The Covenant Of The Flame

by David Morrell

  'That's the problem, isn't it?' O'Malley said.

  'Excuse me, Captain?'

  'What should I think? Trouble? For sure. Obviously something's wrong. The question is whose trouble – ours or that trawler's? I guarantee this. My dear departed mother, God rest her soul, didn't raise her son to be a dummy.'

  'I second that opinion, Captain.'

  'Thank you, Lieutenant.' O'Malley allowed himself to grin despite his nervous preoccupation. 'And I promise you, I'll do everything in my power to insure that every mother's son in my command lives to see his family again.'

  'We already know that, Captain.'

  'I appreciate your confidence, but it won't get you a better rating on your duty report.'

  The lieutenant chuckled.

  'I want a boarding party,' O'Malley said.

  'Yes, Captain.'

  'Armed.'

  'Yes, Captain.'

  'Get the Zodiac ready.'

  'Aye, aye, Captain.'

  O'Malley continued to frown toward the radar. Thirty minutes later, the Sea Wolf's night-vision screen revealed the enormous South Korean trawler wallowing in waves a thousand yards ahead, its bulky outline made eerily green by the monitor.

  The lieutenant straightened, cocking his head. The Air Force wasn't exaggerating, sir. I've never seen a darker ship.'

  'I want every gun manned,' O'Malley said.

  'Aye, aye, Captain.'

  'Still no response to our radio messages?'

  'Afraid not, sir.'

  'Pull portside and hail them on the bullhorn.'

  O'Malley nervously waited as a communications officer crouched protectively beside a housing on the deck and blurted questions through the bullhorn.

  'Ahoy, Bronze Bell!'

  'Ahoy! Please, respond!

  'You have entered United States waters!'

  'Please, respond!

  'Ahoy, do you need assistance?'

  'Fuck it,' O'Malley said. 'Get a team in the Zodiac. Make sure they're fully armed, Berettas, M-sixteens, and for God's sake, make sure they're fully protected from our deck when they cross to the trawler. The fifty-caliber machineguns. The forty-millimeter cannons. The works.'

  'Aye, aye, Captain.'

  The Zodiac, a rubber outboard-motor-powered raft, sped toward the Bronze Bell, its seven-member team holding M-16s at the ready. In the dark, as they reached the trawler and threw grappling hooks connected to rope ladders over the trawler's side, O'Malley said a quiet prayer for their safety and mentally made the Sign of the Cross.

  The team shouldered their rifles, unholstered their pistols, jacked a round into each firing chamber, and clambered briskly up the rope ladders, disappearing over the side.

  O'Malley held his breath, regretting that his duty required him to remain aboard while these other men – good men, brave men -potentially risked their lives.

  Something was very wrong.

  'Captain?' The two-way radio beside O'Malley crackled.

  Picking it up, O'Malley answered, 'Reception is clear. Report.'

  'Sir, the deck is deserted.'

  'Understood. Remain on battle alert. Establish sentries,' O'Malley said. 'With caution, check the lower decks.'

  'Affirmative, Captain.'

  O'Malley waited the longest five minutes in his life.

  'Captain, there's still no sign of anyone.'

  'Keep checking.'

  'Affirmative, Captain.'

  O'Malley waited another tense five minutes.

  Flashlights wavered on the trawler's deck. Lights came on. The two-way radio crackled. 'Captain, we can't find anyone. The trawler appears to be completely deserted.'

  O'Malley knew the answer to his next question. The team would surely have reported the information. But he had to ask it anyhow. 'Did you find any corpses?'

  'No one alive or dead, Captain. Unless they're hiding somewhere, the vessel's been abandoned. It's kind of spooky in a way, sir.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, Captain, the television's on in the crew's recreation area. There's a radio playing in their quarters. There's food on plates in the galley. Whatever it is happened, it must have been fast.'

  O'Malley frowned. 'What about damage to the trawler? Any evidence of a fire, any reason they might have abandoned ship?'

  'No, sir. No damage at all. And anyway, the lifeboats are still aboard.'

