Текст книги "Dark Watch"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

A metal scaffold had been laid from the stairs to the ship’s main deck. He paused in a shadow, listening for the quiet conversation of bored guards or an accidental cough. He heard nothing but the low hiss of water against the ship’s hull and the occasional creak as a large wave surged in from outside.

He padded across the scaffold and found cover on the ship next to one of the ship’s capstans. He brushed his fingertips against the metal deck. Like the hull, it was smooth and newly painted. From what he could tell, the ship was a small tanker, what in the profession was called a product tanker because it usually hauled refined products like kerosene or gasoline rather than crude oil. The first sixty or more feet of the tanker was gone, carved away by the ship saw and hauled outside. It went against his seaman’s sense to see such a new and beautiful vessel get treated like this.

Juan ignored the slight superstitious chill and made his way aft toward the superstructure. The four-story accommodation block sat right at the stern, and he could see that workers had removed her bridge wings and hacked off her funnel so she could fit into the shed. He found an open hatch and stepped inside, making sure he was well away from any portholes before turning on his light. The deck was clean linoleum, and the walls were paneled in wood. He felt along the wall. Instead of finding the plaque that would give the ship’s name, registry, and other information, he found four screw holes. Someone had taken pains to erase the ship’s identity.

He found a stairwell and climbed to the bridge. Keeping his light shielded, he discovered that all her electronics had been stripped out. Her radios, navigation aids, weather computer, it was all gone. The empty racks, where the gear should have been, looked like whoever had done it had taken their time. There were no torn wires or any indication the workers had been rushed.

They had also removed anything that might list the ship’s name. He searched the rest of the superstructure. The galley was nothing more than a room sheathed in stainless steel. The refrigerators and stoves had been removed as well as all the pots, pans, and utensils. They’d taken the place settings as well, which usually carried the owner’s corporate logo and the name of the ship. The cabins were devoid of furniture but somehow retained a hint that they had been recently occupied. One smelled of cigars, while the bathroom of another carried the aroma of aftershave.

His next stop was the engine room.

A pair of big diesels dominated the space, each the size of a bus, and fed by miles of wiring, ducts, and pipes. He checked each engine carefully, cursing where he saw someone had removed all the identification tags. And where serial numbers had been stamped into the engine blocks someone had used a hand grinding wheel to polish them away. In their wake the metal was shiny silver and smooth.

Juan holstered his pistol and began a more thorough search. It was laborious work because of the engine room’s cavernous size compared to his light’s puny cone of illumination. And no matter where he shone the lamp, shadows dominated his view. Still, he pressed on. He got down on the floor to squirm under a freshwater condenser only to find that someone had already beaten him there and peeled off the manufacturer’s decal. He played his flashlight beam over every nook and cranny and found nothing.

Singh’s people knew what they were doing, he thought. Then he spotted an area where a thick coating of spilled oil had congealed under the starboard engine. It would be next to impossible to reach the spot, which was why he felt like ignoring it, but if he was unwilling to check it out so, too, might the men who’d erased the ship’s identity.

Moving his body like a contortionist, he slithered under the cold engine. The space was tight, the engine mounts barely giving him enough room to breathe, and he rapped his hand against an unseen conduit and had to suck the blood from three knuckles. Once he reached the spot, he used his hand to scrape away the tarry grime. As his fingernails peeled back trenches of thick oil, he felt the slightly raised outline of a metal plate. They’d missed one!

It took him a few minutes’ more work to rub away enough grease to read the tag. It said the engine had been built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and there was a fifteen-digit ID number. Juan committed it to memory and squeezed back out from under the engine. He retrieved his computer, powered it up, and began cross-referencing the number.

Their client, his friend Hiroshi Katsui, had provided a wealth of information about the ships that had gone missing in the Sea of Japan, dossiers on all the crews, including pictures, and the serial numbers of dozens of each ship’s principal components. Had the pirates not swiped the oven from the galley, Juan would have been able to check his database and match it to the vessel it had been installed on by its ID number.

Using a stylus, he typed in the fifteen-character number, chose the icon for engines, and pressed the Search button.

When the ship’s name came up, Cabrillo’s jaw literally dropped.

“We’ve been had,” he muttered to himself.

“Understatement of the year, Captain,” a familiar voice whispered in his ear at the same time the muzzle of a gun was pressed to the back of his head.

A second later, men’s voices and the dancing glow of several flashlights approached from one of the engine room’s few entrances.

