Serpent

Clive Cussler's Serpent

INTRODUCING A FRIEND

When I was asked to introduce Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and their friends who serve the National Underwater and Marine Agency, I accepted with great pleasure and enthusiasm. I've had the privilege of knowing Kurt and Joe for many years. We first met when they joined NUMA at Admiral Sandecker's invitation not long after Al Giordino and I came on board. Although we've never had the opportunity to work on the same project together, Kurt and Joe's escapades above and underwater have often fired my imagination and left me wishing I'd done that.

In some ways Kurt and I are similar. He's a few years younger, and we hardly look alike, but he lives in an old remodeled boathouse on the Potomac River and collects antique dueling pistols, a wise choice when you consider how much simpler they are to maintain and store than the old. cars in my aircraft hangar. He's also into rowing and sailing, which sends me into exhaustion just thinking about it.

Kurt is resourceful and shrewd, and he has more guts than a white shark on steroids. He's also a genuine nice guy with two tons of integrity who believes in the flag, mothers, and apple pie. To my chagrin, the ladies find him very attractive, even more attractive than they find me.

The only obscure conclusion I can reachit pains me deeply to say sois that between the two of us he's better looking.

I'm happy that Kurt and Joe's exploits are finally being chronicled from the NUMA Files. There is not the slightest doubt that you will find them entertaining as well as an intriguing way to while away the time. I know that I have.

Dirk Pitt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WITH APPRECIATION TO DON STEVENS for taking us down to the Andrea Doria without getting our feet wet, and for the work of two fine writers, Alvin Moscow and William Hoffer, whose books Collision Course and Saved so vividly describe the human side of that great sea tragedy. And for the tenacity of that intrepid explorer John L. Stephens, who braved mosquitoes and malaria as he trekked through the Yucatan discovering the wonders of the lost Mayan civilization.

PROLOGUE

July 25, 1956

South of Nantucket Island

SO QUICKLY DID THE PALE SHIP appear, she seemed to spring whole from the depths, gliding like a ghost across the silver pool of luminescence cast by the near full moon. Tiaras of porthole lights glittered along her bone-white sides as she raced eastward in the warm night, her sharply raked bow knifing through the flat seas as easily as a stiletto cutting through black satin.

High in the darkened bridge of the Swedish American liner Stockholm, seven hours and 130 miles east of New York City Second Mate Gunnar Nillson scanned the moonlit ocean. The big rectangular windows that wrapped around the wheelhouse gave him a panoramic view as far as he could see. The surface was calm except for a ragged swell here and there. The temperature was in the seventies, a pleasant change from the heavy humid air that weighed over the Stockholm that morning as the liner left its berth at the Fifty Seventh Street pier and headed down the Hudson River. Remains of the woolly overcast drifted in tattered shrouds across the porcelain moon. Visibility was a half dozen miles to starboard.

Nillson swept his eyes to port, where the thin, dark horizon line became lost behind a hazy murkiness that veiled the stars and welded the sky and sea.

For a moment he was lost in the drama of the scene, sobered by the thought of the vast and trackless emptiness yet to be crossed. It was a common feeling among mariners, and it would have lasted longer if not for the tingling in the soles of his feet. The power produced by the massive twin 14,600horsepower diesels seemed to flow up from the engine room through the vibrating deck and into his body, which swayed almost imperceptibly to adjust for the slight roll. Dread and wonder ebbed, to be replaced by the omnipotent sensation that comes with being in command of a swift liner racing across the ocean at top speed.

At 525 feet sterntostern and 69 feet in the beam, the Stockholm was the smallest liner in the transatlantic trade. Yet she was a special ship, sleek as a yacht, with racy lines that swept back from her long forecastle to a stern as softly rounded as a wine glass. Her gleaming skin was all white except for a single yellow funnel. Nillson luxuriated in the power of command. With a snap of his fingers the three crewmen on watch would jump to his orders. With a flick of a lever on the ship's telegraphs he could set bells clanging and men scurrying to action.

He chuckled, recognizing his hubris for what it was. His four-hour watch was essentially a series of routine tasks aimed at keeping the ship on an imaginary line that would bring it to an imaginary point near the stubby red lightship that guarded Nantucket's treacherous shoals. There the Stockholm would make the northeasterly turn onto a course that would take its 534 passengers past Sable Island on a straight shot across the Atlantic to the north of Scotland and, finally Copenhagen Harbor.

