Island 731 (2 page)

The gag went slack and was pulled away.

“Just kill me now,” Coffman said. His voice sounded better. In fact, despite the pain enveloping his body, he felt hydrated.
They’ll heal me first
, he thought,
and then torture me
. It seemed likely, but the pain he felt told him they’d gotten a head start on the torture.

“You are far too valuable alive,” said the voice.

“Show yourself.”

The man didn’t reply.

Coffman stared at a bare cement wall in front of him. He couldn’t see the lamp mounted to the ceiling above him, but felt the heat from it on his skin. He tried to turn his head, but found it restrained.

“I’m going to free your right arm,” came the voice. “When I do, try to move it. Slowly. You were injured.”

Coffman had a list of questions, but when the restraint on his right arm loosened, he felt them melt away. His hand tingled as blood flowed more freely into the limb.

“Go ahead,” the man said. “Move your arm.”

The limb felt heavy. Stubborn. Like it didn’t want to move, but Coffman needed to see something more than this barren cement wall. To know he still existed and this wasn’t hell. Pain pulsed from his shoulder as he moved the limb. He didn’t remember injuring the arm, but he didn’t remember much. His memories of the
Yorktown
felt distant. Years old.

“Good,” the man said. “Very good.”

When his hand came into view, it glowed in the bright light cast from above. His hand looked different. Thicker. Swollen, perhaps. But that wasn’t all. The shape was wrong. The thickness, too. And the pattern of his arm hair, once thin and faint, now appeared thick, and dark. He turned his arm over and found a tattoo of a naked woman sitting upon the guns of a battleship.

“That’s not my arm,” he said. “That’s not my arm!”

The man behind him
tsk
ed a few times and then reached out and pulled the arm down, restraining it once more. “You’ve suffered a great deal,” the man said. “You’re confused.”

Coffman tried to understand. Tried to remember. Images came in flashes. He saw the ocean. A seagull. A beach. Then darkness. And lights. Always lights, blinding him to the shapes around him. Men. Their voices, speaking Japanese, returned like a song heard too many times. But he didn’t know what had been said.

“Now then,” the man said, the tone of his voice as pleasant and soothing as Coffman’s own grandmother’s. “Try to move your other arm.”

There was no tingling this time. In fact, he barely felt the limb, but it was there. He sensed the movement. He needed to see it, to know if he was going mad. Gritting his teeth, he willed the limb up. His eyes clenched with pain and he didn’t see his arm rise, but he felt it.

When the man said, “Wonderful,” Coffman opened his eyes.

And screamed.

This arm wasn’t his, either.

It wasn’t even human.

1.

P
ACIFIC
O
CEAN,
N
OW

“Man overboard!”

Mark Hawkins reacted to the words without thought. He hadn’t even seen who’d fallen and couldn’t identify who had shouted the words. But he heard the confirming splash and saw several crewmembers on the main deck look over the port rail.

At a run, Hawkins leapt up onto the port rail and launched himself over the side. But he wasn’t on the main deck, which was just eight feet above the waterline. He was on the second deck, twenty-five feet up and six feet in from the main deck’s rail. As he dove out and looked down he saw an undulating, solid mass of plastic, rope, and wood. He had no idea how thick the layer of garbage was, or how dense, but when he didn’t see a body languishing atop it, he knew the crew member who’d fallen overboard was trapped beneath it. He also knew that his landing would hurt.

He heard a gasp as he fell past the main deck, just missing the rail. His feet struck the layer of trash a moment later, punching through like a blunt spear. The rest of his body followed, slipping through the chunky film, but not before becoming tangled in rope. Stunned by the impact and chilled by the Pacific waters, Hawkins nearly panicked, but the memory of someone in need of help kept him focused.

His eyes stung when he opened them. Visibility was poor thanks to a swirling cloud of small plastic chips churned up by his explosive arrival, and worsened by the noonday sun being filtered through layers of colored plastic, casting the depths in dull, kaleidoscopic shades.

He tried to swim, but something tugged at his ankle, rooting him in place. He leaned forward and pulled his leg in close. His ankle was wrapped in a loop of rope bound to a lump of congealed refuse that floated like a giant buoy. Had he landed on the mass, his rescue effort would have been cut abruptly short. Not that it was going well at the moment.

