Plague Ship

by Clive Cussler

  The library was well forward, near the ship’s movie theater, but Linda turned aft. There was a bar that overlooked the pool near the stern, and she knew that if she didn’t get a brandy in the next two minutes her breakfast was going to make an encore appearance.

  She was still sitting there an hour later when a Turkish ambulance pulled away from the ship, its lights off and siren silent. Moments later, the ship’s horn gave a trumpeting blast. The Golden Sky was finally leaving port.

  CHAPTER 27

  EVERY TIME JUAN BLINKED, IT FELT LIKE HE WAS scraping his eyes with sandpaper. He’d had so much coffee it had soured in his stomach, and the painkillers he’d swallowed hadn’t made a dent in his headache. Without looking in a mirror, he knew he had a deathly pallor, like his body had been drained of blood. Running a hand over his head, even his hair hurt, if such a thing was possible.

  Rather than refresh him as it usually does, the wind streaming past the windscreen of the water taxi made him shiver despite the balmy temperatures. Next to him on the rear bench, Franklin Lincoln sprawled in a relaxed pose. His mouth was slack, and an occasional snore rose above the engine’s rumble. The lithesome driver who’d brought them into Monte Carlo from the Oregon forty-eight hours earlier had the day off, and Linc had no interest in her substitute.

  Anger was the only thing keeping Juan going now, anger at Linda and Mark for disobeying Eddie’s order to disembark the Golden Sky before she left Istanbul. The pair of stowaways was continuing to search for evidence of the Responsivists’ plan to hit the ship with their toxin.

  Cabrillo was going to throw them in the brig when he saw them again and then give them raises for their dedication. He was fiercely proud of the team he’d assembled, and never more so than now.

  His thoughts returned to Max Hanley and Cabrillo’s mood became more foul. There still hadn’t been any reply from Thom Severance, and every minute that ticked by made Juan think there never would be, because Max was already dead. Juan wouldn’t let himself say that aloud and felt guilty even thinking it, but he couldn’t shake the pessimism.

  With Ivan Kerikov’s megayacht Matryoshka returned to the inner harbor, the Oregon lay at anchor a mile off shore once again. When he studied his ship, Juan could sometimes glimpse what a beauty she must have been in her prime. She was well-proportioned, with just a hint of rake at bow and stern, and her forest of derricks gave her a look of commerce and prosperity. He could imagine her with fresh paint and her decks cleared of debris, facing a backing sea off the Pacific Northwest, where she’d had a career as a lumber hauler.

  But as they now approached, all he saw was the rust-streaked hull, the patchwork paint, and the sagging cables draped across her cranes like disintegrating spiderwebs. She looked forlorn and haunted, and nothing shone on her, not even the propeller of the lifeboat hanging off its amidships davit.

  The sleek taxi nosed under the boarding stairs, the waters so calm and the driver so deft at the controls that she didn’t bother setting out rubber fenders.

  Juan tapped Linc’s ankle with his foot and the big man grunted awake. “You’d better hope I return to the same spot in the dream I was just having,” he said, and yawned broadly. “Things were just getting interesting with Angelina Jolie and me.”

  Juan offered a hand to lift him to his feet. “I’m so damned tired I don’t think I’ll ever have a carnal thought again.”

  They each hefted their bags, thanked the young woman who’d piloted them out, and stepped onto the boarding ladder. By the time they reached the top, Juan felt like he’d just scaled Everest.

  Dr. Huxley was there to greet them, along with Eddie Seng and Eric Stone. She was beaming at Juan with a high-wattage smile and nearly hopping from foot to foot. Eddie and Stoney were smiling, too. For an instant, he thought they had news about Max, but they would have told them when he’d called from the airport following the flight from Manila.

  As soon as he was firmly on deck, she threw her arms around his shoulders. “Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, you are a bloody genius.”

  “Far be it from me to disagree, just remind me what feat of brilliance I performed this time.”

