Life Goes On by Tayell, Frank (large ebook reader txt) 📗

“A massacre,” Adams said. “Those were yachts. Sailing boats. Travelling together. At least twenty so far, but likely to be around ten times that number. They were deliberately sunk, and within the last week. Probably within the last seventy-two hours. Possibly even more recently than that. I’ve sent crews to the deck to look for survivors.”

“Who would do this?” Tess asked. “Sorry, that’s the wrong question. How was it done?”

“Heavy machine gun and explosives,” Adams said. “It’s too early to be certain, but I would think a torpedo.”

“From a submarine?”

“Or from a ship,” Adams said.

Tess crossed to a console, where Mr Kane was analysing images from the ship’s cameras.

“Wait,” she said. “No, can you go back a couple of seconds?”

“Where to?” the lieutenant asked.

“I thought I saw… yes, there’s a life jacket, but without anyone inside. Captain, life jackets are marked with the name of the ship, aren’t they? Can we pick some up?”

“We can certainly get images of them.”

It took an hour to travel through the debris field. They were able to put names to fourteen different vessels either from life jackets, upturned hulls, or other floating wreckage. One of those ships was the Isabella la Bella, the last vessel to have recorded its name at Dégrad des Cannes.

3rd April

Chapter 35 - Tomorrow’s Battle

Venezuela

At midday, the appointed hour for the planning meeting, Tess stepped into the wardroom, and was surprised to find it almost empty. Only Captain Adams and Colonel Hawker were present.

“Am I early?” she asked.

“After discovering the wreckage yesterday, I decided to limit who was involved in this decision,” Adams said. “I can offer you water. We’re out of tea, even the powdered kind. We’re so low on supplies we might be forced to eat those dollar-bars you brought from Australia, though we’re not so desperate yet.”

“How does the wreckage of those yachts change our plans?” Tess asked.

“It clarifies them,” Hawker said.

“That’s an apt description,” Adams said. “When you first pitched this mission of yours, I thought we might get as far as Ascension, and find it a flooded graveyard. On deciding to cross the Atlantic, I wasn’t sure what we’d find. I didn’t expect South America to be worse than Africa. By now, I thought we’d have met some local survivors with local knowledge of what happened here. We’ve only found ghosts and echoes, without a single piece of actionable intel.”

“Does this change our destination?” Tess asked. “Are we skipping Colombia?”

“No,” Adams said. “We will still aim for the cartel’s redoubt.”

“The lack of information limits our options,” Hawker said. “I’ve been staring at this map for a week. Trying to think like these Herrera sisters. They knew what none of the rest of us did. They knew a nuclear war was coming.”

“They knew about the zombies, too,” Tess said.

“Proof if we needed it that we’re not dealing with a rational mind,” Hawker said. “We’re planning with severely limited data. We know there’s a coal mine and a runway, and there must be a water source, but the region is mostly desert.” He pointed at the regional map displayed on the wall. “Our target is Puerto Bolivar, fifty kilometres west-southwest of Punta Gallinas, the most northerly point on the continent. It’s a peninsula on a peninsula down which the border with Venezuela runs. The nearest major city is Maracaibo in Venezuela. Beyond the desert are mountains and jungle-rainforest. It’s relatively untouched, and relatively uninhabited. But across the sea is the tourist-island of Aruba. If we ignore the mountains, it’s not that far from the Venezuelan oil fields. This is not where you’d rebuild civilisation, but it’s a great place to wait for the fallout to settle.”

“The jungle, the mountains, and then the desert all create a barrier to refugees arriving by land,” Adams said. “So does the sea, of course, and the wreckage we saw yesterday tells us what happens to unarmed ships sailing through these waters.”

“You think they were attacked by the sisters?” Tess asked.

“The wreckage was too recent to have been caused by the Vepr,” Adams said. “Either it was the sisters, or there is another hostile ship in these waters.”

“The cartel had a coal mine,” Bruce said. “I’d guess that was a cover for smuggling. But a mine requires miners, and they require food. That flotilla would have contained a lot of hungry mouths. Easier to sink them than persuade them to turn around.”

“A coal mine and a water source,” Tess said. “They must have a coal turbine.”

“Probably, but they would have diesel for the ships,” Adams said. “At least one of which was capable of destroying that flotilla of refugees. Don’t think of the locals as miners. Not anymore. Think of them as conscripted soldiers. If they want to eat, they have to fight.”

“They used the coal mine as cover for shipping narcotics,” Tess said. “The limitation is you can only ship to countries which still imported coal.”

“But the narcotics are cover, too,” Hawker said. “Cover for the laboratory where they made compound-zom. But what about imports? They knew the apocalypse was coming. They’ll have brought in weapons and food to keep that army fed.”

“Weapons to sink a ship,” Tess said. “You could install a deck-mounted torpedo-system on a fishing trawler, couldn’t you? Wouldn’t buying some of those be less conspicuous than buying a warship?”

“The captain on my first posting said you should always assume the worst,” Adams said. “It isn’t always the best advice. But here it holds. Natal is the most easterly cape. Punta Gallinas is the most northerly. Let us assume the sisters fed false intel to their associates, and the destruction of Natal was an attempt to wipe out the cartel. In which case, the sisters knew that a submarine might be sent to hunt them. Yes, they would