Plague Ship
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The main protagonist of the novel is Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice on the Free Trader rocket ship the Solar Queen. Free Traders take on trading contracts on remote and recently discovered planets, which can be dangerous and unpredictable.
The Solar Queen has recently obtained a valuable trading contract on the planet Sargol and are building a relationship with one of the races on the planet, the cat-like Salariki. The process goes slowly till the Salariki discover that the Solar Queen is carrying catnip and other plants from Terra that are unknown on Sargol. The traders exchange what little of the plants they have for the rare and valuable Koros stones and collect a native red-colored wood to exchange at home. At the last minute the storm priests of the Salariki demand that the Solar Queen take a pre-paid contract to return within 6 months with more plants.
A few days after leaving the planet, several members of the crew suffer from attacks, which start with severe headaches and end in a semi-coma state. Only 4 of the younger members of the crew are unaffected, including Dane Thorson. Upon exiting hyperspace on return to the vicinity of Terra, the crew discovers that they are pariah and have been declared a plague ship.
On the short hop to earth, the crew discovers that pests have invaded the ship and are the cause of the illness. In a final bid to prove their case they kidnap a medic and present his evidence by video to a solar-system-wide audience, which is successful.
Plague Ship is the fifth installment of The Oregon Files by Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul. It recounts a series of violent viral attacks on cruise ships by extremists who want to make half the world's population sterile. The group, named "The Responsivists", is a thinly disguised cover for "Scientologists".
The crew of the Oregon has just completed a top secret mission against Iran to steal a rocket torpedo that was illegally sold to them by the Russian Federation, when they come across a cruise ship named the Golden Dawn adrift at sea. The passengers and crew were killed by a hemorrhagic fever, similar to Ebola. The Golden Dawn is similar to the Emerald Dolphin that appears in Valhalla Rising (novel), a book in Cussler's Dirk Pitt series
As Captain and Corporation leader Juan Cabrillo tries to determine what happened, explosions wrack the length of the ship. Barely able to escape with his own life and that of the liner's sole survivor, Jannike Dahl, Cabrillo finds himself plunged into a mystery as intricate and perilous as any he has ever known. He'll be pitted against a cult with monstrously lethal plans for the human race - plans he may already be too late to stop.
But what is most illuminating to us about the New Orleans yellow fever outbreak of 1878 is the question of when things return to normal after an epidemic. The lesson of that particular plague is that sometimes they never really do.
In 1878, several years had passed without a major outbreak of yellow fever, but that year the disease struck New Orleans with vengeance. In June, 1878, the steamship Emily Souder had stopped off in Cuba on its way to New Orleans, and when it docked in the city, people started dying.
Several aspects of the 1878 outbreak mirror episodes in the COVID-19 pandemic. One was when cruise ships were feared floating incubators of coronavirus and forbidden to dock at ports. The famous plague ship of 1878 was not a grand ocean vessel like the Diamond Princess, but a much more humble riverboat steamer named the John D. Porter. It set out from Memphis, Tennessee, carrying passengers desperate to flee the city, only to be turned away from each port upriver from Memphis by authorities who feared it harbored the disease itself.
For four novels, Clive Cussler has charted the exploits of the Oregon, a covert ship completely dilapidated on the outside but, on the inside, packed with sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment. Captained by the rakish, one-legged Juan Cabrillo and manned by a crew of former military and spy personnel, it is a private enterprise, available for any government agency that can afford it—and now Cussler sends the Oregon on its most extraordinary mission yet.
The crew has just completed a top secret mission against Iran in the Persian Gulf, when they come across a cruise ship adrift in the sea. Hundreds of bodies litter its deck, and as Cabrillo tries to determine what happened, explosions rack the length of the ship. Barely able to escape with his own life and that of the liner's sole survivor, Cabrillo finds himself plunged into a mystery as intricate—and as perilous—as any he has ever known, and pitted against a cult with monstrously lethal plans for the human race...plans he may already be too late to stop.
Far from random, the placement of U-boats was planned out with the forethought of a chess master advancing his pieces. Every scrap of intelligence was gathered about the strength, speed, and destination of ships plying the North Atlantic in order to have submarines positioned to strike.
