Steel Fear

by Brandon Webb

  “This was discovered on the flight deck thirty minutes ago, during this morning’s FOD walk,” said the ship’s general medical officer. “By a seaman who was unfortunate enough to pick it up before realizing what it was. Now under sedation in sick bay.”

  Jackson leaned over to inspect the severed end. “Could this have been from a hatch cover?” It wasn’t all that rare to see a careless hand or foot caught in a slammed hatch cover and lose a digit.

  Finn shook his head. “Don’t think so. You’d see a combination crush injury and laceration injury.” He looked up at the GMO for confirmation.

  “Correct,” she said. “The bone would be at least partially fragmented, with a rougher pattern of skin tearing. If I had to guess, I’d say this was hacked off with cable cutters or a pair of aviation snips.”

  Jackson grimaced. “Any idea who this belongs to?”

  “We’re trying to identify its owner now, based on ethnicity and relative bone size, matching against records of people we’ve seen. Not much to go on.”

  A corpsman knocked lightly on the door and poked his head in. “Master Chief Jackson? XO calling on this line.” He nodded at the phone on the GMO’s desk.

  Jackson picked up, and Finn heard him updating Gaines in murmurs.

  Finn could hear the urgent buzz out in the medical suite. People were freaking out. On their way from Chief’s Mess, he and Jackson had passed dozens of sailors rushing to their muster stations, scrambling to get past one another in the passageways and on the ladders. It didn’t take someone with Finn’s skill to read the panic on their faces.

  The grisly news was flying fast.

  Finn saw Jackson’s face cloud over. “Say what?” the master chief growled.

  Finn took two quiet steps toward him, close enough to hear Gaines’s voice.

  “We’ve got a man missing a finger here, Arthur,” continued Jackson. “No, scratch that, we’ve got a finger missing the whole putain man! Are we getting out an SAR or not?”

  “That’s a negative, Robbie,” said the voice on the phone.

  Jackson was silent for a moment. “Once more?”

  A slight pause, followed by a sigh the XO probably didn’t mean to be heard. “The skipper feels a man overboard alert may be an overreaction. Could put undue stress on ship’s company.”

  “Is he serious?”

  “I would say that’s an affirmative.”

  Jackson clicked off the phone and put one hand to his forehead, eyes closed. After a moment he opened his eyes again and looked at the GMO. “Will you let me know the instant you make an ID?”

  “Of course.”

  He stepped out of the office, Finn following.

  “Master chief,” said the GMO. “Before you go, can I ask you something?”

  Jackson turned back and looked at her.

  “What the hell is happening here?”

  72

  Selena Kirkland’s face was all smooth planes and sharp angles, like fragments of a fine china set refashioned into an instrument of war. She reminded Jackson of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and democracy. Also of warfare. And everyone on the Attic plain knew, gods and mortals alike: you did not fuck with Athena.

  There were seven of them seated around the polished wood conference table in the admiral’s war room: the admiral herself, with her chief of staff, a dour-faced rail of a guy; the CAG, or commander of the air wing; Eagleberg, Arthur Gaines, Jackson, and Scott Angler.

  Nobody had spoken for a full minute.

  “So,” said the admiral. “Where are we?”

  If Captain Eagleberg was the mayor of this mobile city, Admiral Kirkland was the governor, chief executive of all ten vessels that made up Strike Group Eight. It was the biggest job on the ocean. She rarely got involved with the business of running the Lincoln itself.

  But then, it wasn’t often a human finger turned up on the flight deck.

  “They X-rayed the finger,” Gaines reported, “and confirmed that the cut was most likely made by a pair of aviation snips.”

  It had taken less than an hour to make the ID; it was Seaman Santiago’s right index finger. They couldn’t get DNA confirmation without sending it ashore, but the medical department had been able to make a 95-percent-likely match. And Santiago was missing.

  A hasty review of CCTV footage had not revealed any trace of his presence on the flight deck. The finger appeared to have been tossed onto the deck, apparently from the adjacent catwalk.

  The admiral’s lugubrious chief of staff spoke up. “So, unless Seaman Santiago snipped off his own index finger, lobbed it up onto the flight deck, and then pitched himself overboard, we have to consider the possibility of foul play.”

  All eyes turned to Admiral Kirkland, who now looked at the captain.

  “Bill,” she said, “do we need to call in the cavalry here?”

  Jackson watched the captain struggle. Multiple suicides, losing an entire helo crew, and now the possibility of a homicide investigation right there on his boat? It was enough to make even the hardest skeptic wonder about that shark curse.

  Sailors were a superstitious lot—even those who sat at DC desks and gave sound bites on CNN. Eagleberg would never admit it, but he believed in bad luck and cursed voyages, and so did at least some of his superiors. He couldn’t afford to let anyone think he was losing control of his ship. The last thing in the world he’d want was some independent authority poking around his ship. His career was on the line.

  The captain cleared his throat. “No, ma’am. I don’t believe we’re at that point.”

  The admiral nodded, letting her gaze drift around the table, as if silently feeling for any rift in consensus. Then frowned. “The two officers,” she said. Looking back at Eagleberg.

