Plague Ship (40 page)

“What the heck are they doing down here?” Linc asked.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” Cabrillo replied, reaching for his camera phone so he could take pictures of the tablets. “I know later cuneiform script had a more abstract look to it, like a bunch of triangles and spikes. This looks more like pictographs.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning these date to the very earliest uses of the language.” He checked the images captured by his camera and reshot a few of them so they were clearer. “These could very well go back fifty-five hundred years or more, and they’re in pristine condition. Most examples of cuneiform have to be pieced together from fragments as small as stamps.”

“Listen, man, this is all well and good, but it isn’t exactly helping our situation. Get some water, and I’ll finish looking around.”

Cabrillo had drunk from thousand-dollar bottles of wine, but nothing could compare to that first sip of water from the spring. He drank palmful after palmful, and could almost feel fluid coursing through his body, recharging his muscles and clearing the fog of exhaustion that had been clouding his mind. His stomach was sloshing by the time Linc finished his reconnoiter.

“Looks like we stumbled into the Responsivists’ love shack,” Linc said. He held up a box of condoms with only two remaining, a wool blanket, and a trash bag with a half-dozen empty wine bottles.”

“I was hoping you’d find a scuba tank and a couple of dive masks.”

“No such luck. I think we’re just going to have to swim for it and hope like hell one of us makes it.”

“Let’s head back into the main chamber. I don’t do my best thinking around explosive charges.”

Cabrillo considered inflating the trash bag with air and towing it behind them so they could each take a breath halfway down the tunnel, but its buoyancy would make it scrape along the roof of the submerged tunnel. The plastic would tear before they’d gone two feet. If they counterweighted it so it maintained neutral buoyancy, the drag would make their progress impossibly slow. There had to be a better way.

Linc handed him a protein bar, and for the next few minutes the men chewed silently, racking their brains to come up with a solution. Juan had shut off the light again. The faint glow coming from the far end of the cavern beckoned with both freedom and frustration. They were tantalizingly close, but the last obstacle seemed insurmountable. And then an idea hit him out of the blue that was so outlandishly simple, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it first.

“Any chance you recall the German words for sodium chlorate? It’s a toxic salt used as a pesticide.”

“
Natrium Chlor
. I remember seeing a jar or two of it back in the dispensary.”

“And you still have that second detonator pencil?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to make an oxygen candle. While I’m gone, I want you to scrape up iron filings from the railroad track. When you mix the two and ignite them, the reaction produces iron oxide, sodium chloride, and pure oxygen. I’ll swim halfway down the tunnel and find someplace to fire it off. The oxygen will displace the seawater, and we’ll have a bubble where we can breathe.”

“More voodoo chemistry from your high school teacher?”

“Actually, I got this from Max. We have oxygen generators aboard the
Oregon
for when we rig the ship for fire or chemical exposure. He explained how the system works.”

Juan was going to need the flashlight, so he left Linc at the railroad track to scrape the shavings they would need with his knife. It took Cabrillo forty minutes to navigate his way back through the partially collapsed section of the tunnel, reach the dispensary, and return to the sea cave. In that time, Linc had managed to produce more than enough iron filings from the old rail.

Working under the beam of the now-dying light, Cabrillo mixed the chemicals in one of the empty wine bottles and wound the rest of the electrician’s tape around the glass while Linc took apart the detonator to reduce its explosive charge. When they were finished, Juan inserted the detonator into the top of the bottle and wrapped the makeshift oxygen generator in the plastic bag.

“Rube Goldberg would be proud,” Linc joked.

Juan kicked off his boots and pants at the edge of the quay and tossed his bush shirt aside. “Back in five,” he said, and lowered himself in the bath-warm water. The sea around him clouded with the dust that washed off his skin. Using an easy sidestroke, holding the bag and flashlight, he swam across the grotto to where he and Linc thought there was an exit.

Juan left the bag floating on the surface as he dove down, pressing hard with his legs and arms, the waterproof light turning the water turquoise. The salty water made his eyes sting, but it was a pain he had grown accustomed to over the years so he set it aside. At first, all he saw was jagged stone covered in kelp and mussels, but when he reached a depth of fifteen feet a yawning tunnel opened up in front of him. It was easily fifty feet around, more than enough to accommodate a World War II-era submarine. When he turned off the torch, he could see the faint glow of sunlight at the very extreme periphery of his vision.

