“It might be the Chinese government,” Sylvia said. “I heard some of the crew on the trimaran speaking Mandarin.”
“You also heard two of them speaking English with an Australian accent. Could you identify them if you saw them again?”
“Absolutely.” Their faces were seared into her memory. Everything about the incident was.
“Eric, take her to see Kevin Nixon. He can draw up a composite sketch of them.” Juan turned back to her. “Is there anything else you can remember to help us narrow our search for the trimaran?”
She nodded. “I don’t know if this means anything, but there was a logo on a metal crate aboard the ship. It was an A and B over a starburst.”
“No name?”
She shook her head.
“Okay. Kevin can draw that up, too. Tracking down this trimaran and the chemical weapon they used might be the only way of discovering an antidote.”
The pilot, a handsome man with a handlebar mustache, announced, “Chairman, we’re approaching the Oregon.”
Juan returned to the cockpit. Then he called back. “We’ll do a flyby so Murph can get a look at her.”
Sylvia went to the window beside Mark’s and gazed out. She saw nothing but open sea lit by the fading sun.
“There she is,” Mark said. “Awesome.”
An ordinary-looking freighter appeared on the water below. Sylvia thought he was joking with her. “That’s it?”
“Looks can be deceiving,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the vessel.
The tiltrotor settled onto a landing pad in the middle of the deck, and to Sylvia’s astonishment, the aircraft was lowered into the ship.
Juan opened the door and said, “I’m going to the op center. Eric, when Kevin has any actionable info, let me know.” With that, he was gone.
“I’m going to take Murph to the infirmary for my own assessment,” Julia said.
“Are you going to be all right?” Sylvia said, taking Mark’s hand.
“Don’t worry,” Mark said. “We’ve got the best medical bay on water.”
Sylvia was uneasy about letting her brother out of her sight, but she could see he was in good hands.
“Come on,” Eric said. “I’ll take you to the Magic Shop. Then we’ll find you a cabin.”
He took her to a corridor where they got on a tram car, surprising her yet again with the technology on this ship. They were whisked toward the stern.
“What is the Magic Shop?” she asked.
“It’s the place where we make fake IDs, uniforms, makeup and wigs, props, and any other disguises and gadgets we need for our operations. It’s run by Kevin Nixon, who is an award-winning special effects expert and makeup artist from Hollywood.”
“What are your operations?”
“We take on difficult jobs that our government can’t do itself. Secret jobs, the type where they don’t want publicity. We’re kind of the last resort. If we can’t do it, it probably can’t be done.”
“So you’re spies. I knew it. My brother is a spy.”
Eric shrugged. “More like special ops.”
“Whatever you call it, I had no idea he worked in such an amazing place with such talented people.”
“I’m glad I could finally meet his sister. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Was I what you were expecting?”
“Exactly.”
Their eyes locked for a moment, and then Eric adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and looked away with flushed cheeks. She’d have to grill Mark later about why he’d never introduced her to his charmingly awkward best friend before.
The tram came to a stop and Eric led her down a series of plush halls more suited to a luxury yacht than a cargo ship. Then they entered a large room crammed with racks of clothing, storage bins and shelves full of props, several mannequins outfitted with military uniforms in various stages of tailoring, and four swivel chairs set in front of a wall of mirrors.
A slim man with a thick brown beard was tinkering with a prosthetic leg propped on the counter. He was sucking on a lollipop and so intent on his work that he hadn’t noticed them come in.
“Kevin,” Eric said, “the Chairman told us to see you.”
Kevin jerked his head around and nearly knocked over the artificial leg.
“Jeez,” he said, grabbing his chest. “What are you? Ninjas?”
“Kevin Nixon, this is Sylvia Chang. She’s Murph’s sister.”
“And yes, Eric, the Chairman told me to expect you.” Kevin turned to Sylvia. “I hope Murph gets better soon.”
“Thanks. That’s why we’re here, if you’re not too busy.”
“No, I was just making some adjustments to the Chairman’s combat leg.”
“He lost his real one in a ship battle a long time ago,” Eric said.
It looked more advanced than any prosthesis Sylvia had ever seen, but before she could ask about it Kevin put it aside and said, “How can I help?”
She told him about the people she saw on the trimaran and the logo she’d spotted on the crate.
“Let’s start with the logo. That’ll be easier to figure out than the faces.” He took out a laptop and pulled up a drawing app. “What did it look like?”
She described it for him, and they fiddled with it until it was an exact match for the AB logo as she remembered it. The recognition of it sent a shiver down her spine.
“I’ll send it to you so you can do a reverse logo search,” Kevin said to Eric.
While he was doing that, they moved on to the two Aussies she’d seen, detailing their features, which Kevin plugged into his app. Within thirty minutes, she was looking at an eerie facsimile of the faces of the man and woman who had hurt her brother and killed the crew.
“That’s them,” she said.
“We can try a facial match with the CIA’s database,” Kevin said. “If my drawings are close enough and they’re in the system, they should pop up.”
