The Ocean Dark

73

David Boudreau couldn’t think of a damn thing to say.

He stood in the open hatchway, pipes hissing steam so quietly it almost sounded like they were breathing, just over his shoulder. Lieutenant Stone and his strike team had cleared the room, leaving one sailor — a tall, formidable woman whose eyes were emotionless behind her gas mask — to watch over them. Turcotte, O’Connell, and Voss stood in respectful silence around the pile of bones as though they were at a graveside funeral, and in some ways that was exactly what it was. No trace had yet been found of the Antoinette’s crew except for spatters and puddles of blood in various spots around the ship. But these bones came with shreds of clothing, bits of hair stuck to the skulls, and among them were at least two guns. Turcotte had said he suspected they would find others as well.

“It’s a warning,” Rachael Voss said, staring at the bones of her dead colleagues — members of Turcotte’s Counter-Terrorism squad.

“Is it?” O’Connell asked. “’Cause it seems to me it’s more a big ‘fuck you’ than anything else.”

“Jesus,” Turcotte whispered, raising a hand to his forehead as he turned away. “Jesus Christ.”

David had gotten a close look at the bones when they had first been led into the junction area, but he had retreated to a corner to give the FBI agents space to move and to grieve. Now he watched them and wondered if he should have left the room entirely, though it seemed too late now. The container ship creaked and hissed and pinged, and David felt claustrophobic, as though the freighter had begun to constrict around them. No matter what the FBI had wanted, he now regretted having brought these three on board, and part of him wished he had not come himself.

No matter how thick the metal hull of the Antoinette might be, he did not feel safe. If he had voiced his fears, others might have labeled them irrational. But they had not encountered the creatures up close before, and they did not wake in the dark with his nightmares. The last time Alena had led a DARPA team into one of these creatures’ habitats, David had been an unofficial member of the expedition. At seventeen, he had already accomplished more than most other members of her team and Alena had been grooming him for a leadership position. But, though he pleaded with her, she refused to let him come ashore on the South Pacific island where the creatures nested.

Alena and her colleagues thought they had learned from their first encounter with the creatures in 1967. They kept all ships at a safe distance overnight, and even during the day would not allow even the largest vessels nearer than half a mile from shore. The Gryphon, an elegant refurbished schooner that Alena used as a research vessel, floated a full mile from the island, and David had been left behind with the Gryphon’s crew and half a dozen scientists, most of them people David had known all of his life.

Safely out of range.

Or so they’d thought until the things began to batter at the hull, splintering wooden beams, and the water started to rush in. And with the water, the monsters came. Even with the sun still shining outside, the creatures invaded the ship. The screams still echoed in David’s head, even now, and the desperate cries of his dying friends lingered. Only a handful of those on board made it to the deck as the Gryphon took on water. The things would not come out into the sunlight, but with the ship listing, sinking, it would not be too long before they were all down in the dark together.

It had taken a handful of minutes for one of the operation’s other ships, a metal-hulled military vessel, to come alongside and execute a rescue. Only David and two members of the Gryphon’s crew had survived. The creatures had killed the rest, and the schooner vanished under the waves. In his nightmares, David sometimes hung from a rescue line, white shapes flashing in the water below, and saw his own pale, dead features staring back up at him.

There were no wooden-hulled vessels on the current operation.

Yet that did not make David feel safe. Out here, with the things so close, he could never feel safe. Not with the sun shining, and no matter how far they kept offshore. The only way for him to ever feel safe, he knew, would be to destroy them all.

The sailor outside the door stepped in, knocking on the frame. “Dr. Boudreau. Lieutenant Stone says you’re to come with me. We’ve found them.”

The FBI agents all turned at once. Turcotte lifted his weapon and led the way. David nodded to him and then fell in behind them as they followed the female sailor through a narrow corridor, up a small flight of metal stairs, and down the other side. He knew he ought to be leading. Without Alena around, he had authority over all of these people. But David believed in letting people do their jobs without interfering — especially when those people were carrying guns and grudges.

Lieutenant Stone waited for them just inside a boiler room. David quick-counted eight other sailors, and every single one of them had an assault rifle raised and pointed at the darkness deeper into the room. If David had thought the pipes elsewhere in the ship breathed, then these must have been the Antoinette’s lungs. Mist from the gas canisters hazed the air and the only illumination came from amber emergency lights spaced at intervals along the ceiling.

Stone tapped his gas mask, indicating that they should switch back over to channel three — which they had left so that their conversation about the dead FBI agents would be private.

“The creatures are alive, but very much out of commission,” the lieutenant said. “Some movement, but we’re guessing it’s involuntary.”

“That could be a dangerous guess,” Agent Voss said.

Stone shook his head. “If they were playing possum, they’d have attacked by now. Dr. Boudreau, my team is bagging one now. Are you still planning to use one of the containers for transport?”

David felt breathless and was tempted to take off his mask. He needed to be outside, up on deck, to breathe fresh air. But more than that, he needed to see.

“Yes,” he said, moving forward, not even looking at Lieutenant Stone anymore. “Captain Siebalt’s confirmed that one of the Hillstrom’s choppers will be able to transport it ship to ship.”

He kept walking. Two of the sailors turned toward him in apparent alarm, raising the barrels of their weapons toward the ceiling to avoid shooting him.

“Hang on,” Stone said, blocking his path. “What are you doing?”

David could feel them all looking at him then — the three FBI agents as well as the armed men and women under Stone’s command.

“You said they were unconscious.”

“As far as we can tell,” Stone hedged.

“I want to see them, Lieutenant.”

“And you’ll get your chance when we get one of them into a lab on the Hillstrom. Until then, I have my orders, Doctor.”

