The Mediterranean Caper Read online

  Companionways, port and starboard alleyways, they all seemed to merge into one long black, underground tunnel. It was an effort not to lose his sense of direction in the maze. A naked man, except for the flotation vest, in a dark nightmare of gray paint and steel walls. He tripped over a bulkhead step and fell, banging a shin and dropping the flashlight; all in harmony with an uttered, “Goddamn!”

  The flashlight had fallen on the hard deck, shattering the lens and blinking out. He knelt on his hands and knees, muttering additional curses and searching frantically. After agonizing seconds his hands grasped the aluminum-plated case. The glass of the lens tinkled with grim foreboding inside the cloth cover. He picked it up and pushed the switch forward. The bulb blinked on as dull as ever. Pitt uttered a gasp of relief and shined the subdued beam down the passage. It dimly illuminated a door that was titled Fire Passage - Number Three Hold.

  The great chambers of Carlsbad Caverns couldn’t have looked much less formidable than Number Three Hold. All that Pitt’s light showed was a vast steel cave crammed with countless sacks and stacked from deck to hatch cover on wooden tiers. The air was permeated with a sweet Incense kind of odor. The cocoa from Ceylon, Pitt surmised. He took the diver's knife and cut a small half inch hole in the coarse cloth of one of the sacks. A flow of stony hard beans fell to the deck, bouncing and rattling like a hail on a quonset hut. A quick examination under the flashlight proved the parchment skinned beans to be the genuine article.

  Suddenly he heard a noise. It was faint and indistinct, but it was there. He froze, listening. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had come, and silence once more gripped the haunted ship; a deserted ship with all its dark and hidden

  secrets. Maybe it’s a ghost ship after all, Pitt mused. Another Mary Celeste or Flying Dutchman. All that was missing was a stormy sea with rain lashing the top decks and lightning flashing in the night and a gale shrieking through the derricks.

  There was nothing more to see in the hold. Pitt left and headed for the engine room. He lost a precious eight minutes finding the right companionway. The heart of the ship was warm from the heat of the engines and smelled of hot oil. He stood on the catwalk above the huge and lifeless machinery and searched for a sign that would indicate bona fide human activity. The flashlight caught the gleam of burnished pipes that snaked across the bulkheads in geometric parallel line., ending in a mass fusion of valves and gauges. Then the faint beam fell on a carelessly wadded oily rag. Above the rag was a shelf containing several coffee-stained cups, and to the left of those, a tray of scattered tools with greasy finger marks. At least someone was working this part of the ship, he thought, quite relieved. He knew that most engine rooms were kept as clean as a hospital ward, but this one was messy. But where was the chief engineer and his oilmen? They couldn’t have evaporated into the Aegean atmosphere.

  Pitt started to leave, then he stopped. There it was again; the same mysterious sound, echoing through the ship’s hull. He stood stock-still, holding his breath for what seemed a lifetime. It was an odd, uncanny sound, like the scraping of a ship’s keel over a submerged rock or coral reef. Pitt involuntarily shivered. It also reminded him of the way chalk squeaked across a blackboard. The sound lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then it was punctuated with the dull clank of metal against metal.

  Pitt had never sat bathed with cold sweat in a cell on San Quentin’s death row, waiting for the warden and the prison guards to escort him to the gas chamber. Nor. did he have to be there to describe the experience for he knew exactly what it felt like. To be alone in a claustrophobic atmosphere, expecting the footsteps of death to come treading from the black unknown, was a blood chilling business. When in doubt, he thought, run like a son of a bitch. And run like a son of a bitch he did. Back through the alleyways, back up the companion-stairs, until at last his lungs were greeted by the pure, wholesome air on deck.

  The early morning was still dark and the derricks reached toward the velvet ceiling of a sky that was alive. with a dazzling array of stars. There was scarcely a stir of wind. Over the bridge, the radio mast swayed back and forth across the milky way, and below Pitts's feet, the hull creaked from the rolls of the gentle swells. He hesitated a moment, gazing at the dark line of the Thasos coast, yet a bare mile away. Then he looked down at the smooth black surface of the water. It looked so inviting. so peaceful.

