Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “I thought you said it was the engine.”

  “I said I thought it might be. The truth is that we don’t know, and I’d rather not test it.”

  Eddie grunted, but said nothing more.

  “Guys,” Mary said, “I think I see something.”

  “What kind of thing?” Cora asked, craning her head.

  “Something big. With a red light on it.”

  “Huh?” Finally, almost directly behind her, Cora spotted what Mary was referring to. “It’s the container ship!” she said.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lai said. “It’s still there? Someone is going to take a huge loss this quarter. Either that or a huge repair bill for ship engines.”

  “Should I steer towards the ship?” Akane asked.

  “You bet your ass,” Cora responded. “They should be able to get us some help. Worst-case scenario, they’ll have a radio, satellite phones and internet access.”

  Mary looked worried. “Unless it’s a ghost ship,” she said.

  Cora laughed, but not as heartily as she usually would have. The way things were going, it wouldn’t have surprised her at all to find an army of the walking dead waiting to eat her brains when they arrived. “Not likely. Ghost ships don’t have working lights.”

  “I suppose you’ve been on several dozen ghost ships in your lifetime,” Eddie snarked from his oar.

  Cora gave him the finger, but was smiling inside. That was almost exactly the way this conversation would have played out on a Marine vessel, right down to the final single-digit gesture. They were all nervous, and they all tried to mask it under a veneer of moronic banter. She was home.

  “Whatever. At least we know one thing,” she said. “No monster is going to be sinking that ship.”

  “I dunno. From what you say, those things are pretty big.”

  “Not that big.”

  “And what if the ones you saw already were just the babies, and mommy comes out to play?” Eddie asked.

  “Then, for all our sakes, I hope you’re really good with that straight knife of yours, because I don’t have any answers.”

  Eddie grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll slice it into lizard sushi.”

  “Cool. I’ll watch.”

  The dark bulk of the ship loomed ahead of them. Cora realized that every eye on the lifeboat was focused on the container vessel, and most faces were rapt, as if expecting God himself to reach out a hand from the large vessel.

  She didn’t fall into that trap. There were still several hundred yards to go, and they already knew what kind of thing swam in these waters.

  Cora scanned the waves for any sign of monsters.

  ***

  Sabrina leaned against the railing. The lifeboat approaching the ship had sailed inside the interdiction zone where the ship’s sonic defenses kept Shiva and Kali away, which meant they were safe from getting eaten. She cursed and turned to Dieter Ratzenberger. “If you’d told me about this earlier, we could have herded my babies and taken them out.”

  The Mosasaurs could be directed using the same sound generators that the ship used to keep them away. All they would have had to do was to nudge one of the creatures into the correct area and then watch. Once in place, they pretty much had only one reaction to something the size of the lifeboat, and that was to establish territorial domination.

  The problem would have disappeared. Instead…

  “I don’t want anyone to see them boarding. Clear the deck of the crew and all the analysts. If they argue, tell them we’re doing a pirate boarding simulation, and if they still argue, toss them in the dinosaur pens. Then get these people on board and lock them somewhere without internet access until I decide what to do with them.”

  Dieter gave her a tight grimace. “Thank you so much for telling me how to do my job. Should we also escort them aboard with a minimum of fuss or should we frighten them and make them panic, so they scream a lot? We’re trained professionals, Sabrina. We can handle this.”

  “Then handle it.” She refrained from asking him if he was going to be as ineffectual as he’d been when attempting to monitor competitive activity. No need to antagonize him yet. But if he messed up again…

  Men in black jumpsuits clustered around Ratzenberger. Sabrina could see others sweeping the passenger deck of the Stern Liberia. They could do nothing about anyone watching from the bridge, but she wasn’t too concerned about that: the crew had been told that there would be some unusual comings and goings, and part of their contract was that they weren’t to be curious about it. As long as they didn’t get close enough to see anything or hear the conversations, she was fine with letting them watch from afar.

  One small blessing had been the bright moonlight. Had the moon been down, or the sky been clouded, their lookout probably would have missed the tiny lifeboat until the people on board were knocking on their hull. In that case, containment would have become a nightmare.

  She wasn’t qualified to assess whether Ratzenberger was any good at his job, but he certainly gave every indication of competence as he coordinated the onboarding efforts. First, he assigned two of his men to guide the lifeboat in using light signals. Then he had other men throw down a rope ladder while a little group held innocuous items like blankets and a first aid kit. She didn’t think any of the resort guests—or the survivors of some playboy’s yacht disaster—were going to board the rescue ship looking for trouble, but if they did, their minds would be set at ease when they saw those preparations.

  Sabrina grunted in grudging recognition. Maybe he knew what he was doing after all. Then she joined him at the head of the rope ladder.

  He nodded and looked happy to see her.

  That was a first. She would have thought Ratzenberger would want to do everything himself. But then she remembered an anecdote she’d heard from a guy who used to work for a tech startup in Latin America. He’d told her that the recruiting team, male and female, were assigned female names and email addresses when in the hiring process. The reason was simple: having a woman coordinating things made it seem more legitimate and less intimidating, especially for female candidates. And since the company this guy worked for had a tiny office with no meeting room and had to hold all the recruiting interviews in cafés, they wanted all the legitimacy they could get.

