Chapter 4 - The bunk Kane should never have opened
By the time I reached berthing, my mattress had already been ripped apart.
So had half the compartment.
Locker doors hung open. Uniforms were scattered across the deck. One sailor stood in the passageway pretending to resecure a panel he had not touched, his face gray with the kind of fear that comes from being seen near something poisonous.
My bunk was stripped down to bare metal.
The NCIS packet was gone.
For one second, all I could hear was the blood pounding behind my eyes.
Kane knew.
Not guessed.
Knew.
Bennett closed the hatch behind us while Reed searched the locker frame with shaking hands.
“Anything left?”
I dropped to one knee and ran my fingers under the lower support rail. My father had raised me on redundancy. If something mattered, you never trusted a single hiding place.
Tape brushed my knuckles.
I peeled back a flat-wrapped memory card no bigger than my thumbnail.
Reed let out a breath. “Please tell me that’s useful.”
“It’s the backup routing file.”
“Does Ward know?”
“She will if we live long enough.”
Alvarez dug under the shredded mattress and came up with a half-torn sheet of paper. Kane must have missed it in his hurry.
It was one page from the original NCIS packet.
A surveillance photo.
Not of Kane.
Of a civilian freighter.
Its hull name blurred by distance, but I recognized the shape from pre-briefing.
Santa Mercedes.
The floating ghost ship that appeared on no official military schedule but somehow seemed to share port windows with the Resolute just often enough to smell like coincidence.
Reed took the paper.
“He’s still making the transfer.”
“Of course he is,” I said. “If he doesn’t, all he’s done is expose himself early.”
Bennett leaned against the bulkhead. “Then we stop the transfer.”
Simple sentence.
Impossible task.
Kane had armed men.
Control of the bridge.
Control of the ship logs.
And now, at least in part, control of the story.
Unless we rewrote it faster.
Then Reed found what I had missed.
Stuffed between my locker wall and the frame was a folded route sheet. Not mine. Kane’s.
He had dropped it or planted it. With him, both possibilities mattered.
The course deviation was marked to rendezvous at 2100 hours—four hours ahead of our declared position. No official meeting. No fueling note. No humanitarian exchange. Just coordinates in a blank patch of Pacific blue.
Below them, in Kane’s handwriting:
Clear lower deck. Only loyal personnel.
“Loyal,” Bennett said quietly. “That tells you everything.”
It did.
Kane was not planning to protect the ship.
He was planning to protect the operation.
Then the general alarm sounded once.
Not emergency.
Assembly.
Through the bulkhead speaker, Kane’s voice rolled out warm and composed.
“All personnel, report to evening accountability muster. Due to a serious internal breach, no one is to leave formation without direct authorization. Lieutenant Reed and Petty Officer Cole are considered security risks.”
Reed looked at me.
“He’s naming us in front of everybody.”
“He wants the crew to choose sides.”
“No,” Bennett said.
We looked at her.
“He wants them to choose safety.”
That was smarter.
And truer.
Then the lights flickered once.
Alvarez straightened.
“That’s the lower cargo crane powering up.”
I looked at the route sheet, then at the memory card in my palm.
He wasn’t waiting for dark.
May you like
He was moving the transfer early.
And if Kane was using the crane already, then Santa Mercedes was close enough to see.
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