CHIMERA-44
A Prequel to the Novel
LAST STAND ON ZOMBIE ISLAND
CHRISTOPHER L. EGER
Smashwords Edition
Necro Publications
2012
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CHIMERA-44
© 2012 by Christopher L. Eger
Cover art © 2012 by Travis Anthony Soumis
This digital edition © 2012 Necro Publications
Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:
David G. Barnett
Fat Cat Graphic Design
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Chapter 1:
The Kostov
Captain Third Rank Vladimir Markov yawned as he watched the sun melt on the horizon. It was breathtakingly beautiful as the ball of orange was consumed into the bright blue water of the Indian Ocean. Forty-nine sunsets in a row, all exactly like the last. He was sick of it.
“Only eleven more sunsets until we head to Jakarta, Pavel Mikhailovich,” the Captain said to the helmsman of the ship, who wholeheartedly agreed. The crew loved the Indonesian port city for a myriad of reasons.
Every 60 days they would put into Jakarta for a week to refuel and take on supplies. The Indonesian government was friendly to Moscow going back as far as the 1950s and was well supplied with Russian-made weapons. This allowed the ship a wide berth in Jakarta with few questions asked. During port visits, the ship’s research labs would be closed, sealed off limits, and barred by armed Russian Federal Security Service (formerly known as the KGB) guards.
The 270-foot long research vessel (R/V) Akademik Kostov was part of the Russian Defense Ministry’s deep-water research department and as such was a naval auxiliary. Painted white and liberally streaked with rust, she was easily mistaken for an old freighter that had seen better days. Still, with most of the once proud Russian Navy swaying abandoned at their docks, Vladimir was happy to get the time at sea—even if he was driving a bug mobile.
For most of the past year, the ship sailed lazily along the length of the 2,600 kilometer-long Sunda Trench that stretched from Myanmar to Sumatra. The trench, at over 25,000-feet deep was one of the longest stretches of hyper-deep water in the world. The fact that you could go days in some parts of the trench and not see another vessel in the area only helped matters. Officially, the Kostov’s mission was in studying giant amphipods that lived in the trench while performing deep-water ocean bed studies. However, the vessel’s true purpose was to house a top-secret Bio Safety Level 4 scientific research laboratory.
Referred to by the code name Vozrozhdeniya II after the former top-secret Soviet bio war facility abandoned years ago in Uzbekistan, Markov knew only that it held the worst of the worst of experimental weaponized bugs. Stuff too lethal to risk working on in the Motherland, even in the remotest parts of Siberia.
“Have you heard from Professor Arkady so far today?” He asked the helmsman.
“No, Captain,” the sailor said, “And I don’t want to,” he added with a smile on his pockmarked face.
Markov knew the feeling. The ship’s crew included 16 naval personnel who actually operated the vessel, some civilian oceanographers who provided the official cover, four machine-gun toting guards from the FSB, and the three Defense Ministry scientists. On port calls, everyone but the FSB guards and the scientists could leave the ship. It was Moscow’s orders, not his, but it definitely made the bug doctors and their cavemen guards abrasive. It didn’t help that Professor Arkady had the personal relationship skills of a dead fish and the breath to prove it.
The phone rang on the wall of the bridge and Markov reached for it. Made of heavy plastic back in the good old Communist days, its weight was comforting to him in a nostalgic way.
“Bridge,” he barked into the receiver.
“This is Pasha,” he heard from the other end. The man was one of the civilian oceanographers, “I was back here having a smoke, and there are two small boats off our stern, coming up very fast.”
Alarm bells went off in the back of Markov’s brain, “What kind of boats?”
“Little rubber ones, with a bunch of monkeys in them,” he said, falling back on the oft-used Russian insult for Asians. “They are throwing lines over the back of the boat! Pirates!” he screamed into the phone before it went dead.
“Sound the alarm,” Markov ordered the helmsman, “and start making evasive maneuvers.” Fucking pirates, he thought. Typically, a ship’s radar does not provide good coverage of the area immediately to the rear of a ship, so the bandits were professionals. If it were a military attack, they would never have seen it coming. These were crooks looking to steal a ship.
More than half of pirate attacks in the world take place in South-East Asian waters. Most of the 400 or so attacks in those waters every year are on merchant ships and private yachts from hard up little Asian gangs who robbed the crew or hijacked the ship and ransomed it back to their owners. Still, with some 40,000 ships passing through those waters in any given year, the chances of encountering a pirate was only 1%. No matter how you took those figures, the Kostov was very unlucky.
The young sailor cranked the ship’s wheel hard over to port until it stopped at full left rudder, simultaneously increasing the throttle on the diesel engine’s topside controls. The Kostov heeled slowly over to the left and Markov grabbed on to the chart table to keep from losing his balance as the deck below his feet canted. Deep below deck, he could feel through his feet the throb of the huge diesel engine increase as it rotated the shaft up to the ship’s maximum speed of 11-knots. They would never outrun the pirates, who could probably make 30-knots or better on their small boats, but maybe they could shake them off.
