Clive Cussler - Plague Ship

CHAPTER 11

LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS AFTER REPORTING THE sinking of the Golden Dawn , admitting nothing about their foray aboard, Cabrillo and his team hadn’t yet formed a cohesive plan, but they had a direction. That they were going to get to the bottom of this mystery was never in doubt.

The Corporation ran strictly as a for-profit enterprise, but they were guided by Juan Cabrillo’s moral compass. There were jobs they wouldn’t take, no matter how much money was offered. And then there were opportunities to do the right thing, regardless of profit. As he had done in the past when there was no chance of a payday, Juan had offered his crew the chance to leave the Oregon until the current mission was complete. He had no qualms putting himself in harm’s way for the sake of what was right, but he would never demand it of his crew.

Like the few times before, not a single man or woman aboard ship had accepted the offer. They would follow Cabrillo to the gates of hell. As proud as he was of the technological marvel that was the Oregon , that feeling paled next to what he felt for his crew.

They might have been mercenaries, but they were also the finest people he had ever worked with. And while they had amassed a fortune over the years, it was the unspoken truth among all of them that they put themselves in harm’s way again and again for the same reasons they had during their years of government service. They did it because the world grew more dangerous every day, and if no one else stood up to face it, they would.

The ship was charging hard northward, having cut through the choke point of Bab el Mandeb, or the Gate of Tears, that separated Yemen from the African nation of Djibouti. They were in the Red Sea, and Cabrillo had already called in enough favors with Atlas Marine Services, the Egyptian company that ran the Suez Canal, to see that his ship would be part of the next morning’s only northbound convoy.

It would take eleven hours to transit the one hundred and one miles from Suez to Port Said, but once they were clear their final destination was only a day away.

With the number of vessels heading into and out of the Suez Canal, the shipping lanes in the Red Sea were heavily congested. So as not to arouse undue suspicion from passing ships, Juan had posted a watch on the bridge, even though the Oregon was being piloted from the Op Center belowdecks.

He was on the bridge now, overseeing preparations for taking on a canal pilot in the morning.

Sandstorms raged in the western sky over Africa. The sun setting through burnt sienna clouds cast the bridge in an otherworldly glow. The temperature remained near eighty degrees, and wouldn’t get much cooler when the sun did finally settle over the horizon.

“What a view,” Dr. Huxley commented as she emerged from a secret doorway in the chart room at the back of the pilothouse. As she stared at the distant storm, the ruddy sky made her face glow like a Plains Indian’s. The kind light helped hide her deep exhaustion.

“How’s our patient doing?” Cabrillo asked, unfurling a dog-eared chart across an old, scarred table.

“She should be fine,” Julia replied. “If she’s still asymptomatic by morning, I’ll let her out of isolation.

How are you?”

“There was nothing wrong with me that a hot shower and some rack time couldn’t cure.” Juan used carpenters’ C-clamps to secure the wrinkled map, as the clips built into the chart table had been intentionally snapped off to make the Oregon look as dilapidated as possible. When it came to camouflaging his ship’s true nature, there were no details too small for Cabrillo’s discerning eye. “Have you learned anything more about her experience?”

“Linda’s compiling a report right now of everything we’ve gotten so far, not just my notes but the stuff Mark and Eric have been able to piece together, too. When I spoke with her, she said she should be ready in a half hour.”

Juan glanced at his watch without really looking at the time. “I didn’t expect anything definitive for a few more hours.”

“Murph and Stone are more motivated than usual.”

“Let me guess: they want to impress Miss Dahl with their sleuthing abilities?” Julia nodded. “I’ve taken to calling them the Hardly Boys.” It took a moment for the joke to register, and Juan chuckled. “That works on so many levels.” When Julia smiled, her nose crinkled like a little girl’s. “Thought you’d like that.” An ancient intercom mounted on a bulkhead squawked like an asthmatic parrot. “Chairman, it’s Linda.” Juan mashed the TALK button with the heel of his hand. “Go ahead, Linda.”

“I’m set up in the boardroom. Eric and Murph are here already. We’re just waiting for you, Max, and Julia.”

“Hux is with me,” Cabrillo said. “Last I saw Max, he was in his cabin, arguing with his ex-wife again.”

“I’ll send Eric to go get him. I’m ready anytime.”

“Be there in a minute.” Juan turned to Julia Huxley. “Go ahead. I’ll be right behind you.” She thrust her small hands into the pockets of her lab coat and stepped onto the elevator that would take her down to the Op Center, the most direct route to the boardroom.

Juan walked onto the bridge wing, the wind ruffling his light cotton shirt. He could taste the distant desert in the back of his throat as he drew a deep breath. Though drawn to the sea since he was a boy, the desert also held a similar fascination. Like the ocean, it was an element that was both inhospitable and indifferent, and yet, since time immemorial, men have ventured across it both for profit and exploration.

Had he been born in a different time and a different place, Cabrillo could see himself leading camel caravans across the trackless Sahara or through Saudi Arabia’s Rub’ al-Khali, the Great Empty Quarter.

It was the mystery of what lay beyond the next wave, or the next dune, that drew him.

He didn’t yet know where delving into the deaths on the Golden Dawn would lead. But the mass murder of hundreds of people was an injustice he couldn’t let go unpunished. His crew had been working tirelessly on gathering background material, and, in a few minutes, they would have their plan. Once their strategy was set, it would be executed with military precision. It was what they did best. Standing at the rail, his hands gripping the hot iron, Juan could allow himself the last moments of unrestrained emotion.

When the briefing began, he would direct his feelings, use them to drive himself onward, but for now he let them boil inside his skull—the rage, the rampaging anger at the senseless deaths.

The injustice of what had happened to those innocent people was like a cancer eating away at his guts, with the only cure being the utter annihilation of the killers. He had no sense of who they were, their image was lost in the fires of his fury, but the Corporation’s investigation would quell those flames as they drew closer to their quarry, and bring the monsters into focus.

The knuckles of Juan’s index fingers popped, and he relaxed his grip on the railing. The metal had scored lines across his palms. He shook blood back into his hands and took another deep breath. “Showtime.” The conference room was filled with the aroma of spicy food. With Africa such a short distance away, Maurice had laid out an Ethiopian meal. There was a stack of injera —unleavened sour-dough bread—and dozens of sauces, some cold and others steaming hot. There were chicken, beef, and mutton stews, lentils and chickpeas, and spiced yogurt dishes. A diner eats the meal by tearing off a section of bread, ladling on some stew, and rolling it up like a cigar, to be chewed in a couple of quick bites. The affair could get messy, and Juan suspected Maurice had served these dishes intentionally for the comic relief of watching Linda Ross, a notorious chowhound, stuffing her face.