Crossbones (25 page)

They found something to pry up the handle,
Sophia thought. There was a metallic groan at the hatch, the lever inching upward and stretching the television cord and sheets they'd used to lash it down. She and Kay stood back from the door, watching the lever move.

The children were all the way at the back of the berthing compartment, hiding under bottom racks or in the head and showers, trying to stay quiet. The lever creaked and rose another inch.

“It's not going to hold,” Kay said, her voice on the edge of panic.

“And they're going to come in shooting,” said Sophia. She looked around, seeing nothing else that could wedge the handle, nothing that would make a difference. She looked at the other woman. “Go back into the compartment. If they get through me, you'll have to take them.” She didn't have to tell her what would happen to the children if both adults fell.

Kay was pale and looked ready to cry, but she bit her lip and nodded, disappearing back into the room. Sophia moved behind a triple stack of bunks facing the hatch and knelt behind them,
resting the shotgun across the mattress, aiming at the door. It was poor cover, she knew, but it might buy her time for an extra shot.

Another creak, and the TV cords snapped, the knotted sheets beginning to tear as the handle went up. Sophia tensed.

•   •   •

S
tay right here, buddy,” Tommy said, setting the toddler on the deck. The little boy had one hand over his eyes and was sucking a thumb furiously, his small body trembling as it had been since the orderly took him from the officer's mess after Mercy and Jerry were murdered by the boarding team. He hadn't fought or squirmed as Tommy carried him through the passageways, and for that the man was thankful, but the boy hadn't spoken, either.

Not surprising. He's seen so much horror just since coming aboard. What had he seen during his time with these killers?

Tommy had been heading toward the room Sophia and Kay used as a school when he heard the gunfire echoing through the corridors. It made him stop, and the child began to whimper. He wished he were holding the rifle slung around his neck, but he couldn't grip that and carry the boy at the same time, so he'd settled for the pistol. Another brief exchange of gunfire followed the first and he moved toward it. The boy started whining, and Tommy briefly wondered how responsible it was to be heading into trouble while carrying a child. But gunfire meant
his
people were in trouble, and so he went.

Things were quiet for a while, and he slowed to a creep as he lost the direction of the shooting. Then he heard a scraping of metal, a creaking noise, and low curses coming from around a corner.

“I'll be right back,” he whispered to the toddler. The boy sat on the deck and covered his face with his hands, his chest hitching. The sight of this terrified child made him angry: not at the boy, but at those who had dragged him along on their brutal mission. Tommy shoved the pistol into its holster, bringing up the rifle.

•   •   •

A
lmost . . . got it . . .” the bearded man said, his face purpling as he heaved on the heavy pry bar he had taken from a nearby firefighting station, forcing the handle upward. His fire axe and pistol were on the deck beside the hatch and his bearded partner stood behind him, rifle pointed and ready.

“Almost . . .” There was a pop and the handle flew up, the man dropping to his knees and letting go of the pry bar. “Yes!”

A long rattle of 5.56-millimeter bullets cut the two men down.

The one who'd been using the pry bar was on his back, blood in his mouth as he struggled to breathe. He saw someone wearing green medical scrubs and an orange backpack run up to stand over him, pointing a rifle down and to his left, firing a single shot into his partner's head. Then the muzzle swung back toward him, aiming at his face.

The bearded man tried to say, “No,” but it came out as a gurgle. The muzzle flashed.

•   •   •

S
ophia listened to a long silence after the initial burst of gunfire followed by two shots. Then came the muffled sound of a child crying in the corridor. Someone banged on the hatch. “It's Tommy,” said a voice outside. “Who's in there?”

“Be ready, Kay,” Sophia called, approaching the hatch with the shotgun to her shoulder, finger on the trigger. The lever had been forced up, the hatch standing slightly ajar, and she eased it open with the toe of a sneaker, aiming. The passageway outside was blood-splattered, two dead men crumpled on the deck with neat bullet holes in their foreheads to go with their other wounds. A child was crying somewhere to the right.

“It's Tommy,” the orderly called. He'd moved back from the hatch, not wanting to become collateral damage.

Sophia peeked into the corridor and saw him. He approached her and held out the little boy. She set down the shotgun at once and took him into her arms.

“You have the kids?” Tommy asked.

“All of them,” she replied, passing the toddler to Kay, who had come up behind her.

The orderly nodded and quickly collected the dead men's weapons, carrying them into the berthing compartment and dumping them on a rack. Then he brought in the heavy pry bar.

“Who is this?” Kay asked, rubbing the toddler's back and swaying with him. The child was crying behind his hands.

“They brought him along as some kind of diversion,” Tommy said with an edge to his voice. “I don't know his name.” He looked at the toddler, who popped his thumb into his mouth and looked away, shaking his head. Tommy sighed and handed the pry bar to Sophia. “Use this to jam the handle. It should hold.”

