Dark Watch

The problem was the only naval force in the area that had any carriers was the United States. China wanted to buy an old Russian flattop, but as far as Juan knew, they were still negotiating, and there was no way pirates could have gotten their hands on one. He was sure it was some other type of vessel that Tory saw. He didn’t discount the possibility that her ship was attacked by trained commandos, only he had no idea how they fit with the pirates Hiro had hired the Corporation to wipe out. Were they working together?

His intercom buzzed. “Juan, it’s Julia. Can you come down to my office?”

Thankful to escape the answerless questions swirling round and round in his head, he left his cabin and made his way down to medical.

He found her in the trauma bay, an equipment-packed room as modern as any level-one ER. The temperature was a cool sixty-five. A sheet-draped body lay on a gurney under brilliant lights. Julia wore green surgical scrubs. Her gloved hands were smeared with blood. Powerful ventilators prevented odors from building up inside the room, yet Juan could still sense the lingering smell of decay.

“One of the Chinese immigrants?” he asked, nodding at the shrouded form.

“No, one of the pirates. Want to take a look?”

Juan said nothing as Julia peeled back the sheet. Death never looked more ignoble, especially with the large sutured Y-incision Julia had cut to examine inside the chest and abdomen. The pirate was young, twenty at most, and skinny to the point of starvation. His hair was lank black, and his fingers and the bottoms of his feet were thickly callused. The pair of sneakers he’d worn when boarding the Oregon were probably stolen during a previous raid and were the first he’d ever owned. There was a single neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, an obscene third eye that was puckered around the edges.

Cabrillo couldn’t discount the brutality of what the pirates had done, but he also couldn’t help feeling a little pity as well. He had no idea what circumstances drove the boy to crime, but he felt the kid should have been with his family, not laid out on a slab like a dissected specimen.

“So what have you learned?” he asked after Julia drew the sheet back over the corpse’s head.

“This guy’s dead.”

“Well, since you performed an autopsy, I assumed he would be.”

“What I mean is if he hadn’t taken a shot to the skull, he would have died anyway, probably within the next few months.” She waved him over to a computer workstation. On the screen were spectrograph lines of a sample Julia had run. He had no idea what he was looking for. His puzzled expression prompted an explanation.

“Hair sample run through optical emission spectrometer.” The Corporation had bought the million-dollar piece of equipment not only for Julia’s medical bay but also for analyzing trace evidence. It had been key a year earlier tracking a missing shipment of RDX explosives. “During my exam,” Julia explained, “I noticed some pretty significant symptomatology. For one, he was about to suffer complete renal failure. Also, he’s anemic as hell; his gums are severely inflamed with late-stage gingivitis. I noted lesions all along his digestive tract and bloody crusts in both nostrils. It made me think of something, and the hair sample proved it.”

“What’s that?”

“This guy had had long-term exposure to toxic levels of mercury.”

“Mercury?”

“Yep. Without treatment, the mercury, like other heavy metals, builds up in tissue and hair. It eventually shuts the body down, but not before causing madness as it deteriorates the brain. I bet if you recheck the video of the pirate attack, you’ll see these guys fought with little regard for their own lives. The level of mercury contamination would have impaired this one’s judgment to the point where he’d fight on, no matter what.”

“Some of them tried to escape,” Juan pointed out.

“Not all of them had such elevated or prolonged exposure.”

“What about the Chinese?”

“I only checked one for toxicity, and she came up clean.”

“But this guy’s riddled with mercury?”

“You could fill a couple of thermometers off him. I checked two of his compatriots quickly and found the same thing. I bet they’re all suffering to one degree or another.”

Juan ran a hand across his jaw. “If we find the source of the mercury, we might find the pirates’ lair.”

“Stands to reason,” Julia agreed, stripping off her gloves with a sharp snap. She removed her surgical cap and redid her ponytail with a well-practiced twist. “You can get mercury poisoning by eating contaminated fish, but the risk’s mostly to children and women who want to conceive. But with the levels I’m seeing here, I’d put my money on these guys basing themselves someplace close to a contaminated industrial site or an old mercury mine.”

“Any idea if there are such mines in this area?”

“Hey, my job’s medical mysteries and patching you cutthroats back together,” Julia teased. “You want geology lessons, call on someone else.”