Crossbones

by John L. Campbell

  “You still cannot appreciate the weight of my responsibility, can you?” Liz sighed and shook her head. “You’re inexperienced, I know, and perhaps I need to set a better example for you. Having a command means making hard decisions, Amy. Sometimes those choices are unpleasant, but the ability to lead depends upon making them.”

  Amy nodded slowly, looking at a woman she realized she didn’t really know at all. “And if they refuse to pay rent, Captain?” she said. “What then?”

  Liz made another marker notation on her map. “I’m sure you can imagine what this ship’s weapons systems would do to that Coast Guard station at this range. If they protest, make sure they can imagine it too.” Liz stood and straightened, twisting her back with a crack and yawning. “That will be all, Miss Liggett. You’re dismissed.”

  • • •

  A week after Liz and Amy’s talk in the combat center, an early winter storm barreled in off the ocean, hitting the coast with terrifying force. Heavy rain pounded the Pacific Northwest, and in Brookings, sustained winds of sixty miles per hour—with gusts as high as ninety miles per hour—lashed the seaside community. Trees were knocked flat, power lines fell, and in several places roofs were torn completely away, the walls beneath them collapsing. The worst of it hit at night, sealing Joshua James in a black envelope of screaming darkness, waves surging into the river’s mouth and crashing against the bow, lifting the cutter and dropping it back down so that it strained against its anchor.

  On shore, the civilian refugees huddled in the Coast Guard station, eyes turned upward and listening as the roof groaned and popped. They watched the doors as well. Weather didn’t bother the dead, and it was too dangerous to put out the normal sentries.

  Joshua James was designed for storms like this, and the ship rode it out, battened down tightly. The night watch stayed safe and dry within the warm protection of the bridge, gripping handles and consoles while the ship rose and fell, watching as rain hammered the glass. Lightning forked out over the Pacific.

  Liz and Charlie were in the captain’s cabin for their late-night coffee, both of them long at ease with the roll and swell of a ship in a storm. Blackbeard was curled on Liz’s bunk, half sleeping and peering at them through slitted eyes. A half-eaten bowl of cat food sat on the deck nearby, and several dozen more cans were tucked in a cabinet. One of the crew had found a few cases of the stuff during a rare excursion into a water’s-edge area of Brookings, along with several bags of cat litter. Liz gave him twenty-four hours off-duty time as a reward.

  Brother and sister held their mugs and drank without spilling. They’d been talking about the day’s events, what the refugees had been doing, and how Amy Liggett was performing. So far she’d carried out Liz’s orders, and the refugees were cooperating, surrendering their firearms (all the captain knew about, anyway) and making their fifty percent tithing.

  “They’re sure not doing it because of her personality or leadership qualities,” Charlie said. “It’s because they know you’re not afraid to use the rope.”

  Liz smiled thinly. The old-time sea captains had it right all along. The modern world had grown soft, conditioning everyone to expect special treatment and to be spoken to in language that wouldn’t hurt their feelings. Along the way, true discipline became fuzzy. The old ways worked the best, she’d decided.

  They were quiet for a while, lost in their thoughts as the storm sea lifted and rolled the ship. Then Liz looked up. “Chick, the FBI said you murdered three people during a drug deal. Is it true?”

  Charlie sipped and looked at her over the rim of his cup. “Does it matter now?”

  “Not to our situation,” Liz said, “or to what was my career, not anymore. But I want to know.”

  “I thought it was four people,” he said without a change to his expression. “One got away, huh? That guy that tried to make a swim for it. I guess he got to shore.” He shook his head. “Damn, I was positive I hit him.”

  Liz set her cup down, still holding it so it wouldn’t slide. She stared at her brother. “Drugs, Chick? How long have . . . why . . . ?”

  He smiled. “It wasn’t really a drug deal. Well, they thought it was.”

  “Make sense,” she said.

  A shrug. “I met a guy in Seattle who knew some cartel guys, and I told him I had a quarter million to invest in coke. After that it was really just setting up time and place.”

