Plague Ship Page 8

  He checked their speed and heading, as well as the depth of the water under the ship. The bottom had dropped to four hundred feet, plenty deep enough for a lurking Iranian sub. But with the Americans so close, he was more concerned with a helicopter or aircraft assault, if they were linked to the theft somehow. A quick glimpse at the camera displays showed him that the Oregon looked as she should, with her single funnel, and decks devoid of containers. Her name was back to normal, though he noted the Panamanian flag still flew from her jack staff. A prudent precaution, because the Iranians wouldn’t need permission to board a ship flying their ensign, as the Oregon normally did. The mast camera high atop one of the cargo derricks showed a tanker they must have passed recently less than a mile astern and a containership steaming along their track a half mile to the north.

  “Hali, anything on sonar?”

  “Except for the noise from eight ships within range that the computer’s already scrubbed, there’s nothing out here but us innocent merchantmen.” He paused, as if to add something.

  Juan saw his frown and said, “Tell me. No matter how small.”

  “About a minute after communications from Bandar Abbas went dead, there was a burst of transmission from the naval base at Chāh Bahār.”

  “Have you heard it since?”

  Hali shook his head. “Just that one time.”

  Juan wasn’t sure what to do with that piece of information, so he let it go for the moment. “What about aircraft or helos?”

  “An ASW plane off the carrier to our south did a pass an hour ago, but nothing from our friends to the north.”

  Cabrillo relaxed slightly, and was beginning to think they might get away with it after all.

  It was just as that thought entered his mind that Hali shouted, “Sonar contact! Bearing ninety-five degrees, seven thousand yards. Torpedo in the water. Damnit, he was waiting to ambush us, with his bow doors open and his tubes flooded.”

  There was more than five miles separating the ship from the incoming torpedo, so Juan knew he had more than enough time to get the Oregon out of danger. His voice remained calm. “Track it, Hali. Let’s make sure we know where it’s going before we react.”

  “Sonar contact!” Kasim cried again. “Second torpedo in the water, same bearing and range. I’m getting target extrapolation off the computer. The first fish is heading for the containership. I have her identified as the Saga, and she left Bandar Abbas twenty minutes before we did.”

  The tactical picture went from bad to worse.

  “We’re getting a warning from the carrier battle group,” Hali called out. “They heard the shots and are launching aircraft.”

  “This is turning into a hell of a fur ball,” Max said sardonically.

  “Tell me about it,” Juan muttered.

  “Come on!” Hali shouted. “New contact. They launched a third torpedo. It’s looking like a spread pattern targeting us, the Saga, and the tanker behind us, a Petromax Oil ULCC named the Aggie Johnston.”

  Had there been just the one torpedo tracking the Oregon, Cabrillo could have handled it. Maybe even two, if he could put his vessel between the second one and the ship it had targeted, but with three fish in the water his options had quickly run out. Either the Saga or the Aggie Johnston was going to take a direct hit. And with a full load of two hundred thousand tons of Gulf crude, there was no way he would let it be the supertanker.

  “They just launched another,” Hali said with disbelief in his voice. “That’s four fish in the water. Range between the Saga and the first is down to six thousand yards. This last fish is going much slower than the others.”

  “It’s lurking to see what the others miss,” Max said. “And will go in to finish it off.”

  If one of the first three torpedoes missed or failed to detonate, this reserve salvo would be in position to destroy its intended target. Cabrillo was familiar with the tactic. He also had no defense against it. He was now thinking they would be lucky to get out of the Sea of Oman alive.

  CHAPTER 4

  MV GOLDEN DAWN

  INDIAN OCEAN

  THE MUGGER’S HAND WAS LIKE A VISE AROUND Jannike Dahl’s mouth and nose. She couldn’t breathe, and any effort to fight him off only made it seem worse. Wriggling against the restraint, she managed to draw a sip of air, barely enough to stave off the blackness threatening to engulf her. She twisted one way and then the other, only to have the hand inexorably stay with her.