  “Officers, ma’am?”

  “The jet pilot. And Schofield, the ATO man. Any possible connection there?”

  Jackson felt his heart rate accelerate. There it was, right out on the table—and from the admiral’s lips, no less. Would Eagleberg acknowledge the possible links he had refused to hear from Jackson?

  The captain cleared his throat once more. “No, Admiral,” he lied. “There’s no evidence of that.”

  Kirkland looked at him. Again, the thoughtful nod. “Very well,” she said. “Keep me posted.”

  As they walked out into the passageway, Eagleberg leaned in close to Jackson and spoke in a harsh whisper.

  “Investigate, Mister Jackson.”

  Robbie nodded and started to turn away, but the captain grabbed his arm and glared at him. Then mouthed one more word:

  Quietly.

  V

  The Other Shoe

  73

  Dusk. A cold Australian drizzle.

  Two days after the discovery of the severed index finger, the USS Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor at the mouth of Fremantle Harbour, the busiest seaport in Western Australia, and a total of zero people disembarked.

  Port call had been canceled—again.

  The official explanation was that a particularly virulent strain of flu was sweeping the city of Fremantle and the captain could not afford the risk to his crew’s health and safety. The “Eaglebeak flu,” some called it when their superior officers weren’t listening.

  Few believed the official explanation.

  The more obvious truth was that they didn’t want to let anyone off the ship and risk the possibility of escape. Not with Santiago’s killer still on board.

  Either way, quarantine or stakeout, there the ship sat, moored some twelve hundred meters from the dock. As far as its population was concerned, it might as well have been twelve hundred miles. For the next two days the Lincoln’s convoy of helos buzzed back and forth, replenishing its supplies, and the ship’s six thousand inhabitants walked through their chores and routines, subdued and claustrophobic, within shootin
g distance of the shore but unable to go ashore.

  The ship had become a floating prison.

  74

  “We don’t have much time.” Scott glanced at his watch and looked up at Jackson.

  In the forty-eight hours since they docked, this was their first chance to meet all four together, and it would have to be brief. Scott and Jackson were both due at the Lincoln Room in twenty minutes with the captain and Gordon MacDonald, the captain’s chief of security, who had apparently developed a few theories on the case.

  Now that Captain Eagleberg had sanctioned Jackson’s investigation, he’d put Mac in charge of conducting interviews with anyone connected to Santiago; Scott was liaising among Mac, Jackson, and the captain.

  Any suggestion that the other two disappearances could be connected was still to be kept strictly under wraps, with those discussions confined exclusively to Jackson’s office and the Lincoln Room.

  “There’s something here I’m still not seeing.” This was Indy. “If our killer is so smart, how can he be so dumb?”

  “How so?” said Lew.

  “That finger,” said Indy. “Dropping a hypodermic cap is one thing, but a finger? Either that was an accident, which is careless beyond belief, or he left it there on purpose—which is even more careless, because now the whole suicide story is out the window.”

  Jackson had been wondering about that, too.

  “And it gets worse,” said Indy. “For the killer, I mean. If Santiago’s disappearance were chalked up as one more suicide, there’d have been no lockdown. The killer could have debarked at Perth along with everyone else and slipped away into the crowd. But…”

  “But Santiago’s finger closed the door on all of that,” said Scott.

  Indy shrugged. “As I said. How could someone so smart be so dumb?” She looked back at Jackson, who was flipping through his notes on the Santiago case and frowning.

  “The finger was a trophy,” said Scott. “So he could reexperience the thrill of the kill. Serial killers are famous for it. For all we know he took fingers from Schofield and Shiflin too.”

  “And he just happened to drop this one?” said Indy.

  “Heat of the moment,” said Scott. “Rushing to slip away unseen. By the time you realize you dropped it, it’s too late to go back.”

  “Maybe,” said Indy. “Or maybe it wasn’t entirely accidental or entirely on purpose, but a little of both. Perhaps he wants to get caught.”

  Jackson looked up from the page he was studying and spread it out on the table so all could see. It was a diagram of the flight deck indicating where the severed finger was discovered. “Anyone notice the location?”

  The others looked at him.

  “Where they found the finger. Just aft of elevator 4, that little spot where there’s just enough room to park a single plane. Know what they call that spot?”

  Every carrier’s flight deck was divvied up into staging areas with idiosyncratic nicknames, such as the Point, Corral, Hummer Hole, Junkyard, Sixpack, Crotch, and—

  “Christ,” said Scott. “The Finger.”

  Indy gave a quiet gasp.

  Jackson looked sideways at Lew, who had listened to this exchange without saying a word. “Lew?”

  Lew slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think he wants to get caught…but I don’t think he’s being careless, either.”

  “Explain,” said Jackson.

  “The hypo cap, the bogus suicide notes, now the finger, even the forced cancellation of port call—my guess would be that it’s all deliberate, calculated, right down to the timing of it. He’s raising the stakes.”

  “To what end?” asked Indy.

  Lew looked at Indy. “That,” he said, “is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Robbie?” said Scott, getting to his feet and glancing at his watch.

