Salt (13 page)

C
hapter 21

Eva stepped into Jim’s cabin and gagged at the smell. She avoided stepping into a pool of vomit. A bottle of rum, empty, lay on its side by the smashed remains of a two-way radio. Old photos, ripped like confetti, littered the floor and the bunk.

“Christ, Jim, you did in a number in here, didn’t you?”

He slumped onto the bunk, dropping his head to his chest. As he did so, the momentum of his weight knocked something off the bunk. A radio thudded to the floor.

Eva picked up the radio. It wasn’t a two-way; it looked like some kind of military VHF unit. A wire from the radio snaked up past the porthole, and she saw it was coming from one of the pipes. The wire must be an antenna, she thought.

Jim raised his head and opened his eyes. When he saw Eva holding the radio, his face dropped. “I can explain… it’s not what you think…”

That was when she noticed dozens of long, thin pieces of paper, curled like shavings of wood, scattered across the bed sheets. “What the hell is this?” Eva said, picking up one of the curled papers. Coded text was printed on one side, and she realised it came from a small printer on the edge of the radio. The screen was blank, but the power was on.

“Who have you been talking to?” Eva said, her voice high and taut, her face flushing with anger and confusion. Jim reached out but fell back. Eva turned and closed the door, locking the latch. Leaning into Jim, she shook the radio in front of his face. “Tell me, Jim,” she shouted. “What’s all this code? Where’s this from? This is connected with the volunteers, isn’t it? Is this why you were so eager to know what Mike was trying to say?”

Her heart pounded against her chest, and her hand shook. It felt like the day she realised the world as she knew it was coming to an end. A huge, unimaginable shock to the system. Here was this man, one of the few she trusted, and he appeared to be the same as everyone else: a duplicitous coward.

For a minute they just both stared at each other. Eva refused to back off, waiting patiently for the truth to come out. As it would. She knew. She’d been in enough interrogations to know that once confronted, it was only a matter of time.

Jim’s first thoughts would be about self-preservation. He’d think of ways he could explain this away, like a husband caught cheating on his wife. “I can explain” were usually the first words out of someone’s mouth. They’d go through a few rounds of that before trying to blame someone else, only here, Jim had no one else to blame. This mess was all his, and there was no escape. No way out. The only course of action left was the truth.

“I can explain,” Jim said.

Eva said nothing, waiting for the process to begin.

Another minute passed, then another. Finally, wiping his face, and perhaps sobering up enough to realise the situation, Jim said, “You’re right.”

“About what?”

“This is everything to do with the volunteers and Mike. I’ve been lying to you since day one. Before, even. And the same goes for everyone on the flotilla. No one knows the truth. Perhaps Mike does, but well, you saw him.”

“What’s on these papers?”

“Messages. Encoded messages.”

“Who from?”

Jim squirmed and scrunched his face, reacting to some inner pain.

“Sit down,” Jim said. “It’s easier if I explain from the start.”

He leaned over and opened the porthole. The fresh salt wind brought swift relief from the stench in the cabin. He threw a pillow over the pool of vomit and sprayed a few squirts of deodorant to help mask the acrid scent. He threw the bottle of rum out of the porthole, watching as it drifted away on the tide.

Eva waited patiently as he fell to his knees and gathered together the confetti of his past life. When he was finished, he sat back on the opposite edge of the bunk and rested his back and head against the grey steel bulkhead. With a deep breath, he looked Eva directly in the eyes and said, “It was always about survival. Secrecy was paramount.”

“Go on,” Eva said, still holding the radio that had now taken on the qualities of a talisman or holy relic, its value incalculable. It represented a way to others, a way to a new understanding of the world. “Tell me everything. Leave nothing out.”

“I was captaining the Alonsa. We’d been at sea for four months. This was after the drowning. It happened so fast. We saw the waters rise while we were still in Southampton. The deaths came as quick as the water.

“We had communicated with the weather centre on and off for a few days before the first earthquake, as a storm had kept us in dock. That was during the first few days of the solar storms, before the big ones took out the satellites and the power grid.”

