Inca Gold dp-12 Page 51

  Zolar looked as if he were about to tear Moore's lungs out whether he got shot in the attempt or not. "You and your lying wife made a deal for a share of the antiquities. Am I right?" He waited for a reply, but when Moore remained silent he went on. "What percentage did they offer you? Ten, twenty, maybe as high as fifty percent?"

  "We made no deals with the government," Moore said slowly. "We knew you had no intention of honoring our agreement, and that you planned to kill us. We had planned to steal the treasure for ourselves, but as you can see, we had a change of heart."

  "The way they act familiar with guns," said Oxley, "Cyrus was right. They are a pair of killers."

  Moore nodded in agreement. "Your brother has an inner eye. It takes an assassin to know one."

  A pounding came from outside the forward passenger door on the deck below. Moore gestured down the stairwell with his gun. "Go down and open it," he ordered Zolar and Oxley.

  Sullenly, they did as they were told.

  When the pressurized door was swung open, two men entered from a stairway that had been pushed up against the aircraft. Both wore business suits. One was a huge black man who looked as if he might have played professional football. The other was a nattily dressed white man. Zolar immediately sensed they were federal agents.

  "Joseph Zolar and Charles Oxley, I am Agent David Gaskill with the Customs Service and this is Agent Francis Ragsdale of the FBI. You gentlemen are under arrest for smuggling illegal artifacts into the United States and for the theft of countless art objects from private and public museums, not excluding the unlawful forgery and sale of antiquities."

  "What are you talking about?" Zolar demanded.

  Gaskill ignored him and looked at Ragsdale with a big toothy smile. "Would you like to do the honors?"

  Ragsdale nodded like a kid who had just been given a new disk player. "Yes, indeed, thank you."

  As Gaskill cuffed Zolar and Oxley, Ragsdale read them their rights.

  "You made good time," said Moore. "We were told you were in Calexico."

  "We were on our way aboard a military jet fifteen minutes after word came down from FBI headquarters in Washington," replied Ragsdale.

  Oxley looked at Gaskill, a look for the first time empty of fear and shock, a sudden look of shrewdness. "You'll never find enough evidence to convict us in a hundred years."

  Ragsdale tilted his head toward the golden cargo. "What do you call that?"

  "We're merely passengers," said Zolar, regaining his composure. "We were invited along for the ride by Professor Moore and his wife."

  "I see. And suppose you tell me where all the stolen art and antiquities in your facility in Galveston came from?"

  Oxley sneered. "Our Galveston warehouse is perfectly legitimate. You've raided it before and never found a thing."

  If that's the case," said Ragsdale craftily, "how do you explain the tunnel leading from the Logan Storage Company to Zolar International's subterranean warehouse of stolen goods?"

  The brothers stared at each other, their faces abruptly gray. "You're making this up," said Zolar fearfully.

  "Am I? Would you like me to describe your tunnel in detail and provide a brief rundown on the stolen masterworks we found?"

  "The tunnel-- you couldn't have found the tunnel."

  "As of thirty-six hours ago," said Gaskill, "Zolar International and your clandestine operation known as Solpemachaco are permanently out of business."

  Ragsdale added. "A pity your dad, Mansfield Zolar, aka the Specter, isn't still alive or we could bust him too."

  Zolar looked as if he were in the throes of cardiac arrest. Oxley appeared too paralyzed to move.

  "By the time you two and the rest of your family, partners, associates, and buyers get out of prison, you'll be as old as the artifacts you stole."

  Federal agents began filling the aircraft. The FBI took charge of the air crew and Zolar's serving lady while the Customs people unbuckled the tie-down straps securing the golden artifacts. Ragsdale nodded to his team.

  "Take them downtown to the U.S. Attorney's Office." As soon as the shattered art thieves were led into two different cars, the agents turned to the Moores.

  "I can't tell you how grateful we are for your cooperation," said Gaskill. "Nailing the Zolar family will put a huge dent in the art theft and artifact smuggling trade."

  "We're not entirely benevolent," said Micki, happily relieved. "Henry feels certain the Peruvian government will post a reward."

