"We're within the helicopter's range now," said Pitt. "We can lift off within the hour."
"I've arranged for a military jet transport to be waiting for your arrival at the airport."
Sandecker was never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Pitt thought. "Then Al and I will see you sometime tomorrow afternoon."
"We have much to discuss."
"Any new developments?"
"An Indonesian freighter was found off Howland Island with a dead crew."
"Did the bodies show the same symptoms as those on Polar Queen?"
"We'll never know," answered Sandecker. "It blew up and sank while a boarding party was investigating, killing them as well."
"That's a twist."
"And to add to the mystery," Sandecker continued, "a Chinese junk luxury yacht owned and sailed by the movie actor Garret Converse is missing in the same area."
"His legion of fans won't be happy when they learn he died from unknown causes."
"His loss will probably get more coverage from the news media than all the dead on the cruise ship,"
Sandecker acknowledged.
"How has my theory on sound waves played?" Pitt asked.
"Yaeger's working it through his computers as we speak. With luck, he'll have gleaned more data by the time you and Al walk through the door. I have to tell you, he and Rudi Gunn think you may be onto something."
"See you soon, Admiral," Pitt said and hung up. He sat motionless and stared at the phone, hoping to God they were on the right track.
The dishes were cleared and the party in the ship's dining room had become loud with laughter as everyone competed in telling shaggy dog stories. As with Pitt, hardly anyone noticed that Giordino also had departed the festivities. Captain Dempsey entered into the humor of the evening with an old, old joke about a rich farmer who sends his ne'er-do-well son to college and makes him take along the old family dog, Rover. The kid then uses the old mangy dog to con his old man out of spending money by claiming he needs a thousand dollars because his professors claim they can make Rover read, write and talk. By the time he came to the punch line, everybody laughed more from sheer relief it was over than from the humor.
On one wall nearby, a ship's phone rang, and the first officer answered. Without a word, he nodded in Dempsey's direction. The captain caught the gesture, came over and took the call. He listened a moment, hung up the receiver and started for the open passageway leading to the stern deck.
"Are you all joked out?" Van Fleet called after him.
"I have to stand by for the helicopter's departure," he answered.
"What's the mission?"
"No mission. Pitt and Giordino have been ordered back to Washington by the admiral, posthaste.
They're flying off to the mainland to catch a military transport."
Maeve overheard and grabbed Dempsey by the arm. "When are they leaving?"
He was surprised by the sudden strength of her grip. "They should be lifting off about now.
Deirdre came over and stood next to Maeve. "He must not care enough about you to say goodbye."
Maeve felt as if a giant hand had suddenly reached inside her and squeezed her heart. Anguish filled her body. She rushed out the door onto the deck. Pitt had only lifted the helicopter a scant three meters off the pad N hen she came running into view. She could clearly see both men through the helicopter's large windows. Giordino looked down, saw her and waved. Pitt had both hands busy and could only respond with a warm grin and a nod.
He expected to see her smile and wave in return, but her face seemed drawn in fear. She cupped her hands and cried out to him, but the noise of the turbine exhaust and thumping rotor blades drowned out her words. He could only shake his head and shrug in reply.
Maeve shouted again, this time with lowered hands as if somehow willing her thoughts into his mind.
Too late. The helicopter shot into the air vertically and dipped over the side of the ship. She sagged to her knees on the deck, head in her hands, sobbing, as the turquoise aircraft flew over the endless marching swells of the sea.
Giordino looked back through his side window and saw Maeve slumped on the deck, Dempsey walking toward her. "I wonder what the fuss was all about," he said curiously.
"What fuss?" asked Pitt.
"Maeve . . . she acted like a Greek mourner at a funeral."
Concentrating on controlling the helicopter, Pitt had missed Maeve's unexpected display of grief.
"Maybe she hates goodbyes," he said, feeling a wave of remorse.
"She tried to tell us something," Giordino said vaguely, reliving the scene in his mind.