Eva remembered that well. She’d already said goodbye to her family a few days before when she headed off on a huge counter-smuggling raid on one of America’s biggest drug importers. She and a dozen of her team boarded a naval destroyer, ready to intercept a transatlantic cargo ship carrying one of the biggest shipments of cocaine in recent history.

Within a day of the grid going down, they’d lost contact with their chiefs in Baltimore, and even the ship’s radio didn’t work because of the amount of EM interference from the storms.

“People panicked,” Jim said. “Half the passengers got off the ship, and I watched them as the waves hit, killing them instantly. Every small vessel capsized. We broke away from the dock and drifted on the storm. Luckily we managed to steer away from land and head out down the English Channel before the worst came.

“Radio communication remained sporadic to non-existent during that first week. We heard reports of most of Europe drowning. With the winds and the constant electromagnetic interference, planes crashed out of the sky. We saw one go down in the Atlantic.

“I knew by then it was over.” Jim wiped his face and took another breath.

Tears were dripping down Eva’s face as she reflected on a similar experience.

On the destroyer, they had tried to make contact with no luck. Had tried to save other seagoing vessels, but the high winds and tall waves had capsized so many boats and ships that had tried to survive.

“After the seas finished rising,” Jim continued, “we had already lost ninety percent of our passengers. Many people took the life rafts, thinking they could make it back to land, not understanding that land was not a concept any more.

“Others just couldn’t go on. Those who left their families behind joined them in going over. I’ll never forget that. The sea was still warm as it came up from the Earth’s crust. We drifted down past Argentina toward the Western Peninsula of Antarctica. For a while we got stuck on drifting ice as the ice-shelf had completely come away from the main part of the continent. But within days it melted.

“Before our very eyes we watched an entire continent melt into the sea.

“We used the last of the fuel to head north up the west coast of the Americas. Our navigator relied on manual navigation, but with the near constant storms and the difficulty of spotting stars, we drifted off course.

“Eventually we ran aground here. The Bravo was already here. We managed to link the boats, using them as a safety barrier to bring other vessels in. During those early days we had nearly six hundred survivors.

“A year later, when you arrived, it was less than a quarter of that. But I’m getting ahead of myself. In those early days, radio communications were spotty. Some days we’d get through, most of the time not. I found that radio,” Jim pointed to the one in Eva’s hand, “on the
Bravo
.

“Over the course of a week I spoke with a doctor on a science vessel. Angelina, her name was.”

“Was?”

“I’ll get to that. Angelina started to explain what her group of ships was doing and the dire state of things. Before the event, she’d worked as a lead virologist for the CDC. She and a group of researchers were tasked with investigating a new kind of marine-based bacterium. This was just a few weeks before the event.

“Angelina told me she believed it was manmade. She believed it was government-made. The full details of its origin were classified, but then the world drowned, and there was no longer anyone to report to.”

Jim stopped and gazed out of the porthole. Black clouds raced past the moon, casting the waters in stripes of black and silver, making it seem as though it moved in jitters and jolts.

“What happened to her and her team?” Eva asked, leaning forward. A distant memory came to her mind of her sitting at the feet of her grandfather one Christmas while he told a story.

“She continued to study the infection. Here on the flotilla we noticed people getting sick from the rainwater, which is why we try to only ever use desalinated water. Angelina believed that the water that evaporated off the sea’s surface and mingled with the atmosphere created an incubation state for this bacterium. By desalinating it and drinking it relatively quickly, the spores don’t have time to develop.”

Although Eva was starting to understand, she remembered her training not to rely on instincts, never to guess. She needed facts. And this confession from Jim was the best time to get them. “Tell me more about Angelina and her team. Where were they? And why the secrecy?”

Jim closed his eyes for a brief moment and rubbed his face. He dropped his head as though in mourning.

“Jim?”

He lifted his head, opening his eyes. “Sorry. Yes, Angelina… it was a small flotilla of four boats, north of the Orizaba. The idea was they would intercept the survivors we sent out. One of the reasons I had to send them was to deliver resources to the scientists over there. Unlike us, they didn’t have the facilities or the manpower to fish. Nor did they have the fuel we did. So every month we would send them extra resources to help them to keep doing research.”

“So they were doing all that for us?”

