Loe raamatut: «Seismic Surge»

PROLOGUE

Bernie Jackson stowed the spare blank forms inside his folding metal clipboard, then adjusted the top inspection sheet until it sat squarely on the cold, bare metal. There had been a few too many incidents for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s liking at the Heyerdal Hull Company, and the Norfolk, Virginia, plant was shut down for the day, pending the results of his OSHA team’s observations.

Seven men had died already, and twenty more were injured due to mishaps at the plant. Heyerdal’s owners, the Jeopardy Corporation, had requested that they be allowed to clean their own house, utilizing one of their security contractors. These promises had held off the federal government’s agents. The fact that Heyerdal was behind some large defense contracts, developing new hulls for a low-profile patrol craft that could be used by the Navy and the Marine Corps, had been enough until the most recent “accident” left two dead and seven wounded. Local constituents were demanding in Congress that the government take a closer look.

The Jeopardy Corporation tried to muddy the waters with claims of outside interference, suggesting saboteurs or espionage agents were responsible for the mayhem and death. Jeopardy owned private military contractor companies that had provided security for the U.S. government overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for allied Middle Eastern governments. As such, they claimed that they could deal with all of this on their own.

That suggestion bubbled up in Jackson’s memory and he had to strangle down a snort of derision.

“Like that’s going to come up kosher,” he muttered.

“I told you, these damn corporate bigwigs act like their shit don’t stink,” Gerber said. Whereas Jackson was an older African-American man, thick around the middle with the weight of advancing years and too many desserts, Gerber was in his thirties. Jackson’s partner was, in his old Virginia way of saying things, all knees and elbows with a ginger head balanced atop a skinny neck. There was a noticeable disparity between the size of his skull and his slender frame, which was further enhanced in its awkwardness by ears that stuck out like jug handles.

Jackson looked his young partner over, shaking his head. “The old military industrial complex—MIC—conspiracy again?”

Gerber nodded avidly, his serious glare looking out of place above freckled cheeks. Jackson and a few of the older men noted that the kid, by their perspective, was what could have been the love child between two timeless comic-book teenagers. Any mention of Arch or Jugs, however, had gone over Gerber’s head, the references eliciting a blank response.

Of course, knowing the history of those comics, Gerber had probably developed a selective memory loss after having been needled over the similarity from other guys in the Navy, especially his instructors.

“Collusion and corruption in those areas do still exist,” Gerber replied. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I saw back in the Navy.”

“But if you told me, you’d just have to kill me,” Jackson concluded, rolling his eyes. The others, eight total, laughed at the end of this particular segment of the “Bernie and Gerb” show. Jackson didn’t mind Gerber’s constant conspiracy theories, and their seeming Moebius Strip of argument and counterargument added some spice and variety to a job that could end up a drudgery as it devolved into rote observation and paperwork.

“Get the camera, Gerb. Document anything you can find,” Jackson ordered. Neither Gerb nor the other cameramen on the inspection teams really needed to be told this, but it was the best way that Jackson knew to turn off his partner’s manic running commentary.

While Gerber was normally a motormouth, when he was recording footage of safety violations, he had the steady focus of a laser beam.

That professionalism, as well as Gerber’s entertainment value, went a long way to helping Jackson forgive the younger man’s many quirks.

Now it was time to go to work.

* * *

“BERNIE! BERNIE!” Gerber shouted, his big green eyes wild and wide as he rushed back to Jackson’s side. He wondered what could light such a fire under his coworker’s

ass like that when a sudden bout of stammering answered his unspoken question. Jackson could recognize the symptoms of too many ideas competing to get out of Gerber’s mouth. Something that the jug-headed man caught on camera had led him to believe that he had conclusive, documented proof.

“Look! Just look!” Gerber squawked, pushing the LCD screen of the digital camera far too close to Jackson’s face. “I knew that the MIC was behind these accidents! Heyerdal is making weapons to provoke a world war!”