  Then what the hell happened? Where in God's name did they go? How? O'Malley nervously wondered but didn't allow his apprehension to affect the sound of his voice. 'Understood,' he said with authoritative calmness. The trawler's engines?'

  'Shut down, but we got them started again. No problem, Captain.'

  'Fuel?'

  'The tanks are half full.'

  'What about the shortwave radio?'

  'We found it turned off, but it's in working order, sir. If they wanted to, if there was trouble, they could have sent a Mayday alert.'

  'No one's reported hearing any. Keep checking.'

  'Aye, aye, Captain.'

  O'Malley set down the walkie-talkie. Pensive, he stared through the darkness toward the lights on the massive trawler. On occasion, he'd heard stories about vessels found abandoned at sea. The explanations were usually obvious: a rustbucket that an owner had scuttled in order to collect insurance but that had failed to sink as the owner intended, or a yacht that pirates had looted after killing the passengers (raping them as well, if there were females) and throwing the corpses overboard, or a fishing boat that drug smugglers had abandoned because they feared that the Drug Enforcement Agency suspected their cargo and was about to try to capture them.

  In previous centuries, O'Malley was aware, a crew would sometimes (though rarely) mutiny, execute their captain, toss him to the sharks, and use lifeboats to escape to a nearby coastline. Again from previous centuries, he knew about ships upon which a plague had broken out, one-by-one the corpses of victims hurled overboard until the last man alive, suffering from the hideous disease, had managed to complete a diary about the ordeal and then jumped into the ocean, preferring a quick, relatively painless death by drowning instead of a prolonged, agonizing one.

  Then too, O'Malley had heard legends about crewless ghost ships, The Flying Dutchman, for example, although in that case the captain was reputed to be still aboard, doomed to drift for all eternity because of a gamble that he'd lost with the Devil.

  The most famous abandoned ship was the Marie Celeste, a brigantine transporting commercial alcohol from New York to Italy, found crewless between the Azores and Portugal in 1872. But O'Malley had never understood why that ship acquired its mysterious reputation. After all, its sails had been damaged, its cabins soaked with water, its lifeboats missing. Obviously a severe storm had frightened the crew into thinking that the Marie Celeste was about to sink. They'd foolishly used the lifeboats to try to escape and been swallowed by the storm-churned sea.

  All easily explainable.

  But despite O'Malley's familiarity with these accounts, he'd never in all his lengthy varied experience in the Coast Guard actually ever come across an abandoned vessel. Certainly, he'd seen barges torn apart on reefs because of a storm, but they didn't fit in this category. A ship in calm open water, drifting without a crew for no apparent reason? O'Malley shook his head. He wasn't superstitious or fanciful. Although he felt a chill, he didn't believe in lost gambles with the Devil or visitors from outer space abducting humans or time warps or the Bermuda Triangle or any other of the ridiculous theories that the supermarket tabloids promoted. Something was terribly wrong here, yes, but its explanation would be logical, and by God, he intended to find out what that explanation was.

  He turned to a crewman. 'Contact headquarters in Portland. Tell them what we've got here. Ask them to send another cutter. Also ask for assistance from the local police, maybe the DEA and the FBI. Who knows how many other agencies will be involved by the time we sort this out? Also… I'm sure headquarters will think of this… they'd better notify the Bronze Bel
l 's owner.'

  'Right away, Captain.'

  O'Malley brooded again toward the massive trawler. There were so many details to anticipate. He couldn't leave the Bronze Bell with his men on board her, but as soon as the other Coast Guard cutter arrived, either it or the Sea Wolf would begin a search for sailors in the water. At dawn, air reconnaissance would join in the search. Meanwhile the Bronze Bell would be escorted to Portland, where various investigators would be waiting.

  The two-way radio crackled. 'Still nothing, Captain. I mean we've looked everywhere, including the cargo hold. I'll tell you this. They sure had good luck fishing. The hold's almost full.'

  A thought abruptly occurred to O'Malley. 'Almost full? What were they using to fish?'

  'This big a catch, they had to use nets, sir.'

  'Yes, but what kind of nets?' O'Malley asked.

  'Oh, shit, sir, I think I see what you mean. Just a minute.'

  O'Malley waited. The minute stretched on and on.

