Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

He moved on and found his first body. It was a young woman dressed as a maid. She was floating in a cabin that she must have been servicing. Her cart lay on its side in a corner of the room, and extra sheets fluttered in the beam of his light like undulating sea creatures. She was facing away from Cabrillo, so he swam closer and gently spun her around.

He blew out a startled breath that overloaded his regulator.

The poor woman must have hit a wall face-first because her features were distorted beyond recognition. Juan recalled the big ship’s near-instantaneous flat roll and guessed she would have met her death when the wall smashed into her at better than twenty miles per hour. It looked no different had she been struck with a baseball bat.

He moved on, knowing that his task was only going to become even grimmer.

Cabrillo found two more bodies on this level. One was dressed like the security detail, in a plain dark suit with tie, and the other wore a chef’s white jacket and gray gingham pants. By the way their heads swiveled so loosely on their necks, he was sure both had died like the maid when they crashed into a bulkhead.

He reached the main stairs, a grand, sweeping affair that curled around an atrium which had once had a glass ceiling. Juan shone his light down on it, seeing that few of the panes remained in the ornate wrought-iron cupola. Below it, the ocean was inky black.

A sense of dread creeping up on him, Juan swam up the staircase. This level appeared fully flooded, but he couldn’t take shortcuts on a mission like this. He laboriously checked every nook and cranny for someone who’d found an air pocket and survived his ordeal. He’d been aboard the Sakir on more than one occasion. It was hard to wrap his mind around all this destruction when he remembered her as the epitome of opulence.

Sadly, there were more bodies. Juan recognized one of the men as the Emir’s nephew, a likable teen who had ambitions of being a scientist. Particle physics, he remembered.

Each gruesome discovery made his anger at Kenin burn that much more, and the cut was doubly painful because these people were never the intended targets. Kenin put their deaths squarely on Juan’s shoulders, and as much as Juan would have liked to rationalize away the guilt, he could not. These people’s deaths were almost as much his fault as they were the rogue Russian admiral’s.

The next deck, closer to the surface and thus the waterline, was the crew’s area. Gone were the elegant silk wall coverings, the plush carpeting, and subdued lighting. Here was a world of white steel walls, exposed electrical conduits, and linoleum tile. The Emir had the money to give them better surroundings for when they were off duty, but leaving the space so stark was a not-so-subtle reminder that they were merely staff and he was the master. Sometimes the pettiness of the rich irked Cabrillo.

He expected to find a lot more bodies, but he didn’t find any at all. Surely there had been some staff down here when the ship capsized, yet he found no one. He eventually located an entrance hatch to the engineering spaces. It had an electronic lock with a card reader, but when the ship lost power, the locks automatically disengaged. He swung open the steel door and swam up what was essentially a ladder because it was too steep to call a stairway.

The main engine room was as clean as the Oregon’s own. The massive diesels, suspended from the ceiling, were painted white, while the floor had been green anechoic tiles. Juan found two bodies here, both in the overalls of engineering staff. He pushed on through to the auxiliary equipment room, where the ship’s sewage and garbage were processed and fresh water was produced by a reverse osmosis desalinator.

He was dismayed that he hadn’t found more victims and came to the sad conclusion that they had all been up on the second deck. Because of the physics involved in a ship flipping over, they would have all been killed by violent impact or so wounded that they could do nothing to prevent their drowning when water flooded into the ship. He was just about to go explore the upper decks when he spotted a hatch overhead that had once been in the floor. It had to be bilge access. He swam up to it and tested the dogging wheel. It spun as if it had been oiled that morning.

The hatch swung down on its hinges, and Juan popped his head and arm into this new space, startling himself when he realized he had broken into a chamber free of water. He didn’t think he’d reached the surface level, and a glance at his depth gauge confirmed he was still under eight feet of water. The air in the chamber was pressurized enough to stop the water from gushing in. He cast his light around what appeared to be an antechamber, because it was a small space, and there was another closed hatch to his right. There was only about four feet of headroom. He removed his tanks.

He realized that if the entire bilge was filled with air, it must be providing the buoyancy that kept the Sakir afloat. Eventually it would bleed out, but, for now, it was keeping the luxury cruiser from plummeting to the ocean floor.

He closed the first hatch and opened the next hatch, his dive light thrust out ahead of him. He was greeted with a tableau of death. There were thirty people stretched out along the walls, some clinging to one another, some off by themselves, others in little groups as if they’d been chatting before falling over. He had no idea how they’d gotten here or what had killed them. The air tasted fine, a bit musty and tainted with salt but breathable.

And as his light swept past one of the corpses, its eyes opened, and it screamed. In an instant, the rest of them came alive. They’d all been sleeping in the cloying blackness of the ship’s bilge.

Two flashlights snapped on, adding their glow to the animated faces of people picking themselves up and rushing at Cabrillo. Several remained on the deck, and Juan could tell they were injured. Questions were hurtled at him in a half dozen languages, but one voice eventually drowned out all the others.

“About time you showed up,” Linda Ross chided him. “Air’s getting a tad thin in here, and I was bored. I lost my last cent playing gin rummy.”

Linda topped out at five feet two, had an elfin face with large eyes and a button nose. She had a few freckles that made her seem even younger and a girlish voice.

“What happened?”

“I was about to ask you the same question.”

Their conversation got derailed for a few minutes as the Emir, whose moniker stretched over eleven names and who Juan called Dullah, short for Abdullah, thanked him again and again for deliverance.

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“We’re not out of the woods yet, old friend. The Oregon is still a half hour away, and I’m afraid if we cut our way down here, the air in the bilge will escape and the Sakir will sink like a stone.”

He turned to Linda. “What happened after you capsized? How did everyone end up here?”

“It was her,” the Emir said, beaming at Linda. “She did it. She saved us all. When the ship rolled over, she knew to get us down here as quickly as possible. She knew that water would enter the boat and she rushed us here. You should have seen her, my friend. She was like a lioness protecting her cubs. I could barely pick myself off the floor, and your lovely Linda was organizing us so the strong could help the lame.”

Juan shot Linda an appraising look. She had a ghost of a smile on her lips, loving the emotional praise from the Emir but too coy to gloat.

“I tell her already,” Dullah went on, “that I will pay her ten times what you give her to be my personal bodyguard. While my men wandered in a daze, she was saving our lives. I say it again, a true lioness. In all my life I have never seen one so brave, one so strong, one so . . .”

Dullah finally ran out of praise, so Linda said, “You forgot the part where I turned water into wine.”