“He’s from the Lincoln, at any rate,” I said. “Why else would an American be skulking around on that island?”
“Anyone can put on an American accent,” Norton said.
“But why?”
“Well, Lincoln crewman or not, he’s dangerous,” Norton said. “He swam out here in the middle of the night and killed three of our men. Did he give you any indication why?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He talked about divers going down into his ship. He didn’t seem happy about it. And he kept calling us liars.”
“Liars?” Blake said. “How could we lie to him? We’ve never talked to him before now.”
I shrugged. “Like he said, he was a basket case.”
“He caught us out once, and he’s not catching us out again,” Norton said. “I’m tripling the guard. The sooner we get a nuke and get out of here, the better.”
“That’s it?” I said, astounded. “Triple guard? That’s it? After what he did? You’re not going to hunt him down?”
“No,” Norton said curtly.
“That’s insane,” I said. “You’re sitting on the flagship here. You’ve got choppers, you’ve got guns, you’ve got spec ops soldiers – you could flush the whole island, you could kill him easy!”
“And what would be the point in that?” Norton said. “Seamen Greaves, Winters and Clark would still be dead. I’m running a Navy ship here, Matt, not a revenge operation. We send more men onto that island, it’s just begging for more casualties. You said yourself that it’s covered in traps and zombies.”
“He’s a murderer,” I said. “He murdered those guys this morning!”
“I’m glad they’re so close to your heart, Matt,” Norton said darkly. “As I said: going after him will only risk more lives. It isn’t happening. Now get out of my sight before I send you back to the brig.”
I left the office with Sergeant Blake, who was emanating a sort of low-key fury. I ignored it. “I can’t believe…”
“Shut up, Matt,” Blake said. He didn’t make sergeant in the SAS by having easy expression of his emotions, but I could tell he was struggling to control them now. “Just shut the fuck up. Everything he said was right. I can’t believe you, Matt…”
He went off on a rant about my failings which was more or less identical to what Norton had served up. But first of all, I know Sergeant Blake much better, and felt more comfortable talking back; second of all, I still felt aggrieved at what I thought were unfair analyses of my actions.
“He cut people’s throats!” I said. “He was loose on the ship! What did you want me to do, go back to bed? There was a posse going after him and I went with him!”
“A posse?” Blake said. “Jesus Christ, Matt, this isn’t the Wild West. You shouldn’t have gone. You should know better. And I’m getting sick of saying that, because obviously you don’t.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew it had been stupid and I’d gone anyway, because I’d wanted to catch the interloper – wanted it so bad it overwhelmed everything else in my head. It was easy to look back on that and know it had been dumb. But I knew just as well that if something like that happened again, I’d do it again. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself.
Lying back on my bunk in any empty cabin, I knew what I had to do. Aaron had been wheedling at the back of my mind all night and all day. There had been a moment, at rest in the chairs on the ferry before I fell asleep, when I’d thought I should call him. But I thought he’d get into such a panic that he’d break radio silence and contact the Canberra from Jagungal, to let them know I was alive, lighting up the eastern seaboard and defeating the entire purpose of me being here in the first place.
What hell is going on? he demanded when I finally sank into a dream state and our minds flowed into one. Why the hell have you been ignoring me? And why the hell does my whole fucking body hurt? What’s happened to you?
I’m okay, I said. Thanks for asking.
If you were dead, I’d know, Aaron snapped. Tell me what happened to you!
We were attacked.
You were WHAT?!
Not by New England, not by any big group, don’t worry, I said. Jesus. You see why I didn’t call you when this was happening? You overreact.
Tell me what happened!
I told him the story from the beginning, leaving nothing out – though I may have suggested I was inadvertently swept up with the RIB shore party, rather than deliberately slipping amongst it. So, that answers the mystery of the survivor on the island, I said. I reckon he was the captain. Or an officer, at least.
We’ll talk to the Americans, see what we can dig up, Aaron said.
What’s the point? We’re not going back there, we’re not letting him come back here.