Pitt did not take a backward glance. He felt deep regret at not having said his farewells. It was rude to have denied Maeve the courtesy of a friendly hug and a few words. He had genuinely felt attracted to her. She had aroused emotions within him that he hadn't experienced since losing someone very dear to him in the sea north of Hawaii many years ago. Her name was Summer, and not a day passed that he didn't recall her lovely face and the scent of plumeria.
There was no way for him to tell if the attraction was mutual. There were a multitude of expressions in her eyes, but nothing he saw that indicated desire. And nothing in her conversation had led him to believe they were more than merely two people touching briefly before passing into the night.
He tried to remain detached and tell himself that their affair had nowhere to go. They were bound to lives on opposite sides of the world. It was best to let her fade into a pleasant memory of what might have been if the moon and stars had shone in the right direction.
"Weird," Giordino said, staring ahead at the restless sea as the islands north of Cape Horn grew in the distance.
" `Weird'?" Pitt echoed in a tone of indifference.
"What Maeve yelled as we lifted off."
"How could you hear anything over the chopper's racket?"
"I couldn't. It was all in the way she formed the words with her mouth."
Pitt grinned. "Since when do you read lips?"
"I'm not kidding, pal," Giordino said in dead seriousness. "I know the message she tried to get across to us."
Pitt knew from long years of experience and friendship that when Giordino turned profound he worked purely from essentials. You didn't step into his circle, spar with him and step out unscathed. Pitt mentally remained outside the circle and peered in. "Spit it out. What did she say?"
Giordino slowly turned and looked at Pitt, his deep-set black eyes reflective and somber at the same time. "I could swear she said `Help me.'"
The twin-engined Buccaneer jet transport touched down smoothly and taxied to a quiet corner of Andrews Air Force Base, southeast of Washington. Fitted out comfortably for high-ranking Air Force officers, the aircraft flew nearly as fast as the most modern fighter plane.
As the flight steward, in the uniform of an Air Force master sergeant, carried their luggage to a waiting car and driver, Pitt marveled at Admiral Sandecker's influence in the capital city. He wondered what general the admiral had conned into temporarily lending the plane to NUMA, and what manner of persuasion it took.
Giordino dozed during the drive, while Pitt stared unseeing at the low buildings of the city. The rush-hour traffic had begun streaming out of town, and the streets and bridges leading into the suburbs were jammed. Fortunately, their car was traveling in the opposite direction.
Pitt cursed his idiocy for not returning to Ice Hunter shortly after liftoff. If Giordino had interpreted her message correctly, Maeve was in some sort of trouble. The possibility that he had deserted her when she was calling out to him gnawed at his conscience.
The long arm of Sandecker reached through his melancholy and cast a shroud over his preoccupation with guilt. Never in Pitt's years with NUMA had he ever placed his personal problems above the vital work of the agency. During the flight to Punta Arenas, Giordino had provided the crowning touch.
"There's a time for being horny, and this isn't it. People and s
ea life are dying by the boatload out there on the water. The sooner we stop this evil, the more lives will be spared to pay taxes. Forget her for now. When this cauldron of crap is over you can take a year off and chase her Down Under."
Giordino might never-have been hired to teach rhetoric at Oxford, but he seldom failed to fill a book with common sense. Pitt surrendered and reluctantly eased Maeve from his mind, not entirely successfully. The memory of her lingered like a portrait that became more beautiful with the passage of time.
His thoughts were broken as the car rolled over the driveway in front of the tall green, solar-glassed building that housed NUMA's headquarters. The visitors' parking lot was covered with television transmitter trucks and vans, emitting enough microwaves to launch a new chicken rotisserie franchise.
"I'll run you into the underground parking area," said the driver. "The vultures were expecting your arrival."
"You sure an ax murderer isn't roaming the building?" asked Giordino.
