Inca Gold

The hacienda was built around the pool and a large garden filled with a variety of tropical plants. All major rooms had balconies with dramatic views of the sea and the town of Guaymas. She was more than happy to relax around the pool or in her skylit bedroom with its own patio and Jacuzzi while the men flew up and down the Gulf in search of the treasure. She picked up her watch from a small table. Five o'clock. The conniving brothers and her husband would be returning soon. She sighed with pleasure at the thought of another fabulous dinner of local dishes.

After the servant girl brought the rum collins, Micki drank it down to the ice cubes and settled back for a brief nap. Just before she drifted off, she thought she heard a car drive up the road from town and stop at the front gate of the hacienda.

When she awoke a short time later, her skin felt cool and she sensed that the sun had passed behind a cloud. But then she opened her eyes, and was startled to see a man standing over her, his shadow thrown across the upper half of her body.

The eyes that stared at her looked like stagnant black pools. There was no life to them. Even his face seemed incapable of expression. The stranger appeared emaciated, as if he been sick for a long time. Micki shivered as though an icy breeze suddenly swept over her. She thought it odd that he took no notice of her exposed body, but gazed directly into her eyes. She felt as if he were looking inside her.

"Who are you?" she asked. "Do you work for Mr. Zolar?"

He did not reply for several seconds. When he spoke, it was with an odd voice with no inflection. "My name is Tupac Amaru."

And then he turned and walked away.

Admiral Sandecker stood in front of his desk and held out his hand as Gaskill and Ragsdale were ushered into his office. He gave a friendly smile. "Gentlemen, please take a seat and get comfortable."

Gaskill looked down at the little man who stood slightly below his shoulders. "Thank you for taking the time to see us."

"NUMA has worked with Customs and the FBI in the past. Our relations were always based on cordial cooperation."

"I hope you weren't apprehensive when we asked to meet with you," said Ragsdale.

"Curious is more like it. Would you like some coffee?"

Gaskill nodded. "Black for me, thank you."

"Whatever artificial sweetener that's handy in mine," said Ragsdale.

Sandecker spoke into his intercom, and then looked up and asked, "Well, gentlemen, what can I do for you?"

Ragsdale came straight to the point. "We'd like NUMA's help settling a thorny problem dealing with stolen artifacts."

"A little out of our line," said Sandecker. "Our field is ocean science and engineering."

Gaskill nodded. "We understand, but it has come to Customs' attention that someone in your agency has smuggled a valuable artifact into the country illegally."

"That someone was me," Sandecker shot back without batting an eye.

Ragsdale and Gaskill glanced at each other and shifted uneasily in their chairs. This turn of events was not what they had expected.

"Are you aware, Admiral, that the United States prohibits the importing of stolen artifacts under a United Nations convention that seeks to protect antiquities worldwide?"

"I am."

"And are you also aware, sir, that officials at the Ecuadorian embassy have filed a protest?"

"As a matter of fact, I instigated the protest."

Gaskill sighed and visibly relaxed. "I had a feeling in my bones there was more to this than a simple smuggling."

"I think Mr. Gaskill and I would both appreciate an explanation," said Ragsdale.

Sandecker paused as his private secretary, Julie Wolff, entered with a tray of coffee cups and set them on the edge of his desk. "Excuse me, Admiral, but Rudi Gunn called from San Felipe to report that he and Al Giordino have landed and are making final preparations for the project."

"What is Dirk's status?"

"He's driving and should be somewhere in Texas about now."

Sandecker turned back to the government agents after Julie had closed the door. "Sorry for the interruption. Where were we?"

"You were going to tell us why you smuggled a stolen artifact into the United States," said Ragsdale, his face serious.

The admiral casually opened a box of his cigars and offered them. The agents shook their heads. He leaned back in his desk chair, lit a cigar, and graciously blew a cloud of blue smoke over his shoulder toward an open window. Then he told them the story of Drake's quipu, beginning with the war between the Inca princes and ending with Hiram Yaeger's translation of the coiled strands and their knots.

"But surely, Admiral," questioned Ragsdale, "you and NUMA don't intend to get into the treasure hunting business?"

"We most certainly do." Sandecker smiled.

"I wish you'd explain the Ecuadorian protest," said Gaskill.

"As insurance. Ecuador is in bitter conflict with an army of peasant rebels in the mountains. Their government officials were not about to allow us to search for the quipu and then take it to the United States for decoding and preservation for fear their people would think they had sold a priceless national treasure to foreigners. By claiming we stole it, they're off the hook. So they agreed to loan the guipu to NUMA for a year. And when we return it with the proper ceremony, they'll be applauded as national heroes."

"But why NUMA?" Ragsdale persisted. "Why not the Smithsonian or National Geographic?"

"Because we don't have a proprietary interest. And we're in a better position to keep the search and discovery out of the public eye."

"But you can't legally keep any of it."

"Of course not. If it's discovered in the Sea of Cortez, where we believe it lies, Mexico will cry `finders keepers.' Peru will claim original ownership, and the two countries will have to negotiate, thereby assuring the treasures will eventually be displayed in their national museums."

"And our State Department will get credit for a public relations coup with our good neighbors to the south," added Ragsdale.

"You said it, sir, not me."

"Why didn't you notify Customs or the FBI about this?" inquired Gaskill.

"I informed the President," Sandecker replied matter-of-factly. "If he failed to filter the information from the White House to your agencies, then you'll just have to blame the White House."

Ragsdale finished his coffee and set the cup on the tray. "You've closed the door on one problem that concerned us all, Admiral. And believe me when I say we are extremely relieved at not having to put you through the hassle of an investigation. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint, you've opened the door to another dilemma."

Gaskill looked at Ragsdale. "The coincidence is nothing short of astonishing."

"Coincidence?" Sandecker asked curiously.

"That after almost five hundred years, two vital clues to the mystery of Huascar's treasure surfaced from two different sources within five days of each other."

Sandecker shrugged. "I'm afraid I don't follow you."

In turn, Gaskill filled the admiral in on the Golden Body Suit of Tiapollo. He finished by giving a brief summary of the case against Zolar International.

"Are you telling me that another party is searching for Huascar's treasure at this very minute?" Sandecker asked incredulously.

Ragsdale nodded. "An international syndicate that deals in art theft, antiquity smuggling, and art forgery with annual profits running into untold millions of untaxed dollars."

"I had no idea."

"Regrettably, our government and news media have not seen the benefit in educating the general public on a criminal activity that is second only to the drug trade."

"In one robbery alone," explained Gaskill, "the dollar estimate of the masterpieces stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in April 1990 came to two hundred million."

"When you throw in the combined theft, smuggling, and forgery operations taking place in nearly every country of the world," Ragsdale continued, "you can understand why we're looking at a billion-dollar industry."

"The list of art and antiquities stolen over the past hundred years would equal the number of names in the New York phone book," Gaskill emphasized.

"Who buys such a staggering amount of illegal goods?" asked Sandecker.

"The demand far exceeds the supply," answered Gaskill. "Wealthy collectors are indirectly responsible for looting because they create a strong market demand. They stand in line to purchase historically significant hot goods from underground dealers. The list of clients reads like a celebrity register. Heads of state, high-level government officials, motion picture personalities, top business leaders, and even curators of major museums who look the other way while negotiating for black market goods to enhance their collections. If they have a buck, they'll buy it."

"Drug dealers also buy untold amounts of illegal art and antiquities as a fast and easy way of laundering money while building an investment."

"I can see why unrecorded artifacts are lost in the shuffle," said Sandecker. "But surely famous art paintings and sculptures turn up and are recovered."

Ragsdale shook his head. "Sometimes we get lucky, and a tip leads us to stolen property. Occasionally honest art dealers or museum curators will call us when they recognize pieces the thieves are trying to sell. All too often missing art remains lost from lack of leads."

"A tremendous number of antiquities obtained by grave robbers are sold before archaeologists have a chance to study them," Gaskill said. "For example, during the desert war against Iraq in the early nineties, thousands of artifacts, including untranslated clay tablets, jewelry, textiles, glass, pottery, gold and silver coins, and cylinder seals, were plundered from both Kuwaiti and Iraqi museums by anti-Hussein opposition forces and Shiite and Kurdish rebels. Much of it had already passed through dealers and auction houses before any of the pieces could be catalogued as missing or stolen."

"Hardly seems possible that a collector would pay big money for art he knows damn well belongs to someone else," said Sandecker. "He certainly can't put it on display without risking exposure or arrest. What does he do with it?"

"Call it a psychological warp," replied Ragsdale. "Gaskill and I can recite any number of cases involving collectors who stash their illegal acquisitions in a secret vault where they sit and view it once a day, or maybe once every ten years. Never mind that none of it is on public display. They get their high by possessing something no one else can own."

Gaskill nodded in agreement. "Collector addiction can make people carry out macabre schemes. It's bad enough to desecrate and despoil Indian graves by digging up and selling skulls and mummified bodies of women and children, but certain collectors of American Civil War memorabilia have gone so far as to dig up graves in national cemeteries just to retrieve Union and Confederate belt buckles."

"A sad commentary on avarice," mused Sandecker.

"The stories of grave plundering for artifacts are endless," said Ragsdale. "Bones of the dead from every culture, beginning with the Neanderthal, are smashed and scattered. The sanctity of the dead means little if there is a profit to be made."

"Because of the many collectors' insatiable lust for antiquities," said Gaskill, "they're prime candidates for rip-offs. Their seemingly inexhaustible demand creates a lucrative trade in forgeries."

Ragsdale nodded. "Without proper archaeological study, copied artifacts can pass undetected. Many of the collections in respected museums display forged antiquities and no one realizes. Every curator or collector is unwilling to believe he has been screwed by a forger, and few scholars have the guts to state that the pieces they are examining are suspect."

"Famous art is not exempt," Gaskill further explained. "Agent Ragsdale and I have both seen cases where an outstanding masterpiece was stolen, copied by experts, and the forgery returned through channels for the finder's fee and insurance. The gallery and its curator happily hang the fake, never realizing they've been had."

"How are the stolen objects distributed and sold?" queried Sandecker.

"Tomb looters and art thieves sell through an underground network of crooked dealers who put up the money and supervise the sales from a distance, acting through agents without revealing their identity."

"Can't they be traced through the network?"

Gaskill shook his head. "Because the suppliers and their distributors also operate behind closed doors under a heavy veil of secrecy, it is next to impossible for us to penetrate any particular branch of the network with any prospect of following a trail to the top dealers."

Ragsdale took over. "It's not like tracing a drug user to his street-corner dealer, and then to his suppliers, and then up the ladder to the drug lords, who are mostly uneducated, seldom go to extremes to hide their identities, and are often drug users themselves. Instead, we find ourselves matching wits with men who are well educated and highly connected in the top levels of business and government. They're shrewd, and they're cunning. Except in rare cases, they never deal with their clients on a direct face-to-face basis. Whenever we get close, they pull into their shells and throw up a wall of expensive attorneys to block our investigations."

"Have you had any luck at all?" asked Sandecker.

"We've picked off a few of the small dealers who operate on their own," replied Ragsdale. "And both our agencies have recovered substantial numbers of stolen goods. Some during shipment, some from buyers, who almost never do jail time because they claim they didn't know the pieces they bought were stolen. What we've recovered is only a trickle. Without solid evidence we can't stem the main flow of illegal objects."

"Sounds to me like you fellows are outgunned and outclassed," said Sandecker.

Ragsdale nodded. "We'd be the first to admit it."

Sandecker silently rocked back and forth in his swivel chair, mulling over the words of the government agents seated across the desk. At last he said, "How can NUMA help you?"

Gaskill leaned across the desk. "We think you cracked the door open by unknowingly synchronizing your search for Huascar's treasure with the world's largest dealer of hot art and antiquities."

"Zolar International."

"Yes, a family whose tentacles reach into every comer of the trade.

"FBI and Customs agents," said Ragsdale, "have never before encountered a single group of art forgers, thieves, and artifact smugglers who have operated in so many countries for so many years and have involved such a diverse cast of wealthy celebrities, who have illegally bought literally billions of dollars worth of stolen art and antiques."

"I'm listening," said Sandecker.

"This is our chance to get in on the ground floor," revealed Gaskill. "Because of the possibility of finding fantastic riches, the Zolars have shed all caution and launched a search to locate the treasure and keep it for themselves. If they are successful, this presents us with a rare window of opportunity to observe their method of shipment and trail it back to their secret storehouse . . ."

"Where you nab them redhanded with the swag," Sandecker finished.

Ragsdale grinned. "We don't exactly use those terms anymore, Admiral, but yes, you're on the right track."

Sandecker was intrigued. "You want me to call off my search team. Is that the message?"

Gaskill and Ragsdale looked at each other and nodded.

"Yes, sir," said Gaskill. "That's the message."

"With your approval, of course," Ragsdale hastily added.

"Have you boys cleared this with your superiors?"

Ragsdale nodded solemnly. "Director Moran of the FBI and Director Thomas of the Customs Service have given their approval."

"You don't mind if I give them a call and confirm?"

"Not at all," said Gaskill. "I apologize that Agent Ragsdale and I didn't go through the chain of command arid request that they deal with you directly, but we felt it was best to present our case from firsthand knowledge and let the chips fall where they may."

"I can appreciate that," said Sandecker generously.

"Then you'll cooperate?" asked Ragsdale. "And call off your search team?"

Sandecker stared idly at the smoke curling from his cigar for several moments. "NUMA will play ball with the bureau and Customs, but I won't close down our search project."

Gaskill stared at the admiral, not knowing if he was joking. "I don't think I catch your drift, sir."

"Have you people ever hunted for something that has been lost for almost five hundred years?"

Ragsdale glanced at his partner and shrugged. "Speaking for the bureau, our search operations are generally confined to missing persons, fugitives, and bodies. Lost treasure is out of our domain."

"I don't believe I have to explain what the Customs Service looks for," said Gaskill.

"I'm quite familiar with your directives," Sandecker said conversationally. "But finding lost treasure is a million-to-one long shot. You can't interview people for leads who have been dead since the fifteen hundreds. All our quipu and your golden mummy have done is given vague references to a mysterious island in the Sea of Cortez. A clue that puts the proverbial needle somewhere within a hundred-and-sixty-thousand-square-kilometer haystack. I'm assuming the Zolars are amateurs at this kind of search game. So the chances of them finding the cavern containing Huascar's golden chain are ten meters this side of nil."

"You think your people have a better chance?" asked Gaskill testily.

"My special projects director and his team are the best in the business. If you don't believe me, check our records."

"How do you plan to play ball with us?" Ragsdale asked, his tone edged with disbelief.

Sandecker made his thrust. "We conduct our search at the same time as the Zolars, but we hang in the shadows. They have no reason to suspect rivals and will assume any NUMA personnel or aircraft they sight are on an oceanographic research project. If the Zolars are successful in discovering the treasure, my team will simply melt away and return to Washington."

"And should the Zolars strike out?" demanded Ragsdale.

"If NUMA can't find the treasure, it doesn't want to be found."

"And if NUMA is successful?" Ragsdale pushed forward.

"We leave a trail of bread crumbs for the to follow, and let them think they discovered the hoard on their own." Sandecker paused, his hard gaze moving from Ragsdale to Gaskill and back. "From then on, gentlemen, the show belongs to you."

"I keep imagining that Rudolph Valentino is going to ride over the next dune and carry me away to his tent," said Loren sleepily. She was sitting on thee front seat of the Pierce Arrow, her legs curled under her, staring at the ocean of sand dunes that dominated the landscape.

"Keep looking," said Pitt. "The Coachella Dunes, slightly north of here, are where Hollywood used to shoot many of their desert movies."

Fifty kilometers (31 miles) after passing through Yuma, Arizona, across the Colorado River into California, Pitt swung the big Pierce Arrow left off Interstate Highway 8 and onto the narrow state road that led to the border towns of Calexico and Mexicali. Drivers and passengers in cars that passed, or those coming from the opposite direction, stared and gawked at the old classic auto and the trailer it pulled.

Loren had sweet-talked Pitt into driving the old auto cross-country, camping in the trailer, and then joining a tour around southern Arizona sponsored by the Classic Car Club of America. The tour was scheduled to begin in two weeks. Pitt doubted that they could wrap up the treasure hunt in such a short time but went along with Loren because he enjoyed driving his old cars on extended tours.

"How much farther to the border?" Loren asked.

"Another forty-two kilometers will put us into Mexico," he answered. "Then a hundred and sixty-five klicks to San Felipe. We should arrive at the dock, where Al and Rudi have tied up the ferry, by dinnertime."

"Speaking of edibles and liquids," she said lazily, "the refrigerator is empty and the cupboards are bare. Except for breakfast cereal and coffee this morning, we cleaned out the food stock at that campground in Sedona last night."

He took his right hand from the steering wheel, squeezed her knee and smiled. "1 suppose I have to keep the passengers happy by filling their bellies."

"How about that truck stop up ahead?" She straightened and pointed through the flat, narrow windshield of the Pierce.

Pitt gazed over the ornate radiator cap, a crouched archer poised to fire an arrow. He saw a sign by the side of the road, dried and bleached by the desert sun, and on the verge of collapsing into the sand at any moment. The lettering was so old and faded he could hardly read the words.

Ice-cold beer and food a mother would love. Only 2 more minutes to the Box Car Cafe.

He laughed. "The cold beer sounds good, but I'm leery of the cuisine. When I was a boy, my mother loved to make dishes that turned me green."

"Shame on you. Your mother is a good cook."

"She is now, but twenty-five years ago, even the starving homeless wouldn't come near our doorstep."

"You're terrible." Loren turned the dial of the old tube-type radio, trying to tune in a Mexicali station. She finally found one, playing Mexican music, that came in clear. "I don't care if the chef has the black plague, I'm starved."

Take a woman on a long trip, Pitt mused miserably, and they're always hungry or demanding to stop at a bathroom.

"And besides," she threw in, "you need gas."

Pitt glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle stood steady at a quarter tank. "I guess it won't hurt to fill up before we cross the border."

"It doesn't seem as if we've driven very far since the last gas stop."

"A big car that was built sixty years ago, with a twelve cylinder engine and pulling a house trailer, won't win any awards for fuel economy."

The roadside restaurant and gas station came into view. All Pitt saw as they drove closer was a dilapidated pair of old railroad freight cars joined together, with two gas pumps out front and a neon EAT sign barely flickering in the shadow of the Box Car Cafe. A cluster of battered old house trailers was parked in the rear, abandoned and empty. Out front in the dirt parking lot, eighteen to twenty bikers were milling around a small fleet of Harley-Davidsons, drinking beer and enjoying a cool breeze that was blowing in from the Gulf.

"Boy, you sure can pick 'em," said Pitt drolly.

"Maybe we'd better go on," Loren murmured, having second thoughts.

"You afraid of the bikers? They're probably weary travelers just like you and me."

"They certainly don't dress like us." She nodded at the assembly, divided equally between men and women, all wearing black riding gear festooned with badges, patches, and embroidered messages touting America's most famous motorcycle.

Pitt turned the outsize steering wheel and the Pierce rolled off the blacktop up to the gas pumps. The big V-12 engine was so whisper-quiet it was hard to tell it had stopped when he turned off the ignition. He opened the suicide door that swung outward from the front, put a foot on the high running board and stepped down. " Hi there," he greeted the nearest biker, a bleached blond female with a ponytail, wearing black leather pants and jacket. "How's the food here?"

