Flood Tide

  "Does that mean you're going to dissolve the corporation?"

  Cabrillo sat up, his eyes gleaming. "Not in your life. Our grateful government has already offered to refit a new ship with state-of-the-art-technology, bigger, more powerful engines and a heavier weapons system. It may take a few operations to pay off the mortgage, but the stockholders and I are not about to close down operations."

  Pitt shook the chairman's hand. "I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps we can do it again sometime." Cabrillo rolled his eyes. "Oh God, I hope not." Giordino took one of his magnificent cigars and slipped it into Cabrillo's shirt pocket. "A little something in case you tire of your smelly old pipe."

  They waited as the attendants transferred Cabrillo to the gumey and lifted him inside the ambulance. Then the door was closed and the vehicle moved across the dock. They were standing there watching for a moment until it disappeared onto a street lined with palm trees when a man came up behind them. "Mr. Pitt and Mr. Giordino?" Pitt turned. "That's us."

  A man in his middle sixties, with gray hair and beard, held up a leather-encased badge and identification. He was wearing white shorts, a flowered silk shirt and sandals. "I've been sent by my superiors to take you to the airport. An aircraft is waiting to fly you to Washington." "Aren't you a little old to play secret agent?" said Giordino, studying the stranger's identification.

  "We oldies but goodies can often pass unnoticed where you younger guys can't."

  "Which way to your car?" asked Pitt conversationally. The senior citizen pointed to a small Toyota van painted in the wild colors of a local taxi. "Your carriage awaits."

  "I had no idea the CIA cut your budget so drastically," Giordino said sarcastically.

  "We make do with what we've got."

  They piled into the van, and twenty minutes later they were seated in a military cargo jet. As the plane rolled down the runway of Guam's Air Force base, Pitt looked out the window and saw the senior intelligence agent leaning against his van as if confirming that Pitt and Giordino had departed the island. In another minute they were flying above the often overlooked island paradise of the Pacific with its volcanic mountains, lush jungle waterfalls and miles of white-sand beaches graced with swaying coco palms. The Japanese swarmed into the hotels and onto the beaches of Guam, but not many Americans. He continued staring down as the plane passed over the turquoise waters inside the reef surrounding the island and headed out to sea.

  As Giordino dozed off, Pitt turned his thoughts to the United States, sailing somewhere on the ocean below him. Something terrible was in the works, a terrible threat that only one man on earth could prevent. But Pitt knew with crystallized certainty that nothing, except perhaps an untimely death, would deflect Qin Shang from his purpose.

  The world may be a place that is scarce of honest politicians, white buffalo, unpolluted rivers, saints and miracles, but there is no shortage of depraved villains. Some, like serial killers, may slay twenty or a hundred innocent victims. But given financial resources they might kill many more. Those like Qin Shang who possessed enormous affluence could hold themselves above the law and hire homicidal cretins to do their dirty work for them. The evil billionaire was not a general who felt remorse over losing a thousand men in battle to achieve an objective. Qin Shang was a cold-blooded sociopathic murderer who could drink a glass of champagne and eat a hearty dinner after condemning hundreds of illegal immigrants, many of them women and children, to a horrible death in the frigid waters of Orion Lake.Pitt was committed to stopping Qin Shang whatever the consequences, whatever the cost, even killing him if the occasion presented itself. He was drawn in too deeply to struggle back over the edge. He fantasized what it would be like if they ever met. What would the circumstances be? What would he say to a mass slaughterer?

  For a long time, Pitt sat there staring up at the cabin ceiling of the aircraft. There was no sense in anything. Whatever Qin Shang's plan had to be, if nothing else it was mad. And now Pitt's own mind was running amok. There is nothing to do, he thought finally, but to sleep it off and hope to see things with a sane eye when we reach Washington.

