by David Poyer
“Sir, one of the storecreatures, I mean storekeepers, reports she was grabbed from behind, blindfolded, taken into a void, and assaulted.”
“Oh, Christ.” He felt sick, and not just from the aftereffects of the crud. As they’d all feared, the steel beach ejaculator had escalated. He sat up and coughed long and hard. Finally choked out, “Who? Is she hurt?”
“Celestina Colón, sir. Seaman storekeeper. She’s in sick bay, but doesn’t seem to be injured, aside from bruises. At least not that I could see before Chief Corpsman shut the door.”
Dan sagged back, panting, coughing. His scarred trachea spasmed, and closed. He gagged, rolling on his side, trying desperately to clear his airway. He reached for the emergency escape breathing device, clipped to the bulkhead. It was charged with oxygen. But pulled his hand back, got the inhaler instead, and triggered a cold burst of vapor down his windpipe. Tried to calm himself. Tried to breathe …
“You all right, Skipper?”
“Yeah … yeah.” He coughed some more, finally got a full breath, and rolled out. Planted his bare feet on the deck tile.
Then reached for his coveralls, and got dressed.
15
Tropic of Cancer
AN unpleasant sense of déjà vu that wasn’t déjà vu at all. Once again he was interviewing a female crew member. But this time, in sick bay instead of the exec’s cabin. And this time, she hadn’t just been fondled, threatened, and ejaculated on.
The victim was a stony-visaged crewwoman sliding back and forth on the leatherette of Grissett’s examining table as Savo Island, rolling and surging in the swells thirty knots of wind from the south-southwest were pushing up, creaked and groaned deep in her steel bones. Colón didn’t look shocked, or numb. Her coveralls were pulled down to the waist. She wore a white uniform-issue T-shirt sweat-stained under the pits. Chief Toan, the master-at-arms, stood behind her; Cheryl Staurulakis leaned in the corner, arms folded; Dr. Schell, who’d apparently been called in, was snapping off green latex gloves by the sink. He started to reach for the tap, but diverted in midmotion to a plastic gallon jug, to pour the rinse water from.
Dan cleared his throat and sank onto a vacant stool. “Is she all right? I mean, physically?”
“I gave her a sedative,” Schell said. “Examined her. Slight bruising. No permanent physical injury.”
“Thank God for that. Celestina. I’m so sorry this has happened. But we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
He took a deep breath. This had to be done right. “One question first. It’s a formality, but the regs say I’ve got to ask it. We have to report all sexual assaults, but there are two kinds of reports we can make. Restricted, and unrestricted. Restricted is when you, the victim, don’t want your name used, and don’t want command or law enforcement involvement. That protects your name and privacy. The other is unrestricted. That triggers a full NCIS investigation.” He paused. “We’re going to ask you to sign a paper, specifying your choice.”
“She wants an unrestricted report,” Staurulakis murmured.
“XO, I need to hear it from her.”
“Unrestricted,” Colón said.
Dan nodded. “I think that’s the right decision. All right then, I file the reports for the full investigation. So, tell me what happened. From the beginning.”
He knew Colón by sight, had eaten with her on mess decks visits and greeted her in the passageways. She worked in Supply. Slight, brown-haired, with smooth olive skin and a tiny mole near her upper lip. She reported now in spare sentences of careful school English that seemed somehow separate from whatever emotional process was going on behind dark eyes. She’d been in the aft supply passageway when the lights had suddenly gone out. Someone had grabbed her from behind. She was shoved into one of the spaces—she wasn’t sure which—and pushed down onto something soft.
“Then he undressed me,” she said. “And used his fingers.”
Dan looked at Schell, who shook his head no almost imperceptibly and held up a plastic bag containing a swab and gauze. The rape kit, Dan guessed, though he’d never seen one before. But unless there’d been penetration …
“Was there more than one assailant?”
“No sir. Only one.”
“Did you see, or feel, a weapon?”
“I felt a point in my back. He said he had a knife, and would use it if I left before the lights came back on.”
“So he spoke. What did he sound like?”
“Gruff. Deep. But it sounded false. Like he was not using his regular voice.”