"Not quite up to the standards of Spago's or Chasen's," she said pleasantly. "But if you're hungry, it's not half bad."

A metal sign liberally peppered with bullet holes said Self Service, so Pitt inserted the nozzle of the gas pump inside the Pierce Arrow's tank filler and squeezed the handle. When he had the engine rebuilt, the machine shop modified the valves to burn unleaded gas without problems.

Loren warily hunched down in her seat as the bikers all walked over and admired the old car and trailer. After answering a barrage of questions, Pitt lifted the hood and showed them the engine. Then he pulled Loren from the car.

"I thought you'd like to meet these nice people," he said. "They all belong to a bike riding club from West Hollywood."

She thought Pitt was joking and was embarrassed half to death as he made introductions. Then she was astounded to discover they were attorneys with their wives on a weekend ride around the Southern California desert. She was also impressed and flattered that they recognized her when Pitt gave them her name.

After a congenial conversation, the Hollywood barristers and their spouses bid goodbye, climbed aboard their beloved hogs and roared off, exhaust stacks reverberating in chorus, toward the Imperial Valley. Pitt and Loren waved, then turned and faced the freight cars.

The rails beneath the rusting wheel-trucks were buried in the sand. The weathered wooden walls had once been painted a reddish tan, and the lettering above the long row of crudely installed windows read Southern Pacific Lines. Thanks to the dry air, the body shells of the antique boxcars had survived the ravages of constant exposure and appeared in relatively good condition.

Pitt owned a piece of railroad history, a Pullman car. It was part of the collection housed inside his hangar in Washington. The once-luxurious rail car had been pulled by the famed Manhattan Limited out of New York in the years prior to World War I. He judged these freight cars to have been built sometime around 1915.

He and Loren climbed a makeshift stairway and entered a door cut into the end of one car. The interior was timeworn but neat and clean. There were no tables, only a long counter with stools that stretched the length of the two attached cars. The open kitchen was situated on the opposite side of the counter and looked as if it was constructed from used lumber that had lain in the sun for several decades. Pictures on the walls showed early engines, smoke spouting from their stacks, pulling passenger and freight trains across the desert sands. The list of records on a Wurlitzer jukebox was a mix of favorite pop music from the forties and fifties and the sounds of steam locomotives. Two plays for twenty-five cents.

Pitt put a quarter in the slot and made his selections. One was Frankie Carle playing "Sweet Lorraine." The other was the clamor of a Norfolk & Western single expansion articulated steam locomotive leaving a station and coming to speed.

A tall man, in his early sixties, with gray hair and white beard, was wiping the oak counter top. He looked up and smiled, his blue-green eyes filled with warmth and congeniality. "Greetings, folks. Welcome to the Box Car Cafe. Travel far?"

"Not far," Pitt answered, throwing Loren a rakish grin. "We didn't leave Sedona as early as I planned."

"Don't blame me," she said loftily. "You're the one who woke up with carnal passions."

"What can I get you?" said the man behind the bar. He was wearing cowboy boots, denim pants, and a plaid shirt that was badly faded from too many washings.

"Your advertised ice-cold beer would be nice," replied Loren, opening a menu.

"Mexican or domestic?"

"Corona?"

"One Corona coming up. And you, sir?"

"What do you have on tap?" asked Pitt.

"Olympia, Coors, and Budweiser."

"I'd like an Oly."

"Anything to eat?" inquired the man behind the counter.

"Your mesquite chiliburger," said Loren. "And coleslaw."

"I'm not real hungry," said Pitt. "I'll just have the coleslaw. Do you own this place?"

"Bought it from the original owner when I gave up prospecting." He set their beer on the bar and turned to his stove.

"The box cars are interesting relics of railroad history. Were they moved here, or did the railroad run through at one time?"

"We're actually sitting on the siding of the old main line," answered the diner's owner. "The tracks used to run from Yuma to El Centro. The line was abandoned in 1947 for lack of business. The rise of truck lines did it in. These cars were bought by an old fella who used to be an engineer for the Southern Pacific. He and his wife made a restaurant and gas station out of them. With the main interstate going north of here and all, we don't see too much traffic anymore."

The bartender/cook looked as if he might have been a fixture of the desert even before the rails were laid. He had the worn look of a man who had seen more than he should and heard a thousand stories that remained in his head, classified and indexed as drama, humor, or horror. There was also an unmistakable aura of style about him, a sophistication that said he didn't belong in a godforsaken roadside tavern on a remote and seldom-traveled road through the desert.

For a fleeting instant, Pitt thought the old cook looked vaguely familiar. On reflection, though, Pitt figured the man only resembled someone he couldn't quite place. "I'll bet you can recite some pretty interesting tales about the dunes around here," he said, making idle conversation.

"A lot of bones lie in them, remains of pioneers and miners who tried to cross four hundred kilometers of desert from Yuma to Borrego Springs in the middle of summer."

"Once they passed the Colorado River, there was no water?" asked Loren.

"Not a drop, not until Borrego. That was long before the valley was irrigated. Only after them old boys died from the sun did they learn their bodies lay not five meters from water. The trauma was so great they've all come back as ghosts to haunt the desert."

Loren looked perplexed. "I think I missed something."

"There's no water on the surface," the old fellow explained. "But underground there's whole rivers of it, some as wide and deep as the Colorado."

Pitt was curious. "I've never heard of large bodies of water running under the desert."

"There's two for sure. One, a really big sucker, runs from upper Nevada south into the Mojave Desert and then west, where it empties into the Pacific below Los Angeles. The other flows west under the Imperial Valley of California before curling south and spilling into the Sea of Cortez."

"What proof do you have these rivers actually exist?" asked Loren. "Has anyone seen them?"

"The underground stream that flows into the Pacific," answered the cook, as he prepared Loren's chiliburger, "was supposedly found by an engineer searching for oil. He alleged his geophysical instruments detected the river and tracked it across the Mojave and under the town of Laguna Beach into the ocean. So far nobody has proved or disproved his claim. The river traveling to the Sea of Cortez comes from an old story about a prospector who discovered a cave that led down into a deep cavern with a river running through it."

Pitt tensed as Yaeger's translation of the quipu suddenly flashed through his mind. "This prospector, how did he describe this underground river?"

The diner's owner talked without turning from his stove. "His name was Leigh Hunt, and he was probably a very inventive liar. But he swore up and down that back in 1942 he discovered a cave in the Castle Dome Mountains not too far northeast of here. From the mouth of the cave, through a chain of caverns, he descended two kilometers deep into the earth until he encountered an underground river rushing through a vast canyon. It was there Hunt claims he found rich deposits of placer gold."

"I think I saw the movie," said Loren skeptically.

The old cook turned and waved a spatula in the air. "People at the assay office stated that the sand Hunt carried back from the underground canyon assayed at three thousand dollars per ton. A mighty good recovery rate when you remember that gold was only twenty dollars and sixty-five cents an ounce back then."

"Did Hunt ever return to the canyon and the river?" asked Pitt.

"He tried, but a whole army of scavengers followed him back to the mountain, hungering for a piece of the River of Gold, as it became known. He got mad and dynamited a narrow part of the passage about a hundred meters inside the entrance. Brought down half the mountain. Neither Hunt nor those who followed him were ever able to dig through the rubble or find another cave leading inside."

"With today's mining technology," said Pitt, "reexcavating the passage should be a viable project."

"Sure, if you want to spend about two million dollars," snorted the cook. "Nobody I ever heard about was willing to gamble that much money on a story that might be pure hokum." He paused to set the chiliburger and coleslaw dishes on the counter. Then he drew a mug of beer from a tap, walked around the bar and sat down on a stool next to Pitt. "They say old Hunt somehow made it back inside the mountain but never came out. He disappeared right after he blew the cave and was not seen again. There was talk that he found another way inside and died there. A few people believe in a great river that flows through a canyon deep beneath the sands, but most think it's only another tall tale of the desert."

"Such things do exist," said Pitt. "A few years ago I was on an expedition that found an underground stream."

"Somewhere in the desert Southwest?" inquired the cook.

"No, the Sahara. It flowed under a hazardous waste plant and carried pollutants to the Niger River, and then into the Atlantic where it caused a proliferation of red tides."

"The Mojave River north of here goes underground after running above the surface for a considerable distance. Nobody knows for certain where it ends up."

Between bites of the chiliburger Loren asked, "You seem convinced that Hunt's river flows into the Sea of Cortez. How do you know it doesn't enter the Pacific off California?"

"Because of Hunt's backpack and canteen. He lost them in the cave and they were found six months later, having drifted up on a beach in the Gulf."

"Don't you think that's highly improbable? The pack and canteen could have belonged to anyone. Why would anyone believe they were his?" Loren questioned the cook as if she was sitting on a congressional investigation committee.

"I guess because his name was stenciled on them."

The unexpected obstacle did not deter Loren. She simply sidestepped it. "There could be a good twenty or more logical explanations for his effects being in the Gulf. They could have been lost or thrown there by someone who found or stole them from Hunt, or more likely he never died in the cave and dropped them from a boat himself."

"Could be he lost them in the sea," admitted the cook, "but then how do you explain the other bodies?"

Pitt looked at him. "What other bodies?"

"The fisherman who disappeared in Lake Cocopah," replied the cook in a hushed voice, as if he was afraid of being overheard. "And the two divers that vanished into Satan's Sink. What was left of their bodies was found floating in the Gulf."

"And the desert telegraph sends out another pair of tall tales," suggested Loren dryly.

The cook held up his right hand. "God's truth. You can check the stories out with the sheriff's department."

"Where are the sink and lake located?" asked Pitt.

"Lake Cocopah, the spot where the fisherman was lost, is southeast of Yuma. Satan's Sink lies in Mexico at the northern foot of the Sierra el Mayor Mountains. You can draw a line from Hunt's mountain through Lake Cocopah and then Satan's Sink right into the Sea of Cortez."

Loren continued the interrogation. "Who's to say they didn't drown while fishing and diving in the Gulf?"

"The fisherman and his wife were out on the lake for the better part of the day when she wanted to head back to their camper to start dinner. He rowed her ashore and then continued trolling around the lake. An hour later, when she looked for him, all she could see was his overturned boat. Three weeks later a water-skier spotted his body floating in the Gulf a hundred and fifty kilometers from the lake."

"I'm more inclined to believe his wife did him in, dumped his remains in the sea and threw off suspicion by claiming he was sucked into an underground waterway."

"What about the divers?" Pitt queried.

"Not much to tell. They dove into Satan's Sink, a flooded pool in an earthquake fault, and never came out. A month later, battered to a pulp, they were also pulled out of the Gulf."

Pitt stabbed a fork at his coleslaw, but he was no longer hungry. His mind was shifting gears. "Do you happen to know approximately where Hunt's gear and the bodies were found?"

"I haven't made a detailed study of the phenomena," answered the diner's owner, staring thoughtfully at the heavily scarred wooden floor. "But as I recollect most of them were found in the waters off Punta el Macharro."

"What part of the Gulf would that be?"

"On the western shore. Macharro Point, as we call it in English, is two or three kilometers above San Felipe."

Loren looked at Pitt. "Our destination."

Pitt made a wry smile. "Remind me to keep a sharp eye for dead bodies."

The cook finished off his beer. "You folks heading for San Felipe to do a little fishing?"

Pitt nodded. "I guess you might call it a fishing expedition."

"The scenery ain't much to look at once you drop below Mexicali. The desert seems desolate and barren to most folks, but it has countless paradoxes. There are more ghosts, skeletons, and myths per kilometer than any jungle or mountains on earth. Keep that in mind and you'll see them as sure as the Irish see leprechauns."

"We'll keep that in mind," Loren said, smiting, "when we cross over Leigh Hunt's underground River of Gold."

"Oh, you'll cross it all right," said the cook. "The sad fact is you won't know it."

After Pitt paid for the gas and the meal, he went outside and checked the Pierce Arrow's oil and water. The old cook accompanied Loren onto the dining car's observation platform. He was carrying a bowl of carrots and lettuce. "Have a good trip," he said cheerfully.

"Thank you." Loren nodded at the vegetables. "Feeding a rabbit?"

"No, my burro. Mr. Periwinkle is getting up there in age and can't graze too well on his own."

Loren held out her hand. "It's been fun listening to your stories, Mr. . ."

"Cussler, Clive Cussler. Mighty nice to have met you, ma'am."

When they were on the road again, the Pierce Arrow and its trailer smoothly rolling toward the border crossing, Pitt turned to Loren. "For a moment there, I thought the old geezer might have given me a clue to the treasure site."

"You mean Yaeger's far-out translation about a river running under an island?"

"It still doesn't seem geologically possible."

Loren turned the rearview mirror to reapply her lipstick. "If the river flowed deep enough it might conceivably pass under the Gulf."

"Maybe, but there's no way in hell to know for certain without drilling through several kilometers of hard rock.

"You'll be lucky just to find your way to the treasure cavern without a major excavation."

Pitt smiled as he stared at the road ahead. "He could really spin the yarns, couldn't he?"

"The old cook? He certainly had an active imagination."

"I'm sorry I didn't get his name."

Loren settled back in the seat and gazed out her window as the dunes gave way to a tapestry of mesquite and cactus. "He told me what it was."

"And?"

"It was an odd name." She paused, trying to remember. Then she shrugged in defeat. "Funny thing . . . I've already forgotten it."

Loren was driving when they reached San Felipe. Pitt had stretched out in the backseat and was snoring away, but she did not bother to wake him. She guided the dusty, bug-splattered Pierce Arrow around the town's traffic circle, making a wide turn so she didn't run one side of the trailer over the curb, and turned south toward the town's breakwater-enclosed harbor. She did not expect to see such a proliferation of hotels and restaurants. The once sleepy fishing village was riding the crest of a tourist boom. Resorts appeared to be under construction up and down the beaches.

Five kilometers (3 miles) south of town she turned left on a road leading toward the waters of the Gulf. Loren thought it strange that an artificial, man-made harbor had been constructed on such an exposed piece of shoreline. She thought a more practical site would have been under the shelter of Macharro Point several kilometers to the north. Oh well, she decided. What did gringos know about Baja politics?

Loren stopped the Pierce alongside an antiquated ferryboat that looked like a ghost from a scrap yard. The impression was heightened by the low tide that had left the ferry's hull tipped drunkenly on an angle with its keel sunk into the harbor bottom's silt.

"Rise and shine, big boy," she said, reaching over the seat and shaking Pitt.

He blinked and peered curiously through the side window at the old boat. "I must have entered a time warp or I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. Which is it?"

"Neither. You're at the harbor in San Felipe, and you're looking at your home for the next two weeks."

"Good lord," Pitt mumbled in amazement, "an honest-to-God steamboat with a walking beam engine and side paddlewheels."

"I must admit it does have an air of Mark Twain about it.

"What do you want to bet it ferried Grant's troops across the Mississippi to Vicksburg?"

Gunn and Giordino spotted them and waved. They walked across a gangplank to the dock as Pitt and Loren climbed from the car and stood gazing at the boat.

"Have a good trip?" asked Gunn.

"Except for Dirk's snoring, it was marvelous," said Loren.

Pitt looked at her indignantly. "I don't snore."

She rolled her eyes toward the heavens. "I have tendonitis in my elbow from poking you."

"What do you think of our work platform?" asked Giordino, gesturing grandly at the ferryboat. "Built in 1923. She was one of the last walking beam steamboats to be built."

Pitt lifted his sunglasses and studied the antique vessel.

When seen from a distance most ships tend to look smaller than they actually are. Only up close do they appear huge. This was true of the passenger/car ferries of the first half of the century. In her heyday the 70-meter (230-foot) vessel could carry five hundred passengers and sixty automobiles. The long black hull was topped with a two-story white superstructure whose upper deck mounted one large smokestack and two pilothouses, one on each end. Like most car ferries, she could be loaded and off-loaded from either bow or stern, depending on the direction the ferry was steaming at the time. Even when new, she would never have been called glamorous, but she had supplied an important and unforgettable service in the lives of millions of her former passengers.

The name painted across the center of the superstructure that housed the paddlewheels identified her as the Alhambra.

"Where did you steal that derelict?" asked Pitt. "From a maritime museum?"

"To know her is to love her," said Giordino without feeling.

"She was the only vessel I could find quickly that could land a helicopter," Gunn explained. "Besides, I kept Sandecker happy by obtaining her on the cheap."

Loren smiled. "At least this is one relic you can't get in your transportation collection."

Pitt pointed to the walking beam mounted above the high A-frame that tilted up and down, one end driven by a connecting rod from the steam cylinder, the other driving the crank that turned the paddlewheel. "I can't believe her boilers are still fired by coal."

"They were converted to oil fifty years ago," said Gunn. "The engines are still in remarkable shape. Her cruising speed is twenty miles an hour."

"Don't you mean knots or kilometers?" said Loren.

"Ferryboat speeds are measured in miles," answered Gunn knowledgeably.

"Doesn't look like she's going anywhere," said Pitt. "Not unless you dig her keel out of the muck."

"She'll be floating like a cork by midnight," Gunn assured him. "The tide runs four to five meters in this section of the Gulf."

Though he made a show of disapproval, Pitt already felt great affection toward the old ferry. It was love at first sight. Antique automobiles, aircraft, or boats, anything mechanical that came from the past, fascinated him. Born too late, he often complained, born eighty years too late.

"And the crew?"

"An engineer with one assistant and two deckhands." Gunn paused and gave a wide boyish smile. "I get to man the helm while you and Al cavort around the Gulf in your flying machine."

"Speaking of the helicopter, where have you hidden it?"

"Inside the auto deck," replied Gunn. "Makes it convenient to service it without worrying about the weather. We push it out onto the loading deck for flight operations."

Pitt looked at Giordino. "Have you planned a daily search pattern?"

The stocky Italian shook his head. "I worked out the fuel range and flight times, but left the search pattern for you."

"What sort of time frame are we looking at?"

"Should be able to cover the area in three days."

"Before I forget," said Gunn. "The admiral wants you to contact him first thing in the morning. There's an Iridium phone in the forward pilothouse."

"Why not call him now?" asked Pitt.

Gunn looked at his watch. "We're three hours behind the East Coast. About now he's sitting in the Kennedy Center watching a play."

"Excuse me," interrupted Loren. "May I ask a few questions?"

The men paused and stared at her. Pitt bowed. "You have the floor, Congresswoman."

"The first is where do you plan to park the Pierce Arrow? It doesn't look safe enough around here to leave a hundred-thousand-dollar classic car sitting unattended on a fishing dock."

Gunn looked surprised that she should ask. "Didn't Dirk tell you? The Pierce and the trailer come on board the ferry. There's acres of room inside."

"Is there a bath and shower?"

"As a matter of fact, there are four ladies' restrooms on the upper passenger deck and a shower in the crew's quarters."

"No standing in line for the potty. I like that."

Pitt laughed. "You don't even have to unpack."

"Make believe you're on a Carnival Lines cruise ship," said Giordino humorously.

"And your final question?" inquired Gunn.

"I'm starved," she announced regally. "When do we eat?"

In autumn, the Baja sun has a peculiar radiance, spilling down through a sky of strange brilliant blue-white. This day, there wasn't a cloud to be seen from horizon to horizon. One of the most arid lands in the world, the Baja Peninsula protects the Sea of Cortez from the heavy swells that roll in from the dim reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Tropical storms with high winds are not unknown during the summer months, but near the end of October the prevailing winds turn east to west and generally spare the Gulf from high, choppy swells.