19

TOO many years had passed since Eddie Seng sat through his freshman lit class at NYU for him to remember how many circles of hell Dante described in the Divine Comedy. He was sure, though, that he had discovered one below whatever the medieval Italian poet had envisaged.

As soon as their plane landed after its six-hour flight, Eddie and the other illegals were herded inside a shipping container. By interpreting the motion that followed, Eddie knew the unventilated steel box was trucked to a port and loaded onto a ship for another ten-hour trip. The only clue that gave Eddie a sense of his location was the cooler temperatures. Factoring in the weather and a six-hour flight at roughly five hundred knots, he put their position within an arc that included northern Mongolia, southern Siberia, and the Russian coast. And since there were no lakes in the hinterland large enough to necessitate a ten-hour boat trip, he figured he was someplace on the Kamchatka Peninsula or along the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk.

The container was offloaded and dropped to the ground hard enough to tumble the men inside. Moments later the doors were opened, and Eddie got his first look at hell.

Dark mountains rose in the distance, their tops obscured by soot of some kind so the rugged peaks looked smeared. He had to blink his eyes to keep them in focus. The beach where he stood was water-worn rock ranging in size from pebbles to bowling balls. The surf made the stones clatter with each wave cycle. The ocean behind was flat and dark, gray, with a menace Eddie associated with the calm before a storm.

These details weren’t what caused Eddie’s mind to go numb. It was the human misery that toiled on the hill rising from sea. It was a scene out of the Holocaust. Emaciated figures, so streaked with grime it was impossible to tell if they were clothed, covered the hillside so the whole expanse seemed to be squirming, like a bloated carcass being devoured by maggots. They were rendered sexless and inhuman by their wasted condition.

There had to be two thousand people forced to work along the slope.

Some climbed up the hillside laden with empty buckets, while others staggered down under their loads. On a level section three-quarters of the way up the hill, shovelers filled the buckets with mud. They moved like automatons, as if their bodies could no longer perform any other act but scoop and dump. Farther up the hillside, others manned water cannons. The cannons were fed by hoses that snaked across the landscape to where glacial runoff from the distant mountains had been diverted into an earthen retention pond. Gravity forced the water through the lines so when it exploded from the cannons it was an arcing jet that the workers cut back and forth across a dirt embankment, sluicing away layers of soil with every pass.

Excess water from the guns poured down the hillside, gathering the topsoil until it was a liquid slurry as treacherous as quicksand. In those first moments that Eddie watched, dumbstruck by what he was seeing, a thick wave of mud suddenly shot down the slope. Those not quick enough were caught in the swell and tumbled down the hill. Some rose quickly back to their feet. Some more slowly. And one not at all. He was soon buried alive.

No one paused from their labor.

Strung over the workings on wooden poles were acres of camouflage netting that had been dyed in the same hues of gray and black and brown as the landscape, so from above, the site was completely hidden.

Near the beach where Eddie and his group gaped, haunted-eyed workers dumped their buckets into a series of mechanical sluice boxes, devices little changed from their introduction more than a century ago. The mud was washed down a long table by a gentle rocking motion. The bottom of the trough was lined with baffles that would trap and separate the heavy material from the lighter overburden. The waste fell away at the end of the boxes and eventually reached the ocean, where it spread in a brown stain, while the concentrated ore would need to be scraped away and taken for further refining.

A bucket brigade of workers formed a human chain from the tables to a three-story building a short way down the beach. Like the undulations of some enormous worm, buckets of ore that had been cleaned out of the sluice boxes were passed hand-to-hand toward the building. Eddie saw that what he assumed was the processing plant had been bolted down to a flat, oceangoing barge that could be easily towed away from the site. Tendrils of white smoke rose from a short stack next to the structure, telling him that whatever process they used to get their final product required heat.

Overseeing the sprawling site were armed men. They were dressed for the weather in thick pants and jackets. Their boots were knee-high and made of rubber to protect them from the ubiquitous mud. Most had gloves. All had AK-47s over their shoulders and carried either clubs or short whips. There were only a few guards positioned up the hill, but there were more closer to where the mining process came to its conclusion. Four men watched over each of the dozen sluice boxes, while it appeared there was a guard for every ten laborers manning the bucket brigade. The lash of whips rising and falling was the work chorus that kept the laborers in motion.

A razor-wire fence prevented the Chinese workers, and from what he could tell they were all Chinese, from approaching the far side of the building where a tracked vehicle similar to an arctic snow cat had direct access to a partially buried cruise ship that had been beached farther down the coast.