Still, Aaron said. It would be interesting to know who he is. What his deal was.
I suppose Aaron, in his own way, is as bored back at Jagungal as I am here on the Canberra.
If that’s it, I’m going to get some sleep, I said. It was kind of a rough night.
Yeah, that’s it, Aaron said. Listen – I’m glad you’re okay.
Me too, I said.
No, really. I need you to come back all right. Ellie needs you to come back all right. We all do. Understand?
Sure, I said.
I appreciate it. I do. Right now I just need to get some fucking sleep.
August 22
The party that came out with me on the RIB all made it back, after giving up the chase in the jungle. That was the same night, I mean, not just now – I’d just been too dopey and tired to ask after them. I didn’t even know who they were.
They had a burial at sea this morning for the three sentries who’d been killed – Greaves (the one who’d turned and attacked me), plus Winters and Clark. Wrapped in white sheets, slid off the deck, 21-gun salute, the whole works. I think about all the people I’ve cared about who’ve died, who we sometimes just had to leave there to rot under the sun, and it makes me a little annoyed, to see people set so much store by this. But I see the point as well. I understand why. Especially in the military. They hang on to the rituals because the rituals is what gives it all meaning.
I do wonder about burial at sea, though. All well and good in the open ocean, but how do the clearance divers feel going down to work this afternoon with their mates’ shrouded corpses on the seabed next to the Lincoln?
August 24
So, at the time the USS Abraham Lincoln was in Brisbane, the commanding officer was Captain Jeffrey Walker, Aaron said. Born 1965 in Connecticut…
Just captain? I said. That seems low for an aircraft carrier.
A captain’s always in charge of a ship, aren’t they? Aaron said.
Norton’s a commodore.
Christ, don’t ask me how it works, Aaron said. This is just what the guys in the Atlantic fleet sent us. Captain Jeffrey Walker, 1965, got his wings in Miramar in ’88…
He was a pilot?
I think most aircraft carrier captains are. Flew in both Iraq wars, got himself a bunch of medals, and a master’s degree from MIT. Been in charge of the Lincoln for a few years before January.
So how the hell does he end up running around on an island setting up traps and putting heads on stakes? I said.
I don’t know. Anybody can go crazy, Matt. They printed this guy’s resume off for me and it was like three pages long. All this Boy Scout shit. It doesn’t matter. If he went crazy, he went crazy.
It might not even be him, I said. Someone could have taken the jacket.
You said he had an American accent.
Well, he’s from the Lincoln, probably, I said. That doesn’t mean he’s the captain, or even the officer. He’d taken all kinds of things from the ship, he could have taken the jacket too.
I guess it doesn’t matter, Aaron said. Anyway. How’s the nuke recovery coming along?
Take a guess, I said wearily. How are things in Jagungal?
Fine, Aaron said. We had more civilians come in – a pretty big group
, actually, about thirty of them. From down near Cooma. But they’re pretty good people, they know what they’re doing – good to have hands on deck, I reckon.
I tried to imagine the Endeavour’s valley, still blanketed in snow in late August, still shivering away through the winter. It had been cold in the rain in the middle of the night on Moreton Island, but only relatively speaking. Today the sun was out and it was 25 degrees. All through August I’ve been getting tanned. I wonder if there’ll still be snow on the ground by the time we get back to Jagungal. The way things are going, the next winter might have rolled around already.
I talked to Aaron a while longer, about Jagungal, about how Jonas and Simon and everyone else was doing. Then I said goodbye, and swam back out of the dreamscape, back into the rigidly grey world of the Australian Navy, back to the wardroom where Rickenbacker was playing solitaire and Lomax and Dresner were watching Breaking Bad on DVD.
That night on the island already feels like a thousand years ago. I can already feel my vitality draining away. I know that’s a stupid thing to write, I know I can leaf back a few pages to remember how desperate and terrified I felt, I know I still have bandages around my wrists and my calf.
I feel it anyway.
