Artifact

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Hey, McKendry,” he called out. “Did you ever read any of those Peter Benchley books? You know,Jaws, The Beast, White Shark ?”

  “Idiot,” McKendry yelled back, but he put on some speed. Keene was impressed by how little fear there was in his partner’s response. See, he said to himself, it was for your own good, Terris.

  “I hope the replacement crew hasn’t come back yet,” McKendry said, climbing out of the water and scaling the tanker’s hull ladder.

  Keene was right behind him. “If they have, we might have a harder time sneaking back to our presidential suite down in the pump room. Let’s see if the captain’s awake. Maybe we can talk ourselves into a decent meal.”

  They had reached the deck. Keene could see a group of people at the far end of the tanker, disengaging the long hose that had been filling theYucatán ’s hold for hours. The shadowy workers made no noise, quietly going through the motions with all the finesse of a Green Beret squadron instead of a crowd of roughnecks.

  “A meal sounds fine to me. I’m so hungry I could eat a shark.” McKendry grinned.

  “Better than the other way around,” Keene responded. He yawned. “It’s after three in the morning. Asleep or awake, Calisto’s likely to be in his stateroom.”

  They entered the crew quarters, climbed up another level, and reached the larger rooms where the crew and officers slept. McKendry sniffed and frowned. “Do you smell that? Gunpowder. Cordite…blood.”

  “Looking for trouble, McKendry?” Keene said. They had reached the captain’s stateroom. The door was not entirely shut and light spilled out. “Captain?”

  Keene tapped lightly on the door. McKendry pushed it wide open. Both men froze.

  Captain Miguel Calisto lay dead in his chair, shot three times in the chest. Pools of blood seeped along the floor.

  Keene looked at McKendry. “I get the feeling,” he said, “that we just found Selene.”

  Before McKendry could respond, the powerful engines of the OilstarYucatán roared to life. With a lurch, the supertanker began to move. The deck vibrated as the tanker crawled away, detaching itself from the pumping station and heading out into the Caribbean.

  “Okay, genius. What now?” McKendry raised his voice above the noise of the engines.

  “We arm ourselves.” Keene swiped his knuckles across the sweat on his forehead. “He’s got to have a gun here somewhere.”

  He was talking as much to Captain Calisto, slumped in his wooden desk chair, as he was to McKendry. The captain’s corpse was still cooling. An occasional drop of blood oozed from his gunshot wounds, playing counterpoint to the groan of the tanker engines that shuddered through the walls of the bridge superstructure and the crew housing.

  “I’d settle for a baseball bat,” McKendry said. Keene knew that his partner was too intent on the imminent crisis to waste words. He moved from cabinet to cabinet, methodically opening cupboard doors, sliding the front panel on an old metal credenza.

  Though he could smell the sour blood and the bitter residue of gunfire in the air, Keene, like McKendry, ignored the carnage and ransacked the captain’s office. Unlike his methodical partner, his mode was to rifle the captain’s desk with all the organization of a squall at sea. He found nothing useful: two well-watched Spanish-language porn videotapes, three battered paperback novels, some paperwork, a stack of photos that variously showed a grinning Calisto with what seemed to be six different women. The wide middle drawer held pencils, office paraphernalia. A few thin ledgers contained uninspired captain’s logs.

  The bottom left desk drawer was locked.

  “This must be it.” Keene tugged on the metal handle and pried into the crack without success, making a loud rattling noise that he knew would put McKendry on edge. When the drawer didn’t open, he reached into the central desk drawer and withdrew a letter opener. Though he snapped the blade off in the hasp of the drawer lock, he finally succeeded in jarring it open. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  He slid open the drawer and rummaged inside. “Nothing but crap!”

  McKendry came forward, looked down, and frowned. He pulled out a half-empty bottle of cheap scotch whiskey. “I guess the captain was more worried about someone stealing his booze than his—”

  He melted back behind the metal cabin door as footsteps resounded in the corridor outside. A man entered, clearly one of the terrorists. He had high cheekbones, dark hair slicked back with seawater, and a gray jumpsuit with plenty of bulging pockets. His wide black belt was studded with the handles of several weapons or tools.