  'Damn it, you were right, sir. The bastards were using drift nets.'

  Furious, O'Malley pressed his hands on a console with such force that his knuckles whitened. Drift nets? Sure. The Bronze Bell was owned by South Koreans. They, the Taiwanese, and the Japanese were notorious for sending trawlers into the North Atlantic 's international waters, casting out drift nets made of nylon mesh that spread for dozens of miles behind each trawler. It had recently been estimated that as many as thirty thousand miles of these nets were in use in the North Atlantic, scooping up every living thing, in effect strip-mining the ocean. The nets were intended to be an efficient means of trapping enormous (unconscionable!) amounts of tuna and squid. The effect was to depopulate these species. Worse, the nets also caught dolphins, porpoises, turtles, and whales, creatures that needed to surface periodically in order to breathe but that couldn't when caught in the nets. Eventually, cruelly, they drowned, their carcasses discarded as commercially useless when the nets were reeled in. Thus those species, too, were depopulated.

  The bastards! O'Malley thought. The murderous bastards!

  He strained to keep rage from his voice as he spoke to the walkie-talkie. 'Is the net still in the water?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Then turn on the winches. Haul the damned thing in. We'll be taking the Bronze Bell to Portland. The weight of the drift net will hold her back.'

  'I'll give the order, sir.'

  O'Malley seethed, glowering at the trawler. Shit! Shit! Those fucking drift nets. Those irresponsible-!

  A voice blurted from the walkie-talkie, 'Oh, my God, Captain! Jesus! Oh, my-!' The man on the other end sounded as if he might vomit.

  'What's the matter? What's wrong?'

  'The drift net! We're hauling it in! You can't believe how much fish it-! Christ! And the dolphins! The porpoises! I've never seen so many! Dead! They're all dead! Tangled in the net! A fucking nightmare! The crew!'

  'What? Say again! The-?'

  'Crew! Twenty! Thirty! We're still counting! Oh, God in heaven! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! We've found the crew! They were tied to the net! They drowned the same way the dolphins and-!'

  The next sound from the walkie-talkie was unmistakable: anguished, guttural gagging, the Coast Guard officer throwing up.

  EIGHT

  Brooklyn.

  The sign on the stake outside St Thomas More grade school said CLOSED, NO TRESPASSING, PROPERTY OF F AND S REALTY. Stapled to the sign was a piece of paper, which in legal-looking fine print explained that this area had been rezoned for multiple-family dwellings. Another sign – this one on the school's front door – said, SCHEDULED FOR DEMOLITION, FUTURE SITE OF GRAND VIEW CONDOMINIUMS.

  The school, a three-story drab brick structure, had been built in 1910. Its wiring, plumbing, and heating systems were so in need of expensive repairs that the local diocese, at the limit of its financial resources, had been forced to sell it and arrange for Catholic students in the neighborhood to attend the newer but already crowded St Andrew's school two miles away. Parents who in their youth had gone to St Thomas More and had sent their children there mourned its passing, but as the bishop had indicated in his letter – read by the local pastor to his parishioners during Sunday mass – the Church faced a looming monetary crisis. Regrettable sacrifices had to be made, not only here but in almost every diocese across the nation. Prayers and donations were required.

  At eight, the smog was already thick, the air sultry, as three cars turned into the teachers' abandoned parking lot beside the school. The cars were dark, four-door, American sedans, each with F AND S REALTY stencilled in yellow on their sides. Two men got out of each car, greeting the others with a nod. In their late thirties to early forties, they wore subdued, light-weight, polyester suits. Five held clipboards, the sixth an oversized metal briefcase. They considered the once vital school and the plywood that now covered its windows.

  'A pity,' one man said.

  'Well,' another man said, 'nothing lasts forever.'

  'Nothing?'

  'At least, on earth.'

  'True,' the third man said.

  'And you know what the bottom line is,' the fourth man said.

  The fifth man nodded. 'The collection plate.'

  'Did you bring the key?' the sixth man asked.

  The first man patted his suitcoat pocket.

  They approached the school's front door, waited while the first man unlocked it, and stepped through its creaky entrance, letting their eyes adjust to the shadows, smelling dust and mold.