  “Where the hell did you get a quarter million dollars?” Liz demanded.

  He laughed. “I didn’t. I just told them that, and brought a bag with a couple of phone books in it. Those guys were so cocky and comfortable that they didn’t check until it was too late. They couldn’t imagine someone would cross them.”

  She shook her head again. “Coke? Chick, what were you thinking? Do you use coke? How long have you been selling it?”

  “No, I don’t use it and I wasn’t going to sell it. When it was over I dumped the shit in the Pacific.”

  “Then why?”

  He sipped his coffee. “I did it for Leo.”

  Liz sat back in her chair. Her brother had known Chief Leonard Massey since he joined the Coast Guard. The two of them had come up through the ranks together, served together aboard ship several times, and even made chief the same year as one another. He was Charlie’s best friend, and as far as Liz knew, his only friend.

  Two years ago, Chief Massey was stationed in Miami and led a boarding party onto a megayacht suspected of being used by some cocaine cowboys. There was a close-range gunfight, and Leo caught a bullet. He died right there on the yacht. The man who shot him surrendered at once and was later convicted of homicide in connection with drug trafficking. In exchange for providing federal agents with information about the cartel, however, Leo Massey’s killer had his sentence commuted from death to life without parole. Losing one of their own during drug operations was every coastie’s fear, and seeing the chief’s murderer go unpunished—anything less than lethal injection wasn’t enough, as far as they were concerned—was a bitter pill. Charlie had never spoken of it, other than to acknowledge that his friend was gone.

  “Chick,” she said, leaning forward, “the man who killed Leo . . . these people weren’t him.”

  “Nope,” he said, “but they were cartel, and I paid them back with interest.”

  “But it wasn’t him,” she insisted.

  The corner of Charlie’s mouth turned up. “Sis, assholes are assholes, and they’re all just as satisfying.”

  “But . . . how could you risk everything like that? Your life, your career . . . our careers.”

  He laughed again. “I didn’t think I’d get caught. We were all on the boat, the four of them and me, all real friendly.” He made his finger and thumb into a gun and pointed it at his sister. “And then I popped them. One jumped over the side, and I fired, thought I popped him too, but it was dark. He must have gotten away and told someone, otherwise I wouldn’t have been taken off my ship in irons, and they wouldn’t have tried to take your command away.” He shook his head. “I really am sorry about that. I know how much your ship means to you.”

  “You’re sorry? Chick, if all this hadn’t happened, we—”

  “But it did happen, Sis,” he said, finishing his coffee. “And good thing too, or we’d have been in some hot water.” He shook his head. “Sloppy mistake on my part.”

  “Chick, you murdered three men to avenge Leo? That’s . . . that’s crazy.” The last word came out in a whisper, as if Liz were afraid to speak it.

  “Maybe,” he said, eyes dancing.

  Liz looked at the man across the table, the killer across the table. How had he become this person without her seeing it? How much of it was her fault for failing him when he’d been little, failing to protect him from a monster like Mr. Drummond? Drug dealers gunned down, federal agents blown out of the sky, refugees shot in the back room of a cannery. None of it see
med to bother him at all. What else had he done that she didn’t know about?

  They sat there without speaking, the swells making them rock in their chairs. Charlie frowned at his empty coffee mug, while Liz’s sat untouched on the table in front of her as she looked at a man she realized she really didn’t know at all. An overhead speaker broke the silence.

  “Captain to the bridge. Radar contact.”

  • • •

  Mr. Waite pointed to the radar scope, Liz standing beside him. Amy Liggett and their helicopter pilot, Lt. Riggs, peered over their shoulders. “It’s a ship, no question about it,” said the quartermaster. “Ten miles out and closing.”

  “The Dorado?” Liz wondered aloud, thinking of the cutter stationed to their south.

  Waite shook his head. “Too big. Could be a tanker, or maybe military.”

  “Any radio traffic?”

  “Negative, the channels are clear.”

