Death Echo

75

DAY SIX

WEST OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

8:09 P.M.

We’ve got to splint that wrist,” Emma said.

“Steer.”

“Splint. You’re no good to anyone if you pass out from pain.”

Mac couldn’t argue with that. There were bones grinding in his wrist, and each time it happened, the pain wrenched his stomach and blurred his vision. He’d had compound fractures before, so he knew it would get worse. A lot worse.

The stab wounds in his left thigh had joined the chorus. Temuri hadn’t gone down without exacting a blood payment. Mac was still paying, and would until he could get stitches.

That was one son of a bitch who lived up to his advance publicity, he thought unhappily. And I’ve lost more of my edge than I realized.

But his willpower was still intact.

He eased out of his small backpack, yet still almost blacked out when one of the straps snagged his wrist. He hissed a savage word between his teeth.

“I’m putting the wheel on auto,” Emma said.

“Not yet.”

“At least wear these so we don’t have to yell.” She slid his fragile-looking headset into place and spoke softly. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

It was more a rasp of sound than a word.

Mac’s backpack made a small thump when it hit the floor. He put his foot on it and yanked at the waterproof opening with his good hand. After a few moments he threw a med kit and a roll of duct tape on the pilot seat.

“Remember the machine space?” Mac asked.

“Where the tools were on the first Blackbird?”

He breathed through clenched teeth and ignored the agony that was his wrist. “See if there are tools down there now.”

“If I’m looking for splints, I’ll be happy to do it. If you’re planning a spot of boat repair, forget it.”

“Splints,” he agreed finally, and reached for the wheel. “If you see ear protectors lying around, put them on.”

Emma slid out of the way, pulled a small flashlight from her belly pack, and went to the middle of the salon. She held on to the overhead rail while a wave of dizziness surged through her. Her head felt like it had been slammed into an anvil.

Think about something else. Like getting home.

She hesitated, then left the tiny headset in place. If the noise bothered Mac, he could take off his own.

Temuri’s body lay at the far edge of the hatch. She could open it without having to touch him. She bent, tugged the hatch up, and was almost blown back by the unbridled thunder of the diesels. If the door had been installed between the machine space and engine room, obviously the cousins had left it open. With a grimace, she secured the hatch and eased down the steep, built-in stairway, clinging to something every inch of the way.

At the bottom she saw ear protectors dangling from a clip, grabbed them, and shoved them on over her smaller headset like oversized earmuffs. The bruise on her forehead rewarded her carelessness with blinding pain, but the assault of sound diminished to a bearable roar.

Sacks and satchels of tools lay scattered around. Either the cousins were messy, or the Blackbird’s wallowing had tossed things about. Probably both.

Staggered by the occasional jagged spurts of pain from having had her head banged against the sink, she began crawling carefully from bag to bag. Soon she had a selection of tools that might serve as splints. She emptied a small satchel into a larger one, filled the smaller one with her choices, and headed upstairs.

By the time she scrambled out of the space and closed the large hatch, Mac had found the best line for taking the waves and cut the speed back a few knots. As a result, the boat had settled down into something resembling the other Blackbird’s usual grace.

Mac was pale, sweaty, drawn. Somehow he had put a compression bandage around his thigh. The heavy elastic was already dark with blood.

Emma knew he was going to feel worse before it got better, but there was no help for that. The wrist had to be splinted. She peeled off the heavy ear protectors and set them on the pilot seat.

“There’s a shot of something like Novocain in the kit,” Mac said hoarsely.

Emma reached for the small red zipper case. It was already open and messy, like Mac had been sorting through it. Despite the surging waves and her throbbing skull, she found and set up the numbing shot quickly.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

Before she could argue, he grabbed the syringe and shoved the needle into his broken wrist. She braced him when his body shuddered in pain, then took the empty syringe when he was finished.

Sweat ran down his face.

“Tell me when it’s numb,” she said roughly. “I’ll steer.”

“Splint it now or I’ll do it without your help.”

Emma choked back her protests. Mac knew more about field medicine and the engine room of any ship than she did. If what they both feared was true, there was no time to educate her. He had to do the work himself.