David spent most of his life on a happily even keel. Now anger flared in him. How long had he studied the cases from Indonesia and the South Pacific? How long had he theorized the existence of other such islands and searched for proof? He wanted answers, and he needed to see these things up close.

“Stand down, Lieutenant Stone. You take your orders from Captain Siebalt, and right now, he takes his orders from the DOD. So get out of my way.”

Even through the gas mask’s plastic face screen, David saw how much he had pissed off Stone, and he understood why. Speaking that way to the man in front of his team had been a terrible idea, but David had only one concern right now and it wasn’t mollifying Stone’s hurt feelings.

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said in icy tones, stepping aside.

David strode forward, moving between two rows of boilers until he saw another sailor, back to him, weapon aimed at something on the ground.

“Yerardi, let Dr. Boudreau pass,” Lieutenant Stone called.

The sailor, Yerardi, glanced over his shoulder, spotted David, and slid out of the way. David silently thanked him, but his focus remained on the amber darkness ahead. Other sailors, masks strapped to their faces, had taken up similar positions in and around several of the boilers, aiming weapons at pale figures whose flesh gleamed like mother-of-pearl in the weird emergency light.

Remarkable. How many thousands of years had it taken for these things to evolve? How long had they remained hibernating in the guts of volcanoes before something — time or climate change, weather or earth tremor — had set them free? They were amphibious creatures, which explained the evolution of arms and hands in spite of their otherwise marine attributes. But how had they survived so long? Had these particular creatures lived for thousands of years, or had they been spawning down there in the subterranean volcanic chambers all this time?

They might well represent the greatest scientific find in centuries. Yet whatever research David might do, whatever discoveries he might make, could only be shared with the Department of Defense as they tried to figure out whether they could benefit from further knowledge of the creatures. The irony pained him deeply.

Two sailors hefted what looked to be a black body bag off the floor and started shuffling toward him. David stepped out of the way to let them pass, well aware of the burden they carried, wondering if it would remain unconscious long enough for them to lock it in one of the massive steel containers up on the deck.

He crouched to get a closer look at the siren nearest Yerardi. The suckers all over the thing’s hands and serpentine lower body pouted open and shut like tiny mouths, searching for sustenance. David wondered if that had anything to do with how they breathed, but he knew those questions were best left to Dr. Ernst.

“Amazing,” he whispered.

With a last glance at the creatures sprawled on the floor and the masked sailors standing watch over them, he rose and turned to follow the strange procession. Lieutenant Stone walked beside the men carrying the body bag. When their grotesque little parade reached the eight sailors standing guard at the front of the boiler room and the three agitated FBI agents, Stone turned to one of the sailors.

“Bring it up to Corriveau. He’s got a container prepped,” the lieutenant said.

The sailor shouldered his weapon and saluted. “Yes, sir.”

“What about the others, Lieutenant?” asked another sailor, a bald man with charcoal-black skin. “Do we seal them in?”

Stone glanced at David. “What do you say, Dr. Boudreau? I know my orders. Do I get to carry them out?”

His tone dripped sarcasm, but the question lingered for a moment. David looked at Turcotte, then at Voss and O’Connell, before turning back to Lieutenant Stone.

“Are the charges set?”

“Yes, sir,” Stone replied with a nod. “Throughout the accommodations block and all along the hull. She won’t just sink, Doctor. She’ll be wreckage and debris.”

“Wait, what the hell are you—” Voss began.

David cut her off. “Good. I want it all underwater, just in case anyone ever comes looking.”

“And the rest of the creatures?”

“Burn them,” David said.

Lieutenant Stone gestured to his team. “You heard the man. Get to work.”

“Hang on a second!” O’Connell shouted. The FBI agent grabbed David’s arm. “Those are our guys back there, nothing but bones. You owe us our shot at this. You said we’d have time to go through the ship and try to come up with information that would help our case against Viscaya! You said we’d have time.”

“You do have time,” David said, looking from O’Connell to Voss to Turcotte, whose face still wore the expression of mixed sorrow and disgust that he’d had while standing over the bones of his dead agents. “You’ve got an hour to do all the searching you want. After that, we blow it apart. I don’t want to leave them anywhere to run when things get hot on the island.”

Voss watched David walk away, hating him a little. He had cooperated just enough to tell the DOD that he had accommodated the FBI’s requests, but no more. They were going to set fire to the sirens down in the boiler room. It wasn’t her area, but she had a feeling that might wreak serious havoc. Would the boilers explode? She had no idea.

“Let’s go,” she said, turning to Turcotte and O’Connell.

O’Connell took a step forward but faltered when Turcotte did not do the same. The eight sailors at the front of the boiler room followed Stone and the two men carrying the body bag, and David left in their wake. In moments, they’d be dousing the sirens’ bodies with some kind of flame accelerant and then it would become insufferably hot in here.

“What’s going on, Agent Turcotte?” Voss asked.

“Ed, let’s go,” O’Connell added. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

“We should at least search the captain’s quarters and the wheelhouse before we give it all up,” Voss went on.

Turcotte gave a hollow laugh. “Forget it, Rachael. Our part in this thing is over.”

Turcotte went out through the metal hatchway. O’Connell seemed pissed, but he followed. A moment later, after hearing a great deal of liquid sloshing toward the forward section of the boiler room, there came a great gasp of rising flames and the bright orange light of a blaze.

The burning sirens began to scream, the sound clawing at her eardrums. Voss froze, waiting to hear gunshots or the shouts of sailors under attack, but neither followed. With the anguished cry of dying monsters at her back, she sped from the room, wishing she had gone with Josh, wishing that she had never heard of Viscaya shipping or the Rio brothers.

Much as she hated to acknowledge it, Turcotte had been right. They were done here.