  “Eric found an online database of cuneiform from a university in England. He was able to translate the tablets from the pictures you e-mailed with your phone.”

  Cabrillo had sent those as soon as they reached the Manila airport.

  “The computer was able to translate,” Eric corrected modestly. “I don’t speak a word of ancient Sanskrit.”

  “It’s a virus after all,” Julia gushed. “From what I’m able to deduce, it’s a form of influenza, but unlike anything science has ever seen. It has a hemorrhagic component almost like Ebola or Marburg. And the best part is that I think Jannike Dahl has natural immunity because the ship where it first broke out landed near where she grew up, and I believe she’s a descendant of the original crew.”

  Juan could barely keep up with the rapid flow of words. “What are you talking about? Ship? What ship?”

  “Noah’s ark, of course.”

  Cabrillo blinked at her for a moment before reacting. He held up his hands like a boxer begging for the fight to be over. “You’re going to have to start this from the top, but I need a shower, a drink, and some food, in whatever order they come. Give me twenty minutes, and meet me in the conference room. Tell Maurice I want orange juice, half a grapefruit, eggs Benedict, toast, and those potatoes he does with the tarragon.” It was nearly dinnertime, but his body was telling him it wanted breakfast. He turned to go but glanced back at Julia. “Noah’s ark?”

  She nodded like a little girl dying to tell a secret.

  “This I’ve gotta hear.”

  Thirty minutes later, his meal gone, the sourness in Juan’s stomach had been replaced with a contented glow, and he felt he had just enough energy to listen to Julia’s report.

  He looked to Eric first, since he had done the translation. “Okay, from the top.”

  “I won’t bore you with the details of enhancing the pictures or finding an online archive of cuneiform, but I did. The writing you found is particularly old, according to what I was able to learn.”

  Cabrillo recalled thinking the same thing. He motioned for Stone to continue.

  “I turned the problem over to the computer. It took about five hours of tweaking the programs to start producing anything coherent. The algorithms were pretty intense, and I was bending the rules of fuzzy logic to the breaking point. Once the computer started to learn the nuances, it got a little easier, and after passing it through a few times, adjusting here and there, it spat out the entire story.”

  “The story of Noah’s ark?”

  “You may not know this, but the epic story of Gilgamesh, which was translated from cuneiform by an English amateur in the nineteenth century, chronicles a flood scenario a thousand years before it appeared in Hebrew texts. Many cultures around the globe also have flood myths as part of their ancient traditions. Anthropologists believe that because human civilization sprang up in coastal areas or along rivers, the very real threat of catastrophic flooding was used by kings and priests in cautionary tales to keep people in line.” Eric adjusted his steel-framed glasses. “As for myself, I can see tsunami events being the genesis for many of these stories. Without written language, stories were passed down orally, usually with added embellishments, so, after one or two generations of retelling, it wasn’t just a giant wave that wiped out your village, it was the whole world that had become inundated. In fact—”

  Cabrillo cut him off. “Save the lecture for later and stick to what you’ve discovered.”

  “Oh, sure. Sorry. The story starts out with a flood, but not a sudden swell of water or a heavy rain. The people who wrote the tablets describe how the water of the sea they lived by rose. I believe it rose about a foot a day. While nearby villages simply moved to higher ground, our folks believed the rising would never stop and decided the only way to survive was to build a large boat. It was in no way as large as
the boat described in the Bible. They didn’t have that kind of technology.”

  “So we aren’t really talking about Noah and his ark?”

  “No, although the parallels are striking, and it is possible that the people who remained behind and described what happened laid the foundation for Gilgamesh and the biblical story.”

  “Is there a time frame for this?”

  “Fifty-five hundred B.C.”

  “That seems pretty precise.”