  “Damn,” he said. He stared at Joshua Keene. “Looks like we missed one.”

  Keene tried to grin disarmingly. “I’m looking for the gents’ room. Can you direct me, please?”

  The terrorist grabbed for a weapon at his belt.

  “I don’t think so.” Terris McKendry sprang out from behind the cabin door. Holding the heavy bottle of scotch, he swung it down with the force of a sledgehammer. With a solid crunch of impact between skull and booze bottle, the stranger’s cranium lost the duel. The golden brown liquid sloshed in the bottle as, head bloodied, the terrorist crumpled to the deck.

  Keene dragged the man deeper into the cabin and closed the door with a kick of his heel. The fallen terrorist did not let out so much as a groan, and Keene didn’t bother to check whether or not he was alive.

  McKendry nudged the motionless form with the toe of his shoe. “Green Impact.” There was no question in his voice. He wiped off the scotch bottle and set it next to the man, as if to offer him a good stiff drink to send him to the underworld.

  Raising an eyebrow at his friend, Keene said, “You didn’t spill a drop.” He looked down at the body. “I don’t see a badge or anything, but I believe you’re correct. We can make the assumption that Selene Trujold and her goons decided to hit this tanker instead of theValhalla platform, like Frik thought.”

  “Frik isn’t always right.”

  “Maybe she considered this just a warm-up exercise.”

  McKendry reached down and pried the dead man’s hand away from his weapon. Instead of a handgun, the terrorist had been trying to draw a large knife, well sharpened, good for throwing or filleting. McKendry took it, examined the wide blade, and shook his head. “Damn macho South Americans. Can’t they carry a regular firearm like everyone else?” He slid the knife into his belt just as his partner found the ship-to-shore phone behind the captain’s desk.

  “Who do we call? Rescue? Venezuelan military? Trinidad’s coast guard?”

  “It’s gotta be Frik,” McKendry said. “He’s not gonna want this to be handled by anybody but his own people.”

  Keene punched in the numbers for Frikkie Van Alman’s private phone on board theAssegai . He listened to it ring until a recording kicked in. “It’s a friggin’ answering machine,” he said. “Pick it up, Frik! We’ve got a crisis here!”

  With a clunk and a burst of static, the answering machine cut off and the phone picked up, carrying Frikkie Van Alman’s familiar voice and familiar impatience. “I’m here. Who is this? What kind of crisis?”

  Keene rapidly summarized what they knew so far. He heard the Afrikaner curse and what must have been him punching several buttons on a keyboard or alarm-control panel. “I’m sending in reinforcements to help you mop up. TheYucatán won’t get far.” In a clipped voice, loud enough to be heard by both of the men, he reminded them of their primary goal. “While Selene Trujold is on board, you have one mission that takes precedence over all others. Acquire that artifact she got from her father.”

  “Instead of stomping terrorists? You’ve got weird priorities, Frik,” Keene said. “Your tanker’s been hijacked and the crew’s been killed, and all you can think about is a hunk of jewelry?”

  “I’m sending help,” Frik said. “You two just stay on top of it there.”

  Keene shrugged. “It’s your problem, Frik. Call up whatever cavalry you want.”

  “Who do you think he’ll send?” he asked his part
ner, setting down the receiver.

  “Frik?”

  “No. The avenging angel. Of course I meant Frik.” He looked around the cabin. “Maybe we should have told him to call in a cleaning crew while he’s at it.”

  McKendry shook his head. “I think you’ve been sniffing blood long enough, Joshua. Let’s get some air.”

  Keene opened the cabin door. Bowing slightly, he waved his partner into the passageway and followed him until they reached the football-stadium-sized deck of the oil tanker.

  Working silently against the thrum of the tanker’s equipment, they circled around theYucatán ’s white-painted bridge. Behind the bridge house loomed the radar mast with swiveling radar antennas and satellite dishes. The superstructure bristled with navigation and communication arrays. Foam monitors and fire-fighting stations stood unmanned. A third of the way forward from the bridge house, hose-handling derricks protruded skyward like stripped trees, and numerous pressure and vacuum-relief valves studded the deck like dark warts.