  Liz peered at the scope. The blue-green blob indicated a ship moving almost imperceptibly across the screen. “I want to know what it is before it catches us anchored in a goddamn river. Senior Chief?”

  Charlie moved to her side.

  “Ready for storm duty?” she asked.

  “Always, Captain.”

  “I want you and another crewman to launch the MLB,” Liz said. “Put eyes on that contact and report back as soon as it’s identified.”

  “Aye-aye,” he said, and disappeared down the bridge ladderway.

  Liz looked at her XO. “Sound general quarters.”

  • • •

  Charlie and a bosun’s mate sat in the bucket seats of the cockpit-style control room, the senior chief driving the motorized lifeboat with a pair of joysticks. Wiper blades slapped furiously at the cockpit windows, doing little to hold back the driving rain and spray. They made no difference, for it was black outside and they were operating on instruments alone. Beyond the heated interior, the storm attacked the forty-seven-foot launch as if enraged that any man would dare put to sea in such a tempest.

  “Contact bearing to starboard, zero-four-zero,” said the bosun’s mate, holding on to a rubberized grip mounted over the right seat radar scope.

  “Here comes a big one,” Charlie said, and then the bow of the launch slammed into something unyielding, climbing, climbing as Charlie applied power. They were nearly vertical for an instant, engines howling back against the wind, and suddenly there was a moment of weightlessness. The bow tipped forward again, and the launch, airborne a full fifteen feet above the surface, crashed back down on the other side of the swell.

  Beyond the windshield was a charcoal wall shot through with green and streaks of foam, and within seconds the launch was climbing again. The hull shuddered, and as the bow appeared to point directly into the black sky, the bosun’s mate let out a wail and closed his eyes. “We’re going over backward!” he shouted. Charlie rammed the joystick forward for maximum power and bared his teeth.

  The launch cleared the swell, trailing foam, and slammed once more into the trench on the other side. The bow of the small vessel knifed through the dark water and climbed another wave, repeating the process several more times, each climb growing slightly less steep as the craft moved out from the roughest of the surf. A mile away from shore, the waves were no less towering but were farther apart, rolling swells that the MLB handled easily. Wind and rain continued their incessant hammering.

  “Give me a bearing,” Charlie ordered.

  The bosun’s mate opened his eyes and in a shaking voice reported, “Contact bearing to starboard, zero-four-four. Eight miles.”

  Charlie steered the launch to an intercept heading, taking the dark waves on an oblique angle, powering across the surface as seawater crashed across the deck. The bosun’s mate gave him regular updates on the contact’s position and distance, the miles between them closing. When they were within one mile, Charlie switched off the cockpit lights, leaving only the glow of the instrument panel. He powered back to twelve knots, careful to keep the launch angled into the swells so as not to take them broadside, something that could easily tip them over.

  “It should be right there,” the bosun’s mate said, pointing. “I don’t see any lights.”

  Neither did Charlie. There should have been something by now, even if only the contact’s red and green navigation lights. The radio frequencies held nothing but dead air.

  At half a mile, Charlie said, “Hit the spots.”

  The man in the right seat switched on the high-intensity lights mounted atop the cockpit and antenna cluster, then took hold of his own joystick to maneuver a powerful spotlight. As Charlie slowed further, the white beam tracked right to left across the darkness. Rain slashed across it like a curtain, impossible to penetrate.

  “It’s right there,” the bosun’s mate growled. The radar scope showed the contact—a huge shape—as just off their starboard bow, but the storm hid it from sight. Seconds later, it was the storm that finally revealed it as a string of dazzling lightning strikes split the sky, searing the image in an instant of flashbulb white that trumped the masking rain.

  “Fuck me,” Charlie whispered.

  It was a cruise ship, completely without lights and power, adrift at the mercy of the sea. And it was heeled over to port at what Charlie judged to be a thirty- or thirty-five-degree angle, waves washing over the railings of its upper decks, surging around the supports of water slides and crashing against the hollows of steeply angled swimming pools. Its bow was pointed south, but the vessel was broadside to the sea, being pushed toward land with every wave.

