Chapter 61
PENDERGAST TURNED AWAY AND let his mind dwell on the business at hand. The engine room—that would, in all likelihood, be where he’d find the chief engineer and possibly the engineer’s mate. He began to head aft, away from the mess… but then stopped.
That stainless-steel door… Why so carefully hardened, and without a handle? It was strange. And the reaction of the cabin boy to the mere mention of it was telling.
Pivoting and moving stealthily forward, he stopped at the door and pressed his ear against it.
Nothing. He took out his improvised set of lockpicks and, despite the sophistication of the lock, he managed to coax it open.
Slipping inside, he closed the door behind him, flicked on the light switches with a sweep of his hand—
And stared.
An opulent bed occupied the center of the room, draped in rich brocaded material, standing on a splendid Aubusson carpet, with paintings on the walls of horses and dogs.
Standing beside the bed was a stainless gurney, such as one might find in a morgue, surrounded by racks and bottles of what appeared, from their color and odor, to be formalin and ethanol.
There were also steel medical carts holding a variety of needles, an angular spring forceps, a cavity injector, and several trocars—again, of the kind one would use in a morgue.
Strangest of all, the bed was turned down invitingly, as if perhaps awaiting a tryst.
This bizarre room and its accoutrements, Pendergast suddenly realized, must be in some way the expression of Magnus’s own special psychosis, caused by the PSI medical experimentation that had triggered suicide in one subject and made a serial killer out of the other.
But what form that psychosis had taken in Magnus—he mused as he took in the inexplicable contents of the room—was still obscure.
He had no more time to spare; ducking out and relocking the steel door, he again headed for his original destination, moving swiftly down the cargo deck leading to the engine room.
The hatch was closed, and the hammering of the engines behind it was very much audible.
Convenient, should there be any screams from his targets.
If the engine room had a standard layout, it would be small and tight.
This meant there was only one option for what he intended to do.
He grasped the marlin spike in one hand and the deburring hook in the other.
With his elbow, he eased down the engine room hatch handle until he felt the latch beyond free itself from the strike plate.
He waited, took a deep breath, and then kicked open the door.
The chief engineer and mate were busy at work on the engine, bent over, heads close together.
They started up as the door crashed open and stared, half paralyzed with horror, at the apparition that had just appeared.
Taking advantage of both his appearance and the engine noise, Pendergast unleashed a Rebel yell and rushed at them, simultaneously driving the marlin spike into the chief engineer’s eye while wrapping his other arm around the mate’s neck, the deburring tool cutting into the skin beneath his chin.
The chief went down with a gurgle, arterial blood drenching both Pendergast and the mate.
“Move and die,” Pendergast said to the struggling mate—who immediately went still.
“I’m not going to gag you. Make a sound, you’re dead.”
A nod.
Pendergast removed the man’s weapon and tucked it next to the other one in his waistband.
Using the rope he’d taken from the storeroom, he tied the man to a nearby steel pipe.
As he did so, he saw that the man’s radio was hooked to his belt, apparently tuned to the open deck frequency.
He let the man keep his radio, pretending not to notice it.
He removed the man’s watch and put it on his own wrist: timing would be critical.
And then he went to work. While the mate watched him balefully, Pendergast unslung the haversack, took out the cylinder of halon gas, and opened its valve.
There was an angry hiss of escaping gas.
He jammed the cylinder into the speaking tube connecting with the pilothouse and was pleased to note it fit snugly.
Given the cylinder’s aggressive rate of dispersion—it was meant for fire suppression, after all—he wouldn’t have long to wait.
The ship was air-conditioned, and while observing the vessel earlier that afternoon, he’d noted that the pilothouse, at the top of the ship in direct sun, had its windows closed.
Halon was nontoxic, heavy, and odorless.
Coming up through the speaking tubes, it would eventually displace the air from the deck up—asphyxiating the captain and anyone else in the enclosed space in the process.
It would render the ship NUC—not under command—but still under propulsion.
He quickly searched the chief’s body, taking his radio and weapon, a .
45—more punch than the other two he had, and he only needed one.
He discarded the other weapons. Slinging the haversack over his shoulder again, Pendergast took a moment to examine the engine.
It was a Caterpillar V16, forty-four hundred horsepower, the drivetrain consisting of a crankshaft and pitman arms connected to the churning stern wheel.
He turned back to the engineer’s mate and untied him. “We’re going to the cargo hold.”
The man glowered at him, and Pendergast raised the weapon. “My dear fellow—will it be necessary to kill you?”
The mate shook his head.
“Good man. Stand up.”
The man complied.
Pendergast went to the hatch and—keeping the man covered—cracked it and peered out. All was calm; the deck was clear.
Pendergast motioned the man over with a wave of his gun.
“Go out the hatch,” he said. “I’ll be behind you, gun aimed.
Break into a run, shout, signal—instant bullet to the spinal cord.
” He paused to let that sink in. “You will walk casually forward to the main cargo hold. You will go inside and I will follow.”
The man did as he was told, walking down the deck with Pendergast one pace behind, approaching the cargo room door, then opening it and going inside.
Pendergast followed. It was a cavernous space that went up two stories, with a metal stair and catwalk above, punctuated by a door leading onto the stateroom deck. The cargo area was mostly empty.
It would serve its purpose well.
Pendergast tied up the engineer’s mate—more securely this time, by both the waist and ankles—to some cargo braces, while allowing his hands to remain free.
Then he ducked out of sight behind some supplies, delved into his haversack, took out the can of acetone, set it on the floor, and used the marlin spike to stab holes in its bottom.
Liquid began gurgling out and spreading over the floor.
While this was happening, Pendergast’s keen ears heard the faintest beep from his unseen prisoner’s radio, followed by the man’s voice—a mere whisper—speaking over the radio, he assumed, to Magnus.
Pendergast allowed another moment to go by, then came back out from behind the supplies to see the man quickly put away his radio—which he pretended not to notice.
But the results of the call were nevertheless evident by the pounding of feet on the deck above; a chorus of shouts and then a whooping alarm sounding over the PA system.
All hell was breaking loose.
The cargo door burst open and three men rushed in carrying AR-15s.
Pendergast sprinted for the metal stairs and leapt up them as the men fired their weapons, spraying rounds, even as Pendergast returned fire, spoiling their aim.
Reaching the top, he pulled a flare out of the haversack, yanked off the cap, hit the igniter button, and gave it a long, lazy toss toward the spreading pool of acetone.
Then he yanked open the door to the stateroom deck, dove through it, and slammed it closed with his feet just as it was raked by another burst of gunfire.
A split second later, an unearthly whoosh, followed by a massive, shuddering explosion, shook the ship from top to keel.
Lying on the deck, Pendergast took a brief moment to tally the result: Manning, Robertson, Dunning, Rodney, and Goins, dead; John, dead. Cabin boy, gone. LaGrange, asphyxiated.
That left one man still alive: Magnus.