  White metal rails ran like a spine down the center of the wide deck, flanking the catwalk connecting the fore and aft gantries. The two Daredevils avoided the catwalk and kept to the shadows of bulkheads, vent pipes, and clusters of fifty-gallon drums that held lubricants and waste oil, dirty rags, and powdered absorbents for deck spills.

  Beneath the square tank hatches, the tanker deck throbbed as the big engines pushed theYucatán through the calm water, heading into the open straits. Far in the distance to the west, Keene could make out the Venezuelan mainland—a dark line with few marks of civilization. Even without a moon overhead, the billions of stars were like pinprick spotlights; the sparkling wire-caged bulbs scattered around the expanse of the giant ship shone down like guard posts around a prison, and the tall and brightValhalla production platform was like a lighthouse towering over the water.

  Looking at the receding platform, Keene figured that by now the disembarked members of the tanker crew, the lucky ones who had drawn R and R time aboard theValhalla, would have noticed that the ship had pulled away from the loading derrick and lurched silently out to sea.

  High up, in the center of the top deck, fore and aft walls of windows glowed with yellow light, showing the ship’s main control rooms. Keene looked up and saw shadows moving in the otherwise quiet bridge, two silhouettes inside the control deck, backlit by the fluorescents. One was the trim and compact figure of a woman, directing the show.

  The woman leaned forward. Her voice came out of the 1950s-era public address system, old bell-shaped metal loudspeakers stationed along the deck. “Everything is secure. The crew has been eliminated. Dump all the bodies overboard. When Oilstar finally catches up with this ship, I want it to look like theMarie Celeste . They’ll never know how many of their crew members were part of our operations, and they’ll waste time and effort looking for traitors among their own employees.”

  “That must be Selene,” Keene said. He had expected her to have a French accent, but what came through the speakers was a flattened version of Peta’s Caribbean lilt with a few hints of Spanish.

  Lucky for Green Impact that the production rig’s efficiency stopped short of security, he thought. She didn’t know that they had called Frik and that Oilstar had its security response on the way, but she must know that her group didn’t have much time. “She’s gotta act fast. It’s not like you can hide an oil tanker, and these things don’t get up a lot of speed.”

  Hunched in the shadows of one of the derrick brackets, McKendry nodded again, which was the usual extent of his conversation during an operation.

  “I am afraid the oil load is not what we expected,” Selene continued. “Apparently, theYucatán docked at the platform two hours late, so there wasn’t enough time to fill the storage chambers to the level we had hoped.”

  From his vantage point, Keene saw several members of Green Impact pause in their furtive duties by the equipment bunkers to look up at her. Before groans could ring out from her team members, she raised her voice. “There’s enough to send a message around the world. Oilstar will never get this stain off its shoes!”

  20

  Following McKendry’s lead—which was mostly to remain flexible and mobile until something better came up—Keene worked his way into the shelter of the thick deck manifold tubing. There, safely hidden, they watched in angry horror as the terrorists emerged from the bridge housing and crew cabins, dragging limp bodies toward the railing as if they were out-of-fashion mannequins.

  “Cleaning up their mess. The sharks will take care of the rest,” Keene muttered as Selene Trujold’s followers went to the white deck rails and, one at a time, wrestled the bloody forms overboard into the sea.

  McKendry looked even more concerned. “They’re going to get the captain, too. When they enter his cabin, they’ll find the guy we left on the floor.”

  “Crap! They’ll know we’re aboard. Let’s go.”

  McKendry put on a burst of speed, sprinting forward to where one lone man had wrestled the uncooperative body of a thin dark-haired crewman to the side. The terrorist used his shoulder to push the victim up and over and waited for the splash. He turned just in time to see McKendry and Keene closing in on him from both sides.

  As if they had coordinated it ahead of time, Keene punched the terrorist in the jaw while McKendry smashed a pile-driver fist into his gut, making the man retch. Then the two men picked him up and dumped him over the tanker railing to join the dead bodies he had dropped into the calm water.

