Medusa

CHAPTER 40

THE TOUR BOAT CAPTAIN WASN’T SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF the people he had pulled out of the Nan Madol Canal. The half-drowned young Asian woman seemed harmless enough, but he wondered about the muscular scuba diver in the wild surfing trunks.

Checking out Austin with a wary eye, the captain asked, “What happened, man?”

Austin pointed to the rental boat, which was sinking at a sharp angle, with only a foot or so of the bullet-riddled bow sticking out of the water.

“Leaky boat,” he said.

“I heard a lot of noise,” the captain said. “Sounded like guns.”

Austin clamped his hand on the captain’s shoulder and turned him around.

“See that bag floating over there?” Austin said, pointing. “That’s mine. Can we pick it up?”

The doubtful look in the captain’s round brown face suggested he was starting to regret his decision to pluck his new passengers from the water, but he sensed that Austin would not be denied. The captain moved the boat closer so Austin could lean over and retrieve the dive-gear bag. Austin unzipped the bag and pulled out his wallet. He peeled off a fifty.

“This is to cover the tickets for the boat ride.” He gave the captain another fifty-dollar bill, and said, “This is for asking no more questions.” Holding out a third fifty, he wrapped his arm around the captain’s shoulders and, speaking low so he wouldn’t be heard by the other passengers, Austin said, “How much longer is left in the tour?”

“I dunno . . . half an hour, maybe,” the captain said.

“This is yours if you cut that time in half.”

The captain grinned, and the third fifty-dollar bill followed the first two into his pocket.

“You just bought the boat, man,” he said. “You and the lady, have a seat.”

Austin and Song Lee ignored the curious gazes of the other passengers and looked for a place to sit. The boat had a canopy overhead to block the sun, but there were no seats and passengers sat on stacked life preservers. A young Japanese couple on their honeymoon made room for the new passengers.

The tour boat captain was true to his word. Fifteen minutes after Austin and Lee had climbed aboard, he told the passengers to take one last look at the mysterious ruins. Using the housing of one of the twin outboards as a seat, he goosed both engines, and before long the boat was pulling up to the dock at Kolonia.

While Lee went off to the restroom to freshen up, Austin made his way to the dive shop. He returned the scuba gear in good condition but asked the crestfallen owner to come up with a figure to replace the boat and motor. Although the price was exorbitant, Austin produced a NUMA credit card and told him to charge the replacement cost. The bean counters at NUMA who kept an eye on finances had become used to Austin’s strange purchases. He asked for a receipt anyhow.

As the boat owner was writing out the purchase order, he said, “Your friend catch up with you?”

“What friend?” Austin asked.

“Asian guy driving a pickup truck. Didn’t leave his name. Showed up a few minutes after you took off in the boat. I told him you were going out to the ruins.”

Austin did a good job hiding his surprise. He thanked the owner and went into the men’s room to change into dry clothes. He stuffed the surfing trunks in a wastebasket and dug his cell phone from the bag. He was glad to see that it was operational. He noticed that the Trouts and, most recently, the captain of the Concord had called him. He returned Dixon’s call first.

“This is Austin,” he said. “I see that you’ve been trying to get in touch with me, Captain Dixon. I’ve been away from my phone.”

“Glad to hear from you, Kurt. I’ve got some bad news. Joe has disappeared. He borrowed a NUMA helicopter from the agency’s ship and flew to the north of here to take a closer look at an atoll. We lost him on radar.”

“Did he send off a Mayday?” Austin asked.

“Not a whisper,” Dixon answered. “Whatever happened must have happened fast.”

“How soon can you have the chopper pick me up?” Austin asked.

“It’s on its way.”

Austin clicked off and was about to call the Trouts. But Lee was coming his way, and he put his cell away to hail a taxi.

Austin was only slightly worried about Zavala. The charming young Mexican-American had an amazing talent for survival, and there was little Austin could do at this point anyhow. He was more worried about the fact that Chang had known that Austin was on the island. Someone had tailed him to the harbor, and that meant his comings and goings from the airport had been under surveillance from the time the Citation landed.

He couldn’t figure it. Only a few trusted people knew that they were in Pohnpei. He cursed himself for underestimating the Triad.

The taxi dropped them off at the airport, and they went out to the tarmac to await the return of the Seahawk. Austin started to tell Lee about Zavala’s disappearance, but she couldn’t contain her excitement.

“Do you know what we discovered in that place?” she said. “It was a hospital or clinic, where the medusa toxin was administered to cure people! This is the immunology discovery of the century. It proves that ancient men knew the value of inoculation and used it to cure disease. I can’t wait to tell Dr. Huang about this. He’ll be thrilled.”