Jackson reached out, trying to still the camera so that he could get a better look. “Then let me look at it, dummy!”

Distant laughter from the closest pair of inspectors reached Jackson’s ears through the excited chatter and dancing of Gerber. Finally, he was forced to snap the camera out of his partner’s hands. “What the hell are you on about, son?”

“They killed workers who had stumbled on that dilapidated old hulk,” Gerber exclaimed. “Once those men saw the submarine pens, they had to die, so they wanted to lay proof about sabotage before we got here.”

The glow of the liquid crystal display showed the interior of a gutted freighter and small docks low in the water and designed for slender craft less than a quarter of the width of the hulk. They would have gone unnoticed had it not been for all of the recent accidents and the diligence of a young inspector with a head full of ideas. The dead freighter didn’t look out of place in a boatyard, as many shipbuilders found that good, extant hulls were a basis for updated craft. However, the footage showed a hull without a keel and small hydraulic doors at the front.

“That is damn strange,” Jackson muttered. “Especially since Heyerdal doesn’t have anything in its records about designing submersibles, just light seacrafts.”

“Told you!” Gerber snapped, all excited. “Secret submarines!”

Jackson pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose. Whenever Gerber got a hair up his ass, he was nearly incomprehensible. What a secret berth had to do with a conspiracy involving the government and Heyerdal’s deck designs would take forever to straighten out in an intelligible manner. But first he had to calm Gerber down, and right now, unfortunately, the kid had a gallon of adrenaline to burn off before he could make any sense.

“Gerb! Focus!”

“This could be used to sink international ships and draw the U.S. into another stupid, bloated war,” Gerber continued. “It’s the Lusitania all over again!”

“Gerb, they must have had weeks to clear anything out. Why would they even leave that area unlocked for you to stumble upon?” Jackson asked.

Something gave the older man pause.

Their two friends, though they had only been about a hundred feet away, close enough to laugh out loud at Gerber’s renewed antics, were now nowhere to be seen. That didn’t feel right, and Jackson’s scalp tingled as if his close-cropped gray-white hairs were all trying to stand up at once.

“Hey, Jake! Ned! Where’d you two go?”

Gerber’s agitation seemed to drain away, as if someone had cut a hole in the bottom of a tub. The call to their coworkers hadn’t seemed to calm the young man, but it had silenced him for the moment.

Gerber snatched back his camera and pulled his phone from his pocket. With a device in each hand, Gerber’s left thumb flew across the touch screen, his lips moving silently as if quietly narrating his own actions. “This is bad.”

“What are you doing?”

Gerber spoke up. “They don’t want witnesses.” This time his manic energy had disappeared, and his voice was flat and serious. The thrill of discovery had been shocked into submission by the dread of some realization. “Got to get the footage out.”

“Because Ned and Jake are probably smoking on government time?” Jackson asked. Even as he spoke the words, he lost faith in his rationalization. Something could have been wrong; he could feel that in the air, even though logic dictated that the deaths or disappearance of ten OSHA inspectors would actually invite even more intense scrutiny to whatever secrets lurked in the boatyard. Such a loss would probably involve the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, so any top-secret construction projects would simply be uncovered in the wake of foul play. They were simply too high profile to warrant any harm, even by the most desperate businessman intent on concealing his shady dealings.

Submarines? he thought to himself.

Why the hell would that be so important to kill witnesses? Sure, there were cases where companies, if they had failed at bribery, sometimes resorted to violence, but there had been no interaction between the OSHA team and the Heyerdal company. There should at least have been a man at the gate with an envelope full of cash.

As much as he tried to dismiss his fears, Jackson couldn’t quiet his nerves. He could sense a predator stalking in the shadows. No one had been allowed through the gate for the past week except for the OSHA team, not even the usual security guards hired to babysit the shipyard. He just couldn’t shake the feel of being stalked, the weight of malevolence hanging in the air.

“It’s out.” Gerber sighed with relief. “They can’t keep this shit quiet.”

