Plague Ship (57 page)

“That’s it,” he said, slapping his thighs and getting to his feet.

He strode into the ELF transmitter room. A technician in a lab coat was bent over the controls. “Can you send the signal now?”

“We aren’t scheduled to send it for another couple of hours.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” Now that his decision had been made, Severance’s haughtiness had returned.

“It will take me a few minutes to double-check the batteries. The power plant is off-line because of the damage to the exhaust system.”

“Do it.”

The man conferred with a colleague deep beneath the facility using an intercom, speaking in arcane scientific jargon that Severance couldn’t follow.

“It will just be another moment, Mr. Severance.”

THE RUSSIAN SATELLITE’S electronic brain marked time in minute fractions as it streaked over Europe at seventeen thousand miles per hour. The trajectory had been calculated to the hundredth of an arc second, and when the satellite hit its mark a signal was sent from the central processor to the launch tube. There was no sound, in the vacuum of space, as an explosive gush of compressed gas blasted the tungsten rod out of the tube. It was pointed almost straight down, and it began its fiery trip to earth, descending at a slight angle, as its builders had designed, so it could be confused with an incoming meteor. Hitting the first molecules of the upper atmosphere created friction that merely warmed the rod. The lower it fell, the more the heat built, until the entire length of the rod glowed red, then yellow, and, finally, a brilliant white.

The heat buildup was tremendous but never approached tungsten’s melting point of over three thousand degrees Celsius. Observers on the ground could see the rod clearly, as it hurtled across Macedonia and the northern Greek mainland, leaving sonic booms in its wake.

THE DIGITAL CLOCK on the main monitor was into the single digits. Juan had avoided looking at it before Max’s rescue but now couldn’t tear his eyes off of it. Max had refused treatment in the medical bay until after the impactor hit Eos, so Hux had brought her kit up to the Op Center and was working on his injuries. The seas were smooth enough for her to do her job, even though the
Oregon
was charging eastward at top speed.

Max usually had a sarcastic comment about Juan running his engines above the red line, but he knew full well what was coming and kept it to himself. They weren’t yet at the minimum safe distance from the blast, and if the Chairman thought getting out and pushing would help he’d do it.

Hali Kasim tore his earphones off his head with a curse.

“What is it?” Juan asked anxiously.

“I’m picking up a signal on the ELF band. It’s from Eos. They’re sending the trigger code.”

Cabrillo paled.

“It’s going to be okay.” Max’s voice sounded nasal because of the cotton balls stuffed in his battered nose. “The wavelengths are so long, the full code will take a while to broadcast.”

“Or they could release the virus at the first sign of an ELF signal,” Hali said.

Juan’s palms were slick. He hated the thought that they had come so far only to fail at the eleventh hour. He wiped his hands on his wet pants. There was nothing he could do but wait.

He hated to wait.

WEARING THEIR CUSTODIAL UNIFORMS, Linda and Mark prowled the lower decks of the
Golden Sky
once again, trying to remember where the ship’s laundry was located. There were only a few crewmen roaming around, and each was too lost in his own suffering to question two unfamiliar faces.

The whine of dryers spooling up drew them to their destination. Steam billowed from the dimly lit room. None of the Chinese workers looked up from their duties when the two stepped inside the laundry.

A man leaning just inside the door that they hadn’t seen grabbed Linda’s arm in a tight grip.

“What are you doing here?” he challenged.

She tried to yank her arm free. Mark recognized the guy as one of the men who had arrived by helicopter with Zelimir Kovac. He should have known they would post a guard. He moved to intercede, and the man drew a pistol and pressed it against Linda’s temple.

“One more step and she’s dead.”

The laundry workers were well aware of what was happening but went about their business of transferring clothes, folding sheets, and pressing shirts.

“Take it easy,” Mark had backed up a couple of paces. “We have a work order for a busted clothes press.”

“Show me your ID badges.”