She took it, felt the weight, and knew he was right. Tommy went back into the corridor, rifle to his shoulder. “I'm going after Rosa.”

Sophia closed the hatch behind him and jammed the pry bar against the handle.

•   •   •

T
he compartment was cold and black with two feet of seawater covering the floor. Rosa had no power, no phone, and no radio, just her flashlight, and found herself wondering how long the batteries would last.

It was a small space containing quarters for two men that doubled as a tiny office. She figured they had to be chiefs or senior petty officers, as low-ranking enlisted men didn't get private quarters like this, and no commissioned officer would be quartered down here in the bowels of the vessel. The racks, stacked one atop the other against one wall, lifted up to reveal bed-sized storage compartments beneath. The lower rack was flooded out, but the upper one still held
the neatly folded clothing and personal items of its former occupant. Rosa was able to put on dry—though slightly large—clothes and layer up with extra T-shirts and socks. A bulky sweater went over the top of it all.

While she went through the contents of the storage space, she was careful not to look at the photos of the man's family, set carefully to one side.

After she had run from the bloated and pasty corpses in the recreation room, Rosa had made a series of turns, dodging down passageways and through black compartments, wading through the knee-deep water. Groans echoed through the maze of flooded corridors, joined on occasion by the deeper creak and rumble of the torn hull taking on water. She could feel that the ship was on a sharper tilt now.

The flashlight's beam revealed bloodless faces and yellow eyes in almost every direction, and she had shot at them until she had emptied her magazine and replaced it with a fresh one—her last. More shots left her with only six rounds, but she didn't regret firing. It had kept her alive and held them back, allowing her the time and space needed to duck into this compartment unseen. A privacy bolt beside the hatch handle ensured it would remain closed.

Now, lying on the top bunk and wrapped in a wool blanket, Rosa looked down at the leftovers of a medical patch job floating on the water's surface in the room: paper from bandage packaging, bloody gauze, and a plastic hypodermic for antibiotics. Her sneakers, one torn and bloody on one side from where the bullet had entered, rested at the end of the bunk next to her medical pack. Under the blanket, her right foot was bandaged and throbbing.

Thank God it was only a ricochet. A direct shot into her foot would be crippling, and the dead would've been on her in seconds. As it was, the flattened slug had lodged in the meat behind her little toe, and Rosa was forced to scream into a pillow as she plucked it out with a pair of forceps. There was Demerol in her kit, though it
remained unused. She needed a clear head, so over-the-counter pain relievers would have to suffice, but they weren't doing much.

The blanket and layers of dry clothes warmed her, and although she wanted to be out there looking for Michael, she knew she'd be of no help to him if she shut down from hypothermia and became an easy meal for the former crew. Warmth and rest. She had no choice.

Michael.
Lying curled up with her head on the pillow, pistol close to her hand, she stared out at the small room, thinking about the boy.
Some rescuer I am. I hope you've been smarter than me.
She shut off the flashlight to conserve the battery.
Hang in there, kid. I'm still coming.

Rosa slept.

•   •   •

L
ying mostly submerged in the blackness of the gear handling compartment, Michael's body, still in a fetal position, jerked and convulsed. The corpse of a female sailor approached and briefly inspected the figure, decided it wasn't food, and shuffled away.

Muscles rippled beneath Michael's tightening skin, while firecracker strings of red electrical pulses made his brain jump. Eyes moved quickly behind closed lids as if the boy were not dead, but deep in REM sleep. His body ejected blackish fluids into the water.

Primal, violent urges flashed in his mutating brain as Michael's flesh began darkening to a deep crimson.

Five pirates, Charlie Kidd and his four civilian recruits, moved along the starboard side of the hangar deck. The young auxiliary deputy was in the lead, following Charlie's whispered directions and commands. They stayed close to the high steel wall, advancing quickly, weapons trained out into the big space. Forklifts and low-slung motorized carts sat on the rubberized decking, along with pallets of crates and the shadowy outlines of five helicopters parked at the end of the bay, hinged tail booms neatly folded against their sides.

Ahead of the group, near an aircraft elevator in a space open to the sea and the night, someone had built a square of sandbags, stacked to form a low wall. The interior was filled with soil and rows of crops. Charlie found it bizarre to see a garden growing in this place of cold steel, green leaves fluttering in the sea breeze.

Sudden movement whipped them all left, and they saw a man with long hair, cutoffs, and sandals dart from behind a pallet of crates, running for an open hatch on the port side. He was carrying a rifle but wasn't pointing it, only running away.

•   •   •

C
harlie aimed his M4 and shot him down. The group immediately ran to the fallen body, and Ava slit the hippie's throat just to be sure he was dead.