But Hawkins was not completely unprepared. He unclipped the sheath on his belt and freed his seven-and-a-half-inch San Mai Recon Scout hunting knife. The razor-sharp blade cut through the rope like it wasn’t there. After sheathing the blade, Hawkins pushed off the heavy chunk of garbage and swam deeper. Six feet from the surface, he came free from the lowest traces of floating debris and immediately saw the kicking feet of the fallen crewmember just twenty feet away.

As he swam closer, he saw that the small feet were attached to a pair of smooth, lithe legs. The man overboard was a woman.

Dr. Avril Joliet.

Despite being a genius, or damn near close to one, Joliet didn’t always make the best choices. How she’d earned two Ph.D.s in biology and oceanography without getting lost at sea, eaten by a predator, or hit by a bus was beyond Hawkins. It wasn’t that she was absentminded, just impulsive. Quick. But it was those same qualities that allowed her to learn fast, blow the doors off conventional theories, and make discoveries while her peers spent time wondering if they should bother. But this time, Joliet’s speed might have finally caught up with her.

Her quick, jerky movements confirmed his fears. She was stuck. Hawkins swam up behind her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. Her white blouse billowed as she spun around, eyes wide with fear. There were a number of predators—large sharks, mostly—that prowled beneath the Garbage Patch, waiting for prey animals to become stuck.

When she saw him, she relaxed, but as she turned, a large, beaked face came into view, startling Hawkins. A burst of bubbles shot from his mouth as he shouted in surprise. When the bubbles cleared, Joliet stared at him with a single eyebrow raised. A second glance over her shoulder revealed the face of a sea turtle, its black eyes staring lifelessly into the abyss.

Confused, Hawkins moved around the oceanographer for a better look. She wasn’t tangled at all!

The turtle, on the other hand, looked like a sacrifice bound to a pillar for some ancient god. Loops of rope around the fins held it tight, the struggle for freedom long since abandoned. The loggerhead sea turtle looked like all the others Hawkins had seen, with one startling exception—the body and shell were pinched at the middle, narrowed to a diameter no thicker than Hawkins’s forearm.

What the hell?

Desperate for air, and confused by Joliet’s actions, he hitched him thumb toward the surface and kicked through the layer of trash. Pushing through the refuse, Hawkins took a breath and craned around, looking for the
Magellan
. The ship cut through the ocean two hundred feet away, coming around in a wide arc.

Joliet surfaced next to him, sucking in three deep breaths and then saying, “You have to help me!”

“The turtle is dead,” he replied.

“Hawkins. Mark. This is an important find. It’s tangible evidence. Provoking. Something like this will be hard to ignore. Who doesn’t love a sea turtle?”

Hawkins didn’t disagree. The loggerhead turtle was an endangered species and images of the deformed creature would make a compelling photographic addition to the article he was writing, but that didn’t mean she had to dive in after it. “It’s not going anywhere. Drake would have come back for it.”

“There isn’t time!” Her eyes were wide. Frightened.

Hawkins had only known Joliet for a month, but in that time he’d seen her step between two fighting crewmen, go toe-to-toe with Captain Drake, and haul in a thirty-pound bluefish, which became a meal for the crew. She wasn’t a timid person. But something had her spooked. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean that usually meant one thing.

Shark.

“Please tell me it’s not a great white,” Hawkins said with a frown.

Joliet’s eyes somehow widened a little bit more.

He had no doubt she was rethinking the wisdom of her actions. She’d seen the turtle, and then the shark—probably just the dorsal fin—and leapt in without thinking. Like he did when he gave chase.

Just like he did the first time he found himself in a similar situation. And while he had no desire to relive that particular event, they were already in the water, and she was right about the turtle. He drew his knife and held it above the water for her to see. “I’ll cut it free, you hold it.”

A nod.

Hawkins looked over his shoulder. The
Magellan
finished its turn and headed back toward them. The crane, which normally lowered submersibles and Zodiacs into the water, rotated out over the water, a line dangling down. If they held on to the wire, the winch would have no trouble plucking them from the ocean. He waved his knife in the air, hoping the glint of sunlight off its blade would alert them to their position. A shark was bad news, but being run over by a two-hundred-seventy-four-foot, three-thousand-ton research vessel could really ruin a guy’s day. “It’s going to be dead weight once it’s free, so we’re going to have to time this right.”

