Lulled by the cemetery-like atmosphere of Sungari, the crew and scientists ate a leisurely breakfast before gathering around the work platforms in the moon pool. A Benthos autonomous underwater vehicle hung in a cradle over the water. This vehicle was three times the size of the compact AUV that Pitt used at Orion Lake. A rugged, streamlined unit with two horizontal thrusters, it could move at speeds up to five knots. The imagery equipment consisted of a Benthos video camera with low-light sensitivity and high resolution. The AUV also featured a digital still camera and a ground-penetrating radar unit that could detect a void through the steel casings, indicating a passage. A diver, wearing a wet suit purely as protection against jellyfish, lazily floated on his back while he waited for the AUV to be lowered.
Stewart looked through a doorway at Gunn, who was sitting in front of a computer monitor that was mounted beneath a large video screen. "Ready when you are, Rudi."
"Drop her in," said Gunn with the wave of a hand.
The winch attached to the cradle hummed and the AUV slowly settled into the perpetual gloom of the river. The diver uncoupled the cradle, swam to a ladder and climbed onto the work platform.
Stewart entered the small compartment that was filled from deck to roof with electronic equipment. He sat down next to Gunn, who was operating the AUV from a computer console while staring into the video monitor. All that was revealed was a long gray wall of steel casing that trailed off into the gloom. "Frankly, this seems like much ado about nothing."
"You'll get no argument from me," said Gunn. "The order to investigate Sungari from under the surface came direct from the White House."
"Do they really think Qin Shang would conduct his smuggling operations through underwater passageways that connect to the hulls of his ships?"
"Some hotshot in Washington must think so. That's why we're here."
"Like me to send for some coffee from the galley?" asked Stewart."I could use a cup," said Gunn without turning from the monitor.
The cook's galley assistant soon brought a tray of cups along with a filled coffeepot. Three hours later the cups and pot were as empty as the inspection project. Nothing showed on the monitor except a seemingly unending wall of steel casings that were driven deep into the silt to act as a barrier for the landfill that in turn acted as a foundation for the dock and terminal buildings. Finally, just before noon, Gunn turned to Stewart.
"So much for the west side of the port," Gunn said wearily. He rubbed his eyes to relieve the strain. "It gets awfully tedious staring at gray, shapeless casing for hours on end."
"See any hint of a door leading to a passage?"
"No so much as a crack or hinge."
"We can move the AUV across the river channel and, with luck, finish up the east side before dark," said Stewart.
"The sooner we wrap this up, the better." Gunn typed a command on the keyboard that sent the AUV on a course toward the opposite side of the port. Then he leaned back and relaxed in his chair.
"Sure you don't want to knock off for a sandwich?" asked Stewart.
Gunn shook his head. "I'll see it through and fill my empty stomach at dinner."
It took only ten minutes for the AUV to cross under the river to the east side of the port. Gunn then programmed the AUV's controls to start the run at the end of the casing wall, working north to south. The AUV had only covered two hundred yards when the phone beside him buzzed. "Can you take that?" he asked Stewart.
The Marine Denizen's skipper picked up the receiver and then handed it to Gunn. "It's Dirk Pitt."
"Pitt." Gunn turned from the monitor, his eyebrows raised in surprise. He took the phone and spoke into the mouthpiece. "Dirk?"
"Hello, Rudi," came Pitt's familiar voice. "I'm calling from an airplane somewhere over the Nevada desert."
"How did your underwater search of the United States go?"
"Got a little hairy there for a while, but all Al and I found was a smooth hull and keel with no openings."
"If we don't find anything on this end in the next few hours, we'll join you."
"Are you using a submersible?" asked Pitt.
"Not necessary," replied Gunn. "An AUV is doing the job just fine."
"Keep a tight leash on it, or Qin Shang's underwater security people will steal it before your eyes. They're sneaky devils."
Gunn hesitated before he replied, wondering what Pitt meant. He was about to ask when Stewart came back. "They're serving lunch, Rudi. I'll talk to you after we reach Washington. Good luck, and give my best to Frank Stewart." Then the connection went dead.
"How is Dirk?" inquired Stewart. "I haven't seen him since we worked together on the Lady Flamborough cruise-ship search down off Tierra del Fuego a few years ago."
"Testy as ever. He gave me a strange warning."
"Warning?"
"He said Qin Shang's underwater security people might steal the AUV," Gunn answered, obviously confused.
"What underwater security?" said Stewart sarcastically.
Gunn didn't reply. His eyes suddenly widened and he pointed at the video monitor. "My God, look!"
Stewart's eyes followed Gunn's outstretched finger and stiffened.
A face wearing a diver mask filled the screen of the monitor. They stared in amazement as the diver pulled off the mask and revealed very Chinese-featured eyes, nose and mouth. Then he flashed a wide grin and waved as a child waves bye-bye.
Then the image went dark and was replaced with jagged gray and white streaks. Gunn frantically commanded the AUV to return to the Marine Denizen, but there was no response. The AUV had disappeared as if it had never been launched.