  She had seconds before unconsciousness overcame her, but there was nothing she could do. It was like drowning, the most terror-filled death she could ever imagine, only it wasn’t a cold water’s embrace that would take her life but the hands of a stranger.

  Jannike fought one last time, a desperate lunge to break free.

  She came awake with a wet gasp, her head and shoulders lifting from the bed only to be dragged back by the sheets and blankets covering her. The clear plastic cannula feeding pure oxygen into her nose had wrapped itself around her throat, choking her as much as the asthma attack she was suffering.

  Filled with the chilling aftereffects of the nightmare that always accompanied an attack when she was asleep, Janni groped for the inhaler on the bedside table, dimly aware that she was still in the ship’s hospital. She placed the mouthpiece between her lips and fired off several blasts of medicine, drawing in the Ventolin as deeply as her fluid-filled lungs would allow.

  As the medicine relaxed her restricted airways, Janni was able to inhale more of the drug and eventually calm the most acute symptoms of the attack. It didn’t help that her heart was still racing from the nightmare or that she had dislodged part of her cannula so only one nostril was getting oxygen. She readjusted the plastic tube and felt the immediate effects. She glanced at the monitor over her bed and saw her oxygen stats start to rise immediately. She smoothed her sheets and settled deeper into the inclined bed.

  This was her third day in the dispensary, the third day of being alone for hours on end, bored out of her mind and cursing her lungs’ weakness. Her friends had stopped by regularly, but she knew none of them wanted to stay. Not that she blamed them. Watching her gasp like a fish and suck on her inhaler wasn’t a pretty sight. She hadn’t even had the strength to let the lone nurse change her sheets and could imagine what her body smelled like.

  The curtain around her bed was suddenly drawn back. Dr. Passman moved so softly that Janni never knew he had entered the recovery room. He was in his sixties, a retired heart surgeon from England who had given up his practice following his divorce and had signed on to be a shipboard doctor with the Golden Cruise Lines to enjoy a more peaceful life and to deny his ex-wife half of the salary he had once made.

  “I heard you cry out,” he said, looking at the monitors rather than his patient. “Are you okay?”

  “Just another attack.” Janni managed a smile. “Same as I’ve been having for three days now.” She then added in her lilting Scandinavian accent, “It wasn’t as bad as before. I think they’re passing.”

  “I will be the one making that determination,” he said, finally looking at her. There was concern in his eyes. “You’re as blue as a berry. My daughter has chronic asthma, but not like you.”

  “I’m used to it,” Jannike shrugged. “I had my first attack when I was five, so I’ve been dealing with it for three-quarters of my life.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask, are there other members of your family who have it?”

  “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, and neither of my parents had it, though my mother told me her mother had it when she was a little girl.”

  Passman nodded. “It tends to run in families. I would have thought being at sea and away from pollution would have reduced your symptoms.”

  “I had hoped so, too,” Janni said. “That’s one of the reasons I took a job waitressing on a cruise ship. Well, that and to get out of a small town with nothing to do but watch fishing boats come in and out of the harbor.”

  “You must miss your parent
s.”

  “I lost them two years ago.” A shadow passed behind her dark eyes. “Car accident.”

  “I am sorry. Your color’s coming back,” Passman said to change the subject. “And your breathing seems to be getting easier.”

  “Does that mean I can leave?” Janni asked.

  " ’Fraid not, my dear. Your oxygen saturation level is still below what I would like to see.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter to you that today is the crew’s social,” she said with a trace of disappointment. According to the clock on the far wall, the party was only a few hours away.

  The dance was the first opportunity for the younger members of the ship’s hotel staff to cut loose a little since the Golden Dawn had left the Philippines two weeks earlier. It was to be the highlight of the cruise for the waiters, waitresses, maids, and off-duty crew, which happened to be comprised of some devilishly handsome Norwegians. Janni knew some of the younger passengers were going to attend as well. It was all anyone had been talking about for a week.

  “No, it doesn’t,” the doctor said.

