Smith, John. Fake identity assumed by Cabrillo when he picks up Pittand Giordino at the Manila Airport.
In disguise, he appears as a great slob of a man with a big belly. Hehas a hook nose that looks as if it has been broken a few times, and hislip and chin are covered with stubble. Has greasy black hair and yellowirregular teeth. His biceps and forearms are covered with tattoos. Pittand Giordino see through the disguise.
Stephen Miller. Cargo ship that recovers a body in a life raft thatcame from the Princess Dou Wan.
Stewart, Frank. Captain of the Marine Denizen. Has brown hair cutshort and slickly combed with a precision part on the right side. Slimand tall with deep set blue eyes. He is unmarried.
Stingray. Compact, battery-powered diver propulsion unit that Pitt useson Orion Lake.
Stowe, Lieutenant Jefferson. Lieutenant on the Weehawken. Described astanned, blond and tall, with the boyish good looks of a tennisinstructor.
Straight, Tom. Bartender at Charlie's Fish dock, Seafood and Booze.
Sungari. Huge port facility built by Shang on Atchafalaya Bay nearMorgan City, Louisiana. Covers two thousand miles and stretches over amile on both sides of the Atchafalaya River. The area is dredged to anoperational depth of thirty-two feet. The port consists of one millionsquare feet of warehouse spac I e, two grain elevators with loadingslips, a six hundred-thousand-barrel-capacity liquid bulk terminal andthree general-cargo-handling terminals that could load and unload twentycontainer ships at one time. The warehouses and office structures areconstructed in the shape of pyramids and are covered by a goldgalvanized material that blazes like fire when struck by the sun.
Swordfish. Laird's code name with the Secret Service.
T'ai, Ling. Fake identity assumed by Lee. T'ai is said to hail fromJiangsu Province, where she lived until age twenty and finished herstudies. She then allegedly went to Canton and became a schoolteacher.
Her father is said to be a professor of chemistry at Beijing University.
Her great-grandfather was a Dutch missionary.
Tien, Yu. Captain of the Chengdo.
Ting, Quan. Chairman of China & Pacific Lines. A competitor ofShang's, Tsang explains that he will be taking over immigrant smugglingfor the Chinese government. Shang has Ting and his wife killed in anauto accident.
Tsang, Yin. Chief director of the People's Republic Ministry ofInternal Affairs. A short man with dense gray hair. His eyes bulge asthey protrude from fleshy pouches. After Shang gives him drugged tea,he suffers a fatal heart attack.
Tsung. Helmsman on the Princess Dou Wan Turner, Colonel Bob. Commanderof the battle group of Louisiana National Guardsmen who try to stop theS.S. United States. A veteran of the Gulf War.
Ultralights. Used by the Chinese to chase the ChrisCraft. Powered by alightweight reduction-drive, 50 horsepower pusher engine. Pittestimates their top speed as 120 miles an hour. The pilot sits forwardout in the open with the passenger behind and slightly elevated.
Undergound Washington. A series of tunnels that connect the White Housewith the Supreme Court, Capitol Building, State Department, under thePotomac River to the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency inLangley, Virginia, and about a dozen other strategic governmentbuildings and military bases around the city.
united states, S.S. Former cruise liner that was taken out of serviceand laid up in Norfolk, Virginia, for thirty years before being sold toa Turkish millionaire.
Towed from Norfolk across the sea to the Mediterranean, past Istanbuland into the Black Sea to Sevastopol. On her maiden voyage, she set thespeed record between New York and London, averaging thirty-five 510knots knots or about forty-one miles an hour. The brainchild of famedship designer William Francis Gibbs. Her keel was laid in 1950 by theNewport News Ship Building & Dry Dock. In an effort to build thefastest and most beautiful passenger liner afloat, Gibbs specifiedaluminum wherever possible. From the 1.2 million rivets in her hull tothe lifeboats and their oars, the stateroom furnishings, bathroomfixtures, babies' high chairs, even the coat hangers and picture frames,all had to be made from aluminum. A huge ship, she measures 990 feetwith a beam of 101 feet.