  PART III CANAL TO NOWHERE

  22

  April 23, 2000 Atchafalaya River, Louisiana

  OF THE MAJOR RIVERS of the world, the Nile casts a romantic spell from an ancient past, the Amazon conjures up images of adventure and danger, while the Yangtze entwines the soul with the mysteries of the Orient. Images of pharaohs lounging on royal barges rowed by a hundred men past the pyramids come to mind. . . the Spanish conquistadors struggling and dying in a green hell. . . Chinese junks and sampans crowding water turned yellow-brown with flowing silt. But it is the Mississippi that truly captures the imagination.

  Thanks to the stories of Mark Twain of big side-paddle riverboats coming around the bend with whistles blowing as they passed Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on a raft, and of battles up and down the river by Union and Confederate ironclads during the Civil War, the Mississippi's past seems so near that one has but to pierce a thin veil to experience it.

  "The Father of Rivers," as the Indians called it, the Mississippi is the only river in North America that ranks in the top ten of the world. Third in length, third in drainage, fifth in volume, it stretches from the headwaters in Montana of its longest tributary, the Missouri, 3,484 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico.

  Almost as fluid as mercury, always searching for the path of least resistance, the Mississippi has changed course many times throughout the last five thousand years, especially after the seas finally reached their present levels at the end of the last ice age. Between 1900 B.C. and 700 B.C. it flowed almost forty miles west of its present course. Restlessly, the river shifted back and forth across the state of Louisiana, carving a channel before migrating and carving another. Almost half of Louisiana was formed by the Mississippi depositing tremendous amounts of silt and clay carried from as far north as Minnesota and Montana.

  "The water looks quiet today," said a man in an elevated seat who gazed from the pilothouse of the George B. Larson, an Army Corps of Engineers survey boat.

  Standing at the control console, the boat's captain, Lucas Giraud, merely nodded as he piloted the craft past the cattle grazing on the levees of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana.

  This was Cajun country, the last outpost of French Acadian culture. Pickup trucks parked under spreading trees next to tar-papered cabins raised on pylons. Nearby, small Baptist churches rose from the damp countryside, their paint-peeled wooden sides overlooking cemeteries with weathered tombs rising above the ground. Soybeans and corn rose from the rich soil between man-made ponds for the farming of catfish. Little hardware and feed stores stood across narrow roads from auto garages surrounded by rusting wrecked cars half-buried in green underbrush that sprouted through their broken windows.

  Major General Frank Montaigne studied the passing scene as the big survey boat cruised down the river that was textured by a light morning mist. He was late fiftyish and wore a light gray suit and a striped blue shirt with a burgundy bow tie. A vest, embellished with a large gold watch chain spanning the pockets, was displayed through the open coat. An expensive Panama hat was perched at a jaunty angle over steel-gray hair that flowed back from the temples. The eyebrows had managed to remain black and arched over limpid eyes that were gray-blue. There was a polished look about him, burnished with a hardness that you knew was there but couldn't see. His trademark, a cane carved from a willow tree with a leaping frog for its handle, lay across his lap.

  Montaigne was no stranger to the capricious nature of the Mississippi River. To him it was a monster that was condemned to move through a narrow passage for eternity. Mostly it slept, but occasionally it went into a rampage, overflowing its banks and causing disastrous floods. It was the job of General Montaigne and of the Army Corps of Engineers, which he represented, to control the monster and protect the millions of people who lived along its banks and levees.

  As president of the Mississippi River Commission, Mo
ntaigne was required to inspect the flood-control projects once a year on an Army Corps towboat that was fitted out almost as ostentatiously as a cruise ship. On those trips he was accompanied by a bevy of high-ranking officers of the Army as well as his civilian staff. Stopping at the many towns and ports along the river, he held conferences with the residents to hear their input and complaints about how the river was affecting their lives.