  The door to the small hospital ward opened, and, a moment later, Elsa and Karin, Janni’s best friends on the Golden Dawn, swept into the room amid a cloud of perfume. They were from Munich, a couple of years older than Janni, and had spent the past three years working for the cruise line. Elsa was a pastry chef, and Karin worked the same dining-room shift as Jannike. They were dressed to kill. Karin wore a black dress with spaghetti straps that accented her ample chest, while Elsa wore a tank dress and, from the lack of lines under the clinging fabric, nothing else. Both were heavily made up and giggly.

  “How are you feeling?” Elsa asked and sat on the edge of Janni’s bed, ignoring Passman.

  “Jealous.”

  “You aren’t well enough to come to the party?” Karin scowled at the doctor as if it was his fault Jannike’s asthma wasn’t in check.

  Janni pushed her damp hair off her forehead. “Even if I was, I wouldn’t stand a chance the way you two are dressed.”

  “Do you think Michael will like it?” Karin pirouetted.

  “He’ll die for it,” Elsa told her friend.

  “Are you sure he’s coming?” Janni asked, caught up in gossip despite the pain constricting her chest. Michael was one of the passengers who sat at the table they served, a Californian with blond hair, blue eyes, and a body honed from a lifetime of exercise. It was generally agreed by the female staff that he was the best-looking guy on the boat. She also knew that Karin and Michael had made out on more than one occasion.

  Karin smoothed her dress. “He made sure to tell me himself.”

  Passman cut into their conversation, “It doesn’t bother you he’s a Responsivist?”

  She shot the doctor a look. “I grew up with four brothers and three sisters. I don’t think not having children is such a bad idea.”

  “Responsivism is more than not having children,” he pointed out.

  Karin took it as an insult that she didn’t know what the group who had chartered the ship believed in. “Yes, it is also about helping humanity by making family planning an option for millions of third world women and reducing the burden our population places on the earth. When Dr. Lydell Cooper founded the movement in the nineteen seventies, there were three billion people in the world. Today, there are twice that many—six billion— and the rates aren’t slowing. Ten percent of all humans who have ever lived, going back a hundred thousand years, are alive right now.”

  “I saw the same informational placards they have placed around the ship,” Passman said archly. “But don’t you think Responsivism goes beyond social consciousness? For a woman to join, she has to agree to have her fallopian tubes tied. It sounds to me more like, well, a cult.”

  “That’s what Michael said people tell him all the time.” With the stubbornness of youth, Karin felt she had to defend her crush’s convictions. “Just because you don’t know all the facts doesn’t mean you can dismiss what he believes.”

  “Yes, but surely you see . . .” Passman let his voice trail off, knowing that whatever argument was put forth would stand little chance against a twenty-something girl with raging hormones. “Actually, you probably wouldn’t. I think you two should let Jannike rest. You can tell her all about the party later.” He left Janni’s bedside.

  “Are you going to be okay, Schnuckiputzi?” Elsa asked, touching Janni’s thin shoulder.

  “I’ll be fine. You two have fun and I want lurid details tomorrow.”

  “Good girls don’t kiss and tell,” Karin said, and grinned.

  “In that case, I don’t expect either of you to be good girls.”

  The two Germans left together, but Karin returned a second later. She eased up to the head of the bed. “I want you to know that I think I’m going to do it.”

  Janni knew what she meant. She knew that Michael was more than a passing crush for her friend, and that apart from kissing a few times he had spent hours talking to her about his beliefs.

  “Karin, that is way too big of a step. You don’t know him that well.”

  “I’ve never really wanted kids anyway, so what’s the big deal if I have my tubes tied now or in a few years.”

  “Don’t let him talk you into it,” Janni said as forcefully as her weakened body would let her. Karin was nice, but not the strongest person Jannike had ever met.

  “He didn’t talk me into it,” she dismissed too quickly. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. I don’t want to be worn out at thirty like my mother was. She’s forty-five now and looks seventy. No thanks. Besides,” she said with a bright smile, “nothing will happen until we dock in Greece anyway.”

  Janni took Karin’s hand to emphasize her point. “This is a decision that will affect the rest of your life. Give it some more thought, okay?”

