Monk aimed across the clearing. He had one round, one shot.

Across the forest glade a pair of air tanks rested against the foot of a boulder. Earlier, as they were stripping out of their suits, Monk had Graff pass him his bio-suit’s air tank. The portable air cartridges were lightweight, constructed of an aluminum alloy. Using the ankle holster from his pistol, Monk had quickly bound the doctor’s tank together with his own and pitched the package in an underhanded throw across to the far side of the jungle clearing. The tanks had crashed amid the crabs, crushing a pair and sending their neighbors scurrying.

Monk took a bead upon the tanks now, steadying his aim with both flesh and prosthetics.

“They’re here!” Graff moaned.

Monk squeezed the trigger.

The blast froze the image in his mind for a split second — then one of the pressurized tanks spat a brief flash of flame. The bound tanks spun and clattered, hissing and jumping. Then the second tank’s nozzle cracked and the dance became more frenzied, smashing into crabs and sweeping and bouncing.

It was enough.

In the past Monk had strolled beaches covered with crabs that — once a seabird or stranger appeared — would clear in a heartbeat, crabs diving back into their sandy burrows. It was the same here. Those crabs nearest the commotion fled, climbing over their neighbors, jarring them into a panic. Soon a trickle became a stampede. The crabs, already riled up, fled on instinct.

The sea of crabs turned their tide — toward Monk — literally becoming a surging, churning wave of claws, climbing over one another to escape.

He fled back to the chestnut tree, pincers snapping at his heels.

He leaped and scurried up into the branches. One crab latched on to his boot. He cracked the shell against the trunk. It fell away. The pincer was still snagged tight to his boot. He felt the sharp edge cutting into his heel.

Damn.

Below, the tide of crabs swept past, obeying some instinct, possibly tied to their annual migration patterns. They fled toward the sea.

Monk climbed up to join Graff. The researcher had one arm hooked around the trunk. He eyed Monk, then turned back toward the slice of open rock that lay around the mouth of the sea tunnel.

The pirates, six of them, were out of the tunnel, spread a bit, but they had ducked low with the pistol shot. Only now were they rising to their feet, unsure.

Then from the jungle, the roiling sea of crabs burst forth.

It struck the man closest to the jungle fringe. Before he could react, comprehend what he was seeing, they scrambled up his legs to the level of his thighs. He suddenly screamed, stumbling back. Then one leg gave out under him.

During combat, a fellow Green Beret had had his Achilles tendon cut by a bullet. He had dropped in the same crooked manner as the pirate.

The man fell to one arm, screaming.

He was overrun, crabs scrabbling across his writhing body. But his wails continued, buried under the mass. For a moment, he surged back up. His mask had been stripped away, along with his nose, lips, and ears. His eyes were bloody ruins. He screamed one last time and fell back under the tide.

The other pirates fled in horrified panic, back to the tunnel, vanishing away. One man was cut off from the tunnel, pinned out on a spur of rock jutting off from the sea cliff. The crabs swelled toward him.

With a final cry he turned and leaped off the cliff.

More screams echoed up from the tunnel.

Like water down a drain, the sea of crabs swirled into the mouth of the tunnel, spiraling away in a red tide of razored claws.

Monk found Graff panting heavily beside him, eyes unblinking.

He reached and touched the man. He flinched.

“We have to go. Before the crabs decide to return to their forest.”

Graff allowed himself to be led down to the forest floor. There were still hundreds of crabs down here; they moved cautiously through them.

Monk broke off a feathery branch of the chestnut tree and swept away any of the crabs that got too near.

Slowly Graff seemed to return to himself, to settle back into his own skin. “I…I want one of those crabs.”

“We’ll have a crabfeed when we get back to the ship.”

“No. For study. Somehow they survived the toxic cloud. It could be important.” The researcher’s voice steadied, in his element.

“Okay,” Monk said. “Considering we left all our samples behind, we shouldn’t return to the ship empty-handed.”

He reached down and snagged up one of the smaller crabs with his prosthetic hand, grabbing it by the back of its shell. The feisty fellow snapped its claws backward at him, straining to get him.

“Hey, no marring the merchandise, buddy. New fingers come out of my paycheck.”

Monk went to smash it against a tree trunk, but Graff waved his good arm. “No! We need it alive. Like I said before, there’s something odd about their behavior. That bears examination, too.”

Monk’s jaw tightened in irritation. “Fine, but if this bit of sushi takes a chunk out of me, you’re paying for it.”

They continued through the plateau forest, wending across the island.

After forty minutes of trekking, the forest thinned and a panoramic cliff-top view opened. The island’s main township — named simply The Settlement — spread out along the beach and port. Out in the surrounding sea, beyond Flying Fish Cove, the white castle that was the Mistress of the Seas floated, a cloud in a midnight-blue sky.

Home, sweet home.

Movement drew Monk’s eyes to a group of smaller boats, a dozen, rounding Rocky Point, each leaving a contrail of white wake. The group traveled in a wide V, like an attack wing of fighter jets.

A matching group appeared on the other side of the township’s port.

Even from here Monk recognized the shape and color of the crafts.

Blue speedboats, long in keel and shallow draft.

“More pirates…” Graff moaned.

Monk stared between the two converging groups, two pincers, even more deadly than any red crab. He gaped at what was trapped between them.

The Mistress of the Seas.

Lisa stared at the radiograph X-ray.

The portable light box was set up on a desk in the cabin. Behind her, a figure lay sprawled on the bed, a sheet fully covering the patient.

Dead.

“It looks like tuberculosis,” she said. The radiographs of the man’s lungs were frothy with large white masses or tubercles. “Or maybe lung cancer.”

Dr. Henrick Barnhardt, the Dutch toxicologist, stood at her side, leaning a fist on the table. He had called her down here.

“Ja, but the patient’s wife said he’d shown no signs of respiratory distress prior to eighteen hours ago. No coughing, no expectorating, and he does not smoke. And he was only twenty-four years old.”

Lisa straightened. They were in the cabin alone. “And you’ve cultured his lungs?”

“I used a needle to aspirate some of the fluid from one of the lung masses. The content was definitely purulent. Cheesy with bacteria. Definitely a lung abscess, not cancer.”

She studied Barnhardt’s bearded face. He stood with a bit of a hunch as if his bearish size somehow embarrassed him, but it also gave him a conspiratorial posture. He had not invited Dr. Lindholm into these discussions.

“Such findings are consistent with tuberculosis,” she said.

TB was caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a highly contagious germ. And while the clinical history here was definitely unusual, TB could be dormant for years, slow-growing. The man could have been exposed years ago, been a ticking time bomb — then his exposure to the toxic gas could have stressed his lungs enough to cause the disease to spread. The patient would have definitely been contagious at the end.

And neither she nor Dr. Barnhardt wore contamination suits.