Markov picked up the phone and rang the Lab as he reached under the chart table and took out the AKS-74U commando rifle that was hidden away there.
««—»»
“What the hell is going on up there?” demanded Professor Arkady as he hit the speaker button on the phone, being impossible to pick up the receiver while he was in his one-piece positive pressure personnel suit. “The Ministry assured me that this ship would be staffed by professional sailors!”
“Would you shut the fuck up, you idiot,” barked Captain Markov over the speaker. “We are under attack.”
Arkady’s blood ran cold in an instant, if the lab’s contents were to fall into the hands of a foreign government, or worse a terrorist organization or criminal gang, the last chapter of the human race was written. “Who is attacking us?”
“We think it’s pirates. I’ve sealed the bridge and ordered all hatches secured. You may want to barricade yourself.”
Arkady looked at the two other scientists in the lab who were very silent and had their eyes fixed on his, waiting for orders. “Have you advised Moscow?” he asked.
Markov’s voice dropped an octave. “I was going to call them on the satellite phone only if I thought they breached the lab.”
“So you haven’t initiated the sequence yet then?”
“No Professor, but I will if I have to.”
Arkady nodded quietly, “I understand.”
The only entrance to
the lab was through a series of airlocks that contained multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. They were all electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from the lab likewise was decontaminated to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release. As each of the four airlocks opened and closed, a light panel would display for each both inside the lab itself and on the bridge. An FSB security guard with a fully automatic AKS-74U assault rifle to repel any unauthorized entrance, with no exceptions, guarded the entrance round the clock.
It was when Arkady heard the distant sound of a rifle firing through several airlocks that he knew the end was coming. The distinct high-pitched staccato of the AKS-74U was answered and silenced by heavier bursts from several different rifles. He only hoped that the guard did not have his access badge visible. With it, the new owners of the badge could open three of the four airlocks that kept them and Chimera-44 locked away from the rest of the ship.
“Markov,” Arkady said into the speaker, “I think they are coming. You have to get the off-duty guards and your men down here as soon as possible to keep them from making it into the lab.”
Only silence hummed from the speaker in reply.
“Markov!” Arkady yelled to the same reply. On the notification panel on the wall of the lab, the first airlock, the vacuum room, was shown opening and then closing. They must have found the guard’s access badge
“Begin the sterilization procedures,” the professor said in a shaky voice to the two lab assistants. Immediately the men started to pull vials of experimental pathogens from the sealed medical cabinets and placed them inside a short magnetron incinerator. With the beams of radiation strong enough to cook a frozen turkey all the way through to perfection in about five seconds, the magnetron would vaporize the active viruses in half that time. It had worked in other labs for Marburg, Ebola, and Nipah virus, so Arkady hoped it would work on Chimera-44.
In Greek and Roman mythology, the chimera combined elements of lion, goat, and serpent into one monstrous form. The modern day version had been under development for decades. One strain had taken the common cold and mixed it with polio, tweaking them at the molecular level to cause a new disease. Another had merged smallpox and anthrax to make a hyperactive spore capable of producing both viruses at once. Arkady’s project was Chimera-44, and merged rabies and a little known transmissible spongiform encephalopathy disease commonly known as kuru, often found among the cannibalistic cultures of Papua New Guinea. The projected outcome was to make a blood-borne pathogen that would ramp up the infester’s level of Kryptopyrrole to the brain and drive them to a destructive, manic fit. It could be very useful in both warfare and covert operations.
The second airlock notification door showed red as it opened. Arkady hurriedly grabbed examination trays, specimen slides, and petri dishes, and hustled them to the incinerator.
“It’s full professor,” argued one of the assistants.
“Go to the devil,” he said and stacked the pieces on the table by the device. “Get these in there somehow.”
The speaker on the wall crackled in, “Professor,” said Markov on the bridge, accompanied by the accent of gunplay rattling in the background. Markov sounded like he had his own issues to deal with. “The second airlock has been breached. There are four pirates in the ultraviolet room trying to get into the third airlock. I’ve got everyone not on the bridge headed down there to you, but I don’t know if they will make it on time.”
“If you see the fourth airlock go red, follow your orders, Captain.”
“That was a given.”
Arkady gave his attention to the test subjects. In a thick Lexan cube in the corner of the lab stood four enclosures. Each held a macaque primate with his or her own filtered air supply. The foul little monkeys had been carefully chosen due to their being carriers of SFV. Some of the best bio war theorists in Minsk believed that Simian Foamy Virus (SFV) was one of the keys to the CIA’s development of HIV, and the best bet to speed up the molecular clock of Chimera-44. All four of the dreadful beasts had been in injected with chimera cells weeks ago and were producing their own mutated versions of it in their veins.