24
PlTT KNEW SOMETHING was wrong the instant the NUMA driver stopped the car. A tiny indescribable alarm tingled inside his brain and traveled to the nape of his neck. Something was not as it should have been.
A life-threatening situation was the last thing on his mind on the ride from Andrews Air Force Base, where the NUMA jet had landed, to his home on a far corner of Washington's National Airport. Darkness had closed over the city, but he ignored the ocean of lights illuminating the buildings. He tried to relax and let his mind drift, but it kept returning to Orion Lake. He thought it odd that the story had not broken in the news media.
From the outside, the former aircraft-maintenance hangar that was built in 1937, the year Amelia Earhart disappeared, appeared forlorn and deserted. Weeds grew right up to its rusting, corrugated-metal walls, whose paint had long since vanished after decades of onslaught by the extremes of Washington's weather patterns. Though it had been condemned as an eyesore and scheduled to be demolished, Pitt had visualized the hangar's potential. Stepping in at the last minute, he thwarted FAA bureaucrats by winning a battle to have it placed on the national register of historic landmarks. Preventing its destruction, he purchased the building and surrounding acre of property and went to work on the interior, remodeling it into a combination living quarters and storage facility for his collection of classic automobiles and aircraft.
Pitt's grandfather had acquired a small fortune in developing Southern California real estate. On his death, he left his grandson a considerable inheritance. After paying the estate taxes, Pitt had chosen to invest in classic cars and aircraft rather than stocks and bonds. In twenty years, he had built up a collection that was highly unique.
Rather than bathe the hangar in a battery of floodlights, Pitt preferred that it appear desolate and empty. One small light atop an electrical pole that gave off a dim yellow glow was all that illuminated the unpaved road that ended at the hangar. He turned and stared through the car's window and studied the top of the pole. A red light that should have beamed from a concealed security camera was dark.
It was an indication as conspicuous to him as a blinking stop sign that something was drastically wrong.
Pitt's security system was designed and installed by a friend with an intelligence agency who was at the top of his trade. No one but a skilled professional could have come within a c
ountry mile of breaking the code and compromising it. He gazed around the barren landscape and detected the shadow of a van faintly visible fifty yards away under the reflected light from the city across the Potomac. Pitt didn't require the services of a psychic to know that someone or some group had gained entry into the hangar and was waiting to throw a welcome inside.
"What's your name?" Pitt asked the driver.
"Sam Greenberg."
"Sam, do you carry a satellite phone?"
"Yes, sir, I do," Greenberg replied.
"Contact Admiral Sandecker and tell him I have uninvited visitors and to please send a security force as quickly as possible."
Greenberg was young, no more than twenty, a student studying oceanography at a local university while earning extra money under a marine educational program with NUMA created by Admiral Sandecker. "Shouldn't I call the police?"
The kid is sharp, Pitt thought; he'd quickly grasped the situation. "Not a matter for local law enforcement. Please make the call as soon as you're away from the hangar. The admiral will know the drill."
"Are you going in alone?" the student asked as Pitt exited the car and retrieved his well-traveled duffel bag from the trunk.
Pitt looked at the young man and smiled. "A good host always entertains his guests." He stood and waited until the NUMA car's taillights faded into the dust cloud trailing the rear bumper. He paused to unzip his duffel bag to retrieve his old Colt .45 before remembering that he'd failed to obtain any cartridges after Julia Lee had emptied the gun at the ultralight aircraft on the Orion River.
"Empty!" he said through his teeth. As he stood alone in the night he began to wonder if he had a permanently dislocated brain. There was nothing left but to act dumb and enter the hangar as if he suspected nothing, then attempt to reach one of his collector cars where he kept a shotgun secreted inside a walnut cabinet originally crafted to contain an umbrella.
He pulled a small remote transmitter from his pocket and whistled the first few bars of "Yankee Doodle." The sound-recognition signal electronically shut down the security systems and unlocked a shabby side door that looked as if it was last open in 1945. A green light on the remote flashed three times in series. It should have flashed four, he observed. Someone who was very clever at neutralizing security systems had broken his code. He closed his eyes, paused for a few moments and took a deep breath. As the door cracked open, he dropped to the ground on his hands and knees and reached around the frame and flicked on the interior lights.
The inside walls, floor and curved roof were painted a glossy white that accented a spectrum of vivid colors gleaming off the thirty beautifully painted cars spaced throughout the hangar. The visual effect was dazzling, which was what Pitt counted on to blind whoever was waiting in the blackened interior to ambush him. He reminded himself that the orange-bodied and brown-fendered 1929 Duesenberg convertible sedan containing the shotgun was the third car from the door.