  The flashlight still glowed. Pitt cursed his stupidity for not switching it off when he reached the open deck. Might as well have advertised my presence with a neon sign, he thought. He quickly doused the light. Then carefully, so as not to cut himself on the broken glass, he unwrapped his swim trunks and removed the remains of the lens. He hurled the tiny slivers over the railing and listened till the faint splash, like rain on a pond, reached his ears. He was tempted to deep six the flashlight too, but his mind shifted into gear and rejected the impulse. Leaving the rack in the wheelhouse void of the flashlight would be about as clever as sending the captain, if there was a captain, a telegram and saying, “Just before dawn, there was a prowler on board your ship who ransacked it from stem to stern.” It very definitely wasn’t a smart move, not with people like these who had outfoxed nearly every law enforcement agency in the world. The fact that the lens was missing would be a gamble that Pitt would have to take.

  He glanced at his watch as he hurried back to the wheelhouse. The luminous hands showed 4:13. The sun would be blossoming soon. He scrambled onto the bridge and replaced the flashlight in the rack. His haste was almost frantic. He had to be off the ship, into his diving gear and a good two hundred yards distant before daylight gave him away.

  The forward deck was still deserted, or at least it seemed to be. A fluttering noise came from behind Pitt. Instantly he spun around in a sudden renewed fear and unsheathed the knife in one deft movement. His nerves were stretched taut to the border of panic, his head pounded like a drum roll. God, he thought, I can’t be caught now, not this close to safety.

  it was nothing but a gull that had flown out of the night and landed in a ventilator, the bird pointed a tiny eye at Pitt and cocked its head questioningly. No doubt wondering what sort of crazy human would run around a ship in the early morning, clothed in nothing but a flotation vest while holding a knife in one hand and a bathing suit in the other. The relief made Pitt feel weak at the knees. It had been quite a scare and he was badly shaken. When he boarded the ship he didn’t know what he expected to find: what he found was silence tinged with unknown terror. Limply he leaned against the railing, getting a grip on himself. At this rate he’d have heart failure or a mental breakdown before sunrise. He took several deep breaths, exhaling slowly until the fear subsided.

  Without a backward glance, he swung over the rail and shinnied down the anchor chain, vastly relieved at departing the ghostly ship. It was a welcome comfort to be in the soothing water again. The sea opened its arms and gave him a sense of remoteness from danger.

  It took only a minute for Pitt to slip on his swim trunks and retrieve his diving gear. Fitting an aqualung tank on your back in the darkness with the swells pushing you against the sides of a steel hull Isn’t an easy operation. But the Ditch and Recovery experience he had obtained during his early diving days came in handy now, and he accomplished the task with little effort. He looked around for the wooden crate, but it had drifted into the black curtain of night and disappeared; the wave action and incoming tide, by this time, carrying it half way to the beach.

  He lay there dead in the water and considered the possibility of diving under the Queen Artemisia and examining her hull. The weird scraping noise he had heard in the engine room seemed to have come from somewhere outside the plates and below the keel. Then it occurred to him the plan was hopeless. Without an underwater light he could see nothing. And he wasn’t in the mood to grope like a blind man along a four-hundred foot hull that was encrusted with razor sharp barnacles. He’d heard old tales that described in detail the ancient and brutal practice of keelhauling insubordinate British sa
ilors. He remembered one particularly bloodcurdling account of a gunner’s mate who was dragged under the keel of the H.M.S. Confident off the coast of Timor in 1786. Punished for stealing a cup of brandy from the captain’s locker, the poor fellow was dragged under the keel of the ship until his body was sliced to ribbons and the white of his ribs and backbone were visible. The unfortunate man might have survived, but before the crew could hoist him back on board, a pair of Mako sharks, attracted by the scent of blood, attacked and chewed the man to pieces before the horrified eyes of the men on deck. Pitt knew what a shark could do. He had once pulled a boy from the surf in Key West who had taken a nasty bite by a shark. The boy had lived, but a massive piece of tissue would always be missing from his left thigh.