With the Pierce Arrow and its travel trailer safely tied down on the cavernous auto deck, Gunn at the wheel in the pilothouse, and Loren stretched on a lounge chair in a bikini, the ferry moved out of the breakwater harbor and made a wide turn to the south. The old boat presented an impressive sight as black smoke rose from her stack and her paddlewheels pounded the water. The walking beam, shaped like a flattened diamond, rocked up and down, transmitting the power from the engine's huge piston to the shaft that cranked the paddlewheels. There was a rhythm to its motion, almost hypnotic if you stared at it long enough.

While Giordino made a preflight inspection of the helicopter and topped off the fuel tank, Pitt was briefed on the latest developments by Sandecker in Washington over the Motorola Iridium satellite phone. Not until an hour later, as the ferry steamed off Point Estrella, did Pitt switch off the phone and descend to the improvised flight pad on the open forward deck of the ferry. As soon as Pitt was strapped in his seat, Giordino lifted the turquoise NUMA craft off the ferry and set a parallel course along the coastline.

"What did the old boy have to say before we left the Alhambra?" asked Giordino as he leveled the chopper off at 800 meters (2600 feet). "Did Yaeger turn up any new clues?"

Pitt was sitting in the copilot's seat and acting as navigator. "Yaeger had no startling revelations. The only information he could add was that he believes the statue of the demon sits directly over the entrance to the passageway leading to the treasure cavern."

"What about the mysterious river?"

"He's still in the dark on that one."

"And Sandecker?"

"The latest news is that we've been blindsided. Customs and the FBI dropped in out of the blue and informed him that a gang of art thieves is also on the trail of Huascar's treasure. He warned us to keep a sharp eye out for them."

"We have competition?"

"A family that oversees a worldwide empire dealing in stolen and forged works of art."

"What do they call themselves?" asked Giordino.

"Zolar International."

Giordino looked blank for a moment, and then he laughed uncontrollably.

"What's so hilarious?"

"Zolar," Giordino choked out. "1 remember a dumb kid in the eighth grade who did a corny magician act at school assemblies. He called himself the Great Zolar."

"From what Sandecker told me," said Pitt, "the guy who heads the organization is nowhere close to dumb. Government agents a mate his annual illicit take in excess of eighty million dollars. A tidy sum when you consider the IRS is shut out of the profits."

"Okay, so he isn't the nerdy kid I knew in school. How close do the Feds think Zolar is to the treasure?"

"They think he has better directions than we do."

"I'm willing to bet my Thanksgiving turkey we find the site first."

"Either way, you'd lose."

Giordino turned and looked at him. "Care to let your old buddy in on the rationale?"

"If we hit the jackpot ahead of them, we're supposed to fade into the landscape and let them scoop up the loot."

"Give it up?" Giordino was incredulous.

"Those are the orders," said Pitt, resentment written in his eyes.

"But why?" demanded Giordino. "What great wisdom does our benevolent government see in making criminals rich?"

"So Customs and the FBI can trail and trap them into an indictment and eventual conviction for some pretty heavy crimes."

"I can't say this sort of justice appeals to me. Will the taxpayers be notified of the windfall?"

"Probably not, any more than they were told about the Spanish gold the army removed from Victorio Peak in New Mexico after it was discovered by a group of civilians in the nineteen thirties."

"We live in a sordid, unrelenting world," Giordino observed poetically.

Pitt motioned toward the rising sun. "Come around on an approximate heading of one-one-o degrees."

Giordino took note of the eastern heading. "You want to check out the other side of the Gulf on the first run?"

"Only four islands have the geological features similar to what we're looking for. But you know I like launching the search on the outer perimeters of our grid and then working back toward the more promising targets."

Giordino grinned. "Any sane man would begin in the center."

"Didn't you know?" Pitt came back. "The village idiot has all the fun."

It had been a long four days of searching. Oxley was discouraged, Sarason oddly complacent, while Moore was baffled. They had flown over every island in the Sea of Cortez that had the correct geological formations. Several displayed features on their peaks that suggested man-made rock carvings. But low altitude reconnaissance and strenuous climbs up steep palisades to verify the rock structures up close revealed configurations that appeared as sculpted beasts only in their imaginations.

Moore was no longer the arrogant academic. He was plainly baffled. The rock carving had to exist on an island in an inland sea. The pictographs on the golden mummy suit were distinct, and there was no mistaking the directions in his translation. For a man so cocksure of himself, the failure was maddening.

Moore was also puzzled by Sarason's sudden change in attitude. The bastard, Moore mused, no longer displayed animosity or anger. Those strange almost colorless eyes always seemed to be in a constant state of observation, never losing their intensity. Moore knew whenever he gazed into them that he was facing a man who was no stranger to death.

Moore was becoming increasingly uneasy. The balance of power had shifted. His edge was dulled now he was certain that Sarason saw beyond his credentials as an insolent schoolteacher. If he had recognized the killer instinct in Sarason, it stood to reason Sarason had identified it in him too.

But there was a small measure of satisfaction. Sarason was not clairvoyant. He could not have known, nor did any man alive know except the President of the United States, that Professor Henry Moore, respected anthropologist, and his equally respected archaeologist wife, Micki were experts in carrying out assassinations of foreign terrorist leaders. With their academic credentials they easily traveled in and out of foreign countries as consultants on archaeological projects. Interestingly, the CIA was in total ignorance of their actions. Their assignments came directly from an obscure agency calling itself the Foreign Activities Council that operated out of a small basement room under the White House.

Moore shifted restlessly in his seat and studied a chart of the Gulf. Finally he said, "Something is very, very wrong."

Oxley looked at his watch. "Five o'clock. I prefer to land in daylight. We might as well call it a day."

Sarason's expressionless gaze rested on the empty horizon ahead. Untypically, he acted relaxed and quiet. He offered no comment.

"It's got to be here, "Moore said, examining the islands he had crossed out on his chart as if he had flunked a test.

"I have an unpleasant feeling we might have flown right by it," said Oxley.

Now that he saw Moore in a different light, Sarason viewed him with the respect one adversary has for another. He also realized that despite his slim frame, the professor was strong and quick. Struggling up the rocky walls of promising islands, gasping from aggravated exhaustion and playing drunk, was nothing more than an act. On two occasions, Moore leaped over a fissure with the agility of a mountain goat. On another, with seemingly little effort, he cast aside a boulder blocking his path that easily equaled his weight.

Sarason said, "Perhaps the Inca sculpture we're looking for was destroyed."

In the rear seat of the seaplane Moore shook his head. "No, I'd have recognized the pieces."

"Suppose it was moved? It wouldn't be the first time an ancient sculpture was relocated to a museum for display."

"If Mexican archaeologists had taken a massive rock carving and set it up for exhibit," said Moore doggedly, "I'd have known about it."

"Then how do you explain that it is not where it is supposed to be?"

"I can't," Moore admitted. "As soon as we land back at the hacienda, I'll review my notes. There must be a seemingly insignificant clue that I missed in my translation of the golden suit."

"I trust you will find it before tomorrow morning," Sarason said dryly.

Oxley fought the urge to doze off. He had been at the controls since nine o'clock in the morning and his neck was stiff with weariness. He held the control column between his knees and poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. He took a swallow and made a face. It was not only cold but tasted as strong as battery acid. Suddenly, his eye caught a flash of green from under a cloud. He pointed out the window to the right of the Baffin flying boat.

"Don't see many helicopters in this part of the Gulf," he said casually.

Sarason didn't bother to look. "Must be a Mexican navy patrol plane."

"No doubt looking for a drunken fisherman with a broken engine," added Moore.

Oxley shook his head. "I can't ever recall seeing a turquoise military aircraft."

Sarason looked up, startled. "Turquoise? Can you make out its markings?"

Oxley lifted the binoculars and peered through the windscreen. "American."

"A Drug Enforcement Agency patrol working with Mexican authorities, probably."

"No, it belongs to National Underwater and Marine Agency. I wonder what they're doing in the Gulf?"

"They conduct ocean surveys all over the world," said Moore unconcernedly.

Sarason stiffened as though he'd been shot. "Two scum from NUMA wrecked our operation in Peru."

"Hardly seems likely there's a connection," said Oxley.

"What operation did NUMA wreck in Peru?" asked Moore, sniffing the air.

"They stepped outside their jurisdiction," answered Sarason vaguely.

"I'd like to hear about it sometime."

"Not a subject that concerns you," Sarason said, brushing him off. "How many people in the craft?"

"Looks like a model that seats four," replied Oxley, "but I only see a pilot and one passenger."

"Are they approaching or headed away?"

"The pilot has turned onto a converging course that will cross about two hundred meters above us."

"Can you ascend and turn with him?" asked Sarason. "I want a closer look."

"Since aviation authorities can't take away a license I never applied for--" Oxley smiled-- "I'll put you in the pilot's lap."

"Is that safe?" Moore asked.

Oxley grinned. "Depends on the other pilot."

Sarason took the binoculars and peered at the turquoise helicopter. This was a different model from the one that had landed at the sacrificial well. That one had a shorter fuselage and landing skids. This one had retractable landing gear. But there was no mistaking the color scheme and markings. He told himself it was ridiculous to think the men in the approaching helicopter could possibly be the same ones who appeared out of nowhere in the Andes.

He trained the binoculars on the helicopter's cockpit. In another few seconds he would be able to discern the faces inside. For some strange, inexplicable reason his calm began to crack and he felt his nerves tighten.

"What do you think?" asked Giordino. "Could they be the ones?"

"They could be." Pitt stared through a pair of naval glasses at the amphibian seaplane flying on a diagonal course below the helicopter. "After watching the pilot circle Estanque Island for fifteen minutes as if he were looking for something on the peak, I think it's safe to say we've met up with our competition."

"According to Sandecker, they launched their search two days ahead of us," said Giordino. "Since they're still taking in the sights, they can't have experienced any success either."

Pitt smiled. "Sort of gladdens the heart, doesn't it?"

"If they can't find it, and we can't find it, then the Incas must have sold us a wagon load of hocus pocus."

"I don't think so. Stop and consider. There are two different search efforts in the same area, but as far as we know both teams are using two unrelated sets of instructions. We have the Inca quipu while they're following the engravings on a golden mummy suit. At the worst, our separate sets of clues would have led us to different locations. No, the ancients haven't misled us. The treasure is out there. We simply haven't looked in the right place."

Giordino always marveled that Pitt could sit for hours analyzing charts, studying instruments, mentally recording every ship on the sea below, the geology of the offshore islands, and every variance of the wind without the slightest sign of fatigue, his concentration always focused. He had to suffer the same muscle aches, joint stiffness, and nervous stress that plagued Giordino, but he gave no indication of discomfort. In truth, Pitt felt every ache and pain, but he could shut it all from his mind and keep going as strongly as when he started in the morning.

"Between their coverage and ours," said Giordino, "we must have exhausted every island that comes anywhere close to the right geological features."

"I agree," said Pitt thoughtfully. "But I'm convinced we're all on the right playing field."

"Then where is it? Where in hell is that damned demon?"

Pitt motioned down at the sea. "Sitting somewhere down there. Right where it's been for almost five hundred years. Thumbing its nose at us."

Giordino pointed at the other aircraft. "Our search buddies are climbing up to check us out. You want me to ditch them?"

"No point. Their airspeed is a good eighty kilometers per hour faster than ours. Maintain a steady course toward the ferry and act innocent."

"Nice-looking Baffin seaplane," said Giordino. "You don't see them except in the North Canadian lake country."

"He's moving in a bit close for a passing stranger, wouldn't you say?"

"Either he's being neighborly or he wants to read our name tags."

Pitt stared through the binoculars at the cockpit of the plane that was now flying alongside the NUMA helicopter no more than 50 meters (164 feet) away.

"What do you see?" asked Giordino, minding his flying.

"Some guy staring back at me through binoculars," replied Pitt with a grin.

"Maybe we should call them up and invite them over for ajar of Grey Poupon mustard."

The passenger in the seaplane dropped his glasses for a moment to massage his eyes before resuming his inspection. Pitt pressed his elbows against his body to steady his view. When he lowered the binoculars, he was no longer smiling.

"An old friend from Peru," he said in cold surprise.

Giordino turned and looked at Pitt curiously. "Old friend?"

"Dr. Steve Miller's imposter come back to haunt us."

Pitt's smile returned, and it was hideously diabolic. Then he waved.

If Pitt was surprised at the unexpected confrontation, Sarason was stunned. "You!" he gasped.

"What did you say?" asked Oxley.

His senses reeling at seeing the man who had caused him so much grief, uncertain if this was a trick of his mind, Sarason refocused the binoculars and examined the devil that was grinning fiendishly and waving slowly like a mourner at graveside bidding goodbye to the departed. A slight shift of the binoculars and all color drained from his face as he recognized Giordino as the pilot.

"The men in that helicopter," he said, his voice thick, "are the same two who wreaked havoc on our operation in Peru."

Oxley looked unconvinced. "Think of the odds, brother. Are you certain?"

"It's them, there can be no others. Their faces are burned in my memory. They cost our family millions of dollars in artifacts that were later seized by Peruvian government archaeologists."

Moore was listening intently. "Why are they here?"

"The same purpose we are. Someone must have leaked information on our project." He turned and glared at Moore. "Perhaps the good professor has friends at NUMA?"

"My only connection with the government is on April fifteenth when I file my income tax return," Moore said testily. "Whoever they are, they're no friends of mine."

Oxley remained dubious. "Henry's right. Impossible for him to have made outside contact. Our security is too tight. Your assertion might make more sense to me if they were Customs officials, not scientists or engineers from an oceanographic research agency."

"No. I swear it's the same men who appeared out of nowhere and rescued the archaeologist and photographer from the sacred well. Their names are Dirk Pitt and Al Giordino. Pitt is the most dangerous of the two. He was the one who killed my men and emasculated Tupac Amaru. We must follow them and find out where they're operating from."

"I have only enough fuel to make it back to Guaymas," said Oxley. "We'll have to let them go."

"Force them down, force them to crash," Sarason demanded.

Oxley shook his head. "If they're as dangerous as you suggest, they may well be armed, and we're not. Relax, brother, we'll meet up with them again."

"They're scavengers, using NUMA as a cover to beat us to the treasure."

"Think what you're saying," snapped Moore. "It is absolutely impossible for them to know where to search. My wife and I were the only ones ever to decode the images on the golden mummy suit. Either this has to be a coincidence or you're hallucinating."

"As my brother can tell you," said Sarason coldly, "I am not one to hallucinate."

"A couple of NUMA underwater freaks who roam the world fighting evil," muttered Moore sharply. "You'd better lay off the mescal."

Sarason did not hear Moore. The thought of Amaru triggered something inside Sarason. He slowly regained control, the initial shock replaced by malevolence. He could not wait to unleash the mad dog from the Andes.

"This time," he murmured nastily, "they will be the ones who pay."

Joseph Zolar had finally arrived in his jet and was waiting in the dining room of the hacienda with Micki Moore when the searchers entered wearily and sat down. "I guess I don't have to ask if you've found anything. The look on your faces reflects defeat."

"We'll find it," said Oxley through a yawn. "The demon has to be out there somewhere."

"I'm not as confident," muttered Moore, reaching for a glass of chilled chardonnay. "We've almost run out of islands to search."

Sarason came over and gave Zolar a brotherly pat on both shoulders. "We expected you three days ago."

"I was delayed. A transaction that netted us one million two hundred thousand Swiss francs."

"A dealer?"

"A collector. A Saudi sheik."

"How did the Vincente deal go?"

"Sold him the entire lot, with the exception of those damned Indian ceremonial idols. For some inexplicable reason, they scared the hell out of him."

Samson laughed. "Maybe it's the curse."

Zolar shrugged impassively. "If they come with a curse, it simply means the next potential buyer will have to pay a premium."

"Did you bring the idols with you?" asked Oxley. "I'd like to have a look at them."

"They're in a packing crate inside the cargo hold of the airplane." Zolar glanced admiringly at the quesadilla that was placed in front of him on a plate. "I had hoped you would greet me with good news."

"You can't say we haven't tried," replied Moore. "We've examined every rock that sticks out of the sea from the Colorado River south to Cabo San Lucas, and haven't seen anything remotely resembling a stone demon with wings and a serpent's head."

"I hate to bring more grim tidings," Sarason said to Zolar, "but we met up with my friends who messed things up in Peru."

Zolar looked at him, puzzled. "Not those two, devils from NUMA?"

"The same. As incredible as it sounds, I believe they're after Huascar's gold too."

"I'm forced to agree," said Oxley. "Why else did they pop up in the same area?"

"Impossible for them to know something we don't," said Zolar.

"Perhaps they've been following you," said Micki, holding up her glass as Henry poured her wine.

Oxley shook his head. "No, our amphibian has twice the fuel range of their helicopter."

Moore turned to Zolar. "My wife may have something. The odds are astronomical that it was a chance encounter."

"How do we handle it?" Samson asked no one in particular.

Zolar smiled. "I think Mrs. Moore has given us the answer."

"Me?" wondered Micki. "All I suggested was--"

"They might have been following us." So.

Zolar looked at her slyly. "We'll begin by requesting our mercenary friends in local law enforcement to begin earning their money by launching an investigation to find our competitor's base of operations. Once found, we'll follow them."

Darkness was only a half hour away when Giordino set the helicopter down neatly within the white circle painted on the loading deck of the Alhambra. The deckhands, who simply went by the names of Jesus and Gato, stood by to push the craft inside the cavernous auto deck and tie it down.

Loren and Gunn were standing outside the sweep of the rotor blades. When Giordino cut the ignition switch, they stepped forward. They were not alone. A man and a woman moved out of the shadow of the ferry's huge superstructure and joined them.

"Any luck?" Gunn shouted above the diminishing beat of the rotors at Giordino who was leaning out the open window of the cockpit.

Giordino replied with a thumbs-down.

Pitt stepped from the helicopter's passenger door and knitted his thick, black eyebrows in surprise. "I didn't expect to see you two again, certainly not here."

Dr. Shannon Kelsey smiled, her manner coolly dignified, while Miles Rodgers pumped Pitt's hand in a genuine show of friendliness. "Hope you don't mind us popping in like this," said Rodgers.

"Not at all. I'm glad to see you. I assume you've all introduced yourselves to each other."

"Yes, we've all become acquainted. Shannon and 1 certainly didn't expect to be greeted by a congresswoman and the assistant director of NUMA."

"Dr. Kelsey has regaled me with her adventures in Peru," said Loren in a voice that was low and throaty. "She's led an interesting life."

Giordino exited the helicopter and stared at the newcomers with interest. "Hail, hail, the gang's all here," he said in greeting. "Is this a reunion or an old mummy hunters' convention?"

"Yes, what brings you to our humble ferry in the Sea of Cortez?" asked Pitt.

"Government agents requested Miles and me to drop everything in Peru and fly here to assist your search," answered Shannon.

Pitt looked at Gunn. "Government agents?"

Gunn made a know-nothing shrug and held up a piece of paper. "The fax informing us of their arrival came an hour after they showed up in a chartered boat. They insisted on waiting to reveal the purpose of their visit until you returned."

"They were Customs agents," Miles enlightened Pitt. "They appeared in the Pueblo de los Muertos with a high-level State Department official and played on our patriotism."

"Miles and I were asked to identify and photograph Huascar's treasure after you found it," explained Shannon. "They came to us because of my expertise in Andean culture and artifacts, Miles's reputation as a photographer, and mostly because of our recent involvement with you and NUMA."

"And you volunteered," Pitt surmised.