Mark plucked his ID from the front of his overalls. Kevin Nixon hadn’t known the exact design the Golden Line used for their employee identification cards, but it was a good fake, and he doubted Kovac’s henchmen would know the difference. “See. Right here. I’m Mark Murphy.”

Kovac suddenly appeared, his bulky body practically filling the doorframe.

“What is this?”

“These two claim to be here to fix something.”

The Serb pulled an automatic from inside his windbreaker. “I gave the captain express orders that no one other than the laundry workers are to enter this room. Who are you?”

“It’s finished, Kovac,” Linda said, her girlish voice icy hard. She could tell using his name had startled him. “We know all about the virus and how you spread it using the washing machines on cruise ships. As we speak, your people are being rounded up on ships all over the world. The devices are being removed. Give it up now and you might see the outside of a prison again.”

“I doubt that very much, young lady. Kovac is not my real name.” He mentioned another, one that had been all over the news during the Yugoslav war. It was the name of one of the worst mass murderers to ever come out of the conflict. “So you see, I don’t believe I would ever be allowed out of prison.”

“Are you totally out of your mind?” Mark asked. “You’re willing to die for this stupid cause of yours? I was aboard the
Golden Dawn.
I saw what your virus does to people. You’re a freak.”

“If that’s what you think, then you don’t know everything. In fact, I think the two of you are bluffing. The virus loaded in those”—he swept his hand to indicate the massive washing machines—“isn’t the same I used on the
Golden Dawn
. It was created from the same strain, but this one isn’t deadly. We are not monsters.”

“You just admitted killing almost eight hundred people and you say you’re not a monster?”

Kovac actually smiled. “Very well. Dr. Lydell Cooper isn’t a monster. The virus we are about to release will cause nothing more than a bad fever, only there is one small side effect. Sterility. In a few months, half of the world’s population is going to discover that it can’t have children.”

Linda felt like she was going to throw up. Mark actually swayed on his feet when he grasped the insidious nature of their plot. Responsivists were always going on about how the planet was doomed because of overpopulation. Now they were planning on doing something about it.

“You can’t do this,” Linda cried.

Kovac leaned his face in inches from hers. “It is already done.”

THE GUARDS SEARCHING Eos Island stopped their work and gazed heavenward. What at first looked like a particularly bright star quickly grew in size and intensity until it seemed to fill the entire sky. And what started as mild unease quickly exploded into panic, as the object plunging from space appeared to be aimed at the island. They ran, for when faced with danger it is what instinct compels humans to do, but it made no difference. There was no escape.

Down in the transmitter room, Thom Severance tapped his foot impatiently against a table leg as the display in front of him showed the agonizingly slow pace of the ELF signal being sent around the globe. In few minutes, it would be done. The first of the virus would flood out of its vacuum-sealed containers and into the washing machines where it would contaminate the sheets, towels, and napkins. That precise amount of virus would be released into each load of laundry, thereafter, until the dewars were emptied.

A faint smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

The tungsten projectile hit Eos island almost dead center, three miles from the subterranean base. Its tremendous speed and weight turned the potential energy of falling two hundred miles into the kinetic energy of a massive explosion.

The center of the island blinked out of existence. The rock was torn apart at the molecular level, so there remained virtually no trace of it at all. As the blast rippled outward, it sent a shock wave through the island that heaved hundreds of tons of rubble into the air. Much of the rock was melted into glowing globules of lava that snapped and hissed when they plunged into the cool sea.

The panicked guards were carbonized, their ashes mixing with the dust and debris.

When the shock wave hit the facility, the hardened ferroconcrete used in its construction cracked like fine porcelain. The building didn’t collapse but rather was uprooted and thrown out of the ground. Walls, ceilings, and floors pancaked on themselves, crushing everyone inside. The destruction was absolute. The miles of thick copper wire that was the ELF antenna were ripped from the earth and melted into streams of liquid metal that poured into the ocean.

The earth shook so fiercely that huge slabs of cliff face sheared away, and cracks spidering out from the impact’s epicenter split the island into seven smaller ones.

