Predatory Instinct: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  They just needed to figure out if anyone on board this ghost ship was in need of assistance, and then they could be on their way again. He imagined the crew in their heated cabins, bedded down like pansies, waiting out the storm, or maybe the savage sea had scared them all so badly they had needed to be airlifted back to shore.

  Russ chuckled at the thought as he followed Jerry across the dark threshold and into the central corridor of the main deck. The smell stopped him in his tracks. It reeked of an entire catch rotting in the hold after the refrigeration unit crapped out. Jerry must have smelled it, too. He stood stock-still, a silhouette against the diffuse glow of his flashlight beam.

  Their breath hung in clouds around their heads.

  “We got no business here,” Jerry whispered. “All we got to do is tell Anders we didn’t see nothing and get the hell off this boat.”

  Russ agreed wholeheartedly, but there was a part of him that needed to know. He stepped around Jerry and swung his beam in front of him. It reflected from puddles on the floor. Exposed wiring hung from severed conduits in the ceiling. An occasional blue spark fizzled and died. A bright light passed over him through the doorway behind him, stretching his shadow down the silent hallway, and then it was gone. It reappeared through each of the open doorways to his right, one at a time, as though some invisible phantom were flicking the overheads on and off in sequence. It was the spotlight from the Dragnet, he knew, sweeping across the side of the larger vessel and passing through the porthole windows.

  “You’re on your own,” Jerry said. His receding footsteps slapped through the puddles on his way back into the rain. “We should have just left—”

  His words were swallowed by the shrieking wind.

  “What’s going on in there?” Anders’s voice crackled through the two-way. “Surely you’ve found someone by now.”

  Russ dialed down the volume on the transceiver as he advanced into the ship. Water dripped to the floor with a metronomic plip…plip. The squeak of his wet soles echoed back at him from the darkness ahead. His pale column of light passed over a sign to the right that read “Machinery Shop.” There was a handprint on the wall below it in what appeared to be some kind of oil. A quick glance into the interior confirmed that other than rows of work tables with toppled chairs, several sinks, and racks of tools, the room was empty. He turned to the left. The “Winch Housing” sign was bisected by a spatter of fluid that had dried in dark ribbons.

  “Answer me, Russ,” the radio hissed. “Tell me what you see.”

  The floor was smeared with crusted streaks, as though someone had dragged a filthy mop across it and never bothered to return.

  Another blue snap above him rained golden sparks.

  His beam crossed a sign to his right—“Galley”—and the closed steel hatch beside it, which looked like it had been sloppily painted finger-painted with mud. The matching door to his right was pitted and dented, the sign illegible beneath more of the dark fluid.

  The smell intensified and he gagged, but he had to know.

  He had to know.

  “Get your…out…there,” Anders’s voice wavered through the static. “We…call it in…reach port.”

  It was like walking through a dream. His legs were numb, yet he could hear his footfalls from both ahead of him and from behind him at the same time. The tapping sound of his pulse in his head was indistinguishable from the patter of fluid dripping from above him, his harsh breath distorted as though he were breathing into a mask.

  The next doorway to the left stood wide open just past a sign that read “Mess.” An array of shattered dishes covered the floor beside overturned tables. His light reflected from aluminum plates and bowls, broken glasses, silverware and standing fluid. He had to clap his hand over his mouth and nose as he stepped inside and slowly moved his column of light from left to right.

  “Anybody in here?” he tried to call, but it passed through his palm as a series of grunts.

  He walked around the tables until he reached the back of the room. Glass from broken bottles twinkled at his feet. A sticky puddle crept across the ground like a shadow. The two porthole windows admitted precious little light. At first he thought they were opaque, and then he saw the bodies crumpled below them and realized that they were spattered with blood.

