Pandemic
Chapter 32 : Then, stopped.The red light came on.No one said a word. Clarence stared, stunned into t

Then, stopped.

The red light came on.

No one said a word. Clarence stared, stunned into thoughtlessness. The man had looked fine.

Cantrell broke the silence. “ ‘If you poison us,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘do we not die?’ ”

Clark raised the testing kit to eye level, his wide stare locked on the steady, red light.

Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said. “No … we won.”

Tim finally reacted. He moved his hands in front of his face, accessing something on his HUD.

“Clark, Diego L., tested positive for cellulose,” he said. “Administering anesthesia.”

He tapped the empty air. Something up above beeped. Clark looked up, eyes wide, body shaking.

“Don’t light me up, man,” he said, “don’t … light …”

He sagged to the floor. He didn’t move.

RUNNING DRUGS

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

José spoke quietly, but Cooper heard the words loud and clear. He tried to ignore them. He was sleeping, after all.

“Hey, Jefe Cooper.”

Cooper lifted his head, opened his eyes. Smiling José was kneeling next to the bed. He was close, almost leaning over Cooper, but the tiny half-stateroom didn’t leave much of an option; it was already too cramped for just one person, let alone a second.

José offered a steaming cup of coffee. “Ah, you’re awake,” he said, as if it was a lucky coincidence.

“I am now,” Cooper said. “And I don’t want to be. I haven’t slept all night, man. Is everything okay?”

José shrugged. “Probably. But … can I show you something?”

Cooper flopped his face back into the pillow. “Does it involve me getting up?”

José laughed, but it seemed forced. “Why, is there something of mine you want to see while you’re lying in bed?”

“Good point. Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”

“I am,” José said. “But I think this is really important.”

Cooper sat up quickly. “Is Jeff …”

His voice trailed off. He was about to ask if Jeff had the helm, but the loud snoring from the other side of a thin wall told him Jeff was out cold. When they’d bought the Mary Ellen, Jeff had built a wall dividing the ten-by-ten captain’s stateroom into two equal five-by-ten rooms. He’d put in another door, even installed a second sink so they would each have one. Partners, fifty-fifty all the way, as they’d been since childhood. While it gave Cooper the luxury of a small amount of privacy, it also meant he heard everything that went on in Jeff’s stateroom. What Jeff did more than anything else in there was snore. Loudly.

Cooper took the cup of coffee. “You left the bridge unattended. This better be f.u.c.king important, dude.”

José nodded quickly, placatingly. “Yes, Jefe Cooper, I know. Maybe it’s nothing. Come up to the bridge, okay? And … and don’t wake up Jefe Jeff, yet, okay?”

“Why?”

José shrugged. “I need the money from this job. If I don’t get it, my family will get kicked out of our house.”

That meant the problem had something to do with Stanton. Jeff seemed one more incident away from insisting on turning back, killing the contract and dumping Stanton and Bo Pan back on sh.o.r.e. José needed the money — so did Cooper, so did Jeff.

“Okay,” Cooper said. “But you do know how ridiculous Jefe Jeff sounds, right?”

José smiled, shrugged. He slid out of the stateroom and into the corridor.

Cooper took a sip of the coffee, set the mug on his half-desk. He stood, slid his feet into his shoes. He was already dressed — in bad weather, you had to be ready to move quick.

He left the stateroom, stopped in front of his best friend’s door. It felt wrong to not wake Jeff up, involve him in this, but Jeff just wasn’t thinking clearly. Cooper would handle it. If it turned out to be anything important, he’d wake Jeff right away.

Cooper headed up. José was waiting for him on the Mary Ellen’s small bridge. Cooper stepped inside, shut the door behind him. The bridge had only a little more room than his stateroom; on the Mary Ellen, everything was nice and cozy.

“Okay, what’s this about?”

“Jefe Stanton’s robot s.h.i.+p,” José said. “Something you need to see from when it launched.”

He turned to the sonar unit and started to call up a recording.

“You woke me up to show me sonar of the customer’s ROV?”

“UUV,” José corrected.

“Right, UUV, whatever.”

Jose finished loading the recording. He played it. Cooper leaned in to look at the sonar readout, and as he did, he grew angry.

The Platypus was ten feet long, not quite two feet wide at its widest point, a long, thick eel of a machine with flippers at the end and the sides. It was artificial — metal and carbon fiber, materials that bounced back sonar loud and strong. The image on the sonar recording didn’t look artificial at all.

“G.o.ddamit, José, that’s a sonar signature from a f.u.c.king fish. This is what I get for letting an illegal Filipino play with expensive equipment.”

“Putang ina mo,” José said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you have pretty eyes, Jefe Cooper.”

“I’m quite certain that’s not what it means,” Cooper said. “Just because you don’t know how to work the equipment doesn’t mean you can insult me.”