“And you say you weren’t actually, uh, penetrated? Even slightly?”
“He had his fingers in me, Captain. I heard him grunting. But I didn’t feel a dick. Then there was a clanking noise. He told me to stay where I was until five minutes after the lights came on.”
Dan looked at the overhead, then to the master-at-arms. “Did you search the compartment yet?”
“Yessir, we conducted a quick search. Whatever this asshole jacked off into, he took it with him.”
“I’ll expect a complete statement by noon. What else, Chief?”
Toan looked away. “We’ll search the compartment again, Captain. See if we can get fingerprints. And yes, we will take a complete statement.”
“Not nearly enough, Chief. This is the second incident. And even worse than the first. You and Lieutenant Singhe were investigating that. I saw one follow-up report. Then nothing. No mess decks scuttlebutt? Nobody bragging to his buddies?”
“We have our eyes on a suspect.” Toan glanced sideways at Colón, who was staring at the door as if hypnotized.
“We’ll talk about that offline. Celestina, what about you? Anyone been stalking, annoying you?”
“I did have one guy.”
“And who was that?”
“The Iranian. Shah.”
“Behnam Shah,” Dan said. One of the castaways they’d picked up in the Arabian Sea. A religious refugee, if you believed their story; an escaped murderer, if you believed the Iranian news agency. Actually, Shah was the one who’d been hanging around outside CIC, before Wenck had told him he wasn’t going to be admitted. “He works in the galley, right? So he’d know the layout back there. He was stalking you?”
“Not exactly. But he kept trying to talk to me.”
“Attempting to get you alone?” Staurulakis asked her.
“No, just to talk.”
“Friendly? Or in a threatening way?”
“I didn’t want to talk to him. I got a boyfriend back in Caguas. I don’t think it was Shah. The man who did this, he did not have an accent.”
Which might mean nothing, if the guy knew more English than he was letting on. Dan asked Toan, “Was Shah one of your suspects in the groping, with Petty Officer Terranova?”
“Not particularly. No sir.” Toan hesitated, then added, “Let me point out one thing, sir. The fact that her attacker turned off the lights.”
“So?”
“He turned off the lights in the helo hangar passageway, too. When the Terror got groped.”
“Which … I’m a little slow today, Chief. Enlighten me as to what you’re saying.”
Toan said, “There’s no topside access from the interior passageway on the Supply Department level. So the lights are always on, and there’s no easily accessible switch. Unless someone knows how to turn them off back at the lighting panel.”
Staurulakis stepped forward, arms still crossed. “So you’re saying, an electrician? Or someone in charge of the compartments?”
“Could be,” Toan said. “Remember, if it’s the same guy, he fiddled with the darken ship switch up on the hangar deck level, too.”
Dan hesitated, then patted the woman on the shoulder. “One more question, Seaman Colón.”
“Yes sir.” A soft voice, but with steel under it. “It isn’t the first time.”
He blinked. Had been about to ask if she’d smelled anything like lime aftershave or cologne, but now said, “What? Not the first … he�
�s done this to you before?”
“Not him. But it isn’t the first time it’s happened to me. Shit like this.”
She stared ahead as the ship groaned around them. “I was in a foster home … my foster brothers. Both of them. I thought, when I joined the Navy, things would be different. But maybe it’s never going to be.”
Staurulakis stepped forward and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. Looking up at Dan, she said, “We’ll get this guy. And put him away for a long, long time. I promise you that, Celestina.”
* * *
CLIMBING to the bridge level, Dan had to stop to catch his breath again. The ladderwell reeled. Weird thuds and moans echoed through the steel. With the monsoon, this wind wasn’t going to stop. And given the layout of their patrol areas, they’d be steaming beam to almost all the time. Ticos didn’t have fin stabilizers, like smaller ships, and were tender anyway; she’d roll nonstop.
He felt doomed. And guilty; the girl already hadn’t had a great life, with foster homes and abusive families. But she’d thought the Navy would be different. Better.
Instead … this.
