Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  Until one had the misfortune of drinking it. It tasted like cow piss.

  Worse, when he went to ask for something else, his friend had laughingly explained that the other companies had caved even harder, and there was not one soft drink remaining that didn’t contain the recycled-puke taste of artificial sweeteners.

  “Yo!” Cora said. “Shouldn’t you be watching the computer instead of reading the labels on the bottles? It’s a Coke for Crissakes.”

  “Nah. It’s going to take at least a few minutes before we get any results.” Unable to understand the label, he shrugged and poured himself a glass. It tasted okay; apparently the insanity hadn’t reached Asia.

  “Shouldn’t we be doing something else?”

  “If you think that would help, go ahead. I can’t get us through that door, but I can probably get us onto the ship’s network in a few minutes.” He sipped the drink slowly, more to make the time pass than because he wanted to exude an air of calm confidence. The truth was that he hated waiting for brute-force password-cracking systems to work, and he was just as anxious as Cora for the results.

  “And what are you going to do once you get in?”

  “First, I’m going to look around very carefully to see if there’s anything nasty, security-wise, lurking on the system. Once I’m confident there isn’t, I want to do two things: send the video in your phone out to a couple of people I trust to handle it correctly,” he nodded towards Cora, “and find out what ship this is, who owns it and what it’s carrying.”

  “This ship is the Stern Liberia,” someone said.

  Sked didn’t immediately recognize the voice and turned to see if someone from the ship’s crew had suddenly appeared in the doorway to make the dramatic proclamation, but the door was still solidly shut, so he scanned the people nearby, finally settling on the ship’s cook.

  “How do you know that?” he said.

  The guy shrugged. “I read it on the side. I never board a vessel without first knowing what I’m getting into. It seems like a perfectly legitimate ship. I see Stern containers all the time in port, and Liberia is one of the classic flags of convenience. I was expecting to be getting drunk with the crew tonight, not getting locked in a conference room.” He shrugged. “It’s still better than monsters and cannibals.”

  The woman with him, the only other survivor from the yacht apart from Cora and Lai himself, giggled as if he’d said something inordinately funny. Sked rolled his eyes and walked back over to the computer which, as expected, still displayed a sign saying that the password-cracking process was still under way.

  But the incident gave him pause. Even though he had more experience in the field than most professional soldiers, his overriding instinct was to hack his way out of any problem digitally. The cook had reminded him that there were other ways to get things done, even gathering information didn’t absolutely have to be a matter of going online.

  “You know what,” he said to Cora, “you’re right. We should also be looking for another way out of this room. Check the floor and the ceiling for ways out. Check to see if we can find any vents that we can squeeze through.”

  “I’m not exactly built for squeezing through vents,” Cora said.

  “Doesn’t matter. If one of us can get outside that door, all that person has to do is spin a metal wheel and the vents become academic. Besides, right now we’re just looking; no one is going anywhere until either I have a sense of what’s going on or I’m convinced that security is too tight to crack.”

  It would be a gigantic oversight for these people to have left a major escape route uncovered, of course, but it wasn’t impossible. After all, they’d only had a few minutes to react between the time their boat changed course for the container ship and the time they were being ushered aboard. Even removing the inner door handle would have been a challenge in that timescale.

  But the rest of the team went at it with verve, pulling up the awful brown carpet that looked like it had been laid in the 1970s and poking at the ceiling while standing on the table. Everyone was checking nooks and crannies except for Ania, who was eating a chocolate-filled cookie with an expression of wonder, lost in her own world, and Akane, who was still lounging on the same chair and raising eyebrows in his direction until he couldn’t help but notice.

  “We’ve got something,” Lai said.

  The billionaire was unceremoniously standing on a chair they’d put on the table itself, legs scratching the veneer finish. They’d pulled out a white foam ceiling panel and Lai’s head was lost in the wiring above the false ceiling.

  “What?” Cora said.

  “Air vent. Not big, but maybe big enough for me to squeeze through.”

  Akane tsked. “If you can squeeze through, so can I. And I can probably shoot straighter.”

  “If we have to shoot at anyone, we’re screwed,” Lai retorted.

  “No. If I have to shoot at anyone, they’re screwed,” Akane replied. “I don’t miss.”

  “I mean if you start shooting, the whole ship will know what’s happening. And container ship crews know how to deal with unfriendly boarders.”

  A shrug. “So I’ll shoot them all. Pretty sure Cora will help out if you guys are too afraid.”

  “And then you’ll be taken in and tried for piracy. Pray that it’s the Indian Navy that grabs you, because you don’t want to be taken by anyone else.”

  “What’s another death sentence? I’ve been there, done that and I used to have the t-shirt, but they take that away when you get the tattoos.”

  “Guys,” Sked said. “We’re in.”

  Everyone crowded around the computer.

  “Not going to work that way,” Sked informed them. “Give me some space. Besides, only Akane will even be able to understand what I’m looking at, so there’s no need to suffocate me.” They moved back, ushered along by Cora and the doctor.

  He began to type in commands, tentatively probing the ship’s internet access.

