“Radio is disabled!” he said.
“Fire in the four-hundred-megahertz generators,” said Moody, cutting out the alarm. They were almost right next to each other on the panel. “He’s sabotaging us,” she said, directly to him.
“Ahead two-thirds!” said McCallister. “Rig for general—”
Before he could finish the order, Frank Tased him. The captain fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
Hana stood up and announced to Frank and to Pete, and to the recording of the deck log, “I am Hana Moody, and I am now in command of the Polaris. I have the deck and the conn.”
“Aye,” said Frank. He was resetting the Taser and smiling as McCallister groaned at his feet.
It had all unraveled so fast. Pete realized that Moody and Frank were now waiting to see how he would react.
“I’ll find Ramirez,” Pete said. And before they could say anything else, he flew down the ladder and out of control.
Radio was trashed, he saw as he sprinted by. The screens of the computers were caved in. A small fire extinguisher had done much of the damage, Pete could see, as it still jutted out of one of the shattered monitors. The small generator room for the 400 MHz machines was a soggy ruin. The fire-suppression system had put out the fire with a thick coating of foam, but the machines were destroyed. Lights shut off as he ran, the electrical system trying to protect itself from the carnage.
Just before reaching the door to his stateroom, he heard a gunshot. The sound was deafening in the confined space.
He burst through the door to see Ramirez slumped against the bulkhead, shot in the head. Leaning over him, the doctor was placing the old nine millimeter in his hand, trying to make it look like a suicide. He turned to see Pete standing in the doorway.
Pete rushed toward him, but the doctor stood up and trained the gun on him.
“What?”
“Don’t move, Hamlin, or I’ll do the same to you. Which would be a shame because we need you.”
“I guess you’re not really a doctor.”
Incredibly, Haggerty looked a little insulted by this. “Of course I’m a doctor.”
“Why did you kill him?”
“He was going to try to stop their stupid little mutiny. And that wouldn’t do. This mutiny might be helpful to us. He and the captain were the only guys smart enough for me to worry about, and now they’ve both been neutralized. As for you, I still need you. I need your mission. I need your orders.”
Pete suddenly lunged toward him, but the doctor was surprisingly fast. He brought the butt of the gun down on the top of Pete’s head, bringing him to his knees. He was now staring right into the face of his dead friend.
He expected to hear a shot, ending it all just like it had for Ramirez. But instead, the doctor fished something out of the small, open safe. A minute later, he felt a needle sinking deep into his neck.
“There,” said Haggerty. “This will make you forget just about everything.”
Haggerty moved fast, knowing he had only minutes before he was discovered.
Almost everything in the stateroom belonged to Ramirez, of course, and while there were stacks of engineering documents that he was certain were classified, he had no way of telling which of the indecipherable tables and charts would be valuable to his masters at Typhon. They all looked the same to him. Deeper into the pile on his desk, he found a trove of pictures of Ramirez’s girlfriend, and he threw these to the floor.
Hamlin’s desk was almost bare, he was furious to discover. But above it, something caught his eye.
He pulled down a smooth Lucite block. Entombed inside it were insects. Honeybees, actually — each stage of life of a honeybee. It had to be Hamlin’s, he knew; he’d been in the stateroom hundreds of times and had never noticed it before. But what did it mean? Did the honeybees contain some kind of secret code? Perhaps inside them there was some kind of microchip, or memory card? He pocketed the block, the only thing he took with him.
On the way out, he checked Hamlin’s pulse to make sure he was still alive, and placed the warm gun in his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A loud crash below their feet snapped Pete back into the present. He was back in the control tower on Eris Island, with McCallister and Admiral Stewart.
“What was that?” said Stewart. Finn stepped to the glass and looked down.
“Carlson and her crew,” he said. “They’re trying to shoot their way into the tower.”
Pete joined them at the glass.
“We don’t have much time,” said Stewart.
“Can they get in?”
“Eventually,” said Stewart. “It’s blast-proof and bulletproof, but they’ll shoot through it sooner or later.”
“And we’ll never fend off that entire crew of marines once they get in,” said Finn.
Pete’s head was spinning, trying to figure out a plan, even as all his memories came flooding back.
Suddenly, the noise from below stopped. Stewart and Finn ran to the other side of the tower. Pete hesitated, then followed them to the glass.
Carlson and her men had given up on the door. They’d climbed to the low rise of exposed rock toward the sea, the bluff that faced them. They began shooting at the windows. Each crack was deafening, and each strike made the windows crack and splinter. They dived to the floor and covered their heads.
“That glass is bulletproof!” yelled the admiral. “But like the door — it won’t last forever against a sustained attack.”
Sure enough, the window that directly faced Carlson was almost completely eradicated, the floor of the control tower covered with powdery glass. Bullets were now flying through the tower and hitting the opposite window from the inside, until it, too, was gone. Suddenly there was a pause in the shooting.
The three men crept slowly to the window. Pete wondered if Carlson was pausing to accept their surrender. He also wondered if they should give it.
On the bluff, another marine was aiming a different weapon at them — a much larger weapon.
“Is that…?”
“It’s a grenade launcher,” said Admiral Stewart. The man holding it had two bandoliers of grenades across his chest.
Carlson was pointing at them, at the damaged window. The man with the grenade launcher took careful aim and fired. The grenade hit just below them, bounced off the tower, and exploded in the air.
“They’re going to lob one in here eventually!” said Finn.
“We can go below,” said Stewart. “Into the bunker. It’s more heavily armored down there, made to survive a missile strike. There’s food, water — we could live down there for months.”
“No!” said Pete.
“What choice do we have?” asked Stewart. “We’re sitting ducks up here.”
“No more hiding beneath the surface!” said Pete.
“Just until help arrives—”
“We are the help!” shouted Pete.
“Then what do we do?” shouted Finn. “Do we have any weapons? Any guns at all?”
“Actually,” said Pete, “we do have a weapon. We’ve got the most sophisticated weapon system in the world.”
They heard the curious noise of the grenade launcher again, and as if in slow motion, watched as a grenade passed all the way through the tower, in one shattered window and out another, exploding in the air outside.
“Jesus Christ!” said Finn. “Let’s get below! We don’t have any choice!”
Pete ran to the center console and entered codes that were rolling back into his memory. Soon, he had the display up that he wanted; an outline of the island, with a dotted line exactly five miles from the tower. He took the red key from around his neck, inserted it, and turned it. The display changed, the five-mile ring blinking. As an alarm rang in the tower, Pete turned a knob and shrank the circle to ten feet. Stewart saw what he was doing.