“And the pirates just happened upon the stricken ship in the right place at the right time? And then someone accidentally tried to kill you and Paul for investigating it?”
Of course not, she thought. “Then it has to be a weapon,” she said. “Something powerful enough to fry a five-hundred-foot vessel without any warning.”
Smith offered a sad smile. “I concur,” he said. “As if the world doesn’t have enough to worry about.”
She sensed it was she who was concurring with him, but it didn’t matter.
“I have to talk to Dirk,” she said.
Dr. Smith nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on Paul.”
27
Washington, D.C., June 23
THE VIEW FROM DIRK PITT’S OFFICE on the twenty-ninth floor of the NUMA headquarters building included much of Washington, D.C. From the generous rectangular window he could watch over a section of the shimmering Potomac, the Lincoln and Washington monuments, and the Capitol building, all of which stood lit up in brilliant white for the evening.
Despite the view, Dirk’s attention was directed elsewhere, toward the monitor of his computer, on which a three-way teleconference was proceeding.
In one corner, the smiling face of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s resident computer genius. Yaeger looked as if he’d just come off the road on a Harley; he wore a leather vest and had his long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail.
In the other corner of Pitt’s screen, a drawn and waifish version of Gamay Trout gazed up at him. Her deep red hair was also pulled back, but out of necessity rather than style. Occasionally, as she spoke, a stray lock worked itself loose and fell in front of her eyes. She would diligently push it back behind her ear or keep talking as if she didn’t notice.
Despite her obvious pain, and eyes Pitt had never seen so dark, she seemed to be holding it together. Certainly she’d helped them take a big step forward in solving the mystery of what happened to the Kinjara Maru.
As she explained a theory she and the Matador’s doctor had come up with, Pitt had to admire her tenacity and devotion to duty. Such qualities were in abundance at NUMA, but they always shone the brightest under the darkest circumstances.
While Pitt listened and asked what he thought were pertinent questions, Yaeger took notes and mostly grunted the occasional “Uh-huh” and “Okay.”
When Gamay was done speaking, Pitt turned to Yaeger. “Can you run a simulation on what she described?”
“I think so,” Yaeger said. “Gonna be a shot in the dark, to some extent, but I could put you in the ballpark.”
“Ballpark’s not good enough, Hiram. I want box seats down the third baseline.”
“Sure,” Yaeger said, drawing the word out slowly. “But the closest I can come is telling you what kind of power might be needed and how this might have accomplished it. So you might be on the third baseline, but you’re still gonna be up in the nosebleeds unless we get more data.”
“You start working,” Pitt said. “I’ll bet you a case of imported beer that we’ll get more data before you’re done with your first run-through.”
“Canadian?” Hiram said.
“Or German. Winner picks.”
“Okay,” Yaeger said. “I’ll take that action.”
His portion of the screen went blank, and Dirk turned to Gamay. “I’m not going to ask how you’re holding up,” he said. “Just want you to know I’m proud of you.”
She nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “And thank you for ordering me to study the samples. It helped me . . . helped me get back to being me.”
Pitt was confused. “I never gave any order like that,” he said.
“But the doctor . . .” she began. A smile creased her face for the first time.
“Doctor’s orders,” Pitt guessed.
“Apparently, part of my treatment,” she said.
“Hobson’s a crafty old guy,” Pitt said, thinking warmly of the doctor. “And he’s smart. If someone out there has developed a weapon like this, our best defense may be to find it and neutralize it before it gets used again. Thanks to you two, we have a chance.”
“What help can we expect?” she asked.
“I’ve already talked to the admiral,” Pitt said. “The Vice President, I mean. He’s going to take what we’ve found directly to the President and Joint Chiefs. I’m sure they’re going to be pretty damn interested, but as for getting involved . . . We’ve got to find them something tangible to get involved in. Right now, this is just a ghost that came to visit and left a mark. We have to put a body with that ghost, something they can deal with. You’ve given us the first step.”
The rebellious strand of hair fell down across her face again, and Gamay dutifully tucked it back behind her ear. “Dr. Smith and I theorized that the crew might have been killed because of what they saw. In other words, having survived the electromagnetic burst, they had to be killed, and the ship scuttled, to keep things quiet.”