Even though he was only twenty eight and had joined the Stockholm barely three months earlier, Nillson had been on boats since he could walk. As a teenager he'd worked the Baltic Sea herring bats and later served as an apprentice seaman with a huge shipping company. Then came the Swedish Nautical College and a stint in the Swedish navy. The Stockholm was one more step in achieving his dream, to be master of his own ship.

Nillson was an exception to the common tall blond Scandinavian stereotype. There was more of Venice than Viking in him. He had inherited his mother's Italian genes, along with her chestnut hair, olive skin, smallboned stature, and sunny temperament. Darkhaired Swedes were not unusual. At times Nillson wondered if the Mediterranean warmth lurking in his large brown eyes had anything to do with his captain's frostiness. More likely it was a combination of Scandinavian reserve and the rigid Swedish maritime tradition of strict discipline: Nevertheless, Nillson worked harder than he had to. He didn't want to give the captain a single reason to find fault. Even on this peaceful night, with no traffic,. near flat seas, and perfect weather, Nillson paced from one wing of the bridge to the other as if the ship were in the teeth of a hurricane.

The Stockholm's bridge was divided into two spaces, the twentyfootwide wheelhouse in front and the separate chartroom behind it. The doors leading out to the wings were left open to the light southwest breeze. At each side of the bridge was an RCA radar set and a ship's telegraph. At the center of the wheelhouse the helmsman stood on a wooden platform a few inches off the polished deck, his back to the dividing wall, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes on the face of a gyrocompass to his left. Directly in front of the helm, below the center window, was a course box. The three wooden blocks in the box were printed with numbers to keep the helmsman's mind focused on the heading.

The blocks were set at 090.

Nillson had come up a few minutes before his eightthirty watch to look at the weather reports. Fog was forecast for the area hear the Nantucket lightship. No surprise there. The warm waters of the Nantucket shoals were a virtual fog factory. The officer going off duty told him the Stockholm was just north of the course set by the captain. How far north he couldn't tell. The radio positioning beacons were too far away to get a fix.

Nillson smiled. No surprise here, either. The captain always took the same course, twenty miles north of the eastbound sealane recommended by international agreement. The route wasn't mandatory, and the captain preferred the more northerly track because it saved time and fuel.

Scandinavian captains did not do bridge watch, customarily leaving the ship in charge of a single officer. Nillson quickly settled into a series of tasks. Pace the bridge. Check the righthand radar. Glance at the engine telegraphs on each wing of the bridge to make sure they were set Full Speed Ahead. Scan the sea from a wing. Make sure the two white masthead navigation lights were on. Stroll back into the wheelhouse. Study the gyrocompass. Keep the helmsman on his toes. Pace some more.

The captain came up around nine after having dinner in his cabin directly below the bridge. A taciturn man in his late fifties, he looked older, his craggy profile worn around the edges like a rocky promontory ground smooth by the unrelenting sea. His posture was still ramrod straight, his uniform razorcreased. Icebergblue eyes glinted alertly from the weathered ruins of his ruddy face. For ten minutes he paced behind the bridge, gazing at the ocean and sniffing the warm air like a bird dog catching the scent of pheasant. Then he went into the wheelhouse and studied the navigation chart as if in search of an omen.

After a moment he said, "Change course to eightyseven degrees."

Nillson turned the oversized dice in the course box to read 087. The captain stayed long enough to watch the helmsman adjust the wheel, then returned to his cabin.

Back in the chartroom Nillson erased the ninetydegree line, penciled in the captains new course, and figured the ship's position by dead reckoning. He extended the track line according to speed and time elapsed and drew in an, X. The new line would take them about five miles from the lightship. Nillson figured strong northerly currents would push the ship as dose as two miles.

Nillson went over to the radar set near the right door and switched the range from fifteen miles to fifty miles. The thin yellow sweep hand highlighted the slender arias of Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Ships were too small for the radar to pick up at that range. He returned the range to its original setting and resumed his pacing.

Around ten the captain returned to the bridge. "I'll be in my cabin doing paperwork," he announced. "I'll make the course change north in two hours. Call me to the bridge if you see the lightship before then." He squinted out a window as if he sensed something he couldn't see. "Or if there is fog or other bad weather."

