Deep Six Page 7

  After a few moments the vibration ceased.

  "Speed zero," the watch officer notified them from the bridge.

  "Anchor away."

  Dover acknowledged, then sat on a stool, cupped his hands around the coffee mug and looked directly at Pitt.

  "Okay, what do you see?"

  "I have the ship we're looking for," Pitt said, speaking slowly and distinctly. "There are no other possibilities. You were mistaken in one respect, Dover, but correct in another. Mother Nature seldom makes rock formations that run in a perfectly straight line for several hundred feet. Consequently, the outline of a ship can be detected against an irregular background. You were right, though, in saying our chances were nil of finding it on the seafloor."

  "Get to the point," Dover said impatiently.

  "The target is on shore."

  "You mean grounded in the shallows?"

  "I mean on shore, as in high and dry."

  "You can't be serious?"

  Pitt ignored the question and handed Dover the magnifying glass.

  "See for yourself." He took a pencil and circled a section of cliffs above the tineline.

  Dover bent over and put his eye to the glass. "All I see is rock."

  "Look closer. The projection from the lower part of the slope into the sea."

  Dover's expression turned incredulous. "Oh, Jesus, it's the stern of a ship!"

  "You can make out the fantail and the top half of the rudder."

  "Yes, yes, and a piece of the after deckhouse." Dover's frustration was suddenly washed away by the mounting excitement of the discovery. "Incredible. She's buried bow-on into the shore, as though an avalanche covered her. Judging from the cruiser stern and the balanced rudder, I'd say she's an old Liberty ship." He looked up, a deepening interest in his eyes. "I wonder if she might be the Pilottown?"

  "Sounds vaguely familiar."

  "One of the most stubborn mysteries of the northern seas. The Pilottown tramped back and forth between Tokyo and the West Coast until ten years ago, when her crew reported her sinking in Ashton. A search was launched and no trace of the ship was found.

  Two years later an Eskimo stumbled on the Pilottown caught in the ice about ninety miles above Nome. He went aboard but found the ship deserted, no sign of the crew or cargo. A month later, when he returned with his tribe to remove whatever they could find of value, it was gone again. Nearly two years passed, and she was reported drifting below the Bering Strait. The Coast Guard was sent out but couldn't locate her. The Pilottown wasn't sighted again for eight months. The crew of a fishing trawler boarded her. They found her in reasonably good shape. Then she disappeared for the last time."

  "I seem to recall reading something Pitt paused. "Ah, yes, the Magic Ship."' "That's what the news media dubbed her," Dover acknowledged.

  "They described her disappearing act as a 'now you see it, now you don't routine."

  "They'll have a field day when it gets out she was drifting around for years with a cargo of nerve agent S."

  "No way of predicting the horror if the hull had been crushed in an ice pack or shattered on a rocky shore, creating an instant spill," Dover added.

  "We've got to get in her cargo holds," said Pitt. "Contact Mendoza, give her the position of the wreck and tell her to airlift a team of chemists to the site. We'll approach from the water."

  Dover nodded. "I'll see to the launch."

  "Throw in acetylene equipment in case we have to cut our way inside."

  Dover bent over the chart table and stared solemnly at the center of the marked circle. "I never thought for a minute I'd stand on the deck of the Magic Ship."

  "You're right," said Pitt, staring into his coffee mug, "the Pilottown is about to give her last performance."

  THE SEA HAD BEEN CALM, but by the time the Catawba's launch was a quarter-mile from the lonely, forbidding coast, a twenty-knot wind kicked up the water. The spray, tainted by the nerve agent, struck the cabin windows with the fury of driven sand. Yet where the derelict lay beached, the water looked reasonably peaceful, protected as it was by jagged pinnacles of rock that rose up a hundred yards offshore like solitary chimneys from burned-out houses.

  Far above the turbulent waters Augustine Volcano seemed calm and serene in the late afternoon sun. It was one of the most beautifully sculptured mountains in the Pacific, rivaling the classic contour of Mount Fuji in Japan.

  The powerful launch surfed for an instant on a white capped swell before diving over the crest. Pitt braced his feet, gripped a railing with both hands while his eyes studied the shore.

  The wreck was heeled over at a twenty-degree angle and her stern section blanketed in brown rust. The rudder was canted in the full starboard position and two barnacle-encrusted blades of the propeller protruded from the black sand. The letters of her name and borne port were too obscured to read.

  Pitt, Giordino, Dover, the two EPA scientists and one of the Catawba's junior officers all were garbed in white encapsulating suits to protect them from the plumes of deadly spray. They communicated by tiny transmitters inside their protective headgear.

  Attached to their waist belts were intricate filter systems designed to refine clean, breathable air.

  The sea around them was carpeted with dead fish of every species.

  A pair of whales rolled lifelessly back and forth with the tine, united in rotting decay with porpoises, sea lions and spotted seals.

  Birds by the thousands floated amid the morbid debris. Nothing that had lived in the area had escaped.

