Virus (5 page)

All thanks to the good captain . . .

Foster had given Steve an earful when they’d gotten below, away from that crazy fuck; he was still fuming.

Squeaky was already gathering his scuba gear for an outside look, sloshing through the room to pick up a tank. Steve shook his head, wondering if the others had any idea how bad it really was; they were screwed, no two ways about it. If they couldn’t patch it over, the ship would sink.

“How could we be so stupid to sign up with this guy again?”

Squeaky shrugged. “The fucker pulled a gun on you? I’da decked him.”

Steve wished he had. “The bastard had us pullin’ five hundred tons of steel and lumber,
uninsured,
a hundred miles from any normal shipping lane in a
typhoon.
Our helmsman’s a weasel, our navigator’s a . . .”

Squeaky grinned and muttered something in Spanish; Steve only picked up “hot” from the Cuban vernacular.

Steve scowled. “Ah, she got drummed out of the navy for striking a superior officer—”

He broke off, realizing that he’d just been thinking about doing pretty much the same thing. He looked around and shook his head again, not wanting to talk about Foster anymore.

“I can’t
believe
this,” he said, and hoped that Squeaky wouldn’t notice the change of direction; he kind of liked Foster, or at least didn’t dislike her, and Squeaky would tease him mercilessly if he knew it.

Squeaky was still smiling. “So Foster has a problem with authority; you’re not the coolest cucumber either, Steve.” He picked up his tank and heaved it out of the hatch as he spoke. “But I’ll tell you this, this is the last time we work for percentage of the cargo instead of a salary.”

Might be the last time we do anything,
Steve thought, and then boosted himself up after Squeaky to find out for sure. With any luck, they could fix the problem and make it out Leiah’s other side. If it was as bad as it seemed right now, though, not getting paid was going to be the very least of their troubles.

Foster stood out on the jutting wing bridge with Richie, the two of them inspecting the damage to the radio system in the heavy, strange air. The long-range antenna had been snapped off almost at the base, which was bad enough—but the coupler had also shattered into multiple pieces, and that meant rigging a replacement wasn’t going to happen.

On the top deck below them, Steve was helping his partner into a dive suit and Hiko was busy with a torch, leaning against what was left of the safety railing. Woods had crashed for a short spell and Everton was nowhere in sight; she hadn’t seen him in over an hour. Rays of sun pierced through the fog, made the scene look almost peaceful; a day of hard work on an ocean tug in the tropics . . .

Richie stared out past the men, his dark features intent as he studied the silently raging storm beyond. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want to talk to her, ignoring her attempts to start a conversation; maybe this was an opening. In spite of her irritation with the sullen attitude of the crew, she was tired of feeling like an outsider.

“That inner wall may be as high as forty-five thousand feet,” she said. “The eye, twenty to thirty miles across.”

Richie seemed interested. “Weird. I’ve never been in the eye of a hurricane before.”

“Typhoon. In the South Pacific it’s called a typhoon.”

Richie glanced at her, sneering slightly. “Thank you very much for that,” he said, words dripping sarcasm.

Jesus, what’s it gonna take?

Foster stared at him, wondering why she even bothered. He was stoned half the time anyway . . .

Richie crouched down, scooped up a chunk of the broken coupler, and sighed heavily. “This thing’s history.”

Foster looked out across the deck and watched as Squeaky plunged overboard, the splash loud in the unnatural quiet of the eye. Steve ran a hand through his thick, dark hair and paced back and forth a few steps, looking down into the rippling water. Tall, but not too tall. Well built, definitely, good-looking in a preppy kind of way—

She realized suddenly that she was checking him out and turned back to Richie, surprised at herself. She gave it another shot. “Couldn’t you bypass that capacitor, rewire it . . . ?”

“On an antenna coupler, it’s a resistor, not a capacitor. I don’t talk to you about navigation, so don’t talk to me about electronics, okay?” He stood up, his low words stinging and sharp.

Foster glared at him. “Could you please explain the problem you have with me? Are you mad at me
today,
or is this a female thing?”

Richie’s expression remained blank, his dark eyes unreadable. “No, no, don’t get me wrong, Foster. I
love
women, I just don’t think they should be on a boat.”

He tossed the piece of mangled equipment to the floor and started to walk away—then stopped and turned, and Foster could see the anger now, the reality behind his little speech.

“I know who your father is. We all needed the money a hell of a lot more than you did.”

Foster called after him as he started walking again, unable to let it ride. “That’s right, Richie, I have a trust fund and a Park Avenue apartment, this is just a hobby! I love this, I love sleeping in a closet and using the head after Woods—”

She was talking to air, Richie had walked out, headed for the top deck where Steve and Hiko waited for Squeaky to come up with news. Frustrated, she kicked at the ruined coupler, sent it skittering across the boards.

She took a deep breath, turned and looked out at Leiah. The raging storm mirrored her feelings perfectly; she’d made mistakes, a lot of them, but it wasn’t her fault that she was an admiral’s daughter, or that both of her parents were successful. And it wasn’t fair that Richie blamed her for it, assuming that she was some kind of debutante just because she came from money.

Her father’s voice was tough, unforgiving.
You gonna give up then, sailor? Throw in the towel because some classist asshole thinks he’s better than you? You have the skills, Kit, you worked hard to get them; don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t belong here.

