Plague Ship (50 page)

Mark and Linda knew otherwise. And there were other subtle signs as well. They saw more crewmen roaming the decks, ostensibly to perform maintenance. However, they spent a great deal of time watching the passengers. No one was asking to see room keys yet, but Linda and Murph knew it was only a matter of time.

It was clear that the word was out that there were stowaways on the
Golden Sky
, and the cruise line was determined to find them.

More troubling than this information were the sniffles.

On the morning of their second day aboard ship, a number of passengers and crew had runny noses and suffered occasional bouts of sneezing. By listening to people talking near the pool and around the dining room, the two pieced together that everyone had felt fine the night before but that the ones who were sick had all gone to the midnight buffet, and that the waitstaff and cooks who’d worked the buffet shift were ill as well.

“It has to be a test,” Mark surmised.

“How can you be so sure?” They were just finishing breakfast in a secluded corner of the cavernous dining room.

“Two reasons. Most natural shipboard viral outbreaks are of a gastrointestinal nature. This is presenting like a rhinovirus. Second, if this was the main attack, we’d all be dead.”

“What do you think we should do?” Although her appetite was legendary, Linda only picked at her food.

“Don’t shake anyone’s hand, don’t touch any handrails, do not—and this is critical—do not touch your eyes. It’s a cold’s favorite way of entering the body. We wash our hands every half hour, and immediately if we break any of the other rules. And, last, we find out how the hell they are going to release the deadly virus they used to hit the
Golden Dawn
.”

“Did we screw up by staying on this ship?” Linda asked, wiping her mouth and setting her napkin next to her plate.

“No, because we are going to find out how they are releasing it before the main attack.”

“Be reasonable. We’ve checked the water system, the air intakes, the air-conditioning plant, hell, even the ice makers. If we haven’t found it yet, what are the odds we will?”

“They get better every time we check off another vector source from our list,” Mark replied. “Have you ever wondered why, when you lose something, you always find it in the last place you look?”

“Why?”

“Because you stop looking when you find it. Therefore, it is invariably in the last place you searched.”

“What’s your point?”

“We haven’t checked the proverbial last place yet.”

Even through the insulation of the dining room’s walls, they heard the distinctive beat of a helicopter’s rotor. They got up from the table and made their way aft. There was a swimming pool at the
Golden Sky
’s fantail. A hard cover had been placed over its aqua waters, and deckhands had cordoned off the area with rope to keep passengers well clear.

The chopper was a Bell JetRanger, with POSEIDON TOURS emblazoned on its flank. From several decks up, Mark and Linda could see the pilot and three passengers in the cabin.

“This can’t be good,” Linda said over the growing din.

“You think they’re here for us?”

“People rarely die on cruise ships, so when one of his followers was killed in Istanbul Thom Severance must have acted fast. I wonder how he got the cruise line to agree to this. Gomez Adams makes it look easy, but landing a helo on a moving ship is dangerous.”

“They’ve got deep pockets.”

The chopper flared in over the jack staff, the downwash kicking up a little spray from where crewmen had washed the deck of grit. It hung poised like a hovering insect, as the pilot judged speed and windage before lowering the craft toward the pool cover. He kept the power on, so the skids barely put any pressure on the cover, and three doors opened at the same time. The men jumped from the chopper, with nylon packs over their shoulders. The pilot needed to make a quick power adjustment to account for the sudden drop in weight. As soon as the doors were closed, the chopper lifted clean and peeled away from the ship.

“Eddie said something about Zelimir Kovac looking like Boris Karloff on a bad day.” Mark pointed with his chin.

“The big guy in the middle?”

“It’s got to be him.”

The three men were greeted by a ship’s officer but made no move to shake hands. They somehow managed to make their casual clothes—khakis, polo shirts, and light windbreakers—look like military uniforms. It was the matching backpacks, Linda thought.

“What do you think is in those bags?” she asked.

“Change of underwear, fresh socks, a razor. Oh, and guns.”

