“Aye, aye, Captain,” Edgar replied.
Katrina turned to see Alexander and Eevi embrace. They held each other for several seconds in a tight hug. The stolen moment gave her time to question her own orders. What if more enemy sailors were hiding on the boat?
“Captain, how are you feeling?” Sandy asked.
Katrina decided to let her orders stand. She limped over to Sandy.
“I’m fine—just a bruised rib,” she said. “How are you holding up?”
Sandy lifted a shoulder. “I thought killing Cazadores would make me feel better, but I don’t know. I almost feel… guilty.”
Katrina pondered the words. Part of her felt the same way.
“This is war, Sandy,” she said. “We have to be strong. It’s only going to get harder from here on out.”
A beep sounded—a welcome distraction.
“Anchors up, Captain,” Sandy said.
Katrina bit the inside of her lip and moved over to her station. She tapped the touch screen, and brought up the controls, plotting a course around the bay to flank the container ship and the fishing vessel.
A message from the cargo bay played over the comms as she worked.
“We’re ready to move out,” Alexander said.
“Stand by for my order,” Katrina said. She hit another button to raise the hatches over the broken porthole windows, giving her a view of the burning container ship.
Her eyes flitted from the view outside to her screen. The scanners continued to search the waters for hostiles. Eevi had manually adjusted the sensors to pick up anything the size of a human. They had tried it on the container ship, but the fires were messing with the infrared sensors.
Katrina steered the warship out of the bay, providing a new view of the fishing vessel in the distance. She cursed when she saw that it was moving.
A flash of lightning confirmed what she thought she had seen in the darkness. Now that the trawler’s engines were out, the Cazadores aboard were trying to escape under sail.
She picked up the receiver to connect back to the CIC. “Edgar, I want you to target that fishing boat with the MK-65, but hold your fire until I give the order.”
“Roger that, Captain.”
She put the receiver back down and kept the heading toward the container ship. Smoke dissipated from the bridge as a light rain suffocated the fires. The drops pattered inside the porthole frames on the Zion, but Katrina kept the hatches open to give her a view of their target.
She used the manual controls to guide the warship around the two Cazador vessels. The MK-65’s enclosed turret rotated toward the fishing ship. Her plan was to board the container ship first, clear it, and then go after the trawler.
“Alexander, Trey, Vish, you’re clear to launch,” she said.
The team left the ship in a second Zodiac. It wasn’t long before they came into view. Blue battery units ascended a ladder to the davits from which the Cazadores had lowered their boats.
Eevi and Sandy moved over to the porthole windows with Katrina to watch. They were close enough that Katrina could see dead bodies with her NVGs. The blue glow of the Hell Divers faded away, melting into the interior passages.
“We’re in,” Alexander said over the comms.
A beeping sound issued from the radar station, and Katrina motioned for Sandy to check the monitor. Eevi remained beside Katrina, chewing on a fingernail as her husband moved deeper into the ship.
“They will be okay,” Katrina said, trying to reassure Eevi.
“Uh, Captain,” Sandy said, “looks like those sensors have picked up multiple heat signatures in the bay, moving fast.”
“Is it possible one of the boats came back online?” Katrina asked.
“I’m not sure,” Sandy said.
Katrina moved back to the ladder. “Eevi, you have the bridge. I’m headed back to the command center.”
“Got it, Captain.”
Katrina stopped halfway up to catch her breath and hold her aching chest. Then she continued to the top and centered her binos on the bay. The green hue of the night-vision optics didn’t reveal any moving vessels.
Distant gunshots rang out from the container ship, and a voice came over the comms. “Captain, we’re engaging a group of four Cazadores,” Alexander said. “Two are down, two more on the run.”
Be careful, God damn it.
She trained the binos on the ship, but a quick scan revealed nothing. She turned them back to the bay and switched to infrared. Sure enough, a pair of red heat signatures moved through the water.
Katrina switched to night vision, expecting to see Cazadores using oars or paddles to escape in boats. But these weren’t boats, and they weren’t Cazadores.
“My God,” she whispered. The two sharks were fifty feet long, almost double anything from the books she had read growing up.
Dorsal fins cut the surface as they navigated the debris field and searched for food. She zoomed in to see one of the beasts swallow a flailing survivor in a single bite.
The other men tried to climb onto the destroyed boats. One of them made it onto a WaveRunner just as a shark grabbed his leg, severing it with razor-sharp teeth. The soldier slumped into the water, where the second shark inhaled the rest of him.
In a matter of minutes, the two monsters had picked the bay clean of bodies, living or dead. Katrina stared in horror, holding the binos to her eyes as the sharks turned and swam toward the USS Zion.
Another message crackled from the comm system. “Captain, this is Alexander, do you copy?”
“Go ahead, Alexander, I copy,” she replied, trying to mask her fear.
“We have neutralized all hostiles so far, and… we found something, Captain.”
“Found what?”
“You’re going to have to see this to believe it.”
The hybrid human lay unconscious on the metal table, water dripping off its wrinkled flesh. Layla had pumped the guy full of morphine after taking him out of the chamber, but Les wasn’t convinced that would keep him from getting back up and doing what he warned them of: killing them all.
He checked the straps on the man’s wrists and metal ankles. They seemed secure, but metal limbs were powerful, even though they were attached to a body that looked over a hundred years old.
Michael checked the restraints over his legs. “He’s secure. Go ahead and hook him up to the computer.”
Les reluctantly uncoiled a cable from his gear and connected the nodes to the man’s neck. Then he plugged in his wrist monitor and raised his arm to check the vitals.
This couldn’t be right.
“How is this guy still alive?” Les asked. “I’m not getting a heart rate, and he doesn’t look like he’s breathing.”
“That is because he has no heart and no lungs,” Timothy said. “But if you take a closer look at your monitor, I’m sure you will see electrical activity in the brain, which is actually a computer the size of a fly—a fruit fly.”
Les did a double take as he saw what looked like brain waves on his screen.
“I don’t like this,” he repeated for the fifth time. “What’s the point of talking to this… guy. Especially after what he said when he was still in the tank.”
The words repeated in his mind.
Destroy me before I kill you all.
“I want to ask him a few questions,” Michael said. “Maybe he can help us.”
Les tried not to snap, but this was crazy. “Commander, he just said he would kill us all if he got the chance. Did you not hear that?”
Timothy folded his arms across his translucent suit jacket. “That’s why I suggested hooking him up to a monitor. I should be able to hack into his brain while he is unconscious. There is little risk to you all from doing this.”