  Montaigne disliked wining and dining local officials while surrounded by the pomp of his office. He much preferred unannounced inspection tours conducted from a workaday survey boat with no one but himself, Captain Giraud and his crew on board. Without distraction, he could study firsthand the workings of the revetments laid along the levees to reduce erosion, the condition of the levees themselves, the rock jetties and navigation locks leading to and from the river.

  Why is the Army Corps of Engineers in command of the never-ending war against flooding? They launched their attack to tame the Mississippi River in the early eighteen hundreds. After building fortifications during the War of 1812 along the river to keep out British forces, it seemed expedient for them to turn their experience to civil works, and the Military Academy at West Point had the only school of engineering in the country. Today the organization almost seems like an anachronism when one considers that civilians who work for the Corps outnumber Army officers by a hundred and forty to one.

  Frank (his birth certificate read Francois) Montaigne was born a Cajun in Plaquemines Parish below New Orleans and spent his boyhood in the French Acadian world of southern Louisiana. His father was a fisherman, or to be more exact a crawfisherman, who built a floating house in the swamp with his own hands, and made a great sum of money over the years, hauling his catch and selling directly to the restaurants of New Orleans. And, like most Cajuns, he never spent his profits and died a rich man.

  Montaigne spoke French before he learned English, and his classmates at the academy called him Potpourri because he often mixed the two languages together when speaking. After a distinguished career as a combat engineer in Vietnam and the Gulf War, Montaigne was rapidly promoted after receiving several academic degrees in his spare time, including a Ph.D. in hydrology. At the age of fifty-five he was appointed commander of the entire Mississippi Valley from the Gulf up to the Missouri River where it joins the Mississippi near St. Louis. It was a job he was born for. Montaigne loved the river almost as much as he loved his wife, who was also a Cajun, the sister of his best boyhood friend, and his three daughters. But mixed with his love for the flowing waters was a fear that someday Mother Nature would turn violent and wipe out his efforts, sending the Mississippi raging over the levees and flooding millions of acres while cutting a new channel to the Gulf.

  Earlier in the morning just before dawn, the Larson, named after an Army Corps engineer long deceased, had eased into the navigation locks that were constructed by the Army Corps for flood control and to stop the Atchafalaya from capturing the Mississippi. Giant control structures that are basically dams with spillways were built fifty miles above Baton Rouge at an old bend in the river where a hundred and seventy years before the Red River once entered into the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya flowed out. Then in 1831 a steamboat entrepreneur, Captain Henry Shreve, dug a channel across the neck of the bend. Now the Red River bypassed the Mississippi and flowed through remains of the bend that became known as the Old River. Almost as if it was a siren enticing an unwary sailor, the Atchafalaya, with only 142 miles to the Gulf versus the Mississippi's 315, beckons the main river into its waiting arms.

  Montaigne had stepped out on deck as the gates swung and closed off the water of the Mississippi and watched as the walls of the lock seemed to rise toward the sky while the survey boat descended to the Atchafalaya. He waved to the lockmaster, who waved back. The waters of the Atchafalaya run fifteen feet lower than the Mississippi's, but it only took ten minutes before the west gates opened and the Larson moved out into the channel that led south to Morgan City and the Gulf beyond.

  "What time do you estimate our rendezvous with the NUMA research ship below Sungari?" he asked the Larson's captain.

  "Around three o'clock, give or take," answered Giraud without indecision.

  Montaigne nodded at a big towboat pushing a string of barges downriver. "Looks like a cargo of lumber," he said to Giraud.

  "Must be heading for that new industrial development near Melville." Giraud looked like one of the Three Musketeers with his hawklike French features and flowing black mustache waxed and twisted at the ends. Like Montaigne, Giraud had grown up in the Cajun land, only he had never left it. A big man with a belly seldom empty of Dixie beer, he possessed a sardonic humor that was known up and down the river.

  Montaigne watched as a small speedboat filled with four teenagers darted recklessly around the survey boat and cut in front of the barges, followed by four of their friends astride a pair of watercraft.

