Death Echo

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.

76

DAY SIX

SOUTH OF TOFINO

8:33 P.M.

Emma worked to hold Blackbird close to the course Mac had laid out. It took more strength than she’d expected. The waves seemed bigger, steeper, pushed up rather than rounded. As Mac had warned her, the wind was backing toward southeast, changing everything.

And the radar was getting flakey. Once in a while it returned an odd blip off to their stern, just at the edge of the radar’s reach. Sometimes the echo was there, more often it wasn’t, making it more a tease than a threat.

Or maybe it was just the meds and the fact that a big freighter was closing with them that had her edgy. On the radar, the ship’s echo looked like an island. She hoped that Mac returned before