  Dover expertly threaded the launch between the threatening offshore barrier of projecting rock, the remnant of an ancient coastline. He slowed, waiting for a momentary lull in the surf, bining his time while carefully eyeing the depth. Then as a wave slammed onto the shore and its backwash spilled against the next one coming in, he aimed the bow at the small spit of sand formed around the base of the wreck and pushed the throttle forward. Like a horse bracing for the next hurdle at the Grand National, the launch rose up on the wave crest and rode it through the swirling foam until the keel dropped and scraped onto the spit.

  "A neat bit of handiwork," Pitt complimented him.

  "All in the timing," Dover said, a grin visible behind his helmet's facemask. "Of course, it helps if you land at low tine."

  They tilted back their heads and stared up at the wreck towering above them. The faded name on the stern could be deciphered now. It read Pilottown.

  "Almost a pity," Dover said reverently, "to write finish to an enigma."

  "The sooner the better," Pitt said, his tone grim as he considered the mass death inside.

  Within five minutes the equipment was unloaded, the launch securely moored to the Pilottown's rudder, and the men laboriously climbing the steep slope on the port side of the stern. Pitt took the lead, followed by Giordino and the rest as Dover brought up the rear.

  The incline was not made up of Solid rock but rather a combination of cinder ash and mud with the consistency of loose gravel.

  Their boots struggled to find a foothold, but mostly they slid back two steps for every three they gained. The dust from the ash rose and clung to their suits, coating them a dark gray. Soon the sweat was seeping through their pores and the increasingly heavy rasp of their breathing became more audible over the earphones inside their helmets.

  Pitt called a halt at a narrow ledge, not four feet wine and just long enough to hold all six men. Wearily Giordino sank to a sitting position and readjusted the straps that held the acetylene tank to his back. When he could finally pant a coherent sentence, he said, "How in hell did this old rust bucket jam her in here?"

  "She probably drifted into what was a shelving inlet before 1987," replied Pitt. "According to Mendoza, that was the year the volcano last erupted. The explosion gases must have melted the ice around the mantle, forming millions of gallons of water. The mudflow, along with the cloud of ash, poured down the mountain until it met the sea and buried the ship."

  "Funny the
stern wasn't spotted before now."

  "Not so remarkable," Pitt answered. "So little is showing it was next to impossible to detect from the air, and beyond a mile from shore it blends into the rugged shoreline and becomes nearly invisible.

  Erosion caused by recent storms is the only reason she's uncovered now."

  Dover stood up, pressing his weight against the steep embankment to maintain his balance. He unraveled a thin knotted nylon rope from his waist and unfolded a small grappling hook tied to the end.

  He looked down at Pitt. "If you'll support my legs, I think I can heave the hook over the ship's railing."

  Pitt grasped his left leg as Giordino edged over and held the right. The burly Coast Guardsman leaned back over the lip of the ledge, swung the hook in a widening arc and let it fly.

  it sailed over the stern rails and caught.

  The rest of the ascent took only a few minutes. Pulling themselves upward, hand over hand, they soon climbed onto the deck.

  Heavy layers of rust mingled with ash flaked away beneath their feet. What little they could see of the Pilottown looked a dirty, ugly mess.

  "No sign of Mendoza," said Dover.

  "Nearest flat ground to land a copter is a thousand yards away," Pitt replied. "She and her team will have to hike in."

  Giordino walked over to the railing beside the corroded shaft of the jack staff and stared at the water below. "The poison must be seeping through the hull during high tine."

  "Probably stored in the after hold," said Dover.

  "The cargo hatches are buried under tons of this lava crap," Giordino said in disgust. "We'll need a fleet of bulldozers to get through."

  "You familiar with Liberty ships?" Pitt asked Dover.

  "Should be. I've inspected enough of them over the years, looking for illegal cargo." He knelt down and began tracing a ship's outline in the rust. "Inside the aft deckhouse we should find a hatch to an escape trunk that leads to the runnel holding the screw shaft. At the bottom is a small recess. We might be able to cut our way into the hold from there."

  They all stood silent when Dover finished. They should all have felt a sense of accomplishment at having found the source of the nerve agent. But instead they experienced apprehension-a reaction, Pitt supposed, that stemmed from a letdown after the excitement of the search. Then also there was a hidden dread of what they might actually find behind the steel bulkheads of the Pilottown.

  "Maybe . . . maybe we better wait for the lab people," one of the chemists stammered.

  "They can catch up," Pitt said pleasantly, but with cold eyes.

  Giordino silently took a pry bar from the tool pack strapped on Pitts back and attacked the steel door to the after deckhouse. To his surprise it creaked and moved. He put his muscle to it, the protesting hinges surrendered and the door sprung open. The interior was completely empty, no fittings, no gear, not even a scrap of trash.

  "Looks as though the movers have been here," observed Pitt.

  "Odd it was never in use," Dover mused.

  "The escape trunk?"