“Who is Dr. Huang?” Austin asked.

“He’s my friend and mentor,” Lee said. “He’s with the Ministry of Health, and was the one who brought me into the medusa project.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“He asked me to keep him informed on a daily basis about what I was doing. I climbed the water tower every night at Bonefish Key to get a phone signal.”

“Every detail?” Austin asked.

“Yes,” Lee said. “I even called him when we stopped at Los Angeles and told him that we were coming to Pohnpei.”

“That explains how Chang and his buddies knew we were here.”

“Oh, no, you don’t think . . .”

Austin shrugged.

“Our mission is top secret,” he said. “Only a few trusted people knew we were coming here. But Chang must have had someone on our tail from the second we landed. How well do you know Dr. Huang?” he asked. “Could he be an informant?”

“I met him at Harvard, and he was quite helpful finding me employment.” She thought about Huang’s failure to fight her exile and his deceptive manner in bringing her into the medusa research. “Dr. Huang is a brilliant but fearful man. It would take only a little threat to bend him to someone’s will.”

“Someone or something like the Triad.”

Her mood darkened.

“Yes,” she said. “But it is my fault for letting him deceive me.”

“You did a favor for someone you thought was an old friend,” he said. “I’d suggest that you keep Dr. Huang in the dark from now on.”

The distant whup-whup of rotor blades from over the lagoon announced the imminent arrival of the helicopter from the Concord. The Seahawk set down moments later. Austin and Lee climbed in, and the chopper lifted off. It was less than an hour, but it seemed like days to Austin, before the helicopter was setting down for a landing on the aft deck of the Concord.

Captain Dixon helped Lee off the helicopter, and said, “Welcome to the Concord, Dr. Lee. Your government has been trying to get in touch with you.”

“We were somewhat delayed in Pohnpei,” she said.

“Quite all right,” he said. “I told your people that you were on the way. We’ve got a teleconferencing setup you can use. I’ll have my communications officer take you there.”

While Dixon stepped off to the side to use his hand radio, Lee turned to Austin.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Kurt. Thank you for an interesting day.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Perhaps on our next tour of Nan Madol, we can spend more time above water.”

“That would certainly be different,” she said with a smile.

The communications officer arrived minutes later and led Lee to her teleconference. Dixon welcomed Austin back to the Navy cruiser, and said he would show him on a chart where Zavala had disappeared. On the way to the bridge, the captain said aircraft in the vicinity had made several sweeps around the atoll, but there was no sign of Zavala or the helicopter.

“No debris or oil slick?” Austin asked.

“Nothing,” Dixon said. “But we’ll keep looking.”

“Thanks, Captain, but you can’t spend any more time looking for Joe. The lab is our top priority.” Noting the frustrated look on the captain’s face, he added, “Don’t worry about Joe. He pops up when you least expect him.”

Austin studied the atoll’s location, wondering what had attracted Zavala to the tiny speck of land, and then punched in the Trouts’ number on his cell phone. Gamay answered.

“Kurt! Thank goodness you called. We’ve been worried. What’s going on?”

“We had a run-in with one of the Triad leaders in Nan Madol. Guy named Chang. The Triad had an informant. We’re back on the Concord, but now Joe is missing. Captain Dixon said Joe borrowed a helicopter and went off to check out an atoll.”

“We gave him the atoll’s coordinates,” Gamay said. “It’s located approximately where Trouble Island was, the place Captain Dobbs stopped at with his whale ship a hundred fifty years ago.”

“You found the logbook?” Austin asked.

“No,” she said. “You’re not the only one who’s discovered that the Triad has a long reach. We contacted a book dealer who said he had a lead on the log, but someone killed him and tried to jump us. We got away by the skin of our teeth.”

“Glad to hear that,” Austin said with relief. “I’m puzzled, though. If you didn’t find the log, where did you dig up the information about the atoll?”

Gamay told Austin about Perlmutter’s lead to Caleb Nye, the visits to the Dobbs mansion and Brimmer’s store, and finding Brimmer’s body in the old mill. Austin fumed as he listened to the details of Brimmer’s murder and the attempt to ambush the Trouts. Even without Dr. Huang, the vast criminal organization seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. He asked for the longitude and latitude coordinates from Nye’s diorama and said he would check them out immediately.

“What do you want us to do in the meantime?” Gamay asked.