  Russ gasped and stumbled back out of the mess. Even as he turned and ran down the hallway, his mind was still trying to rationalize what he had seen. Two men: one on his side, the other folded backward. Mouths agape, eyes wide, necks opened as though by a shovel. The doorways flew past to either side until he burst out into the storm. His first step onto the wet deck sent him sprawling. The back of his head ricocheted from the boat. He saw stars as he slipped and slid toward the stern.

  Anders’s voice barked at him from his jacket, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  Jerry was already in the Zodiac, cranking the outboard. Russ threw himself down the ladder and nearly capsized the raft.

  “Jesus, man—” Jerry started, but Russ shoved him aside, yanked the motor to life, and guided them back toward the Dragnet through troughs that dropped violently beneath them and drenched them with spray.

  Felix Juarez, a stocky Hispanic with jailhouse tattoos scaling his neck above his parka, popped up from belowdecks at the sound of the Zodiac’s whine. He waved them over and helped haul the smaller craft back on board while Russ hurried inside and thundered up the stairs into the wheelhouse.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Anders snapped. The gray-haired captain whirled to face Russ, smoke from the cigar clenched between his yellowed teeth swirling around his coarse features. His forehead creased over his hazel eyes when he saw Russ’s face.

  “Get us out of here,” Russ said.

  “Tell me what you saw. Is everybody—?”

  “Get us out of here!” Russ shouted. “Now!”

  “What did you see? If anyone on that ship needs help, we’re honor bound—”

  “They’re all fucking dead!” Russ shouted.

  Anders looked into his wild eyes for a long moment, then simply nodded and turned back to the rain-sheeted glass.

  Russ stomped down the stairs and headed toward the port rail, where he stood beneath the dripping net and stared between the outrigger booms toward the ebon shape of the factory ship. A shiver rippled up his spine. He didn’t know what had happened on that ship, but he wanted no part of it. Damn the maritime code. There was no one left on that ship to save. Images of what he now understood to be blood assaulted him: streaked on the corridor floor, painted on the walls by unimaginable suffering, spattered on the windows in the mess, in front of which two nearly decapitated corpses had been left to rot.

  The sooner they were far away from this ghost ship the better.

  He heard a thump from the bow and turned in that direction as the engines roared, churning up flumes of water in their wake. One of the hatches to the lower hold flapped open and closed at the mercy of the wind.

  The spotlight flashed across the starboard bow of the larger ship. He read the letters painted on the hull—“Pacific Scourge; PNG-4189; Orcas Island, Washington”—before the ship fell behind them into the roiling darkness once more, leaving him to wonder what in the name of God had befallen her crew.

  TEN

  Seattle, Washington

  Tuesday, October 16th

  1:53 a.m. PST

  Russ tore the page out of the phone book and walked away from the desolate booth under the lone street lamp. The working harbor was as dark and deserted as it would ever be, which was exactly why they had slowed their pace and timed their arrival to coincide with the lull. Nearly all of the buildings and warehouses were dark, save for the harbor master’s office and one pier nearly a mile to the north where a crane unloaded containers from a Handymax freighter with Japanese letters on the hull. He could hear the grinding of the crane, the resounding boom when it dropped its cargo in the storage lot, and the occasional shouted directions echoing across the bay. They wer
e otherwise alone on the commercial fishing docks, where the trawlers, seiners, and sports boats were tethered to the piers in long, silent lines. The waves clapped against their hulls as they rose and fell in a gentle rhythm. Far to the south, the shoreline was pitch black, a conspicuous gap of nothingness along Salmon Bay, where he could vaguely discern the outlines of the demolished buildings of the old wharf against the backdrop of the lights of downtown, two worlds from different eras juxtaposed upon one another. From where he now stood, in the shadows under the overhang of the fish market, he could see his crewmates as shadows on the deck of the Dragnet, their bags slung over their shoulders as they prepared to disembark onto their home soil for the first time in nearly half a year. Their haul would keep in the hold for one more night. They’d be back in a matter of hours to transfer their cargo into refrigerated panel trucks, assuming the market prices for their catch were agreeable, but for tonight, they were going to sleep in their own beds, if only for a few precious hours.