“The logo has popped up,” Eric said, looking at his phone. “At least, I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities.”
He showed them to Sylvia. They were all similar, but her eye was immediately drawn to the image in the center.
“It’s that one.”
“Alloy Bauxite is the name of the company,” Eric said. “According to their corporate filings, they process aluminum.”
“What could that possibly have to do with an attack on the Namaka and Empiric?” Sylvia wondered.
“I don’t know. But if we want to find out, we don’t have to go too far. All their operations are based in one small town in the Northern Territory. It’s called Nhulunbuy. We can be there by tomorrow morning.”
TWENTY-FOUR
PORT COOK, AUSTRALIA
After a hot afternoon spent replacing a burned-out transformer on a utility pole, electrician Paul Wheatley was looking forward to tossing back a cold beer at his favorite pub. The only problem was that his loony workmate would probably join him.
“Mate, I’m telling you,” Harry Knoll said from the passenger seat of their maintenance truck. “They have aliens in there.”
“You’re daft.”
“Then why would they build this place out in woop-woop?”
Wheatley rolled his eyes. He’d had this conversation a hundred times with Knoll. The transformer they’d fixed had been near Royal Australian Air Force Base Talbot, which was located in the far north of Queensland and was the service’s newest “bare base.” Situated on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, it was used in earnest only a few times a year by training squadrons headquartered at other bases. The rest of the time, Talbot had a skeleton staff of four and served as a backup base in case someone tried to invade Australia, which Wheatley thought was about as likely as Knoll suddenly abandoning his paranoid delusions.
“Last ye
ar, they had trucks going in and out from the docks,” Knoll rambled on when Wheatley didn’t answer him, “and planes were coming and going. We never saw what was in them, did we?”
“They told us what was happening,” Wheatley said. “They temporarily used the base as an immigrant detention center. They’ve built several of them.”
“That’s what the government wanted us to think. But the military could be doing anything in there. Didn’t you hear about that research ship they found west of Darwin? I heard all those scientists are vegetables now from some secret Navy experiment.”
“The news said they were paralyzed.”
“Same difference. Don’t you think it’s possible they’ve got a team of boffins inside the base tinkering with some unholy technology not of this earth?”
“No. I reckon it’s got four blokes bored out of their noggins waiting for something interesting to happen. Besides, there are only three hundred and twenty people in Port Cook. Good luck keeping something secret from that gossipy lot.”
They were almost back to town when a thunderclap split the air.
“Where did that come from?” Knoll wondered. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”
Something in the rearview mirror caught Wheatley’s eye. Dense black smoke was soaring skyward from the air base two miles behind them.
“There’s been an explosion at Talbot. We need to get to the station.” Wheatley stepped on the gas. Both he and Knoll were members of the volunteer fire brigade.
Knoll twisted in his seat and gaped at the column of smoke. “It had to be the alien technology. Maybe we’ll get a chance to see it now.”
“Don’t be a dipstick. One of their ammo dumps must have blown up.”
As he drove, Wheatley kept one eye on the fire burning behind him. He had no idea what set it off, but the light breeze coming from the sea would be fanning the flames.
Then from that direction, he saw something new, a bright light streaking toward them.
“What is that?” Wheatley asked.
Knoll turned in his seat. “It looks like a missile. Maybe it cooked off when the ammo dump went up.”
The missile shot over them just as they were entering the outskirts of Port Cook. Wheatley craned his neck to watch it through the windshield as it changed course and angled down toward the ground.
Five hundred feet above Port Cook, the rocket detonated, emitting a puff of white mist that seemed to quickly dissipate.
“That’s lucky,” Knoll said. “Looked like it was going to land in the center of town.”
As they were crossing the bridge over the river that marked the edge of town, Wheatley saw several of the townspeople outside on the main street watching the smoke in the distance. Without warning, each of them collapsed and slumped to the ground.
“What’s going on . . .”
That was all Wheatley got out before he lost consciousness.
When he came to, the first thing he noticed was the smell of brackish water. His legs and nose ached. He vaguely remembered that there was an accident at Talbot, and his last memory was of a missile shooting toward them. After that, it was black.
He opened his eyes and saw that the windshield was cracked and the hood crumpled. It was also sideways. In front of him was the bank of the river. Somehow they had plunged off the bridge, but he didn’t recall that happening.
Wheatley turned his head with effort, but his legs wouldn’t move, and he could only flail his arms. Knoll was below him, water from the river threatening to submerge him.
Wheatley tried talking, but he could croak out nothing more than a few unintelligible groans. Knoll responded with a terrified keening. The river’s surface was creeping higher as the truck settled into the river’s muck, and it didn’t look like he could move either.
Wheatley fumbled in an attempt to unhook his seat belt, then thought better of it. His seat belt was the only thing keeping him from dropping into the water beside Knoll.
The feeling of complete helplessness was horrifying. He could only watch as the water rose to Knoll’s neck. A similar fate would follow soon for Wheatley unless someone in town came to their rescue.