“Right again, sir,” she whispered, and let the anger go in another deep breath, blown out slowly. She’d had to prove herself before, and she was at least as smart as anyone else on the tug . . .

Foster squared her shoulders and headed off to get a cup of sorely needed coffee, which she would drink out on the deck with the others. They didn’t want her there? Too bad; her ass was on the same line as theirs and she wasn’t going to run off crying because Richie or Everton or any of them didn’t like it.

I am woman, hear me roar—or get the fuck out of my way,
she thought, and found herself smiling for the first time in much too long. Just let Everton try to ignore her now.

The captain sat at the battered desk in his quarters and stared down at the clutter, feeling old and tired and more than a little drunk. Papers and photos lay across the crowded desktop, a few words distorted and magnified by a shot glass that was somehow empty again.

My whole life, right here,
he thought miserably.
Sitting on my own goddamn ship, sitting here with my whole life right in front of me . . .

It was pathetic, the small spread of papers that made up who he was. Financial records from the bank that spanned decades, told of every hard-earned deposit and every meager withdrawal—up until the last one, of course. There was a picture of his tiny house in Guam, sold now; not even a place to hang his hat when they made it to land . . .

“Not
gonna
make it,” he mumbled, and reached for the shot glass and the half-empty bottle. Whiskey, and not even a decent brand. Everton felt a drunken self-pity well up inside and hated himself for it, which only made the feelings stronger.

At least there would be no witnesses to talk about his failure, to tell people what had happened. The
Sea Star
was still taking on water; he could feel her heaviness, her slow and inevitable settling into the sea. His beautiful little tug was going to sink unless the crew managed to stop it somehow, and they weren’t good enough.

The crew,
his
crew. They hated him, but did he care? Jokes, the whole lot. A bitch navigator, an ass-kissing helmsman, a couple of screwed-up deckhands—a primitive with tattoos on his face and a pot-smoking black. And the engineers—he’d expected more from them, the only two he’d worked with before, but they wouldn’t be able to plug a bottle with a cork; pretty boy and his Cuban pal, probably buggered each other anyway.

He poured the cheap whiskey with shaking hands and a few drops splashed across a snapshot of the
Sea Star,
taken on the day he’d brought her home. He brushed the liquid off and held it up, studied it. There he was, young and strong, grinning like a man without a care in the world; he was standing in front of the tug proudly and wearing the captain’s hat that his young, pretty wife had bought for him. Sarah had taken the picture, and he could remember her laughing, making him don the cap for the posed shot. She’d been wearing a dress, green with tiny white flowers . . .

Gone, Sarah, everything’s gone now.

Everton picked up the glass and downed it, felt the fire pour down his aching throat and loosen the knot in his belly. It would all be over soon, one way or another.

The captain poured himself another drink and carefully avoided looking at the revolver that lay across one corner of his desk; it wasn’t time, not yet. He wanted to finish the bottle and look through the pictures, remembering what it had been like to still have dreams. He picked up a photo of himself at age eighteen. “I’ve let ya down, lad.”

• 5 •

S
teve watched for bubbles over the side of the
Sea Star
and felt his spirits sink lower with each passing minute; he could see the air rising to the surface, Squeak was fine—but the longer he stayed down, the more likely that it wasn’t good news.

Hiko had laid aside his tools for the moment and started watching with him, his inked face solemn in the morning light. Steve had wondered about the deckhand, about his culture, but hadn’t wanted to ask any intrusive questions; Hiko, like everyone else on board, kept pretty much to himself. And now certainly didn’t seem to be the time for Maori Q and A, with the
Sea Star
pulling water in the eye of a typhoon.

Richie joined them, pushed himself up on the rail next to Hiko, and pulled a joint out from behind one ear. He lit up, inhaling the pungent smoke deeply as the three of them waited for Squeaky to surface.

Steve frowned slightly. It seemed like a monumentally stupid time to get high, but he supposed that everyone had their own way of dealing; for him and Squeaky, it was work. Maybe Richie worked better stoned; he’d known a few guys who could do that . . .

Hiko looked at Richie, his broad, distinctive features flat and expressionless beneath the etched lines on his face. “You’re a strange duck, Richie,” he said, the New Zealand accent strong in his low voice.

Richie motioned with the lit smoke at Hiko’s face and arms. “That’s saying something, coming from a human wall of graffiti. I mean, are you people actually under the impression that those things are attractive? And what kind of name is
Hiko,
anyway?”

Hiko grinned suddenly, probably realizing that Richie was yanking his chain. He started to rise menacingly, as if to tackle the toking man.

“Give it a rest,” said Steve, and Hiko sat down again, his grin fading.

“Hiko is Maori. I am Maori. The tattoos are my spiritual armor.”

Richie clenched the joint between his teeth and rolled up one sleeve, revealing a U.S. Navy tattoo, complete with anchor. “We do it a little differently where I come from.”

Steve was surprised. “Navy? Come on . . .”

Richie nodded, serious. “Six years with the Seventh Fleet. Weapons technology specialist, first class. Graduated top of my class.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow. “So what happened?”

Richie took another hit and pushed off the railing, exhaling the answer as he walked away.

“Drugs.”

Steve grinned as Hiko turned back to his work, cutting steel plates with an acetylene torch as patches for the hull. The Maori was right, Richie
was
a strange duck.