  She’d angrily asked him if that wasn’t sexist as hell, and he’d shrugged and said no one cared, because it was true.

  Dieter apparently shared that philosophy, and thought it would be good for the rescues to see a woman’s face, so Sabrina lined up beside him and gritted her teeth for her closeup. She hated being around people she didn’t know, and this encounter promised to stretch her social skills to the limit.

  She contented herself with the knowledge that it would only be for a few minutes and that, after they were safely contained, she’d feed them to her Compsognathus families. They would undergo a marvelous transformation from useless witnesses to usable nutrients. “Hello, dinosaur food,” she whispered as the lifeboat clunked against the hull of the Stern Liberia.

  Dieter shot her a look that was half amused grin and half warning to control herself.

  People began to climb up the ladder. The first to come up was a young woman in awful makeup, followed by another, equally young but much too thin, who refused all offers of help and stood apart, flinching away from everyone, even the man who offered her a blanket.

  Dieter’s people led the two women off to a conference room that opened onto the deck and which had been chosen not only for its proximity but also because the door was a nice thick bulkhead-type door, complete with one of those round locking mechanisms that she associated with submarines. They’d removed the one on the inside.

  Weirdly, the lost-looking tourists that the first two girls represented perfectly were soon replaced by a much tougher-looking crew. The next person up the ladder was another woman, almost as thin and pale as the second, but covered with tattoos. She didn’t look frightened as she emerged onto the deck; instead, she looked a
round with a sharp eye that seemed to take everything in at once.

  Sabrina forced a smile. “Would you like a blanket?” she said, trying to look concerned.

  “It’s a hundred degrees out here. Who the hell needs a blanket?” the woman replied. “Where are Mary and Ania?”

  “We put them in a room with refreshments.” It was true. The table in the room they’d prepared held soft drinks and cookies, the only thing they’d been able to scrounge up on such short notice, but another link in the chain of deception.

  “Show me.”

  “It’s that door right there,” Sabrina replied, pointing.

  The woman marched straight in.

  Next came a bunch of guys, each harder-looking than the last. An old guy with steely eyes. Two Chinese-looking men who seemed almost too relaxed for her comfort, as if they were used to controlling larger numbers through intimidation. The following two men were more nondescript, but the last guy, though not big, exuded an air of competence that chilled her. Like the second thin woman, he seemed to take everything at a glance, but unlike her, Sabrina could almost see his thought process. He counted heads and shrugged. Then he went where he was told.

  The last person up the ladder was a woman a full head taller than Sabrina and who looked like she could beat Ratzenberger’s team up singlehandedly. She saw Sabrina looking down the ladder and grunted. “I’m the last one. Ten of us made it off that island. That’s it.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story. Do you have an internet connection?” The big woman held up her phone. “I’m not getting anything, and I have to make a shitload of calls.”

  “We should be able to connect you inside. If you step in that door over there, we have some refreshments set up, and you can tell me your story. It sounds absolutely incredible.”

  The woman headed for the door. Unlike the guy before her, she seemed unconcerned with Dieter’s troops standing around. Even holding blankets and first aid kits, they looked anything but innocuous.

  Sabrina turned to Dieter and whispered, “Sink the lifeboat.”

  He gave her a sardonic smile. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  She snorted and walked to the room holding the survivors. She stuck her head in the door to see that they were beginning to relax, drinking from Styrofoam cups. Some had even sat in the chairs around the table. One of the Chinese guys was munching a cookie.

  She pulled her head out of the door and nodded to two of Dieter’s men who immediately swung the thick metal door shut and spun the wheel to seal it.

  “They can’t get out?” she said.

  “Not unless they can chew through metal,” the man closest to her replied.

  “Good.”

  She walked off to think about how she could feed them to her dinosaurs without anyone else on board being any the wiser. If she had Dieter kill them all, it would be easy, but her poor babies cooped up on the ship needed their exercise. Hunting live prey would be ideal.

  But how to make it happen?

  Chapter 17

  “Subtle,” Sked said.

  “As a plane crash,” Akane replied.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Cora said.

  “The way they locked us in,” Sked replied. “They weren’t very concerned with making the reception committee believable in the least.”

  “Nope,” Harold, the Philadelphia Triad leader said. “But they were smart enough to split us into groups of two when we boarded. With all the guys they had patrolling the deck, there wasn’t a hell of a lot we could do to fight it. Besides, they had cookies.” He finished stuffing one into his mouth. “That has to count for something.”

  Cora studied each of the speakers in turn. “Are you saying the people on this ship aren’t what they seem? That their welcome was fake?”

  “Try the door,” Sked said with a nod in the appropriate direction.

  He was amused to see that the big Marine actually walked all the way to the thick iron plate and studied it intently.

  “There’s no handle.”