The Stockholm was now forty miles west of the lightship, close enough to pick up its radio beacon. The radio direction finder indicated that the Stockholm was more than two miles north of the captains course. Currents must be pushing the Stockholm north, Nillson concluded.

Another RDF fix minutes later showed the ship nearly three miles north of the course. Still nothing to be alarmed about; he'd simply keep a close eye on it. Standing orders were to call the captain in case of drift off course. Nillson pictured the expression on the captain's seamed face, the hardly veiled contempt in those seabitten eyes. You called me up here from my cabin for this? Nillson scratched his chin in thought. Maybe the problem was with the direction finder. The radio beacons still might be too far away for an accurate fix.

Nillson knew he was a creature of the captain's will. Yet he was, after all, the officer in command of the bridge. He made his decision.

"Steer eightynine," he ordered the helmsman.

The wheel moved to the right, taking the ship slightly south, closer to the original course.

The bridge crew changed posts as it did every eighty minutes. Lars Hansen came in from standby and took over the helm.

Nillson grimaced, not altogether pleased with the change. He never felt comfortable sharing a shift with the man. The Swedish navy was all business. Officers talked to the crewmen only to give orders. Pleasantries simply were not exchanged. Nillson sometimes broke the rule, quietly sharing a joke or wry observation with a crewman. Never with Hansen.

This was Hansen's first voyage on the Stockholm. He came on board as a lastminute replacement when the man who signed on hadn't shown up: According to Hansen's papers he'd kicked around on a number of ships. Yet nobody couldplace him, which was hard to believe. Hansen was lanternjawed, tall, broadshouldered, and his blond hair was cropped close to the scalp. The same description could apply to a few million other Scandinavian men in their early twenties. It would be hard to forget Hansen's face. A fierce white scar ran from his prominent cheekbone nearly to the righthand corner .of his mouth, so his lips seemed turned up on one side in a grotesque smile. Hansen had served mostly on freighters, which might explain his anonymity. Nillson suspected it was more likely the man's behavior. He kept to himself, spoke only when he was spoken to, and then not very much. Nobody ever asked him about his scar.

He turned out to be a good crewman, Nillson had to admit, jumping smartly to orders and carrying them out without a question. Which was why Nillson was puzzled as he checked the compass. On past shifts Hansen had shown himself to be a competent helmsman. Tonight he was letting .the ship drift as if his attention were wandering. Nillson understood that it took a while to get the feel of the helm. Except for the current, though, steering was undemanding. No howling wind. No giant seas breaking over the deck. Just move the wheel a little this way, a little that way.

Nillson checked the gyrocompass. No doubt about it. The ship was yawing slightly. He stood close to the helmsman's shoulder. "Keep a tight line, Hansen," he said with gentle humor. "This isn't a warship, you know."

Hansen's head swiveled on the muscular neck. The reflected glow from the compass imparted an. animal glitter to his eyes and accentuated the deepness of the scar. Heat seemed to radiate from his glare. Sensing. a quiet aggressiveness, Nillson almost. stepped backward in reflex. He stubbornly held his ground, though, and gestured at the course box numerals.

The helmsman stared at him without expression for a few seconds, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

Nillson made sure the course was steady, mumbled his approval, then escaped into the chartroom. .

Hansen gave him the creeps, he thought, shivering as he took another radio fix to see the effect of the drift. Something didn't make sense. Even with the twodegree correction to the south, the Stockholm was north of the course by three miles.

He went back into the wheelhouse, and without looking at Hansen he ordered, "Two degrees to the right."

Hansen eased the wheel to ninetyone degrees.

Nillson changed the course box numbers and stayed by the compass until he was satisfied Hansen had brought the ship onto the new tack. Then he bent over the radar, the yellow glow from the scope giving his dark skin a jaundiced tinge. The sweep hand illuminated a blip off to the left side of the screen, about twelve miles away. Nillson raised an eyebrow.

The Stockholm had company.

Unknown to Nillson, the Stockholm's hull and superstructure were being washed by unseen electronic waves that rippled back to the revolving radar antenna high atop the bridge of a ship speeding toward it from the opposite direction. Minutes earlier, inside the spacious bridge of the Italian Line passenger ship Andrea Doria, the officer manning the radar scope called out to a stocky man wearing a navy beret and a uniform of evening blue. .