  “Pretty standard MSI,” he said.

  “And in English?” Cora demanded.

  “Sorry. Maritime satellite internet. It’s internet for ships.” Finding nothing unexpected in the setup, he took a risk and accessed the information about different wi-fi routers. Only one of them caught his eye, a node grafted into the system via a cable connection. It likely meant that someone had brought their own router and piggybacked onto the ship’s system. Those people would likely be sending encrypted traffic and their security would be professional grade both in detecting threats and blocking them. With the current setup, there was nothing Sked could do about breaking into something like that.

  But he wouldn’t need to. There were plenty of computers on the ship that he now had access to. No one expected someone to hack into your wi-fi at sea, after all, so security was anywhere from basic to downright silly on some of the devices he had access to. He ignored the obvious cellphones and tablets—why hack into the porn stashes of a bunch of bored sailors?—and also the navigation and propulsion systems—he had no interest in steering the boat off course, anyway.

  “Bingo.”

  Everyone crowded around him again. This time he let them.

  “Full points to you, sir,” he said to the cook. “This is, indeed, the Stern Liberia, and we’re carrying a load of biological specimens from San Diego.”

  “Zoo animals?” Cora asked in a puzzled voice.

  “By the size of the load, it can’t really be anything else. Half of the tonnage was loaded there.” He scanned the rest of the manifest. “Ooh. Naughty. Mr. Lai was right. There’s also a couple of dozen containers full of air conditioners on their way to Singapore which are ten days overdue already. Someone is going to be sending the shipping company a very sternly worded letter.”

  “More likely a very large debit note,” Lai sneered.

  “So a bunch of zoo animals and some household appliances. And if I’m reading this right, the ship is stopped here because they want to be here, not because of any mechanica
l failures. At least they didn’t mention any to the Indian Navy when asking permission to halt for a couple of weeks.”

  “It makes no sense,” Lai said.

  “Agreed. And that leaves just one place to look if we don’t want to get into some very serious hacking. The passenger manifest.”

  He clicked a few times. Either the admin computer he was accessing was extremely slow or the distant wi-fi router signal was very weak. It took forever before the names of the passengers began to appear on-screen.

  None of them rang any bells, but there were a lot. He glanced at the cook. “Says here there are about sixty paying passengers on the ship. Is that normal?”

  “On a container ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean?” He thought for a second. “Depends. They might be migrants heading to South Africa or something for a major infrastructure project. In that case, I wouldn’t be surprised. Sometimes people pool their money to negotiate a room like this one for a passage.”

  “Nah. These guys are mainly American. A few Euros in there, too. Oh, and they all work for the same company. A company called ZooDef.”

  “Never heard of it,” Cora said. “But it sounds right if they’re transporting animals.”

  Akane spoke. “Ask the Buddha,” she said.

  Everyone looked at her. “Who?” Cora asked.

  “Sked knows.”

  He did, and he also wished Akane knew how to keep her mouth shut. Especially when she was right.

  He dashed a quick query to a one-time address from the list he’d been given to speak to the Buddha under non-secure conditions and, while he waited for an answer, turned to Cora. “Want to send out that video?”

  It took forever to upload even a short clip and by the time he was done, an answer from the Electric Buddha was sitting in his inbox.

  I’m glad you’re alive. I was starting to fear the worst when you didn’t contact me for so long.

  ZooDef is a gene-modification company developing biological systems for defense applications.

  If you are interested, there is a large fee offered for information regarding their current level of development.

  There is also a job for Akane, if she wishes it. It concerns a passenger called Sabrina Williams. There is an even larger fee offered if she is unable to continue her research.

  Sked looked around hastily, but since he’d been doing boring video upload stuff, they’d all drifted back to the table and to studying the air vent.

  He cursed under his breath.

  The bastard Buddha had known what they would find on North Sentinel Island all along. Both the white slavery operation and the crazy monsters. And he’d sent them there anyway.

  In fact, the Buddha had probably sent everyone except Lai’s yacht and the slavers themselves into the operating theater, knowing that if they damaged each other, he could get paid for all of it. After all, the Triads spent half their time at war with Blood Orchid, and the contract figures at the bottom of the email made ZooDef a very tempting target.

  He sent us all here to kill one another. Son of a bitch.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the Buddha had figured that Sked would find a way to contact him from the island, and therefore be able to give him instructions. Hell, that was what he, himself, had expected.

  It hadn’t worked out that way. Blood Orchid had been extremely smart to completely cut the island off from the net. That the Buddha had found out about it was typical of the man… he just seemed to know everything.

  Which meant that he’d actually sent Sked and Akane to do a job. Blood orchid was probably part of the job. And this was definitely part of the job.

  He erased the message and whispered in Akane’s ear. “You up for an assassination assignment? Pays six zeroes.”

  “I’m stuck on this ship,” she replied warily.

  “So’s the target.”

  Chapter 18

  “All right, everyone, listen up,” Sked said.

  Eyes focused on him again.