“Call Sandecker and bring him up to speed,” Austin said. “I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

Austin signed off with a quick thank-you, then sat down in front of a computer and called up a satellite image on the monitor using Nye’s coordinates. Nineteenth-century navigation was not exactly precise, and the atoll Austin saw on the screen didn’t match the position on the map.

But a radar reading of Joe’s trajectory showed that he seemed to be heading directly for the atoll. Austin zoomed in on the tiny speck. The monitor showed a palm-studded, handkerchief-sized patch of sand encircled by a coral reef. Nothing unusual, except for a dark streak near one side of the lagoon. He ran through the possibilities: school of fish, coral, undersea vegetation, shadows . . . Nothing seemed to fit. He looked up earlier images of the island: the streak was larger then. He kept going back in time, hour by hour.

As he dug back into the satellite photos, he saw that the streak had disappeared. He went further back, and he stopped in his tracks. A cigar-shaped object had taken the place of the streak. The conning tower protruding from the object identified it as a submarine. He enlarged the image, and did a quick Internet search for an Akula-class submarine. He found a series of pictures, extracted one that had the conning tower in roughly the same position, and placed the two images side by side. The subs were identical.

With growing excitement, Austin backed up in the photo file even further. There was no submarine in the lagoon now, not even a black streak. But he saw a dark spot which, upon enlargement, showed the unmistakable outline of a helicopter. Starting with that shot, he rapidly played the pictures forward like images in a nickelodeon: empty lagoon, helicopter, submarine, no helicopter, black streak shrinking in length.

“Thank you, Caleb Nye,” Austin said loud enough to be heard by Dixon, who leaned over his shoulder to study the computer monitor.

“Who?” the captain asked.

“He was a nineteenth-century whaler, and he just helped me find Joe.”

Austin ran through the series of satellite photos.

“Damn,” the captain said. “I think you’ve got something, Kurt.”

“We need to get in for a closer look. I’m going to need your help.”

Dixon picked up the microphone that connected to the ship’s public-address system.

“I’ll call the ship’s officers together immediately,” he said.

Five minutes later, Austin was in the wardroom, running through the satellite series again for the benefit of the cruiser’s offers. A gunnery officer suggested surrounding the atoll with every ship in the fleet, then launching an invasion of it.

Austin shook his head.

“A full-fledged naval raid is out of the question, in my opinion,” he said. “There simply isn’t enough intelligence available on which to base an attack. One miscalculation might result in a massacre of the lab’s scientific team.”

The officer didn’t like being rebuffed.

“Who’s calling the shots here, Captain?” he asked. “The U.S. Navy or NUMA? That lab is Navy property.”

“That’s true,” Dixon said, “but I’ve got orders from the Navy brass to let NUMA take the lead.”

“I’m not concerned about competence,” the officer said. “It’s a question of firepower. NUMA’s a research agency, last time I heard.”

“We’ll back it up as best we can,” Dixon said. He was becoming annoyed.

The last thing Austin wanted was an argument over strategy. He intervened to help the gunnery officer save face.

“The officer makes a good point about firepower, Captain,” Austin said. “What about putting some ships within hailing distance? You could come to the rescue if I get in a jam.”

“Sure,” Dixon said. “We could position a few close by, with the rest ready to dash in if needed.”

“I’ll trust your judgment and that of your officers, Captain,” Austin said. “My main concern is getting into the lagoon undetected. Any idea what I’m likely to encounter?”

“We’ll have to assume that the atoll is protected by a sensor system,” Dixon said. “Night vision devices and radar are a worry, of course, but I’m most concerned about thermal sensors.”

“Any way we can get around those security measures?” Austin asked.

“A low-flying helicopter might be able to blend into the sea clutter on a radar screen,” Dixon said. “If the insertion was quick, there is a chance you could pull it off.”

Austin needed no further encouragement.

“That’s settled,” he said. “How soon can we leave?”

The captain glanced around at his officers, wanting to give them one last chance to pitch in.

“Gentlemen?” he asked.

Receiving no response, Dixon reached for a phone to pass along his orders. But by that time, Austin had already sprinted for the door.

WHILE KURT AUSTIN WAS debating strategy with Dixon and his men, Song Lee was in another part of the ship, sitting behind a table and staring at a blank screen.

“Just talk to the camera in a normal tone of voice, as if you were having a chat with an old friend,” the communications officer said. “The transmission should begin any second.”

Lee clipped the tiny microphone to her collar and arranged her hair as best she could. The officer made a call to inform the other participants in the teleconference that all was ready, then he left Lee alone in the room.

