Dusk. A cold Australian drizzle.
Two days after the discovery of the severed index finger, the USS Abraham Lincoln dropped anchor at the mouth of Fremantle Harbour, the busiest seaport in Western Australia, and a total of zero people disembarked.
Port call had been canceled—again.
The official explanation was that a particularly virulent strain of flu was sweeping the city of Fremantle and the captain could not afford the risk to his crew’s health and safety. The “Eaglebeak flu,” some called it when their superior officers weren’t listening.
Few believed the official explanation.
The more obvious truth was that they didn’t want to let anyone off the ship and risk the possibility of escape. Not with Santiago’s killer still on board.
Either way, quarantine or stakeout, there the ship sat, moored some twelve hundred meters from the dock. As far as its population was concerned, it might as well have been twelve hundred miles. For the next two days the Lincoln’s convoy of helos buzzed back and forth, replenishing its supplies, and the ship’s six thousand inhabitants walked through their chores and routines, subdued and claustrophobic, within shooting distance of the shore but unable to go ashore.
The ship had become a floating prison.