The Hamlet Warning (17 page)

“We’ll take a look, if you don’t mind,” Johnson said. Larson led the way forward to his sea cabin. The ship was incredibly dirty. Lead-based paint, oil smudges, rusted plates, and welding slag covered the decks. Below, the clutter was even worse. Tools and equipment lay scattered and rusting wherever someone had tossed them the last time they were used. The passageways showed no evidence of having been cleaned since the ship was built. And the tanker was permeated with the smells of crude oil, engine fumes, stack gas, stale urine, and cooking grease. Larson seemed right at home amidst the mess. He showed them into a small wardroom.

From a shelf over a writing desk Larson took down a heavy journal. He was right in one respect. He kept good books. Their neatness was dramatically out of context with the rest of the ship.

The
Captain’s
Inquiry
into
the
Death
of
Able
Seaman
Stanislaus
Boleslaw
was typed into an impressive document bearing the signatures of all ship’s officers. Included was extensive testimony from those who last saw Boleslaw alive and from those familiar with his habits.

The
Inquiry
found that Boleslaw spent most of his off-watch time back on the fantail smoking his pipe. The
Inquiry
even noted that the smoking area on open deck was restricted to a small portion of the fantail. According to the testimony, Boleslaw was feeling his way aft in the dark. The cook’s helper had just dumped a load of garbage over the fantail and had gone back to the galley for another, leaving the safety chain down in front of the garbage chute. Boleslaw went aft, feeling for the chain in the darkness, and walked right over the side. Attached to the
Inquiry
was a list of Boleslaw’s personal effects. Among them, Loomis noticed a detailed description of a half-dozen pipes.

Johnson read the
Inquiry
, impatiently tapping a pencil on the metal desk. “Well, it certainly seems to be in order,” he said. “But Boleslaw’s death really complicates matters. May take a week to clear this up.”

“I can’t wait a week,” Larson said. “My owners don’t pay me to fuck around.”

“I assure you that you in no way can be held responsible,” Johnson said. “A full report of the circumstances will be filed with your owners. Thus far, they have been most cooperative.”

Larson now definitely seemed unsure of himself. He was worried. Loomis was certain of that. Larson was good at hiding his fear, but he now had all the appearances of a man trapped, hunting desperately for a way out.

“If Boleslaw’s dead, what’s the problem?” Larson asked.

Johnson shrugged. “For all we know, Boleslaw was out of his head with fever, went to the rail to vomit, and fell over the side from vertigo — all caused by the first symptoms of the plague. And if that happened, then every member of your crew has been exposed.”

“I can’t leave the ship untended,” Larson insisted.

“Your owners have suggested that you sign responsibility for the ship over to the Dominican Republic until the matter is cleared up. The ship is safely at anchor. We will have plenty of experienced shiphandlers aboard. If any weather should develop, we can have you back aboard in twenty minutes.”

“What outfit you with, anyway?” Larson asked belatedly.

“World Health Organization,” Johnson said without blinking an eye.

Larson sat lost in thought, idly tracing the long scar across his face. Loomis could understand a certain amount of concern. The delay would rearrange his schedule of docking for loading and unloading. The time lost might be even more valuable than the cargo involved. Time had been the owners’ chief concern. But Loomis sensed that Larson had on his mind some other, far more important problem.

For the first time, Loomis began to have hope that he had been wrong, that the nuclear materials were on board.

“I’ll have to talk to the owners,” Larson said.

He spent almost thirty minutes in the radio shack. He emerged a defeated man.

“All right,” he said to Loomis. “Let’s get this shit over with.”

Loomis and Larson signed the papers that had been prepared. The ship’s crew was mustered on the main deck and transferred to motor launches for the trip to shore.

As Larson left the deck he hesitated at the rail for a moment, looking back, visually searching the ship.

It could have been the natural reaction of a captain leaving his command, ascertaining that all was in order before going over the side.

But Loomis felt there was something more in the gesture.

Larson went over the side with the demeanor of a man heading toward the gallows.

*

Loomis and Johnson stood at the rail, watching the motor launches heading toward the opening at the end of the breakwater. The launches were to return immediately with the remainder of the search teams and the sophisticated electronics equipment flown in from Washington.

“Think Larson knows what we’re after?” Loomis asked.

“I’m not certain,” Johnson said. “But if he doesn’t, there are plenty of people aboard who do.”

Loomis watched the seagulls sailing around the stem, searching for garbage. “How you figure that?” he asked.

“Larson told me. You see, I knew Boleslaw.” Johnson sat down on a bollard, leaned back on the life lines, and stretched out his legs. “In his own way, Boleslaw was a strange one. I worked with him. He had a Polish background of some sort but was reared in Hungary. Something to do with the war, I suppose. He was one of the teen-aged heroes in the Hungarian revolt during the fifties. He had to flee the country and made his way to America. He joined the U.S. Army. With his background, he shot up through the ranks, received a good education on the GI Bill after a hitch in Vietnam, returned to duty, and was a captain in G2 when he transferred over to the company. He was a linguist, specializing in Slavic languages.”

“All very interesting. But what the hell does that have to do with this?”

“As I said, he was a strange one. A health freak. Worked out with weights, kept in top shape no matter where he was, what he was doing. Never polluted his body with poisons such as alcohol, coffee, or tea.”

Johnson paused to watch the motor launches disappear around the head of the breakwater.

“And he didn’t smoke,” he added.

Loomis pondered all the ramifications of that bit of intelligence. “If Larson fabricated Boleslaw’s death inquiry, then he must have known — or suspected — he was CIA.”

