Vector Borne Page 8

  “Jesus,” Bradley whispered.

  The following minutes were filled with scenes of thrashing appendages and movements too rapid for the camera to properly capture. Doors and hallways blurred past. The voices of the divers were so jumbled by static and their heavy breathing that their words were incoherent. Eventually, the recording lightened and the view abruptly became bright and clear. Choppy brown waves filled the screen. He saw the crown of a woman’s head and then the rusted hulk of a ship. In a matter of seconds, the scuba-clad divers hauled a man and a woman up onto the deck and set to work resuscitating them.

  Reaves reached in front of him, stopped the video, and closed the window.

  “Apparently neither of them has regained consciousness yet, but at least they’re still among the living.”

  “Thank God.” Bradley released a pent-up sigh. “Do we know if there are more of them?”

  “I’m getting to that.” Reaves scrolled through the index of video files that had been forwarded from the Huxley. “We’re dealing with a considerable lag time in communication while they chop and bundle the live digital feeds, so all of this happened more than an hour ago. There’s one clip in particular I know you’ll want to see. Here.” He double-clicked the file and the video screen once again appeared. “Are you ready?”

  Bradley nodded. He prayed there were more survivors. For a heartbeat, he felt a swell of hope. Rather than standing in front of a gathering of reporters at a press conference to tell them that the entire crew of the Mayr had been lost as he had been imagining all day, he envisioned himself triumphantly declaring that the forty-six men and women were still alive despite the worst that nature could throw at them.

  Just as quickly, his hopes were dashed when Reaves pushed “Play.”

  A woman floated in the water, her bloated features whitewashed by the diver’s light. There was no doubt that she was dead.

  Bradley turned away and closed his eyes. A tear crept down his cheek.

  “You need to keep watching,” Reaves said softly. He rested a consolatory hand on Bradley’s shoulder.

  When Bradley looked back again, the view was of a dark channel through a maze of pipes. A human form materialized from the darkness at the extent of the light’s reach. Scales flashed as a shark darted away. The diver swam closer and brought the form into focus, behind and to the right of which more bodies hung suspended in the water.

  “They’re all dead,” Bradley whispered.

  “Look closely.” There was a ghoulish note of excitement in Reaves’s voice that made Bradley’s skin crawl. How could he possibly—?

  And then Bradley saw it.

  All of the corpses had been disemboweled. His mind jumped to the pictures of the deceased found scattered around Mpulungu Village in Zambia that hung on the wall behind the encased remains in The Crypt. He had stared at them so often and for so long that he’d memorized every detail of the macerated wounds and every inch of the carved flesh.

  Pike’s voice from the laptop echoed Bradley’s thoughts.

  “Are you guys seeing this?”

  The condition of the bodies in the hold of the Mayr was nearly identical to that of the victims in the African savannah.

  Bradley’s heart thundered in his chest. He clenched his trembling hands in his lap.

  “Do you think…?”

  “That’s why I called you in here to see it.”

  “If those two people could survive, then…”

  “It’s a distinct possibility.”

  “And if not—”

  “It could be either somewhere in that ship, on the ocean floor, or maybe it even reached the shore.”

  “Either way, do you know what this means?”

  “Bear in mind, it’s possible we’re only seeing what we want to see. Any number of scavengers could have done that to them. You saw the shark.”

  Bradley could barely contain his excitement. All thoughts of the loss of life fled him. He paused the recording and stared at the waterlogged carcass of one of the researchers, the tattered edges of his lab coat forming parentheses around the maw in his abdomen.

  “There’s only one way to know for sure.” Bradley leapt from the chair and hurried out of Reaves’s office. “Meet me in the lobby in ten minutes. We have a plane to catch.”

  Fourteen

  Feni Islands

  South Pacific Ocean

  52 km East of New Ireland Island, Papua New Guinea

  November 30th

  3:06 p.m. PGT

  Pike breached the surface and bobbed on the rolling waves. Raindrops snapped and popped all around him like water on hot oil. The winch grumbled as it ratcheted its payload, the watertight data storage unit from the communications room that Walker had found in the rubble, battered and half-buried in silt, up onto the deck. If the security cameras on the Mayr had captured anything worthwhile, the footage would be somewhere inside of that massive black cabinet, but they would have to wait for the data analysis team on the Huxley to arrive before they could crack it open, considering they currently had neither the proper equipment nor the skills. With any luck, the research vessel should be crossing the horizon within the next couple of hours. In the meantime, Pike and his men needed to exhume everything of importance from the ruined ship on the seafloor.