  “I know. It should be a big metal wheel. Someone took it out before they closed it from the outside.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Precisely what we said,” Sked replied. “They don’t want us in the way, from which I surmise that these guys aren’t thrilled to see us.”

  “No wonder they could afford to park an expensive boat in the middle of nowhere. They’re probably smugglers or pirates,” Lai said. “Now it makes a little more sense.”

  “What they’re doing doesn’t matter,” Akane said. “I would like to know what they’re going to do with us.”

  Sked winked at all of them and pointed to his ear, signaling that the crew of the ship could very likely be listening to every word they said. “I wouldn’t worry about that. They have been really nice to us, so I guess we owe it to them to trust them. Maybe they’ll keep us confined here until they can drop us somewhere, but we’re much better off than back on that island.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Akane said, playing along.

  While they spoke, Sked rummaged in his backpack and pulled out a small black box. He turned it on and walked around the room, holding it out towards the walls. He’d already done a visual check and was pretty certain there were no cameras in the place, but the black box would rule out any really small or well-concealed cameras or listening devices.

  He finished his lap of the room and chuckled. “Either these guys are total amateurs or they’re so good we’re screwed anyway. I can’t find anything.”

  Akane pulled a chair out and sprawled on it. “So what now?”

  “Now, we find out what’s going on.”

  “That should be a neat trick,” Crazy Eddie said. “My phone is saying there isn’t a single network in a million miles, so unless you’ve got something in that bag of tricks that can get you through a steel door, we’re out of luck.”

  Sked smiled. “There’s no need for anything that drastic yet. All we need is a better antenna than your phone has. I’ll bet you anything you want that there’s a network on this ship, but that the nodes near us are off. If our hosts are planning on dropping us off somewhere, we don’t want to antagonize them. If there’s something more sinister going on… I’d much rather know what it is than jump out the door and run into it.” He paused, wondering how much he should say openly, but then sighed. He hadn’t been joking earlier: if there was someone listening, despite his precautions, they were already screwed. “We have one advantage: these guys were so preoccupied with putting up a good guy front that they didn’t frisk us for weapons.” He glanced at Cora’s holstered sidearm, displayed proudly on her right hip. “Although I don’t think they could have missed yours. Fortunately, the rest of us are a little… less accustomed to showing off our guns in public. So they’ll be expecting one gun at most. How many do we actually have?”

  Harold and the cook from the yacht raised their hands.

  “So, five guns plus Eddie’s chopper. That’s not bad.” He grinned at Akane. “Yeah, I’m also counting yours. You never gave it up, so I know it’s still on you somewhere.”

  She stuck out her tongue but didn’t deny it.

  “Now it’s time to get to work.”

  He pulled out his laptop and powered it up. The charge was near 100%, which meant that, unless he decided to use full processor power by running 3D rendering software or something equally stupid, he had several hours to work with. Good. He might need them.

  “Akane, could you slip this wire through a crack in the door?”

  “Antenna?”

  “Yeah. We probably won’t need it, but I would feel better knowing there’s no chance of my connection going down in the middle of trying to get us hooked into the system.”

  Akane knew what she was doing, but still had a little trouble with the thick door until she finally managed to find a crack between the door and jamb that allowed the thin wire through.

  Even before she was
finished, Sked was scanning the air around the ship for electronic traffic.

  “Bingo,” he said.

  “What do you have?”

  “Ship’s wi-fi. It’s a weak signal, but I can probably get in. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to brute force it, because they’re not using the manufacturer’s defaults.”

  “Won’t someone be watching?” Akane asked.

  “I doubt it. They’re using Nexxt routers without any kind of encryption.” Akane nodded, knowing as well as he did that it was the kind of equipment a regular family might use, hoping the password they chose was enough to keep them safe. Normally, it was, as someone had to be specifically interested in the household to get close enough where they would actually brute force the router through the wi-fi signal. People who had something to hide or a lot of money would use better protection.

  “How long?” Cora asked.

  “Could be ten minutes. Could be thirty. Definitely won’t go over forty for this kind of router, and it will only go that high if we’re really unlucky.”

  “Won’t it detect the failed attempts to get in and sound an alarm or shut down or something?”

  “Not this stuff. Hell, the fact they’re using wi-fi this open makes me think we might have misjudged our hosts. Maybe they’re just afraid we might be pirates and are calling the Coast Guard.”

  He left the computer running and walked to the table. The first thing he did was to check the Coca-Cola bottle on the table. One of his few clear memories from his time in Latin America was getting caught out with a sugar-reduced ‘regular’ Coke. The locals had explained that, in an effort to pretend to be European socialists, the government had not only applied an imbecilic sugar tax but also forced any foodstuff with a high energy content to put a black mark on their labels saying that the product might be unhealthy. Though his contact hadn’t been able to explain whether the government was simply brain-dead or fishing for bribe money, Coca-Cola had caved to the pressure and introduced a version of the original flavor with ‘less sugar’ and zero-calorie sweeteners. The sneaky part was that, other than the fact that it said ‘Original Flavor – Less Sugar’ on the label, it looked exactly the same as the real thing.