  “Okay,” Karin said, as if to a parent.

  Janni gave her a quick hug. “Good. Now, go have some fun for me.”

  “Count on it.”

  Their perfumes lingered long after the girls were gone.

  Janni’s face was scrunched in concentration. The ship wasn’t due to dock in Piraeus for another week, giving her hope that she and Elsa could talk Karin out of her decision. One of the prerequisites for becoming a Responsivist is being sterilized. A vasectomy for men and a tubal ligation for women. It was part of their code to agree to not add more children to an already-overpopulated planet, a dramatic first step that was difficult, expensive, and, in later years, impossible to reverse. Karin was too young for that just so she could bed a good-looking guy.

  She drifted off to sleep, and when she awoke a few hours had passed. She could hear the muffled rumble of the ship’s engines but could hardly feel the calm rocking of the Indian Ocean swells. She wondered how Elsa and Karin were enjoying the party . . .

  Jannike woke again an hour later. She hated being in the hospital. She was lonely and bored, and, for a moment, considered grabbing her old clothes from under the bed and sneaking up to the ballroom for a peek. But her body just wasn’t up to it and again she closed her eyes.

  She heard a crash the instant before the mugger wrapped his hand around her throat again and started to squeeze.

  Jannike flashed awake, reaching for her inhaler just as the door to her room opened in a blaze of light from the office beyond. Stricken by the asthma attack, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Dr. Passman staggered into the room. He wore a bathrobe and his feet were bare. It looked like the front of the robe and his face was covered in blood. Jannike sucked greedily on the inhaler, blinking to clear her eyes of sleep.

  Passman made an obscene cawing sound, and more blood dribbled from his mouth. Janni gasped. He took two more faltering steps, and it seemed the bones of his knees dissolved. He fell back, and his body hit the linoleum floor with a wet smack. Janni saw that wavelike ripples traveled the length of his body, as though his insides had been liquefied, and in seconds he was surrounded by a viscous moat of
his own blood.

  She clutched her sheets tighter, drawing on the inhaler as she began to hyperventilate. Then another figure came into her room. It was Karin in her little black dress. She was coughing violently, wet, racking convulsions that spewed blood in a bright spray. Janni screamed through her own coughing fit, terrified at what she was seeing.

  Karin tried to speak, but all that came out was a watery gargle. She stretched out with her arms in a supplicating gesture, her pale fingers reaching for Jannike. Janni hated herself for recoiling back to the far side of her bed, but she could not will herself forward. A crimson tear escaped the corner of Karin’s eye and left a thick red streak down to her jaw where it dripped, blooming like a rose when it pattered against her chest.

  Like Passman seconds earlier, Karin could no longer support herself. She tipped backward, making no move to break her fall. When she hit the floor, it was as though her skin didn’t exist. Blood exploded everywhere as Karin’s body came apart, and in the instant before Jannike Dahl went into catatonic shock she was certain she was going insane.

  CHAPTER 5

  JUAN CABRILLO STUDIED THE TACTICAL DISPLAY ON the forward bulkhead of the Op Center for a few seconds, time he knew he didn’t have but needed to take anyway. Three of the four torpedoes fired from the Iranian Kilo Class sub were fanning out and tracking toward their targets, while the sonar showed the fourth had slowed so much that the computer gave only its approximate location.

  There was less than two miles separating the containership Saga from the first torpedo, while the two-hundred-thousand-ton supertanker Aggie Johnston had another mile-and-a-half cushion. The third torpedo was coming straight for the Oregon at more than forty knots.

  Cabrillo knew the Oregon could take a direct hit, thanks to the reactive armor along her hull that exploded outward when struck by an incoming torpedo and negated the detonative forces, though it would likely damage critical systems. He could also dodge the incoming fish, using the Oregon’s superior speed and maneuverability, but the overshooting torpedo then would home in on the Saga as a secondary target and seal her fate. There was simply no way for him to protect the two merchantmen and the Oregon, especially with the reserve torpedo lurking out there.