"Captain, I see a ship, seventeen miles, four degrees to starboard.

The radar had been monitored constantly at twentymile range since three o'clock, when Superior Captain Piero Calamai walked onto the bridge wing and saw gray wisps hovering over the western sea like the souls of drowned men.

Immediately the captain had ordered the ship rigged for running in the fog. The 572 man crew had been on full alert. The foghorn was blowing automatically at hundredsecond intervals.

The crow's nest lookout was reassigned to the bow where he'd have a clearer, view. The engineroom crew was put on standby, primed to react instantly in an emergency The doors between the ship's eleven watertight compartments were sealed.

The Andrea Doria was on the last leg of a 4,000mile, nine-day voyage from its home port of Genoa carrying 1,134 passengers and 401 tons of freight. Despite the dense fog pressing down on its decks, the Doria cruised at dose to its full speed, its massive 35,000 horsepower twinturbine engines pushing the big ship through the sea at twentytwo knots.

The Italian Line did not gamble with its ships and passengers. Nor did it pay captains, to arrive behind schedule. Time was money. No one knew this any better than Captain Calamai, who had commanded the ship on ail its transatlantic crossings. He was determined that the ship would arrive in New York not one second beyond the hour it had lost in a storm two nights earlier.

When the Doria had rolled by the lightship at tentwenty PM., the bridge could pick the vessel up on radar and hear the lonely moan of its foghorn, but it was invisible at less than a mile away.. With the lightship behind them, the Doria's captain ordered a course due west to New York

The radar pip was heading east, directly at the Doria, Calamai bent over the radar screen, his brow furrowed, watching the . blip's progress: The radar couldn't tell the captain what hind of ship he .was looking at or how big it was. He didn't know he was looking at a fast ocean liner. With a combined speed of forty knots, the two ships were dosing on each other at the rate of two miles every three minutes.

The ship's position was puzzling. Eastbound ships were supposed to follow a route twenty miles to the south. Fishing boat, maybe.

Under the rules of the road, ships coming directly at each other on the open sea are supposed to pass porttoport, left side to left side, like cars approaching from opposite directions: If ships maneuvering to comply with this rule are forced into a dangerous crossover, they may instead pass starboardtostarboard.

From the look of the radar, the other vessel would pass safely to the right of the Doria if the two vessels held their same course. Like autos on an English highway, where drivers stay to the left.

Calamai ordered his crew to keep, a close eye on the other ship. It never hurt to be cautious.

The ships were about ten miles apart when Nillson switched on the light underneath the Bial maneuvering board next to the radar set and prepared to transfer the blip's changing position to paper.

He called out, "What's our heading, Hansen?"

"Ninety degrees," the helmsman replied evenly.

Nillson marked X's on the plotting board and drew lines between them, checked the blip again, then ordered the standby lookout to keep watch from the port bridge wing. His plot line had shown the other ship speeding in their direction on a parallel course, slightly to the left. He went out onto the wing and probed the night with binoculars. No sign of another vessel. He paced back and forth from wing to wing, stopping at the radar with each pass. He called for another heading report.

"Still ninety degrees, sir," Hansen said.

Nillson started over to check the gyrocompass. Even the slightest deviation could be critical, and he wanted to make certain the course was true. Hansen reached up and pulled the lanyard over his head. The ship's belt rang out six times. Eleven o'clock. Nillson loved hearing ship's time. On a late shift, when loneliness and boredom combined, the pealing of the ship's bell embodied the romantic attachment he had felt for the sea as a youngster. Later' he would remember that clanging as the sound of doom.

Distracted from his intended chore, Nillson peered into the radar scope and made another mark on the plotting board.

Eleven o'clock. Seven miles separated the two ships.

Nillson calculated that the ships would pass each other port-toport with more than enough distance in between. He went out on the wing again and peered through binoculars off to the left. Maddening. There was only darkness where radar showed a ship to be. Maybe the running lights were broken. Or it was a navy ship on maneuvers.

He looked off to the right. The moon was shining brightly on the water. Back to the left. Still nothing. Could the ship be in a fog bank? Unlikely. No ship would move that fast in dense fog. He considered decreasing the Stockholm's speed. No. The captain would hear the jangle of the ship's telegraph and come running. He'd call that frostyassed bastard after the ships had safely passed.