  “Why hasn’t she foundered?” the bosun’s mate said, finally putting the spotlight on it, the beam crawling across its hull in a circle of white, all that could be seen now that darkness had once again replaced the lightning. The angle of the ship reminded both men of news footage they’d seen about the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship run aground off the Italian coast years ago by a reckless captain, capsizing and ending up mostly on its side within swimming distance of a beach. The pitch to this ship wasn’t quite as severe, but it was close, and the sight of it was unsettling to anyone who spent their life at sea.

  Charlie powered the MLB around it, keeping a safe distance for fear a wave would throw them against her side, and motored along the seaward, starboard side that was tipped up toward a violent sky. The ship was massive, 960 feet, nearly the length of an aircraft carrier, eleven decks high and eighty-three thousand tons. It had a dark blue hull and a white superstructure with two red stacks climbing above. On the side of each stack was an iconic silhouette known the world over.

  “This is the sickest,” the bosun’s mate muttered, working his joystick.

  The spotlight revealed that about half the lifeboats were missing on this side, one still dangling partway down the hull, hanging crooked on its cables. When the light settled on the boat, a gray arm stretched from within a side hatch, its hand pawing at the yellow fiberglass.

  Charlie used the launch’s powerful engine to fight the waves and motored around to the stern, seeing the ship’s name in elegant, yellow script. They continued back around to port, the direction of the tilt, and the spotlight inched across portholes and glass balcony doors. Many were smashed, the sea flowing in and out at will, but others remained intact, and behind many of them were gray corpses dressed in shorts and tank tops, sundresses and flowered shirts. They pressed against the glass, mouths open in silent moans.

  Charlie suddenly realized he had been aboard this ship, not as a passenger but with the Coast Guard, during a safety inspection ten years ago in San Diego. He remembered the gilded atrium, the rich décor and attention to detail, a thousand feet of fun and luxury. How many guests and crew aboard? Three or four thousand?

  It was probably making a summer run from Vancouver to Alaska, he thought, or south to San Diego. Summertime . . . it would have been filled to capacity, half
of them kids. Charlie could picture thousands of corpses crawling along tilted passageways in the dark, stumbling past statues of princesses and cartoon animals, feet shuffling through drifts of broken plates and glass. Some would be trapped in staterooms, others wandering restaurants and shops and theaters, still more caught in flooded, lower decks. All of them in the dark, all of them hungry. He imagined the moans that would echo through those carpeted, steeply angled corridors, and shuddered.

  “That, shipmate,” Charlie said, “is a ghost ship.”

  The bosun’s mate simply moved his head up and down without speaking.

  Charlie checked the cruise ship’s position and calculated the movement of the sea. “It’s going to be on the rocks by morning,” he said, then turned the launch back toward Brookings and applied power. He lifted the radio mic. “Seven-five-four, this is Recon Launch One. Contact identified.”

  • • •

  The storm blew out around six the next morning. While Amy Liggett went ashore to see how the refugees had fared in the night, Liz, Charlie, and several others went back out in the motorized lifeboat. Although the sky still churned with hues of black and gray and a light rain continued, the seas had calmed considerably, and they were all able to stand on the vessel’s top control deck, facing the spray in foul-weather ponchos.

  As Charlie predicted, the cruise ship had indeed reached the rocks during the night, and came to rest in the shallows a hundred yards west of where the town of Brookings sloped down to meet the Pacific. In the light of morning, the scene was even more chilling and awe-inspiring. The ship, upon grounding amid the rocks and shoals, had been pushed even farther to port and now tilted toward shore at an even forty-five-degree angle. Surf curled about its hull, but decks that had once been kept awash by the sea were now able to drain. Dozens of separate waterfalls gushed from points along the length of the ship, seawater pouring out through smashed windows and over balconies, carrying with them a tide of flotsam: luggage, couch cushions and bedding, plastic cups and stuffed animals . . .

  And corpses.