“It’s reasonable,” Pitt said. “Dead men tell no tales.”
“I know,” she said. “But I was thinking there has to be something more. I mean, they fired torpedoes at us. We have to assume they could have done the same to the freighter when she was afloat.”
Pitt considered this. Sometimes you learned more by what wasn’t done than what was. “Would have been easier than boarding the ship.”
“And quicker,” she said.
“Yeah,” Pitt said, “that it would. So why didn’t they?”
“And why hit this particular ship in the first place?”
Another good question. He guessed there could be only one reason. One answer to both.
“There was something they wanted on that ship,” he said. “Something they had to get before it went down. And whatever that something was, whoever was behind this didn’t want the world to know it had gone missing.”
On the screen, Gamay nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”
It explained a few things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s—more of an old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved his life—but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard to reach.
Shortly after the freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least a yellow flag.
A few days later, just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s manifest.
The two young men had been stymied in Takagawa’s lobby, made to wait for hours and then all but tossed out on their ears. It felt like a slap in the face to Pitt, enough to get his considerable anger up and running. So far, he’d been too busy to press the issue. But now it seemed paramount.
“We need to know what the Kinjara Maru was carrying,” Gamay said.
Pitt nodded. He knew what he had to do. He knew there was only one way to find out the truth.
28
Eastern Atlantic, June 24
A POUNDING ON HIS CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.
The pounding returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice shouted.
“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them on.
He heard footsteps as the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argo was in motion, not turning or making steerage or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the water as if racing something.
Joe pulled a shirt over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never untied, and then ran out the door.
A minute later, he was on the bridge. The Argo
was indeed moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the increasing swells.
“Captain,” Joe said, reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the crew.
“Where in God’s green earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes barked.
Still a little groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s on a date,” Joe said.
“A date?” Haynes shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle of the ocean?”
Joe scratched his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”
“Zavala!” the captain shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full attention. Who is Austin out with?”
For a second, Joe wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.
“He’s with the Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said. “She told him she had some secret information that he might find interesting.”
“What time was he planning on coming back?”
“Well,” Joe said, “I guess that would kind of depend on how the date went . . . sir.”
The captain cut his eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s the big deal?”
The captain explained about the attack on the Grouper, Paul Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that whoever attacked the Grouper had used torp edoes.
“What are they doing now?” Joe asked.
“They’re headed due west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital ship.”
“What about us? Is that why we’re heading in?”
“The Director feels it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”
“Have we contacted the local police?”
“Yes,” the captain said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like, and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been recovered.”
Thank God, Joe thought. He gazed through the Argo’s forward windows. The lights of Santa Maria were visible up ahead.
“We’ll reach port in twenty minutes. I want you to come up with a plan to find him,” the captain said. “I don’t care if you use the phone or some flares or you rent a damn plane to fly around trailing a banner that reads ‘Kurt Austin, Call NUMA.’ You just find him before anything else goes wrong.”
Joe nodded. He would start with the Russian scientist. Hopefully, someone at one of the hotels would recognize her.
AS THE ARGO was racing shoreward, Kurt and Katarina were descending toward the lights of Vila do Porto themselves. The sensation was rather unlike any Kurt could remember.
The open cockpit was designed for daytime use in warm weather. There were no lights to see the limited instrument panel by. In addition, though the small craft never made more than 50 knots, the damp mountain air blowing over them at fifty miles an hour was enough to chill them to the bone.
In daylight conditions Kurt would have brought them down to a lower altitude as rapidly as possible, but night flying presented a different challenge. Piloting such a craft through the mountains in the dark was like walking through an unfamiliar room without any lights on, only hitting the furniture here would hurt far worse than a stubbed toe.
At one point, he spotted the lights of a car on the twisting road down below. He angled toward them, knowing that the road cut through the mountain passes. Following the car, staying far above and well behind it, he was able to follow the road itself. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the car turned out to be faster than the flying lawn mower he was commanding.
