“Stairs are gone,” he told Dalton. Grabbing the side railing, he sidestepped his way down to a crosswalk that ran across the width of the hold. The decking was still there, but so rusted that Danny nearly fell through on his first step. He grabbed hold of the railing there, then decided it would be much easier simply to jump down to the deck below, some eight feet away.
“Catwalk’s gone,” he said, tacking his gun to his vest before going over the side. He dangled off the rail, then let himself drop. He landed badly, rolling over onto his back.
“Coming down,” said Dalton.
Danny scrambled to his feet and stepped out of the way. As Dalton landed — two feet, perfect balance — he started toward the stern end of the compartment, heading for an opening into the rear compartment.
The trooper tapped Danny’s shoulder as he ran. “I’ll take point, sir.” He passed in front of him before Danny could object.
The waterproof hatchway on the bulkhead was wide open. A dim yellow light shone at the far end, beyond the array of engines. A few inches of water lapped across the deck.
Dalton turned left, out of Danny’s view. Another Whiplasher, Baby Joe Morgan, whispered over the radio circuit that he was starting down behind them.
“We’re in the engine room,” Danny told him. “Searching. Nothing obvious yet.”
He had just reached the decrepit boiler when a shout went up nearby. Danny leapt forward, turning the corner, finger on the trigger.
“Las manos en alto!” yelled Dalton, struggling with his Spanish. “Put your hands up. All of you!”
The beam from the flashlight on Dalton’s wrist played over three men sleeping in blankets on a platform built over the machinery.
“Rendirse,” said Dalton, trying to tell them to surrender. “Give up!”
Danny took over. The smart helmet had a language translation program built in, but his Spanish was more than adequate enough to tell them what he wanted them to do.
His rifle didn’t hurt either. By the time Morgan joined them, the three men had been trussed with flex cuffs and were sitting against the hull. To say that they looked confused would be an understatement.
Danny was confused as well. This was the area the analysts thought most likely to be used as the conspirators’ control center. Not only were there no computers or other electronic gear of any type, the three men were wearing Filipino uniform tops. While that didn’t necessarily mean anything — anyone could put a green shirt on over dirty shorts — they certainly didn’t look like tech wizards either.
Disheveled and dispirited soldiers, maybe. They kept asking what was going on, in English as well as Spanish, and one of the men said loudly that the Philippines were allies with America and Danny had better be careful or “our American brothers will keel you when they come.”
“I’m American,” Danny told them. “We’ll sort it all out in a minute. Just do what we say for now and everything will be fine. We’re not going to hurt you, but we’re not taking chances either.”
Danny told Dalton and Morgan to take the prisoners topside, where Grisif, Chris Bulgaria, and Ivan Dillon had already secured the two men who’d been on guard. He headed to join the others in what they believed was the Filipinos’ bunking area near the bow.
“Boston, what’s the situation?”
“Closed door,” said Boston. “I’m going to blow it.”
“Not too much,” warned Danny. “Damned ship’s falling apart. One charge may tear it to pieces.”
He heard the muffled explosion a few seconds later. The rest of the Filipino contingent — which only consisted of a single man — was in the compartment, sleeping peacefully despite the commotion. In fact, he didn’t even react to the boom that took out the door. The reason was obvious as soon as anyone entered the compartment — it smelled like formaldehyde, a result of the burn-off from the homemade still that dominated the center of the compartment.
Roused to semiconsciousness, the man was taken above, to join the other prisoners. Boston and Achmoody began questioning the Filipinos while the rest of the team proceeded to search the ship.
Danny was making his way up into the superstructure when Breanna hailed him from the Cube.
“What’s your situation?” she asked.
“I have no command center here, no computers, no nothing,” he told her. “We’re searching.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Negative. Six Filipinos. Every one of them was asleep when we landed. Including the people who were supposed to be on watch.”
“Have you questioned them?”
“About to.”
“Don’t forget, you have a Chinese warship nearby.”
“I’m not about to forget that.”
“All right. We’re watching.”
Danny continued into the superstructure. The analysts had guessed it would be in a state of advanced decay, and they were correct. Huge flakes of metal and pieces of broken bulkheads littered Danny’s path as he made his way to the bridge.
The space that had been the bridge was now used only as a lookout area, a fact attested to by a pair of binoculars hanging near the entrance. The navigation and communications gear had been stripped from the ship years before; a handful of wires hung forlornly from the panel, as if longing for their old companions. The ship’s wheel was gone, as were most of the metal panels that had once held other controls. Even some of the boards that made up the deck had been lifted out, probably to be used as fuel by the men stationed here.
Danny saw no reason to test the jigsaw puzzle of rotted wood and rusted metal that formed a scrabblelike walkway across the space. He leaned in far enough to scan the compartment immediately behind the bridge — the bulkhead there had rusted into nothingness — and once assured that it was completely empty, backtracked to continue hunting through the rest of the ship’s superstructure.
“Colonel, we got one of the fishing boats moving,” said Turk from the Tigershark. “It’s moving parallel to the reef, not getting any closer, but I think it’s trying to get a view of what’s going on.”
“Thanks, Turk. Keep an eye on it.”
“Roger that.”
Dalton and Morgan had come up and were working their way through the compartments in the superstructure. Danny decided to go back and see how Boston and Achmoody were getting on with the Filipinos.
When Danny Freah had drawn up the plan, he’d predicted that the boarding team would be discovered by the Chinese fishing boats or the minesweeper within thirty seconds of landing. Things were going much better than that: they’d been on the ship for more than five minutes before the system told Turk that one of the first fishing boats was starting to move.
“Track surface target one,” Turk directed the computer. “Network, scan for communications.”
“Null set,” responded the computer.
It was telling him that the Whiplash network, which was tied into the elint data from the Global Hawk above, was not picking up any transmissions from the fishing boat. There were several possible reasons for this, beginning with the most likely: the fishing boat wasn’t using its radio. But it was also possible that the boat was using an extremely sophisticated low-powered radio too weak and too far from the Global Hawk for the signal to be detected.
The fishing boat was clearly curious. It sailed parallel to the merchant ship, passing the stern, then slowed and turned back in the direction it had come. After passing the beached vessel once more, it made another turn and headed in closer.