The guidelines were clear. Once the report landed on the CNO’s desk, there’d be an NCIS agent en route at flank speed. Flying out from the nearest office, which was Bahrain, to the carrier, and maybe getting him or her on a helo, if the carrier was close enough. Or, if someone had planned a resupply and refuel, via the resupply ship. They wouldn’t let this stagnate. Too much chance of splatter.
And though he didn’t like to think this way, he had to cover his own ass and the command’s by making sure he followed the instructions on sexual assault—sending messages to God and everyone documenting every detail, everything he’d directed done, everything he’d been told to do. It would take time and command attention, time he desperately needed.
But he owed it to Colón. Her assailant must be the same guy who’d assaulted Terranova.
Or was it? He clung to the smooth steel of the handrail, and broke into a cold sweat just thinking about two sexual predators on the same ship. A copycat? No, Occam’s razor: Do not unnecessarily multiply entities. And the MO, which hadn’t been announced, was the same: finagling the lights, then abduction at knifepoint. Their perpetrator had started with fondling, and now progressed to manual penetration while masturbating. The next step, from everything he’d read, would be rape and possibly mutilation, or even murder.
So, how to proceed. One of the castaways had been hitting on her. But he doubted they’d know the ship well enough to screw with the wiring. Also, they hadn’t been aboard when Terranova had been … no, wait, they had. So that didn’t exonerate them. Especially this Behnam Shah.
But Toan had mentioned another suspect. One he “had his eyes on.” Dan hadn’t wanted to ask who in front of the others. Maybe they could identify a suspect. Isolate him, until they could offload the bastard. But he had to root this out. Before it widened the already deep chasm between the females, including the female officers, and the rest of the ship.
A damaged crew took much longer to repair than a damaged ship. Was it Jenn Roald who’d told him that? Or Nick Niles?
So he needed to address it. Not just officially, by the reporting requirements, but directly, to the crew. He lifted his head toward the top of the ladder as someone opened the door to the bridge. Cleared his throat, straightened his back, and climbed toward the light.
* * *
THEY cruised through the day and the next and then the next, midway between Karachi and Mumbai. The wind varied between twenty and thirty knots, consistently from the southwest, and the seas continued very heavy. Terranova picked up another strange high-altitude, slow-moving contact, like the one they’d tracked going through Hormuz. Or that had perhaps tracked them … On the second day a message relayed that Pakistan had both refused their refueling request and officially protested their presence within the Islamic Republic’s exclusive economic zone. The government had referenced its reservation, on signing UNCLOS, that it did not authorize military maneuvers by foreign-flagged warships within the EEZs of coastal states without the consent of said states. The U.S. was asked to remove its task forces and not to intrude again.
In sick bay that morning, Dan was examining a reddish stain on a cotton pad. “I’m not sure what I’m looking at here,” he confessed as the ship labored around them.
Schell, dark circles under his eyes, sagged back against the tier of bunks. Grissett sat on the lowest. The command master chief, Tausengelt, had pulled out a desk chair and reversed it. The doctor murmured, “It’s a culture. The stain brings it out. From one of your hot-water heating systems.”
“And?”
“We’d need an electron microscope to be certain, but I’m 90 percent sure it’s somebody new in the zoo. A previously unidentified amoebal pathogen. In other words, a variation of Legionnaires’ disease.”
Dan held the stain to the light as the physician went on to explain that Legionella bacteria had evolved to infect freshwater protozoa. “Such as amoebas. Now, we may not care for the idea, but we’re pretty much always surrounded by bacteria. And most of our freshwater systems—at home, in hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and so forth—are colonized by protozoa. They love warm water 24-7, same as we do, so it’s an ideal habitat. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, they never cause trouble, because we’re adapted to them. But in the case of Legionella pneumophila—meaning, it likes the lungs—the bacteria can jump to us, infect us, and cause the symptoms you’re familiar with.”
Dan nodded. He still felt exhausted, even when he got enough sleep, and too many of the crew felt the same way, evidenced by the way they dragged around. “But, a bacterium? Doc here’s been dosing everybody with cipro—”
“You’ve obviously got a ciprofloxacin-resistant bug. Which we’re seeing a lot more of, by the way.”