  Pitt cursed out loud. He must stop thinking about things like that. His ears began to ring from a humming sound. At first he thought it was a trick of his imagination. He shook his bead violently: it was still there, only louder; it seemed to be gaining momentum. Then Pitt knew where the humming was coming from.

  The ship’s generators had started again. The navigation lights blinked on, and the Queen Artemisia suddenly came alive with sound. If there was ever a time when the better part of valor was discretion, it was now. Pitt clamped the mouthpiece of the regulator between his teeth and dove clear of the ship. He kicked his fins with every ounce of power in his legs, seeing nothing under the ink black water, hearing only the strange gurgling sound of his exhaust bubbles. It was times like this that he wished he didn’t smoke. After covering nearly fifty-five yards, he surfaced and looked back at the ship.

  The Queen Artemisia rode at anchor in tombstone solitude, her silhouette outlined against the graying eastern sky like an old fashioned shadowgram.. Dim shafts of white light came to life here and there about the ship, interrupted only by the green glow of the starboard navigation light. For several minutes nothing more happened. Then without any signal or shouted command, the anchor clattered up from the seafloor and clanged into the hull. The wheelhouse was lit and Pitt could see it clearly; it was still vacant. It just can’t be, he repeated to himself over and over again: it just can’t be. But the old ship hadn’t yet finished the last act of her ghostly performance. As if on cue, the Queen Artemisia’s telegraph jangled faintly across the calm pre-dawn sea. The engines responded with their gentle throb, and the ship continued on her voyage: the secret of her evil cargo still locked somewhere within her steel plates.

  Pitt didn’t have to see the ship move to know it Was underway; he could feel the beat of her propellers through the water. Fifty-five yards was more than enough. At that distance he was invisible to any lookout and had little to fear from being sucked through the huge propellers and mangled into fish bait.

  A seething flood of frustration swept over Pitt as the great hull slowly slid past his bobbing head. It was as though he was watching a ballistic missile lift from a launching pad and hurtle on its pre-set path toward devastation and death. He was helpless, he could do nothing to stop it. Hidden somewhere on the Queen Artemisia was enough heroin to drown half the population of the Northern Hemisphere in delirium. God alone knew what chaos would erupt in every city and town if it was distributed to all the peddling scum who preyed on its malignant addiction. How many people would become listless dregs and eventually die from the drug’s deadly narcosis? One hundred and thirty tons of heroin on the ship. What was that song again, the little ditty that he’d sung all those long years ago in school. “A hundred bottles of beer on the wall” It had nearly the same ring, but it was for light hearts and souls, not drugged minds and lost hopes.

  Then Pitt thought of himself. Not with self-pride for destroying the yellow Albatros or searching the Queen Artemisia and getting away with it undetected. He thought of himself only as an idiot for risking his life on a job he had no business performing, a job he wasn’t paid to do. His orders were to expedite oceanographic expeditions. No one said anything about chasing after drug smugglers. What could he accomplish? He wasn’t a guardian angel of humanity. Let Zacynthus, Zeno, INTERPOL and every other damn cop in the world play cat and mouse with von Till. It was their game, they were trained for it. And they were paid for it too.

  Again Pitt swore loudly to himself. He had already spent too much time daydreaming. It was time to head for shore. Mechanically, his eyes watched the ship’s lights diminish bit by bit into the fading darkness of the early morning. He was just wading onto the beach when the sun lifted itself from the horizon and threw its rays on the, rock strewn summits of the Thasos mountains.

  Pitt stripped off the tank and let it fall to the soft wet sand along with the breathing regulator and his mask and snorkel. Exhaustion curled its numbing tentacles around him and he succumbed to it, dropping to his hands and knees. His body felt sore and beat, but his mind hardly noticed these things; it was busy with something else.

  Pitt could find no indication of the heroin on board the ship, nor would the Bureau of Narcotics or the Customs Inspectors. That much was certain. Below the waterline, that was a possibility. But surely the wary investigators would have divers examine every inch of the hull when the ship docked. Besides, there was no way a cargo of that size could be removed, unless it was dropped in the water and recovered Later. That wouldn’t work either, he thought, it was too obvious; retrieving a watertight container filled with a hundred and thirty tons of solid material would require a full scale salvage operation. No, there had to be a more ingenious method, one that had successfully defied detection for so long.

