Chimera-44 (2 page)

“
If you see the fourth
airlock go red, follow your orders, Captain.”

“
That was a
given.”

Arkady gave his attention to the test
subjects. In a thick Lexan cube in the corner of the lab stood four
enclosures. Each held a macaque primate with his or her own
filtered air supply. The foul little monkeys had been carefully
chosen due to their being carriers of SFV. Some of the best bio war
theorists in Minsk believed that Simian Foamy Virus (SFV) was one
of the keys to the CIA’s development of HIV, and the best bet to
speed up the molecular clock of Chimera-44. All four of the
dreadful beasts had been in injected with chimera cells weeks ago
and were producing their own mutated versions of it in their
veins.

They had to be killed.

Arkady took a knee awkwardly in his
pressurized suit and reached under the monkeys’ enclosure. One by
one, he twisted the knobs that turned off the oxygen supply to
their self-contained bio space. Within minutes, they would
suffocate and die, taking their virus with them into death. The
professor hoped that they had that long to wait.

The third airlock blinked red on the
notification board on the wall. The intruders were in the shower
room directly outside the lab itself. Next to the notification
board was a CCTV monitor that showed several short Asian men armed
with AK-47s ransacking the cabinets in the room. The only thing
that protected them from the unwitting pirates and the pirates in
turn from virus in the lab was a single, secured, double-doored
airlock.

««—»»

Markov inserted the last
magazine he had for his AKS-74U and aimed it out of the shattered
bridge window into the darkness. He triggered a few short bursts to
keep the attackers’ heads down as he carefully braced himself
against the bulkhead to keep from slipping in the blood on the
deck. The helmsman had taken a round in the face the first time the
pirates had unsuccessfully rushed the pilothouse and the
Kostov
was making lazy
circles in the open sea on autopilot. As far as he could tell,
there were about a dozen pirates on board from the two small boats.
As soon as the attack had started, a large surface contact had
appeared trailing them at the extreme range of their radar—most
likely the small boats’ mother ship. They were running out of
time.

“
Yes sir, that position is
correct,” he said into the satellite phone cradled between his
shoulder and ear as he watched for threats. “I am showing
4875-meters of seawater under the keel right now. They are in
airlock three and I don’t think the reaction team will stop them in
time.”

“
You will win the Gold Star
for this, Markov,” said the Admiral, as he probably sat safe at his
desk back in Vladivostok.

Markov smiled grimly as he
fired a burst at a shadow in the dark. The last Gold Star the
ministry had awarded was posthumously to submarine captain Gennady
Lyachin, of the
Kursk
, which sank after an explosion in 2000. He was sure that his
elderly father would show it off proudly by a framed picture of
him. It would make the old man proud.

Markov slung the assault rifle over
his shoulder and inserted his key into the black box on the control
panel. The box, once unlocked, opened to display a switch and a
button. The switch armed the device, the button triggered it. “Tell
my father that I did my duty, Admiral,” he said as he clicked the
phone off. For a true Russian, the glass is always
half-empty.

He watched the cameras that showed him
the labs four decks below his feet. A cluster of bandy-legged Asian
men armed with everything from chair legs to machetes and AK-47s
were beating on the airlock door in the shower room. On the other
side of the airlock, the camera chronicled Professor Arkady and his
assistants rushing about the laboratory. In the corner, four
monkeys fought the glass of their containers and clawed at their
throats. Soundlessly, he saw muzzle flashes in the shower room
camera as the pirates started attacking the sealed and locked door.
They would be inside the lab itself in moments.

Markov picked up the phone again and
rang the lab. He saw Arkady look to the phone, then directly at the
camera, and slowly nod his head. The scientist removed his
pressurized helmet and ran gloved fingers through his hair. One of
the assistants, saw Markov, was busily crossing himself.

The Captain armed the
device with a flick of the switch and then plunged his fingertip
into the button on the panel to initiate the sequence. With a
centimeter of depression, the switch sent a trigger of electricity
as it made contact and completed the circuit. In a microsecond, the
electric waves coursed to 38 separate 100-kilo charges placed
throughout the hull bilges of the
Kostov
. The 270-foot long ship was
partitioned into 19 watertight compartments to keep it from
sinking. However, each of those compartments had its own pair of
the demolition charges inside each of them. With the force of a
dozen heavy torpedoes, more than four tons of Semtex-10 plastic
explosives tore the entire bottom out of the ship in one violent
motion.

In less than a minute, the
smoking hulk that had formerly been the R/V
Akademik Kostov
had slipped below the
waves, careening downward to the eternal darkness of the seafloor
some three miles below it. The Russian media would simply release a
bulletin stating that the ship was overdue in Jakarta 12 days later
and no follow up information was ever forthcoming. Again, for a
true Russian, the glass was always half empty.

—
| — | —

Chapter 2:

The
Ikan Hiu

Abdurrahman, or simply Dur to his
friends, clung to a mat of broken wreckage atop the gently swaying
sea. He was getting too old for this robbery and killing routine.
He had spent the majority of his life as a simple fisherman, plying
the waters off Java for tuna and other huge pelagic fish. However,
foreign trawlers from China and India had destroyed the local fish
populations in the past decade. The giant factory ships had
vacuumed the ocean clean and left nothing for him to harvest to
feed his family. Then the Preman, organized crime bosses from the
city, had come to his village looking for local sailors who could
handle small boats and weren’t afraid of the sea. Men who needed
money to keep their family from starving and would do anything for
it. The next thing he knew, he was a member of a seagoing gang of
hijackers who crept aboard ships in the middle of the open ocean,
and hijacked the vessel.