With the
Magellan
closing in, Hawkins said, “Ready?”

“After you,” she replied.

Hawkins didn’t really understand how he’d become the ring leader of this unauthorized salvage, but he was determined to see it through. He pushed the air from his lungs and descended through the debris.

The turtle, still bound to the lump of plastic detritus, was easy to find, despite the poor conditions. Hawkins kicked over to the loggerhead and began cutting away its bonds. As the first flipper came free, Joliet slipped up next to him and took hold of the turtle. He had no idea if the turtle would be buoyant at all—it might sink like a stone—but he hoped there was enough gas trapped in its deformed body to keep it afloat. If it sank, there was no way he and Joliet could keep it aloft.

He moved to the second of the four bound flippers and began hacking away at the ropes. The lines fell away like overcooked spaghetti. Free from its bonds, the turtle fell forward, but its descent stopped when it leveled out. Hawkins allowed himself a grin. Gas trapped beneath the shell would make the job much easier.

Gripping the cut lines, Hawkins pushed himself down and started on the line binding one of the back flippers to the mass. But the knife had no impact.

Steel cable
, Hawkins thought.
Damn
.

A distorted shout and hard tap on his shoulder brought his eyes around. Joliet clung to the turtle with one hand, but the other stabbed out toward the open ocean.

A shadow slid through the debris like a wraith through fog. Circling. Closing in. Sharks weren’t above scavenging the dead, but the electric impulses of their racing hearts and kicking feet drew the predator toward the promise of a fresh meal. Man-eating sharks, bears, and big cats were often treated as aberrations needing to be hunted and killed, but Hawkins knew his place in the food chain.

With renewed urgency, Hawkins moved the knife up and hacked off the turtle’s rear flipper. The large reptile came loose, but it didn’t sink. Joliet kept it aloft. Hawkins looked for the shark again, but it was lost in the field of debris. That he couldn’t see the hunter didn’t put him at ease. The sharks ampullae of Lorenzini—jelly-filled electroreceptors on the snout—would easily detect the electric field produced by their bodies. While they were blind, the shark would see them with the clarity of a falcon hovering overhead.

A loud rumble through the water announced the presence of the
Magellan,
reversing its screws and coming to a stop. Hawkins slid over the top of the turtle, took hold of its shell on either side, and kicked for the surface. He felt lumps of hard plastic bounce off his back as he rose. The debris grew bigger as he neared the surface.

Almost there,
he thought. But a garbled scream and jarring impact told him he wouldn’t be reaching the surface. He turned to the right and saw the maw of a great white shark open to envelop him.

2.

Hawkins clung to the reddish-brown loggerhead shell, hoping the armored carapace would shield him from the snapping jaws. The shark’s snout hit the turtle’s underside, scraping deep grooves in the softer underbelly as it manically snapped its jaws open and closed, searching for a bit of flesh to bite into. The impact drove the deformed shell into Hawkins’s torso, knocking out what little air remained in his lungs.

The turtle rolled around the shark’s nose and spun past its gills, bumping Hawkins into the large predator’s body. The unexpected collision caused the shark to twitch. It craned its head, and open jaws moved toward Hawkins and bit down hard, finding a limb.

With a vicious shake of its head, the shark’s serrated teeth went to work, carving through flesh and bone as easily as Hawkins’s knife. The limb came free, clutched in the giant’s jaws. With surprising speed, the great white gave a twitch of its tail and sped away to devour its prize.

Still reeling from the attack, Hawkins watched the shark swim away, keenly aware of how close the shark had come to eating
his
arm. Luckily, the loggerhead wouldn’t miss its fin. Not that the two-foot-long appendage would satiate the shark’s hunger for long. It would soon return and the turtle had only one large fin left to sacrifice.

A hard tap on Hawkins’s shoulder made him flinch and spin around so fast that he let go of the loggerhead. After catching a glimpse of Joliet above him, he swam after the turtle without a second thought, not because he’d already risked his life recovering it, but because it was his only protection against the great white. Without looking for signs of the shark, he took hold of the turtle’s shell once more and hoisted it back toward the surface.