At 11:03 radar on both vessels showed them four miles apart.

Still no lights.

Nillson again considered calling the captain, and again dismissed the idea. Nor did he give the order to sound warning signals as required by international law. A waste of time. They were on open ocean, the moon was out, and visibility must be five miles.

The Stockholm continued to cut through the night at eighteen knots.

The man in the crow's nest called out, "Lights to port!"

Finally.

Later, analysts would shake their heads in puzzlement, wondering how two radarequipped ships could be drawn together like magnets on the open ocean.

Nillson strode onto the left bridge wing and read the other ship's lights. Two white pinpoints, one high, one low, glowed in darkness. Good. The position of the lights indicated that the ship would pass off to the left: The red portside light came into view, confirming that the ship was heading away from the Stockholm. The ships would pass porttoport. Radar put the distance at more than two miles. He glanced at,, the clock. It was 11:06 p.m.

From what the Andrea Doria's captain could see on the radar screen, the ships should pass each other safely on the right. When the ships were less than three and a half miles apart, Calamai ordered a fourdegree turn to the left to open up the gap been them. Soon a spectral glow appeared in the fog, and gradually white running lights became visible. Captain Calamai expected to see the green light on the other ship's starboard side. Any time now

One mile apart.

Nillson remembered how an observer said the Stockholm cold turn on a dime and give you eight cents change It was time to put that nimbleness to use.

"Starboard two points," he ordered the helm. Like Calamai, h wanted more breathing room. `

Hansen brought the wheel two complete turns to the right.. The ship's bow went twenty degrees to starboard: .

"Straighten out to midships and keep her steady"

The telephone rang on the wall. Nillson went over to answer it.

"Bridge," Nillson said. Confident of a safe passing, he faced the wall, his back to the windows.

The crow's nest lookout was calling. "Lights twenty degrees to port.

"Thank you," Nillson replied, and hung up. He went over and checked the radar, unaware of the Doria's new trajectory. The blips were now so dose to each other the reading didn't make any sense to him. He went to the port wing and, without arty urgency, .raised his binoculars to his eyes and focused on the fights.

Calmness deserted him.

"My God." He gasped, seeing the change in the masthead lights for the first time.

The high and low lights had reversed themselves: The ship no longer had its red portside light to him. The light was green. Starboard side. Since he'd last looked, the other ship seemed to have made a sharp turn to its left.

Now the blazing deck lights of a huge black ship loomed from the thick fog balk .that had kept it hidden and presented its right side directly in the path of the speeding Stockholm.

He shouted a course change. "Hard astarboard!"

Spinning around, he gripped the levers of the ship's telegraph with both hands, yanked them to Stop, then all the way down as if he could bring the ship to a halt by sheer determination. An insane jangle filled the air.

Full Speed Astern.

Nillson turned back to the helm. Hansen stood there like a stone guardian outside a pagan temple.

"Damn it, I said hard astarboard!" Nillson shouted, his voice hoarse.

Hansen began to turn the wheel. Nillson couldn't believe his eyes. Hansen wasn't rotating the wheel to starboard, which would have given them a chance, even a slight one, to avoid a collision. He spun it slowly and deliberately to the left.

The Stockholm's bow swung into a deadly turn.

Nillson heard a foghorn, knew it must belong to the other ship.

The engine room was in chaos: The crew was frantically turning the wheel that would stop the starboard engine. They scrambled to open the valves that would reverse power and stop the port engine. The ship shuddered as braking took hold Too late. The Stockholm flew like an arrow at the unprotected ship.

In the port wing Nillson hung on grimly to the ship's telegraph.

Like Nillson, Captain Calamai had watched the masthead, lights materialize, reverse themselves, saw the red portside light glowing like a ruby on back velvet. Realized the other ship had made a sharp right turn directly into the Doria's path.

No warning. No foghorn or whistle.

Stopping was out of the question at this speed. The ship would need miles of room to skid to a halt.

Calamai had seconds to act. He could order a right turn,

directly toward the danger, hoping that the ships would brush each other. Maybe the speeding Maria could outrun the attacking ship..

Calamai made a desperate decision.

All left," he barked.

A bridge officer called out. Did the captain want the engines shut down? Calamai shook his head. "Maintain full speed." He knew the Doria turned better at higher velocity. .