  “That’s because there is physical evidence of a flood just as it’s described on the tablets. It occurred when the earthen dike at what is now the Bosporus collapsed and flooded what had been, up until that time, an inland sea that was some five hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. We now call this area the Black Sea. Using underwater ROVs, marine archaeologists have confirmed that there were humans living along the ancient shoreline. It took more than a year for the basin to fill, and they estimate the falls at the Bosporus would make Niagara look like a babbling brook.”

  Cabrillo was amazed. “I had no idea.”

  “This has only been confirmed in the last few years. At the time, there was a lot of talk that this catastrophic event could be the origin of the biblical flood, but scientists and theologians both agreed that it wasn’t.”

  “Seems, with what we’ve discovered, that the debate isn’t over yet. Hold on a second,” Juan said as a thought struck him. “These tablets were written in cuneiform. That comes from Mesopotamia and Samaria. Not the Black Sea region.”

  “Like I said, this is a very early form of the writing style, and it was most likely brought southward by people leaving the Black Sea region and taken up by those other civilizations. Trust me on this, Chairman: the tablets you found are going to fundamentally alter our understanding of ancient history.”

  “I believe you. Go on.”

  “Okay, so this one seaside village thought the rising waters would never stop. Like I said, it took a year of flooding to match the sea level, so I can imagine how they came to that conclusion. They also write that with so many refugees there was a great deal of sickness.”

  Dr. Huxley interrupted. “It would have been the same stuff we see today in refugee populations. Things like dysentery, typhus, and cholera.”

  Eric picked up the thread of his story again, “Instead of joining the mass exodus, they cannibalized the buildings in their town to build a boat that was large enough to take all four hundred of them. They don’t mention the dimensions but did say the timber hull was caulked with bitumen and then sheathed in copper.

  “Now, this was the very beginning of the Copper Age, so it must have been a prosperous area to have enough of the metal to cover the hull of a ship that size. They brought livestock, like cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, as well as chickens, and enough silage to last them a month.”

  “I’d estimate the boat was at least three hundred feet long, for all of that.”

  “The computer agrees. It came up with three hundred and eighteen feet, with a beam of forty-three feet. She probably would have had three decks, with the animals on the bottom, supplies in the middle, and the villagers on top.”

  “What about propulsion?”

  “Sails.”

  Cabrillo held up a hand. “Sails didn’t appear until two thousand years after the period we’re talking about.”

  Eric scrolled down on the laptop sitting in front of him on the conference-room table. “Here’s a direct translation: ‘From two stout poles anchored to the deck a sheet of animal skins was stretched to catch the wind.’ ” He looked up. “Sounds like a sail to me.”

  “I’ll be damned. Keep going.”

  “The water eventually rose high enough to float the boat, and they started off. It’s kind of ironic, because they must have started their journey not long before the water level stabilized. Otherwise, they never would have made it out of the Black Sea. Anyway, they stayed at sea much longer than a month. In the places where they tried to land, they either couldn’t find freshwater or they were attacked by people already living there.

  “After five lunar months, countless storms, and the loss of twenty people, the boat finally grounded, and no amount of work could get it free.”

  “Where?”

  “The area is described as ‘a world of rock and ice.’ ”

  Julia leaned forward to catch Juan’s eye. “This is where Eric and I started using some deductive reasoning.”

  “Okay. Where?”

  “Northern Norway.”

  “Why Norway?”

  Eric replied, “You found the tablets in a facility that Imperial Japan’s Unit 731 used to perfect biological weapons. The Japanese were very keen on this kind of research, unlike a certain ally that preferred chemical agents to do their mass killings.”

  “You mean the Nazis?”

  “Who else would have given the tablets to them?”

  Juan rubbed his eyes. “Hold it. I’m missing something here. Why would Unit 731 want some old writings about an ancient boat?”

  “The disease,” Julia said. “The one that broke out on the boat after they landed. The scribe who wrote the tablets described it in detail. As best I can tell, it was an airborne hemorrhagic fever with a contagion level equal to influenza. It killed half their population before burning itself out. What’s really interesting is, only a small handful of the survivors could bear children after they recovered. A few managed to breed with the indigenous people living nearby, but the virus had made most of them sterile.”