“Where were you going?” Charlie mused, crouching and relieving the dead man of a canvas flight deck vest, its pockets stuffed with six heavy magazines of rifle ammunition. Then he collected the rifle itself, grinning. It was an M14, the 7.62-millimeter assault rifle of the early 1960s, originally produced with a wood stock and grips. This was the newer version used by naval services, prisons, and Special Forces: blued steel and a dense, black plastic composition. A lethal weapon, and Charlie knew it well.

“Hello, baby,” Charlie said, running his fingers over the weapon.

The deputy kicked the body. “This one's gonna be up in a minute.” He pointed the muzzle of his rifle at the head.

“Don't,” Chick said. “Save the bullet. He'll make things interesting for the folks aboard once he's up and walking.”

“He might attack us,” the kid said.

“And then you may shoot him,” Chick said, as if speaking to a five-year-old. The chief handed his assault rifle to Ava, shrugging into the canvas vest full of magazines. The others quickly moved away from the corpse as Charlie took his time to ensure that the M14 had a full magazine, flicking off the safety. Then he followed his people as they continued through the hangar.

Chick looked around at hatches and ladderways climbing to interior catwalks. Once he was inside and stirring things up, his mission was to make certain it was safe for the second boarding party—the one that would be heavily armed with three times the original boarding group's numbers—to reach and enter the ship. The carrier's defenders would try to stop them, and Charlie knew they had only two ways to do that: put a helicopter into the air armed with an anti-ship torpedo (which they couldn't do, not while
he controlled the hangar bay) or mount fifty-calibers to the catwalk rails.

U.S. aircraft carriers were mighty things, but it was the ship's aircraft that allowed the carrier to visit earth-shaking destruction on an enemy, as they both served as offensive weapons and provided for the ship's defense. Without them, the ship was extremely vulnerable, relying on an entire battle group of screening ships including destroyers, guided missile cruisers, frigates, and subs to protect it from attack long before a threat could reach striking distance.

Nimitz
, like all supercarriers, had minimal defenses of its own: a few Phalanx close-in weapon systems with Gatling-gun-style barrels to chop inbound missiles out of the air, and several batteries of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) to shoot down aircraft. Neither system could protect the carrier from a surface threat. It had no gun batteries, only the fifty-cals to guard against small craft and suicide bombers in speed boats. If Charlie and his team could secure the catwalks where those guns would be mounted, the carrier would be helpless when the second boarding party came at them.

Chick was about to order two of his group to stay and watch the choppers while he and the others headed up to the catwalks when another flash of movement appeared down near the helicopters and he spotted a man running. Charlie saw the muscular upper body, the short haircut, and the brown face with its cruel scar.

The priest!

Charlie opened up with the M14 at once, the powerful
cracks
ringing though the hangar. Bullets sparked off metal and the priest suddenly stopped and dodged, throwing himself behind the nose of a Navy Seahawk. The auxiliary deputy sent three-round bursts into the bird, peppering its thin skin with holes.

From beneath the helicopter's fuselage came the flash of shotgun fire, the air around Charlie and his pirates buzzing with angry hornets, a nearby wooden crate splintering. They went for cover.

“I'll watch the front,” Charlie yelled at the deputy. “You watch the tail. Don't let him out.”

The boy knelt at the right end of the crates and sighted on the rear of the helicopter while Charlie targeted the nose. The shotgun crashed from under the chopper's belly, splintering the crate again.

“The rest of you get to the catwalks like we planned,” Charlie said to the others, then looked at Ava. “You know what to do.” He aimed back at the helicopter and fired three heavy-caliber bullets at the place where he'd seen the shotgun flash. “This fucker is
mine
.”

You just hide there, Father,
Charlie thought, searching for movement.
I can afford to be patient.

•   •   •

Adventure Galley

Aboard the cutter, now renamed by the captain after her infamous ancestor's ship, Elizabeth Kidd stood in the combat center looking over her operations specialist's shoulder. She had admitted to herself that her team had stopped being Coast Guard a long time ago, and might as well call the ship what it was. On a video screen, one of the cutter's exterior infrared cameras was zoomed in on the drifting aircraft carrier, showing her images in varying shades of green. It was the same system they'd used to surveil the vessel across the long distance of the bay, from their position of concealment behind the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge.

The cutter had slipped into the San Francisco Bay five nights ago, invisible as it hugged the northern coastline and dropped anchor behind the bridge. Then they had watched, and planned and trained. By the time Liz decided to strike, her boarders were eager and pep talks sprinkled with rhetoric about taking what was rightfully theirs urged them on. For Liz's part, the time spent watching gave her a good idea of just how thin the crew aboard
Nimitz
was, as well as the comfortable, unsuspecting patterns into which they'd
fallen. She'd been pleased when the Black Hawk lifted off the deck yesterday without any torpedoes aboard and hadn't returned.