There were other beached ships on the workers’ side of the barbed wire. They were small cruise ships that were so badly decayed it was astounding they had survived the trip here. They, too, had been buttressed with rubble and their decks strung with netting to break up their outlines.

Dormitories, Eddie realized, for the workers.

Even as he thought it, he corrected himself. These weren’t workers. They were slaves, forced to mine the hillside in the most deplorable conditions he could have imagined.

There were only a few things on earth valuable enough for such insatiable greed. And he instinctively understood what they were after: gold. It seemed even longer ago that Eddie had sat in a geology class, but he remembered enough to recognize that someone had discovered a gold-bearing strata up the hillside. The water cannons used hydrokinetic pressure to crumble the soil so it could be fed into the sluice boxes. From there the concentrate was spun in centrifuges to further separate out the lighter waste. The final process was to dump what was removed from the bottom of the centrifuges into mercury, the only substance in the world that attracts the precious metal. Once bonded to the microparticles of gold, the ball of mercury would then be boiled away, leaving pure molten gold.

In most modern smelting facilities the mercury vapor was recaptured, condensed, and reused in a closed-loop system that prevented workers from coming into contact with the deadly metal. Judging by the deplorable conditions of the men working the hill, he imagined the poor souls in the refinery being subjected to untold amounts of mercury vapor, one of the most savage toxins in the world.

Those few seconds taking in the enormity of the workings were the last moments he was spared the depravity of his captors. He and the others that had followed the snake with him from Shanghai were ordered into a line. An Indonesian guard locked a small chain around his neck. From it dangled a tag stamped with an identification number. Another guard noted the number in a ledger book, and the batch of them were led off to one of the derelict cruise liners. They were assigned unheated cabins. While the ship had never been luxurious by any standard, the rooms were crowded with bunk beds so ten men occupied a room designed for two. From the stench it was clear the ship’s plumbing no longer functioned, and even this deep into the vessel Eddie could see his own breath. Each bunk had a single mud-caked blanket, and the mattresses were soaked through and molding. There was no place for the workers to dry themselves, so at the end of their shifts they merely collapsed into their beds, wet and covered in slime.

A guard prodded him on. He and the others were shown where they ate. It had once been the cruise ship’s main dining room. All the furniture was long gone, and any ornamentation had been stripped from the walls. The floor was bare metal, and that was where the workers took their meals. The group was ordered into a line, and each took a filthy metal bowl from a pile. A Chinese man with his arm in a sling used his free hand to scoop a palm full of rice into the bowl. Next to him another disabled worker ladled in a grayish pink slop from a huge drum.

The concoction retained just a trace of warmth and was barely fit for human consumption. Eddie would later learn that the operators of the mine sent out a pair of fishing boats to drag the oceans. Anything and everything that got caught up in their nets was fed into a giant shredder to rip apart the bigger chunks and was then liquefied.

Five minutes after finding a place on the floor to choke down the sickening gruel, their guard cocked his weapon and shouted, “On your feet.”

Knowing he’d need to keep his strength, Eddie tipped the remainder of the bowl into his mouth, wolfing down the rank paste as well as his own bile. Bits of fish scale scraped at the back of his throat.

“You were fed now because you are newly arrived,” the guard continued. “From now on you only get food at the end of your shift.”

The men were led outside once again. For the first time Eddie became aware of the wind, a constant breeze that blew in from the sea and passed through his clothes and seemed to buffet against his bones. It also carried fine particles of ash, volcanic, he guessed, which confirmed for him that he was on the Kamchatka Peninsula. They were ordered to begin lugging buckets up the hill, and as Eddie began what would be the first of a hundred torturous climbs that day, he patted the meaty part of his thigh where Doc Huxley’s homing device had been implanted.

He was a long way from the Oregon, but he knew he wasn’t alone. It would be a day, or two at the most, before Juan had a team on the ground, and the nightmare would end before it really got started.

That night he got a chance to talk to the men assigned to his cabin. There was no electricity, so the exhausted workers whispered in the dark. They all had similar stories about being smuggled out of China as illegal immigrants inside shipping containers. They had paid the snakeheads to take them to Japan, but when the containers were unsealed, they found themselves here.

“How long have you been here?” Eddie asked.

A disembodied voice replied from his bunk, “Forever.”

“Seriously, how long?”