Before now, they had only risked being placed in whatever passed as a brig aboard the
Golden Sky
and having a lot of explaining to do when they reached shore. That had changed. Kovac and his two henchmen were coming for them, and there wasn’t any doubt what would happen if they caught them. Mark and Linda’s only advantage was, Kovac didn’t know how many people were hunting for the virus. However, with the ship’s officers and crew acting more vigilant about possible stowaways, the two of them could be flushed out at a moment’s notice.

“Something just occurred to me,” Mark said as they turned away from the rail.

“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Would Kovac risk being aboard this ship if they are going to hit it with the virus they used to kill everyone on the
Golden Dawn
?”

“He would if he’d been vaccinated.”

By noon, three-quarters of the people on the ship were suffering coldlike symptoms, and, despite precautions, Mark and Linda were included in that group.

CHAPTER 32

THE HIGH DESERT WIND SHRIEKED ACROSS THE AIRFIELD, throwing up towering clouds of dust that threatened to block out the sky. The pilot of the chartered Citation jet came in on the runway fully thirty feet to the left, to account for the cross-wind hammering the fuselage.

The gear came down with a mechanical whine and thump, and flaps were extended. The turbojets roared to keep the aircraft aloft for a few more seconds.

The sole passenger seated in the cabin paid no attention to the weather conditions or the dangerous landing. Since catching a commercial flight from Nice to London, and then on to Dallas, where the leased executive jet was waiting, he sat with his laptop open and his fingers dancing across the keys.

When Eric had come up with his plan to fire the Russian ballistic projectile weapon, it had been the barest outline of an idea. He hadn’t considered the tremendous amount of data he needed to make it work. Orbital speeds, vectors, the rotation of the earth, the mass of the tungsten rods, and a hundred other elements—all had to be factored into his computations.

With his naval background, he was more than confident he could do the mathematics, although he would have liked Murph’s help. Mark had an innate grasp of trigonometry and calculus that would have made this so much easier. But, then, he would have insisted on taking command, and the Chairman would have rightly given him the slot. Mark was simply more qualified to do this than Eric.

Because this broke down to a communications exercise between the satellite and the computer, Hali Kasim would have been the next logical choice. The only problem was that Hali got sick on carnival rides and wouldn’t have been able to do the work.

Eric got tapped to do what only a handful of people had ever done. He would allow himself to get excited about it later, but, for now, he had to work the numbers. He had told Jannike Dahl about needing to do this, embellishing the danger, while not spelling out the reason. And with Mark trapped on the
Golden Sky
, he had stepped up his pursuit of the beautiful young Norwegian. He was already up to the eighth item on his courtship checklist and almost pushed it to number nine by trying to hold her hand when he explained why he had to leave the ship. He wished he knew what it meant when she had cocked her head and parted her lips just before he left her in the infirmary.

He should have asked Dr. Huxley.

The plane touched down, swaying dangerously on two wheels for a moment before the pilot could kick in the rudder to even her out again. They taxied a long way—the airstrip was over three miles long—and finally came to a massive hangar next to another unmarked executive jet. Above the hangar door was the name of a long-defunct airline. The engines spooled to silence, and the copilot emerged from the cockpit.

“Sorry, Mr. Stone, but we can’t taxi into the hangar in this sandstorm. But, don’t worry. It’s going to die down by tonight.”

Eric had already checked a dozen weather sites on the Internet and knew to the minute when this cold front would move on. By midnight, there wouldn’t even be a breeze.

He closed up his laptop and grabbed his suitcase, an old Navy duffel that had followed him from Annapolis.

The copilot opened the door and Eric fought his way down the stairs, slitting his eyes against the sand blowing across the tarmac. There was a man near a small door set into the larger hangar door waving him over. Eric jogged the forty feet to the door and ducked through. The stranger immediately closed it. There was a large aircraft in the center of the hangar covered in canvas tarps. Its shape was hard to make out, but it was unlike anything else in the world.

