The Last Passenger Read Online Free

murmured. He pointed the floodlight toward his men and cursed.
    A smashed lifeboat hung a few feet above them. Having come loose from its support, the boat had shattered against the Valkyrie ’s hull. Now it was barely hanging by one end.
    “Shit! Look at the pulley wheel. It’s given out,” remarked Duff from the back, relieved. “That was close! We could have been crushed like ants.”
    “You’ll always remember this as the day you were nearly flattened by a pulley that gave way,” answered O’Leary without taking his eyes off the dangling lifeboat. Unless someone sabotaged it, he thought. He had no idea why this had occurred to him, but it triggered a flash of acid in his stomach. He wouldn’t swear it, but he was fairly certain he had heard something just before the lifeboat came loose.
    They maneuvered until they were able to hook the grapple on the bottom end of the broken lifeboat. With one end tightly secured, O’Leary turned to his men.
    “Who’s coming with me?”
    The two exchanged glances. Neither moved.
    “What if we all go up, sir?” came Duff’s voice, almost pleading. “It’s a very large vessel.”
    “Plus, I don’t want to be left alone on this damned raft while you two walk around up there, sir,” added Stepanek.
    “All right,” O’Leary conceded. “Secure the raft before we go up. If it goes adrift, the old man will have our heads, especially mine.”
    In less than a minute the officer and the two sailors secured the raft and began to crawl up the wreckage of the lifeboat. O’Leary tried to control his breath while he climbed. He stretched out his arm and grabbed the bulwark to climb aboard.
    Then, several things happened at once.
    First, O’Leary felt cold again, but this was a bitter cold that charged into his veins, cutting his breath short. The metal of the rail was so frigid that he had to suppress a yell of pain.
    Second, the silence. Nothing could be heard aboard that mammoth ship.
    Third, the overwhelming sensation he was being watched.
    The three mariners clustered together on board the Valkyrie , unsure what to do next.
    “Let’s go to the bow and then to the bridge,” said the first officer, trying to control his voice. “If there’s nobody aboard, then we’ll toss our cable over to the Ballaster and tow her to port. Rescuing a ship like this should make for a tidy sum!”
    As they explored the deck, using their lanterns to light the way, O’Leary was overcome by a wave of excitement. Until now it hadn’t occurred to him that the ship might be deserted. International maritime law dictated that a third party had the right to rescue any goods abandoned at sea. The abandoned ship’s owner would have to fork over an enormous premium to recover the property.
    “Did you hear that?” asked Stepanek suddenly, wrenching the senior officer from his reverie.
    O’Leary pricked up his ears but could not detect anything unusual.
    “What am I supposed to be listening for? I don’t hear anything.”
    It took O’Leary a moment to catch on—he couldn’t hear anything at all besides their footsteps. Neither the creak of metal nor the clang of a skylight closing. Not even a gust of wind whistling across a sail.
    Nothing.
    It’s almost as if the entire ship is holding its breath. The idea, like a snake, slithered into O’Leary’s thoughts. We are being watched.
    “Quit fooling around,” he whispered, unaware he had lowered his voice. “Let’s work our way to the bridge and finish this as quickly as we can.”
    The Valkyrie ’s deck was lost in the darkness. Their lantern barely illuminated the few feet in front of them while the mist flickered in its light. As they walked, O’Leary took note of the lifeboat pulleys with an expert eye. Since the Titanic disaster some twenty-seven years earlier, every passenger liner in the world was required to be equipped with enough vessels to seat every passenger and crew member. The Valkyrie was much smaller than the Titanic ,