"No, the reception is for you. The news media are starved for details of the cruise ship massacre. The Australians tried to put a tight lid on it, but all hell broke loose after the surviving passengers talked when they reached Chile. They were glowing in their praise of how you guys rescued them and saved the cruise ship from going on the rocks. The fact that two of them were daughters of diamond king Arthur Dorsett naturally excited the expose rags."
"So now they're calling it a massacre." Pitt sighed.
"Lucky for the Indians they can't blame this one on them," said Giordino.
The car stopped in front of a security guard stationed in front of a small alcove that led to a private elevator. They signed an entry form and took the elevator to the tenth floor. When the doors opened they stepped into a vast room that was Hiram Yaeger's electronics fiefdom from which the computer wizard directed NUMA's vast data systems network.
Yaeger looked up from a huge horseshoe-shaped desk in the middle of the room and smiled broadly.
No bib overalls today, but he was wearing a faded Levi's jacket that looked like it had been dragged from Tombstone to Durango by a horse. He jumped to his feet and came from behind the desk, vigorously shaking Pitt's and Giordino's hands. "Good to see you two scoundrels back in the building. It's been as dull as an abandoned amusement park since you skipped to the Antarctic."
"Always good to be back on a floor that doesn't rock and roll," said Pitt.
Yaeger grinned at Giordino. "You look nastier than when you left."
"That's because my feet still feel cold as ice," Giordino replied in his usual burlesque tone.
Pitt glanced about the room crowded with electronic data systems and a crew of technicians. "Are the admiral and Rudi Gunn on hand?"
"Waiting for you in the private conference room," answered Yaeger. "We assumed you and A1 would go there first."
"I wanted to catch you before we all sat down."
"What's on your mind?"
"I'd like to study your data on sea serpents."
Yaeger raised his eyebrows. "You did say sea serpents?"
Pitt nodded. "They intrigue me. I can't tell you why."
"It may surprise you to learn I have a mountain of material on sea serpents and lake monsters."
"Forget the legendary creatures swimming around in Loch Ness and Lake Champlain," said Pitt. "I'm only interested in the seagoing variety."
Yaeger shrugged. "Since most of the sightings are on inland waters, that cuts the search by eighty percent. I'll have a fat file on your desk tomorrow morning."
"Thank you, Hiram. I'm grateful as always."
Giordino peered at his watch. "We'd better move along before the admiral hangs us from the nearest yardarm."
Yaeger gestured to a nearby door. "We can take the stairway."
When Pitt and the others entered the conference room, Sandecker and Gunn were studying the region where the latest case of unexplained death was projected on the holographic chart. The admiral and Gunn stepped forward to greet them. For a few minutes they all stood in a tight little huddle and deliberated the turn of events. Gunn anxiously probed Pitt and Giordino for details, but they were both extremely tired, and they condensed the wild series of incidents into brief descriptions.
Sandecker knew better than to crowd them. Full reports could be written at a later time. He motioned to the empty chairs. "Why don't you sit down, and we'll get to work."
Gunn pointed toward one of the blue globes that seemed to float over one end of the table. "The latest kill zone," he said. "An Indonesian freighter called Mentawai, with a crew of eighteen."
Pitt turned to the admiral. "The vessel that exploded after another ship's crew had boarded her?"
"The same," said Sandecker, nodding. "As I told you aboard Ice Hunter, actor Garret Converse, his crew and his fancy junk were reported sailing in the same area by an oil tanker that went unscathed. The junk and everyone on board appear to have vanished."
"Nothing on satellite?" inquired Giordino.
"Too much cloud cover, and the infrared cameras won't pick out a vessel as small as a junk."
"There is something else to consider," said Gunn. "The captain of the American container ship that found Mentawai reported a luxury yacht speeding from the site. He can't swear to it in court, but he's certain the yacht closed with Mentawai before he arrived, after responding to the freighter's distress call.