“Damned dust plays havoc on the planes,” the man griped. “You must be Eric Stone. I’m Jack Taggart.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, Colonel.” Eric said with a touch of hero-worship. “I read about you when I was a kid.”

Taggart was in his sixties, with a leathery weather-beaten face and clear blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome, like an idealized figure of a cowboy, with a firm jaw and a day’s worth of silver stubble. He wore chinos, a flight uniform shirt, and a bomber jacket despite the heat. His handshake was like iron, and his baseball cap had the logo for one of the early Space Shuttle missions. He had been its pilot.

“You ready for the ride of your life?” Taggart asked, leading him to an office in one corner of the hangar. His voice had a West Texas twang.

Eric grinned. “Yes, sir, I am.”

There were two men in the office. Eric recognized one of them right away by his thick muttonchop sideburns. It was legendary aircraft designer Rick Butterfield. The other was a tall, patrician figure with a shock of white hair. He wore a banker’s three-piece suit, with the chain of a Phi Beta Kappa key arcing across his waistcoat. Eric put his age on the high side of seventy.

“Mr. Stone,” he said, extending a hand. “I so rarely get to meet members of Juan’s team.”

“Are you Langston Overholt?” Eric asked with awe.

“I am, my boy, I am. Although you have never, and most likely will never, meet me. Do you understand?”

Eric nodded.

“I really shouldn’t have come at all. This is a private deal between the Corporation and Mr. Butterfield’s company, after all.”

“That I wouldn’t have agreed to if you hadn’t threatened to gum up my certification applications with the FAA and NASA.” Butterfield had a high-pitched voice.

Overholt turned to him. “Rick, it wasn’t a threat, just a friendly reminder that your aircraft hasn’t yet been certified flightworthy, and that a word from me will cut a lot of red tape.”

“You’d better not be yanking my chain.”

“I think that my getting you a temporary certificate for this flight is proof enough of what I can do for you.”

Butterfield’s expression remained sour, but he seemed mollified. He asked Eric, “What time do we need to do this?”

“Using tracking data from NORAD, I calculate that to make an intercept I have to be in position at exactly eight-fourteen and thirty-one-point-six seconds tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t guarantee you that kind of time accuracy. We’ll need an hour just to get to altitude, and another six minutes for the burn.”

“A minute either way shouldn’t make much of a difference,” Eric said to reassure him. “Mr. Butterfield, I want you to understand the gravity of this situation. There are literally millions of lives counting on us. I know that sounds like a line from a bad spy novel, but it is the truth. If we fail, the people of the world are going to suffer in unspeakable agony.”

He opened his laptop to show the aeronautical engineer some of the footage taken aboard the
Golden Dawn
. The scenes spoke for themselves, so Eric didn’t bother narrating. When it was over, he said, “Most of the people killed were the ones responsible for manufacturing the virus. The men behind this murdered their own people just to keep them silent.”

Butterfield looked up from the computer. His face was ashen under his farmer’s tan. “I’m on board, kid. One hundred percent.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You ever taken any serious g’s, son?” Taggart asked.

“When I was in the Navy, I was launched off a carrier. That was about three, maybe three and a half.”

“You barf easy?”

“It’s why I’m here and another one of my associates isn’t. I’m a member of ACE, American Coaster Enthusiasts. I spend my vacations riding roller coasters. Haven’t been sick once.”

“Good enough for me. Rick?”

“I’m not going to have you sign a bunch of insurance waivers and all that boilerplate. I can vouch for my bird so long as you vouch for your health.”

“My company gives us physicals every six months. There’s nothing wrong with me that these eyeglasses can’t correct.”

“Okay, then. We have a lot of prep work to get done before morning.” Butterfield glanced at the big Rolex he wore on the inside of his wrist. “My team should be here in twenty minutes or so. I need to get you and your gear on a scale to calculate weights and balance, and then I think you should remain on your aircraft until the flight. Your pilots can stay at the hotel in town. I’ll have one of my guys drive them.”

“That works for me. Ah, Mr. Butterfield, I do have one request.”