  Gaskill nodded. "I think you've got a sure bet."

  "The prestige of being the first to catalogue and photograph the treasure will go a long way toward enhancing our scientific reputations," Henry Moore explained as he holstered his gun.

  "Customs would also like a detailed report on the objects, if you don't mind?" asked Gaskill.

  Moore nodded vigorously. "Micki and I will be happy to work with you. We've already inventoried the treasure. We'll have a report for you before it's formally returned to Peru."

  "Where will you store it all until then?" asked Micki.

  "In a government warehouse whose location we can't reveal," answered Gaskill.

  "Is there any news on Congresswoman Smith and the little man with NUMA?"

  Gaskill nodded. "Minutes before you landed we received word they were rescued by a local tribe of Indians and are on their way to a local hospital."

  Micki sank down into a passenger seat and sighed. "Then it's over."

  Henry sat on an armrest and took her hand in his. "It is for us," he said gently. "From now on we'll live the rest of our lives together as a pair of old teachers in a university with vine-covered walls."

  She looked up at him. "Is that so terrible?"

  "No," he said, kissing her lightly on the forehead, "I think we can handle it."

  Slowly climbing from the depths of a dead stupor, Pitt felt as if he were struggling up a mud-slick slope, only to slip back every time he reached out and touched consciousness. He tried to retain a grip on these brief moments of awareness, only to fall back into a void. If he could open his eyes, he thought vaguely, he might return to reality. Finally, with a mighty effort, he forced open his eyelids.

  Seeing only grave-cold blackness, he shook his head in despair, thinking he had fallen back into the void. And then the pain came rushing back like a burst of fire, and he came fully awake. Rolling sideways and then forward into a sitting position, he swung his head from side to side, trying to shake off the fog that clung to the alcoves of his mind. He renewed his fight with the pounding ache in his shoulder, the stiff hurt in his chest, and the sting from his wrist. Tenderly he felt the gash on his forehead.

  "A hell of a fine specimen of manhood you are," he muttered.

  Pitt was surprised to find that he didn't feel overly weak from loss of blood. He unclipped from his forearm the flashlight that Giordino had given him after their drop over the falls, switched it on, and propped it in the sand so the beam was aimed at his upper torso. He unzipped his wet suit jacket and tenderly probed the wound in his shoulder. The bullet had passed through the flesh and out his back without striking the scapula or the clavicle. The neoprene rubber on his shredded but still nearly skintight wet suit had helped seal the opening and restrict the flow of blood. Relieved that he did not feel as drained as he thought he would, he relaxed and took stock of his situation. His chances of survival were somewhere beyond impossible. With 100 kilometers (62 miles) of unknown rapids, sharp cascades, and extensive river passages that passed through caverns completely immersed with water, he did not need a palmist to tell him that the life line running across his hand would halt long before he reached senior citizenship. Even if he had air passages the entire way, there was still the distance from the opening of the subterranean channel to the surface of the Gulf.

  Most other men who found themselves in a Hades of darkness deep within the earth with no hope of escape would have panicked and died tearing their fingers to the bone in a vain attempt to claw their way to the
surface. But Pitt was not afraid. He was curiously content and at peace with himself.

  If he was going to die, he thought, he might as well get comfortable. With his good hand he dug indentations in the sand to accommodate his body contour. He was surprised when the flashlight beam reflected from a thousand golden specks in the black sand. He held up a handful under the light.

  "This place is loaded with placer gold," he said to himself.

  He shone the light around the cavern. The walls were cut with ledges of white quartz streaked with tiny veins of gold. Pitt began laughing as he saw humor in the implausibility of it all.

  "A gold mine," he proclaimed to the silent cave. "I've made a fabulously rich gold strike and nobody will ever know it."

  He sat back and contemplated his discovery. Someone must be telling him something, he thought. Just because he wasn't afraid of the old man with the scythe didn't mean he had to give up and wait for him. A stubborn resolve sparked within him.