“Yes. And for anyone else who might have survived this. I sent them information about the spread of the infection here, how it was speeding up. Angelina believed it was adapting and mutating. When we had the chance, that’s why I sent Mike.”

Eva thought through his words while she looked out of the porthole, looking north past the mountain peak, wondering what they were like, Angelina and the scientists. Wondering what they learned.

“Wait,” Eva said, realising. “No one came back. You were sending them to be tested on, weren’t you?”

Jim’s silence confirmed it. As did the guilty expression on his face. His eyes were glossy in the moonlight. Eva had often seen grown men, tough men, break down in the interrogation room. Not because of the punishment they were facing, but for the release of what they had done.

“Is Mike the only one that survived?” Eva asked, trying to keep the tremble of anger from her voice. She had to try to understand, learn as much as possible. There still might be hope for Mike and everyone else on the flotilla, but she couldn’t lose Jim’s cooperation, not while he was in this mood of admission.

Jim shook his head.

“None were killed. They were only ever used to test possible vaccinations. Up until yesterday Angelina had assured me they were being looked after. Some were looking promising. She thought she might have had a breakthrough in identifying a potential vaccine.”

“So what happened with Mike?”

“That’s just it,” Jim said. “I don’t know. Since he returned I’ve not received any messages, and the messages I’ve sent haven’t been acknowledged. Something catastrophic must have happened.”

“Why have you kept this a secret all this time?” Eva asked, though as even as she said the words, she knew.

“It would destroy the flotilla. The science vessels would be overwhelmed. There was also the problem of the infection. It’s still not entirely clear how it is transmitted from one person to another. They had to remain apart from us. By the time the lies had started, it was too late to do anything else. It would have split the flotilla apart. But I guess it’s too late for that as well, now, isn’t it?”

“So that’s why you were so eager to talk with Mike. You didn’t want him revealing your secret.”

“There’s that, yes,” Jim admitted. “But I also want to understand what happened out there. What went wrong? Is there anyone left? Eva, now you know, you can’t say anything about all this.” He pointed to the radio and the coded messages. “You know what it’s like out there at the moment with the water running out, the problems with the power, not to mention Graves and that bitch Faust jockeying for position.”

And that’s what she was afraid of: being made a part of the conspiracy. She hated the position it put her in. But she could understand it all from Jim’s point of view.

In a bizarre way, despite his actions, he had proven to her that he was a good man and was doing all this, taking the huge amount of pressure on his shoulders, for the greater good.

She knew exactly what would happen if this got out.

The already strained relations between Jim and Faust’s group, not to mention Graves always sniffing around in the shadows waiting for an opportunity, would erupt.

The power vacuum would create a lot of unnecessary division.

With a killer and saboteurs on the loose, this wasn’t the time to unleash a power struggle. As a group they had to remain as united as possible.

There was still a chance she could use this to her advantage.

“Jim, I’ll agree to keep your secrets safe, but you have to do something for me in return.”

He leaned forward, his eyebrows rising in hope. “What is it? What do you want?”

“The working manifest you keep for the engineering department. I believe it will be crucial in narrowing down suspects for the murders.”

“Of course. It’s in the bridge office safe; it’s yours.”

“But there’s something else, too,” Eva said. “In the morning, I want you to let Faust go. Show them kindness and forgiveness and take some of the wind out of their sails. You might just buy enough time to sort all this out before they revolt.”

“Are you serious? The woman’s a cancer.”

“Your choice, Jim. Let her go, or I’ll explain to everyone what you’ve done. And don’t think I won’t.”

Jim shook his head. His face took on a pained expression. Eva knew it was no real choice. Not only would the truth undermine his position and turn the flotilla into chaos, but he would probably be lynched.

“Fine, but I won’t be held responsible for her actions.”

“No, but you will be for your own. Make this right.”

***

By the time Eva left his cabin, Jim had shown her where to hide the radio and how to decode the messages using the encryption key from his notebook. She left him snoring on his bunk and took the notebook with her. She realised it might help her decode the information taken from the sub. It was a long shot, but even if it just gave them some clue as to how to go about dealing with the indecipherable text, it was worth it.

Before she left, Eva stopped by Danny’s cabin. He was fast asleep, tired after his day working with the crew. Eva stood outside with Duncan.