The appearance of the Navy helicopter was unexpected, but the way it flew carelessly into their air defense envelope told her it was accidental; her ship remained undetected. Shooting it down was an easy decision and left the carrier vulnerable. One bird was down and the other missing. How many pilots could they have?

On the bridge two decks above, Mr. Waite was now conning the ship in a slow, distant circle around the crippled aircraft carrier, permitting Liz to use the exterior camera to get a view of her prize from all angles. Since her warning shot, there had been no sign that the occupants were mustering on deck as ordered. This wasn't particularly surprising; they were mostly civilians as far as she'd seen, disorganized refugees who'd lucked into an island fortress. That fact made her angry, considering how hard she'd fought—and what she'd lost—just to reach a point where her people were barely holding on. She'd used this in her speeches to the crew as well.

“Why should
they
have it so easy when
you've
had it so hard? What did
they
do to deserve such a sanctuary?” It worked, and her crew was now bloodthirsty.

No, the carrier's occupants hadn't complied, and Liz didn't expect they would. She'd given Chick six hours to create as much chaos and destruction as possible before sending in the second team—and now that
Nimitz
had passed under the Bay Bridge, the walking dead were aboard as well. Even if they could coordinate a surrender, the flight deck wasn't an inviting place to assemble.

Liz had no intention of firing on the carrier again unless there was no alternative. She wanted it intact, and the shot across the bow was a bluff. That, combined with the terror of Charlie Kidd belowdecks, would soften them up nicely for the second wave.

Lieutenant Riggs would command the motorized lifeboat they'd towed here with them, leading a group of the remaining ten civilians Charlie had recruited and most of her Coast Guard crew. Their
numbers would easily overwhelm whoever remained aboard after her brother ripped through them. Although Riggs was a pilot and not a true seaman, he accepted the assignment eagerly. He'd also welcomed the promotion to executive officer, after Ensign Liggett put on that mutinous display as they left Brookings, Oregon.

Liz would hang the girl at her leisure.

•   •   •

A
my had lost track of time. Was it possible she'd been locked in this maintenance closet for a week? She thought it was. The captain had ordered the room's lightbulb removed, so the only illumination came from the narrow crack at the base of the door. Once a day the door opened about six inches (prevented from opening further by someone's boot braced against the other side—she'd tested it) for a handful of crackers to be tossed inside, along with a plastic bottle of water. She didn't get fresh water until she'd handed out the empty. Twice, a bowl of half-eaten cat food was pushed inside. After resisting for a day, Amy gave in and devoured it. The stuff tasted as bad as it smelled, and she decided that cats probably didn't care, considering they licked their own rear ends. Amy had a bucket for a toilet, and it was never emptied. The closet was foul. She was hungry, dirtier than she could ever remember, and her bones and muscles ached from sleeping on the cold steel deck.

Footsteps or voices would pass in the corridor outside, but no one stopped to speak to her. When she pounded on the door or yelled, she was ignored.

The young woman had no illusions that anything awaited her other than the rope, but she decided she wouldn't have done anything differently. Well, instead of simply yelling and demanding the captain turn back for the Brookings refugees, she could have taken the bridge at gunpoint.

Here in the dark she could see their faces clearly, the families struggling to survive, looking at Amy with trust even as she
burdened them with more and more of the captain's restrictions. She saw the children, and for days their images brought tears. She was all cried out now, though.

They're all dead. All of them, even the kids.
They'd been left with no way to defend themselves against the oncoming horde, and there was nowhere to run.
I own that. I should have seen what that bitch was planning.
Amy would have liked to blame it on the fact that she was young and inexperienced, that she was only following orders. How convenient it would be to tell herself she'd been seduced by all the lofty concepts she'd learned about command and duty and obedience to those appointed above her. And how simple to rationalize that she'd been overwhelmed by her captain's reputation and charisma.

Right. Lie to yourself the way you lied to those people. Will that save you from the rope?
She knew it wouldn't, but she no longer cared about being hanged on deck while the crew looked on. Amy decided she deserved punishment, for she'd betrayed those people just as assuredly as the madwoman commanding this ship.

When she heard the fifty-seven-millimeter gunfire on the foredeck, felt the dull vibration in the steel beneath her, Amy knew that Elizabeth Kidd was now inflicting her terror on yet another group of refugees. It made the young woman clench her teeth until her jaws ached and make fists so tight the nails left marks in her palms.

No amount of forgiveness could undo the role she'd played in Brookings, she knew that. As she sat alone in the dark, awaiting her fate, she wondered if she might find
some
small measure of absolution. Not for the defenseless people she'd left to their fates, but for herself.