Crossbones (23 page)

Amy Liggett tried to make Christmas festive for the crew, hoping it would help with morale. She risked the dead on shore and chopped down a tiny pine at the edge of the RV park, bringing it back to the ship. Then she used a pair of tin snips to cut simple ornaments from empty metal cans to decorate the tree, and tried to get the crew to sing some carols. Every effort fell flat. The holidays were making her shipmates heartsick for home and lost loved ones, and people were too concerned with scratching unwashed skin and the stench from the plastic toilet buckets to care much about “Jingle Bells.” The captain hadn't even acknowledged the time of year.

The crew was hungry after being put back on half rations. Now that thousands of walking corpses roamed Brookings—with more finding their way out of the grounded cruise ship every day—the scavenging runs had stopped completely. The civilian refugees bunkered down in the Coast Guard station and didn't venture out, because in the past week hundreds of corpses had poured across the US 101 bridge and found their way around the marina, and they were now walking through the nearby RV park. This activity caught the attention of the dead gathered around the motels and condos to
the south, and they began to move as well, adding their numbers to the horde.

Military-grade weapons were no longer issued to the refugees for defense, and the ammunition for the hunting weapons and shotguns their sentries were permitted to use was almost gone.

Two Coast Guardsmen deserted Christmas night: the crewman locked up for five days, and the petty officer third class who'd been Amy's mentor, the man so reserved with her in the mess. During the night, they slipped away with weapons and sea bags of supplies, and the captain could risk no one to go look for them. Their absence cut the engine room team by half.

Liz wanted to lash the petty officer on watch for not spotting or stopping the desertion. Instead she made him stand on the foredeck for eight hours in a cold, misting rain dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts. Chick made a trip out into the rain and whispered in the shivering man's ear, telling him he was getting off easy. If the decision had been his, Charlie said, he'd have seen the petty officer keelhauled.

•   •   •

C
harlie Kidd headed south in the motorized lifeboat, driving from the top deck and enjoying the wind and sting of spray. Lt. Riggs stood beside him in a foul-weather poncho, gripping the rail, excited to be off the ship for a while. It was the day after Christmas, and the sky was a palette of shale, beginning to break up enough for some rare sun to fall upon the coast. The launch was two miles offshore, powering through easy seas at twenty knots.

“Our position is untenable,” Liz said before sending them south. They had been ordered to recon the coastal California town of Crescent City, putting eyes on the airport, harbor, and small Coast Guard station located there. The captain reasoned that the town had to have fewer of the walking dead than Brookings, and if it looked good,
Joshua James
would relocate.

The trip took just under an hour in the MLB, and as they drew closer, Charlie slowed and angled in toward shore. The sea rolled over rocks at the base of a low cliff, stunted pines climbing the hillside above. Ahead of them, near what would be the harbor entrance, the two men saw the red-and-white shape of the Battery Point Lighthouse.

Charlie glanced up at the cliffs to his left. Somewhere beyond the trees, he knew, was Pelican Bay, a supermax prison built to house California's “worst of the worst,” a place of long-term confinement and simmering violence. If the dead within those walls had somehow gotten out, then Crescent City would be completely uninhabitable.

Lt. Riggs looked at a map. “We should see the airport coming up on the left.”

Charlie kept an eye on the rocks as he took the forty-seven-foot craft as close as he dared toward shore and powered back to a cruising speed. Riggs used a pair of binoculars and pointed. “Right there, I can see a hangar.” Evaluating the condition of the airport was the reason Liz sent the man on this mission.

The Del Norte County Airport was spread across a low, flat stretch of land close to the shore, large enough to handle commuter express planes for a trip to San Francisco, but nothing bigger. A minute was all it took to see that the airport was a complete loss. The few buildings still standing were burned-out shells, and the hangar Riggs had seen was gutted and empty. Out on the field sat the black and broken remains of a twin-prop SkyWest Express. Crows lifted off from the fuselage, winging into the morning sky.