“I don’t know,” Johnson said. “The whole mess puzzles me. Larson is scared shitless about something. He didn’t seem worried about Boleslaw. In fact, he even bordered on bragging about that. But when it became plain we were taking the ship, he really turned worried. I think now the stuff is on board. I just hope Boleslaw managed to leave us some message or clue, before they killed him and threw him over the side. Sure would save us some work.”

After rigging the accommodation ladder on the starboard side, the special teams brought aboard their equipment and started the search. Loomis and Johnson wandered throughout the ship, monitoring progress. The job was marvelously complicated.

The forepart of the ship contained a maze of cargo spaces both above and below the waterline. To make certain nothing was missed, all goods were removed from the two huge dry cargo spaces under the fo’c’sle. Nothing was left to chance. The entire anchor chain was hauled up from the chain locker to ensure that no nuclear birdcages were stored beneath. All of the bos’n’s stores were brought to the main deck and examined. The forepeak tanks and deep tanks forward were probed electronically and physically.

The cargo tanks amidships proved less difficult than Loomis had expected. After the first few efforts, the searchers fell into a routine that scoured all thirty tanks within ten hours.

The stern section was another matter. The engine rooms, the after-engine rooms, the boiler spaces, and the pump rooms contained hundreds of inaccessible areas where physical search was hampered, and thick metal thwarted the radiation monitors. Closed-circuit television probes were brought in to search crevices no man could enter. The work was tedious and painstaking, continuing after other areas had been secured.

The crew’s quarters yielded nothing of interest, aside from an impressive mass of clutter and an interesting collection of pornography. Boleslaw’s bunk was located and searched. No hidden message was found.

With the search entering the twentieth hour, Loomis had spread the ship’s blueprints on the steel deck. He was kneeling, tracing measurements in the pumping rooms against his notes, when a hollow, popping noise seemed to come up through the ventilator shafts on the after part of the ship.

“What the hell was that?” Johnson asked behind him.

Loomis reached for his Heckler. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I sure as hell think we better go find out.”

On the third level below the main deck, they met four men from “C” Team fleeing topside in panic. Loomis tried to stop them.

“Gunmen!” one of them yelled. “They’re killing everybody!”

As if to prove him right, another burst of gunfire sounded from below. Loomis grabbed the man’s arm and held him. He was one of the specialists, flown in from Washington.

“Where are they?” Loomis demanded. 

“In the engine spaces,” he said, pointing.

“How many?”

The man seemed confused. “I don’t know,” he said. “Three, maybe four.”

“What happened?”

“We opened the drive-shaft housing. They were inside. They started shooting. They killed Smitty and Joe.”

He was pulling away. Loomis turned him loose. He scurried on up the ladder. Johnson worked the action on his Heckler to chamber a round. “No wonder Larson was worried,” he said. “Apparently he has some passengers not carried on the ship’s papers.”

Loomis tried to remember the layout of the engine spaces. From what he could recall, a narrow hatch opened onto a catwalk that made a square figure eight through the main engine room. The engines were in the center. On the outside of the catwalk were boilers, evaporators, and a maze of machinery. At regular intervals ladders led down to a steel deck and the engine bedplates. Loomis had no idea where the drive-shaft housing was located. Logically, it should be somewhere at the rear of the engine spaces.

He led Johnson down to the main engine room hatch. It was standing wide open. None of the fleeing search team had bothered to dog it. Loomis moved cautiously to the opening.

Twenty feet away, crawling slowly toward them on the catwalk, a member of the search team was calling for help. He had left a trail of blood along the catwalk.

“Cover me,” Johnson said, moving past Loomis. He trotted out onto the catwalk, picked up the man, and brought him back. There were no sounds from the engine room.

Johnson put the man on the deck. Loomis recognized him as one of the radiation specialists from Los Alamos. He had been hit in the stomach, groin, and thigh. He wasn’t bleeding much; Loomis figured he would live. The man was conscious, eyes bright with pain.

Johnson knelt beside him. “How many of them are there?” he asked.

“Four,” the man said, gasping for breath. “Smitty’s down there. I think he’s dead.”

“Well, we’ll go see,” Johnson said. “Where exactly are those four fellows?”

“They were in the drive shaft. The housing. But I think they’ve moved.”

Six Dominican marines came down the ladder, guns ready. Loomis motioned for them to stop where they were.

Johnson edged to the hatch and peeked in. “I’ve never seen so many places for bullets to bounce,” he said. “I think the fewer people we have shooting in there, the better.”

Loomis nodded agreement. He saw movement at the far end of the main engine room. He held his fire, on the outside chance it was a search-team member.

“My time to move,” Loomis said to Johnson. “Cover me.”

Crouching, he ran down the catwalk. He made it past the first engine. A stream of bullets spanged off the metal around him. Johnson fired one long, sustained burst that put heads down. Loomis rolled off the cat-walk and dropped the eight feet to the steel deck. He took up the firing so Johnson could make his advance. When Johnson reached the crosswalk, he took up the firing, giving Loomis time to hunt cover.

The old team was working again. Loomis jammed home a fresh magazine with a feeling of exhilaration. They had established triangulation. With any luck, they should be able to cover each other through the advance.

“This is Interpol!” Johnson yelled from the catwalk. “You fuckers are under arrest!” 

Johnson was just making noise, hoping to rattle them, make them get careless.

The ploy worked. Loomis saw a figure move, trying to spot Johnson. Loomis cut loose with a burst. The man dropped.

Then all hell broke loose. Two guns sprayed the area around Loomis, the bullets ripping into the boiler behind him with an uncannily loud clamor. Live steam roared through the bullet holes. Loomis had to move. He dashed across an open space to the after-engine, hearing Johnson’s gun above covering him. He dropped beside the engine, taking what protection he could from a brace beam. For a full minute he heard nothing except the roar of the steam.