“What? Where?” Jackson asked.

“App on my phone and built into the camera. It can read off the memory and then upload it to a backup site,” Gerber explained. “Better than the little piece of garbage in the usual cell. This transmits good, crisp images.”

“Why?” Jackson continued.

“Safety for us. Keeping my documentation of their secrets kills any incentive for them to do the same to us.”

Jackson looked around.

“Kill us? Try to silence us? No go,” Gerber said. He let loose a nervous titter. “Their dirt is now in the Cloud. The whole conspiracy sphere knows and is breathing this all in now.”

“Gerb, they wouldn’t kill federal inspectors,” Jackson countered. His strength ebbed, and he added in a softer, more nervous tone, “Would they?”

The red-haired ex-Navy man pocketed his phone after frowning at its screen. “I wish I had brought my knife.”

That was all Gerber had to say for Jackson’s sake. The older man brought out his walkie-talkie and keyed it. All he received was static, unfortunately. He tried again, but the radio was working; it just wasn’t receiving or transmitting any usable signal.

“Hey! Anyone’s walkies still working?” Jackson yelled as he transferred to his own cell. “Ned?”

“All the phones are out, Bernie,” Gerber said, deadly serious.

In the distance he could hear spasmodic coughing erupt. A silhouetted form, Jackson couldn’t tell who, staggered into view, then clutched his throat and chest, toppling over. Sudden bright flares, vomitous blossoms of flame, erupted throughout the area. Smoke billowed from multiple sources, obscuring the scene as at least two men screamed their last.

“Gerb, you think you can swim?” Jackson asked, his mind racing.

“Hello! Navy submariner!” Gerber replied. He waved to the hulk, where no flames had erupted yet. “Come on!”

Jackson followed blindly, sweeping the boatyard around him for signs of impending death or onrushing danger. He hoped that Gerber, in all of his paranoia, knew what he was doing. The coughing brought to mind choking smoke, but the men appeared to be suffocating even before the flames erupted and thick, strangling clouds spread out to suck the breath from them.

Now all he could see behind him were yellow splashes of glow that burned through black roiling darkness that flowed into the air. Getting to the water was the means to get to safety, a place to duck from the fury of blaze and asphyxiation.

Jackson tabbed his phone again, dialing 9-1-1, but there was still no signal.

It didn’t make sense. Only moments before, Gerber had transmitted a call, sending data to the internet. Maybe he’d done that, or now Jackson was hot on the heels of a delusional freak, not a former military man who showed the foresight to upload conspiracy documentation.

Gerber led him to the hull of the dead freighter, and as they passed through a door, Jackson stopped cold. What he saw was something out of a James Bond movie, a wide, empty interior dock with spaces for four submarines, two on each side of the hull, with loading cranes above to supply the subs with their gear. The covered docks were empty now, but there was no other explanation for the catwalks and support equipment inside the empty ship’s corpse.

It was crazy.

Or was he just influenced, mentally contaminated by the ravings of his jug-headed friend?

Gerber pointed to the water. “We can dive out through there!”

Jackson followed Gerber, but only visually. His feet had been rooted to the spot thanks to fear and indecision.

That momentary pause extended the OSHA inspector’s life and allowed him to see that Gerber was right. The younger man tripped, having snagged a small wire.

A loud hiss erupted immediately, and Gerber folded over, agonized as he passed through what must have been a cloud of poison. Gerber coughed, kicked, gurgled, then his limbs fell still.

Behind Jackson, the boatyard was a blazing inferno, hot flames racing up the gangplank they’d left behind. On instinct, Jackson threw the hatch shut, hoping that the steel would delay the inevitable blast of heat. He then looked back at Gerber, lying twenty yards away, forever stilled by an invisible hand that crushed the life from his lungs.

Jackson looked around. Surely there must have been some other way out. He couldn’t sit still forever, but there was an unseen assassin that killed instantly in front of him, or there was the slow, agonizing demise of burning alive behind the hatch, which was swiftly growing warmer, even as he leaned against it.