  "Stupid kids," muttered Giraud. "If any of them lost their engines in front of the barges, there is no way the towboat could stop the momentum before running them over."

  "I used to do the same thing with my father's eighteen foot aluminum fishing skiff with a little twenty-five horsepower outboard motor, and I'm still alive."

  "Forgive me for saying so, General, but you were even dumber than them."

  Montaigne knew that Giraud meant no disrespect. He was well aware the pilot had witnessed his share of accidents during the long years he'd piloted ships and towboats up and down the Mississippi river system. Ships running aground, oil spills, collisions, fires, he'd seen them all, and as with most old river pilots, he was a cautious man. No one was more aware that the Mississippi was an unforgiving river.

  "Tell me, Lucas," said Montaigne, "do you think the Mississippi will flow into the Atchafalaya one day?"

  "One great flood is all it will take for the river to tear away the levees and sweep into the Atchafalaya," replied Giraud stoically. "One year, ten years, maybe twenty, but sooner or later the river will run no more past New Orleans. It's only a matter of time."

  "The Army Corps has fought a good battle to keep it in control."

  "Man can't tell nature what to do for very long. I only hope I'm around to see it."

  "The sight won't be pretty," said Montaigne. "The effects of the disaster will be appalling. Death, major flooding, mass destruction. Why would you want to be a witness to such devastation?"

  Giraud turned from the wheel and stared at the general, a dreamlike look in his eyes. "The channel already carries the flow of the Red and Atchafalaya rivers. Just think what a mighty river will flow through southern Louisiana when the entire Mississippi breaks loose and adds its discharge to the other two. It will be a sight to behold."

  "Yes," said Montaigne slowly, "a sight to behold, but one I hope I never live to see."

  23

  AT FIVE MINUTES before three o'clock in the afternoon, Lucas Giraud slipped the throttles to the big Caterpillar diesels to quarter speed as the Larson cruised past Morgan City at the lower end of the Atchafa-laya River. After crossing the Intracoastal Waterway and dropping below Qin Shang Maritime's port of Sungari, the Larson entered the glassy-smooth waters of Sweet Bay Lake six miles from the Gulf of Mexico. He swung the boat toward a turquoise-colored research ship with NUMA painted in large block letters on the hull amidships. She has a no-nonsense, businesslike air about her, Giraud noted. As the Larson drew closer he could read the name on the bow, Marine Denizen. She looked like a ship that had seen her share of service. He judged her age at twenty-five years or more, old for a working ship.

  The wind blew out of the southeast at fifteen miles an hour and the water had a light chop. Giraud ordered a crewman to drop the fenders over the side. He then eased the Larson against the Marine Denizen with a gentle bump, and held the survey boat against the research vessel just long enough for his passenger to step across a ramp that had been extended for his arrival.

  On board the Denizen, Rudi Gunn raised his eyeglasse
s to the light streaming in through a porthole of the NUMA marine-survey ship, squinted his eyes and checked for smudges on the lenses. Seeing none, he replaced the rims and adjusted the earpieces. Then he looked down and studied the three-dimensional diorama of the Sungari shipping port that was beamed down on a horizontal surface by an overhead holographic projector. The image was processed from forty or more aerial photographs taken at low altitudes by a NUMA helicopter.

  Constructed on newly made land in a swampland along both banks of the Atchafalaya River before it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, the port was hailed as the most modern and efficient shipping terminus in the world. Covering two thousand acres and stretching over a mile on both sides of the Atchafalaya River, it was dredged to a navigational depth of thirty-two feet. The Port of Sungari consisted of over one million square feet of warehouse space, two grain elevators with loading slips, a six-hundred-thousand-barrel-capacity liquid bulk terminal and three general-cargo handling terminals that could load and unload twenty container ships at one time. The steel-faced docks on opposite sides of the river channel backed by landfill provided twelve thousand feet of deep-water berthage for all ships except heavily laden supertankers.