The screen fuzzed for a second and then an image appeared of six people sitting at a wooden table in a dark-paneled room. She recognized two people as being from the Ministry of Health, but the others were strangers to her. A silver-haired man wearing the greenish brown uniform of the People’s Liberation Army asked Lee if she could see and hear him.

When she replied in the affirmative, he said, “Very good, Dr. Lee. Thank you for this meeting. My name is Colonel Ming. Since time is short, I’ll spare the introductions and get right down to business.

“This committee is the counterpart of a similar group that we are working with in the United States. I have been asked to be the spokesman because the Army is at the forefront of the effort to contain the epidemic.”

“I have been out of touch,” Lee said, “so I know only that quarantine has been imposed around the area where the outbreak began.”

“That’s correct,” Ming said. “The Army was able to contain the epidemic for a time, but this is an enemy we are not equipped to fight. The virus is winning.”

“How bad is it, Colonel?”

Ming had expected the question, and a square appeared in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen showing a map of China’s northern provinces. Red dots were clustered around one village, with a few stray dots outside its perimeters.

“This shows the outbreak before the quarantine,” he said. “The clusters represent virus outbreaks.”

Another picture appeared. The dots were centered in one area, but scattered outbreaks were showing up in neighboring towns.

“This too represents outbreaks before the quarantine?” Lee asked.

“No,” Ming answered. “The quarantine is in full effect, but the virus has managed to spread despite all that we have been trying to do. I will reserve comment on the next few images.”

As the maps were thrown on the screen one after another, the red dots could be seen expanding over a greater part of the Chinese landscape. They clustered and then metastasized like cancer cells. More alarming still, the virus was dangerously close to Beijing in the northeast, and it was sending out spokes toward Shanghai along the southeast coast, Hong Kong to the south, and the sprawling city of Chongqing to the west.

“What is the period of time covered by these projections?” Lee asked, her throat so dry she could barely get the question out.

“One week,” Ming said, “ending today. The Ministry of Health projects that the spread of the virus is accelerating. It will hit Beijing first and then spread to the other cities less than two weeks later. You understand better than I what that means.”

“Yes, I do, Colonel,” she said. “In military terms, it would be like lighting a fuse leading to many different ammunition dumps. The embers thrown out by those explosions will ignite other fuses around the world.”

Ming pressed his lips together in a tight smile.

“I understand you were involved in planning for the worst-case scenario, as this appears to be,” he said.

“That’s correct, Colonel Ming. I drew up the plans to establish vaccine-production centers in locations where it could be best distributed. It’s a bit like you and your colleagues planning for a battle.”

“Tell me about the vaccine that has been under development in the missing laboratory.”

“The last I knew the vaccine was very close to being synthesized from the toxin.”

“That is very good news,” Ming said.

“True,” Lee said. “But the problem from the first was not only isolating the chemical that could kill the virus but producing millions of doses quickly to deal with it. The old method of producing vaccines in eggs was too slow and clumsy: you’d need millions of eggs, and production could take weeks. There was also the problem of a mutating virus. You might have to tailor a vaccine instantly to a different strain of influenza. Tech-based vaccines grown in an animal or human cell could produce three hundred million vaccines in a year.”

“The whole population of the planet could be wiped out in less time than that,” Ming said.

“That’s true,” Lee said, “which is why the lab was looking into the genetic engineering of vaccines. You don’t manufacture the vaccine but instead produce the molecule that makes it work.”

“And what were the results of this research?”

“I don’t know. The lab had moved to its new location by then. I didn’t have clearance for the final phase.”

“Dr. Kane would understand the procedure?”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t know the final test results, which he would have been informed of had he been able to return to the lab.”

“To put it bluntly, Dr. Lee, even if we find the lab and produce the vaccine, it may be too late?”

“To put it bluntly, yes.”

Colonel Ming turned to the others.

“Any questions? No? Well, thank you very much for your time, Dr. Lee. We will be in contact with you again.”

The screen went blank. Song Lee was terrified at being alone in the room with her thoughts. She bolted out the door and onto the deck, where she looked around frantically for a glimpse of Kurt Austin’s reassuring face. She needed an anchor to keep her from drifting over the edge. She climbed to the bridge, and asked Dixon if he had seen Austin.

“Oh, hello, Dr. Lee,” the captain said. “Kurt didn’t want to interrupt your meeting. He said to tell you that dinner has been postponed. He left the ship.”

“Left? Where?”

Dixon called her over to look at a chart and jabbed his index finger down on the wide expanse of ocean.

“Right now, I’d say that Kurt is just about here.”