He returned to the surface and corralled the bag. He began taking deep breaths, filling his lungs to the maximum, purging as much carbon dioxide out of his system as he possibly could. When he began to feel light-headed, he thrust himself out of the water to clear his chest so he could take an even-deeper breath, filled his lungs, and dropped back into the gloom. He followed his flashlight beam downward and entered the tunnel. The tidal action that had created the cavern system kept the sides free of marine life. He counted the seconds in his head as he swam. He hit the one-minute mark and noted the sunlight was markedly brighter. He kept going, keeping his mind clear and his body relaxed as he went deeper into the tunnel. At a minute thirty seconds, he turned the flashlight to the ceiling. Ten feet farther, there was a concave space in the rock, a natural dimple, easily five feet across and a foot deep.

The bag had just enough air in it to keep it pressed to the ceiling. Juan felt through the plastic for the timing pencil and activated the detonator. He turned and started swimming away, keeping the same measured pace he’d used to enter the tunnel. He’d been under three minutes when he cleared the tunnel’s mouth and angled for the surface. He broached like a dolphin, coming halfway out of the water, expelling the air from his lungs in an explosive whoosh.

“You okay?” Linc called out from the darkness.

“I might have to give up my occasional cigar, but, yeah, I’m fine.”

“I’m coming over.”

An instant after Linc said it, Juan heard him dive into the water. He was at Cabrillo’s side moments later, with their boots laced across his shoulders and their clothes tied around his waist. “I double wrapped your cell with the condoms,” Linc said. “It’s in your pant pocket.”

“Thanks. I forgot all about it.”

“That’s why you’re giving me a raise when we get back aboard ship.” Linc’s bantering tone then vanished. “Just so we’re clear, if your little Frankenstein experiment doesn’t work and there’s no pocket of oxygen we just keep going?”

The distance was too great for even the best swimmer, so when Juan replied he knew it was their death sentence. “That’s the plan.”

The detonator was too distant and small to feel through the water, so Juan let ten minutes tick by on his watch before asking Linc if he was ready. They began to hyperventilate, each knowing their bodies enough to keep from becoming euphoric from too much oxygen.

Together, they dove for the tunnel. For some reason, it looked ominous to Cabrillo. Like a massive mouth, and with the slight ebb tide sucking at him, it seemed the rock wanted to swallow him whole. The flashlight was fading fast, so he shut it off as he and Linc swam for the distant glow coming from beyond the cave. After a minute and a half, he turned the light back on and began searching for the oxygen pocket. The tunnel’s ceiling was featureless rock. The underside of the bubble should flash silver, like a pool of suspended mercury, but the light revealed nothing but blank stone. Juan had slowed as he searched and had just a second to decide if they should accelerate in a desperate, but hopeless, dash for the exit or keep searching for the dimple.

He panned the light around and realized they had drifted to the right. He cut left, followed by Linc, and still couldn’t see the bubble.

The taste of defeat was as bitter as the salt water pressing his lips. His oxygen generator hadn’t worked, and he and Linc were going to die. He started stroking hard toward the distant tunnel exit when he felt Linc’s hand on his ankle. Linc was pointing a bit more to their left, and when Juan hit the spot with the light he saw a flash like a mirror. They swam to it, expelling the air in their lungs before surfacing carefully so as not to hit their heads.

Neither cared that the oxygen was still warm from the exothermic chemical reaction and had a foul smell. Juan was inexorably pleased with himself and was grinning like an idiot.

“Nice piece of work, Chairman.”

There was only enough oxygen for a three-minute break. The men filled their lungs greedily before they committed themselves to the final leg of their journey.

“Last one to the entrance buys the beer when we get back,” Juan said, taking one last breath before dropping into the tunnel.

A second later, he could feel the water churning as Linc swam in his wake. A minute into the dive, it looked as though the outlet had grown no closer. Even with the tide working in their favor, their progress was much too slow. When he was in his twenties, Juan could free-dive for almost four minutes, but there had been a lot of hard living in the years since. Three minutes fifteen seconds was the best he could manage now, and he knew Linc’s big body burned oxygen even faster.