There was a railing ahead and a twenty-yard drop into the water. Maybe he could make it through the invisible poison gas, swim beneath it and reach the small locks that emptied out into the harbor. Jackson had little else to choose from, so he hurled himself forward, vaulting the rail.

Instead of sailing into the water with grace and speed, an agonizing spasm contorted him in midfall, his lungs feeling as if they had been filled to the brim with hot sauce. He didn’t know how much of the gas he’d sucked in, but it didn’t matter. His change in pose, midfall, granted him one small mercy.

Dropping twenty yards to the water headfirst, without his hands breaking the surface, resulted in his neck shattering, bones driven deep into his skull.

Instantly dead, Jackson didn’t have to worry about drowning or suffocating from the effects of the nerve gas released inside. The waters also would preserve his corpse for a month as the inferno melted steel, rendering the submarine pen an utterly unrecognizable stack of twisted, deformed and charred metal. In the cold waters off Norfolk, Bernie Jackson’s lifeless form entered a long sleep, never seeing the light of day until thirty days hence.

* * *

NATALIE CHASE COULD ONLY imagine the string of luck that had got her this cruise of the Spanish Canary Islands with some of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen. She ran her fingers through her blond curls, calling attention to her face as the guys walked past. Their eyes were agog with all of the women in bikinis who were out on the deck. There must have been two dozen guys, all of them with washboard abs. Not a single extra chin in the bunch.

The crew of this yacht kept their eyes on everything, the one small hindrance to Natalie’s admonition that the way to really pick up people was to go topless, leaving nothing to the imagination. The captain of the yacht was a handsome man, if likely twice Natalie’s age of twenty-five. She couldn’t tell what kind of body he had under his uniform, but he was tall, square-shouldered, with a disciplined, finely groomed beard and piercing eyes.

He was the most tantalizing item on this oceangoing all-you-can-eat buffet of beefcake. Captain Raul Espinoza was classically Spanish, with dark hair, skin sun-burned to a pleasing even tan, and clear, cool blue eyes. He was still virile; the salt and pepper of his beard and hair gave proof to that, in Natalie’s eyes.

The young men around her were fit and trim and handsome, but there was an aloofness to Espinoza that made her feel as if she needed to get to him. He didn’t have wealth, but he had every ounce of manliness that Natalie could imagine.

There were still the other crew members, swarthy, scruffy, dark-eyed, seeming more as if they belonged in a pirate movie than working on the decks of a miniature cruise ship. They had scars, and hands that looked made more of callus than flesh and bone. Their knuckles were especially distorted, swollen with pads of skin that seemed liked the armor plate on some movie superhero’s suit than the result of working on engines and such.

“Come up to the deck,” Espinoza said, interrupting Natalie’s thoughts. “And this time, it’s captain’s orders. Everyone topless. No excuses.”

Natalie pursed her lips, trying to decide whether she was ready to walk half naked on deck. Espinoza’s voice had held the lilt of self-satisfied humor. Could she do it?

Over the past two nights, at least four men had seen the goods, and Natalie knew they hadn’t been disappointed.

Captain Espinoza was going to be there, from the sound of things. She could endure the leers of the scraggly, battered-looking pirates if she could present herself to him.

“Comin’, Nat?” Derek, one of her recent conquests, asked. His gaze didn’t meet her at eye level. He wanted a repeat performance, and Derek, all dimples and bright white smile, would be an absolutely great consolation prize. He had just the right amount of “man pelt” on his upper chest, neither a thick hair shirt nor the smooth, overly waxed self-conscious shiny pectorals. His trail was all but unbroken, from clavicle down into his board shorts.

Natalie nodded.

Derek’s smile couldn’t have been more obvious if it had been put up in neon.