The intruders were not on a social visit. His suspicions were abruptly confirmed when he heard what sounded like a series of muted pops and sensed rather than felt a torrent of bullets spraying the doorway. The suppressors on the killers' guns changed the character of the gunfire in such a way that it was not identifiable as gunshots. They were using silencers even though there wasn't another soul within a mile. His arm whipped around the door again, and he flicked the lights. Then he slithered like a snake under the hail of fire around the doorway and then crept beneath the first two collector cars, a 1932 Stutz and a 1931 L-29 Cord, blessing the old vehicles for sitting high off the ground. Reaching the Duesenberg unscathed, he leaped over the side door onto the floor of the rear seat. In almost the same motion he turned the knob on the door of the cabinet behind the front seat and pulled it open. Then he removed an Aserma 12-gauge Bulldog self-ejecting shotgun that held eleven rounds. The deadly, compact firearm lacked a buttstock but was mounted with a flash hider/muzzle brake. It was one of four guns Pitt secreted throughout the hangar for just such an occasion.
The interior of the hangar was as dark as the deepest reaches of a cave. If these guys are pros, Pitt considered, and there was almost no uncertainty about their being highly trained, they'll be using night-vision scopes and infrared laser sights. Assessing the trajectory of the bullets as they whistled through the doorway, Pitt guessed that there were two assassins probably armed with fully automatic machine pistols. One was somewhere on the ground floor, the other on the balcony to his living quarters thirty feet above one corner of the hangar. Whoever wanted him dead made certain there was a backup in case one assassin failed.
There was no attempt to rush the door. The killers knew that Pitt had entered and was somewhere on the floor of the hangar. Realizing their intended quarry had knowingly entered the trap would make them apprehensive and wary.
With no place to go, Pitt quietly cracked both rear doors on the Duesenberg, peered into the darkness and waited for his assailants to make the next move.
He tried to slow his breathing to hear any sounds of stealth, but all his ears could detect was the beat of his own heart. There was no overpowering sense of fright, no feeling of hopelessness, only a slight mist of fear to be sure. He wouldn't be human if he didn't experience a degree of dread at being a target for two professional killers. But he was on home ground, while the assassins were in a strange environment. If they were to fulfill their mission and kill him, they had to find their target in the dark amid thirty antique automobiles and airplanes. Whatever advantage they had before Pitt walked in the hangar was lost. And what they didn't know was that he was armed and deadly. All Pitt had to do was sit it out in the back of the Duesenberg and wait for them to make a mistake.
He began to wonder who they were and who sent them. The only enemy that came to mind whom he had antagonized in the past few weeks, and who was still among the living, had to be Qin Shang. He could think of no one else who wanted him dead. It was evident to him the Chinese billionaire nurtured a vindictive streak.
He laid the shotgun across his chest, cupped his ears and listened. The hangar was as quiet as a crypt at midnight in the middle of a churchyard. These guys were good. There was no soft patter of stockinged or bare feet, but then stockinged or bare feet did not make noise on concrete if stepped on carefully. They were probably biding their time, also listening. He decided against the old movie trick of throwing something against a wall to draw their fire. Master assassins were too savvy to give their position away with random gunfire.
One minute dragged by, two, then three-it seemed far longer than that. Time seemed to flow like a stream of molasses. He looked up and saw the beam of a red laser sweep across the windshield of the Duesenberg and move on. He was betting his assailants were beginning to wonder if he might have slipped out of the hangar and escaped the trap. There was no way of knowing when Admiral Sandecker, backed by a team of federal marshals, would arrive on the scene. But Pitt was prepared to wait all night if need be while he laid there waiting for a sound or shadow that betrayed movement.
A plan began to form in his mind. He normally made a habit of removing the batteries from all his collector cars because of the danger of creating a fire from an electrical short. But since he planned on driving the Duesenberg when he returned from Orion Lake, Pitt had arranged for the chief mechanic of NUMA's fleet of vehicles, who was entrusted to enter the hangar, to charge a battery and install it in the car. It now struck him that if the opportunity presented itself, he could use the headlights of the Duesenberg to illuminate the floor of the warehouse.
Prudently keeping his eyes locked on the laser beams that swept around the hangar like tiny guard-tower lights from an old prison movie, he silently rolled over the backrest and slipped into a horizontal position on the front seat. Taking a calculated gamble, he aimed the spotlight on the outer cowling beside the steering wheel upward until the lens faced in the general direction of the balcony on the outside of his apartment. Then he raised the shotgun over the upper frame of the windshield and
switched on the light.
The bright beam shot aloft and pinpointed a figure in a black ninja suit with a hood covering the head and face crouched at the balcony railing and clutching a tactical machine pistol. The assassin's hand instinctively flew up to shield his eyes from the unexpected blinding glare. Pitt barely had time to adjust his aim before firing off two shots and blinking out the light, throwing the hangar into darkness again. The twin blast from the shotgun sounded like the firing of a cannon inside the metal-walled hangar. A surge of satisfaction swept through him as he heard the thud of a body against the concrete floor. Reckoning the second assassin would be expecting him to hide by throwing himself under the car, he stretched out horizontal on the wide running board and waited for a hail of gunfire.