skull-torn landscape looked like in between bursts of idle conversation. It seemed these people were being cautious, not even taking their encrypted channels for granted.

  Good for them, Shepherd thought, bad for us.

  Finally, they reached Lajes. Shepherd strode down the gangplank from the cargo bay to the pier. A blustery wind greeted him, bringing with it a salty scent that intermingled with the dense foliage of the island. Portuguese soldiers were already moving up the gangplank with pallets and crates to resupply the Huntress. Colonel Ronaldo had made good on his promise to aid Dom and his crew.

  When Shepherd reached the bottom of the gangplank, he stepped to the side to allow four men carrying a particularly large load. He saw Dom speaking with Colonel Ronaldo and Frank Battaglia, the Huntress’s pilot, at one end of the pier. Frank had successfully flown Shepherd, Rachel, and Rory from Baltimore to Lajes the first time they’d visited the island. They were damn lucky to have met Ronaldo, and even luckier that he had been so open to helping them.

  “Colonel Shepherd,” Ronaldo said. He offered a hand in hearty greeting. “It is a pleasure to see you here again.”

  “Didn’t think I’d be back so soon,” Shepherd said. “With luck, I’ll be leaving sooner.”

  “You do not enjoy my company?” Ronaldo asked with a gruff laugh. “Do you not like my island paradise?”

  “I’d love to stay,” Shepherd said, “but that isn’t going to help anyone back home, is it?”

  “No, it is not,” Ronaldo agreed. “Captain Holland tells me we need to place some urgent calls.”

  “That we do,” Shepherd said. They needed to convince Kinsey to let them back into his circle. Shepherd was a career military man, but after seeing how Kinsey had treated the Hunters—and after being waterboarded himself—the prospect of calling Kinsey, much less meeting the man face-to-face, made him sick with apprehension.

  “The sooner we do that, the sooner we can get out of here,” Dom said as they boarded a jeep.

  At Ronaldo’s behest, the driver took off, bumping along the empty roads through town toward Lajes Field. They passed the golden sands of the Praia da Vitoria. In another time, the beach had been very picturesque against its backdrop of a quaint, white-walled town. But now, with no one to wander the streets except for military personnel or civilians pressed into service, it looked lonely and depressing.

  They didn’t bother with idle chatter as they crested the hills toward Lajes, instead jumping straight into business.

  “I have a C-130 ready to transport you and whoever else you want back to the United States,” Ronaldo said. “It can land on just about any runway, even if there are a few Skulls in its way. I’ll send a few of my own men with you, of course.”

  Shepherd traded a glance with Dom. That wasn’t part of the original deal. “Why do you want your people to go? They’re saf
er here,” Dom said.

  “If I tell your General Kinsey that I’m sending you, this Matsumoto man, and a few other Americans, I want to make sure you arrive. My people may need the help of the United States someday, and I don’t want your country to think I am not a man of my word.”

  “I do appreciate that,” Shepherd said. “But I can take care of myself.”

  “My plane, my rules,” Ronaldo said. “I would like very much to make a good impression with the Americans.”

  “I won’t tell you what to do,” Shepherd said after a pause, “so long as I get Matsumoto to Kinsey.”

  “Then there is nothing to worry about.”

  The jeep pulled up to a barbed-wire-topped gate. A guard saluted Ronaldo and let them through. They reached a flat, red-roofed building that served as his headquarters. The colonel led them through hallways bustling with men and women, all of whom seemed to be on a mission. Shepherd was surprised. The last time he had been at Lajes, the people here had been restless, but they hadn’t had much to do other than guarding the field against errant Skulls and maintaining the airplanes at the base.

  “What’s everybody up to?” Dom asked. “Looks like you all are running quite the operation in here.”

  “Ah, well, just to prove to you my dedication, I have ordered a few scouting operations to see if we could confirm any of that intel you gave us on the alleged distribution port.”

  Dom’s eyes lit up. “What did you find?”

  “We’ve only just begun,” Ronaldo replied. “My men will report the results as they can. We’re relying on a combination of satellite imagery and flyovers.”

  “That’s much appreciated,” Dom said.

  “It is not so much a favor to you,” Ronaldo said. “I am very much devoted to ending the Skulls.”

  “At least we’re all on the same page there,” Shepherd said as a private held a door open for them. They entered another room full of buzzing communications equipment and technical officers operating computers and radios.