Rodgers replied "When the Customs agents informed us the gang of smugglers we met in the Andes are connected with the family of underground art dealers who are also searching for the treasure, we started packing."

"The Zolars?"

Rodgers nodded. "The possibility we might be of help in trapping Doc Miller's murderer quickly overcame any reluctance to become involved."

"Wait a minute," said Giordino. "The Zolars are involved with Amaru and the Solpemachaco?"

Rodgers nodded again. "You weren't told? No one informed you that the Solpemachaco and the Zolar family are one and the same?"

"I guess someone forgot," Giordino said caustically. He and Pitt looked at each other as understanding dawned. Each read the other's mind and they silently agreed not to mention their unexpected run-in with Doc Miller's imposter.

"Were you briefed on the instructions we deciphered on the quipu?" Pitt asked Shannon, changing the subject.

Shannon nodded. "I was given a full translation."

"By whom?"

"The courier who hand-delivered it was an FBI agent."

Pitt stared at Gunn and then Giordino with deceptive calm. "The plot thickens. I'm surprised Washington didn't issue press kits about the search to the news media and sell the movie rights to Hollywood."

"If word leaks out," said Giordino, "every treasure hunter between here and the polar icecaps will swarm into the Gulf like fleas after a hemophiliac St. Bernard."

Fatigue began to tighten its grip on Pitt. He was stiff and numb and his back ached. His body demanded to lie down and rest. He had every right to be tired and discouraged. What the hell, he thought, why not share the despair. No good reason why he should bear the cross by himself.

"I hate to say it," he said slowly, staring at Shannon, "but it looks as if you and Miles made a wasted trip."

Shannon looked at him in surprise. "You haven't found the treasure site?"

"Did someone tell you we had?"

"We were led to believe you had pinned down the location," said Shannon.

"Wishful thinking," said Pitt. "We haven't seen a trace of a stone carving."

"Are you familiar with the symbol marker described by the quipu?" Gunn asked Shannon.

"Yes," she replied without hesitation. "The Demonio del Muertos."

Pitt sighed. "The demon of the dead. Dr. Ortiz told us. I go to the back of the class for not making the connection."

"I remember," said Gunn. "Dr. Ortiz was excavating a large grotesque rock sculpture with fangs and described it as a Chachapoyan god of the underworld."

Pitt repeated Dr. Ortiz's exact words. "Part jaguar, part condor, part snake, he sank his fangs into whoever disturbed the dead."

"The body and wings have the scales of a lizard," Shannon added to the description.

"Now that you know exactly what you're looking for," Loren said with renewed enthusiasm, "the search should go easier."

"So we know the I.D. of the beast that guards the hoard," said Giordino, bringing the conversation back to earth. "So what? Dirk and I have examined every island that falls within the pattern and we've come up empty. We've exhausted our search area, and what we might have missed our competitors have likely checked off their list too."

"Al's right," Pitt admitted. "We have no place left to search."

"You're sure you've seen no trace of the demon?" asked Rodgers.

Giordino shook his head. "Not so much as a scale or a fang."

Shannon scowled in defeat. "Then the myth is simply that. . . a myth."

The treasure that never was," murmured Gunn. He collapsed dejectedly on an old wooden passenger's bench. "It's over," he said slowly. "I'll call the admiral and tell him we're closing down the project."

"Our rivals in the seaplane should be cutting bait and flying off into the sunset too," said Giordino.

"To regroup and try again," said Pitt. "They're not the type to fly away from a billion dollars in treasure."

Gunn looked up at him, surprised. "You've seen them?"

"We waved in passing," answered Pitt without going into detail.

"A great disappointment not to catch Doc's killer," Rodgers said sadly. "I also had high hopes of being the first to photograph the treasures and Huascar's golden chain."

"A washout," murmured Gunn. "A damned washout."

Shannon nodded at Rodgers. "We'd better make arrangements to return to Peru."

Loren sank next to Gunn. "A shame after everyone worked so hard."

Pitt suddenly returned to life, shrugging off the exhaustion and becoming his old cheerful self again. "I can't I speak for the rest of you pitiful purveyors of doom, but I'm going to take a bath, mix myself a tequila on the rocks with lime, grill a steak, get a good night's sleep, and go out in the morning and find that ugly critter guarding the treasure."

They all stared at him as if he had suffered a mental breakdown, all that is except Giordino. He didn't need a third eye to know Pitt was scenting a trail. "You have the look of a born-again Christian. Why the about-face?"

"Do you remember when a NUMA search team found that hundred-and-fifty-year-old steamship that belonged to the Republic of Texas navy?"

"Back in 1987, wasn't it? The ship was the Zavala."

"The same. And do you recall where it was found?"

"Under a parking lot in Galveston."

"Get the picture?"

"I certainly don't," snapped Shannon. "What are you driving at?"

"Whose turn is it to cook dinner?" Pitt inquired, ignoring her.

Gunn raised a hand. "My night in the galley. Why ask?"

"Because, after we've all enjoyed a good meal and a cocktail or two, I'll lay out Dirk's master plan."

"Which island have you selected?" Shannon asked cynically. "Bali Ha'i or Atlantis?"

"There is no island," Pitt answered mysteriously. "No island at all. The treasure that never was, but is, sits on dry land."

An hour and a half later, with Giordino standing at the helm, the old ferry reversed course as her paddlewheels drove her northward back toward San Felipe. While Gunn, assisted by Rodgers, prepared dinner in the ferry's galley, Loren searched for Pitt and finally found him sitting on a folding chair down in the engine room, chatting with the chief engineer as he soaked up the sounds, smells, and motion of the Alhambra's monstrous engines. He wore the expression of a man in the throes of undisguised euphoria. She carried a small bottle of blanco tequila and a glass of ice as she crept up behind him.

Gordo Padilla smoked the stub of a cigar while wiping a clean cloth over a pair of brass steam gauges. He wore scuffed cowboy boots, a T-shirt covered with bright illustrations of tropical birds, and a pair of pants cut off at the knees. His sleek, well-oiled hair was as thick as marsh grass, and the brown eyes in his round face wandered over the engines with the same ardor they would display if beholding the full-figured body of a model in a bikini.

Most ship's engineers are thought to be big ebullient men with hairy chests and thick forearms illustrated with colorful tattoos. Padilla was devoid of body hair and tattoos. He looked like an ant crawling on his great walking beam engines. Diminutive, his height and weight would have easily qualified him to ride a racehorse.

"Rosa, my wife," he said between swallows of Tecate beer, "she thinks I love these engines more than her. I tell her they better than a mistress. Much cheaper and I never have to sneak around alleys to see them."

"Women have never understood the affection a man can have for a machine," Pitt agreed.

"Women can't feel passionate about greasy gears and pistons," said Loren, slipping a hand down the front of Pitt's aloha shirt, "because they don't love back."

"Ah, but pretty lady," said Padilla, "you can't imagine the satisfaction we feel after seducing an engine into running smoothly."

Loren laughed. "No, and I don't want to." She looked up at the huge A-frame that supported the walking beams, and then to the great cylinders, steam condensers, and boilers. "But I must admit, it's an impressive apparatus."

"Apparatus?" Pitt squeezed her around the waist. "In light of modern diesel turbines, walking beam engines seem antiquated. But when you look back on the engineering and manufacturing techniques that were state-of-the-art during their era, they are monuments to the genius of our forefathers."

She passed him the little bottle of tequila and the glass of ice. "Enough of this masculine crap about smelly old engines. Swill this down. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes."

"You have no respect for the finer things in life," said Pitt, nuzzling her hand.

"Make your choice. The engines or me?"

He looked up at the piston rod as it pumped the walking beam up and down. "I can't deny having an obsession with the stroke of an engine." He smiled slyly. "But I freely confess there's a lot to be said for stroking something that's soft and cuddly."

"Now there's a comforting thought for all the women of the world."

Jesus dropped down the ladder from the car deck and said something in Spanish to Padilla. He listened, nodded, and looked at Pitt. "Jesus says the lights of a plane have been circling the ferry for the past half hour."

Pitt stared for a moment at the giant crank that turned the paddlewheels. Then he gave Loren a squeeze and said briefly, "A good sign."

"A sign of what?" she asked curiously.

"The guys on the other side," he said in a cheery voice. "They've failed and now they hope to follow us to the mother lode. That gives an advantage to our team."

After a hearty dinner on one of the thirty tables in the yawning, unobstructed passengers' section of the ferry, the table was cleared and Pitt spread out a nautical chart and two geological land survey maps. Pitt spoke to them distinctly and precisely, laying out his thoughts so clearly they might have been their own.

"The landscape is not the same. There have been great changes in the past almost five hundred years." He paused and pieced together the three maps, depicting an uninterrupted view of the desert terrain from the upper shore of the Gulf north to the Coachella Valley of California.

"Thousands of years ago the Sea of Cortez used to stretch over the present-day Colorado Desert and Imperial Valley above the Salton Sea. Through the centuries, the Colorado River flooded and carried enormous amounts of silt into the sea, eventually forming a delta and diking in the northern area of the sea. This buildup of silt left behind a large body of water that was later known as Lake Cahuilla, named, I believe, after the Indians who lived on its banks. As you travel around the foothills that rim the basin, you can still see the ancient waterline and find seashells scattered throughout the desert.

"When did it dry up?" asked Shannon.

"Between 1100 and 1200 A.D."

"Then where did the Salton Sea come from?"

"In an attempt to irrigate the desert, a canal was built to carry water from the Colorado River. In 1905, after unseasonably heavy rains and much silting, the river burst the banks of the canal and water poured into the lowest part of the desert's basin. A desperate dam operation stopped the flow, but not before enough water had flowed through to form the Salton Sea, with a surface eighty meters below sea level. Actually, it's a large lake that will eventually go the way of Lake Cahuilla, despite irrigation drainage that has temporarily stabilized its present size."

Gunn produced a bottle of Mexican brandy. "A short intermission for spirits to rejuvenate the bloodstream." Lacking the proper snifter goblets, he poured the brandy into plastic cups. Then he raised his. "A toast to success."

"Hear, hear," said Giordino. "Amazing how a good meal and a little brandy changes one's attitude."

"We're all hoping Dirk has discovered a new solution," said Loren.

"Interesting to see if he makes sense." Shannon made an impatient gesture. "Let's hear where all this is going."

Pitt said nothing but leaned over the maps and drew a circular line through the desert with a red felt-tip pen. "This is approximately where the Gulf extended in the late fourteen hundreds, before the river's silt buildup worked south."

"Less than a kilometer from the present border between the United States and Mexico," observed Rodgers.

"An area now mostly covered by wetlands and mudflats known as the Laguna Salada."

"How does this swamp fit into the picture?" asked Gunn.

Pitt's face glowed like a corporate executive officer about to announce a fat dividend to his stockholders. "The island where the Incas and the Chachapoyas buried Huascar's golden chain is no longer an island."

Then he sat down and sipped his brandy, allowing the revelation to penetrate and blossom.

As if responding to a drill sergeant's command, everyone leaned over the charts and studied the markings Pitt had made indicating the ancient shoreline. Shannon pointed to a small snake Pitt had drawn that coiled around a high rock outcropping halfway between the marsh and the foothills of the Las Tinajas Mountains.

"What does the snake signify?"

"A kind of `X marks the spot,' " answered Pitt.

Gunn closely examined the geological survey map. "You've designated a small mountain that, according to the contour elevations, tops out at slightly less than five hundred meters."

"Or about sixteen hundred feet," Giordino tallied.

"What is it called?" Loren wondered.

"Cerro el Capirote," Pitt answered. "Capirote in English means a tall, pointed ceremonial hat, or what we used to call a dunce cap."

"So you think this high pinnacle in the middle of nowhere is our treasure site?" Rodgers asked Pitt.

"If you study the maps closely, you'll find several other small mounts with sharp summits rising from the desert floor beside the swamp. Any one of them matches the general description. But I'm laying my money on Cerro el Capirote."

"What brings you to such an uncompromising decision?" Shannon queried.

"I put myself in the Incas' shoes, or sandals as it were, and selected the best spot to hide what was at the time the world's greatest treasure. If I were General Naymlap, I'd look for the most imposing island at the upper end of a sea as far away from the hated Spanish conquerors as I could find. Cerro el Capirote was about as far as he could go in the early fifteen hundreds, and its height makes it the most imposing."

The mood on the passenger deck of the ferry was definitely on the upswing. New hope had been injected into a project that had come within a hair of being written off as a failure. Pitt's unshakable confidence had infected everyone. Even Shannon was belting down the brandy and grinning like a Dodge City saloon hostess. It was as if all doubt had been thrown overboard. Suddenly, they all took finding the demon perched on the peak of Cerro el Capirote for granted.

If they had the slightest hint that Pitt had reservations, the party would have died a quick death. He felt secure in his conclusions, but he was too pragmatic not to harbor a few small doubts.

And then there was the dark side of the coin. He and Giordino had not mentioned that they had identified Doc Miller's killer as one of the other searchers. They both quietly realized that the Zolars or the Solpemachaco, whatever devious name they went under in this part of the world, were not aware that the treasure was in Pitt's sights.

Pitt began to picture Tupac Amaru in his mind, the cold, lifeless eyes, and he knew the hunt was about to become ugly and downright dirty.

They sailed the Alhambra north of Punta San Felipe and heaved to when her paddlewheels churned up a wake of red silt. A few kilometers ahead, the mouth of the Colorado River, wide and shallow, gaped on the horizon. Spread on either side of the murky, salt-laden water were barren mudflats, totally devoid of vegetation. Few planets in the universe could have looked as wretched and dead.

Pitt gazed at the grim landscape through the windscreen of the helicopter as he adjusted his safety harness. Shannon was strapped in the copilot's seat and Giordino and Rodgers sat in the rear passenger section of the cabin. He waved at Gunn, who replied with a V for victory sign, and Loren, who appropriately blew him a kiss.

His hands danced over the cyclic and collective pitch sticks as the rotors turned, gathering speed until the whole fuselage shuddered. And then the Alhambra was falling away, and he slipped the helicopter sideways across the water like a leaf blown by the wind. Once safely free of the ferry, he gently slipped the cyclic forward and the aircraft began a diagonal climb on a northerly course. At 500 meters (1640 feet) Pitt adjusted the controls and straightened out in level flight.

He flew above the drab waters of the upper Gulf for ten minutes before crossing into the marshlands of the Laguna Salada. A vast section of the flats was flooded from recent rains, and the dead limbs of mesquite rose above the heavily salted water like skeletal arms reaching for salvation.

The giant slough was soon left behind as Pitt banked the helicopter across the sand dunes that marched from the mountains to the edge of the Laguna Salada. Now the landscape took on the characteristics of a faded brown moon, more substance than color. The uneven, rocky terrain looked fearsome. Beautiful to the eye but deadly to the body that struggled to survive its horror during the blazing heat of summer.

"There's a blacktop road," announced Shannon, motioning downward.

"Highway Five," said Pitt. "It runs from San Felipe to Mexicali."

"Is this part of the Colorado Desert?" asked Rodgers.

"The desert north of the border is called that because of the Colorado River. In fact this is all part of the Sonoran Desert."

"Not very hospitable country. I wouldn't want to walk through it."

"Those who are intolerant of the desert die in it," said Pitt thoughtfully. "Those who respect it find it a compelling place to live."

"People actually live down there?" Shannon asked in surprise.

"Mostly Indians," replied Pitt. "The Sonoran Desert is perhaps the most beautiful of all the world's deserts, even though the citizens of central Mexico think of it as their Ozarks."

Giordino leaned out a side window for a better view and peered into the distance through the trusty binoculars. He patted Pitt on the shoulder. "Your hot spot is coming up off to, port."

Pitt nodded, made a slight course change and peered at a solitary mountain rising from the desert floor directly ahead. Cerro el Capirote was aptly named. Though not exactly conical in shape, there was a slight resemblance to a dunce cap with the tip flattened.

"I think I can make out an animal-like sculpture on the summit," observed Giordino.

"I'll descend and hover over it," Pitt acknowledged.

He cut his airspeed, dropped, and swung around the top of the mountain. He approached and circled cautiously, on the watch for sudden downdrafts. Then he hovered the helicopter almost nose-to-nose with the grotesque stone effigy. Mouth agape, it seemed to stare back with the truculent expression of a hungry junkyard dog.

"Step right up, folks," hawked Pitt as if he were a carnival barker, "and view the astounding demon of the underworld who shuffles cards with his nose and deals 'em with his toes."

"It exists," cried Shannon, flushed with excitement, as they all were. "It truly exists."

"Looks like a timeworn gargoyle," said Giordino, successfully controlling his emotions.

"You've got to land," demanded Rodgers. "We must get a closer look."

"Too many high rocks around the sculpture," said Pitt. "I have to find a flat spot to set down."

"There's a small clearing free of boulders about forty meters beyond the demon," Giordino said, pointing through the windscreen over Pitt's shoulder.

Pitt nodded and banked around the towering rock carving so he could make his approach into the wind blowing across the mountain from the west. He reduced speed, eased back the cyclic stick. The turquoise helicopter hovered a moment, flared out, and then settled onto the only open space on the stone summit of Cerro el Capirote.

Giordino was first out, carrying tie-down lines that he attached to the helicopter and wrapped around rock outcroppings. When he completed the operation, he moved in front of the cockpit and drew his hand across his throat. Pitt shut off the engine and the rotor blades wound down.

Rodgers jumped down and offered a hand to Shannon. She hit the ground and took off at a run over the uneven terrain toward the stone effigy. Pitt stepped from the helicopter last, but did not follow the others. He casually raised the binoculars and scanned the sky in the direction of the faint sound of an aircraft engine. The seaplane was only a silver speck against a dome of blue. The pilot had maintained an altitude of 2000 meters (6500 feet) in an attempt to remain unseen. But Pitt was not fooled. His intuition told him he was being tailed the instant he lifted off from the Alhambra. Spotting the enemy only confirmed his suspicions.

Before he joined the others already gathered around the stone beast, he took a moment and stepped to the edge of the craggy wall and stared down, thankful that he did not have to make the ascent. The unobstructed panorama of the desert was breathtaking. The October sun tinted the rocks and sand in vivid colors that turned drab during the hot summer. The waters of the Gulf sparkled to the south and the mountain ranges on both sides of the marshlands of the Laguna Salada rose majestically through a slight haze.

Satisfaction swelled within him. He had made a good call. The ancients had indeed selected an imposing spot to hide their treasure.

When he finally approached the huge stone beast, Shannon was making detailed measurements of the jaguar body while Rodgers busied himself shooting roll after roll of photos. Giordino appeared intent on searching around the pedestal for a trace of the entrance to the passageway leading down into the mountain.

"Does he have the proper pedigree?" Pitt asked.

"Definitely Chachapoyan influence," Shannon said, her face flushed with fervor. "An extraordinary example of their art." She stood back as if admiring a painting hanging in a gallery. "See how the motifs on the scales are exactingly duplicated. They're a perfect match for those on the sculpted beasts in the Pueblo de los Muertos."

"The technique is the same?"

"Almost identical."

"Then perhaps the same sculptor had a hand in carving this one."

"It's possible." Shannon raised her hand as high as she could reach and stroked the lower part of the serpent's scaled neck. "It wasn't uncommon for the Incas to recruit Chachapoyan stone carvers."

"The ancients must have had a strange sense of humor to create a god whose looks could sour milk."