  But there was one thing he needed to do first.

  Since he had been the one who had witnessed the carnage on the Scourge, the duty of making the call had fallen to him. He had done everything in his power to put the whole situation out of his mind, and yet nothing seemed to work. He couldn’t even blink without seeing the black smears of blood framed in his flashlight beam on the walls and the floor, the two corpses sprawled in front of the windows painted with their pain. There was nothing they could do for whoever had been on that boat now. Russ and his men had too much to lose. The cash on the Dragnet aside, they had undoubtedly committed a felony by not calling in their discovery the moment they nearly broadsided the factory ship in the middle of the Pacific, but it was too late to change that now. Besides, why should they stick their necks out when the fate of the Scourge had already been decided? Their involvement changed nothing. They’d probably even spend the next year in and out of the offices of various lawyers and law enforcement agencies, answering the same questions over and over, all the while defending their innocence in a situation that had always been outside of their control, but there was still the unwritten code to uphold. Whether he wanted to or not, he owed the men on that infernal ghost ship the phone call he now had to make.

  He unwrapped the disposable cell phone and threw the plastic packaging in an oil drum-wastebasket beside a scaling trough with entrails coiled through the holes in the drain covers. After a frustrating minute trying to figure out how to work the blasted phone he’d purchased down the street at the Shell station, he dialed the number from the torn page, crumpled it up, and dropped it in the trash. The phone rang in his ear.

  He felt like a punk. The arrogant seaman who had once served aboard the USS Nimitz, who had seen a world he never knew existed from the deck of one of the most feared aircraft carriers ever put to sea, who had grabbed his groin in one hand and raised the middle finger of the other toward shores where the meek huddled in fear, curled up like a beaten dog inside of him. There was now only the prematurely aging man for whom self-preservation superseded all else and the hard life had pummeled into the kind of coward who was now poised to pawn the responsibility for the lives of those aboard the Scourge onto whoever picked up the phone when he dialed the number and pressed “Send.”

  When a drowsy female voice answered the Coast Guard’s Maritime Emergency Hotline, he recited the line exactly as he had practiced.

  “Write this down. Word for word.” She tried to interrupt, but he just plowed ahead. “The Factory Ship Pacific Scourge, PNG-4189, is dead in the water at forty-nine-point-two-one north latitude and one-twenty-eight-point-two-six-three west longitude. I don’t know what happened onboard, but there don’t appear to be any survivors. How you handle it from here is your call. Did you get that?”

  “Sir, there’s no sign of an activated EPIRB distress beacon in that area. Please repeat the coordin—”

  Russ terminated the call, ejected the battery, and hurled the cell phone out into the bay.

  There. The deed was done. Now he could slink off into the night like the chump that he was. He’d just have to find a way to live with the man he’d become. Who was he kidding? With his share of the money in the hold, he’d be able to forget all about this mess in no time at all. He supposed men had sold their souls for far less.

  His footsteps echoed on the hollow planks of the pier as he headed back toward the Dragnet. Already he was thinking about a hot shower in his own apartment and snuggling up into his dry, warm bed and putting all of this behind him where it belonged.

  ELEVEN

  Pacific Ocean

  104 km West-Northwest of the Washington Coast

  7:02 a.m. PST

  The Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter raced across the Pacific. Its mechanized thunder echoed back from the cresting black waves. Special Agent Grey Porter listened to the pilot coordinating with the Coast Guard through the cans on his ears. He craned his neck in an effort to see the western horizon, where he could barely discern the skeletal outline of the Scourge. Two Coast Guard vessels circled it like sharks. Their crews had retreated to their boats as he had instructed, and now waited for the FBI and the contracted forensics specialists from the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Scene Response Team to begin their investigation before towing the factory ship back to Seattle. Porter was certain the scene couldn’t be half as bad as it had been described to him, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have his work cut out for him. Piracy on the high seas was on the rise. It was starting to feel like a return to the seventeenth century out here. While the Bureau wasn’t called upon to investigate every instance, it was becoming more and more frequent. Murder on a vessel of this size with international ports-of-call generally meant trafficking of some kind, and whether in drugs, firearms, or human beings, it fell under Federal jurisdiction. Porter cared little about smuggling. The men and women from the CSRT, seated beside him and in the chopper behind him, were infinitely more qualified to deal with that. He was here because he was the best field operative the Violent Crimes Division had to offer. It was his job to identify the perpetrators and hunt them to the ends of the earth, if that was what it took to being them to justice.

