HAYWIRE: A Pandemic Thriller (The F.A.S.T. Series Book 2) (41 page)

‘Find them!’ Christov yelled into his radio. ‘She’s in a wheelchair, for God’s sake! How hard can she be to find!’

His men on the bridge were searching the surveillance cameras for Neve and the Marine captain.

He pressed the radio to his forehead, thinking.

His watch beeped.

He stared at his wristwatch in disbelief.
No. That must be wrong. That much time hasn’t passed already.

It wasn’t wrong.

The acid drive would self-wipe in less than sixty minutes. He had sixty minutes to recover the drive and reset the timer.

He touched the tool on his chest.

I had them
, he told himself again.
I had them surrounded in the casino!

Then the crazies had attacked. Christov had never seen them attack with a pack mentality. Of the six men he’d taken into the casino, only two had survived. The Marine had killed two. The crazies had killed two more. Had his team not had flamethrowers, the crazies would have totally overwhelmed them.

He needed to reprioritize his remaining manpower.

He changed channels and keyed his radio. ‘Bolton. What’s your status?’

‘On schedule,’ reported Bolton. ‘The explosives are ready. We’ve stripped the switchboard. The ship is blind.’

‘How’s your team?’

‘Lost one,’ replied Bolton. ‘Fried by the switchboard.’

Christov made some quick mental calculations. He had two small teams pursuing the other Marines in case they had the acid drive.

‘Send me two of your men,’ Christov ordered. ‘Change their radios to my frequency.’

That will give me four men to kill the Marine and the bitch in the wheelchair.

‘They’re on their way,’ confirmed Bolton. ‘I know where you are.’

Bolton had obviously been monitoring both radio frequencies.

Christov stood before a massive window that looked into the aquarium.

He approached the glass and stared at the sea life beyond.

Just two meters away, he saw it.

Tall and tubular, the animal rose from a coral outcrop like some kind of underwater chimney.

A sea sponge. You caused all this trouble.

It had all started with a sea sponge. The strange animals clustered like motionless sentinels around the deep sea thermal vents that Elizabeth studied. Elizabeth’s remote-controlled submersible had collected samples from all of them. Pharmafirst already knew the sponges functioned like little chemical factories, but they needed Elizabeth to identify the species with potential.

The potential to provide new drugs.

‘They’re like animals from another planet,’ Elizabeth had told Christov. ‘The thermal vent is their sun. It’s their entire world. Every world is unique.’

Many showed promise, but it was the tall, bright yellow sponges growing around thermal vent number nineteen that provided their miracle drug.

The drug stimulated human tissue growth. And not just any human tissue. It stimulated growth and repair in
neural
tissue - a hurdle modern science had yet to achieve.

Elizabeth had done it.

The most incredible medical discovery of the twenty-first century had been found in a sea sponge on the bottom of the ocean.

Pharmafirst fast-tracked the drug’s development. Christov and Elizabeth worked side-by-side every day.

Everything ran to schedule until the chimpanzees.

The drug sent the chimpanzees berserk.

‘A side effect,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘I can fix it. I just need time.’

Christov watched Elizabeth dissecting the chimps’ brains.

It was repulsive.

The chemical proved far more complicated than they’d imagined. The side effects were shocking. Some brain areas had withered while others grew like tumors.

The sea sponges provided the answer.

A sea sponge couldn’t move. It made an easy target for predators.

In response, this particular species had developed an ingenious defense mechanism.

A neurotoxin.

A neurotoxin designed to turn its predators against their own kind by over-stimulating the territoriality response. Any animal that consumed part of the sponge became enraged by its own species and attacked its cohorts mercilessly, essentially becoming the sea sponge’s bodyguard.

The miracle drug and the neurotoxin were part of the same chemical compound.

It became Elizabeth’s job to eliminate the toxic side effects.

In the meantime, Christov took steps to ensure that even if Elizabeth failed, Pharmafirst would profit.

The potential for the drug to function as a weapon was glaringly obvious. Christov hadn’t set out to produce a contagious drug that would turn a nation’s enemies against themselves – but he was no fool.

With the tremendous investment already poured into the drug and its dispersal mechanism, Pharmafirst needed to be ready if Elizabeth failed to perfect the drug.

Christov was so busy trying to cover every angle that he overlooked the real threat.

Never for a moment did he suspect Elizabeth would betray him.

But she did.

Using her privileged status as lead researcher, she’d stolen her own research from Pharmafirst and physically destroyed the backup copies.

Was it for money?
Christov wondered.
What had the Americans offered her?

It didn’t matter now. She was dead. And soon the Marines she was meeting would be dead too. Not long after that, every trace of what had happened on this ship would be on its way to the deepest part of the ocean.

Christov just needed the acid drive.

The only remaining copy of Elizabeth’s research was stored on that drive.

Christov had the tool for recovering the data from the drive strapped to his chest. Once he had the data, he could return to Pharmafirst’s remote laboratories and reinstate the stolen information.

But first he needed that drive.

‘Christov, I’ve found them,’ came a voice over his radio. ‘The woman in the wheelchair and the Marine captain. They’re not far from you.’

Christov tore his gaze from the tall sea sponge and growled into his radio.

‘Where are they?’

Bolton didn’t need the map to find the main hydraulic pressure chamber.

The HP chamber always lay toward the rear of a ship and deep below the waterline.

Compared to the noisy engine room, the HP chamber was practically silent. All Bolton heard were his men’s boots descending the metal stairs behind him into the huge chamber.

‘Stay down here,’ he ordered.

A metal ladder led up to the HP maintenance platform.

The hydraulic pressure equipment raised and lowered the bulkheads that partitioned the ship during a hull breach. Without hydraulic power, the bulkheads were just tons and tons of dead weight.

After the explosions, Bolton needed the floodwater to fill the ship as quickly as possible. Water preferred an obstacle-free path.

Bolton was providing that path.

Before him, a metal railing prevented maintenance staff from falling. It also prevented Bolton from reaching the equipment properly.

He lowered his mask.

His plasma lance flared to life obediently.

He didn’t need to warn his men this time. He heard them dashing to safety as he sliced away the hand rail. The metal fell away and landed noisily. Now he could reach the main regulation valve.

He paused and lowered his lance, remembering the dead man they had left near the electrical switchboard.

Don’t get yourself killed by making a stupid mistake.

Bolton studied the heavy metal valve.

It should
be empty of hydraulic fluid.

What if it’s already primed? Already filled with fluid?

If he severed a pressurized valve, he’d be sprayed with liquid metal and boiling hydraulic fluid. Leaping into boiling lava would be a much quicker and less painful way to die.

He slipped a hammer from his vest and struck the pipe.

DOOOONG!

It sounded like a hollow church bell, not a solid engine block.

It’s empty.

The ship’s maintenance engineers were competent. Bolton liked that. It made his job easier.

He raised his plasma lance and sliced clean through the solid metal valve.

The steel offered almost no resistance. He moved along and cut the heavy pipe that served the valve.

The pipe, with half the valve still attached, crashed down to the floor, scattering his men like terrified cockroaches.

Bolton laughed at the men trying to dodge the red hot liquid metal dripping from his work.

He studied his work.

Now if the ship tried to lower her bulkheads, this chamber would simply fill with hydraulic fluid.

The bulkheads wouldn’t move an inch.

Bolton smiled as he climbed down the ladder.

He was really enjoying this.