They continued onward anyway, stroking through the crystal water as efficiently as they could. At two minutes thirty seconds, the mouth of the cave had finally brightened but remained impossibly out of reach. Juan felt the first flutter at the base of his throat telling him he needed to breathe. Fifteen seconds later, his lungs spasmed without warning, and a little air escaped his lips. There were twenty yards to go, sixty tantalizing feet. By force of will, he clamped his throat to fight his body’s urge to inhale.

His thoughts started to drift as his brain burned up the last of his air. He was growing desperate, his motions uncoordinated. It was as if he no longer remembered how to swim, or even how to control his limbs. He’d been close to drowning before, and he recognized the symptoms, but there was nothing he could do about it. The broad ocean beckoned. He just couldn’t reach it.

Juan stopped swimming and felt water sear his lungs.

And as soon as he did, he started accelerating. Linc had recognized the trouble Cabrillo was in and had grabbed the back of his T-shirt. The ex-SEAL had to be as desperate to breathe as the Chairman, but his legs kicked like pistons, and each great arc of his right arm propelled them closer and closer. Juan had never seen a more determined display. Linc was simply ignoring the fact he was drowning and kept swimming anyway.

The water suddenly grew lighter, as they emerged from the cavern. On guts alone, Linc dragged them to the surface. Gasping, Juan spewed a mouthful of water and coughed up what felt like lungfuls more. They clung to rocks like victims of a shipwreck, as the sea surged gently around them. Neither man could speak for several minutes, and, when they could, there was nothing to say.

It would take an hour of hard climbing and another two and a half to circle far around the former Japanese installation before they reached their hidden jeep. Cabrillo had put the ordeal behind them even before they reached the top of the cliff. His mind was focused solely on the images stored on his cell phone. He didn’t know how or why, but he was certain it was the evidence he needed to blow the case wide open.

CHAPTER 25

HALI KASIM FOUND EDDIE SENG IN THE
OREGON
’S gym. Seng was wearing the baggy pants of a martial arts
gi
but no shirt. Sweat coursed down his lean flanks as he went through a series of karate moves, grunting with each punch and chop. Eddie noticed the look on Hali’s face and ended the routine with a roundhouse kick that would have taken off the head of an NBA center.

He grabbed a white towel from a bin next to a Universal weight machine and wiped his neck and torso.

“I screwed up,” Hali said without preamble. “After Kevin interviewed Donna Sky, I went to that damned tape again, programming new parameters into the computer. Gil Martell didn’t say ‘Donna Sky.’ He said ‘Dawn’ and ‘Sky.’ I checked, and the
Golden Dawn
has a sister ship named
Golden Sky
. Eric and Murph did some digging. The Responsivists are holding one of their Sea Retreats aboard her as we speak.”

“Where is she now?” Eddie asked.

“Eastern Mediterranean. She’s scheduled to dock in Istanbul this afternoon. Afterward, she heads to Crete.” Hali then added, before Eddie could ask, “I’ve already tried to call Juan. He doesn’t answer.”

With the Chairman incommunicado and Max still in the hands of Zelimir Kovac, Eddie was in command of the ship, and any decision would fall on his shoulders.

“Have there been any reports of illness on the ship?”

“Nothing in the news and nothing on the cruise line’s internal communications logs.” Hali recognized the hesitation in Eddie’s dark eyes. “If it helps, Linda, Eric, and Mark have all volunteered. They’re already packing.”

“If the ship is hit with a chemical or biological attack, they’ll be at risk as much as anyone else,” Eddie reminded.

“This is too much of an opportunity to pass up. If we can get our hands on some of their people, the intelligence will be invaluable.” Hali had put into words the other half of a dangerous equation.

Balancing risk versus reward was the most difficult of all military decisions because lives invariably hung in the balance.

“They can get to shore on the Rigid Inflatable Boat. The jet’s waiting at Nice. Tiny can file an emergency flight plan, and our people can be in Turkey as the
Golden Sky
arrives. It isn’t likely the Responsivists will attack while they’re in port, so we can at least sneak aboard and have a look-see.”