This is why you’re paid the big money, Sam, he told himself.
He scanned the dock and the Trego in both infrared and night-vision modes until satisfied he knew the positions and movments of all the NEST people, then chose his best route.
Sticking to the shadows, he moved down the dock, heading toward the Trego’s stern. Once he drew even with it, he crept to the edge of the dock, grasped the aft mooring line in both hands, and began shimmying his way over the water. Twice he had to pause as biohazard-suited figures shuffled across the deck and through the decon tent, but at last he reached the railing, swung his legs over, and dropped to the deck in a crouch.
He took two quick steps, mounted a ladder on the superstructure, and started climbing.
He’d gotten only ten rungs when he heard the scrape of a boot.
He froze, looked down.
Below him, a NEST person was standing at the rail. The man pulled back his hood and titled his head backward, gulping fresh air. A tinny voice called, “Len, where’re you at?”
The man pulled a portable radio off his belt and replied, “Main deck. Taking a breather.”
“When you’re done, come over to starboard midships. I’ve got a team rotating out. They need a wash down.”
“On my way.”
The man pulled his hood back in place and walked off.
Fisher kept climbing.
Once on the superstructure, it took but two minutes for him to find the deck scuttle he was looking for. While a main deck hatch would have provided him a more direct route to the engine room, his penetration of any of the quarantine barriers would not only raise immediate suspicion but also prompt another security sweep.
The scuttle he’d chosen was similarly sealed, but the duct tape separated from the deck’s nonstick coating easily. He turned the wheel and lifted. Inside, a ladder dropped into darkness. He did a quick IR/NV scan, saw nothing, then slipped his legs through the opening and started down. He paused to close the scuttle behind him, then dropped to the deck.
“I’m inside,” Fisher radioed.
Lambert replied, “According the radio transmissions we’ve been monitoring, most of the NEST personnel are in the forward part of the ship. Whatever the radioactive material is, it looks like it’s somewhere in the bow ballast tank. Grim’s updated your OPSAT; the waypoint markers will take you to the engine room.”
“Been there before.”
Grimsdottir said, “I’ve analyzed the paths the dock workers have been taking. My route will skirt those areas.”
Fisher checked his OPSAT. The Trego’s blueprint, shown in a rotatable 3D view, was overlayed with a dotted amber line, starting with his position — shown as a blue square — and ending at the Trego’s engine room — shown as a pink square.
“Got it,” Fisher replied. “Grim, just so we’re clear—”
“You have my word, Sam. The inspectors have to wear those suits. Government regs. Hell, you know better than anyone how persnickety government is. I’ve done the calculations backward and forward. As long as you’re out of there in an hour, you’re fine.”
And at sixty-one minutes? he thought.
Over the years he’d faced every nightmare an operator can imagine, but like most people, radiation held a special, dark place in his mind and heart. Invisible and virtually inescapable, radiation mutated the human body at the core level, destroying and twisting cells in monstrous ways. He’d seen it up close and in person. It was a horrific way to die.
His mind immediately went to Slipstone. If in fact the town’s water supply had been poisoned with some type of radiation, he hated to imagine what the surviving residents were going through: nausea, vomiting, skin burns, hair loss, lungs filling with fluid, accelerated tumor growth…
Eyes on the job, Sam. Deal with what’s in front of you.
The bottom line was he trusted Grimsdottir and Lambert with his life and had done so dozens of times before. He would do so again now. “Okay,” he said. “I’m moving.”
To avoid interfering with the NEST team’s equipment, the Trego’s generators had been powered down and switched over to the dock’s power grid, so the passageway was darkened, lit only by red emergency lanterns affixed to the bulkhead at ten-foot intervals.
With one eye fixed on the OPSAT and one eye scanning for movement, Fisher padded down the passagway to a T-turn. Right led further aft; left, forward to the bow. He went left. The engine room was eighty feet forward of his position and down three decks. To get there he’d have to navigate five ladders and two deck scuttles.
As he reached the next intersection and started down a ladder, the OPSAT’s screen flickered. The Trego’s blueprint began to pixelize before his eyes. He pressed himself against the bulkhead and got on the radio: “Who forgot to pay the cable bill? My OPSAT’s losing signal.”
“Grim was afraid of that,” Lambert replied. “The NEST people are degaussing.”
Degaussing was a fancy term for demagnetization. Over time, steel-hulled ships pick up a magnetic charge that can interfere with radio and navigation systems. In this case, the charge was making it hard for the NEST inspectors to nail down the signature of whatever material was hidden in the Trego’s ballast tanks, so they were using degaussing emitters.
“Switch to internal,” Grimsdottir said. “You’ll still have the blueprint, but no overlay.”
“No problem,” Fisher said. “I’ll improvise.”
He returned to the head of the ladder and drew his SC- 20 from its back holster.
Compact and lightweight, the SC-20 was equipped with a flash/sound suppressor and it fired a standard NATO 5.56mm Bullpup round. That, however, was where similarities to other weapons ended. The SC-20’s modular under-barrel attachment gave Fisher an unprecedented array of options, including a gas/frag/chaff grenade launcher; LTL (Less-Than-Lethal) weapons such as ring airfoil projectiles (RAFs) and sticky shockers; an EM (Electro-Magnetic) pod with a laser-based directional microphone, a signal jammer, and a laser port sniffer for at-a-distance data transfers with IR computer ports; SPs (Surveillance Projectiles) such as a self-adhesive remote camera nicknamed, predictably, a “sticky cam,” and finally a gadget Fisher had dubbed the ASE, or All-Seeing-Eye, a micro-camera embedded in a tiny parachute made from a substance called aero-gel.
Consisting of ninety percent air, aero-gel could hold four thousand times its own weight and had a surface area that boggled the mind: Spread flat, each cubic inch of aero-gel — roughly the size of four nickels stacked atop one another — could cover a football field from end zone to end zone. In the case of the ASE, its palm-sized, self-deploying aero-gel chute could keep the camera aloft for as long as ninety seconds, giving Fisher a high-resolution bird’s-eye view of nearly a square mile.
Unfortunately, tonight, he wasn’t likely to need the ASE; he was hoping he wouldn’t need the SC-20 at all, but then again, ring airfoils and sticky shockers could turn out to be his best tools should he encounter trouble aboard the Trego.
He flipped his NV goggles into place and heard the faint electronic whistle in his earpiece as the they powered up. He scanned the darkened deck below. He saw nothing.
“Proceeding belowdecks,” Fisher radioed.
9
With the SC-20 held at ready-low, Fisher crept down to the next deck, turned the corner, and headed aft. He was halfway down the passageway when he froze. With exaggerated slowness, he crouched down, crab-stepped to the left, and pressed himself against the bulkhead.