August 26
It’s good to know, at least, that I’m not the only person going stir crazy here. Nobody on the HMAS Canberra ever expected the mission to last this long. The divers are still cutting their way in through the floorplates of the level above the warhead armoury – their time is limited, since the work site is below thirty metres, and their decompression stops on the way back up are complicated by the circuitous route they have to take through the flooded labyrinth of the Abraham Lincoln. The end result is that they’re pulling long shifts, seven days a week, coming back to the surface exhausted and overworked. Commodore Norton had to pull a few off them off duty from exhaustion; I heard rumours in the cafeteria that at least one of them had been hallucinating, imagining he saw other divers out in the murk along the seabed. Not encouraging, when these guys are using hydrogen torches to cut into a room full of nuclear bombs.
That’s just the divers. At least they have work to keep them busy. Everybody else on the ship is getting a bit of cabin fever as well. The soldiers and civilians, airlifted out of New South Wales, thought they’d be on Christmas island by now. Tempers are fraying.
August 28
We finally have a nuke. Nearly a month of floating above this stricken aircraft carrier, and we have a nuke.
The divers broke through to the warhead magazine yesterday, cutting away enough of the floorplates to slip through the gap, but there’s a difference between getting in and finding a warhead in working order. Those things have been underwater for six months – and clearance divers, despite all their briefings and all the information we have from the Americans, aren’t nuclear technicians. More than once yesterday they brought a warhead up to the surface – manoeuvring it all through those long, underwater passages, through the heart of the Lincoln, people bursting into cheers when they got it to the surface – only for the Canberra’s techs to deem it unworkable. “They’re full of failsafe designs,” Petty Officer Mack explained to us in the wardroom at one point. “If something goes wrong, if this or that piece gets corroded or damaged, rather than make the weapon unstable, it just renders it safe. Useless, but safe.” He’d been drawing on a white board the basics of exactly how a nuclear bomb works, going back to the Trinity test in World War II, but you can forgive me for not exactly keeping up with that. I had a hard enough time in Year 12 chemistry, never mind nuclear physics.
“So that’s why we need the codebook as well, right?” Rickenbacker asked.
“That’s right.”
“And how’s that coming along?”
The answer is not good. No codebooks have been found in any of the three locations they were meant to be. The divers have started searching through the magazine as well – though there were never supposed to be any there – and the senior officers’ quarters. Whatever happened to the Abraham Lincoln when it was leaving port, the fact is that it sank, and things went chaotic. Maybe people broke protocol. Or maybe there were safety protocols at work that we don’t know about.
Maybe they destroyed the fucking things. Rahvi says back in the old days – before digital records – it was SOP to chuck the log overboard if you were about to be captured. Maybe the Americans did the same thing with the PAL codes.
But at least we have a nuke. Or at least, we have what the dive team is confident is a nuke in the best condition yet, since it was sealed inside a bomb rack in an unflooded vault. We don’t actually have it yet, since it’s at the back of the vault and they have to shift all the other corroded bombs out of the way first. But we have a nuke. Just no nuclear codes.
Though I have a faint idea of where, in fact, we might find them.
August 29
I had a word with Sergeant Blake last night, in the cabin, while the others were still in the wardroom. “We’ve been looking all over that ship for a PAL codebook,” I said. “And we’ve found nothing. I think I know where they might be. Or where one might be, anyway.”
Blake didn’t look impressed. “Well?”
“When I was on the island, in that bunker,” I said. “It was full of stuff. That guy had been collecting shit – not just junk from the island, there was stuff there that was definitely from the Lincoln…”
“Matt, I know,” the sergeant said. “I was there at your debriefing. That stuff might have just washed ashore.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “He’s been swimming out there. The superstructure’s basically at the water level at low tide, and…”
“The captain’s office is the place closest to the surface you’d find a set of the PAL codes, and that’s six metres down.”
“People can dive six metres,” I said stubbornly. “He definitely can, you didn’t see him the night he came out here – he’s got a set of lungs on him, believe me. Besides, maybe he had them on him when the ship went down.”