  And the clock started now.

  “I can’t get any lower than this,” the pilot shouted through the cans.

  Porter looked down at the long bow of the Scourge, a full fifty feet below them. The rotors were already whipping the ropes and rigging across the desk as though they were caught in a cyclone. Any lower and they might as well let a herd of wildebeests charge through the crime scene for all the damage they were doing.

  “Just hold her steady,” Porter said. He slipped out of his seatbelt and made his way to the open side door, where a crewman passed him a harness attached to a steel cable. The wind buffeted him with rain as he seated himself in the harness and approached the edge. He gave a curt nod to the man at the winch and stepped out over the nothingness.

  The deck below him rose at a steady pace. He twirled in slow circles, affording him a full view of the bow. Waves broke over the gunwales and flooded across the deck. If there had been any evidence out there, it washed through the scuppers long ago. All of the windows of the upper decks were dark and lifeless. There was no indication that anyone had ever been aboard, as though the vessel had been put to sea unmanned and set to drift for eternity. Of course, he knew that wasn’t the case. He’d already been informed of what he could expect to find inside.

  He splashed down into ankle-deep water, shed the harness, and heard the cable zip upward behind him. The entire ship rocked at the mercy of the ocean. The engine was silent and still underfoot. Waves boomed against the hull. Rain clapped on every surface. He was soaked to the bone before he even reached the open doorway and stepped into the shadows.

  The smell struck him with enough force to make him recoil.

  He clicked on his flashlight and drew his Beretta 92FS Inox. Surely whoever was responsible for the slaughter was long gone, but there was no point in taking any chance
s. His beam passed over smears and spatters on the smooth walls, none of which were pitted with bullet holes, scored by ricochets, or showed any other indications of a prolonged siege. A thin stream sloshed from side to side on the floor in time with the canting ship.

  Columns of pale light crossed the corridor from the doorways on the starboard side, highlighting the ribbons of water trickling from the seams on the walls and the bloodstains that had already dried to a brownish crust. He glanced through the each doorway as he passed, taking note of the condition and the presence or absence of bodies. There were two in the mess, as the Coast Guard had already documented. He paused in the stairwell at the end of the hallway. A flight led downward into the absolute darkness of the hold, while another led upward to the cabins and the wheelhouse. He could return to the hold later. There was probably nothing more significant than fish rotting in the thawing freezers down there anyway. First and foremost, he needed to figure out where the rest of the bodies were and what happened to the crew.

  He glanced back and watched two of the forensics techs haul their cases into the mess before starting his ascent. His footsteps clanged on the iron stairs as climbed, his flashlight directed upward at a steep angle toward the landing above. The lurching ship tossed him alternately against the railing and the wall. There were no bloodstains on the walls here, only sporadic, ill-defined smudges on the rail. When he reached the landing, he peered out into the corridor. Narrow doorways lined both sides of the thin walkway every eight feet or so. Only a fraction of the minuscule crew cabins appeared as though they were currently in use. While the Scourge could house and employ nearly forty men, Porter had learned that a large percentage of them had been Russian nationals who’d been hired right off the docks for pennies on the dollar, leaving only the ten American seamen and the captain to make the return trip. He found one of them in his bunk with the side of his throat opened wide enough to see the faint white glimmer of his trachea. The wall above the man’s shaved head was spattered with long arcs of blood.