Typically, they raided the ships for
cash, robbing the crews of their personal belongings and rifling
through the ship’s cash box. If the cargo was anything valuable
they would hijack the ship, take it to an isolated inlet where the
local naval police were paid to look the other way, and ransom the
ship back to its owner for a sum of gold or foreign currency. It
paid the bills, and the fact that most often the ships were foreign
kept Dur from feeling bad about spending his cut.

This hijacking had been so much more
different from all the others he had been a part. The bosses,
working on rumors they picked up in the bars of Jakarta, believed
the Russian ship was making a powerful new drug onboard. Whether it
was cancer cure, a new dick pill, or a cure for the shingles, it
simply didn’t matter. What did was capturing it and the researchers
working on it so they could ransom the ship back to its owners for
millions. The Preman gang had even imported a dozen former military
men with experience in Timor as shooters. Dur and his fellow
sailors were just bus drivers along for the ride.

He shook seawater out of his ears in
the dark as a low wave lifted him and his pile of wreckage high
before ebbing back down. He yelled out into the dark but received
no reply.

Everything had initially gone
according to plan on the attack. They had stalked the Russian ship
for days and waited until no other ship was visible for miles in
any direction. Then, with a calm sea, they crept toward the Russian
ship in small rubber boats from behind while their main ship
remained over the horizon. Dur and Haddam, his brother, landed with
the shooters who broke off into two groups, one to seize the
bridge, the other to capture the lab. Haddam had gone with the
bridge team and Dur, armed only with a chair leg, had accompanied
the second group to the lab. They had just made it in through the
series of complicated doors when the whole ship exploded around
them.

Dur had ridden a column of rushing
water through a maze of passages and hatches, ever higher as the
ship sank under him. In the darkness he had found and fought a
monkey—of all things—who had clawed and bit his hands in the water
as they shot out on deck and found themselves alone in the ocean.
Dur knocked the cursed creature off a floating life ring and saw
its quizzical face, small and furry; sinking downward to the ship
that it had come from.

“
Haddam!” he yelled into
the night repeatedly. He had promised his brother that this job
would help them leave this life. His brother had seven children and
a wife to support. Now they would certainly be added to Dur’s own
burden.

For quite some time he floated alone
with only bits of wreckage and his own thoughts. He fought the urge
to cry, to feel self-pity for his situation—to not simply push
himself from the wreckage and sink to join Haddam, the monkey, and
the Russians and Indonesians below him on the seafloor. He felt his
pockets for anything that would identify his body if found, but
they were empty. The only thing that brought him solace was the
thought of the tribal Mentawai tattoo on his arm would enable
whoever recovered his body to help identify it. He shook violently
and his guts felt like jelly. Was this to be his last night on
earth? Allah could be so vengeful sometimes, but it is His
will.

In the ocean ahead of him, he saw a
light is the distance. As the waves lifted and then lowered between
him and the light, it would appear and then vanish in turn. Each
time it appeared, it seemed closer, larger.

“
Help!” he yelled hoarsely
and waved his arms in the dark. “Help!”

He strained his ears as his
head ached. Near uncontrollable shaking had consumed his body in
the warm water that enveloped him. From the light came the sound of
a deep old diesel engine throbbing. He knew the engine well. It was
from the
Ikan Hiu,
their mother ship and home. They were coming to check the
wreckage.

Allah had not forsaken him. He could
be merciful sometimes as well.

««—»»

Lieutenant Lachlan Wilson
knew the smell of death, and the derelict vessel had it. He
carefully poked around the corner of the bulkhead as he led an
Australian Navy seaman from the patrol boat
HMAS Larrakia
around the ghost ship.
In his first year with the
Larrakia
he had gone aboard a Liberian-flagged freighter
and found a CEU container filled with illegal Chinese immigrants
bound for Darwin. The tragic part of the story was that the
immigrants were sealed inside the metal container in 100+-degree
heat for two weeks. When he and his crew opened it for inspection,
it had the same smell as the boat he was on now.

“
It’s a phantom ship,
Lieutenant,” said the sailor behind him as he clutched his Steyr
AUG rifle.

Wilson agreed with a nod as
he pointed his Browning Hi-Power 9mm in front of him, at the ready
for anything. The derelict ship had been spotted drifting a hundred
miles offshore by a passing patrol plane last week and the
Larrakia
had been
dispatched to check it out.
It was a
Javanese two-masted pinisiq, a ship unique to Southeast Asian
waters. Built on a design mix of Chinese junks, Indian dhows, and
Dutch schooners, the pinisiq was the most common locally built
vessel that plied the thousands of islands of the world’s largest
archipelago. Its description and dimensions match a pinisiq named
the
Ikan Hiu
missing out of Belwan for the past two years.

Intelligence had passed along that the
Indonesian Navy suspected the ship to be implicated in a number of
pirate attacks in the Straits of Malacca. Odds are the pirates
hijacked it, deep-sixed the original crew, repainted it, and had
used it since then. Either way, the away team from the patrol boat
was on high alert as they inspected it.

Wilson opened the hatch leading into
the ship’s wheelhouse and gagged at the stench. Inside the small
structure, billows of flies coated the windows and walls, crowding
for space on any surface. The grime-streaked deck of the
compartment held four figures that had once, before the decay had
set in, been human. One was bloated and swollen like a child’s
balloon. Another had what looked to be a shotgun blast to the face.
Still another, who was face down on the deck had what appeared to
be the plastic handle of a screwdriver extending out from the back
of his head.

Wilson pressed the button
on his radio mic to call the
Larrakia
, “
Larrakia
, Away Team. Be advised we
have found four bodies here. You may want to call Darwin and let
them know to advise AFP that we have possible homicides here.” The
Australian Federal Police would want to come in and take over the
ship. The Navy’s job was defense, not criminal
investigation.