They had to be killed.
Arkady took a knee awkwardly in his pressurized suit and reached under the monkeys’ enclosure. One by one, he twisted the knobs that turned off the oxygen supply to their self-contained bio space. Within minutes, they would suffocate and die, taking their virus with them into death. The professor hoped that they had that long to wait.
The third airlock blinked red on the notification board on the wall. The intruders were in the shower room directly outside the lab itself. Next to the notification board was a CCTV monitor that showed several short Asian men armed with AK-47s ransacking the cabinets in the room. The only thing that protected them from the unwitting pirates and the pirates in turn from virus in the lab was a single, secured, double-doored airlock.
««—»»
Markov inserted the last magazine he had for his AKS-74U and aimed it out of the shattered bridge window into the darkness. He triggered a few short bursts to keep the attackers’ heads down as he carefully braced himself against the bulkhead to keep from slipping in the blood on the deck. The helmsman had taken a round in the face the first time the pirates had unsuccessfully rushed the pilothouse and the Kostov was making lazy circles in the open sea on autopilot. As far as he could tell, there were about a dozen pirates on board from the two small boats. As soon as the attack had started, a large surface contact had appeared trailing them at the extreme range of their radar—most likely the small boats’ mother ship. They were running out of time.
“Yes sir, that position is correct,” he said into the satellite phone cradled between his shoulder and ear as he watched for threats. “I am showing 4875-meters of seawater under the keel right now. They are in airlock three and I don’t think the reaction team will stop them in time.”
“You will win the Gold Star for this, Markov,” said the Admiral, as he probably sat safe at his desk back in Vladivostok.
Markov smiled grimly as he fired a burst at a shadow in the dark. The last Gold Star the ministry had awarded was posthumously to submarine captain Gennady Lyachin, of the Kursk, which sank after an explosion in 2000. He was sure that his elderly father would show it off proudly by a framed picture of him. It would make the old man proud.
Markov slung the assault rifle over his shoulder and inserted his key into the black box on the control panel. The box, once unlocked, opened to display a switch and a button. The switch armed the device, the button triggered it. “Tell my father that I did my duty, Admiral,” he said as he clicked the phone off. For a true Russian, the glass is always half-empty.
He watched the cameras that showed him the labs four decks below his feet. A cluster of bandy-legged Asian men armed with everything from chair legs to machetes and AK-47s were beating on the airlock door in the shower room. On the other side of the airlock, the camera chronicled Professor Arkady and his assistants rushing about the laboratory. In the corner, four monkeys fought the glass of their containers and clawed at their throats. Soundlessly, he saw muzzle flashes in the shower room camera as the pirates started attacking the sealed and locked door. They would be inside the lab itself in moments.
Markov picked up the phone again and rang the lab. He saw Arkady look to the phone, then directly at the camera, and slowly nod his head. The scientist removed his pressurized helmet and ran gloved fingers through his hair. One of the assistants, saw Markov, was busily crossing himself.
The Captain armed the device with a flick of the switch and then plunged his fingertip into the button on the panel to initiate the sequence. With a centimeter of depression, the switch sent a trigger of electricity as it made contact and completed the circuit. In a microsecond, the electric waves coursed to 38 separate 100-kilo charges placed throughout t
he hull bilges of the Kostov. The 270-foot long ship was partitioned into 19 watertight compartments to keep it from sinking. However, each of those compartments had its own pair of the demolition charges inside each of them. With the force of a dozen heavy torpedoes, more than four tons of Semtex-10 plastic explosives tore the entire bottom out of the ship in one violent motion.
In less than a minute, the smoking hulk that had formerly been the R/V Akademik Kostov had slipped below the waves, careening downward to the eternal darkness of the seafloor some three miles below it. The Russian media would simply release a bulletin stating that the ship was overdue in Jakarta 12 days later and no follow up information was ever forthcoming. Again, for a true Russian, the glass was always half empty.
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Chapter 2:
The Ikan Hiu
Abdurrahman, or simply Dur to his friends, clung to a mat of broken wreckage atop the gently swaying sea. He was getting too old for this robbery and killing routine. He had spent the majority of his life as a simple fisherman, plying the waters off Java for tuna and other huge pelagic fish. However, foreign trawlers from China and India had destroyed the local fish populations in the past decade. The giant factory ships had vacuumed the ocean clean and left nothing for him to harvest to feed his family. Then the Preman, organized crime bosses from the city, had come to his village looking for local sailors who could handle small boats and weren’t afraid of the sea. Men who needed money to keep their family from starving and would do anything for it. The next thing he knew, he was a member of a seagoing gang of hijackers who crept aboard ships in the middle of the open ocean, and hijacked the vessel.
Chimera-44 Page 1
