Crossbones (3 page)

“Yes, ma'am.” Her voice was quavering, and she fought to control it.

Liz softened her voice even further, so that no one else on the bridge would hear her. “Maintain your bearing. Be a role model for
the crew. They're going to be scared and confused, and they need to see calm, confident officers. You know my expectations.”

The younger woman took a deep breath and nodded, and Liz gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze before sending her off.
Joshua James
had moved slowly into the center of the channel, and Liz gave the command to reverse at four knots. A new vibration in the deck signaled the change, and the cutter began to back up, slowly coming alongside
Klondike
on the port side, still tied to its berth. Liz returned to the bridge windows to inspect the other ship.

The dead were swarming across the cutter's decks, hunting the living.

Liz keyed the microphone. “This is the captain. Stand by to commence rescue operations.”

One of two Short Range Prosecutors—SRPs—aboard
Joshua James
launched at speed from the stern ramp of the cutter, its water jets throwing up a fan of spray. Seven meters long, the rigid, inflatable boat hooked around the vessel and blasted back up the channel toward
Klondike
, LCDR Coseboom at the helm with three other men aboard. In the bow, a Coast Guardsman crouched with the M16 Charlie Kidd had taken from the port security Hummer.

There were people in the water ahead and more leaping from
Klondike
's deck or simply toppling over the rails with reaching arms. The men in the SRP saw a female petty officer try to scramble over the railing, only to be pulled back by dead shipmates before she could make the leap to the water.

Boomer slowed as he neared the other cutter, taking a moment to think. Some of the figures were swimming away from the ship; others were struggling to stay afloat, splashing and waving their arms. A few sank almost immediately, not even attempting or unable to swim. These had ashy faces and snapping teeth.

“Be careful what you pull out of the water,” he said to the two men standing at the SRP's edge. “Only the living, understand?” He
was a little surprised at himself, at how easily he had accepted that the dead were rising. But that brought on thoughts about his wife in their little apartment, and the stupid argument that had caused him to storm out and spend the night on
Joshua James
. He should have been with her.

The young crewmen aboard weren't so accepting, their faces revealing their overall shock, but they nodded at the order. Boomer angled the SRP to bring them closer to the swimmers, careful not to get too close to the cutter's hull. He didn't want one of those things dropping into his boat.

The guardsmen cast out their lines and started pulling survivors from the water.

•   •   •

J
oshua James
, still reversing at an agonizing four knots, had nearly reached the mouth of the channel, where it would back briefly into the Duwamish Waterway, then steam almost immediately into the sound. Elizabeth was impatient to engage forward propulsion, aching for open water where she would have some maneuvering options. This was like backing slowly down an alley, and she felt vulnerable. She used a pair of binoculars to watch the rescue operation taking place off the bow. Boomer seemed to have it under control.

On the radio, the Guard channel was crowded with impossible horrors and unthinkable events, monotone voices mixing with panicked cries for help and even screaming. Mass riots were tearing Seattle apart, the police were being overwhelmed, and civilian casualties were staggering. Chaos, confusion, and miscommunication reigned, but the commonly repeated fact was that people were returning from the dead and killing the living.

Sea-Tac airport had been closed to nonmilitary traffic, and any airborne civilian flights were being diverted. National Guard units were being mobilized to defend hospitals. Fires were erupting
throughout the city and suburbs, and the population was being ordered to evacuate, though to where was unclear. North of her position, the naval base in Everett, where
Nimitz
berthed when it was home, was locked down and reporting attacks by ground forces.

What ground forces?
Liz wondered.

A lone destroyer had managed to sortie from Everett an hour earlier and was now cruising just offshore of the city, raking the waterfront with its five-inch gun in an attempt to “suppress aggressors.”

Liz stared at the radio.
The Navy is shelling Seattle.
She shook her head.

An order came down from National Command Authority. It was transmitted in the clear, but it had a genuine authenticity code, as Liz confirmed with a plastic snap-card from a small safe below the communication gear. NCA announced that the United States had been placed under martial law and all military units were to consider their country under attack by foreign aggressors. Biohazard protocols were to be observed, though
Joshua James
was currently unequipped for such measures, and every unit was to prepare for strike operations.
Joshua James
had just become a ship at war.