Her gross tonnage is 53,329. Designed to carry 694 passengers, the shipfeatured air conditioning, nineteen elevators, three libraries, twocinemas and a chapel. Powered by eight massive boilers creatingsuperheated steam, her four Westinghouse-geared turbines could put out240,000 horsepower or 60,000 for each of her four propeller shafts, andcould drive her through the water at more than fifty miles an hour. In1952, she won the prestigious Blue Riband, awarded for the fastest timeacross the Atlantic. No liner has won it since. By 1969, she wasretired and laid up at Norfolk, Virginia, for thirty years. Her hullwas painted black, her superstructure white and her two magnificentfunnels red, white and blue. Used by Shang in an attempt to flood theLower Mississippi River Basin.
Valparaiso, Chile. City where a radio operator reported a distress callfrom the Princess Dou Wan.
Wallace, Dean Cooper. President of the United States.
Was vice president. A former two-term governor from Oklahoma. Sleepsthree hours a night between four 511 and seven A.m. He looks sixty-fivebut is only in his late fifties. Has premature gray hair, red veinsstreaming through his facial skin and beady eyes that always look red.
An intense man with a round face, low forehead and thin eyebrows.
Wan Tzu, Han. Fake identity Seng assumes when he delivers Pitt andGiordino to the dock where the S.S.
United States is located. Wan-Tzu is said to be chief of docksidesecurity.
WeekawkeiL Coast Guard Cutter that drops Lee off on the Sung Lien Star.
Welland Canal. Canal that separates Lake Erie from Lake Ontario.
Perlmutter finds the Princess Yung Tai passed through the canal onDecember 7, 1948.
well, Chu. Second engineer on the Princess Dou Wan.
Wheeler, Doug. Old friend and neighbor of the Bayou Kid. Owner ofWheeler's Landing. A portly man with a thick mustache.
Wheiler's Landing. Where Pitt and Giordino pick up the Bayou Kid'sshanty boat and buy supplies for their trip. Raised off the ground onshort pilings, has a long porch that runs around the building. Thewalls are painted a bright green with yellow shutters framing thewindows.
Wiay, Hui. Former Nationalist Chinese Army colonel.
Now lives in Taipei. Fought against the Communists until forced to fleeto Formosa (now Taiwan). Ninety 512 two years old, but his mind isstill sharp. Perlmutter contacts him, and he discloses that he followedChiang Kai-shek's orders, rounded up artwork and delivered it to theShanghai docks and an old passenger liner commanded by Hui.
Willbanks, Ralph. One of the crew of the Divercity.
Described as a big, jolly man in his early forties with expansive browneyes and a bristling mustache.
Wong, Ki. Chief enforcer on the Indigo Star. A thin, neatly attiredman. Has a smooth brown face that is intelligent but expressionless.
Has narrow lips. Discloses to Lee that he knows she is not T'ai andsentences her to die. Later captures Lee at Bartholomeaux Sugar but isshot and killed by Giordino.
XM4 command-and-control vehicle. Location where Turner directs fireonto the S.S. United States.
Yokohama Ship Sales & Scrap Company. Based in Japan, the front companyShang uses to purchase his competitors' ships so his shipping companycould grow.
Zhong, So. Shang's private secretary. Moves with the grace of aBalinese dancing girl.
Answers to Advanced Pitt Trivia1. Al Capone.
2. British Sterling.
3. Omega.
4. Serial number 19385628.
5. "Alexander's Ragtime Band."
6. Miss Gosset.
7. Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger.
8. Abercrombie & Fitch.
9. "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
10. The complex is SKI QUEEN. The unit number is 22B.
11. "TRIVMFATOR."
12. Asakusa Dude Ranch.
13. Susan.
14. The Algonquin Hotel.
/> 15. Bentley.
16. "Alkali Sam's Tequila: If your eyes are still open, it ain't AlkaliSam's."
17. Aqualand Pro.
18. Dodge Viper.
19. Managua, Nicaragua.
20. Ninety-five miles.
ATLANTIS FOUND byCLIVE CUSSLERIMPACT 6120 B.C.