“How, exactly, does it infect? What’s the route of transmission?”
“Via the hot-water systems.”
Dan shook his head. “No, you said it bred in the hot-water systems. How does it get from there to the crew? In the drinking water?”
Schell squinched up his face. “No, stomach acid’s usually up to the job of dissolving any bacteria. It’s still iffy, but I suspect your showers.”
Dan frowned. “You mean in them, or … or by taking showers?”
“The latter. Unfortunately. Aerosolized and misted by the nozzle, water’s easy to breathe into the lungs. Which are also wet, warm, and welcoming.”
Schell droned on about how the bacterium involved was atypical, which was why Bethesda hadn’t detected it in the sputum and blood from the first fatality, back in the Med. Dan interrupted. “I get all that, Doc. But how do we fix this? We thought it was in the vent ducts.”
“Right, your corpsman told me that.” He nodded to Grissett. “Not a bad guess, working with what you knew.”
“You’re certain it’s our hot water.”
“As I said, without an electron microscope to positively identify, no. But based on everything else, 90, 95 percent certainty. The fact that your bronchoalveolar washings came back negative makes me suspect a new strain. I plan to call it Legionella savoiensis.”
Oh, great. But maybe this wasn’t the time or place to argue over Latinate terminology. “All right, let’s go with that diagnosis. What do we do about it?”
“The book answer is, have the ship recalled and quarantined. Steam-clean every hot-water pipe and heater and fixture aboard. Especially any dead legs in your system. And wherever your cold- and hot-water systems mix, like heat exchangers. If I report this to Navy Medical, that’s what’s going to come back. Pull you off the line and send you home.”
“We can’t do that.” But as Dan rubbed his mouth, he remembered previous experiences with NavMed. Both professionally competent and fiercely independent, the Bureau of Navy Medicine was its own fiefdom. Pressure from outside, or even from above, merely hardened its stance. Recall and quarantine was all too possible. “We can’t l
eave now. Not with a war about to start.”
“You also can’t keep the guys on a gallon of water a day, sir,” Grissett put in. “Or keep the showers secured.”
“I sailed with the Korean navy,” Dan said. “They didn’t have showers. They bathed in buckets.”
All three men just looked at him. He grimaced, seeing how it was, and went on. “But, uh, obviously we can’t do that for more than a couple days. So, tell me what to do. Chemicals? Hyperchlorination? How do we fix this?”
Schell looked away. In a low voice he said, “You can’t use chemicals aboard ship. Not in the concentrations needed for eradication. We’re not talking just upping the chlorine count here. Trihalomethane, chlorine dioxide—you can’t use those in confined spaces.”
“There isn’t anything else?”
Schell hesitated. “Well … there is one thing you could try. It’s called ‘heat and flush.’”
Dan glanced at Grissett. “I’m listening. Doc?”
“Me too, Captain. But I think I know what he’s gonna say.”
The physician said, “You have to get your water up almost to boiling. At least a hundred and eighty degrees. Two hundred is better. Hold it there for thirty minutes, and you’ve got a sterile system. We do that with outbreaks in hospitals.”
Dan said, “Okay. The downside?”
“It doesn’t work for long-term infestation management. You’d have to follow up with some form of continuous chemical disinfection. The main problem for you is how labor-intensive it’s going to be. We’re talking isolating every section of the system, cleaning out any incrustation or scale that can harbor colonies, then charging with superheated water and maintaining it at that temperature for half an hour. The thermal expansion—”
“We’re gonna burst some pipes,” Dan said.
“Which means potential burns and scalding.”
Dan nodded, tracing the plumbing systems in his mind. He turned to Tausengelt. “Sid, an interrelated issue. CMC, you can speak to this, maybe. We’re really stressing this crew. If we break them, we can lose this ship, with or without eliminating the crud. We’re seeing equipment degradation—the reduction gear assembly on number one gas turbine generator, the water intrusion on the CRP prop system. This heat and flush Dr. Schell is describing … can we impose this extra level of work? Deployed, at condition three, in heavy seas?”