“Four months,” the same man said, shifting in the dark to find a less damp spot on his mattress. “But the mine has been in operation much longer. Years maybe.”

“Has anyone tried to escape?”

“To where?” another answered. “We can’t swim away. The water is too cold, and the fishing boats are heavily guarded when they return, and they are only here long enough to dump their nets on the dock. You’ve seen the mountains. Even if you get past the guards, which no one has been able to do, you wouldn’t last a day out there.”

“They own us,” a third man remarked. “From the moment we said we wanted to leave China, they own us. Does it matter if we work ourselves to death here, in a textile factory back home, or in a sweatshop in New York City? This is what the gods meant for us, for all Chinese peasants. We work and then we die. I have been here ten months. All the men originally assigned this room are now gone. Go ahead with your fantasies of escape, my friend. In the end there is only one way out – and that is death.”

Eddie wasn’t sure if he should tell them who he really was. From what he saw as the men shuffled to the cabin, they were all in terrible condition, so he doubted the mine’s overseers had planted any informants within the ranks. However, he couldn’t discount the idea he’d be exposed by one of them for an extra ration of food or a dry blanket. As much as he wanted to give these wretched souls a glimmer of hope, it went against his years of training and experience. In the end he allowed exhaustion to overcome his wet bedding and the knots of pain radiating from every joint in his body. Two of his cabin mates coughed and hacked throughout the night. Pneumonia or worse. He imagined the squalid conditions and meager food rations meant disease was already rampant throughout the operation.

It was on the third day of shivering cold, and constant wet that pruned and paled his skin, and backbreaking work, that Eddie began to realize rescue might be a long time in coming. Surely Juan could have flown someone to Russia where they could rent a helicopter and at least fly over the area. But there had been no such overflight. Instead, he’d worked with the others, mindlessly hauling mud down the mountain, like ants who know nothing but to follow their instincts.

He’d already lost his shoes, and every time he took a deep breath he felt a slight rattle in the depths of his lungs. He’s started off in much better shape than the others, but his body was used to regular food and rest, unlike the peasants who had lived their entire lives on a starvation diet and knew nothing but hard labor. Two of the men from his cabin were already dead. One of them had been buried by an avalanche, and the other was beaten by a guard so severely he died with blood dripping from his ears and from around his eyes.

By the fifth day, his back stinging from a particularly brutal whipping that he’d done nothing to trigger, Eddie Seng realized two things. One was that the burst transmitter in his leg had failed, and the second was that he was going to die on this forlorn coast.

On the morning of the sixth day, as the work crews were being led outside into the predawn chill, a huge ship had appeared in the bay. Eddie paused on the ramp leading to the beach to note that it was a floating drydock but mistakenly assumed it was the Mausand not her sister. Even at a distance the stench emanating from the black-hulled behemoth was overpowering, and flocks of gulls swooped around open ports to pluck the human waste that had spilled out from within.

As a guard prodded Eddie with a baton jab to the kidneys, he realized she was a slave ship, loaded with workers to replace the ones who’d died or were so weak they could no longer rise from their bunks no matter how hard they were beaten. How many hundreds or thousands had already perished, he wondered, only to be replaced with a steady supply of hopeful immigrants thinking they’d bought their one chance at freedom?

“That is how I was brought here,” Tang, one of his roommates, remarked as they trudged up the slick hillside. Tang was the one who’d said he’d been here for four months already. His body was stick thin, and Eddie could clearly see his breastbone and rib cage through his torn shirt. He was twenty-seven years old but looked sixty. “We were loaded onto an old ship, and then it was swallowed up inside an even bigger ship like that one. If you can imagine, the journey here was worse than the work they force us to do.”

By the time they’d filled their buckets for the journey down to the sluice boxes, a rust-coated ship was slowly emerging from the belly of the drydock, and workers were throwing large bundles off its deck.

“Bodies,” Tang said. “I was forced to do that. We had to dump over the corpses of those who didn’t survive the journey.”

“How many?”

“A hundred, perhaps more. I myself had to dump the bodies of my two cousins and my best friend.”

Tang didn’t slow his pace, but Eddie could tell the memory was taking its toll. “So they will beach the boat and use it to house more workers?”

“First they will pile rocks around it and cover it with nets so it can’t be seen from the air.”

“What about the water? This whole operation is exposed to the sea.”

Tang shook his head. “Other than the two fishing boats, I haven’t seen any other ships since I arrived. I think we are too far from anywhere for ships to pass close by.”