He also thinks the crew of the yacht are somehow responsible for the explosives that wiped out his boarding party."
"Sounds like the good captain has an overactive imagination," suggested Yaeger.
"To say this man is seeing demons is incorrect. Captain Jason Kelsey is a very responsible seaman with a solid history of skill and integrity."
"Did he get a description of the yacht?" asked Pitt.
"By the time Kelsey concentrated his attention on it, the yacht was too distant to identify. His second officer, however, observed it earlier through binoculars before it widened the gap. Fortunately, he's an amateur artist who enjoys sketching ships and boats while in port."
"He drew a picture of it?"
"He admits to taking a few liberties. The yacht was pulling away from him, and his view was mostly of the stern quarter. But he managed to give us a good enough likeness to trace the hull design to her builders."
Sandecker lit one of his cigars and nodded toward Giordino. "Al, why don't you act as lead investigator on this one?"
Giordino slowly pulled out a cigar, the exact mate of Sandecker's, and slowly rolled it between his thumb and fingers while warming one end with a wooden match. "I'll get on the trail after a shower and a change of clothes."
Giordino's slinky method of pilfering the admiral's private stock of cigars was a mystery that bewildered Sandecker. The cat-and-mouse game had gone on for years, with Sandecker unable to ferret out the secret and too proud to demand an answer from Giordino. What was particularly maddening to the admiral was that his inventory invariably failed to turn up a count of missing cigars.
Pitt was doodling on a notepad and spoke to Yaeger without looking up. "Suppose you tell me, Hiram. Did my idea of killer sound waves have any merit?"
"A great deal, as it turns out," replied Yaeger. "The acoustics experts are still working out a detailed theory, but it looks as if we're looking at a killer that travels through water and consists of several elements. There are multiple aspects to be examined. The first is a source for generating intense energy.
The second, propagation, or how the energy travels from the source through the seas. Third, the target or structure that receives the acoustic energy. And fourth, the physiological effect on human and animal tissue."
"Can you make a case for high-intensity sound waves that kill?" Pitt asked.
Yaeger shrugged. "We're on shaky ground, but this is the best lead we have at the moment. The only joker in the deck is that sound waves intense enough to kill could not come from an ordinary sound source. And even an intense source could not kill at any gre
at distance unless the sound was somehow focused."
"Hard to believe that after traveling great distances through water a combination of high-intensity sound and excessive resonance energy can surface and kill every living thing within thirty or more kilometers."
"Any idea where these sound rays originate?" asked Sandecker.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, we do."
"Can one sound source actually cause such a staggering loss of life?" asked Gunn.
"No, and that's the catch," replied Yaeger. "To produce wholesale murder above and under the sea of the magnitude we've experienced, we have to be looking at several different sources on opposite sides of the ocean." He paused, and shuffled through a stack of papers until he found the one he was looking for.
Then he picked up a remote control and pressed a series of codes. Four green lights glowed on opposite corners of the holographic chart.
"By borrowing the global monitoring system of hydrophones placed by the Navy around the oceans to track the Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War, we've managed to trace the source of the destructive sound waves to four different points in the Pacific Ocean." Yaeger paused to pass printed copies of the chart to everyone seated at the table. "Number one, by far the strongest, appears to emanate from Gladiator Island, the exposed tip of a deep ocean range of volcanic mountains that surfaces midway between Tasmania and New Zealand's South Island. Number two is almost on a direct line toward the Komandorskie Islands, off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea."
"That's a fair ways north," observed Sandecker.
"Can't imagine what the Russians have to gain," said Gunn.
"Then we head east across the sea to Kunghit Island, off British Columbia, Canada, for number three,"
Yaeger continued. "The final source as traced by a data pattern from the hydrophones is on the Isla de Pascua, or Easter Island as it is better known."
"Making the shape of a trapezium," commented Gunn.
Giordino straightened. "A what?"
"Trapezium, a quadrilateral with no two sides that are parallel."