  Better to enter the great beyond after an audacious attempt at staying alive than to throw in the towel and go out like a dishrag, he concluded. Perhaps other adventurous explorers would give up everything they owned for the honor of entering this mineralogical sanctum sanctorum, but all Pitt wanted now was to get out. He rose to his feet, inflated the buoyancy compensator with his breath and walked into the water until he was adrift in the current that carried him along.

  Just take it one cavern at a time, he told himself, flashing the light on the water ahead. There was no relying on eternal vigilance. He was too weak to fight rapids and fend off rocks. He could only be calm and go wherever the current took him. He soon felt as if he had been cruising from one gallery to another for a lifetime.

  The roof of the caverns and galleries rose and fell with monotonous regularity for the next 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Then he heard the dreaded rumble of approaching rapids. Thankfully, the first chute Pitt encountered was of medium roughness. The water crashed against his face and he went under churning froth several times before reaching placid water again.

  He was granted a comfortable reprieve as the river turned smooth and ran through one long canyon in an immense gallery. When he reached the end nearly an hour later, the roof gradually sloped down until it touched the water. He filled his lungs to the last crowded millimeter and dived. Able to use only one arm and missing his swim fins, the going was slow. He aimed the flashlight at the jagged rock roof and swam on his back. His lungs began to protest the lack of oxygen, but he swam on. At last the light revealed an air pocket. He shot to the surface and mightily inhaled the pure, unpolluted air that had been trapped deep beneath the earth millions of years ago.

  The small cave widened into a large cavern whose ceiling arched beyond the beam of the flashlight. The river made a sweeping turn where it had formed a reef of polished gravel. Pitt crawled painfully onto the dry area to rest. He turned off the light to prolong the life of the batteries.

  Abruptly, he flicked the flash on again. Something had caught his eye in the shadows before the light blinked out. Something was there, not 5 meters (16 feet) away, a black form that revealed a straight line aberrant to natural geometrics.

  Pitt's spirits soared as he recognized the battered remains of the Wallowing Windbag. Incredibly, the Hovercraft had come through the horrific fall over the cataract and had been cast up here after drifting nearly 40 kilometers. At last a gleam of hope. He stumbled across the gravel beach to the rubber hull and examined it under his light.

  The engine and fan had been torn from their mountings and were missing. Two of the air chambers were punctured and deflated, but the remaining six still held firm. Some of the equipment was swept away, but four air tanks, the first-aid kit, Duncan's plastic ball of colored water dye tracer, one of Giordino's paddles, two extra flashlights, and the waterproof container with Admiral Sandecker's thermos of coffee and four bologna sandwiches had miraculously survived.

  "It seems my state of affairs has considerably improved," Pitt said happily to nobody but the empty cavern.

  He began with the first-aid kit. After liberally soaking the shoulder wound with disinfectant, he awkwardly applied a crude bandage on it inside his tattered wet suit. Knowing it was useless to bind fractured ribs, he gritted his teeth, set his wrist and taped it.

  The coffee had retained most of its heat inside the thermos, and he downed half of it before attacking the sandwiches. No medium-rare porterhouse steak, doused and flamed in cognac, tasted better than this bologna, Pitt decided. Then and there he vowed never to complain or make jokes about bologna sandwiches ever again.

  After a brief rest, a goodly measure of his strength returned and he felt refreshed enough to resecure the equipment and break open Duncan's plastic dye container. He scattered Fluorescein Yellow with Optical Brightener into the water. Under the beam of his flashlight he watched until the dye stained the river with a vivid yellow luminescence. He stood and watched until the current swept it out of sight.

  "That should tell them I'm coming," he thought aloud.

  He pushed the remains of the Hovercraft out of the shallows. Favoring his injuries, he awkwardly climbed aboard and paddled one-handed into the mainstream.

  As the partially deflated Wallowing Windbag caught the current and drifted downriver, Pitt leaned back comfortably and began humming the tune to "Up a Lazy River in the Noonday Sun."

  Informed of up-to-the-minute events from california by Admiral Sandecker and agents Gaskill and Ragsdale in El Paso, the secretary of state decided to sidestep diplomatic protocol and personally call the President of Mexico. He briefed him on the far-reaching theft and smuggling conspiracy engineered by the Zolars.