Liz switched over to the Coast Guard channel, bringing up the microphone. Before she could speak, the airwave buzzed with an official-sounding voice.

“
Joshua James
, this is Base Seattle Command. Acknowledge.”

“This is USCGC seven-five-four,” Liz said, “Captain Elizabeth Kidd, commanding.”

“
Joshua James
, you are ordered to return to port immediately.”

Liz made a face. “Base Seattle, our pier has been overrun, and we are engaged in rescue operations for
Klondike
. I am preparing to maneuver my ship.” There were going to be a lot of civilians in need of help, she thought. Why would Command order her back during a crisis?

The voice came again. “Negative, seven-five-four. Return to port immediately.”

The bridge crew looked at their commanding officer, then at each other. Out the thick front windows, Liz saw LCDR Coseboom's small craft racing back toward
Joshua James
. She couldn't see any more figures in the water near
Klondike
. There was plenty of movement on the decks of the smaller ship and the docks beyond, however, staggering figures, none of them living. Did Command think she was going to return her ship to
that
? She had a responsibility to her crew.

“I cannot comply with that order, Seattle Command,” she said, shocked to hear herself utter words she had never before even considered. But then nothing like this had ever happened in her nearly three-decade-long career. “We are at wartime conditions, and I will preserve this ship.” The voice on the radio began to repeat its demand, but Liz snapped over to the Guard channel again, cutting it off.

The close, heavy thump of rotors approached above the ship, making the deck thrum. A black helicopter dropped into view twenty-five yards off the cutter's bow, its cockpit level with the bridge windows. A yellow star and the letters
DEA
were stenciled on the fuselage, and a man in body armor holding a sniper rifle could be seen at an open side door, clipped into a harness.

A loudspeaker mounted to the helicopter's belly blared over the chop of rotors. “This is DEA flight zero-three.
Joshua James
, heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

•   •   •

E
nsign Amy Liggett hurried down a passageway, clipboard in hand. Earlier, nearing the end of her overnight watch, she thought she'd been tired. No longer. Adrenaline and the sudden appearance of her commanding officer had erased all traces of sleepiness, but those weren't the only reasons.

The crew was using the word
zombie
. People were attacking and
eating
one another, and the crew was looking to her for answers she didn't have.

Having the captain aboard made things better. The woman was a career veteran who knew her business, and she was gifted with a cool decisiveness Amy could only envy. But then, what of the captain? Crew members had told her they'd seen port security take a man off
Klondike
in handcuffs and put him in the back of a Humvee, someone a petty officer said he recognized as the captain's brother. Then the captain had shown up, shot down two guardsmen, and brought the man aboard. Now he was loose on the ship and barking orders.

It couldn't be true, could it? Just scuttlebutt, people misunderstanding things amid the chaos. And what was really happening? Zombies? Please!
Her little brother back in Virginia was a zombie freak, devouring anything that had to do with the walking dead: books, movies, and video games. It was kid stuff, fun, yes, but not real.

Now they were at battle stations, leaving Base Seattle with less than a quarter-strength crew. They were unprepared for a cruise of any length in a ship not yet commissioned. They were just now transitioning from builder's trials to acceptance trials, and the cutter hadn't yet received its Coast Guard markings. Many of the ship's systems either hadn't been fully tested or weren't working at all. Actual readiness was many months away.

Amid all the questions and unknowns, there was only one certainty, and that was her fear. Amy had never been so scared in her life.

“Steady,” she chastised herself. An officer had to be locked down and in control, even when all she wanted to do was cry. “There'll be none of that,” she growled at the empty corridor, turning a corner toward the armory.

The door was open.

She slowed, suddenly wary, and looked inside. The lights were on, illuminating a room that was, as it should have been, mostly empty. To the right stood vacant rifle racks, where the M4s, M14s,
and shotguns would be, once they were delivered. Beneath these were numerous empty slots for handguns, the forty-caliber Sigs. Regulations at this point of the trial process authorized only three: one each for the captain, XO, and chief of the boat. There they were, snug in their slots. Spaces for rifle and pistol ammunition were all but empty, again as they should be.

