Plague Ship (Oregon Files 5)

Severance raked his fingers through his hair. Lydell Cooper’s final orders had been very specific. He wasn’t to send the signal for another two hours. But what if this had been the vanguard of a much larger assault? To delay might mean failure. On the other hand, if he sent the signal early it could mean that not all the virus had been attached to the feed lines of the laundry machines on all fifty cruise ships.

He wanted to call his mentor, but this was a decision he felt he should make on his own. Lydell was en route with Heidi and her sister, Hannah. They wouldn’t arrive until after the virus was released. He had had full control of the Responsivist movement for years, and, yet, like a son taking over a family business, he knew that he was under a constant microscope and wasn’t truly in charge at all. He never forgot that Lydell could override any decision he made, without warning or explanation.

He had chafed at that a little, not that Cooper interfered much. But now with the stakes so high, he wished he had that safety net of being told what to do.

What would it matter if they missed a couple of ships? Lydell’s calculations of the disease’s vector only called for forty shiploads of people in order to infect everyone on the planet. The extra ten were insurance. When questioned why some of the ships escaped infection, he could claim the dispersal devices failed. And if they all worked, no one would ever know.

“That’s it,” he said, slapping his thighs and getting to his feet.

He strode into the ELF transmitter room. A technician in a lab coat was bent over the controls. “Can you send the signal now?”

“We aren’t scheduled to send it for another couple of hours.”

“That isn’t what I asked.” Now that his decision had been made, Severance’s haughtiness had returned.

“It will take me a few minutes to double-check the batteries. The power plant is off-line because of the damage to the exhaust system.”

“Do it.”

The man conferred with a colleague deep beneath the facility using an intercom, speaking in arcane scientific jargon that Severance couldn’t follow.

“It will just be another moment, Mr. Severance.”

THE RUSSIAN SATELLITE’S electronic brain marked time in minute fractions as it streaked over Europe at seventeen thousand miles per hour. The trajectory had been calculated to the hundredth of an arc second, and when the satellite hit its mark a signal was sent from the central processor to the launch tube. There was no sound, in the vacuum of space, as an explosive gush of compressed gas blasted the tungsten rod out of the tube. It was pointed almost straight down, and it began its fiery trip to earth, descending at a slight angle, as its builders had designed, so it could be confused with an incoming meteor. Hitting the first molecules of the upper atmosphere created friction that merely warmed the rod. The lower it fell, the more the heat built, until the entire length of the rod glowed red, then yellow, and, finally, a brilliant white.

The heat buildup was tremendous but never approached tungsten’s melting point of over three thousand degrees Celsius. Observers on the ground could see the rod clearly, as it hurtled across Macedonia and the northern Greek mainland, leaving sonic booms in its wake.

THE DIGITAL CLOCK on the main monitor was into the single digits. Juan had avoided looking at it before Max’s rescue but now couldn’t tear his eyes off of it. Max had refused treatment in the medical bay until after the impactor hit Eos, so Hux had brought her kit up to the Op Center and was working on his injuries. The seas were smooth enough for her to do her job, even though the Oregon was charging eastward at top speed.

Max usually had a sarcastic comment about Juan running his engines above the red lin

e, but he knew full well what was coming and kept it to himself. They weren’t yet at the minimum safe distance from the blast, and if the Chairman thought getting out and pushing would help he’d do it.

Hali Kasim tore his earphones off his head with a curse.

“What is it?” Juan asked anxiously.

“I’m picking up a signal on the ELF band. It’s from Eos. They’re sending the trigger code.”

Cabrillo paled.

“It’s going to be okay.” Max’s voice sounded nasal because of the cotton balls stuffed in his battered nose. “The wavelengths are so long, the full code will take a while to broadcast.”

“Or they could release the virus at the first sign of an ELF signal,” Hali said.

Juan’s palms were slick. He hated the thought that they had come so far only to fail at the eleventh hour. He wiped his hands on his wet pants. There was nothing he could do but wait.

He hated to wait.

WEARING THEIR CUSTODIAL UNIFORMS, Linda and Mark prowled the lower decks of the Golden Sky once again, trying to remember where the ship’s laundry was located. There were only a few crewmen roaming around, and each was too lost in his own suffering to question two unfamiliar faces.

The whine of dryers spooling up drew them to their destination. Steam billowed from the dimly lit room. None of the Chinese workers looked up from their duties when the two stepped inside the laundry.

A man leaning just inside the door that they hadn’t seen grabbed Linda’s arm in a tight grip.

“What are you doing here?” he challenged.

She tried to yank her arm free. Mark recognized the guy as one of the men who had arrived by helicopter with Zelimir Kovac. He should have known they would post a guard. He moved to intercede, and the man drew a pistol and pressed it against Linda’s temple.