In what is now Hudson's Bay, CanadaThe intruder came from beyond. A nebulous celestial body as old as theuniverse itself, it had been born in a vast cloud of ice, rocks, dustand gas when the outer planets of the solar system were formed more thanfour and a half billion years ago. Soon after its scattered particlesfroze into a solid mass one mile in diameter, it began streakingsilently through the emptiness of space on an orbital voyage thatcarried it around a distant sun and halfway to the nearest stars again,a journey lasting two million years from start to finish.
The comet's core, or nucleus, was a conglomeration of frozen water,carbon monoxide, methane gas and jagged blocks of metallic rocks. Itmight accurately be described as a dirty snowball hurled through spaceby the hand of God. But as it whirled past the sun and swung around onits return path beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, the solarradiation reacted with its nucleus and a metamorphosis took place. Theugly duckling soon became a thing of beauty.
As it began to absorb the sun's heat and ultraviolet light, a long comaformed that slowly grew into an enormous, luminous blue tail that curvedand stretched out behind the nucleus for a distance of ninety millionmiles. A shorter, white dust tail more than one million miles wide alsomaterialized and curled out on the sides of the larger tail like thefins of a fish.
Each time the comet passed the sun, it lost more of its ice, and itsnucleus diminished. Eventually, in another two hundred million years,it would lose all its ice and break up into a cloud of dust and become aseries of small asteroids. This comet, however, would never orbitoutside the solar system or pass around the sun again. It would not beallowed a slow, cold death far out in the blackness of space. Within afew short minutes, its life would be snuffed out. On this, its lastorbit, the comet passed within nine hundred thousand miles of Jupiter,whose great gravitational force made it veer off on a collision coursewith the third planet from the sun, a planet its inhabitants calledEarth.
Plunging into the Earth's atmosphere at one hundred twenty thousandmiles an hour on a forty-five-degree angle, its speed ever increasingwith the gravitational pull, the comet created a brilliant luminescentbow shock as its two-billion-ton mass began to break into fragments dueto friction from its great speed.
Seven seconds later, the misshapen comet, having become a blindingfireball, smashed into an ocean with horrendous effect. The immediateresult from the explosive release of kinetic energy upon impact was togouge out a massive cavity the size of today's Hawaiian island of Mauias it vaporized and displaced a gigantic volume of water.
The entire Earth staggered from the seismic shock of an 11.0 earthquake.Millions of tons of sediment from the ocean bottom burst upward, thrownthrough the hole in the atmosphere above the impact site and into thestratosphere along with a great spray of pulverized, fiery rock that wasejected into suborbital trajectories before raining back to earth asblazing meteorites. Firestorms destroyed forests throughout the world.Volcanoes that had been dormant for thousands of years suddenly erupted,sending oceans of molten lava spreading over millions of square miles,blanketing the ground a thousand or more feet deep.
So much smoke and debris were hurled into the atmosphere and later blowninto every corner of the land by terrible winds that the sun was blockedout for nearly a year, sending temperatures plunging below freezing andshrouding the earth in darkness. Climatic change in every corner of theworld came with incredible suddenness. Temperatures at vast ice fieldsand northern glaciers rose until they reached between ninety and onehundred degrees Fahrenheit, causing a rapid meltdown.
Animals accustomed to tropical and temperate zones became extinctovernight. Many, such as the woolly mammoths, turned to ice where theystood in the warmth of summer eating grasses and flowers stillundigested in their stomachs. Trees along with their leaves and fruitwere quick-frozen. For days, fish that had been hurled upward from theimpact fell from the black skies.
Waves thousands of feet in height were thrown against the continents,surging over shorelines with a destructive power that was awesome inmagnitude.
Water swept over low coastal plains and swept hundreds of miles inland,destroying everything in its path.
Endless quantities of debris and sediment from the ocean floors werespread over low land masses. Only when the great surge smashed againstthe base of mountains did it curl under and begin a slow retreat, butnot before changing the course of rivers, filling land basins with seaswhere none existed before and turned large lakes into deserts.
The chain reaction seemed endless.
