There was no sign of any of the crew, and as they moved through the bowels of the Empress, all they found were more signs of explosives planted with radio detonators, the detonators so constructed that even a genius with explosives, like Darwin Hughes, would likely have been unable to defuse them safely. The explosives were planted, as best Cross could tell (and Comstock concurred with his judgement), to blow out a fore-to-aft gash on either side of the Empress below her waterline. Coupled with the massive explosives package in the hold, which would blow off much of the forward section of the vessel and gut the base of her hull with a hole big enough to drive a truck through, she would sink in minutes. There wouldn’t be time to lower her lifeboats; or, if they were lowered already when she blew, there wouldn’t be time enough to get far enough away to avoid the lifeboats being sucked down after her.
It was a perfect setup for mass murder, Cross realized, and the only way to prevent the deaths of all passengers and hands was to prevent O’Fallon and his gang of hijackers from using the detonators.
Because Liedecker was with them, with his superior firsthand knowledge of the Empress’s layout below decks, it proved a relatively simple matter to lose the party of hijackers who had followed after them once they evacuated the hold. Armed with an adequate number of automatic weapons, they had the equipment to go after O’Fallon and his men, but a plan was still lacking.
And the enormity of the Empress below decks convinced Cross of two things: First, they would not find Alvin Leeds unless sheerly by accident; second, finding whatever it was exactly that had been taken from the Russians, if Leeds had hidden it, equated on level of difficulty with a blind man searching for a needle in a haystack while wearing metal mittens.
They sat in a circle on the floor in the mouth of a massive ventillation pipe, secure from observation above or below and with clear fields of fire fore and aft, their voices low as they spoke to avoid them being carried. “We tell this O’Fallon monster that we’re armed and that if he and his men don’t leave the Empress, they’re in for it,” Jenny Hall said with all the authority of Moses reading the riot act to the People of Israel. Unfortunately, she lacked the same wisdom, Cross realized.
“We can’t do that. A: Once he stops laughing he’ll remember he’s supposed to be killing hostages; B: He already knows we’re reasonably well armed and I doubt he’s preparing to depart; C: In for what? Once we lose what little element of surprise we’ve got, then what? We’re still outnumbered. He still has hostages. If you’re gonna play in the mud, you gotta expect to get your dress a little dirty, kid.”
“I’m not wearing a dress. But there has to be some kind of solution besides just killing and more killing.”
“You think I like it? You’re nuts. You’re still beautiful. I still love you. But, you’re a friggin’ nutball.”
“Eat it,” she sneered.
“Really,” Comstock interjected. “I think this is getting us nowhere. We can’t find Leeds. Can’t find this precious thing he’s taking away from our Russian chums. We can’t just sit about waiting for O’Fallon to kill more hostages or blow up the bloody ship. ”
Cross looked at Liedecker. The man shrugged his shoulders. “I have a responsibility to the passengers and the crew as a ship’s officer. It seems clear to me that, overall, fewer lives will be endangered if we take some positive action. I know nothing about explosives, terrorists or anything else. But my parents survived the Nazi era, and one time my mother told me that all of them, those who weren’t Nazis, distrusted the Nazis, distrusted war as a means of achieving greatness—that all of them kept waiting for something to happen, for someone else to stop what was going on. But no one ever did until the war ended, and by then, so much had changed forever. I think we must do something; or else, this madman will blow up the Empress and every one of the passengers and the crew will die for certain.”
Cross looked at Jenny Hall. “What’s Leeds got?”
“What?”
“What’d he steal from the Russians, Jenny?”
“Some kind of lab sample. That’s all I know,” she said almost indifferently.
“That’s, ah, not entirely true, is it Miss Hall?”
Cross looked sharply at Comstock.
“Unless I miss my guess, you know exactly what it is, or they wouldn’t have sent you along to serve as nanny for it, would they?”
Her pretty eyes hardened.
“What the hell is it, then?” Cross asked, not knowing who to ask. Did Comstock know? Or was he baiting her with a bluff that seemed to be working?
“Why would anybody have told you?” Jenny whispered.
“The question is, why won’t you tell us?” Comstock smiled.
Cross closed his eyes, shook his head to clear it. “What’s the deal, here, huh?”
“Now perhaps Miss Hall really doesn’t know, and the United States government just trusted a foreign secret service with more information than one of their own officers. Is that it?” Comstock asked her.
“It’s a sample of biological warfare agent,” she said so softly Cross could barely hear her.
“Biological warfare what?”
Comstock cleared his throat. “It’s some sort of viral agent. Very deadly. Causes flu-like symptoms for about twenty-four hours, is what we got. Then after that, the virus mutates as the patient of course gets worse and worse. It attacks the cerebral cortex and kills, death in thirty-six hours after infection and incubation. They told us, too, there’s no vaccine against it. Our undercover people got some word on it, by the by, while involved in something else and we’ve done our best to monitor the development. Might have tried stealing it ourselves if you Yanks hadn’t beaten us to it.” He smiled. “The idea, I presume, behind CIA going after it was that our Russian chums wouldn’t dare use it if both sides had it. And, if my days down at university haven’t gone all foggy on me, it seems it might be capable of being airborne. Aren’t most influenza strains?”
Cross stared at Jenny Hall. “I’m a bloodthirsty killer because I want to fight terrorists rather than surrender to them? And you’re Miss Pureheart because you’re smuggling biowarfare materials aboard a passenger vessel?”
“What if—and this is just a theory, of course …” Comstock began. “But, what if the Empress Britannia does blow up? Couldn’t the heat of the explosion drive this virus up into the atmosphere and the prevailing winds take it across Europe or something? And don’t viruses and nasty things like that thrive in warmth?”
“Mein Gott,” Liedecker murmured.
“Epidemic. A manmade plague?” Cross asked, rhetorically really.
“We didn’t develop the thing. The Russians did!” Jenny insisted.
“Ironic, isn’t it, that the champion of Western democracy would unleash it then, what?”
She looked at Comstock as if she wanted to kill him.
Cross asked a question then that had started gnawing at him and worked its way up until he couldn’t do anything but ask it. “This Alvin Leeds-does he know what he’s got?”
Jenny closed her eyes and the life was gone from her face. “No. He doesn’t know anything about it except that if he opens it, breaks it or otherwise releases it the stuff could be dangerous.”
Comstock laughed. “And they say we British are the masters of understatement!”