She looked around. The M240 medium machine guns weren't due to arrive until just before commissioning, and ammo for the ship's heavier weapons—what was aboard, anyway—would be secured in the magazine one deck below. Four rail-mounted fifty-caliber heavy machine guns had arrived ahead of schedule, along with their crates of belted ammo, and stood against the far bulkhead.

Why didn't things look right? She started counting.
One . . . two . . . three . . .

“Uh-oh,” she whispered.

•   •   •

L
iz moved to the front of the bridge, holding the radio handset and still on the Guard channel. “DEA flight zero-three, this is
Joshua James
. That is a negative, do not attempt to board. We are on a war footing per National Command Authority, and we
will
enter Puget Sound.”

The response from the loudspeaker came as if those aboard the helicopter weren't monitoring the military traffic channel. “Coast Guard Cutter, heave to at once.” The sniper in the helicopter's door raised his rifle and sighted on the bridge. “Captain Elizabeth Kidd,” the speaker boomed, “you have unlawfully seized a vessel of the United States and are harboring a federal fugitive. Surrender your vessel immediately.”

Liz gripped the handset so tightly she thought the plastic might crack. “Flight zero-three, do you even
know
what's happening at Seattle Base?”
It was insane. Everything was coming apart, they were
in the middle of a national security crisis, and the DEA was worried about Charlie and Elizabeth Kidd?
“Flight zero-three, we are—”

The sniper fired, the bullet sparking off the steel just above the bridge windows with a loud ping. Liz and the crewmen ducked.

“This is your last warning,” the loudspeaker blared. “Stop your vessel now.”

“Cease fire!” Liz shouted into the mic. “Do not—”

The chopper banked left and roared over the ship toward its stern, flying over Coseboom's SRP as the officer prepared to come around to the cutter's boat ramp for recovery. The DEA bird hung in the air, then pivoted to face the ship's stern, and then four men in black with assault rifles rappelled from its doors, two on each side. All four descended an even twenty-five feet on their lines and hung there in the air.

On the water, Boomer completed his turn around a ship that was backing toward him. He couldn't think about helicopters now, or about what the loudspeaker had said about his captain, though all other eyes on the small boat were looking up. He had to concentrate on lining his boat up with the narrow, alleylike gap that was the cutter's boat ramp.

Above, the DEA helicopter moved forward, the four men beneath it swinging backward as a group. Seconds later the chopper flared and hovered, a maneuver that now swung the four men forward and low over the flat, eight-by-fifty-foot flight deck, where they would unclip and drop onto the vessel.

•   •   •

L
iz dropped the mic and headed for the ladderway on the run. “Mr. Waite has the conn,” she yelled as she disappeared down the metal stairs, leaving command of a vessel nearly as big as a Navy frigate to a midlevel enlisted man. Her boots pounded the steel decking as she ran aft down the passageway. The DEA would board
at the flight deck, she knew. Liz had worked enough joint operations with them to know their tactics.

She had to get there before they boarded, had to reason with them when they arrived, before any of her people could be hurt. Two-thirds of the way along the passage, Amy Liggett charged up a ladderway to the left and started running behind her captain.

A moment later they both heard the thunder of a heavy machine gun.

•   •   •

A
t a range of one hundred feet, a storm of fifty-caliber bullets shredded the helicopter's cockpit, both pilots and the sniper in back. More bullets raked across the fuselage, rotor blades, and engine cowling. The weapon, designed to go up against armored vehicles, knocked the thin-skinned aircraft out of the sky. It crashed into the channel and went down fast. As it fell, the four men still attached to it by rappelling lines were snapped away, their bodies slamming hard against rails and steel protrusions before being dragged beneath the surface by their tethers.

Still reversing,
Joshua James
crept past the point where the helicopter had gone under, the surface boiling with bubbles and oil. LCDR Coseboom's SRP roared up the boat ramp a moment later, and the officer and his small crew immediately began helping the handful of
Klondike
survivors up onto the deck.

Elizabeth Kidd and Amy Liggett burst through a hatch and onto the aft deck that sat atop the ship's twin helicopter hangars, overlooking the flight deck and boat ramp below. Directly ahead of them, Senior Chief Charlie Kidd stood behind an M2 heavy machine gun set in a pintle mount, the deck around him littered with fifty-caliber shell casings. Liz slowed as she reached him, her face revealing her horror.