  "An incredible story," said Mexico's President.

  "But true," the secretary of state assured him.

  "I can only regret the incident occurred, and I promise my government's full cooperation with the investigation."

  "If you'll forgive me, Mr. President, I do have a wish list of requests."

  "Let's hear them."

  Within two hours the border between Mexico and California was reopened. The government officials who were suckered by the Zolars into jeopardizing their positions by false promises of incredible riches were rounded up.

  Fernando Matos and Police Comandante Rafael Cortina were among the first to be arrested by Mexican Justice investigators.

  At the same time, vessels of the Mexican navy attached to the Sea of Cortez were alerted and ordered to sea.

  Lieutenant Carlos Hidalgo peered up at a squawking gull before turning his attention back to the straight line of the sea across the horizon. "Are we searching for anything special, or just searching?" he casually asked his ship's captain.

  "Looking for bodies," Commander Miguel Maderas replied. He lowered his binoculars, revealing a round, friendly face under long, thick black hair. His teeth were large and very white and almost always set in a Burt Lancaster smile. He was short and heavy and solid as a rock.

  Hidalgo was a sharp contrast to Maderas. Tall and lean with a narrow face, he looked like a well-tanned cadaver. "Victims of a boating accident?"

  "No, divers who drowned in an underground river."

  Hidalgo's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Not another gringo folktale about fishermen and divers being swept under the desert and disgorged into the Gulf?"

  "Who is to say?" Maderas replied with a shrug. "All I know is that orders from our fleet headquarters in Ensenada directed our ship and crew to patrol the waters on the northern end of the Gulf between San Felipe and Puerto Penasco for any sign of bodies."

  "A large area for only one ship to cover."

  "We'll be joined by two Class P patrol boats out of Santa Rosalia, and all fishing boats in the area have been alerted to report any sighting of human remains."

  "If the sharks get them," Hildago muttered pessimistically, "there won't be anything left to find."

  Maderas leaned back against the railing of the bridge wing, lit a cigarette, and gazed toward th
e stern of his patrol vessel. It had been modified from a 67-meter (220 foot) U.S. Navy minesweeper and had no official name other than the big G-21 painted on the bow. But the crew unaffectionately called her El Porqueria ("piece of trash") because she once broke down at sea and was towed to port by a fishing boat-- a humiliation the crew never forgave her for.

  But she was a sturdy ship, quick to answer the helm, and stable in heavy seas. The crews of more than one fishing boat and private yacht owed their lives to Maderas and El Porqueria.

  As executive officer of the ship, Hidalgo had the duty of plotting a search grid. When he was finished poring over a large nautical chart of the northern Gulf, he gave the coordinates to the helmsman. Then the dreary part of the voyage began, plowing down one lane and then reversing course as if mowing a lawn.

  The first line was run at eight o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the afternoon a lookout on the bow yelled out.

  "Object in the water!"

  "Whereaway?" shouted Hildago.

  "A hundred and fifty meters off the port bow."

  Maderas lifted his binoculars and peered over the blue green water. He easily spotted a body floating face down as it rose on the crest of a wave. "I have it." He stepped to the wheelhouse door and nodded at the helmsman. "Bring us alongside and have a crew stand by to retrieve." Then he turned to Hildago. "Stop engines when we close to fifty meters."

  The foaming bow wave faded to a gentle ripple, the heavy throb of the twin diesels died to a muted rumble as the patrol vessel slipped alongside the body rolling in the waves. From his view on the bridge wing, Maderas could see the bloated and distorted features had been battered to pulp. Small wonder the sharks didn't find it appetizing, he thought.

  He stared at Hidalgo and smiled. "We didn't need a week after all."

  "We got lucky," Hidalgo mumbled.

  With no hint of reverence for the dead, two crewmen jabbed a boat hook into the floating corpse and pulled it toward a stretcher, constructed from wire mesh, that was lowered into the water. The body was guided into the stretcher and raised onto the deck. The ghastly, mangled flesh barely resembled what had once been a human being. Maderas could hear more than one of his crew retching into the sea before the corpse was zipped into a body bag.