  He had spent the last hour and a half swimming through what remained of the Mayr, scouring every nook and cranny for clues to its demise while Walker combed the surrounding reef. Since Brazelton was the only one of them with even rudimentary medical training, he had been tasked with monitoring the survivors from the submerged laboratory, neither of whom had yet to awaken. It was still too early for Pike to share his suspicions, even with the members of his unit, who may or may not have recognized what he had, so he continued to gather corroborative footage via the camera on his dive helmet. Including the physician, Dr. Walter Partridge, whose body floated in the hospital suite, and those gathered in the hold, there had been a total of thirty corpses aboard the ship. All of the other rooms had been empty, confirming what they had found on the first pass. Walker had encountered the crumpled remains of five others trapped in the reef amid the wreckage of the pilothouse and the chart room from the decapitated 04 Deck. Four men and a woman, all wearing crew uniforms. The master of the ship, Ryan Cartwright, had been identifiable, despite what the crabs had done to his face, by his jacket. That left nine souls unaccounted for to go with the workboat Pike had determined was missing from the main deck of the Mayr. If their SART rescue beacon had been activated upon launch, then a sweep through the radar bands on the tug would be able to locate it as a series of dots, which was exactly what he prepared to do right now.

  He hauled himself up onto the stern, removed his helmet, and walked around the cabin to the bow where he helped Walker land and unhook the data cabinet. The geologist appeared to be lost in thought. He had been with the team long enough now that he was undoubtedly at least pondering the possible significance of what they had seen. Sure, a shark or any number of scavengers could have feasted on the entrails of the dead, but none of them had the kind of claws that could inflict the superficial lacerations on the bodies or the deep scratches in the steel doors lining the main corridor.

  “I hate leaving them down there for the crabs and fish to work over,” Walker said.

  “Would you rather we pile them up here on the deck? Have you ever smelled a drowned body as the flesh begins to dissolve away from the bone, leaving puddles of putrefaction—”

  “Christ, Pike. I didn’t say I wanted to share a bunk with them. I was just commenting on how…wrong it is.”

  “We’ll get them into cold storage on the Huxley when it finally arrives.”

  “There’s something to look forward to.” Walker shook his head. “Cold storage…”

  Pike had no patience for this line of conversation. He clambered up the steps into the wheelhouse and scrolled through the radar bands. Their ancient captain seized the opportunity to make himself scarce. The workboat could
easily have washed off the deck during the sinking with no one on board to activate the search and rescue transponder. It could be sunken in this very bay or it could have ridden the tsunami all the way to New Ireland for all he knew. There was the distinct possibility that the nine missing people might never be—

  A series of white dots appeared on the radar in the X-band range.

  Pike waited another complete cycle. There it was again. Roughly two nautical miles off their stern. He turned around and stared through the cracked, rain-beaded rear window. The forested slopes of Ambitle Island were barely visible through the dark storm clouds. Could they possibly have made it to land and dragged the small craft up past the tree line? It was more likely the vessel had been pulverized on the reef and its remains scattered on the beach, but he had to find out for sure.

  Grabbing the field glasses from a hook beside the door, he hurried down the stairs and ran to the end of the tug. He steadied himself on the canting deck and raised the binoculars. The distant shore lurched up and down. It was so overgrown with trees that it appeared to be a solid wall of foliage beyond the debris-strewn white sands. He panned across the rows of trunks, between which he hoped to spot the small boat, but instead only found more trunks and snarls of skeletal shrubs draped with shadows. Broken branches hung vertically, burdened by limp brown leaves. Intricate lattices of vines connected the trees. Warped steel panels nested in the canopy with the twisted remnants of the Mayr’s satellite tower. He imagined the monstrous tidal wave rising up over the shore like a cobra preparing to strike, and directed his gaze higher into the canopy.

  Pike steadied the binoculars and toyed with the focus until the image was as sharp as he could make it. With the rolling deck, it was nearly impossible to maintain his field of view and he was so far away that he couldn’t be entirely positive, but he was confident that he had found what he was looking for.

  “Must’ve been some wave.” He lowered the field glasses and strode back around the deck and into the cabin under the wheelhouse, where he interrupted a conversation between his men. “Walker…you’re coming with me.”

  He glanced at the two forms in the lone bunk to the right, heaped beneath mounds of blankets. Their exposed faces were still a ghastly shade of pale. Were it not for the subtle movement of the covers in time with their shallow breathing, they could have been as dead as their shipmates beneath his feet.

  “We identified them from their personnel files,” Brazelton said. “Dr. Courtney Martin, a marine biologist, and John Bishop, the submersible pilot.”

  “Keep them alive. We need to hear what they know.”

  “Where are we going?” Walker asked.

  Pike smirked.

  “Grab your boots. We’re going to climb some trees.”

  Fifteen

  Ambitle Island

  Pike and Walker hopped out into the shallows and dragged the Zodiac up onto the beach to the tree line, past bent girders and folded sheets of steel, electrical components and broken glass that glittered indigo when the lightning flashed, and a rainbow of coral gravel sheared from the reef. The waves broke against the debris with the sound of unrequited destructive potential. Raindrops lay siege to the forest, which raged against the whipping monsoon winds. Trunks and branches groaned and snapped with the weight of the satellite tower that would inevitably succumb to the will of gravity.

  “You saw something from the ship, didn’t you?” Walker asked. “That’s why we brought the tarps.”