  "This way." Dover led them through another compartment that was also barren. He stopped at a round hatch in the center of the deck.

  Giordino moved forward, pried open the cover and stepped back. Dover aimed a flashlight down the yawning tunnel, the beam stabbing the darkness.

  "So much for that idea," he said dejectedly. "The tunnel recess is blocked with debris."

  "What's on the next deck below?"

  "The steering gear compartment." Dover paused, his mind working.

  Then he thought aloud. "Just forward of the steering gear there's an after steering room. A holdover from the war years. It's possible, barely possible, it might have an access hatch to the hold."

  They went aft then and returned to the first compartment. It felt strange to them to walk the decks of a ghost ship, wondering what happened to the crew that abandoned her. They found the hatchway and climbed down the ladder to the steering gear compartment and made their way around the old, still oily machinery to the forward bulkhead.

  Dover scanned the steel plates with his flashlight. Suddenly the wavering beam stopped.

  "Son of a bitch!" he grunted. "The hatch is here, but it's been welded shut."

  "You're certain we're in the right spot?" Pitt asked.

  "Absolutely," Dover answered. He rapped his gloved fist against the bulkhead. "On the other side is cargo hold number five-the most likely storage of the poison."

  "What about the other holds?" asked one of the EPA men.

  "Too far forward to leak into the sea."

  "Okay, then let's do it," Pitt said impatiently.

  Quickly they assembled the cutting torch and connected the oxygen-acetylene bottles. The flame from the tip of the torch hissed as Giordino adjusted the gas mixture. Blue flame shot out and assaulted the steel plate, turning it red, then a bright orange white.

  A narrow gap appeared and lengthened, crackling and melting under the intense heat.

  As Giordino was cutting an opening large enough to crawl through, Julie Mendoza and her lab people appeared, packing nearly five hundred pounds of chemical analysis instruments.

  "You found it," she stated straight from the shoulder.

  "We can't be sure yet," Pitt cautioned.

  "But our test samples show the water around this area reeks with Nerve Agent S," she protested.

  "Disappointment comes easy," said Pitt. "I never count my chickens till the check clears the bank."

  Further conversation broke off as Giordino stood back and snuffed out the cutting torch. He handed it to Dover and picked up his trusty pry bar.

  "Stand back," he ordered. "This thing is red hot and it's damned heavy."

  He hooked one end of the bar into the jagged, glowing seam and shoved. Grudgingly, the steel plate twisted away from the bulkhead and crashed to the deck with a heavy clang and spray of molten metal.

  A hush fell over the dark compartment as Pitt took a flashlight and leaned carefully through the opening, staying clear of the superheated edges. He probed the beam into the bowels of the darkened cargo hold, sweeping it around in a 180-degree arc.

  It seemed a long time before he straightened and faced the bizarrely clad, faceless figures pressing against him.

  "Well?" Mendoza demanded anxiously.

  Pitt answered with one word: "Eureka!"

  Four THOUSAND Miles and five hours ahead in a different time zone, the Soviet representative to the World Health Assembly worked late at his desk. There was nothing elaborate about his office in the Secretariat building of the United Nations; the furnishings were cheap and Spartan. Instead of the usual photographs of Russian leaders, living and dead, the only piece of wall decor was a small amateurish watercolor of a house in the country.

  The light blinked and a soft chime emitted from his private phone line. He stared at it suspiciously for a long moment before picking up the receiver.

  "This is Lugovoy."

  "Who?"

  "Aleksei Lugovoy."

  "Is Willie dere?" asked a voice, heavy with the New York City accent that always grated on Lugovoy's ears.

  "There is no Willie here," Lugovoy said brusquely. "You must have the wrong number." Then he abruptly hung up.

  Lugovoy's face was expressionless, but a faint pallor was there that was missing before. He flexed his fists, inhaled deeply and eyed the phone, waiting.

  The light blinked and the phone chimed again.

  "Lugovoy."

  "You sure Willie aid't dere?"

  "Willie aid't here!" be replied, mimicking the caller's accent.

  He slammed the receiver onto the cradle.

  Lugovoy sat shock-still for almost thirty seconds, hands tightly clasped together on the desk, head lowered, eyes staring into space.

  Nervously, he rubbed a hand over his bald head and adjusted the horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. Still lost in thought, he rose, dutifully turned out the lights and walked from the office.

 
He exited the elevator into the main lobby and strode past the stained-glass panel by Mare Chagall symbolizing man's struggle for peace. He ignored it, as he always had.

  There were no cabs at the stand in front of the building, so he hailed one on First Avenue. He gave the driver his destination and sat stiffly in the back seat, too tense to relax.

  Lugovoy was not worried that he might be followed. He was a respected psychologist, admired for his work in mental health among the underdeveloped countries. His papers on thought processes and mind control in no espionage work and held no direct ties with the undercover people of the KGB. He was discreetly told by a friend with the embassy in Washington that the FBI had given him a low priority and only performed an occasional, almost perfunctory observation.