Page 141 of Enemy of My Enemy

As he reached the top, he gripped his rifle, holding it one-handed. The barrel went over the tanker’s edge first, and then his eyes, scanning the deck, right and left, clearing his line of sight.

Again, nothing.

Ambling up, he came over the side and landed on the deck in a crouch, moving forward slowly, his head on a swivel. The mottled deck of the tanker was a mess: toppled barrels, cut lines, pieces of scrap metal and shorn steel piled in heaps. Tangled electrical cords lay across the deck, zig-zagging into piles before snaking off toward the bow. At midships, one cargo manifold was open to the sky, one of the wide iron doors thrusting upward, and whatever had once been in the cargo hold was long gone.

An open door banged at the tanker’s house, the boxy protrusion rising from the aft of the vessel.

Whirling, he aimed for the house, but loose hinges on the swinging door creaked, rocking on the waves, and it banged again, flapping with the current only.

No one was there.

He headed down the deck, toward the ship’s aft. The house used to be white, but blown sand had chipped the paint and rust had taken over the lower half.

A torrent of blood stained the deck iron-red and had splashed against the house’s exterior walls.

The swinging door whined when he pushed it open. He scanned the hallways, eyes darting right and then left. Old blood dried on the walls, on the floor. The tanker’s former crew, perhaps. He crept up one hallway and down the other, his rifle up, finger half-squeezed on the trigger.

An empty mess hall. Chairs tipped over.

A destroyed bunkhouse, where a crew had once slept, bloody mattresses scattered on the floor.

On the bridge, someone had taken a gun to the consoles, destroying the equipment. Shattered glass covered the tile floor, crunching beneath his boots. Spiderwebbed lines cracked through the bridge’s windows, bullets still lodged in the thick glass. Nothing worked. Everything was dead. Charts lay in a heap in a wastebin, burned to ash, the edges of a map of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea sticking out.

He headed back down to the main deck, frowning. This had definitely been Madigan’s ship. It had been his base. The damage, the bullet holes, the bloody detritus left behind. He’d been here. Where was he now?

His gaze landed on the open cargo manifold.

Ethan silently moved down the ship, keeping to the shadows and darting from structure to structure. Pylons and giant pipes snaked across the deck, and he crouched low, running down the side of a chipped pipe heading toward the bow and right past the cargo manifold.

Every hair on the back of his neck stood straight. A light breeze skittered over the ship, tickling his skin and whispering through the ghostly vessel. He wanted to believe it was just the wind and the sun, and the eerie otherness of the broken tanker, but something kept prickling at his senses. A sense of wrongness.

A sense that he wasn’t alone. That he was being watched. He could almost feel the slick, hot slide of someone’s eyeballs against his skin.

He scanned fore and aft, crouched low at the manifold. Still, nothing moved. Beneath him, the dark mouth leading to the belly of the vessel yawned wide, an almost impenetrable darkness. From where he crouched to the water line, the ship was almost thirty feet tall, and most of that height was swallowed within the black hole below his feet. A rickety metal stair ladder descended into the pit. He could barely make out the first landing, a catwalk ringing the hold, fifteen feet down.

Electrical cords dangled into the darkness across from him.

Ethan flicked on the flashlight mounted on top of his M4 and swept the interior of the hold. His beam couldn’t penetrate the bottom. He pulled out a glow stick from his tac pack, snapped it, and tossed it down.

A clang echoed upward, the plastic hitting the metal bottom. A soft yellow glow surrounded the stick. He waited, rifle up and ready, aiming into the black.

Nothing.

Slowly, he slipped into the hold, down the first steps of the stair ladder. The stench of the cargo hold hit him like a gut-punch. Sulfur, rotten eggs, and the rancid tang of tar, decades of crude oil sloshing in the hold and searing the stench into the iron and steel. He gagged and his eyes watered.

Still, he moved on, creeping down the ladder to the landing. He kept going, all the way down.

Past the first landing, his flashlight beam caught on something at the bottom of the hold. What looked like tables set up, and monitors arrayed along the sides. Chairs, facing the monitors. The skeletal outlines of flood lamps.

Heart pounding, he quickened his pace, descending into the belly of the vessel, the bottom of the hold. Scanning left and right, he kept his rifle up, finger curled over the trigger, as he crept forward. Electrical cords dangled in his face, and he used the barrel of the rifle to push them aside.

His flashlight beam landed on a control panel and one softly illuminated power button. The cords all connected there, and to a huge rack of computer servers and a single display, and then veered out again, connecting the rest of the hold’s tech.

Shadows loomed around him, long lines of the shapes in the hold throwing odd angles into the darkness. He leaned forward, pressing the power button on the control panel, and stepped back fast.

Whirring hums echoed through the hold, the servers roaring to life. Flood lights winked on, some cracking to brilliant illumination, others blinking before droning to life. Monitors buzzed, pixels and video streams slowly turning on, paused mid-motion. Next to the monitors, rolling whiteboards and glass boards covered the wide deck of the hold, pictures tacked haphazardly and what looked like flow charts, battle plans, and targets. Chairs sat in a circle, facing the monitors, their backs to each other, each with a dedicated bank of monitors and boards and pictures arrayed before them.

Restraints were fixed to the chairs, at the wrists and ankles, and a crude piece of wood had been fixed to the backs. A strap on the boards had held someone’s head immobile. On a tray next to each chair, a terrifying set of glasses with spikes facing toward the eyes lay, dried blood coating the pinpoint ends.