In a blur of spokes the helmsman whipped the wheel around to port using both hands. The whistle shrieked twice to signal the left. turn. The big ship struggled against its forward momentum for a half mile before it heeled into the start of the turn.

The captain knew he was taking a big risk in exposing the Doria's broad side. He prayed that the other vessel would bear off while there was still time. He still couldn't believe the ships were on a collision course. The whole thing seemed like a dream.

A shout from one of his officers snapped him back to reality. "She's coming right at us]"

The oncoming ship was pointed at the starboard wing where Calamai watched in horror. The sharp upturned bow seemed to be aimed directly at him..

The Doria's skipper had a reputation for being tough and in control. But at that moment he did what any sane man would have done in his position. He ran for his life.

The Swedish ship's reinforced bow pierced the metal skin of the speeding Andrea Doria as easily as a bayonet, penetrating almost a third of the liner's ninetyfoot width before it came to rest.

With a weight of 29,100 tons, more than twice that of the Stockholm, the Italian liner dragged the vessel with it, pivoting around the point of impact below and aft of the starboard bridge wing. As the stricken Doria plunged ahead, the Stockholm's crumpled prow pulled free, ripping open seven of the liner's ten passenger decks like a raptor's beak tearing into the flesh of its victim. It scraped along the long black hull in a bright shower of sparks.

The gaping wedgeshaped hole that yawned in the Doria's side was forty feet at the top and narrowed to seven feet below sea level at the bottom.

Thousands of gallons of seawater rushed into the massive wound and filled empty outboard fuel tanks tom open in the collision. The ship tilted to the right under the weight of five hundred tons of seawater that flooded into the generator room. An oily river poured through an access tunnel and manholes and began to rise through the floor gratings of the engine room. The struggling engine crew slid on the oilslicked decks like circus clowns taking pratfalls.

More water gushed in, surged around the undamaged empty fuel tanks on the port side, and buoyed them up like soap bubbles.

Within minutes of being hit, the Doria had heeled over into a severe list.

Nillson expected to be flung to the floor by the impact. The jolt was surprisingly soft yet strong enough to jar him from his paralysis. He dashed from the wheelhouse into the chartroom and lunged for the alarm button that would close the Stockholm's watertight doors.

The captain roared onto the bridge. "What in God's name happened?° .

Nillson tried to mouth an answer. The words stuck in his throat. He was at a loss to describe the scene. Hansen ignoring his order to go to starboard. The blurred spin of the wheel to port. Hansen leaning forward into the wheel, hands tightly clutching the spokes as if frozen in time. No fear, no horror in his eyes. Only a glacial blue coldness. Nillson thought it was a trick of the light at first, the illumination from the gyrocompass housing catching the ugly scar. There was no mistake. As the ships hurtled toward certain disaster, the man was smiling.

There was no doubt in his mind. Hansen had deliberately rammed the other ship, aiming the Stockholm as if he were riding a torpedo. No doubt, too, that nobody, not the captain or anyone else on the ship, would ever believe such a thing could happened

Nillson's anguished eyes shifted from the captain's angry ` face to the helm. as if the answer lay there. The deserted wheel spun madly out of control.

In all the confusion Hansen had vanished.

Jake Corey was shocked from his slumber by a doomful metallic thunderclap. The hollow boom lasted only an instant before it was followed by the tortured shriek of steel against steel and a terrifying crumple and crunch as if the upper deck cabin were imploding. Corey's eyes blinked open, and he stared fearfully at what looked to be a moving grayishwhite wall, only a few feet away

Carey had drifted off to sleep minutes before. He had kissed his wife, Myra, good night and slipped beneath the cool sheets of a twin bed in their firstclass cabin. Myra read a few pages of her novel until her eyelids drooped. She switched off the light, pulled the blanket dose around her neck, and sighed, with pleas. ant memories of the sunbaked Tuscan vineyards still in her head.

Earlier, she and Jake had toasted the success of their Italian sojourn with champagne in the firstclass dining room. Carey had suggested a nightcap in the Belvedere Lounge, but Myra replied that if she heard the band play "Arrivederci Roma" one more time, she'd swear off spaghetti forever. They retired shortly before tenthirty P.m.