  “If the Japanese were looking for a way to pacify mainland China,” Eric said, “they would definitely be interested in a disease like this. Julia and I think that, aside from the tablets, the Germans also gave them any mummified bodies they found when they discovered the boat.”

  “Ah. I get it now. If the Japanese got the tablets from the Germans, you’re guessing they found them in Norway, because Germany occupied Norway, starting in 1940.”

  “Right. A land of rock and ice could describe Iceland, or parts of Greenland, but the Germans never took those countries. Finland fell to the Russians, and Sweden remained neutral throughout the war. We guessed Norway, most likely a fjord on the northern coast, which is sparsely populated and largely unexplored.”

  “Wait. Julia, out on deck you said Jannike was immune to this disease?”

  “The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t come up with a definitive answer for why she wasn’t affected when everyone else on the Golden Dawn had died. The disease mentioned on the tablets is airborne, and if it is the basis of whatever new virus the Responsivists have developed then she still would have breathed some contaminated air even if she was on supplemental oxygen.

  “However, if an ancestor of hers had been exposed to the virus and survived, there’s a good chance she has the antibodies coded into her DNA. The fact that she comes from a small town in northern Norway only bolsters our hypothesis.”

  “Can you test for it?” Juan asked.

  “Sure, if I had a sample of the virus.”

  Cabrillo tried to stifle a yawn. “Sorry. I need sleep. I think we’re still missing another piece of the puzzle. Let’s assume that the Germans discovered the boat and translated the tablets. They learn about this horrible disease, and it’s something they aren’t interested in, but their Japanese allies are, so the Germans ship it to Japan, or, more precisely, to an island in the Philippines, where Unit 731 is conducting its experiments. We don’t know if they managed to perfect it, but we can assume they didn’t, since a disease like this has never been mentioned in the history books.”

  Julia and Eric nodded.

  “How do we make the jump to the Responsivists getting their hands on it? If the Japanese failed sixty years ago, how did Severance and his gang succeed?”

  “We thought about that,” Eric admitted, “but couldn’t come up with any sort of link, other than the fact that their founder, Lydell Cooper, was a leading disease researcher. They used the same facility that the Jap
anese had used during the war, so it’s obvious they knew about their work on the virus. We just don’t know how.”

  “The next question is, why?” Juan said. “They used the virus or a derivative to kill everyone aboard the Golden Dawn. What do they plan to do with it now?” He overrode whatever answer Eric was going to give and added, “I know they see overpopulation as the worst crisis facing the planet, but unleashing a virus that kills off humanity, or even a majority of it, would leave the world in such a state of chaos that civilization would never recover. This thing is a doomsday weapon.”

  “What if they don’t care?” Eric said. “What I mean is, what if they want civilization to collapse? I’ve read up on these people. They’re not rational. Nowhere in their literature do they espouse going back to the Dark Ages, but it could be that that’s exactly what they want—the end of industrialization and the return to humanity’s agrarian roots.”

  “Why attack cruise ships?” Juan asked. “Why not just release the virus in every major city in the world and be done with it?”

  Eric made to reply and then closed his mouth. He had no answer.

  Juan pressed himself up from the table. “Listen, guys. I really appreciate all the work you’ve done, and I know this will help figure out the Responsivists’ end gambit, but if I don’t hit the rack I am going to fall asleep right here. Have you briefed Eddie about all of this?”

  “Sure have,” Julia said.

  “Okay, ask him to call Overholt and tell him the entire story. At this point, I don’t know what he can do, but I want the CIA in the loop. Are Mark and Linda scheduled to report in anytime soon?”

  Eric said, “They didn’t bring a satellite phone, so they have to use the Golden Sky’s ship-to-shore telephone. Linda said they would check in again”—he looked at his watch—“in another three hours.”