Riggs made a distressed noise and looked away.

The launch continued south, and the town itself came into view. Much like Brookings, Crescent City extended almost to the water's edge, and at its south end, man-made breakwaters formed a sheltered harbor for commercial fishing and a few pleasure craft.

“There's our answer,” Chick said. Beside him, Riggs only stared.

Crescent City had burned. Block after block of charred homes and businesses marched back from the shore, streets choked with abandoned cars and downed power lines, all of it black. As they neared the harbor, the reason became immediately clear. A fuel supertanker had come in from the Pacific and run up onto the narrow stone jetty that framed one side of the town's little sheltered bay. Its hull and holds had ruptured, dumping millions of gallons of gasoline into the harbor.

“Probably came in with that storm,” said Chick. “This place got a tanker instead of a cruise ship.”

“A single lightning strike would have set it off,” said the helicopter pilot.

The supertanker was burned down to its waterline, and the fire had ripped across the harbor, sinking anything still afloat. From there it spread, consuming the docks, the town, and part of the surrounding forest. Even a month later, sea winds hadn't completely erased the smell of fire.

Charlie continued around to where the tiny Coast Guard station was positioned on a knuckle of land framing the other side of the harbor. Neither man needed binoculars to see that the small buildings that made up the station were burned flat; the skeletons of two school buses were parked out front.

“I'll be damned,” Charlie said. “It's been here the whole time.”

At the pier behind the little station, the bridge windows and antenna array of the USCGC
Dorado
protruded from the surface of the water. The rest of the eighty-seven-foot cutter was submerged, its keel resting on the bottom.

“This place has had it,” said Riggs.

“Let's go tell the skipper,” Charlie said, turning the launch north.

•   •   •

W
e're out of options,” Liz said. She, her two officers, and her brother were gathered in the small working space one deck below the bridge, the door closed. “We can't stay.”

Heads nodded around the table.

“I've been working on this for a while,” Liz continued, “anticipating this would happen eventually. I'd hoped we could stay until spring or even beyond, but issues with the cutter's system are making life aboard next to impossible, and we didn't expect a ship full of corpses to make it so we can't scavenge anymore. I have a plan.”

She unfolded a map covered in red notations and spread it across the table. The others leaned in as Liz put a slender index finger on the page. “There are four other operational Legend Class cutters in service, each identical to
Joshua James
. The
Hamilton
is based in Charleston, South Carolina.” She tapped her finger. “But the cutters
Bertholf
,
Waesche
, and
Stratton
are all stationed at Coast Guard Island, Alameda, in the San Francisco Bay.”

Looks were exchanged as they imagined what such a city must be like now.

Liz went on. “I'm not naïve enough to think that any of those cutters are still there. Even if they were, they'd probably be in the same condition as the
Dorado
.” She nodded at Charlie and the lieutenant. “But the base supports three national security cutters, and that means their warehouses and machine shops will have all the parts and equipment we need to get this vessel running properly again. If we're
very
lucky, we might find that the armory hasn't been completely raided, and there could be food stores and fuel as well.”

Amy and Lt. Riggs were starting to smile. Liz nodded. It was the reaction she was hoping for and the same one she would want to see from the crew; hope, and having a goal upon which they could focus, was a powerful motivator. “This is going to mean a lot of work, and there are still hard decisions to be made.”

Amy looked at her captain for elaboration, but the other woman went on.

“San Francisco and the surrounding area is heavily populated, and it's going to be crawling. Far worse than Seattle, worse than we can imagine. We don't know if there's a military presence there,
whether refugee clusters—if any—will be hostile, and we don't know the condition of Coast Guard Island. It could look just like Crescent City.”

The smiles began to falter at that point, but Liz went on quickly. “That's why we're going to make a detailed plan and conduct some reconnaissance.” She looked at the pilot. “Mr. Riggs, you're going to get the chance to fly.”