With a low rumble that grew to the roar of continuous thunder, themountains began to sway like palm trees under a light breeze asavalanches swept down their sides. Deserts and grassy plains undulatedas the onslaught from the oceans reared up and struck inland again.
The shock from the comet's impact had caused a sudden and massivedisplacement in the Earth's thin crust. The outer shell, less thanforty miles thick, and the mantle that lay over the hot fluid corebuckled and twisted, shifting crustal layers like the skin of agrapefruit that had been surgically removed and then neatly replaced soit could move around the core of fruit inside. As if controlled by anunseen hand, the entire crust then moved as a unit.
Entire continents were shoved around to new locations. Hills werethrust up to become mountains. Islands throughout the Pacific Oceanvanished, while others emerged for the first time. Antarctica, oncewest of modern-day Chile, slid more than two thousand miles to thesouth, where it was quickly buried under growing mountains of ice. Thevast ice pack that once floated in the Indian Ocean west of Australianow found itself in a temperate zone and rapidly began to melt. Thesame occurred with the former North Pole, which had spread throughoutwhat is now northern Canada. The new pole soon began to produce a thickice mass in the middle of what once had been open ocean.
The destruction was relentless. The convulsions and holocaust went onas if they would never stop. The movement of the Earth's thin outershell piled cataclysm on cataclysm. The abrupt melting of the formerice packs, combined with glaciers covering the continents havingsuddenly shifted into or near tropical zones, caused the seas to risefour hundred feet, drowning the already destroyed land that had beenoverwhelmed by tidal waves from the comet's impact.
In the time span of a single day, Britain, once connected to the rest ofthe European continent by a dry plain, was now an island, while a desertthat would become known as the Persian Gulf was abruptly inundated. TheNile River, having flowed into a vast fertile valley and then on towardthe great ocean to the west, now ended at what had suddenly become theMediterranean Sea.
The last great ice age had ended in the geological blink of an eye.
The dramatic change in the oceans and their circulation around the worldalso caused the poles to shift, drastically disturbing the Earth'srotational balance.
Earth's axis was thrown off by two degrees as the north and south poleswere displaced to new geographical locations, altering the centrifugalacceleration around the outer surface of the sphere. Because they werefluid, the seas adapted before the Earth made another three revolutions.But the land mass could not react as quickly.
Earthquakes went on for months.
Savage storms with brutal winds swirled around Earth, shredding anddisintegrating everything that stood on the ground for the next eighteenyears, before the poles stopped wobbling and settled into their newrotational axis. In time, sea levels stabilized, permitting newshorelines to form as bizarre climatic conditions continued to moderate.Changes became permanent. The time sequence between night and daychanged as the number of days in a year decreased by two. The earth'smagnetic field was also affected and moved northwest by more than ahundred miles.
H
undreds, perhaps thousands of different species of animals and fishbecame instantly extinct. In the Americas, the one-humped camel, themammoth, an ice age horse and the giant sloth all disappeared.
Gone also were the saber-toothed tiger, huge birds with twenty-five-footwingspans and most other animals that weighed one hundred or morepounds, most dying by asphyxiation from the smoke and volcanic gases.
Nor did the vegetation on land escape the apocalypse. Plant life notturned to ashes by the holocaust died for lack of sunlight along withthe algae in the seas. In the end, more than eighty-five percent of alllife on Earth would die from floods, fires, storms, avalanches poisonfrom the atmosphere and eventual starvation.
Human societies, many quite advanced, and a myriad of emerging cultureson the threshold of a progressive golden age were annihilated in asingle horrendous day and night. Millions of Earth's men, women andchildren died horribly. All vestiges of emerging civilizations weregone, and the few pathetic survivors were left with nothing but dimmemories of the past. The coffin had been closed on the greatestuninterrupted advance of mankind, a ten-thousand-year journey from thesimple Cro-magnon man to kings, architects, stone masons, artists andwarriors. Their works and their mortal remains were buried deep beneathnew seas, leaving few physical examples and fragments of an ancientadvanced culture. Entire nations and cities that stood only a few hoursbefore had vanished without a trace. The cataclysm of such magnitudeleft almost no evidence of any prior transcendent civilizations.