They had just reached the sluice boxes when Eddie suddenly fell flat on his back as though a rug had been yanked out from under him. Stunned, he looked around to see hundreds of others had also fallen. That was when he felt the ground shaking.

Even as he realized it was an earthquake, the shaking subsided, but a deep roar continued to echo like distant thunder.

He got to his feet, wiping the worst of the clinging mud from his tattered clothes. His attention and soon that of every person at the mine was drawn upward toward the central-most mountain peak that dominated the workings. Steam and dark ash gushed from near its peak in an ever-expanding cloud that would soon blot out the sun. Lightning crackled around the summit like Saint Elmo’s fire.

The separating plant’s door burst open, and a man rushed out, stripping off a gas mask as he ran. He was the first white person Eddie had seen this whole time at the mine.

“That is Jan Paulus,” Tang whispered as the man ran toward them. “He is the overseer.”

Jan Paulus was a solid-looking man, broad across the shoulders with weathered features and hands as big as anvils. He stopped just a few paces from Eddie and Tang and studied the now-active volcano that towered above the bay. He watched it for only a moment before pulling a clunky satellite phone from a holster strapped around his waist. He flipped up the antenna, waited a beat to ensure he had a signal, then dialed.

“Anton, it’s Paulus,” he said in English but with a Dutch or Afrikaans accent. He listened before saying, “I’m not surprised you felt it in Petropavlovsk. Shook the shit out of us. Worst one yet, but that’s not why I called. The volcano above the site is active.” A pause. “Because we’ve talked about this possibility a dozen times, and I’m looking at a bloody great cloud of ash and steam, that’s how I know. If that thing really lets go, we’re finished.”

As if to punctuate his sentence, the ground shook again in a mild aftershock. “Feel that one, too, Savich?” the South African asked sarcastically. He listened for a beat. “Your assurances don’t mean anything. It’s my arse out here while yours is sitting in a hotel sauna three hundred kilometers away.” He glanced around as he listened again. Eddie quickly dipped his bucket into the sluice, hoping that the mine’s foreman hadn’t noticed him eavesdropping. “Yeah, the Sourijust arrived. They’re offloading the latest batch of Chinese in another of Shere Singh’s rust buckets. As soon as they’re ready, I’m going to load the first shipment like we talked about last week.”

Paulus shot Eddie a scowl. He had no choice but to move on, but still he listened for as long as he could. “We just finished another run with the mercury smelter, so now would be a good time to think about at least towing the processing plant off the beach until we know what’s happening with the volcano. You have the influence to stop your fellow Russkies from sending any scientists over to have a look-see, but you sure as hell can’t stop that mountain from blowing. Why don’t you chopper over and take a look? In the meantime I’m going to make plans to get out of here.” The miner’s voice rose, as though the connection was fading. “What? Who cares about them? We can evacuate the guards using the Souri. Singh can get us more ships, and there’s a million Chinese a year trying to get out. We can replace the lot of them…So what if we lose a month or two, we’ve already got enough raw material to keep the minters going for at least that long…All right, see you in a couple of hours.”

Tang had gone on ahead, ascending the mountain with the dull gait of a pack animal. Eddie made no effort to catch up. He watched the ballooning ash cloud high above, digesting what he’d just heard. The foreman wanted to evacuate his people and the guards, but it sounded like he needed the permission of someone named Anton, someone with enough pull to keep Russian volcanologists from visiting the area. The South African had argued that now was the perfect time. The drydock was here with its powerful tugs ready to go, and it sounded as though they had already amassed a large stockpile of gold destined to be struck into coins. The separating plant, arguably the most important and expensive piece of equipment, could be towed to safety. The beached ships being used as dormitories were worth only their scrap price, and it sounded like they had a line on how to obtain more. That just left the workers, and as Paulus had said, with a million illegal Chinese riding the snake every year, replacing their slave force would be simple enough.

Eddie understood their twisted logic. The only thing of value they would really lose is time.

Another temblor struck. Eddie knew there was a real danger that the volcano would erupt, and he envisioned a cataclysmic explosion like the one that leveled a couple hundred square miles around Mount Saint Helens. There was no way he or anyone else left behind could escape such a blast. Over the past few days he’d resigned himself to work the weeks or even months it would take Juan to find him, and of his eventual rescue he had no doubt. The Corporation did not leave its people behind.

But the one thing Paulus and Savich could afford was the one thing Eddie Seng no longer possessed: time.