•   •   •

T
his isn't what I had in mind,” Riggs said. He was seated in front of a console down in the cutter's combat center, a colorful array of lights and switches before him. At his left and right hands were rubberized joysticks. Mr. Vargas, the operations specialist, sat beside him, and Liz stood behind his chair.

“Stow your complaints, mister,” she said, poking him in the shoulder. “This beats other duties I could invent.”

Riggs laughed. “Roger that, Captain.”

It was late morning on the day after their meeting belowdecks, and Liz had ordered the anchor raised, taking
Joshua James
several miles offshore and putting the stern into the wind. Riggs, Charlie, and a work party of six had been prepping since daybreak, and now the unmanned drone was ready.

The MQ-1 Predator was an older, earlier-model UAV, smaller than the MQ-9 Reapers used in Afghanistan, though still capable of carrying the AGM Hellfire missile. No such weapons had been delivered to
Joshua James
, and in fact the Predators had been aboard only because the cutter was due to test the close-in weapons system mounted aft of the superstructure. They were to have been the subject of target practice, and new drones for regular operations would have been delivered just prior to commissioning. These older birds were still sophisticated units capable of conducting detailed, aerial reconnaissance, sending back real-time digital video. They also carried an infrared camera with digitally enhanced zoom capabilities
that could identify the heat signature of a human body from an altitude of ten thousand feet.

The drone could fly 460 miles to a target, loiter overhead for fourteen hours, and then return. It was just less than 360 miles to the San Francisco Bay, so Riggs would have more than enough time to conduct a detailed recon.

Normally, the MQ-1 required 125 feet of hard surface runway to take off. The Coast Guard variant, however, was adapted for launch from a rail-and-catapult system that could be assembled across the length of the helicopter flight pad and out over the stern. The drawback to this process was that since the drone needed an equal length of runway in order to land, the cutter could not recover its own drones. Normal procedures called for the Predator, upon completion of a mission, to be flown to a military airfield to await later pickup. In this case, Riggs would bring the drone back to Brookings and attempt to land it on the access road approaching the Coast Guard station.

“Ready for takeoff,” Riggs said, flexing his hands around the joysticks.

Mr. Vargas spoke into a microphone. “Drone launch, drone launch. All personnel clear the flight deck.”

Once video cameras showed the helicopter pad empty except for the drone and its launch rail, Liz said, “Launch when ready, Mr. Riggs.”

The lieutenant checked the speed and direction of the wind, glanced at a barometer, and looked at the bird's video feed one last time. It gave him a view directly off the drone's nose, currently a shot of the rail stretching beyond the stern and out over open water. There were other video angles he could switch to once he was airborne.

“Firing,” he said, depressing a button on the console. The video image began vibrating slightly as the UAV's propeller spun up to power. “Launch,” he said, punching another button.

Assisted by the miniature catapult built into the rail, the Predator shot off the deck with a howl, skimming a few meters above the waves for a moment before climbing. It rose sharply into the morning sky, the hum of its propeller fading. Although it was capable of flying as high as twenty-five thousand feet, the UAV obeyed its pilot's controls and leveled off at twelve thousand.

The northern Pacific coast slid beneath it as the Predator headed south.

•   •   •

C
oming up in about two minutes,” Riggs said. Liz had taken over the seat beside her pilot while Mr. Vargas made another coffee run to the galley. Flight time so far was just over three hours. Above them on the bridge, Amy Liggett and their quartermaster slowly backed the cutter once more into its anchorage at the mouth of the river.

On-screen before them, in addition to the pilot's frontal view, was a color, look-down video from ten thousand feet, the drone flying much slower now than it had been. The Bay Area was overcast, but the Predator was flying just beneath the cloud cover, its gray skin making it almost invisible.

“Will anyone hear it?” Liz asked.

“I doubt it,” said Riggs. “And even if someone hears the hum and thinks to look up, they won't see it.” The bridge and city came into view, and Riggs's voice dropped to a whisper. “There's no one
left
to see it.”