Sam suppressed a smile. “Sure. I’ll bite. Why?”
“I removed the grille, and you’ll never believe what I found there…”
Sam said, “Go on!”
“Someone had hooked up the diesel engine’s exhaust manifold — which appears to have been designed to be funneled through the ceiling and out the roof — to the air conditioning intake vent.”
“Are you saying, whoever these two men are, they died because of a tragic maintenance accident?”
Tom nodded. “It would appear so.”
Sam glanced down at the rotting bodies. “What a terrible waste of life.”
He stepped over to the helm and switched off the engine.
After the drone of the twin diesel engines ceased, the Carpe Diem turned silent, like the ghost ship she’d become.
And then the tapping started.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sam cocked his ear, trying to listen to the sound.
Inside the FE suit, it was near impossible to determine the location of something based on sound alone, because noise echoed inside.
He said, “Tom, can you hear that?”
Tom turned to look around the bridge, trying to guess what Sam was talking about. “Hear what?” he asked.
The tapping continued.
“That!” Sam said. “The tapping sound.”
Tom paused. “Hey, I hear it too.”
“What is that sound?”
“I don’t know. Probably water from the impeller draining back out its piping now that engines have been switched off, and there’s no longer any driving force sucking the seawater in.”
Sam stopped, listened to the sound some more.
It went three short tap, tap, taps… followed by three long tap, tap, taps…
He shook his head. “No. It’s too regular. There’s no way that’s coming from the backflow of an impeller or any other water pipe.”
Tom said, “Then what do you think it is?”
“I have no idea,” Sam replied. “But I’m going to find out. It’s coming from down below.”
Sam stepped through the open door leading down the stairwell from the bridge into the main living and entertaining compartment of the large motor yacht. He followed the sound as best he could, toward the forward cabins.
The sound stopped.
He waited.
Nothing happened.
Sam waited and listened, becoming acutely aware of the sound of the breathing apparatus echoing inside his FE suit.
Then he heard it again.
Three short taps, followed by three long taps, followed again by three short taps.
“Holy shit!” He swore. “That’s an SOS!”
He and Tom moved forward, opening the cabin door.
The cabin housed a king-sized double bed, lavatory, and a TV, but no people.
Again, the sound stopped.
Sam said, “Hello. Is anyone here?”
No answer.
“We’re here to help. There’s medical help on the way, too.”
Silence.
“My name’s Sam Reilly and my friend here is Tom Bower.”
The silence was finally broken by the sound of more tapping.
It continued identically to the previous taps, producing the sound of SOS in Morse Code. Sam would have been hard pressed to remember much about Morse Code from his early induction days as a marine, but SOS was kind of a hard one to forget.
This sounded almost mechanical.
That was a more likely explanation than someone still being alive onboard.
The SOS tapping was interrupted by a thirty second pause, before starting again.
Sam looked at Tom and asked, “Where is that sound coming from?”
“I have no idea.”
On the next round of taps, Sam turned to the locker next to the bed. The sound was definitely coming from inside.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m Sam Reilly. I’m here to help.”
The tapping stopped — two taps short of completing the SOS.
Sam reached for the door handle. It was locked from the outside. He slid the lock open.
He said, “I’m going to open the door now…”
Sam opened the heavy mahogany door.
A woman burst out immediately. She screamed as soon as she saw Sam and Tom in their yellow, alien-like, FE suits. Sam tried to hold her, but that just made her more hysterical and she started to lash out at him with her arms.
Sam removed the mask from his FE suit.
“It’s all right,” Sam said, holding her in his arms. “You’re okay now. I promise.”
She kept screaming.
“My name’s Sam Reilly. Medical help his on its way. You’re safe now.”
The woman suddenly stopped fighting him. She didn’t say anything. Sam glanced at her. She was tall, her blue eyes level with his own. She had multiple blisters all over her body, her dark brown hair was unkempt and disheveled, but there was a beauty in her face that was striking. More than that, he saw something else in her face, too.
What was it?
Hatred?
Determination?
Defiance?
Sam said, “You’re safe now. Can you tell me what happened?”
The woman locked eyes with him and spoke. Her voice was sharp and unyielding. “Nothing’s all right. They’re going to kill us all.”
Sam set his jaw. “Who are?”
Her voice was soft, more like a whisper. “The ones who came from the island!”
“What island?” Sam asked.
But the woman didn’t answer.
Instead she started to fit. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and her arms and legs stiffened. Her entire body shook in a tonic seizure.
Sam held her until her body stopped shaking.
He checked her carotid pulse. It was there, but it seemed weak to him, her breathing labored and irregular.
Sam looked at Tom. “Get on to that radio and let them know we have a casualty — but she’s unconscious.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sam Reilly sat on a single chair in the isolation room of the hospital with his fingers steepled in boredom. It wasn’t that he didn’t have things to do. He’d taken ownership of the Tahila less than eight hours ago, but already, there was a lot of work to be done — and none of it while he was trapped in isolation, waiting to discover what, if anything, his body had been exposed to. Everything he had in his possession when he boarded the Carpe Diem, including his clothes, and even his cell phone, had been taken away for decontamination.
That left him with nothing to use to search for answers. Instead, all he could do was replay in his mind the events of the past eight hours, in search of what had happened, what could now be done to deal with it, and what had to be done in terms of priorities providing the greatest good for the greatest amount of people.
What happened to the crew and owner of the Carpe Diem might all be attributed to careless maintenance and a tragic accident. If that ended up being the case, it would be the least harmful outcome. But what if it turned out to be something much more sinister? What if the ship harbored patient zero, and the first casualties in a potentially devastating pandemic?
He closed his eyes thought about what type of circumstances could have led to the deaths of the two men on the bridge but kept the woman alive. More importantly, why had she survived, only to lapse into a seemingly permanent state of coma after he had freed her?
He pictured the scene he came across when he’d discovered her. The door had been locked from the outside. It was made of solid mahogany, meaning that it would have been nearly impossible to break through without any tools. The opposite side of the door led to a secret compartment, more than twenty feet wide, most likely designed for the storage of valuables. It reminded him of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Inside, Tom told him there were significant food stores, so whatever happened to cause the woman to slip into a coma, it wasn’t starvation or dehydration.