Teeth clenched until they ached in time with her pulse, she measured the tools against his injured wrist. She selected two wrenches and wrapped them into place. Duct tape was good for more than handcuffs.

He kept steering. And sweating.

She was sweating, too.

“I’ll make a sling,” she said, turning away.

She pulled Temuri’s knife out of her belly bag as she went to the back of the salon and turned her little flashlight on. She knew that she’d probably have nightmares about Temuri’s open eyes staring at death, glassy in the cone of her flashlight, but that was for later.

Right now she needed his shirt for a sling. She leaned down and went to work with the already bloody knife.

As the worst of Mac’s wrist pain let up, the knife wounds in his left side felt like they were on fire. He’d already put a compression bandage on the thigh wound. The other one was on his hip, too high for anything close to a tourniquet. He knew that the steady blood loss from the wounds would bring him down, but he didn’t know when.

Mac forced himself to concentrate on the readouts and settings on the console behind the wheel. It didn’t take him long to confirm that the starboard trim tab was locked down on maximum. The port tab wasn’t being used at all, which meant that something on the port side of the boat was heavy enough to require a lot of compensating with the opposite trim tab.

He fought a wave of dizziness and nausea. He would rather have been wrong about Blackbird’s bad trim.

But he wasn’t, so he went through the tools remaining in the little satchel by touch. As he’d hoped, a telescoping rod had caught Emma’s eye. Holding the wheel on course with his right thigh, he put the rod between his teeth and clamped down.

Emma reappeared with stinking strips of Temuri’s shirt. Silently she knotted them into a rough sling. She arranged it on Mac and eased his wrist into place. Since he didn’t pass out during the process, she figured the numbing shot was working. Or maybe it was the steel tool clenched between his teeth.

He spat out the rod, caught it, then placed it carefully in the sling.

“Take the wheel,” he said, grabbing the big ear protectors from the seat. One-handed, he fumbled them into place. Like Emma, he didn’t bother removing his own communications headset first. “Keep the same angle into the waves.”

She slid by him and took over steering. She didn’t have his instinctive understanding of waves and bow angles, but she could keep Blackbird keel side down.

She hoped.

“I could use some headlights to see what’s coming,” she said.

“Why not call the Canadian Coasties while you’re at it? I don’t even have the running lights on.”

Whatever she might have said in reply was drowned out by the blast of engine noise as Mac heaved the hatch open and secured it. He put all his weight on his left hand and dropped into the machine space. Taking a chance, he flicked on the engine-room light.

On his left thigh, blood gleamed against his black waterproof gear and ran down his leg to the floor. More blood than he’d hoped, less than he’d feared. Either way, it was what it was.

He limped down the passageway between the two diesel engines that were identical to the ones he’d checked out in the other Blackbird.

One-handed, it took him three times as long to go over the engines. The fact that they were hot didn’t help, but being below waterline at least minimized the boat’s motion. Not that he didn’t burn himself more than once. Compared to what he’d already been through, the burns were nothing.

There was a slight leak from one of the packing boxes connecting the starboard engine with the pod drive. He caught a drop of the fluid, smelled it, tasted it. Saltwater from the cooling system. It was the kind of minor leak that came with new engines and usually fixed itself.

He went to the bulkhead wall and inspected the fuel manifold, a complicated set of high-pressure lines, gauges, and switches. Diesel engines weren’t as simple as gasoline, since diesels had a constant return flow of unused fuel. The gauges and levers told him that everything was working as expected.

There were no big blocks of lead or gold or anything else heavy strapped along the port side of the engine room. The extra weight had to be in the port fuel tank itself.

The big stainless-steel boxes of the fuel tanks were painted white. They were equipped with brass fittings and sight gauges that gave a direct measure of the level inside. The starboard engine registered full. So did the port.

He rapped his knuckles against the metal sides of each tank, but couldn’t be sure of anything through the ear protectors. He pushed against the metal of the starboard tank with his left hand. It gave ever so slightly, just as he expected.

But the port tank was like trying to flex a steel girder.