  Keene looked at his partner. “Pity he didn’t have a chance to take off those bloody clothes. With so many hungry sharks around tonight, I’m sure he’ll be quite the dining attraction.”

  Moving at its top speed, the tanker soon left the floating bodies behind.

  They heard the bass chatter of helicopter blades, fast dark aircraft coming in from the main Oilstar complex on Trinidad. They saw lights in the sky drowning out the stars above the dark and quiet channel.

  “Party’s over. Good old Frikkie to the rescue,” Keene said.

  On the bridge, Selene’s silhouetted form stood straight, like an empress surveying newly conquered territory. “Time to go. Set the detonators for twenty minutes.”

  With a click, she switched off the loudspeaker system. She and her companion on the bridge disappeared from the lit windows and came around the bridge housing, running down the outer stairs to the main deck level.

  Once again hidden from sight, Keene and McKendry watched Green Impact troops drop packaged, blinking explosives through the flung-open hatches for the below-deck storage chambers. Top hatches led down into the crude-oil storage chambers, a honeycomb of tanks that comprised theYucatán ’s cargo space. Keene and McKendry saw the terrorists link the timers and detonation cables, rigging everything together on a small cluster of timers outside the top hatches.

  “I thought the point of Green Impact was to protect the environment.” Keene shook his head in disgust. “Some conservationists.”

  The Green Impact members began to scramble toward the bow of the tanker. Selene gestured urgently for her team to hurry. Apparently the terrorists had boats tied up to the hijacked oil carrier. As each man finished, she signaled him to go over the side and climb down ropes tied to the anchor windlass. When only one of her group remained, she waved to him and grabbed the rope herself. He gathered the wires from the explosives by the petroleum cargo hatches and ran back to the detonator.

  That’s some piece of work, Keene thought, watching Selene go over the side, moving with the sleek grace of an otter. At that distance, he could make out cinnamon-colored hair, cut short and practical, and skin the color of burnt sienna. He couldn’t really see her face, but judging by her narrow frame he would guess that she had delicate features. Dangerous, beautiful, tough; doubtless a challenge for any man. “There goes our chance to get Frik’s Cracker Jack prize.”

  “I’m more interested in saving this tanker,” McKendry said. “No matter what Frik tells us.”


  “Looks like now or never, Terris.” Keene scanned the tanker deck frantically for a means to get to the linked detonators before all the bombs went off.

  “Any ideas?”

  “Got it.” Keene pointed to two old company bicycles leaning against the fifty-gallon drums; the bikes were used for traversing the long deck on regular inspection runs. “There’s our mode of transportation.” He grabbed one, holding the handlebars as he swung himself over and began to pound the pedals. McKendry mounted a bicycle of his own. The dented wire basket rattled between the handlebars as they closed the distance.

  Keene’s sense of the absurd made him wish he had a little bicycle bell to ring. “Not exactly James Bond style,” he said, hunched over and gripping the handlebars. “More like Encyclopedia Brown.”

  McKendry grinned. “I vote for Harry Potter.”

  “We could sure use a bit of magic right now.”

  The thin tires hummed across the oil-stained plates of the deck, ignoring the painted boundary lines that made theYucatán look like some child’s board game.

  “Here comes Evel Knie—.” The chain slipped on Keene’s bike. He skinned his ankle on the pedal but kept pumping until the bicycle got moving again. McKendry passed him, saving his breath and using his stronger legs to push the bike for all it was worth.

  They both picked up speed.

  The lone terrorist at the front hatches heard the buzz of tires and looked up. He dropped the detonator box and slung the rifle off of his shoulder. Like an experienced professional, the man didn’t call out, but simply aimed the weapon.

  Keene ducked and swerved the bicycle, but the terrorist shot twice, coolly confident. The sharp crack of the high-powered rifle sounded simultaneously with Terris McKendry flying backward, as if someone had hit him with two sucker punches. Blood spurted from his back as he flipped off of the padded seat. The bicycle coasted forward another five feet and crashed into a set of fifty-gallon drums.