Then something strange happened. It was as if he took a slow step back from his own body, experiencing the moment from a great faraway distance. A sense of peace washed over him, beautiful and serene. Nothing mattered. Not really. He allowed his one hand to slip out of the powder-filled box, his other to fall from his ragged stomach. The Japanese, the war, the months aboard the submarine, even his wife and daughter seemed so distant, so insignificant, and he wondered why — but even that question held no real significance.
All Doctor Oskar Goering could do was remember an old poem. He chanted it again and again in the silence of his own mind as he faded inexorably into nothingness.
PART 2
Present Day
CHAPTER 3
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant glinted in January moonlight, gentle waves lapping against the snow-dusted rock jetty below the crippled cooling towers. Dull yellow halogen lamps dotted the facility’s buildings and fences, leaving the abandoned coastal villages surrounding the area all the darker by comparison. Tall transmission lines and cranes pierced the horizon, and thick electrical cables disappeared into the darkness. Behind the three main buildings, endless rows of white temporary storage tanks lapped up leaking irradiated groundwater as it seeped from the crumbling stacks.
The Scorpion drifted towards the power plant at dead-slow, her matte-black hull submerged, a single narrow periscope slicing through the dark ocean. The underwater craft mirrored the aesthetic of Fukushima — both stark and utilitarian. Both, relics of another era.
Dr. Hassan Nassiri stood in a corner of the submarine’s cramped command compartment with arms crossed, trying to swallow his butterflies as the tactical lighting bathed him in thick crimson. It still surprised him that a group of just five could run the entire 250-foot diesel/electric submarine. He supposed they were lucky the vessel’s previous crew of mercenaries had automated and computerized the bulk of the antiquated systems.
Before him, his captain — his friend, though it still felt a strange notion — clasped the periscope handles with both hands as he deftly navigated the submarine into the shallow foreign harbor.
Yes, his friend… he’d discovered Jonah Blackwell— salvage diver, criminal, man without a country — in a secret Saharan prison. Caught on an illegal underwater mission in Moroccan waters, Jonah had been rendered by the secret police and forced to carve out a tense, often violent life among gangsters and terrorists. But this desert anvil had also forged the only man willing to accompany Hassan into the heart of Somali pirate territory, a man audacious enough to rescue the doctor’s captured mother and recruit a crew of hardy survivors and outlaws. Jonah and the doctor created the core of an unexpectedly effective team, their very own wrecking crew, as Jonah liked to call them— Hassan with his intelligence and medical training, Jonah with his capacity for quick thinking, cunning, and combat.
But the voyage from Washington’s Puget Sound had been long, long enough for the ghosts that haunted the corridors of their stolen vessel to make themselves known. Whenever he closed his eyes, he felt as though some unseen force spun a wheel until it clicked to a stop upon a terrible or profound recent memory.
Blink.
A proud island metropolis perched upon the foundation of massive oil platforms, its tall skyscrapers toppling into the sea under the impact of a hijacked super container ship.
Blink.
His body wedged within the twisted metal of the Scorpion as the last of his air drained from his lungs, his narcotic mind reeling with panic.
Blink.
Seeing Alexis for the first time, the young Texan sitting on the floor of a superyacht engine room bobbing her head to unheard music, eyes closed, and her long legs, blonde hair, and freckles—
Blink.
His mother, wrapped in white cloth as their pirate allies solemnly ferried away her pale, electrocuted body for an honored burial in a distant land.
But the one memory he forbade himself was his life as an army surgeon in Morocco, the life he’d abandoned to find his biologist mother after her plane disappeared over the Arabian Sea. Absent without leave from his military service, he’d been instrumental in multiple savage clashes, hijackings, and the obliteration of an entire island nation; too many lines crossed to ever return home.
Hassan shook his head and ran his fingers through the tousled black hair that framed his dark eyes. He returned his attention to the data-stream steadily marching across his communications console. The butterflies again — but such was life amongst the barbarians. Always some measure of danger, however great or small.
Jonah looked up from his periscope and grimaced, scanning the red-illuminated command compartment with piercing eyes. Hassan wondered if the American would ever lose a prisoner’s affectations or physicality, his intense, almost paranoid attention to detail made manifest in his gaunt, muscled form.
Over the course of the voyage, Jonah had kept his blonde hair close-cropped and his beard tightly trimmed. Seeing the scarred-up knuckles and the residual hardening around the American’s eye socket and jaw, the doctor had to wonder if the beard covered further scarring.
“Vitaly — check the readings,” Jonah commanded, pointing at the Russian helmsman as he returned his eyes to the periscope. “How bad is our radiation exposure?”
“About twenty mili-sievert per minute,” Vitaly said glancing at a Geiger counter nestled approximately atop his testicles, his answer only somewhat discernible through a thick accent. “We in radioactive containment chamber drainage outflow for sure now. Maybe equivalent of one chest x-ray every two-three minutes. I am detecting Iodine-131, Caesium-134 and… da, Caesium-137. Like Chernobyl, nyet?”
“How bad is that?” asked Jonah. “Am I going to grow a third eye here?”
“For Russian, is no problem,” answered Vitaly. “For you, I think maybe not so good news.”
“Doc?”
“He’s right,” said Hassan, trying to dig through the cobwebs of his mind to a short rotation in radiology during his medical residency. “In two hours, we’ll be exposed to more radiation than we would in a typical year. I advise we not linger any longer than absolutely necessary.”
“Agreed,” said Jonah, looking up from his periscope and patting the doctor on the shoulder as he turned to face the main corridor that ran the entire length of the submarine. Yes, friend… Perhaps it wasn’t so strange a notion after all.
Jonah pressed the intercom that lead to the engine room. “Alexis!” he shouted, loud enough to get the engineer’s attention over the constant thrumming of the recently overhauled diesel-electric engines.
A static-filled response came back, not clear enough to make the words out.
“How are my engines?” asked Jonah, again speaking into the intercom.
“Good!” said a young female voice from the engine compartment, background noise echoing through the transmission. “We’re five-by-five back here.”
“You want to come up here for a few, take a look at the harbor through the periscope?” asked Jonah.