The two of them remained like that for what seemed like an eternity, but for all Wheatley knew, it could have been mere minutes. He heard nothing but the gurgling of water until the air was split by the screech of brakes.
The water was nearly up to Knoll’s mouth, so Wheatley did his best to shout, but it sounded more like the cry of a wounded animal.
“What is it, Wilson?” a man said from above. Wheatley recognized the voice as Sam Carter, one of the young airmen stationed at Talbot. The other man had to be his buddy Todd Wilson.
“Looks like a truck went over the side of the bridge,” Wilson said. “There are two guys inside.”
“Who is it?”
“Wheatley and Knoll.” He called to them as he clambered down the riverbank. “Oy, there. Are you hurt?”
Both Wheatley and Knoll responded with groans to the question.
“Come on, then, Carter,” Wilson said. “Give me a hand before they drown.”
Wilson yanked the driver’s door open. As Wheatley felt hands gripping his shoulders while his belt was unclipped, he was overwhelmed with relief at being rescued.
Wilson and Carter grunted with effort as they carried him back up to the road.
“Why do you think the fire brigade didn’t answer when we called?” Wilson asked.
“It certainly wasn’t because they were helping these fellows.”
They laid Wheatley roughly on the warm grass next to their Humvee so they could go back for Knoll.
As they went back down, Wilson said, “Crazy day. First, the storage depot goes up in smoke for no reason, and now we find these two in the river.”
They disappeared back down to the river while Wheatley could only look out at the placid ocean. The next few minutes of exchanges from below were about how to get Knoll out of the truck. Wheatley wasn’t sure they had succeeded until he saw them carrying Knoll over the embankment. They laid him next to Wheatley. Knoll was soaking wet but still breathing, his eyes wide with fear about his near-death experience.
“Why can’t either of them talk?” Carter asked.
“I don’t know,” Wilson said. “Concussions, perhaps?”
Wilson dropped to his knees to check them for wounds while Carter tried his phone.
“Still can’t get anyone,” he said after a moment. He turned toward town. “Maybe they . . .” His voice trailed off. “It can’t be.”
“Huh?” Wilson asked without looking up.
“I was so focused on the damaged bridge railing, I didn’t see them.”
“See what?”
“Bodies. They’re everywhere.”
Wilson’s head snapped around, and he leaped to his feet. He gaped for a moment, then yelled to Carter.
“Call Canberra. Tell headquarters we’ve got a major incident here.” Wilson turned back to Wheatley and Knoll. “Don’t worry, fellas. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
Wheatley tried to protest, pushing himself up awkwardly with his arms, but his moans didn’t stop the two panicked airmen from jumping in their Humvee and speeding away.
Exhausted from that small movement, Wheatley lay back down, waiting for them to return. He tried to distract himself from his predicament by watching an odd trimaran ship hurtling past Port Cook before abruptly turning out to sea.
TWENTY-FIVE
NHULUNBUY
Although he was the harbormaster for a small Northern Territory mining town, Burt Gulman took his ship inspection task seriously, part of his plan to get a transfer to a prestigious job at the giant port in Melbourne. The captain of the docked cargo vessel Norego, a fit-looking American named John Cable, was trying to impress Gulman with the technology on the ship’s state-of-t
he-art bridge, but the harbormaster played it like he’d seen it all before.
“The control panel looks functional,” Gulman said as he checked off an item on his clipboard. In fact, it was sleek and high-tech. The only object that seemed out of place was a vintage brass coffeemaker, attached to the back wall, that was giving off a tempting aroma.
“All the latest software,” Cable said proudly. “We can control everything in the ship right here, from navigation to fire suppression to cargo transfer. If I didn’t need to eat, I could probably run the ship myself.”
Cable let out a hearty laugh, but Gulman didn’t join in.
“After we finish here, I’ll need to see the engine room and then the cargo holds.”
“Of course. I’ll be happy to show them off, but you can see them from these monitors, too.”
Cable punched some buttons and pointed at one of the many high-definition display panels. Cameras switched between multiple views of an immaculately clean engine room holding two giant turbines. A single worker could be seen checking one of the instruments.
“That’s our chief engineer, Michael Wong,” Cable said. “Loves vehicles of any kind. He was especially keen on that hovercraft we saw arriving this afternoon. Very unusual to see that here.” He pointed at the giant craft on the tarmac, where it was being loaded with trucks from a nearby warehouse.
“That’s the Marsh Flyer,” Gulman said as he ticked off more items on his checklist. “Alloy Bauxite brought it in to access their production facility.”
“I’ll have to ask the pilot if Mike can take a peek.”
“I doubt it. Bob Parsons is a friendly sort, but he knows who butters his bread. AB is very protective of their proprietary information.”
“Too bad. Mike has been talking about it nonstop.”
“If your engineer wants to chat him up, Bob can usually be found at the Lazy Goanna when he’s off work.”
“The Lazy Goanna?”
“Our local tavern. All he has to do is buy Bob a drink.”
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