  He took the diver’s knife and idly began sketching the Queen Artemisias outline in the wet sand. Then, quite suddenly, the idea of a diagram intrigued him. He stood up and traced a hull that stretched for approximately thirty feet. The bridge, the holds and engine room, every detail he could recall was etched into the yielding white sand. Minutes passed and the ship started to take shape. Pitt had become so totally absorbed in his work that he didn’t notice an old man and a donkey, trudging wearily along the beach.

  The old man stopped in his tracks and stared at Pitt from a ripened old face that had seen too many decades of strife to show an expression of bewilderment. After a few moments he shrugged uncomprehendingly and ambled off after his donkey.

  Finally the diagram was nearly complete, down to the last companionway. The knife flashed in the new sun as Pitt added a final humorous touch; a tiny bird on a tiny ventilator. Then he stepped back to admire his handiwork. He stared at it for a moment, then laughed aloud. “One thing’s certain, I’ll never be acclaimed for my artwork. It looks more like a pregnant whale than a ship.”

  Pitt continued to absentmindedly gaze at the sand drawing. Suddenly his eyes took on a trance-like glaze and his rugged face lost all expression. The spark of a novel and fanciful idea lit dimly in his conscious mind. At first the idea seemed too outlandish for him to consider, but the more he dwelt on its possibilities, the more feasible it became. Quickly he traced additional lines in the sand. Completely absorbed again, he raced to match up the diagram with the picture in his mind. When the last change was finished, his mouth slowly twisted into a grim smile of satisfaction. Damned clever of von Till, he thought, damned clever.

  He wasn’t tired anymore, his mind was no longer burdened with unsolvable questions. It was a new approach, a new kind of answer. It should have been discovered long before. Quickly, he gathered up the diving equipment and started to hike over the incline that separated the beach from the coastal road. There was no thought of quitting the game now. The next inning would prove to be the most interesting. At the top he turned and looked back at the sketch of the Queen Artemisia in the sand.

  The rising tide was just washing over and erasing the ship’s funnel, the funnel marked with the big Minerva “M.”

  14

  Giordino lay stretched out beside a blue Air Force pickup truck, dead asleep, his head resting on a binocular case and both feet propped carelessly on a large rock. A trail of ants tramped across his outflung forearm and, ignor
ing the obstacle in their path, continued their uninterrupted journey toward a small mound of loose dirt. Pitt looked down smiling. If there was one thing Giordino could do, and do well, he thought, it was sleeping anywhere at anytime and under any condition.

  Pitt shook his fins, letting the salty dampness dribble on Giordino’s composed face. No drowsy babble, no sudden reaction greeted the rude sprinkling. The only response came from one big brown eye that popped open, gazing straight at Pitt in obvious annoyance.

  “Aha! Behold! Our intrepid guardian with the watchful eye!” There was no mistaking Pitt's sarcastic tone. “I shudder to think of the death toll if you should ever decide to become a lifeguard.”

  The opposite lid slowly raised like a window shade, revealing the matching eye. “Just to set the record straight,” Giordino said wearily. “These tired old eyes were glued to the night glasses from the time you got into your packing crate to the time you came ashore and started playing in the sand.”

  “My apologies old friend.” Pitt laughed. “I suppose that doubting your unflagging vigilance will cost me another drink?”

  “Two drinks,” Giordino murmured slyly.

  “Consider it done.”

  Giordino sat up, blinking in the sun. He noticed the ants and casually brushed them off his arm. “How’d your swim go?’

  “Robert Southey must have had the Queen Arteinisia in mind when he wrote ‘No stir in the air, no stir in the sea, the ship was still as she could be.’ You might say that I found something by finding nothing”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll explain later.” Pitt lifted the diving gear and loaded it in the truck bed. “Any word from Zac?”

  “Not yet.” Giordino trained the binoculars on von Till’s villa. “He and Zeno took a platoon of the local gendarmerie and staked out von Till’s baronial estate.