  “I know.” Jackson nodded but didn’t move. Still frowning at his notes, from which he’d pulled a summary of all three timelines: Schofield, Shiflin, Santiago. “Just one more thing.” He sighed.

  It occurred to him that he’d been doing that a lot lately. Sighing. Sister Mae used to say chronic sighing was a sign you had a lost soul clinging to your lungs. Now, there was a disturbing thought.

  “Speaking of timing. Sam Schofield went missing the night of August second. Lieutenant Shiflin, on the eighth. Santiago—”

  “The fourteenth,” said Indy. “Oh, my.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Could be pure coincidence,” said Scott.

  “Or not,” said Jackson. “In which case, another six days past the fourteenth would be—”

  “The twentieth,” said Indy.

  Tomorrow.

  Jackson got to his feet and nodded at Scott.

  “Like you said. We don’t have much time.”

  75

  “So far we’ve got three hypotheticals.” Gordon MacDonald, the captain’s chief of security, was beanpole thin and sat straight as a crease; when he spoke, the only thing that moved was his trim red mustache.

  “Scenario One: these were hate crimes. You can see the pattern. Schofield: gay man. Shiflin: strong woman in what some, regrettably, still regard a ‘man’s job.’ And finally, Santiago: Hispanic. Three demographic groups the killer despised.”

  “So our guy is a misogynistic bigot?” said Scott.

  “Correct. Male, almost certainly white. Likely an enlisted man, ship’s crew. At least that’s hypothetical number one.”

  Jackson frowned, a disturbing thought occurring to him. He pushed it aside for later contemplation.

  Mac plowed on. “Scenario two: the assaults were driven more by a sort of class resentment, someone with a grudge against officers in general. Again: enlisted man, possibly flight crew, though I’d lean toward ship’s crew, someone who spends his days cooped up below. Possibly Schofield and Shiflin both insulted him, intentionally or not. Or maybe he just took their very existence as an insult.”

  Now Arthur spoke up. “Santiago?” Not an officer, obviously.

  “Witnessed something. Stumbled onto the killer’s identity somehow.”

  “And the finger?”

  “A warning to anyone else who might finger the killer. Classic witness intimidation. Like cutting out a rat’s tongue before whacking him.”

  Jackson noticed Scott suppressing an eye roll at that last remark, and he had to agree. Mac may have watched a few too many gangster movies.

  “And theory number three?” prompted Scott.

  “The least helpful possibility, but it needs to be considered: that these were purely crimes of opportunity. Our three victims, in other words, all happened to be out on the exterior, isolated, and at night.”

  “Chosen at random.”

  “Correct. Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “So why attack them at all?” asked Captain Eagleberg, irritably. “What’s the supposed motive here? Killing for killing’s sake?”

  Mac looked at the captain. “Your guess is as good as mine, sir.”

  Jackson noticed that Mac had consistently used the past tense. They were hate crimes. The assaults were driven. He was not describing a clear and present danger. There was no sense of urgency here. None at all.

  Despite his vow to sit back and observe, Jackson needed to speak up.

  “Skipper,” he said. “I wonder if we should look at stepping up security on the ship. Specifically, at all perimeter points.”

  “Why?” snapped the captain.

  Jackson chose his words carefully. “To forestall the possibility of any further incidents.”

  “I hardly think that’s necessary. If these were assaults, which I’m still not at all convinced is the case, then our putative killer has bollixed it up with that bloody finger business. I don’t expect we should see any further
episodes.”

  The captain looked around as if gathering a consensus, then nodded and got to his feet.

  “Good,” he said. “In any case, no point unnecessarily spooking the crew.”

  You mean any more than they’re already spooked? thought Jackson.

  76

  “What do you think of Mac’s analysis, Artie?”

  “Hard to say, sir. All three seemed plausible enough.”

  An audible snort, no doubt from Eagleberg.

  “Occam’s razor, Artie, Occam’s razor. When did all this business start? I’ll tell you when: with Schofield, just two days after we took a certain guest into our midst. Which prompts a question, doesn’t it? If these really were homicides at the hand of one man…”

  Finn sat on the deck of his broom closet, his back to the bulkhead so he faced the door, motionless, earbuds in, listening to his recording of the previous evening’s conversation in the bugged Lincoln Room. His sliced-up Sandburg Lincoln volume with its embedded bug was performing flawlessly.

  And here came the punch line.

  “…wouldn’t the most likely suspect be our good friend Chief Finn?”

  He pressed PAUSE.

  He’d known it was coming, even before Schofield disappeared. He’d known it from his first morning on this ship, from the moment he gazed up at the Vulture’s Nest and saw those steel-gray eyes fixed on him, radiating mistrust.

  Sooner or later the man behind that eagle’s gaze would be coming for him.

  He looked at the little electronic assembly in his lap, thinking.

  After a moment he pressed START again.

  “I can’t trust Jackson, Artie. So here’s what I want you to do. Talk to Scott Angler. Quietly. Explain our concerns. Have him look into the SEAL himself. His movements since arriving on the ship. Any possible connections with the three disappearances. Clear?”