"The legend is vague but it contends that a condor laid an egg that was eaten and vomited by a jaguar. A snake was hatched from the regurgitated egg and slithered into the sea where it grew fish scales. The rest of the mythological account says that because the beast was so ugly and shunned by the other gods who thrived in the sun, it lived underground where it eventually became the guardian of the dead."

"The original ugly duckling fairy tale."

"He's hideous," Shannon said solemnly, "and yet I can't help feeling a deep sadness for him. I don't know if I can explain it properly, but the stone seems to have a life of its own."

"I understand. I sense something more than cold stone too." Pitt stared down at one of the wings that had dropped off the body and shattered into several pieces. "Poor old guy. He looks like he's fallen on hard times."

Shannon nodded sadly at the graffiti and the gouges from bullet holes. "The pity is that local archaeologists never recognized the beast for what it is, a remarkable piece of artwork by two cultures that thrived thousands of kilometers from here--"

Pitt interrupted her by abruptly raising a hand for silence. "You hear something, a strange sound like someone crying?"

She cocked an ear and listened, then shook her head. "I only hear the shutter and automatic winding mechanism on Miles's camera."

The eerie sound Pitt thought he heard was gone. He grinned. "Probably the wind."

"Or those the Demonio del Muertos is guarding."

"I thought he guaranteed they rest in eternal peace."

Shannon smiled. "We know very little about Inca and Chachapoyan religious rites. Our stone friend here may not have been as benevolent as we assume."

Pitt left Shannon and Miles to their work and walked over to Giordino, who was tapping the rock around the beast's pedestal with a miner's pick. "See any hint of a passage?" Pitt asked.

"Not unless the ancients discovered a method for fusing rock," answered Giordino. "This big gargoyle is carved from an immense slab of solid granite that forms the core of the mountain. I can't find a telltale crack anywhere around the statue's base. If there's a passage, it has to be somewhere else on the mountain."

Pitt tilted his head, listening. "There it is again."

"You mean that banshee wail?"

"You heard it?" Pitt asked in surprise.

"I figured it was just wind whistling through the rocks."

"There isn't a whisper of wind."

A curious look crossed Giordino's face as he wetted one index finger with his tongue and tested the air. "You're right. Nary a stir."

"It's not a steady sound," said Pitt. "I only notice it at intervals."

"I picked up on that too. It comes like a puff of breath for about ten seconds and then fades for nearly a minute."

Pitt nodded happily. "Could it be we're describing a vent to a cavern?"

"Let's see if we can find it," Giordino suggested eagerly.

"Better it come to us." Pitt found a rock that seemed molded to his buttocks and settled in. He leisurely wiped a smudge from one lens of his sunglasses, dabbed his brow with a bandanna that hung from his pocket, then cupped his ears and began turning his head like a radar antenna.

Like clockwork, the strange wail came and went. Pitt waited until he heard three sequences. Then he motioned for Giordino to move along the north side of the peak. No reply was necessary, no words passed between them. They had been close friends since they were children and had maintained close contact during their years together in the Air Force. When Pitt joined NUMA at Admiral Sandecker's request twelve years ago, Giordino went with him. Over time they learned to respond to each other without needless talk.

Giordino moved down a steep slope for about 20 meters (65 feet) before stopping. He paused and listened while awaiting Pitt's next gesture. The dismal wail came stronger to him than it did to Pitt. But he knew that the sound reverberated off the boulders and was distorted. He didn't hesitate when Pitt motioned him away from where it sounded loudest and pointed to a spot where the side of the peak suddenly dropped off in a narrow chute 10 meters (33 feet) deep.

While Giordino was lying on his stomach surveying a way down to the bottom of the chute, Pitt came over, crouched beside him, and held out a hand, palm down.

The wail came again and Pitt nodded, his lips parting in a tight smile. "I can feel a draft. Something deep inside the mountain is causing air to be expelled from a vent."

"I'll get the rope and flashlight from the chopper," said Giordino, rising to his feet and trotting toward the aircraft. In two minutes he was back with Shannon and Miles.

Her eyes fairly sparkled with anticipation. "Al says you found a way inside the mountain."

Pitt nodded. "We'll know shortly."

Giordino tied one end of a nylon line around a large rock. "Who gets the honor?"

"I'll toss you for it," said Pitt.

"Heads."

Pitt flipped a quarter and watched as it clinked and spun to a stop on a small, flat surface between two massive boulders. "Tails, you lose."

Giordino shrugged without complaint, knotted a loop and passed it over and then under Pitt's shoulders. "Never mind bedazzling me with mountain climbing tricks. I'll let you down, and I'll pull you up."

Pitt accepted the fact his friend's strength was greater than his own. Giordino's body may have been short but his shoulders were as broad as any man's, and his muscled arms were a match for a professional wrestler. Anyone who tried to throw Giordino, including karate black belt experts, felt as if they were caught up in the gears of an unyielding piece of machinery.

"Mind you don't get rope burn," Pitt cautioned him.

"Mind you don't break a leg, or I'll leave you for the gargoyle," said Giordino, handing Pitt the flashlight. Then he slowly paid out the line, lowering Pitt between the walls of the narrow chute.

When Pitt's feet touched the bottom, he looked up. "Okay, I'm down."

"What do you see?"

"A small cleft in the rock wall just large enough to crawl through. I'm going in."

"Don't remove the rope. There could be a sharp drop just inside the entrance."

Pitt lay on his stomach and wormed through the narrow fissure. It was a tight squeeze for 3 meters (10 feet) before the entryway widened enough so he could stand. He switched on the flashlight and swung its beam along the walls. The light showed he was at the head of a passageway that appeared to lead down into the bowels of the mountain. The floor was smooth with steps hewn into the rock every few paces.

A rush of dank air rushed past him like the steamy breath of a giant. He moved his fingertips over the rock walls. They came away wet with moisture. Driven by curiosity, Pitt moved along the passageway until the nylon became taut and he was stopped from venturing further. He-aimed the light ahead into the darkness. The cold hand of fear gripped him around the neck as a pair of eyes flashed back at him.

There, upon a pedestal of black rock, seemingly sculpted by the same hand as the demon on the mountain peak above, glaring toward the entrance to the passage, was another, smaller Demonio del Muertos. This one was inlaid with turquoise stone and had white, polished quartz for teeth and red gemstones for eyes.

Pitt thought seriously of casting off the rope and exploring further. But he felt it wouldn't be fair to the others. They should all be in on the discovery of the treasure chamber together. Reluctantly, he returned to the crack in the wall and squirmed back into daylight.

When Giordino helped him over the edge of the chute, Shannon and Rodgers were waiting in hushed expectation.

"What did you see?" Shannon blurted, unable to contain her excitement. "Tell us what you found!"

Pitt stared at her without expression for a moment, then broke into an elated grin. "The entrance to the treasure is guarded by another demon, but otherwise the way looks clear."

Everyone shouted in elation. Shannon and Rodgers hugged and kissed. Giordino slapped Pitt on the back so hard it jarred his molars. Intense curiosity seized them as they peered over the edge of the chute at the small opening leading inside the mountain. None saw a black tunnel leading downward. They gazed through the rock as if it were transparent and saw the golden treasure far below.

At least that's what they thought they saw. But not Pitt. His eyes were sweeping the sky. Foresighted, intuitive, maybe just superstitious, he had a sudden vision of the seaplane that had followed them to the demon, attacking the Alhambra. For a moment he could see it as clearly as if he were watching television. It was not a pretty sight.

Shannon noticed that Pitt was quiet, his face contemplative. "What's wrong? You look like you've just lost your best girl."

I may have," Pitt said darkly. "I very well may have."

Giordino returned to the helicopter and retrieved another coil of rope, a second flashlight, and a Coleman lantern from a storage locker. The rope he slung over his shoulder. He gave the flashlight to Shannon and handed the Coleman to Rodgers along with a box of wooden matches.

"The tank is full of gas, so we should have light for three hours or more."

Shannon airily took the extra flashlight. "I think it best if I lead the way."

Giordino shrugged. "Suits me. As long as somebody other than me sets off the Incas' booby traps down in the cave of doom."

Shannon made a sour face. "That's a cheery thought."

Pitt laughed. "He overdoses on Indiana Jones movies."

"Give me a hard time," said Giordino sadly. "You'll be sorry someday."

"I hope it's not soon."

"How wide is the opening?" asked Rodgers.

"Dr. Kelsey might make it through on her hands and knees, but we boys will have to snake our way in."

Shannon peered over the edge at the bottom of the fissure. "The Chachapoyas and the Incas could never have hauled several tons of gold up steep cliffs and then lowered it through a rat hole. They must have found a larger passage somewhere around the base of the mountain above the ancient waterline."

"You could waste years looking for it," said Rodgers.

"It must be buried under landslides and the erosion of almost five centuries."

"I'll bet the Incas sealed it off by causing a cave-in," Pitt ventured.

Shannon was not about to allow the men to go first. Scrambling over rocks and slinking into dark recesses was her specialty. She eagerly slipped down the rope as smoothly as if she did it twice a day and crawled into the narrow aperture in the rock. Rodgers went next, followed by Giordino, with Pitt bringing up the rear.

Giordino turned to Pitt. "If I get caught in a cave-in, you will dig me out."

"Not before I dial nine-one-one."

Shannon and Rodgers had already moved out of sight down the stone steps and were examining the second Demonio del Muertos when Pitt and Giordino caught up to them.

Shannon was peering at the motifs embedded in the fish scales. "The images on this sculpture are better preserved than those on the first demon."

"Can you interpret them?" asked Rodgers.

"If I had more time. They appear to have been chiseled in a hurry."

Rodgers stared at the protruding fangs in the jaws of the serpent's head. "I'm not surprised the ancients were frightened of the underworld. This thing is ugly enough to induce diarrhea. Notice how the eyes seem to follow our movements."

"It's enough to make you sober," said Giordino.

Shannon brushed away the dust from around the red gemstone eyes. "Burgundy topaz. Probably mined east of the Andes, in the Amazon."

Rodgers set the Coleman lantern on the floor, pumped up the fuel pressure and held a lit match against the mantle. The Coleman bathed the passage in a bright light for 10 meters (33 feet) in both directions. Then he held up the lantern to inspect the sculpture. "Why a second demon?" he asked, fascinated by the fact that the well preserved beast looked as if it had been carved only yesterday.

Pitt patted the serpent on the head. "Insurance in case intruders got past the first one."

Shannon licked a corner of a handkerchief and cleaned the dust from the topaz eyes. "What is amazing is that so many ancient cultures, geographically separated and totally unrelated, came up with the same myths. In the legends of India, for example, cobras were considered to be semi divine guardians of a subterranean kingdom filled with astounding riches."

"I see nothing unusual about that," said Giordino. "Forty-nine out of fifty people are deathly afraid of snakes."

They finished their brief examination of the remarkable relic of antiquity and continued along the passageway. The damp air that came up from below drew the sweat through their pores. Despite the humidity they had to be careful they didn't step too heavily or their footsteps raised clouds of choking dust.

"They must have taken years to carve this tunnel," said Rodgers.

Pitt reached up and ran his fingers lightly over the limestone roof. "I doubt they excavated it from scratch. They probably hollowed out an existing fissure. Whoever they were, they weren't short."

"How can you tell?"

"The roof. We don't have to stoop. It's a good foot above our heads."

Rodgers gestured at a large plate set on an angle in a wall niche. "This is the third one of these things I've seen since we entered. What do you suppose their purpose was?"

Shannon rubbed away the centuries-old coating of dust and saw her reflection on a shining surface. "Highly polished silver reflectors," she explained. "The same system used by the ancient Egyptians for lighting interior galleries. The sun striking a reflector at the entrance bounced from reflector to reflector throughout the chambers and illuminated them without the smoke and soot given off by oil lamps."

"I wonder if they knew they were paving the way for environmentally friendly technology?" murmured Pitt randomly.

The echoing sound of their footsteps spread ahead and behind them like ripples on a pond. It was an eerie, claustrophobic sensation, knowing they were entering the dead heart of the mountain. The stagnant air became so thick and heavy with moisture it dampened the dust on their clothing. Fifty meters (164 feet) later they entered a small cavern with a long gallery.

The chamber was nothing less than a catacomb, honeycombed with crypts hewn into the walls. The mummies of twenty men, wrapped tightly in beautifully embroidered woolen mantles, lay head to toe. They were the mortal remains of the guards who faithfully guarded the treasure, even after death, waiting for the return of their countrymen from an empire that no longer existed.

"These people were huge," said Pitt. "They must have stood two hundred and eight centimeters or six foot ten inches tall."

"A pity they aren't around to play in the NBA," muttered Giordino.

Shannon closely examined the design on the mantles. "Legends claim the Chachapoyas were as tall as trees."

Pitt scanned the chamber. "One missing."

Rodgers looked at him. "Who?"

"The last man, the one who tended to the burial of the guardians who went before."

Beyond the gallery of death they came to a larger chamber that Shannon quickly identified as the living quarters of the guardians before they died. A wide, circular stone table with a surrounding bench rose out of the floor that formed their base. The table had evidently been used to eat on. The bones of a large bird still rested on a silver platter that sat on the smoothly polished stone surface along with ceramic drinking vessels. Beds had been chiseled into the walls, some still with woolen covers neatly folded in the middle. Rodgers caught sight of something bright lying on the floor. He picked it up and held it under the light of the Coleman.

"What is it?" asked Shannon.

"A massive gold ring, plain, with no engravings."

"An encouraging sign," said Pitt. "We must be getting close to the main vault."

Shannon's breath was coming in short pants as the excitement mounted. She hurried off ahead of the men through another portal at the far end of the guardians' living quarters that led into a cramped tunnel with an arched ceiling, similar to an ancient cistern wide enough for only one person to pass through at a time. This passageway seemed to wind down through the mountain for an eternity.

"How far do you think we've come?" asked Giordino.

"My feet feel like ten kilometers," Shannon answered, suddenly weary.

Pitt had paced the distance they'd traveled down the stone steps since leaving the crypts. "The peak of Cerro el Capirote is only five hundred meters above sea level. I'd guess we've reached the desert floor and dropped twenty or thirty meters below it."

"Damn!" Shannon gasped. "Something fluttered against my face."

"Me too," said Giordino with obvious disgust. "I think I've just been garnished with bat vomit."

"Be happy he wasn't of the vampire variety," joked Pitt.

They descended along the tunnel another ten minutes when Shannon suddenly stopped arid held up a hand. "Listen!" she commanded. "I hear something."

After a few moments, Giordino said, "Sounds like someone left a tap on."

"A rushing stream or a river," Pitt said softly, recalling the old bartender's words.

As they moved closer, the sound of the moving water increased and reverberated within the confined space. The air had cooled considerably and smelled pure and less stifling. They rushed forward, anxiously hoping each bend in the passage was the last. And then the walls abruptly spread into the darkness and they rushed headlong into what seemed like a vast cathedral that revealed the mountain as incredibly hollow.

Shannon screamed a full-fledged shriek that echoed through the chamber as if intensified by huge rock concert amplifiers. She clutched the first body that was handy, in this case, Pitt's.

Giordino, not one to scare easily, looked as if he'd seen a ghost.

Rodgers stood petrified, his outstretched arm frozen like an iron support, holding the Coleman lantern. "Oh, good God," he finally gasped, hypnotized by the ghostly apparition that rose in front of them and glistened under the bright light. "What is it?"

Pitt's heart pumped a good five liters (a gallon) of adrenaline through his system, but he remained calm and clinically surveyed the towering figure that looked like a monstrosity out of a science fiction horror movie.

The huge specter was a ghastly sight. Standing straight, the apparition towered above them, its grisly features displaying grinning teeth, its eye sockets wide open. Pitt judged the horror to be a good head taller than him. High above one shoulder, as though poised in the act of bashing out an intruder's brains, a bony hand held an ornate battle club with a notched edge. The Coleman's light gleamed off the gruesome figure that looked as if it were encased in yellowish amber or fiberglass resin. Then Pitt determined what it was.

The last guardian of Huascar's treasure had been frozen for all time into a stalagmite.

"How did he get like that?" Rodgers asked in awe.

Pitt pointed to the roof of the cavern. "Ground water dripping from the limestone ceiling released carbon dioxide that splattered on the guardian and eventually covered him with a thick coating of calcite crystals. In time, he was encased like a scorpion inside a cheap gift shop acrylic resin paperweight."

"But how in the world could he die and remain in an upright position?" queried Shannon, coming out of her initial fright.

Pitt ran his hand lightly over the crystallized mantle. "We'll never know unless we chisel him out of his transparent tomb. It seems incredible, but knowing he was dying he must have constructed a support to prop him in a standing position with his arm raised, and then he took his life, probably by poison."

"These guys took their jobs seriously," muttered Giordino.

As if drawn by some mysterious force, Shannon moved within a few centimeters of the hideous wonder and stared up into the distorted face beneath the crystals. "The height, the blond hair. He was Chachapoya, one of the Cloud People."

"He's a long way from home," said Pitt. He held up his wrist and checked the time. "Two and a half hours to go before the Coleman runs out of gas. We'd better keep moving."

Though it didn't seem possible, the immense grotto spread into the distance until their light beams barely revealed the great arched ceiling, far larger than any conceived or built by man. Giant stalactites that came down from the roof met and joined stalagmites rising from the floor, merging and becoming gigantic columns. Some of the stalagmites had formed in the shapes of strange beasts that seemed frozen in an alien landscape. Crystals gleamed from the walls like glittering teeth. The overpowering beauty and grandeur that sparkled and glittered under the rays of their lights made it seem they were in the center of a laser light show.

Then the formations stopped abruptly, as the floor of the cavern ended on the bank of a river over 30 meters wide (100 feet). Under their lights, the black, forbidding water turned a dark emerald green. Pitt calculated the speed of the current at a rapid nine knots. The babbling brook sound they had heard further back in the passageway they now saw was the rush of water around the rockbound banks of along, low island that protruded from the middle of the river.

But it was not the discovery of an extraordinary unknown river flowing far beneath the floor of the desert that captivated and enthralled them. It was a dazzling sight no ordinary imagination could ever conceive. There, stacked neatly on the level top of the island, rose a mountain of golden artifacts.

The effect of the two flashlights and the Coleman lantern on the golden hoard left the explorers speechless. Overcome, they could only stand immobile and absorb the magnificent spectacle.

Here was Huascar's golden chain coiled in a great spiral 10 meters (33 feet) in height. Here also was the great gold disk from the Temple of the Sun, beautifully crafted and set with hundreds of precious stones. There were golden plants, water lilies and corn, and solid gold sculptures of kings and gods, women, llamas, and dozens upon dozens of ceremonial objects, beautifully formed and inlaid with huge emeralds. Here also, stacked as if inside a moving van, were tons of golden statues, furniture, tables, chairs, and beds, all handsomely engraved. The centerpiece was a huge throne made from solid gold inlaid with silver flowers.

Nor was this all. Arranged row after row, standing like phantoms, their mummies encased in golden shells, were twelve generations of Inca royalty. Beside each one lay his armor and headdresses and exquisitely woven clothing.

"In my wildest dreams," Shannon murmured softly, "I never envisioned a collection this vast."

Giordino and Rodgers were both paralyzed with astonishment. No words came from either one of them. They could only gape.

"Remarkable they could transport half the wealth of the Americas thousands of kilometers across an ocean on balsa and reed rafts," said Pitt in admiration.

Shannon slowly shook her head, the awed look in her eyes turning to sadness. "Try to imagine, if you can. What we see here is only a tiny part of the riches belonging to the last of the magnificent pre-Columbian civilizations. We can only make a rough assessment of the enormous number of objects the Spanish took and melted down into bullion."

