“I think so. I have not used my inhaler since . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“But you stayed on the oxygen?”
“I saw what happened to Dr. Passman and to my friend, Karin. I thought maybe it was something they had breathed, so I kept using it.”
“You are a brave and resourceful girl. I think you saved your life by doing that.”
Knowing she had done something to help herself gave Jannike a bit of confidence, and hope that she would get off the ship alive.
Eddie jogged back into the room. “The blast wrecked the hallway about twenty yards from here. We can’t go back up the way we came.”
“Is there another way?”
“We better hope so. I can hear the lower part of the ship flooding.”
WATER SURGED UNDER the jammed door like a rising tide, and, if not for the protection of his hazmat suit, with its own air supply, Cabrillo would have drowned. After a few minutes struggling again to free his crushed prosthesis, he lay back and let the sea roar over him, as it rapidly filled the main engine room. The swell was already a foot and a half deep, and rising by the second.
Juan’s only consolation was that the rest of his team hadn’t ventured this deep into the Golden Dawn and would be able to escape relatively easily.
During his earlier examination of the engineering spaces, he hadn’t seen any victims of the virus, or whatever had been unleashed on the ship, telling him that the vessel had been running on automated mode, with just two men on the bridge and no one down here to monitor the power plants. With no one to infect, he wondered, how long would the pathogen remain in the air? Hux might have an idea, but this was a new virus, even for her, so, at best, she could make only a calculated guess.
The air conditioners had been shut down for a while, letting dust and microbes settle. Had enough time elapsed? Cabrillo could only hope so, because he knew that by lying in the torrent of rising water and thinking about it, he was just putting off the inevitable.
He worried his right arm free of his sleeve and snaked it down across his chest to his right leg. He took a handful of cloth from the bottom of his pants and yanked it upward over his artificial limb, giving him access to the straps that held it in place. With practiced fingers, he released the straps and popped the slight vacuum seal that held the leg to his stump. He felt an immediate measure of freedom after detaching the limb, although his suit remained pinned beneath the door.
Now for the hard part. Juan reached over his shoulder to crank up the airflow in his suit and felt it balloon out against its seams. He carried three things on him at all times. One was a cigarette lighter, although all he smoked was an occasional cigar; the other two were a compass, no bigger than a button, and a folding knife. He pulled the knife from his pocket and opened the blade with one hand. He had to lie in a fetal position to reach as far down his pant leg as he could, fighting the weight of water still pouring in from under the door.
The knife was as sharp as a scalpel and sliced though the protective hazmat suit with ease. Air began to gush from the slit, and, for a moment, was able to hold back the force of water trying to exploit the cut, but the suit soon began to fill. Juan worked faster, slicing through the material in a race to free himself before he was overwhelmed by the flood. He was lying on his side, and the water pressed against his face forced him to turn his head and try to raise himself a couple of inches without losing track of where he was cutting the suit.
His new position was too awkward to allow him to work efficiently, so he took a deep breath and lay flat again, torquing the blade around his calf, to keep cutting away the trapped suit material. His lungs screamed for air, but he ignored his body’s needs, working with preternatural calm despite the danger. He tried yanking himself free, but the tough plastic cloth wouldn’t tear. He tried again with the same results. Now he had to breathe, so he heaved himself upright to clear his helmet of water, but there was too much pressure. The helmet wouldn’t drain.
Cabrillo’s lungs convulsed, allowing a trickle of bubbles to escape his lips. It was like suppressing a cough, and the corresponding pain in his chest was an unnecessary reminder that his brain was starving for oxygen. He was already becoming light-headed. He pulled savagely at the suit and felt it tear slightly, but it wouldn’t give completely. Juan tried to force himself to calm down, but survival instincts were overwhelming any sense of logic. He bent down yet again to work the knife, though this time he hacked at the suit in a frenzy, all the while pulling against it with his last bit of strength.
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Without warning, he tumbled back. Either he had completely cut away the boot portion of his suit or it had ripped. He rolled onto his knees and pushed himself from the floor, feeling the water drain from the suit through the rent in its fabric. Fearful of exposing himself to anything, he allowed himself only a tiny sip of air, barely enough to clear the creeping shadows that filled his mind.
He stood, letting the rest of the water that had filled his suit to sluice down his body and out. With seawater surging under the door, Juan couldn’t stand steady on one leg, so he hopped a couple of feet to a workbench. Leaning against it, he quickly tied off the shredded remains of the suit, making the tightest knots he could. He dialed down the airflow when the suit became rigid. He was sure a little would leak through the cut, but, with positive pressure on the inside, he didn’t think anything could enter. In all, his exposure had been nominal, and having spent nearly all of his exposure time under water he was confident that he would be okay.
That was until he remembered he was trapped in a sinking ship, with no way out and no way to communicate with his team or the Oregon.
He groped blindly through the darkness with his hands held in front of him, using his sense of touch to locate his position within the cavernous engine room. Without his artificial leg, movement was clumsy and difficult, but he finally found another workbench he’d seen earlier. He opened drawers and felt around, identifying tools by feel, until he found what he had hoped would be there.
The flashlight wasn’t as powerful as the one he’d lost, but its beam gave him a mental lift. At least now he wasn’t blind. He hopped across the engine room, hampered by the rising floodwater that reached his knees. He passed the twin diesels and reached the far watertight door. This one was down securely. He searched for a manual release that would allow him to open it, but there was no such mechanism.
He felt the first tentacles of panic tickling the back of his mind and crushed them down savagely. Not knowing the extent of damage done to the ship by the scuttling charges, he didn’t know how long the Golden Dawn would stay afloat. If she remained stable, like she was now, it would take a couple of hours for the engine room to fill, more than enough time to think up an alternative escape route or for Eddie and the others to find a way to rescue him.
No sooner had that thought occurred to him than a prolonged moan reverberated through the hull, a rending of metal pushed past its stress point. He physically felt the ship lurch toward the bow. The water in the engine room sloshed in a titanic wave that crashed against the far door. It rushed back, and Juan had to leap onto a table to keep from being crushed against a bulkhead. He shone his light across the room and could tell that the rate of water bubbling up from the forward part of the ship had doubled. Seawater fountained from under the door in angry geysers, as if the ocean was eager to claim its latest victim.
Cabrillo’s hours had just turned into minutes.
He flashed the light around, looking for any way out of the sealed room. The seed of a crazy idea struck him, and he turned the beam to one of the massive engines and the ducts rising from it. The light slowly drifted upward, his eyes following. “Aha!”
JULIA TURNED TO JANNIKE DAHL, keeping her voice as soothing as she could. “Janni, sweetheart, we have to get you out of here, but, in order to do that, you need to put on a protective suit like the ones Eddie and I are wearing.”
“The boat is sinking?” she asked.
“Yes, it is. We have to go.”