The sight turned his blood to ice.
He turned and raced down the ladder, shouting, “Tom! Stop!”
Tom met him at the lower deck. “What’s up?”
The creases around Sam’s faced deepened. “They’re all dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Everyone on board this boat,” Sam said, his voice steady but hurried. “I don’t know why. Their skin’s all blistered. They look like they’ve been exposed to something toxic. Or maybe they’re infectious.”
Tom’s cheerful voice hardened. “That means we might be infectious too.”
“It’s a possibility we’ve already been exposed to whatever it is.” Sam looked up at the gentle ripples on the bay. The wind was picking up. “Look. If this boat is dangerous, we need to move it before that wind sweeps away all the toxins or whatever it was that killed those men.”
Tom said, “All right. I’ll get Genevieve to throw us down a couple FE suits. And then you and I will have to move her back off shore into quarantine until someone can work out what went wrong.”
Sam nodded. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s get this done quick.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sam donned his yellow FE suit.
FE stood for Fully Encapsulated hazardous material suit. It was rated Level A, which was the highest level of protection against chemical, nuclear, and biological hazards by restricting any penetration by vapors, gases, mists, and particles. Sam switched on his tank of air and started to breath from his Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus.
He turned to face Tom and gave him the thumbs up signal. “You okay?”
“Never better, you?”
“I’m all right. I’ll be happier once I know what the hell’s going on.”
“Agreed.”
Sam climbed the ladder up to the bridge. This time he was followed by Tom. He stopped at the door to the bridge, and checked the handle. It moved freely.
He glanced at Tom, who signaled with a curt nod that he was good to enter.
Sam turned the handle and opened the door.
Inside were two corpses — both men and starting to decompose.
There was no point checking either of them for signs of life. Instead, he consciously put them out of his mind, and made his way to the helm, where all maneuvering controls for the luxury motor yacht could be accessed.
It was the sort of helm that looked like it belonged to anything but a boat. Traditionalist sailors would have called it an affront. Sam couldn’t care less what it looked like; he just wanted to work out how to get the Carpe Diem out to sea. Instead of a wheel, the ship had a single joystick — the same sort of thing a kid might use to play a video game — and instead of a simple pair of throttles for its twin engines, it used a touchscreen computer, with two digital towers representing the number of RPMs to give to each propeller.
At the center of the touchscreen were the words, Forward, Neutral, and Back.
To the right of that was an ECDIS screen, which stood for Electronic Chart Display and Information System. This provided geographic information for nautical navigation. It was synchronized with the ship’s fully autonomous autopilot.
Sam tried to shift the digital gears into forward, but nothing happened. In fact, not only did the ship not move, but the computer gave him an immediate warning sound, as though he’d done something wrong.
He tried again with the same response.
“What the hell’s wrong with this?” Sam asked.
Tom stood next him, his eyes sweeping the array of digital equipment. He pressed a button on the touchscreen which read, New Waypoint.
A cute little digital image of a ship appeared.
Sam watched as Tom placed his heavily gloved, impervious fingers on the touchscreen and dragged the ship’s marker to a point two miles west of San Diego Bay.
He pressed enter.
Sam looked at him. “You’re going to let the autopilot take this ship out to sea?”
The Carpe Diem’s engines started roaring loudly as they increased RPM. The motor yacht slowly separated from the splintered jetty, making its way through the shipping channel of the harbor, and out to sea.
Tom met his eye. A small grin could only just be seen beneath his FE visor. “Hey, at least it’s moving!”
Sam studied the rest of the bridge while the ship was under way, and Tom ducked down below to search for other survivors. The ship looked state of the art and immaculate. There was no sign of a fire, or drugs, or even alcohol. One person might have had a heart attack, but two? That seemed unlikely.
What the hell went wrong?
It was a short trip out to sea, lasting less than fifteen minutes, before the ship’s engines eased into an idle and the computer applied a short burst of reverse thrust, bringing the ship to a complete standstill.
Sam pressed a button on the touchscreen and the electric motor whirred as the anchor and two hundred feet of chain rolled out of their cradle.
Tom came back up the internal stairs and opened the door. “There’s no one else on board. Now what?”
“Now we wait for someone from the Navy’s CBR emergency response team to come on board and tell us what the hell went wrong here.”
Tom crossed his arms. “All right. Bet you I can find out the cause before they get here.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe there will be something obvious. Like a suicide note?”
Sam said, “The man owned a yacht probably worth a hundred million. I doubt he was the type.”
“How would we know whether he was the type or not?”
Sam shrugged inside his FE suit. He was happy to play investigator while they wait. It might be hours before someone decides that they’re safe to come off the boat. Until then, they were going to be stuck there.
He walked around the bridge, trying to see if there was anything that might provide some sort of explanation for the two deaths.
It was a long shot, and he found nothing unusual.
He squatted down and forced himself to look at the two bodies, thankful that he was wearing an FE suit with breathing apparatus, so he didn’t have to smell the rotting remains. He let his mind take a morbid wonder. At a guess, he figured they must have been dead for a week or maybe even more. Either that or they had come from somewhere warm and humid, leading to a more rapid process of decomposition.
Sam brought up the navigational history log.
The previous trip had originated at Horse Shoe Island, within the Mergui Archipelago of the Andaman Sea, off the west coast of Thailand.
It made a single stop on the way, lasting a little under an hour, at a point a hundred and ten miles south of Guam, before cruising on autopilot all the way back to its home port in San Diego Bay.
Sam stared at the location on the map.
Why stop in the middle of nowhere out in the open ocean?
He felt Tom’s hand on his shoulder. It was hard to hear people inside the FE suit over the sound of your breathing apparatus echoing inside the impervious material of the garment.
Sam asked, “What is it?”
Tom’s face had turned hard. “I think I know why these two men are dead.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “You do?”
“Yeah they were poisoned.”
“By what?”
“Carbon monoxide.”
“Really?” Sam felt almost let down by the simple explanation. “How?”
“I noticed the air conditioning was blowing hot air. And I mean, really hot air. Enough so that I could feel it while inside my FE suit.”
Sam shrugged. “Okay. So what? You really hate the heat. I get it.”
“So, I adjusted the thermostat, and still the air conditioner blew hot air. You want to know why?”