A massive tidal wave surged off Eos in the direction the Orbital Ballistic Projectile had been traveling. Unlike a tsunami, which travels below the surface and grows in height only as it shoals, this was a solid wall of water with a frothing crest that seemed to curl forever. It roared as though the gates of hell had been thrown open and raced across the sea at astronomical speeds. The wave wouldn’t last. Friction would eventually reduce its size until it wasn’t even a ripple, but, for as long as it lasted, it was the most destructive force on the planet.

Forty miles away, the
Oregon
was racing with everything she had. All her hatches had been doubly secured. Her two submersibles had been lowered into their cradles and lashed down. Every loose object the crew could think of had been stuffed into closets and drawers. They knew they weren’t going to get out of this without some damage, but they wanted to keep it to a minimum.

“Time till impact?’ Juan asked.

“I estimate five minutes,” the helmsman reported.

Juan hit the button for the shipwide PA system. “This is the Chairman. Everyone hold on tight. We’re in for a wild ride. Five minutes.”

The mast-mounted camera was turned aft and switched to night vision mode so they could watch the wave coming at them. It filled the sea from horizon to horizon, impenetrable, implacable. Its face was veined with emerald lines of phosphorus, and its crest looked like green fire.

“I have the conn,” Juan said suddenly, and took command of his ship.

He had noticed they were running from the wave at a slight angle and gave the
Oregon
a bit of rudder by way of correction. If they were going to ride this out, they needed to take the hit directly on the stern. Any deviation and the five-hundred-foot ship would auger into the wave and roll a dozen times before being released from its grip.

“Here we go!”

It was like an express elevator. The stern came up so fast that, for a moment, there was no water under her middle. The sound of the hull’s moaning was lost in the savage roar of the wave. The bow plunged into the sea. Juan cut power to keep her from burying her prow, and then the entire ship was dragged up the face of the wave. The acceleration sent everyone lurching forward. The ship climbed the wave, her bow pointing down at a dizzying angle. Juan glanced at their speed through the water, which was down to four knots, but their speed over bottom was nearly seventy miles an hour.

The stern burst through the wave’s crest in an explosion of froth that swamped the decks. Water sluiced from the scuppers in sheets and blasted from the drive tubes in solid white jets. Thirty, forty, fifty feet of
Oregon
’s stern hung suspended over the back of the wave before she began to tip. And then she went over, falling faster than when she’d been plucked off the surface.

Cabrillo fire-walled the engines, asking his ship to give him everything she had. When they hit the bottom of the wave, her stern would knife through the surface, and if the
Oregon
didn’t have enough power she would simply keep going until the ocean closed over her bow.

With the ship at an almost sixty-degree angle, the fantail splashed into the rough water in the wave’s trailing edge, and vanished. The sea climbed over the rearmost cargo hatch, and, had it not been for the thick rubber seals, the helicopter hangar under it would have swamped.

“Come on, girl,” Juan cajoled, watching the water claim more and more of his ship. “You can do it.”

The angle began to flatten out as the bow came off the wave, and
Oregon
’s plunge into the abyss seemed in check. For a long moment, she neither sank nor rose out of the water. The vessel shuddered with the strain of her engines trying to deadlift eleven thousand tons from the sea’s crushing embrace. And slowly, so slowly at first that Juan wasn’t sure he was seeing it right on the monitors, the deck began to clear. The leading edge of the stern hatch appeared as the magnetohydrodynamics thrust her out of what should have been her watery grave.

Cabrillo finally joined the chorus of whistles and cheers when he saw the sodden Iranian flag hanging off her jack staff. He eased off the power and turned control back over to the helmsman.

Max sidled up to his chair. “And I thought you were crazy jumping an ATV off a dock. Any other ship would have turtled on a wave like that.”

“This isn’t any other ship,” Juan said, and patted Max’s arm. “Or any other crew, for that matter.”

“Thank you,” Max said simply.

“I’ve got one of my wayward children home. It’s time to get the other two.”