From bases in Norway and Denmark, patrol aircraft scoured the seas, looking for the convoys of merchantmen, radioing positions back to fleet headquarters so the U-boats could lie in wait for their prey. For the first years of the war, the submarines enjoyed near-total supremacy of the seas, and untold millions of tons of shipping had been sunk without mercy. Even under heavy escort by cruisers and destroyers, the Allies could do little more than play the odds of having one ship sunk for every ninety-nine that made it through. By being gambled so coldly, the men of the merchant marine paid as high a toll as frontline combat units.
The four-engined Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Kondorwas a massive plane—seventy-seven feet long, with a wingspan of nearly one hundred and ten feet. Designed before the war for Lufthansa as a passenger airliner, the aircraft had been quickly pressed into military duty as both a transport and a long-range reconnaissance platform. Her twenty-five-hundred-mile range allowed the Kondor to remain aloft for hours and hunt Allied shipping far from shore.
The aircraft's pilot, Franz Lichtermann, chafed at the monotonous hours spent searching the trackless sea. He longed to be in a fighter squadron, fighting the real war, not loitering thousands of feet above frigid nothingness hoping to spot Allied shipping for someone else to sink. Back at base, Lichtermann maintained a high level of military decorum and expected the same from his men. However, when they were on patrol and the minutes stretched with the elasticity of India rubber, he allowed a certain amount of familiarity among the five-man crew.
"The squadron commander assured me that a U-boat returning from patrol spotted at least a hundred ships two days ago above the Faeroe Islands," Lichtermann told his crew. "The ships were heading north, so they've got to be out here somewhere."
He thought grimly about all the men dying on the Eastern Front, and about how the tanks and planes shipped to the Russians prolonged the inevitable fall of Moscow. Lichtermann would be more than happy to sink a few ships himself.
The Allied powers had done a remarkable job of applying dizzying camouflage patterns to their freighters and tankers, to prevent observers from seeing the ships from the surface, but nothing could hide a convoy at night, since the wakes that formed behind the vessels burned white against the ocean.
At first, it was just a large patch of gray on the otherwise-dark water, yet, as they flew closer, the gray sharpened to become dozens of parallel white lines, as distinct as chalk marks on a blackboard. They were the wakes of an armada of ships, driving eastward as fast as it could. From the Kondor's altitude, the ships looked as plodding as elephants traveling in a herd.
CAMs, or Catapult Aircraft Merchantmen, were the Allies' answer to German aerial reconnaissance. A long rail was mounted over the bows of a freighter, and, with a rocket assist, they could launch a Hawker Sea Hurricane fighter aircraft to shoot down the lumbering Kondors or even attack surfaced U-boats. The drawback to the CAMs was that the planes couldn't land back aboard their mother ship. The Hurricanes either had to be close enough to Great Britain or some other friendly area for the pilots to land normally. Otherwise, the plane had to be ditched in the sea and the pilot rescued from the water.
The convoy steaming below the Fw 200 was more than a thousand miles from any Allied territory, and even with the bright moon a downed pilot would be impossible to rescue in the dark. There would be no Hurricanes launched tonight. The Kondor had nothing to fear from the mass of Allied shipping unless it strayed within range of the destroyers and the curtain of antiaircraft fire they could throw into the sky.
Kessler came to a stop under the bow of a huge ship, constructed of thick wood with copper sheathing and towering over his head, that had become trapped in the ice. Knowing how slowly glaciers moved, he estimated that for the vessel to be so deeply buried it had been here for thousands of years. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen. Even as that thought crossed his mind, he knew it wasn't true. He'd seen pictures of this ship before. There were illustrations in the Bible his grandfather used to read to him when he was a boy. Kessler had much preferred the Old Testament stories to the preachings of the New, so he even recalled the ship's dimensions—one hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide, and thirty cubits tall.
At some point as it traveled through space, Cybonic plague spread through the ship's crew and they all died, leaving the ship flying without control. It eventually crashed on Earth in a remote area. Centuries later, Team Prime detected the ship's emergency beacon, and Optimus Prime and Ratchet cut their way into the ship to search for potential survivors. They found only bodies, but the unstable ship moved as they walked through it, causing infected energon to drip onto Optimus and resulting in him catching the plague. Sick Mind 781b155fdc