  In answer, Pike led him under the arms of the batai and rosewood trees and out of the torrent. Droplets and streams poured from above them to spatter on the exposed ground, stripped of the detritus that had been swept higher onto the island by the wall of water. Serpentine roots snaked in and out of the mud around bare shrubs, the sparse clusters of leaves that clung to them withered and yellow. Pike turned back toward the tug to gather his bearings, then struck off to the south until he found the massive kapok tree he had seen through the field glasses. Mud and shredded vegetation were crusted to the eastern face of its trunk clear up past its stripped lower branches. He looked skyward until he saw the body, swarming with black flies, more than thirty feet above his head.

  “Get him down from there.”

  He could feel Walker’s eyes on his back. The geologist hesitated and Pike heard an intake of air as though in preparation of voicing his protests, but the moment passed and Walker approached the tree. The trunk was as broad as he was tall, but with his vast climbing experience, Walker scurried almost effortlessly up into the canopy. Pike watched Walker navigate through the limbs until he reached a pair of legs that swung gently on the gale winds, attenuated to a soft breeze by the jungle. A wet sock hung from one foot. The laces dangled from the Nike on the other. The dirty jeans identified the man as part of the scientific crew. He was folded backward over a thick bough like a roll of carpet, his back obviously broken. His torso rested on the adjacent limb, his bruised arms draped across the smaller branches. The flesh on his face had been gnawed to the bone, his eyes pecked from their sockets. Pike could only assume the man had been on deck when the earthquake struck and the resultant tsunami had cleaved him from the ship and carried him along on its crest as though he were a piece of Styrofoam.

  “You should probably step back a little,” Walker called down to him.

  With the sound of tearing fabric, Walker pulled the corpse by the legs until it tumbled from its perch. It broke through the branches in a cartwheeling descent until it struck the ground with a sickening thud and the crack of breaking bones.

  Pike crouched over the remains and arranged the heap so that the man was sprawled flat on his back. The flies that had claimed him as their own tracked him in a buzzing cloud.

  “Eight more to go,” Pike said.

  Walker swung from the tree and dismounted with a gymnastic flourish.

  “Drag him back down to the beach and double-time it back here.” Pike removed the ship-to-shore transceiver from its holster on his diving vest, pressed the button, and spoke into the microphone. “Brazelton.”

  A moment of crackling static.

  “Copy, Pike.”

  “Where am I in relation to the SART beacon?” Through the foliage and the rain, he glimpsed the wheelhouse of the tug far out to sea.

  “It’s impossible…pinpoint on the radar…”

  “I know. Just give me a heading.”

  “…breaking up.” The electrical activity in the storm wreaked havoc on their short-range communications. “Roughly twenty degrees west-northwest…your current position. Could be anywhere…approximately a square kilometer—”

  Pike clicked off the transceiver and turned toward the island. No natural paths presented themselves. They were going to have to forge their own.

  Walker shoved through the underbrush behind him.

  “Where to now?” Walker asked.

  Pike pressed his finger to his lips and scanned the forest. Other than the ruckus above him where the wind and the rain rattled the branches and rustled the leaves, there was only a preternatural silence marred by the occasional peal of thunder. The birds and animals must have bedded down to ride out the storm, but still, it was an uneasy quiet. The air felt electric, as though they stood under power lines.

  He struck off through the jungle, weaving around the trunks, forging through waist-high shrubs, and swatting away vines. Tented roots and the lianas that constricted the gnarled ceiba trunks snatched at his feet. His body attuned itself to his surroundings with the practiced ease of the soldier he had once been. The training had been beaten into his very being. His heartbeat slowed and his breathing became silent. His tread lightened. He unconsciously reached for the firearm that wasn’t there and had to settle for the hilt of the knife on his thigh. In his mind, he was the twenty-eight year-old sergeant leading his unit of the First Marine Division through the smoky streets of Kuwait City with the crackle of rifle fire in the distance beyond buildings still burning, with M1 Abrams tanks grinding ahead of
them and Tomcats screaming overhead.

  While the return of his skills pleased him, he couldn’t help but wonder what had triggered them and why, when they were on an essentially uninhabited island stalked by nothing more intimidating than the crocodiles in the brackish river mouths and coastal lagoons.

  Pike waved for Walker, who trundled through the foliage with all the grace of a charging rhinoceros, to fan out to the right. Twenty yards apart, they saw each other only as intermittent shadows through the trees. They had traveled perhaps half a kilometer when Walker shouted.

  “Over here! I found something!”

  Pike dashed toward the sound of Walker’s voice, ducking and hurdling his way through the natural obstacle course until he found Walker kneeling at the edge of a furrow in the earth. The rain had eroded the edges, but the impression was still fairly well defined where the shrubs had been flattened. There were sloppy footprints to either side.

  “Someone dragged a boat through here,” Walker said.

  Pike crouched and traced a pair of footprints with his fingertips. The rainfall had distorted their shape and puddled inside, yet he could still discern that they were made by different sized feet wearing different treads. They couldn’t have been more than forty-eight hours old. He looked to his right and followed the trail through the trees in the direction of the beach with his eyes, then back and in the opposite direction to where the terrain grew rapidly steeper.

  “They’re still alive,” Walker said.