Giordino's face beamed almost as brightly as all the gold. "Warms the cockles of your heart, knowing the gluttonous Spaniards missed the cream of the crop."

"Any chance we can get over to the island so I can study the artifacts?" asked Shannon.

"And I'll need to get close-ups," added Rodgers.

"Not unless you can walk across thirty meters of rushing water," said Giordino.

Pitt scanned the cavern by sweeping his light along the barren floor. "Looks like the Chachapoyas and the Incas took their bridge with them. You'll have to do your study and shoot your pictures of the treasure from here."

"I'll use my telephoto and pray my flash carries that far," said Rodgers hopefully.

"What do you suppose all this is worth?" asked Giordino.

"You'd have to weigh it," said Pitt, "figure in the current market price of gold, and then triple your total for the value as rare artifacts."

"I'm certain the treasure is worth double what the experts estimated," said Shannon.

Giordino looked at her. "That would be as high as three hundred million dollars?"

Shannon nodded. "Maybe even more."

"It isn't worth a good baseball card," remarked Pitt, "until it's brought to the surface. Not an easy job to barge the larger pieces, including the chain, off an island surrounded by a rushing flow of water, and then haul them up a narrow passageway to the top of the mountain. From there, you'll need a heavy transport helicopter just to carry the golden chain."

"You're talking a major operation," said Rodgers.

Pitt held his light on the great coiled chain. "Nobody said it was going to be easy. Besides, bringing out the treasure isn't our problem."

Shannon gave him a questioning stare. "Oh, no? Then who do you expect to do it?"

Pitt stared back. "Have you forgotten? We're supposed to stand aside and hand it over to our old pals from the Solpemachaco."

The repulsive thought had slipped her mind after gazing enthralled at the wealth of golden artifacts. "An outrage," Shannon said furiously, her self-esteem blossoming once more, "a damned outrage. The archaeological discovery of the century, and I can't direct the recovery program."

"Why don't you lodge a complaint?" said Pitt.

She glared at him, puzzled. "What are you talking about?"

"Let the competition know how you feel."

"How?"

"Leave them a message."

"You're crazy."

"That observation has been cropping up quite a bit lately," said Giordino.

Pitt took the rope slung over Giordino's shoulder and made a loop. Then he twirled the rope like a lariat and threw the loop across the water, smiling triumphantly as it settled over the head of a small golden monkey on a pedestal.

"Ah, ha!" he uttered proudly. "Will Rogers had nothing on me."

Pitt's worst fears were confirmed when he hovered the helicopter above the Alhambra. No one stood on the deck to greet the craft and its passengers. The ferry looked deserted. The auto deck was empty, as was the wheelhouse. The boat was not riding at anchor, nor was she drifting. Her hull was resting lightly in the water only two meters above the silt of the shallow bottom. To all appearances, she looked like a ship that had been abandoned by her crew.

The sea was calm and there was no pitch or roll. Pitt lowered the helicopter onto the wood deck and shut down the engines as soon as the tires touched down. He sat there as the sound of the turbine and rotor blades slowly died into a morbid silence. He waited a full minute but no one appeared. He opened the entry door and dropped to the deck. Then he stood there waiting for something to happen.

Finally, a man stepped from behind a stairwell and approached, coming to a halt about 5 meters (16 feet) from the chopper. Even without the phony white hair and beard, Pitt easily recognized the man who had impersonated Dr. Steven Miller in Peru. He was smiling as if he'd caught a record fish.

"A little off your beat, aren't you?" said Pitt, unruffled.

"You seem to be my never-ending nemesis, Mr. Pitt."

"A quality that thrills me no end. What name are you going under today?"

"Not that it's of use to you, but I am Cyrus Samson."

"I can't say I'm pleased to see you again."

Sarason moved closer, peering over Pitt's shoulder at the interior of the helicopter. His face lost the gloating smile and twisted into tense concern. "You are alone? Where are the others?"

"What others?" Pitt asked innocently.

"Dr. Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and your friend, Albert Giordino."

"Since you have the passenger list memorized, you tell me."

Please, Mr. Pitt, you would do well not to toy with me," Sarason warned him.

"They were hungry, so I dropped them off at a seafood restaurant in San Felipe."

"You're lying."

Pitt didn't take his gaze off Sarason to scan the decks of the ferry. Guns were trained on him. That was a certainty he knew without question. He stood his ground and faced Miller's killer as if he didn't have a care in the world.

"So sue me," Pitt retorted, and laughed.

"You're hardly in a position to be contemptuous," Sarason said coldly. "Perhaps you don't realize the seriousness of your situation."

"I think I do," said Pitt, still smiling. "You want Huascar's treasure, and you'd murder half the good citizens of Mexico to get it."

"Fortunately, that won't be necessary. I do admit, however, two-thirds of a billion dollars makes an enticing incentive."

"Aren't you interested in knowing how and why we were conducting our search at the same time as yours?" asked Pitt.

It was Sarason's turn to laugh. "After a little persuasion, Mr. Gunn and Congresswoman Smith were most cooperative in telling me about Drake's quipu."

"Not very smart, torturing a United States legislator and the deputy director of a national science agency."

"But effective, nonetheless."

"Where are my friends and the ferry's crew?"

"I wondered when you'd get around to that question."

"Do you want to work out a deal?" Pitt didn't miss the predator's eyes staring unblinkingly in an attempt to intimidate. He stared back piercingly. "Or do you want to strike up the music and dance?"

Sarason shook his head. "I see no reason why I should bargain. You have nothing to trade. You're obviously not a man I can trust. And I have all the chips. In short, Mr. Pitt, you have lost the game before you draw your cards."

"Then you can afford to be a magnanimous winner and produce my friends."

Sarason made a thoughtful shrug, raised his hand, and made a beckoning gesture. "The least I can do before I hang some heavy weights on you and drop you over the side."

Four burly dark-skinned men, who looked like bouncers hired from local cantinas, prodded the captives from the passageway with automatic rifles, and lined them up on the deck behind Sarason.

Gordo Padilla came first, followed by Jesus, Gato, and the assistant engineer whose name Pitt could not recall ever hearing. The bruises and dried blood on their faces showed that they had been knocked around but were not hurt seriously. Gunn had not gotten off so lightly. He had to be half dragged from the passageway. He had been badly beaten, and Pitt could see the blotches of blood on his shirt and the crude rags wrapped around his hands. Then Loren was standing there, her face drawn and her lips and cheeks swollen and puffed up as though stung by bees. Her hair was disheveled and purplish bruises showed on her arms and legs. Yet she still held her head proudly and shook off the guards' hands as they roughly pushed her forward. Her expression was one of defiance until she saw Pitt standing there. Then it turned to cruel disappointment, and she moaned in despair.

"Oh, no, Dirk!" she exclaimed. "They've got you too."

Gunn painfully raised his head and muttered through lips that were split and bleeding. "I tried to warn you, but. . ." His voice went too soft to be understood.

Sarason smiled, unfeeling. "I think what Mr. Gunn means to say is that he and your crew were overpowered by my men after they kindly allowed us to board your ferry from a chartered fishing boat after begging to borrow your radio."

Pitt's anger came within a millimeter of driving him to inflict pain on those who had brutalized his friends. He took a deep breath to regain control. He swore under his breath that the man standing in front of him would pay. Not now. But the time would surely come if he didn't try anything foolish.

He glanced casually toward the nearest railing, gauging its distance and height. Then he turned back to Sarason.

"I don't like big, tough men who beat up defenseless women," he said conversationally. "And for what purpose? The location of the treasure is no secret to you."

"Then it's true," Sarason said with a pleased expression. "You found the beast that guards the gold on the top of Cerro el Capirote."

"If you had dropped for a closer look instead of playing peekaboo in the clouds, you'd have seen the beast for yourself."

Pitt's last words brought a flicker of curiosity to the beady eyes.

"You were aware you were being followed?" asked Sarason.

` It goes without saying that you would have searched for our helicopter after our chance meeting in the air yesterday. My guess is you checked out landing fields on both sides of the Gulf last night and asked questions until someone it San Felipe innocently pointed the way to our ferry.'

"You're very astute."

"Not really. I made the mistake of overestimating you. I didn't think you'd act like a reckless amateur and begin mutilating the competition. An act that was completely unwarranted."

Puzzlement filled Sarason's eyes. "What goes on here, Pitt?"

"All part of the plan," answered Pitt almost jovially. "I purposely led you to the jackpot."

"A barefaced lie."

"You've been set up, pal. Get wise. Why do you think I let off Dr. Kelsey, Rodgers, and Giordino before I returned to the ferry? To keep them out of your dirty hands, that's why."

Sarason said slowly. "You couldn't have known we were going to capture your boat before you came back."

"Not with any certainty. Let's say my intuition was working overtime. That and the fact my radio calls to the ferry went unanswered."

A shrewd hyenalike look slowly spread across Sarason's face. "Nice try, Pitt. You'd make an excellent writer of children's stories."

"You don't believe me?" Pitt asked, as if surprised.

"Not a word."

"What are you going to do with us?"

Sarason looked disgustingly cheerful. "You're more naive than I gave you credit for. You know full well what's going to happen to you."

"Crowding your luck, aren't you, Sarason? Murdering Congresswoman Smith will bring half the United States law enforcement officers down around your neck."

"Nobody will know she was murdered," he said impassively. "Your ferryboat will simply go to the bottom with all hands. An unfortunate accident that is never fully solved."

"There is still Kelsey, Giordino, and Rodgers. They're safe and sound in California, ready to spill the story to Customs and FBI agents."

"We're not in the United States. We're in the sovereign nation of Mexico. The local authorities will conduct an extensive investigation but will turn up no evidence of foul play despite unfounded accusations from your friends."

"With close to a billion dollars at stake, I should have known you'd be generous in buying the cooperation of local officials."

"They couldn't wait to sign on board after we promised them a share of the treasure," Sarason boasted.

"Considering how much there is to go around," said Pitt, "you could afford to play Santa Claus."

Sarason looked at the setting sun. "It's getting late in the day. I think we've chatted long enough." He turned and spoke a name that sent a shiver through Pitt. "Tupac, come and say hello to the man who made you impotent."

Tupac Amaru stepped from behind one of the guards and stood in front of Pitt, his teeth set and grinning like a skull on a pirate's Jolly Roger flag. He had the joyful but clinical look of a butcher sizing up a slab of prime, specially aged beef.

"I told you I would make you suffer as you made me," Amaru said ominously.

Pitt studied the evil face with a strangely paralyzed intensity. He didn't need a football coach to diagram what was in store for him. He braced his body to begin the scheme he had formed in the back of his mind right after he had stepped out of the helicopter. He moved toward Loren, but stepped slightly sideways and inconspicuously began to hyperventilate.

"If you are the one who harmed Congresswoman Smith, you will die as surely as you stand there with that stupid look on your face."

Sarason laughed. "No, no. You, Mr. Pitt, are not going to kill anybody."

"Neither are you. Even in Mexico you'd hang if there was a witness to your executions."

"I'd be the first to admit it." Sarason surveyed Pitt inquiringly. "But what witness are you talking about?" He paused to sweep an arm around the empty sea. "As you can see, the nearest land is empty desert almost twenty kilometers away, and the only vessel in sight is our fishing boat standing off the starboard bow."

Pitt tilted his head up and stared at the wheelhouse. "What about the ferryboat's pilot?"

All the heads turned as one, all that is except Gunn's. He nodded unobserved at Pitt and then raised a hand, pointing at the empty pilothouse. "Hide, Pedro!" he cried loudly. "Run and hide."

Three seconds were all Pitt needed. Three seconds to run four steps and leap over the railing into the sea.

Two of the guards caught the sudden movement from the edge of their vision, whirled and fired one quick burst from their automatic rifles on reflex. But they fired high, and they fired late. Pitt had struck the water and vanished into the murky depths.

Pitt hit the water stroking and kicking with the fervor of a possessed demon. An Olympic committee of judges would have been impressed, he must have set a new world record for the underwater dash. The water was warm but the visibility below the surface was less than a meter due to the murk caused by silt flowing in from the Colorado River. The blast of the gunfire was magnified by the density of the water and sounded like an artillery barrage to Pitt's ears.

The bullets struck and penetrated the sea with the unlikely sound of a zipper being closed. Pitt leveled out when his hands scoured the bottom, causing an eruption of fine silt. He recalled learning during his U.S. Air Force days that a bullet's velocity was spent after traveling a meter and a half (5 feet) through water. Beyond that depth, it sank harmlessly to the seafloor.

When the light above the surface went dark, he knew he had passed under the port side of the Alhambra's hull. His timing was lucky. It was approaching high tide and the ferryboat was now riding two meters off the bottom. He swam slowly and steadily, exhaling a small amount of air from his lungs, angling on a course astern that he hoped would bring him up on the starboard side near the big paddlewheels. His oxygen intake was nearly exhausted, and he began to see a darkening fuzziness creeping around the borders of his vision, when the shadow of the ferry abruptly ended and he could see a bright surface again.

He broke into air 2 meters (6.5 feet) abaft of the sheltered interior of the starboard paddlewheel. There was no question of his risking exposure. It was that or drown. The question was whether Sarason's goons had predicted what his game plan would be and run over from the opposite side of the vessel. He could still hear sporadic gunfire striking the water on the port side, and his hopes rose. They weren't on to him, at least not yet.

Pitt sucked in hurried breaths of pure air while getting his bearings. And then he was diving under the temporary safety of the ferry's huge paddlewheels. After gauging the distance, he raised a hand above his head and slowly kicked upward. His hand made contact with an unyielding wood beam. He clutched it and lifted his head above the water. He felt as if he had entered a vast barn with support beams running every which way.

He looked up at the great circular power train that drove the big ferry through the water. It was a radial type similar in construction and action to the old picturesque waterwheels used to power flour and sawmills. Strong cast-iron hubs mounted on the drive shaft had sockets attached to wooden arms that extended outward to a diameter of 10 meters (33 feet). The ends of the arms were then bolted into long horizontal planks called floats that swung around and around, dipping into the water, pushing backward while driving the ferry forward. The entire unit and its mate on the opposite side were housed in giant hoods set inside the ferry's hull.

Pitt hung on to one of the floats and waited as a small school of nosy spotted sand bass circled around his legs. He was not completely out of the woods yet. There was an access door for crewmen to perform maintenance on the paddlewheel. He decided to remain in the water. A sane mind dictated that it would be a big mistake to be caught in the act of climbing up the wooden arms by some tough customer who burst through the access door with an itchy trigger finger. Better to be in a position to duck under the water at the first sound of entry.

He could hear footsteps running on the auto deck above, accented by an occasional burst of gunfire. Pitt couldn't see anything, but he didn't need a lecture to know what Sarason's men were doing. They were roving around the open decks above, shooting at anything that vaguely resembled a body under the water. He could hear voices shouting, but the words came muffled. No large fish within a radius of 50 meters (164 feet) survived the bombardment.

The click of the lock on the access door came as he had expected. He slipped deeper into the water until only half his head was exposed but he was still hidden to anyone above by one of the huge floats.

He could not see the unshaven face that peered downward through the paddlewheel at the water, but this time he heard a voice loud and clear from behind the intruder at the door, a voice he had come to know too well. He could feel the hairs stiffen on the nape of his neck at hearing the words spoken by Amaru.

"See any sign of him?"

"Nothing down here but fish," grunted the searcher in the access door, catching sight of the spotted sand bass.

"He didn't surface away from the ship. If he's not dead, he must be hiding somewhere underneath the ship."

"Nobody hiding down here. A waste of energy to bother looking. We put enough lead into him to use his corpse for an anchor."

"I won't feel satisfied until I see the body," said Amaru in a businesslike tone.

"You want a body," said the gunman, pulling back through the access door, "then drag a grappling hook h rough the silt. That's the only way you'll ever see him again."

"Back to the forward boarding ramp," Amaru ordered. "The fishing boat is returning."

Pitt could hear the diesel throb and feel the beat of the fishing boat's propellers through the water as it pulled alongside to take off Samson and his mercenary scum. Pitt wondered vaguely what his friends would say to him for running out on them even though it was a desperate measure to save their lives.

Nothing was going according to plan. Sarason was two steps ahead of Pitt.

Already Pitt had allowed Loren and Gunn to suffer at the hands of the art thieves. Already he'd stupidly done nothing while the crew and ferryboat were captured. Already he'd given away the secret to Huascar's treasure. The way he was handling events, Pitt wouldn't have been surprised if Sarason and his cronies elected him chairman of the board of Solpemachaco.

Nearly an hour passed before he sensed the sounds of the fishing boat die in the distance. This was followed by the beating rotor of a helicopter lifting off the ferry, indisputably the NUMA helicopter. Pitt cursed. Another gift to the criminals.

Darkness had fallen and no lights reflected on the water. Pitt wondered why the men on the upper decks had taken so long to evacuate the vessel. His absolute conviction was that one or more would be left behind to take care of him in the event the dead came back to life. Amaru and Samson could not kill the others unless they knew with cold certainty that Pitt was dead and could tell no tales to the authorities, especially the news media.

Pitt could feel apprehension in his chest like a stone tied to his heart. He was at a distinct disadvantage. If Loren and Rudi had been removed from the Alhambra, he had to get ashore somehow and inform Giordino and the Customs officials in the U.S. border town of Calexico of the situation. And what of the crew? Caution dictated that he must be certain Amaru and his friends were no longer on board. If one of them stayed behind to see if he was only playing dead, they could wait him out. They had all the time in the world. He had practically none.

He pushed away from the float, curled over and dived under the hull. The bottom silt seemed closer to the keel than he remembered from his earlier dive. It didn't seem logical until he passed under a bilge exhaust pipe and felt a strong pull of suction. Pitt didn't have to be told that the seacocks in the bilge had been opened. Amaru was scuttling the Alhambra.

He turned and swam slowly toward the end of the ferryboat where he had left the helicopter. He took the risk of being seen by surfacing briefly alongside the hull beneath the deck overhang to take another breath. After nearly an hour and a half's immersion, he felt waterlogged. His skin looked like that of a shriveled old man of ninety-five. He did not feel overly fatigued, but he sensed his strength was reduced by a good 20 percent. He slipped under the hull again and made for the shallow rudders fitted on the end. They soon loomed out of the murky water. He reached out and gripped one and slowly raised his face out of the water.

No leering face stared back, no guns aimed between his eyes. He hung on to the rudder and floated, relaxing and building back his strength. He listened, but no sound came from the auto deck above.

Finally, he pulled himself up far enough to lift his eyes over the raised edge of the entry/exit ramp. The Alhambra was in complete darkness with neither interior nor exterior lights showing. Her decks appeared still and lifeless. As he suspected, the NUMA helicopter was gone. The tingling fear of the unknown traveled up his spine. Like an old fort on the western frontier before a surprise attack by the Apaches, it was far too quiet.

This wasn't one of his better days, Pitt thought. His friends were captured and held hostage. They might be dead. A thought he refused to dwell on. He'd lost another NUMA aircraft. Stolen by the very criminals he was supposed to entice into a trap. The ferryboat was sinking beneath him and he was dead certain one or more killers were lurking somewhere on board to exact a terrible revenge. All in all he'd rather have been in East St. Louis.