Natalie reached behind her, undid the string holding her top on and slid out. It was warm, sunny, and the kiss of the sun on her not-yet-tanned tits was something new. Something fun. She could get used to this kind of attention. Natalie wasn’t going back to Indiana with a single tan line. That was it.

She got up and spotted something on the water, just past Derek’s shoulder. It was everything the yacht they were on was not. It was dirty, grunting out smoke, with rust all along its sides. She could see the nets on it. A fishing boat.

And more sea men, no doubt.

Natalie began to have second thoughts about displaying her wares for not one but two boatloads of men. Derek slid his arm around her waist, his lips brushing her cheek.

“Come on, beautiful. We have a special party to get to,” he told her.

Derek’s nearness, the strength of his arm holding her around her waist, the smell of his just-washed hair, pulled her worries away from the boat. She gave his muscular shoulder a nibble, and he reciprocated by leaning down for a warm, passionate kiss.

“Time’s wasting, beautiful people!” Espinoza announced once more.

The two jogged toward the deck.

There, Espinoza stood on a railing overlooking the party deck. All fifty of the passengers were here, and Natalie hadn’t seen such a collection of smooth, unlined faces, flowing hair and tanned skin in her life. There were more than a few with pale patches where they had avoided going topless, as well, but in those same faces, she saw the giddy excitement of an experiment with sexual freedom and the dismissal of traditional bans on nudity. One girl looked as if she were a sneeze away from ripping off the thong that covered the few inches of her flesh that weren’t exposed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you to our ship,” Espinoza said. He began to unbutton his jacket, sliding out of it. The rest of the bridge crew was there. They were younger and in fairly good shape, as well, though as they peeled out of their shirts Natalie could make out the scar tissue on each of them. Captain Espinoza was especially marked up, but that only made him even more interesting. He had lived a life of danger and peril, and her imagination ran away with her.... The brave, blue-eyed captain risking life and limb, battling smugglers and rescuing half-nude maidens from wicked pirates, bringing them to the safety of his bed and the warmth of his strong arms....

“You think that you are quite lucky to be on board this ship,” Espinoza said. “But you each have been chosen to come here for one specific purpose.”

Natalie watched him, but lost herself more in his chest, broad, with salt-and-pepper hair where scars didn’t leave bare patches. He was muscled, but not overly so. Lean and tall, he had lived a life of activity, showing in how he was tightly built without taking on the obscene distortions of a bodybuilder.

He took out a small nylon pouch and began handing out syringes to his bridge crew. He pushed the needle into his pectoral muscle and squeezed the bulb. There was a slight grunt of discomfort, and then he resumed talking.

“We needed your identifications, your luggage, your general appearances,” Espinoza said.

Natalie looked to the fishing boat, growing ever closer. There were women on the deck of that ship, as well as men.

“This was an excuse to get you all together in one spot, with a minimum of cleanup,” Espinoza said.

Suddenly people to Natalie’s right began coughing, jerking spasmodically. The wave of those falling ill spread quickly through the crowd. Natalie took a frightened breath, then she lost control of her hands and arms. Her head snapped upright and she could feel her teeth tear open her tongue as her jaws clenched violently shut like a bear trap. Blood and froth oozed over her lips as her legs gave way and she slumped to the deck. Derek was beside her, vibrating as if he were some child’s doll malfunctioning. The only signs that he was even alive were the spurts of blood through his nose, broken as he’d fallen onto his face, as his lungs tried to suck in fresh breath.

Vomit burst from Natalie’s stomach, and she felt her bladder release, as well.

“The Sendero Luminoso thanks you for the donation of your lives,” Espinoza’s voice echoed in her ears. “We promise to use them well, you spoiled little children.”

Natalie winced, reaching up as Espinoza glared down at her. Her specifically. Those blue, cool eyes she’d once lost herself in were now cold, hard, angry.

Darkness settled on the girl as the nerve gas finally took full effect.

Minutes later, gloved hands would hoist her over the rail, dropping her and the other young murder victims onto the ocean floor.