He dragged himself back to the manifold and studied its scheme again. It took him too long to figure out what was wrong because his eyesight kept going dark at the edges. But enough blinking and squinting told him that the lines that returned unburned diesel from the engines had been rearranged. The fuel return from the port engine had been rerouted to the starboard tank.

No wonder it didn’t take them long to refuel.

He limped heavily to the machine space, selected a wrench, and went to work on the inspection port welded to the top of the port fuel tank. By stretching and balancing on his good leg, he could peer into the tank just enough to see red diesel fuel sloshing around.

And bang his head a few times, making it ring along with the insidious dizziness that kept trying to bring him down.

With a savage curse he pulled the telescoping rod out of his sling. There was a magnet on one end for retrieving tools that fell into the bilge. He didn’t need the magnet, but he needed the extending rod. After a few misses thanks to waves rolling the deck beneath his feet, and his own eyesight taking holidays, he got one end of the rod in the inspection port. He hit the button that released the sections.

The rod went only six inches below the level of the fuel in the “full” tank.

Mac leaned against the tank while he closed the inspection port. Sweat made the wrench slippery. So did blood. A wave of dizziness nearly sent him to his knees.

Got to check the wiring harness, he told himself.

Another round of dizziness forced him to admit that he could check the wiring harness and pass out in the engine room, or he could climb back into the cabin and steer until he passed out.

Wrong answers.

He fumbled some pills from his pocket. He’d really hoped to delay taking them. The false energy of chemicals didn’t prevent blood loss, and had never worked long for him anyway, but he had no choice. He had to stay on his feet until they reached the border.

He put the pills under his tongue and let them melt.

In less than a minute, a wave of adrenaline roared through him, burning away the darkness that kept trying to shut him down. That was the good news. The bad news was that when the chemicals wore off, he would crash. Period. No exemption for emergencies.

He was hoping he would last more than an hour.

Experience told him it would be less than half that.

Mac limped slowly toward the wiring harness. Like arteries, the wires took power from the fuel-driven heart of the ship. He wiped sweat out of his eyes, noted without interest that he must be bleeding somewhere on his head, and began tracing wires according to function. Knowing there had been modifications to the port tank made him distrust anything he couldn’t see for himself.

Leaning heavily against any available support that didn’t burn him, he studied the reinforced blue rubber hosing and individual metal fittings of the fuel injection systems. Electronically controlled diesel engines operated at very high pressures. The connectors and hoses were notorious for leakage.

These metal connectors were bright, shining in the hard fluorescent light. Just right for a new boat. Yet the longer he looked at the hoses, the more he thought something was wrong.

Even with the chemicals sleeting through his blood, it took him several minutes to realize what his eyes were seeing. Two of the hoses were a lighter shade of blue than the others. It was a subtle difference, but real. Since the engines had been installed at the same time, the tubing should be precisely the same.

Two of the hoses had been changed out.

Mac wiped his eyes, cursed the scalp wound that bled like a faucet into his eyes, and followed the two hoses. One led from the fuel distribution manifold to the generator that was mounted on a platform between the big diesel propulsion engines. The second ran from the manifold around to the back of the starboard fuel tank.

Why? There already are hoses in place for fuel supply and return on the generator.

He forced himself to concentrate on each detail. The hoses looked like fuel lines but one of them was connected to the output line of the generator, not the fuel system. He squeezed the line. It didn’t feel right. No humming tension of fuel under pressure.

Why?

It made no sense.

Mac staggered to the machine space and dragged a satchel of wrenches into the engine room. He fumbled out one wrench, found it didn’t fit, and tried another. By the fourth wrench he’d found a winner.

Carefully, fighting dizziness and the constant lurch and roll of the deck beneath his feet, he went to work on the connector at the generator end of the circuit. After a minute it gave way. He unthreaded it and slid it back down the blue hose.

It wasn’t a fuel line. It was a heavy-gauge electrical wire.

With growing dread, he followed the wire. It was tied into the electrical circuit that ran from the generator to one of the starter batteries.

A different kind of adrenaline slammed through Mac.

Fear, pure and simple.