Island 731

or simply entertaining themselves?

“This is odd,” Joliet said, bending down to the skeleton with the illusion of a third arm.

Hawkins glanced at her, but as he did, he saw something strange, too. He turned back to Coffman’s body. The left arm looked strange. He turned his head to the side, trying to get a good look at both arms at once. He knelt down and placed one hand at Coffman’s shoulder and the other at his wrist—the hand was missing. Without shifting his hands, he picked them up and moved them to the right arm. The hell? While his system of measurement was crude, he felt positive that Coffman’s left arm was at least three inches shorter than the right. The bones in the left arm were also thinner.

Was Coffman deformed? Hawkins wondered, but then discounted it. He doubted a man with a deformed arm would have seen active duty outside of an office setting or hospital. It might not have been much of a handicap, but in a war setting, a weaker arm would definitely be a liability. Then what? Malnutrition? That didn’t make sense, either. It wouldn’t affect a single arm.

Hawkins leaned in close. The left arm almost looked dainty. Feminine. His head snapped to the left, where the woman they’d first discovered lay, three bodies over. The woman’s right arm lay to her side. The left arm was missing.

He faintly heard Bray asking him what he was doing, but ignored the man. He could barely hear him over the rushing of his own blood. He measured out the left arm again. Doing his best to keep his arms in place, he stood and walked to the skeleton missing an arm. He placed his hands over the right arm.

They matched.

He leaned up, eyes wide, but not seeing. “Fuck.”

Hawkins snapped out of his daze. Joliet had muttered the same curse, at the same moment he had.

“What is it with you two?” Bray asked as he stomped toward them. “What are you doing?”

“Coffman’s left arm,” Hawkins said. “It’s not his.” He looked down at the woman missing a limb. He pointed to the empty shoulder joint. “It’s hers.”

Bray stumbled back a few steps. “What?” His eyes darted back and forth between Coffman’s body and the woman’s. “That can’t be right.”

“It’s right,” Joliet said and then pointed to the body she’d been inspecting. “You thought there was another row of bodies beneath these because of the extra limbs.” She looked up at Bray. “There is no second row. The third arm—” Her eyes moved to Hawkins. “It’s been surgically attached.”

Hawkins and Bray both leaned over the woman. Joliet had cleared the sand away from the arm, revealing a shoulder ball joint with a pin in it. The pin ran straight through the bone where it attached to the sixth rib. It wasn’t hard to picture this person in life, in agony, with a limp arm hanging from the ribs.

“These people weren’t tortured,” he said. “They were experimented on.”

A deep roar filled the lagoon valley. All three of them jumped back, spinning around in search of the sound’s source. Hawkins found it in a cloud of gray smoke issuing from the Magellan’s exhaust.

The engines were running.

“How you like that?” Drake said over the radio, sounding pleased. “It’s about as piss-poor a rig as I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to two-way radio every course change to the engine room so they can manually adjust the ship, but we’ll be mobile.”

Hawkins stood and looked down at the three-armed body. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that, sir.”

He knew they couldn’t leave without discovering Kam’s fate, but it was nice to know they could, if they had to. He didn’t think getting through the sharply bending channel that led into the lagoon would be easy, but if they moved slowly enough, they could do it. They could escape the island graveyard.

“Let’s get back to the Magellan,” Hawkins said. “Figure out what to do next.”

Neither Bray nor Joliet disagreed. They quickly and quietly made for the Zodiac. Hawkins took one last look at the jungle and the bodies and hoped that if Kam were in the hands of the people who had committed these crimes, or their descendants, that he was being treated well, or already dead. The alternative was unthinkable.

15.

The lavish spread on the mess hall’s long dinner table felt inappropriate, given the fact that two men were dead, another missing, and they’d just uncovered the bodies of fifteen mutilated war crime victims, at least three of which were United States Navy. But it seemed surviving the storm and getting the engines back up was cause for celebration. At least it was to the Tweedle brothers.

In attendance were Captain Drake, Blok, Bray, Joliet, and Hawkins. Ray and Jim Clifton remained in the kitchen preparing meals for Jones and Bennett, who’d kept working in engineering, Sanchez, in case he woke up, and DeWinter, who manned the bridge. The crew normally ate in shifts, and the captain almost always ate alone, but this was as much a group debriefing as it was a meal.

The table held an assortment of foods. Grilled steaks sat in front of everyone except for Blok, a vegetarian who got pasta instead. Sides included mashed potatoes, green beans, and salads with dried cranberry, sugar- coated almonds, and avocado, served in frozen bowls. Not exactly high on the fancy scale, but filling, comforting, and served with red wine that helped ease Hawkins’s tension.

He’d eaten quickly, devouring the food while listening to Jones explain how the young Phil Bennett had been the one to figure out the engine problems. He heard the details, but only retained what was important—the engines worked. After Jones finished speaking, conversation faded to little more than “pass the salt.” It seemed that discussing what they’d found on the island, both living and dead, would wait until everyone had finished eating. During the silence, Hawkins sketched the strange lizard he’d seen. He drew a top view, a side view, and a nasty close-up of its strange, fanged teeth.

His mind drifted as he used a paper stump to smudge the dark charcoal he employed to draw the image. The shading brought the lizards face to life, its black and white eye staring at Hawkins as it had in the jungle—with grim intention.

Drake cleared his throat loudly, snapping Hawkins out of his memories. He flinched and dragged a smudge across the creature’s extended wing.

After wiping his bearded face with a cloth napkin, Drake said, “I don’t normally do things this way, but given the gravity of our situation, I want to hear from all of you before I make any decisions.” He tossed the napkin on his cleared plate and continued. “We’ve got two men dead, one that might be in a coma, and another missing. We have the most basic control of the Magellan, but still no communications, no radar, no navigations. If we try to leave we’ll be sailing by the stars with no weather service. We’d be on our own.

“Way I see it,” the captain said, “we have three choices. First, we stay right here, find Kam, and then leave.”

“Uh-uh,” Bray said, nibbling on an almond. “If someone boarded the Magellan and took Kam, I don’t think we should make ourselves a target by staying in the lagoon.”

Joliet wielded her fork like a laser pointer, aiming it at Bray. “You think we should leave Kam behind?”

“No, no,” he said. “I think we should get the ship out of this lagoon, anchor off shore—far enough to make swimming the distance tough—and come back in the small boats.”

“Which is option number two,” Drake said. “Park off shore and return to search in shifts. We’ll set up a search grid, and—”

“Won’t work,” Hawkins said, not lifting his eyes from the page as he added stripes to the lizard’s top view. “The island is too big to search a grid with so few people while returning to the ship every night. From what I could see, most of the island meets the sea with a cliff. The lagoon might be the only way to make land. We also have to assume that Kam—if he’s alive—or the people holding him, might be mobile. You can’t search an area and then assume he won’t be there later. We’d be better off leaving, getting help, and returning with a small army.”

“And that would be option three,” Drake said.

“I can’t believe you’re suggesting that,” Joliet said.

“Makes sense,” Blok said, running his hands over his bald head. “It’s possible Kam is already dead and we’d