  The first man shut the door and locked it, the shadows thickening. His voice echoed, emphasizing the building's desolation. 'I suppose any room will do.'

  'It's better on the second floor,' the man with the briefcase said. 'Less chance of our being overheard in case someone stands outside near a window. I noticed gaps in some of the plywood.'

  'Agreed,' the second man said.

  'All the same, we'd better check this floor.'

  'You're right,' the first man said. 'Of course.'

  Now the echo came from their footsteps as they crossed the hallway. While four of the men inspected each classroom, the boys' and girls' rest rooms, a storage room, and the various closets, the fifth man made sure that the back door was locked, and the sixth man checked the basement. Only then did they proceed up the creaky stairs.

  Throughout, the first man had the eerie sense that they were intruding, that the spiritual residue of more than eighty years of eager, laughing children had been absorbed by the building, that there were… for lack of a better word… ghosts here, and that all they wanted was to be left alone to play here one last time, their final summer. Sentimental, he admitted, but in a profession that so often required him to be cynical, he decided that for a few harmless seconds at least, he could indulge himself.

  The man was of medium height and weight, with brown hair, hazel eyes that tended to assume the color of the clothes he wore, and unremarkable features, so average that no one ever remembered him. Over many years, he'd trained himself to be a chameleon, and yesterday afternoon, he'd followed Tess to LaGuardia Airport.

  When he reached the second floor, he squinted higher toward the continuing stairs, then right and left, noticing open-doored classrooms and two drinking fountains that seemed unnaturally low until he recalled that they weren't designed for adults. Shrugging, deferring to the man with the oversized briefcase, he said, 'Which room do you like?'

  'The one on the left above the parking lot.'

  'As you wish.'

  'But not until…' The man with the briefcase pointed upward toward the final floor.

  'Do you really think it's necessary? The dust on the stairs hasn't been disturbed.'

  'I was trained to be thorough. Your expertise is surveillance, but mine is…'

  The first man nodded. 'And you do it superbly.'

  'I accept the compliment.' The man's eyes glinted.

  'I'll check the upper floor while the others inspect the rooms on this floor. In the meantime, si
nce we're under pressure, can you…?'

  'Yes, I'll set up my equipment.'

  Five minutes later, after having inspected the musty upper floor where he found no one, the first man descended to the middle floor and the room on the left above the parking lot. He and his associates had been very careful in selecting this meeting place. It was highly unlikely that their enemy had managed to trace them here. Mostly – he suspected – the man with the briefcase was concerned that despite the abandoned school's locked doors and barricaded windows, a drug addict or else one of the city's innumerable homeless might have discovered a way to gain access and find sanctuary here. Even a drug addict might make sense of their conversation and become an informant.

  At the same time, the chameleon reminded himself that the enemy, over many years, had demonstrated remarkable cleverness, extreme survival characteristics, ruthless determination, including the ability to counterattack. No matter how carefully this abandoned school had been chosen, the fact was that the rendezvous site had been used four times already. A pattern had been established, and whenever a pattern occurred, that pattern could be discovered. The man with the briefcase was right. There was no harm in being cautious.

  The chameleon noticed two things when he entered the classroom. First, the sixth man, the electronic-security specialist, had opened his oversized briefcase, plugged a monitor into a battery, and was using a metal wand to scan the blackboard, the ceiling, the walls, the floor, and the furniture. Second, the other men – normally so serious and dignified – were seated in cramped positions in miniature table-topped chairs designed for ten-year-olds. The absurd situation reminded the chameleon of scenes from Gulliver's Travels and Alice in Wonderland.

  'It's clean,' the sixth man said, replacing his equipment in the briefcase, shutting it, and locking it.

  'Then we'll begin.' Although the chameleon had been deferential until now, he assumed the place of authority, sitting at the teacher's desk.

  As one, each member of the group reached into his suitcoat pocket, removed a ring, and placed it on the middle finger of his left hand. Each ring was identical, handsome, distinctive, a twenty-four karat band on top of which a large gleaming ruby was embossed with the golden insignia of an intersecting cross and sword.