“We don’t even know that he’s the captain, Matt,” Blake said. “He could be anyone, just wearing the uniform.”
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a warhead. Without the codes it’s just a lump of metal. We’ve searched the whole ship, we’ve come up with nothing – you don’t think it’s worth checking out this guy’s gigantic souvenir collection?”
“He’s a nutcase, who’s set traps up all over his zombie-infested island, living in some old bunker in the jungle,” Blake said. “That’s not a casual undertaking, Matt. We don’t even know where that bunker is.”
“I could remember, I’m sure,” I said – though I wasn’t really sure at all, since it had been pitch black and pissing with rain when I’d escaped it.
“Matt, if this is another excuse to go on a jaunt off to that island…”
“No, no, listen,” I said. “It was dumb. It was dumb the first time and it was dumb the second time. I shouldn’t have run off. But if we all go, and take some more men, a proper team… I think I could find it again. And we might find the PAL codes. We’re not having any luck finding them underwater, are we?”
Blake was silent.
“Just talk to the commodore,” I said. “Please.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Blake said. “Jesus Christ, Matt, you’ve got some nerve.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked back to the wardroom feeling cheerful.
August 30
Commodore Norton has agreed to my idea. That was relayed to me through Sergeant Blake, since the commodore doesn’t much like talking to me these days – all the progress reports I send to Aaron come through Blake as well. The only explanation I have is that I’m right: it’s a good idea, we might find the PAL codebook, and logic won through. I can’t imagine Norton was pleased about giving me what I want, and even Sergeant Blake seemed irritated by the whole thing.
The rest of the team, though – Rahvi and Rickenbacker and Dresner and Lomax – were ha
ppy as punch. They’ve had cabin fever as much as I have over the past month, stewing around in the wardroom or up on deck, and last night they were in high spirits, cleaning their guns and sharpening their knives.
Aaron wasn’t happy about it. At least don’t do anything fucking stupid this time, he said.
He’s one guy, Aaron.
One guy who swam out to your ship and killed three people. One guy who set up a bunch of traps all over the island. One guy who probably would have killed you if you hadn’t gotten out of there.
Well, we need the codes, I said. Simple as that.
Like I said, just don’t do anything stupid, Aaron said. Listen to Sergeant Blake. Don’t go running off. Christ, they should have sent me up there and kept you here.
How’s the weather? I smirked.
Yeah, yeah. Listen, just be careful, all right?
I always am, I said. Everything goes well, I’ll be back around the fire in Jagungal in less than a week freezing my ass off with the rest of you.
August 31
I woke up early this morning, a little before dawn. Showered, dressed and headed down to the cafeteria for the first breakfast rotation. By the time I was back up in the cabin the others were dressed and ready as well, and Sergeant Blake took us down to the armoury to get kitted out. I was issued a Browning Hi-Power and a Steyr Aug. Sergeant Blake had pursed lips as he handed me the rifle, and as I put my hand around the stock, he didn’t let go.
“You’re on thin ice, Matt, as far as Commodore Norton’s concerned,” he said. “Don’t fuck this up.”
Then he relinquished it. I loaded a magazine and slung the rifle over my back.
And then we waited. We may as well have slept in until noon. Commodore Norton had assigned a clearance diving team to accompany us to the island – but both the dive teams had their hands full below the surface, cutting and clearing debris away from the bomb rack containing the warhead, widening the passage they’d carved into the bulkhead, and trying to get the damn thing out of there. We spent the morning and the early afternoon up on deck, watching the RIBs coming and going from the well dock, ferrying various tools and equipment to the pontoon to be sent down the daisy chain of divers strung through the Lincoln’s corridors. It was a warm day, even for Brisbane, and wearing jeans and boots, it was starting to get hot. Rahvi and the privates were in proper combat gear, which must have been even more uncomfortable. None of us complained. I spent most of my time looking out at Moreton Island, wondering if I’d see the American captain again.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 20