How long he hung on the rudder he couldn't be sure. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, but all he could see inside the big auto deck was the dim reflection of the chrome bumpers and radiator grill of the Pierce Arrow. He hung there waiting to see a movement or hear the faint sound of stealth. The deck that stretched into the gaping cavern looked frightening. But he had to enter it if he wanted a weapon, he thought nervously, any weapon to protect himself from men who intended to turn him into sushi.

Unless Amaru's men had made a professional search of the old Travelodge, they wouldn't have found inventor John Browning's dependable Colt .45 automatic where Pitt kept it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.

He gripped the deck overhang and heaved himself on board. It took Pitt all of five seconds to run across the deck, sweep the door of the trailer against its stops, and leap inside. In a clockwork motion, he tore open the door to the refrigerator and pulled open the vegetable drawer. The Colt automatic lay where he'd left it. For a brief instant relief washed over him like a waterfall as he gripped the trusty weapon in his hand.

His feeling of deliverance was short-lived. The Colt felt light in his hand, too light. He pulled back the slide and ejected the magazine. It and the firing chamber were empty. With mushrooming despair and desperation he checked the drawer beside the stove that held the kitchen knives. They were gone, along with all the silverware. The only weapon in the trailer was the seemingly useless Colt automatic.

Cat and mouse.

They were out there all right. Pitt now knew Amaru was going to take his time and toy with his prey before dismembering him and throwing the pieces over the side. Pitt treated himself to a few moments for strategy. He sat down in the dark on the trailer's bed and calmly began planning his next moves.

If any of the killers were haunting the auto deck, they could easily have shot, knifed, or bashed Pitt with a club during his dash to the trailer. For that matter, there was nothing stopping them from breaking in and ending it here. Amaru was a sly hombre, Pitt grudgingly admitted to himself. The South American had guessed Pitt was still alive and would head for any available weapon at the first opportunity. Searching the trailer and finding the gun was shrewd. Removing the bullets but leaving the gun in its place was downright sadistic. That was merely the first step in a game of torment and misery before the final deathblow. Amaru intended to make Pitt twist in the wind before he killed him.

First things first, Pitt decided. Ghouls were lurking in the dark all right, ghouls who wanted to murder him. They thought he was as defenseless as a baby, and he was on a sinking ship with nowhere to go. And that was precisely what he wanted them to think.

If Amaru was in no rush, neither was he.

Pitt leisurely removed his wet clothes and soggy shoes and toweled himself dry. Next he donned a dark gray pair of pants, a black cotton sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Then he made and calmly ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank two glasses of Crystal Light. Feeling rejuvenated, he pulled open a small drawer beneath the bed and checked the contents of a leather gun pouch. The spare magazine was gone, just as he knew it would be. But a small flashlight was there, and in one corner of the drawer he found a small plastic bottle with a label advertising its contents as vitamin supplement A, C, and beta carotene. He shook the bottle and grinned like a happy camper when it rattled.

He unscrewed the lid and poured eight .45-caliber bullets into his hand. Things are looking up, he thought. Amaru's cunning fell a notch below perfection. Pitt fed seven bullets into the magazine and one in the firing chamber. Now Pitt could shoot back, and the good old Alhambra was not about to sink above her lower deck overhang once her keel settled into the shallow bottom.

Just one more manifestation of Pitt's law, he thought "Every villain has a plan with at least one flaw."

Pitt glanced at his watch. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since he entered the trailer. He rummaged through a clothing drawer until he found a dark blue ski mask and slipped it over his head. Next he found his Swiss army knife in the pocket of a pair of pants thrown over a chair.

He pulled a 'small ring in the floor and raised a trapdoor he'd built into the trailer for additional storage space. He lifted out the storage box, set it aside and squirmed through the narrow opening left in the floor. Lying on the deck beneath the trailer, he peered into the darkness and listened. Not a sound. His unseen hunters were patient men.

Coldly and deliberately, like a methodical man with a decisive purpose, who was in no doubt as to the outcome of his intended actions, Pitt rolled from under the trailer and moved like a phantom through a nearby open hatch down a companion ladder into the engine room.

He moved cautiously, careful not to make sudden movements or undue sound.

Amaru would not cut him any slack.

With no one to tend them, the boilers that created heat to make the steam that powered the walking beam engines had cooled to such a degree that Pitt could lay the palm of his bare hand against their thick riveted sides without blistering his skin. He leveled the gun with his right hand and held the flashlight as far to his left as his outstretched arm could allow. Only the unwary aim a beam in front of them. If a cornered man is going to shoot at the person shining a light into his eyes, he unerringly points his weapon where the body is expected to be, directly behind the light.

The engine room looked deserted, but then he tensed. There was a soft mumbling sound like somebody trying to talk through a gag. Pitt swung the beam of the flashlight up into the giant A-frames that supported the walking beam. Someone was up there. Four of them were up there.

Gordo Padilla, his assistant engineer, a man whose name Pitt had not learned, and the two deckhands, Jesus and Gato, all hung upside down, tightly bound and gagged with duct tape, their eyes pleading. Pitt pried open the largest blade of the Swiss army knife and quickly cut them down, freeing their hands and allowing them to pull the tape from their mouths.

"Muchas gracias, amigo," Padilla gasped as the tape tore out a dozen hairs of his moustache. "Blessed be the Virgin Mary you came when you did. They were going to cut our throats like sheep."

"When did you see them last?" asked Pitt softly.

"No more than ten minutes ago. They could return at any second."

"You've got to get away from the boat."

"I can't remember when we dropped the lifeboats." Padilla shrugged with a manana display of indifference. "The davits and motors are probably rusted solid and the boats are rotted."

"Can't you swim?" Pitt asked desperately.

Padilla shook his head. "Not very well. Jesus can't swim at all. Sailors do not like to go in the water," Then his face lit up under the beam of the flashlight. "There is a small six-man raft tied to the railing near the galley."

"You'd better hope it still floats." He handed Padilla his knife. "Take this to cut away the raft."

"What about you? Aren't you coming with us?"

"Give me ten minutes to conduct a quick search of the ship for the others. If I've found no sign of them by then, you and your crew get free in the raft while I create a diversion."

Padilla embraced Pitt. "Luck be with you."

It was time to move on.

Before he traveled to the upper decks, Pitt dropped into the water that was rapidly filling the bilges and turned off the valves of the seacocks. He decided against climbing back up the companion ladder or using a stairway. He had the uneasy feeling that somehow Amaru was following his every move. He climbed up the engine to the top of the steam cylinder and then took a Jacob's ladder to the top of the A-frame before stepping off onto the top deck of the ferry just aft of its twin smokestacks.

Pitt felt no fear of Amaru. Pitt had won the first round in Peru because Amaru wrote him off as a dead man after dropping the safety line into the sacred pool. The South American killer was not infallible. He would err again because his mind was clouded with hate and revenge.

Pitt worked his way down after searching both pilothouses. He found no sign of Loren or Rudi in the vast passenger seating section, the galley, or the crew's quarters. The search went quickly.

Never knowing who or what he might encounter in the dark, or when, Pitt investigated most of the ship on his hands and knees, scurrying from nook to cranny like a crab, using whatever cover was available. The ship seemed as deserted as a cemetery, but by no stretch of his imagination did he believe for a moment the killers had abandoned the ship.

The rules had not changed. Loren and Rudi Gunn had been removed from the ferry alive because Sarason had a reasonably good hunch Pitt was still alive. The mistake was trusting the murder to a man fired with vengeance. Amaru was too sick with hate to take Pitt out cleanly. There was too much satisfaction in making the man who took away his manhood suffer the tortures of the damned. Loren and Rudi Gunn had a sword hanging over their heads, but it wouldn't fall until the word went out that Pitt was absolutely and convincingly terminated.

The ten minutes were up. There was nothing left for him but to cause a distraction so Padilla and his crew could paddle the raft into the darkness. Once he was certain they were away Pitt would try to swim to shore.

What saved him in the two seconds after he detected the soft sounds of bare feet padding across the deck was a lightning fall to his hands and knees. It was an obsolete football tackle that no longer worked with more sophisticated training techniques. The movement was pure reflex. If he had swung around, flicked on the flashlight and squeezed the trigger at the dark mass that burst out of the night, he would have lost both hands and his head under the blade of a machete that sliced the air like an aircraft propeller.

The man that tore out of the dark could not halt his forward momentum. His knees struck Pitt's crouching body and he flew forward out of control as if launched by a huge spring and crashed heavily onto the deck, the machete spinning over the side. Rolling to one side, Pitt beamed the light on his assailant and pulled the trigger of the Colt. The report was deafening, the bullet entering the killer's chest just under the armpit. It was a killing shot. A short gasp and the body on the deck shriveled and went still.

"A nice piece of work, gringo," Amaru's voice boomed through a loudspeaker. "Manuel was one of my best men."

Pitt did not waste his breath on a reply. His mind rapidly turned over the situation. It suddenly became clear to him that Amaru had followed his movements once he reached the open decks. The need for stealth was finished. They knew where he was, but he couldn't see them. The game was over. He could only hope Padilla and his men were going over the side unnoticed.

For effect, he fired three more shots in the general direction Amaru's voice came from.

"You missed." Amaru laughed. "Not even close."

Pitt stalled by firing one shot every few seconds until the gun was empty. He had run out of delaying tactics and could do no more. His situation was made even more desperate when Amaru, or one of his men, turned on the ferryboat's navigation and deck lights, leaving him as exposed as an actor on an empty stage under a spotlight. He pressed his back against a bulkhead and stared at the railing outside the galley. The raft was gone-- the lines were cut and dangling. Padilla and the rest had slipped into the darkness before the lights came on.

"I'll make you a deal you don't deserve," said Amaru in a congenial tone. "Give up now and you can die quickly. Resist and your death will come very slowly."

Pitt didn't require the services of a mediator to explain the depth of Amaru's intent. His options were somewhat limited. Amaru's tone reminded him of the Mexican bandit who tried to coax Walter Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Tim Holt from their gold diggings in the motion picture Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

"Do not waste our time making up your mind. We have other--"

Pitt wasn't in the mood to hear more. He was as certain as he could ever be that Amaru was trying to hold his attention while another of the murderers crept close enough to stick a knife somewhere it would hurt. He did not have the slightest intention of waiting to be made sport of by a gang of sadists. He sprinted across the deck and leaped over the side of the ferry for the second time that evening.

A gold-medal diver would have gracefully soared into the air and performed any number of jackknifes, twists, and somersaults before cleanly entering the water 15 meters (50 feet) below. He'd have also broken his neck and several vertebrae after crashing into the bottom silt only two meters below the surface. Pitt had no aspirations of ever trying out for the U.S. diving team. He went over the side feet first before doubling up and striking the water like a cannonball.

Amaru and his remaining two men ran to the edge of the top deck and looked down.

"Can you see him?" asked Amaru, peering into the dark water.

"No, Tupac, he must have gone under the hull."

"The water is turning dirty," exclaimed another voice. "He must have buried himself in the bottom mud."

"This time we're not taking any chances. Juan, the case of concussion grenades we brought from Guaymas. We'll crush him to pulp. Throw them about five meters from the hull, especially in the water around the paddlewheels."

Pitt made a crater in the seafloor. He didn't impact hard enough to cause any physical damage, but enough to stir up a huge cloud of silt. He uncoiled and swam away from the Alhambra, unseen from above.

He was afraid that once he cleared the cover of murk he might still be seen by the killers. This was not to be. A freshening breeze from the south turned the water surface into a light chop that caused a refraction the lights from the ferryboat could not penetrate.

He swam underwater as far as he could until his lungs began to burn. When he came to the surface, he broke it lightly, trusting in the ski mask to keep his head invisible in the black water. A hundred meters (328 feet) and he was beyond the reach of the lights illuminating the ferry. He could barely distinguish the dark figures moving about on the upper deck. He wondered why they weren't shooting into the water. Then he heard a dull thud, saw the white water rise in a towering splash and felt a surge of pressure that squeezed the air out of him.

Underwater explosives! They were trying to kill him with the concussion from underwater explosives. Four more detonations followed in quick succession. Fortunately, they came from the area amidships, near the paddlewheels. By swimming away from one end of the boat, Pitt had distanced himself from the main force of the detonations.

He doubled over with his knees in front of his chest to absorb the worst of the impact. Thirty meters closer and he would have been pounded into unconsciousness. Sixty meters (200 feet) and he would have been crushed to putty. Pitt increased the gap between himself and the ferry until the eruptions came with the same sensual squeeze as from a strong woman.

He looked up at a clear sky and checked the north star for his approximate bearings. At 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) away, the desolate west coast of the Gulf was the closest land. He tore off the ski mask and rolled over. Face toward the carpet of stars across the sky, he began a comfortable backstroke toward the west.

Pitt was in no condition to try out for the swimming team either. After two hours, his arms felt as if they were lifting twenty-pound weights with each stroke. After six hours, his muscles protested with aches he didn't believe possible. And then finally, and most thankfully, fatigue began to dull the pain. He used the old Boy Scout trick of removing his pants, tying the ankles into knots and swinging them over his head to catch the air, making a reasonably efficient float for rest stops that became more numerous as the night wore on.

There was never any question of stopping and letting himself drift in the hope of being spotted by a fishing boat in daylight. The vision of Loren and Rudi in the hands of Sarason was more than an ample stimulus to drive him on.

The stars in the eastern sky were beginning to fade and blink out when his feet hit bottom, and he staggered out of the water onto a sandy beach where he collapsed and immediately fell asleep.

Ragsdale, wearing an armored body suit beneath a pair of workman's coveralls, casually walked up to the side door of a small warehouse with a For Lease sign in the front window. He laid the empty toolbox he carried on the ground, took a key from his pocket, and opened the door.

Inside, a combined team of twenty FBI and eight Customs agents had assembled and were making last-minute preparations for the raid on the Zolar International building directly across the street. Advance teams had alerted local law enforcement to the operation and scouted the entire industrial complex for unusual activity.

Most of the men and the four women wore assault suits and carried automatic weapons, while several professional experts in the art and antiquities field wore street clothes. The latter were burdened with suitcases crammed with catalogues and photographs of known missing art objects targeted for seizure.

The plan called for the agents to split off into specific assignments once they entered the building. The first team was to secure the building and round up the employees, the second was to search out any stolen cache, while the third was to investigate the administration offices for any paper trail that led to theft operations or illegal purchases. Working separately, a commercial business team specializing in art handling was standing by to crate, remove and store the seized goods. The U.S. Attorney's Office, working on the case for both the FBI and Customs, had insisted the raid be carried out in a faultless manner and that confiscated objects be treated with a velvet touch.

Agent Gaskill was standing at an operations board in the center of the command post. He turned at Ragsdale's approach and smiled. "Still quiet?"

The FBI agent sat down in a canvas chair. "All clear except for the gardener trimming the hedge around the building. The rest of the grounds are as quiet as a churchyard."

Damned clever of the Zolars to use a gardener as a security guard," said Gaskill. "If he hadn't mowed the lawn four times this week, we might have ignored him."

"That and the fact our surveillance identified his Walkman headset as a radio transmitter," added Ragsdale.

"A good sign. If they have nothing to hide, why the wily tactics?"

"Don't get your hopes up. The Zolar warehouse operations may look suspicious, but when the FBI walked in with a search warrant two years ago, we didn't find so much as a stolen ballpoint pen."

"Same with Customs when we talked agents at Internal Revenue into conducting a series of tax audits. Zolar and his family surfaced as pure as the driven snow."

Ragsdale nodded a "thank you" as one of his agents handed him a cup of coffee. "All we've got going for us this time around is the element of surprise. Our last raid failed after a local cop, who was on Zolar's payroll, tipped him off."

"We should be thankful we're not walking into a high security armed fortress."

"Anything from your undercover informant?" asked Gaskill.

Ragsdale shook his head. "He's beginning to think we've put him in the wrong operation. He hasn't turned up the slightest hint of unlawful activities."

"No one in or out of the building except bona fide employees. No illegal goods received or shipped in the past four days. Do you get the feeling we're waiting for it to snow in Galveston?"

"It seems that way."

Gaskill stared at him. "Do you want to rethink this thing and call off the raid?"

Ragsdale stared back. "The Zolars aren't perfect. There has to be a flaw in their system somewhere, and I'm staking my career that it's across the street in that building."

Gaskill laughed. "I'm with you, buddy, right on down to forced early retirement."

Ragsdale held up a thumb. "Then the show goes on in eight minutes as planned."

"I don't see any reason to call a halt, do you?"

"With Zolar and two of his brothers running around Baja looking for treasure, and the rest of his family in Europe, we'll never have a better opportunity to explore the premises before their army of attorneys gets wind of the operation and swoops in to cut us off at the pass."

Two agents driving a pickup truck borrowed from the Galveston Sanitation Department pulled up at the curb opposite the gardener who was cultivating a flower bed beside the Zolar building. The man in the passenger seat rolled down the window and called out, "Excuse me."

The gardener turned and stared questioningly at the truck.

The agent made a friendly smile. "Can you tell me if your driveway gutters backed up during the last rain?"

Curious, the gardener stepped out of the flower bed and approached the truck. "I don't recall seeing any backup," he replied.

The agent held a city street map out the window. "Do you know if any of the surrounding streets had drainage problems?"

As the gardener leaned down to study the map, the agent's arm suddenly lashed out and tore the transmitter from the gardener's head and jerked the cable leading from the microphone and headphones from its socket in the battery pack. "Federal agents," snapped the agent. "Stand still and don't wink an eye."

The agent behind the wheel then spoke into a portable radio. "Go ahead, it's all clear."

The federal agents did not smash into the Zolar International building with the lightning speed of a drug bust, nor did they launch a massive assault like the disaster that occurred years before in the compound in Waco, Texas. This was no high-security, armed fortress. One team quietly surrounded the building's exits while the main group calmly entered through the main entrance.

The office help and corporate administrators showed no sign of fear or anxiety. They appeared confused and puzzled. The agents politely but firmly herded them out onto the main floor of the warehouse where they were joined by the workers in the storage and shipping section and the artisans from the artifact preservation department. Two buses were driven through the shipping doors and loaded with the Zolar International personnel, who were then taken to FBI headquarters in nearby Houston for questioning. The entire roundup operation took less than four minutes.

The paperwork team, made up mostly of FBI agents trained in accounting methods and led by Ragsdale, went to work immediately, searching through desks, examining files, and scrutinizing every recorded transaction. Gaskill, along with his Customs people and professional art experts, began cataloguing and photographing the thousands of art and antique objects stored throughout the building. The work was tedious and time-consuming and produced no concrete evidence of stolen goods.

Shortly after one o'clock in the afternoon, Gaskill and Ragsdale sat down in Joseph Zolar's luxurious office to compare notes amid incredibly costly art objects. The FBI's chief agent did not look happy.

"This is beginning to have the look of a big embarrassment followed by a storm of nasty publicity and a gigantic lawsuit," Ragsdale said dejectedly.

"No sign of criminal activity in the records?" asked Gaskill.

"Nothing that stands out. We'll need a good month for an audit to know for certain if we have a case. What did you dig up on your end?"

"So far every object we've studied checks clean. No stolen goods anywhere."

"Then we've performed another abortion."

Gaskill sighed. "I hate to say it, but it appears the Zolars are a hell of a lot smarter than the best combined investigative teams the United States government can field."

A few moments later, the two Customs agents who had worked with Gaskill on the Rummel raid in Chicago, Beverly Swain and Winfried Pottle, stepped into the office. Their manner was official and businesslike, but there was no hiding the slight upward curl of their lips. Ragsdale and Gaskill had been so absorbed in their private conversation that they hadn't noticed the two younger Customs agents had not entered through the office door, but from the adjoining, private bathroom.