  “We’ve come to the conclusion that the people on this ship aren’t friendly.” He waited for groans, curses, signs of disbelief, anything to show the frustration the group must have felt at his words. None was forthcoming. Instead, they regarded him with resignation. “So we’re going to bust out of here. Akane will attempt to open the door from the outside. She’ll go into the ventilation.”

  “And if there’s a guard?” Cora said.

  “That’s his bad luck,” Akane replied. Agile as a cat, she jumped onto the table, balanced on the chair and disappeared into the guts of the roof. Sked smiled to himself, inwardly relieved to see the wonders that a few weeks of R&R had done for her. There was no sign of the way she’d been brutalized by the Chinese.

  “Remember that you only need to go as far as the next wall,” Cora called after her.

  Akane’s voice echoed back. “Of course. The shorter the better. Crawling around in filthy vents is not my idea of fun. This looks like it hasn’t been cleaned since 19-oh-whenever this piece of crap ship was launched.” Her voice trailed off, making it hard to understand what she said next, but it sounded to Sked that it wasn’t useful information unless you were trying to expand your vocabulary when it came to terms describing obscene bodily functions.

  Though he was never going to fit into a ventilation shaft—it was the one problem with being wide-shouldered—Sked stuck his head in, illuminating the claustrophobic tunnel with his cell phone. Akane had disappeared around a bend in the metal tubing.

  A clanking sound reverberated through the pipe, followed by some muted cursing and then silence.

  “I think she’s out,” he told the group. “Be ready to run.”

  “Why?”

  A gunshot sounded, clear as day, on the deck outside.

  “Because she isn’t in the mood for subtlety. I hope Mr. Lai has good lawyers, because we might all end up on trial for piracy after she’s done with these guys.”

  He tensed at a metallic sound from the doorway. What if the guard had seen Akane first?

  But when the thick iron bulkhead door swung open, Akane’s familiar smirk appeared. “One down,” she said.

  They poured out into the night, dead still and heavy with moisture in the depths of the small hours before dawn.

  “Now what?” Sked asked Cora.

  “We should hide.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the lifeboat coverings.”

  The cook groaned. “That’s literally the first place they’ll look,” he said. “Everyone tries that. It’s stupid.”

  “So where would you suggest, genius?”

  “I would go between the container stacks. It’s dangerous as hell in there if you don’t know what you’re doing, plus, except along the edges, you probably won’t have any security cameras like that one.” He pointed up at one looking down at them from the corridor. “So they won’t be able to find us immediately. It might take them five minutes.”

  “Dammit,” Cora said. “We’re fucked.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sked replied. “There’s a lot of people on this ship, and we think the bad guys and the crew aren’t necessarily sharing information with each other. Even if the crew is monitoring the cameras, they might not even realize anything is wrong. They might think we’re with the dudes in black.”

  “Your girlfriend just shot this guy,” she kicked the corpse beside the door, “in the face. I kinda suspect they’ll know that’s not a good thing.”

  “Crap. Well, hopefully no one is watching too closely. No real need to watch while anchored in the middle of the ocean, after all. Help me toss him in the room.”

  He and Eddie dumped the corpse unceremoniously under the table in the room they’d just vacated, deep enough to hide him from a casual glace and then spun the wheel closed. There was nothing they could do about the pool of blood on the floor, but maybe, if whoever was watching the security monitors hadn’t been very vigilant, they might get away clean.

  Not that it would be much help. The peopl
e who locked them up would be back to relieve the guard at any moment. They wouldn’t miss the blood… and the hunt would be on.

  Under those conditions, Sked would have opted to be far, far away when they started looking for him.

  That was not an option if they stayed on the ship.

  And swimming for it was worse.

  ***

  Sabrina watched the group from the island walk forward along the walkway and grinned. She switched to the next camera as they got out of range of the one before.

  The crew, she knew, would not be monitoring the feed, not at that time of night, which made it even better. No one else would know what was happening, or how badly Dieter had messed up. All she had to do to remove him was to send the videos of the escape to Jermaine with a little note explaining the gravity of what having those particular people loose on this particular ship meant.

  She’d do that, of course, but first, she had to get the situation under control. Witnesses were unacceptable, and besides, this was a great opportunity to test her Compsognathus herd under slightly more industrial conditions and gather some good video. The island had, she suspected, given all the advertising material it could, and most of ZooDef’s clients weren’t going to be releasing weaponized animals on remote islands. A ship was much more like a mall than a jungle was.

  The witnesses had decided to hide in the container deck. Perfect.

  She sang to herself, a few bars of Abba’s Dancing Queen, and walked out of her room. For a moment she considered calling Tim Rugger to help her identify the right containers, but that wasn’t necessary. She could find them by herself, and Tim wouldn’t share the credit.

  The ship was dark. She encountered no one on the way, which proved that Ratzenberger was incompetent. Had he been any good, he’d have known something bad had happened and had his people tearing the ship apart. But the halls were deserted, silent.

  The container deck was huge, but that didn’t matter. Most of it consisted of commercial freight she didn’t give a damn about and the large, empty tanks they’d used to transport the Mosasaurs. She ignored all of that and headed straight for the Compsognathus area.