As the car’s lights became too faint to see, another set of lights came into view: the comparatively bright streets of Vila do Porto. He angled toward them, knowing that if he could keep them in sight no mountain could rise up and smite them from the sky.
Katarina noticed them too. “Are we almost there?” she said. Her teeth were chattering.
She sat behind him in the two-seat machine. Kurt remembered the simple black dress she had on. Not exactly made for 50-knot winds and 40-degree temperatures.
“You’re cold,” he said.
“Freezing to death,” she insisted.
She had to be turning blue by now. “I thought you Russians were used to the cold.”
“Yes, and we know how to dress for it, with layers and fur hats. You don’t have one hiding up there for me, do you?”
He had to laugh, imagining her with a giant fur hat on.
“Lean forward,” he said. “Press against me and put your arms around me.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.
In an instant he felt her pressed against him, her arms wrapped around his chest. It was a lot warmer and nicer that way.
They continued on, buzzed their way through the last of the mountain passes, and watched as Vila do Porto spread out before them. The town had fifty thousand inhabitants, or thereabouts, but it looked like Metropolis at that moment.
“Where are we going to land?” Katarina asked.
Kurt had been thinking about that the whole way down. The ultralight only needed a two-hundred-foot strip to land and stop in. In the daylight there might have been fifty places to put down safely, but at night everything that wasn’t lit up looked the same. Thinking he was descending toward a flat field or patch of open ground, he could easily have them ramming a telephone pole, or a house, or a stand of trees.
They had to land somewhere lighted to be safe. The only problem was, most lighted areas had power lines strewn around them. Then Kurt spotted a sight that looked as glorious to him as the runway lights at JFK International. A soccer field, lit for a night game and open to the sky.
A hundred twenty yards of smooth, flat grass without any power lines crossing it or obstructions in the way. It was perfect. He angled toward it, descending slightly. There was a crosswind coming off the Atlantic, and Kurt had to crab the little plane sideways at a thirty-degree angle to keep them from getting blown inland.
At five hundred feet, he could see a crowd around the perimeter but no players on the field. Katarina pressed into him tighter.
“I need my arms back,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Don’t like flying. Especially takeoffs and landings.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “This one’s going to be a breeze.”
Within a minute of saying that, Kurt wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He saw players taking the field, either it was the start of the game or halftime had just ended.
He and Katarina were a hundred feet up, three hundred feet from the end of the grass. They had to hear him. Of course hearing a plane flying around didn’t exactly make one run for cover. He guessed that would change in a few seconds.
The engine began to sputter and cough.
“We’re almost out of fuel,” he said.
“Just land, already,??
? she shouted back.
He continued on, wishing the damn thing had a horn. “Too bad I don’t have my vuvuzela,” he shouted.
He could see the players shaking hands, the referee standing in the center with his foot on the ball about to blow the whistle. The engine sputtered again, and Kurt put the nose down to pick up speed. The prop sped up again, and he saw the players look his way. The crowd turned as well.
He zoomed over the crowd. A flagpole or something he hadn’t seen hit the right wing. The frame bent, the right side dropped, and Kurt overcorrected back to the left.
Players began running for the sidelines as the sputtering craft descended into the lighted area.
They hit the grass and bounced. The ultralight almost nosed over, but Kurt corrected and planted the wheels firmly in the middle of the field, right at the fifty-yard line.
He reached for the brake, pulled it, and felt the small plane skid across the wet grass. One last player dove out of the way, and the ultralight slammed into the goal at the far end of the field.
The net wrapped around them, the propeller died, and the little plane stopped.
Kurt looked up and back. The crowd, the players, the ref, everyone, just stared in an incredible silence. They looked at him and Katarina, and then at one another, and then finally at the ref. He did nothing for a second, then slowly raised one arm, blew his whistle, and yelled, “Goooooaaaaaallll!”
The crowd shouted in unison, raising their arms as if it were a triumph, as if it were an overtime goal to win the World Cup for tiny Vila do Porto, and in moments the players were reaching for Katarina and Kurt, laughing and clapping, as they freed the plane from the net and dragged it back out onto the field.
The players helped Katarina climb out, admiring her form as they did. The ref helped Kurt. And then they were escorted off the field to the sidelines.