"Got a minute, boss?" Beverly Swain asked Gaskill.

"What is it?"

"I think our instruments have detected some sort of shaft leading under the building," answered Winfried Pottle.

"What did you say?" Gaskill demanded quickly.

Ragsdale looked up. "Instruments?"

"The ground-penetrating sonic/radar detector we borrowed from the Colorado School of Mines," explained Pottle. "Its recording unit shows a narrow space beneath the warehouse floor leading into the earth."

A faint ray of hope suddenly passed between Ragsdale and Gaskill. They both came to their feet. "How did you know where to look?" asked Ragsdale.

Pottle and Swain could not contain their smiles of triumph. Swain nodded at Poole who answered, "We figured that any passageway leading to a secret chamber had to start or end at Zolar's private office, a connective tunnel he could enter at his convenience without being observed."

"His personal bathroom," Gaskill guessed wonderingly.

"A handy location," Swain confirmed.

Ragsdale took a deep breath. "Show us."

Pottle and Swain led them into a large bathroom with a marble floor and an antique sink, commode, and fixtures, with teak decking from an old yacht covering the walls. They motioned to a modern sunken tub with a Jacuzzi that seemed oddly out of place with the more ancient decor.

The shaft drops under the bathtub," said Swain, pointing.

Are you sure about this?" asked Ragsdale skeptically. "The shower stall strikes me as a more practical setup for an elevator."

"Our first thought too," answered Pottle, "but our instrument showed solid concrete and ground beneath the shower floor."

Pottle lifted a long tubular probe that was attached by an electrical cable to a compact computer with a paper printout. He switched on the unit and waved the end of the probe around the bottom of the tub. Lights on the computer blinked for a few seconds and then a sheet of paper rolled through a slot on the top. When the recording paper stopped flowing, Pottle tore it off and held it up for everyone to see.

In the center of an otherwise blank sheet of paper, a black column extended from end to end.

"No doubt about it," announced Pottle, "a shaft with the same dimensions as the bathtub that falls underground."

"And you're sure your electronic marvel is accurate?" said Ragsdale.

"The same type of unit found previously unknown passages and chambers in the Pyramids of Giza last year."

Gaskill said nothing as he stepped into the tub. He fiddled with the nozzle, but it simply adjusted for spray and direction. Then he sat down on a seat large enough to hold four people. He turned the gold-plated hot and cold faucets, but no water flowed through the spout.

He looked up with a big smile. "I think we're making progress."

Next he wiggled the lever that raised and lowered the plug. Nothing happened.

"Try twisting the spout," suggested Swain.

Gaskill took the gold-plated spout in one of his massive hands and gave it a slight turn. To his surprise it moved and the tub began to slowly sink beneath the bathroom floor. A reverse turn of the spout and the tub returned to its former position. He knew, he knew, this simple little water spout and this stupid bathtub were the keys that could topple the entire Zolar organization and shut them down for good. He gave a come-hither motion to the others and said gleefully, "Going down?"

The unusual elevator descended for nearly thirty seconds before coming to a stop in another bathroom. Poole judged the drop to be about 20 meters (65 feet). They stepped from the bathroom into an office that was almost an exact copy of the one above. The lights were on but no one was present. With Ragsdale in the lead, the little group of agents cracked open the door of the office and peered out onto the floor of an immense storehouse of stolen art and antiquities. They were all stunned by the size of the chamber and the enormous inventory of the objects. Gaskill made a wild guess of at least ten thousand pieces as Ragsdale slipped into the storeroom and made a fast recon. He was back in five minutes.

"Four men working with a forklift," he reported, "lowering a bronze sculpture of a Roman legionnaire into a wooden crate about halfway down the fourth aisle. Across on the other side, in a closed-off area, I counted six men and women working in what looked to be the artifact forgery section. A tunnel leads through the south wall, I'd guess to a nearby building that acts as a front for the shipping and receiving of the stolen property."

"It must also be used for the covert employees to enter and exit," suggested Pottle.

"My God," murmured Gaskill. "We've hit the jackpot. I can recognize four works of stolen art from here."

"We'd better stay put," said Ragsdale softly, "until we can shuttle reinforcements from above."

"I volunteer to operate the ferry service," said Swain with a foxy grin. "What woman can pass up the opportunity to sit in a fancy bathtub that moves from floor to poor?"

As soon as she left, Poole stood guard at the door to the storage area while Gaskill and Ragsdale searched Zolar's underground office. The desk produced little of value so they turned their attention to searching for a storeroom. They quickly found what they were looking for behind a tall sideboard bookcase that swiveled out from the wall on small castors. Pushed aside, it revealed a long, narrow chamber lined with antique wooden cabinets, standing floor to ceiling. Each cabinet held file folders in alphabetical order containing acquisition and sales records of the Zolar family operations as far back as 1929.

"It's here," muttered Gaskill in wonder. "It's all here." He began pulling files from a cabinet.

"Incredible," Ragsdale agreed, studying files from another cabinet that stood in the middle of the storeroom. "For sixty-nine years they kept a record of every piece of art they stole, smuggled, and forged, including financial and personal data on the buyers."

"Oh, Jesus," Gaskill groaned, "take a look at this one."

Ragsdale took the offered file and scanned the first two pages. When he looked up his face was marked with disbelief. "If this is true, Michelangelo's statue of King Solomon in the Eisenstein Museum of Renaissance Art in Boston is a fake."

"And a damned good one, judging by the number of experts who authenticated it."

"But the former curator knew."

"Of course," said Gaskill. "The Zolars made him an offer he couldn't refuse. According to this report, ten extremely rare Etruscan sculptures excavated illegally in northern Italy, and smuggled into the United States, were exchanged along with the forged King Solomon for the genuine article. Since the fake was too good to be caught, the curator became a big hero with the trustees and patrons by claiming he had enhanced the museum's collection by persuading an anonymous moneybags to donate the objects."

"I wonder how many other cases of museum fraud we'll find," mused Ragsdale.

"I suspect this may only be the tip of the iceberg. These files represent thousands upon thousands of illegal deals to buyers who turned a blind eye in the direction the objects came from."

Ragsdale smiled. "I'd like to be a mouse hiding in the wall when the U. S. Attorney's Office finds out we've laid about ten years' worth of legal work on them."

"You don't know federal prosecutors," said Gaskill. "When they get a load of all the wealthy businessmen, politicians, sports and entertainment celebrities who willfully purchased hot art, they'll think they've died and gone to heaven."

"Maybe we'd better rethink all the exposure," cautioned Ragsdale.

"What've you got cooking?"

"We know that Joseph Zolar and his brothers, Charles Oxley and Cyrus Sarason, are in Mexico where we can't arrest and take them into custody without a lot of legal E hassle. Right?"

"I follow."

"So we throw a blanket on this part of the raid," explained Ragsdale. "From all indications, the employees on the legitimate side of the operation have no idea what's going on in the basement. Let them go back to work tomorrow as if the raid turned up nothing. Business as usual. Otherwise, if they get wind that we've shut down their operation and federal prosecutors are building an airtight case, they'll go undercover in some country where we can't grab them."

Gaskill rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Won't be easy keeping them in the dark. Like all businessmen on the road, they probably keep in daily communication with their operations."

"We'll use every underhanded trick in the book and fake it." Ragsdale laughed. "Set up operators to claim construction work severed the fiber optic lines. Send out phony memos over `their fax lines. Keep the workers we've taken into custody on ice. With luck we can blindside the Zolars for forty-eight hours while we figure a scam to entice them over the border."

Gaskill looked at Ragsdale. "You like to play long shots, don't you, my man?"

"I'll bet my wife and kids on a three-legged horse if there is the tiniest chance of putting these scum away for good."

"I like your odds." Gaskill grinned. "Let's shoot the works."

Many of Billy Yuma's village clan of one hundred seventy-six people survived by raising squash, corn, and beans. Others cut juniper and manzanita to sell for fence posts and firewood. A new source of income was the revival of interest in their ancient art of making pottery. Several of the Montolo women still created elegant pottery that had recently come into demand by collectors, hungry for Indian art.

After hiring out as a cowboy to a large ranchero for fifteen years, Yuma finally saved enough money to start a small spread of his own. He and his wife, Polly, managed a good living compared to most of the native people of northern Baja, she firing her pots, and he raising livestock.

After his midday meal, as he did every day, Yuma saddled his horse, a buckskin mare, and rode out to inspect his herd for sickness or injury. The harsh and inhospitable landscape with its bounty of jagged rocks, cactus, and steep-sided arroyos could easily maim an unwary steer.

He was searching for a stray calf when he saw the stranger approaching on the narrow trail leading to his village.

The man who walked through the desert seemed out of place. Unlike hikers or hunters, this man wore only the clothes on his back-- no canteen, no backpack. He didn't even wear a hat to shade his head from the afternoon sun. There was a tired, worn-to-the-bones look about him, and yet he walked in purposeful, rapid strides as if he was in a hurry to get somewhere. Curious, Billy temporarily suspended his hunt for the calf and rode through a creek bed toward the trail.

Pitt had hiked 14 kilometers (almost 9 miles) across the desert after coming out of an exhausted sleep. He might still be dead to the world if a strange sensation hadn't awakened him. He blinked open his eyes to see a small rock lizard crouching on his arm staring back. He shook off the little intruder and checked his Doxa dive watch for the time. He was shocked to see that he had slept away half the morning.

The sun was already pouring down on the desert when he awoke, but the temperature was a bearable 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). The sweat dried quickly on his body, and he felt the first longing for water. He licked his lips and tasted salt from his swim through the sea. Despite the warmth, a cold self-anger crept through him, knowing he had slept away four precious hours. An eternity, he feared, to his friends enduring whatever misery Sarason and his sadists felt like inflicting on them this day. The core of his existence was to rescue them.

After a quick dive in the water to refresh himself, he cut west across the desert toward Mexico Highway 5, twenty, maybe thirty kilometers away. Once he reached the pavement, he could flag a ride into Mexicali, and then make his way across the border into Calexico. That was the plan, unless the local Baja telephone company had thoughtfully and conveniently installed a pay phone in the shade of a handy mesquite tree.

He gazed out over the Sea of Cortez and took one final look at the Alhambra in the distance. The old ferryboat looked to have settled in the water up to her deck overhang and was resting in the silt at a slight list. Otherwise she seemed sound.

She also looked deserted. There were no search boats or helicopters in sight, launched by an anxious Giordino and U.S. Customs agents north of the border. Not that it mattered. Any search team flying a reconnaissance over the boat, he figured, wouldn't expect to look for anyone on land. He elected to walk out.

He maintained a steady 7-kilometer (4.3-mile) an-hour pace across the isolated environment. It reminded him of his trek across the Sahara Desert of Northern Mali with Giordino two years before. They had come within minutes of dying under the fiery hell of scorching temperatures with no water. Only by finding a mysterious plane wreck did they manage to construct a land yacht and sail across the sands to eventual rescue. Next to that ordeal, this was a jaunt in the park.

Two hours into his journey, he came to a dusty footpath and followed it. Thirty minutes later he spotted a man sitting astride a horse beside the trail. Pitt walked up to the man and held up a hand in greeting. The rider gazed back through eyes worn and tired from the sun. His stern face looked like weathered sandstone.

Pitt studied the stranger, who wore a straw cowboy hat with a large brim turned up on the sides, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, worn denim pants, and scuffed cowboy boots. The black hair under the hat showed no tendency toward gray. He was small and lean and could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. His skin was burnt bronze with a washboard of wrinkles. The hands that held the reins were leathery and creased with many years of labor. This was a hardy soul, Pitt observed, who survived in an intolerant land with incredible tenacity.

"Good afternoon," Pitt said pleasantly.

Like most of his people Billy was bilingual, speaking native Montolan among his friends and family and Spanish to outsiders. But he knew a fair amount of English, picked up from his frequent trips over the border to sell his cattle and purchase supplies. "You know you trespass on private Indian land?" he replied stoically.

"No, sorry. I was cast ashore on the Gulf. I'm trying to reach the highway and a telephone."

"You lose your boat?"

"Yes," Pitt acknowledged. "You could say that."

"We have telephone at our meeting house. Glad to take you there."

"I'd be most grateful."

Billy reached down a hand. "My village not far. You can ride on back of my horse."

Pitt hesitated. He definitely preferred mechanical means of transportation. To his way of thinking four wheels were better than four hooves any day. The only useful purpose for horses was as background in Western movies. But he wasn't about to look one with a gift in the mouth. He took Billy's hand and was amazed at the strength displayed by the wiry little man as he hoisted Pitt's 82 kilograms (181 pounds) up behind him without the slightest grunt of exertion.

"By the way, my name is Dirk Pitt."

"Billy Yuma," said the horseman without offering his hand.

They rode in silence for half an hour before cresting a butte overgrown with yucca. They dropped into a small valley with a shallow stream running through it and passed the ruins of a Spanish mission, destroyed by religion-resistant Indians three centuries ago. Crumbling adobe walls and a small graveyard were all that remained. The graves of the old Spaniards near the top of a knoll were long since grown over and forgotten. Lower down were the more recent burials of the townspeople. One tombstone in particular caught Pitt's eye. He slipped to the ground over the rump of the horse and walked over to it.

The carved letters on the weathered stone were distinct and quite readable.

Patty Lou Cutting

2/11/24-2/3/34

The sun be warm and kind to you.

The darkest night

some star shines through.

The dullest morn a radiance brew.

and where dusk comes,

God's hand to you.

"Who was she?" asked Pitt.

Billy Yuma shook his head. "The old ones do not know. They say the grave was made by strangers in the night."

Pitt stood and looked over the sweeping vista of the Sonoran Desert. A light breeze gently caressed the back of his neck. A red-tailed hawk circled the sky, surveying its domain. The land of mountains and sand, jackrabbits, coyotes, and canyons could intimidate as well as inspire. This is the place to die and be buried, he thought. Finally, he turned from Patty Lou's last resting place and waved Yuma on. "I'll walk the rest of the way."

Yuma nodded silently and rode ahead, the hooves of the buckskin kicking up little clouds of dust.

Pitt followed down the hill to a modest farming and ranching community. They traveled along the streambed where three young girls were washing clothes under the shade of a cottonwood tree. They stopped and stared at him with adolescent curiosity. He waved, but they ignored the greeting and, almost solemnly it seemed to Pitt, returned to their wash.

The heart of the Montolo community consisted of several houses and buildings. Some were built from mesquite branches that were coated with mud, one or two from wood, but most were constructed of cement blocks. The only apparent influence of modern living was weathered poles supporting electrical and phone lines, a few battered pickup trucks that looked as if they'd barely escaped a salvage yard crusher, and one satellite dish.

Yuma reined in his horse in front of a small building that was open on three sides. "Our meeting house," he said. "A phone inside. You have to pay."

Pitt smiled, investigated his still soggy wallet, and produced an AT&T card. "No problem."

Yuma nodded and led him into a small office equipped with a wooden table and four folding chairs. The telephone sat on a very thin phone book that was lying on the tile floor.

The operator answered after seventeen rings. "Si, por favor?"

"I wish to make a credit card call."

"Yes, sir, your card number and the number you're calling," the operator replied in fluent English.

"At least my day hasn't been all bad," Pitt sighed at hearing an understanding voice.

The Mexican operator connected him to an American operator. She transferred him to information to obtain the number for the Customs offices in Calexico and then put his call through. A male voice answered.

"Customs Service, how can I help you?"

"I'm trying to reach Albert Giordino of the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

"One moment, I'll transfer you. He's in Agent Starger's office."

Two clicks and a voice that seemed to come from a basement said, "Starger here."

"This is Dirk Pitt. Is Al Giordino handy?"

"Pitt, is that you?" Curtis Starger said incredulously. "Where have you been? We've been going through hell trying to get the Mexican navy to search for you."

"Don't bother, their local commandant was probably bought off by the Zolars."

"One moment. Giordino is standing right here. I'll put him on an extension."

"Al," said Pitt, "are you there?"

"Good to hear your voice, pal. I take it something went wrong."

In a nutshell, our friends from Peru have Loren and Rudi. I helped the crew escape on a life raft. I managed to swim to shore. I'm calling from an Indian village in the desert north of San Felipe and about thirty kilometers west of where the Alhambra lies half-sunk in the muck."

"I'll dispatch one of our helicopters," said Starger. "I'll need the name of the village for the pilot."

Pitt turned to Billy Yuma. "What do you call your community?"

Yuma nodded. "Canyon Ometepec."

Pitt repeated the name, gave a more in-depth report on the events of the last eighteen hours and hung up. "My friends are coming after me," he said to Yuma.

"By car?"

"Helicopter."

"You be an important man?"

Pitt laughed. "No more than the mayor of your village."

"No mayor. Our elders meet and talk on tribal business."

Two men walked past, leading a burro that was buried under a load of manzanita limbs. The men and Yuma merely exchanged brief stares. There were no salutations, no smiles.

"You look tired and thirsty," said Yuma to Pitt. "Come to my house. My wife make you something to eat while you wait for friends."

It was the best offer Pitt had all day and he gratefully accepted.

Billy Yuma's wife, Polly, was a large woman who carried her weight better than any man. Her face was round and wrinkled with enormous dark brown eyes. Despite being middle aged, her hair was as black as raven's feathers. She hustled around a wood stove that sat under a ramada next to their cement brick house. The Indians of the Southwest deserts preferred the shade and openness of a ramada for their kitchen and dining areas to the confining and draftless interior of their houses. Pitt noticed that the ramada's roof was constructed from the skeletal ribs of the saguaro cactus tree and was supported by mesquite poles surrounded by a wall of standing barbed ocotillo stems.

After he drank five cups of water from a big olla, or pot, whose porous walls let it sweat and keep its contents cool, Polly fed him shredded pork and refried beans with fried cholla buds that reminded him of okra. The tortillas were made from mesquite beans she had pounded into a sweet-tasting flour. The late lunch was accompanied by wine fermented from fruit of the saguaro.

Pitt couldn't recall eating a more delightful meal.

Polly seldom spoke, and when she did utter a few words they were addressed to Billy in Spanish. Pitt thought he detected a hint of humor in her big brown eyes, but she acted serious and remote.

"I do not see a happy community," said Pitt, making conversation.

Yuma shook his head sadly. "Sorrow fell over my people and the people of our other tribal villages when our most sacred religious idols were stolen. Without them our sons and daughters cannot go through the initiation of adulthood. Since their disappearance, we have suffered much misfortune."

"Good God," Pitt breathed. "Not the Zolars."

"What, senor?"

"An international family of thieves who have stolen half the ancient artifacts ever discovered."

"Mexican police told us our idols were stolen by American pothunters who search sacred Indian grounds for our heritage to sell for profit."

"Very possible," said Pitt. "What do your sacred idols look like?"

Yuma stretched out his hand and held it about a meter above the floor. "They stand about this high and their faces were carved many centuries ago by my ancestors from the roots of cottonwood trees."

"The chances are better than good that your idols were bought from the pothunters by the Zolars for peanuts, and then resold to a wealthy collector for a fat price."

"These people are called Zolars?"

"Their family name. They operate under a shadowy organization called Solpemachaco."

"I do not know the word," said Yuma. "What does it mean?"

"A mythical Inca serpent with several heads that takes up housekeeping in a cave."

"Never heard of him."

"I think he may be related to another legendary monster the Peruvians called the Demonio del Muertos, who guards their underworld."