After strolling handinhand past the shops .in the foyer deck, they took the elevator one level up and walked forward to their large upperdeck cabin on the starboard side. They put their luggage out in the corridor, where the stewards would collect it in anticipation of the ship's arrival in New York the next day There was a slight roll to the ship because the vessel had become more topheavy as fuel in the big hull tanks was used up. The motion was like being naked in a giant cradle, and before long Myra Carey, too, fell asleep.

Now her husband's bed lurched violently. He was catapulted into the air as if he'd been launched from a siege machine. He floated in free fall for several lifetimes before splashing into a deep pool of darkness.

Death stalked the decks of the Andrea Doria.

It roamed from the posh cabins on the higher levels to the touristclass accommodations below the waterline. Fiftytwo people lay dead or dying in the wake of the crash. Ten cabins were demolished in the firstclass deck where the hole was at its widest. The hole was at its narrowest at the bottom, but the cabins below the waterline were smaller and more crowded, so the effect was even more devastating.

Passengers died or lived according to the whims of fate. A firstclass passenger who'd been brushing his teeth ran back to the bedroom to find the wall gone, his wife vanished. On the deluxe foyer deck two people were killed instantly. Twentysix Italian immigrants in the smaller, cheaper cabins of the lowermost deck were right in line with the collision and died in a mass of crushed steel. Among them were a woman and her four young children. There were miracles as well. A young girl scooped out of a firstclass cabin woke up in the Stockholm's crumpled bow. In another cabin the ceiling crashed down on a couple, but they managed to crawl out into the corridor. '

Those from the two lowest decks had the toughest struggle, fighting their way up the slanting smokefilled passageways against a stream of oilslicked black water. Gradually people began to work their way to the muster stations and waited for instructions. .

Captain Calamai was at the far side of the undamaged bridge when the ships hit. Recovering from his initial shock, he pulled the ship's telegraph lever to Stop. The ship eventually came to a halt in the deep fog.

The second officer strode to the inclinometer; the instrument that measured the ship's angle.

"Eighteen degrees," he said. A few minutes later he said, 'Nineteen degrees.'

Cold fingers brushed the captain's heart. The list should be no more than fifteen degrees, even with two compartments flooded. A tilt of more than twenty degrees would overwhelm the watertight compartments.

Logic was telling him the situation was impossible. The designers guaranteed that the ship would remain on an even keel with any group of two compartments flooded. He called for damage reports from each deck; especially on the status of the watertight doors, and ordered an SOS sent out with the ship's position.

Officers rushed back to the bridge with damage reports. The engineroom crew was pumping the starboard compartments, but water was coming in faster than they could get it out. The boiler room was flooded, and water was flowing into two more compartments.

The problem was at A Deck, supposed to serve as a steel lid over the transverse bulkheads that divided the ship into compartments. Water was flowing down those passenger stairways into the other compartments.

The officer called out the new reading. "Twentytwo degrees."

Captain Calamai didn't have to look at the inclinometer to know the list had, passed the point where it could be corrected. The evidence was in the slant of the chartlittered floor right at his feet.

The ship was dying.

He was numb with grief. The Andrea Doria was not just any ship. The twentyninemilliondollar Queen of the Italian Line was the most magnificent and luxurious passenger vessel afloat. Barely four years old, it was launched to show the world that the Italian merchant marine was back in business after the war. With its graceful black hull and white superstructure, the rakish red, white, and green funnel, the liner looked more like the work of a sculptor than a marine architect.

Moreover, this was his ship. He had commanded the Doria on her trial runs and in a hundred Atlantic crossings. He knew her decks better than the rooms of his own home. He never tired of strolling from one end to the other, like a spectator in a museum, breathing in the work of thirtyone of Italy's finest artists and artisans, glorying in the Renaissance beauty of the mirrors, gilt, crystal, rare woods, fine tapestries, and mosaics. Surrounded by the massive mural that lionized Michelangelo and other Italian masters, he would pause in the firstclass lounge before the massive bronze statue of Andrea Doria, second only to Columbus in greatness. The old Genoese admiral stood ready as always to draw his sword at. the first sign of a Barbary pirate.

All this was about to be lost.

The passengers were the captain's first responsibility. He was about to give the order to abandon ship when an officer reported on the lifeboat situation. The lifeboats on the port side were unlaunchable. That left eight boats on the starboard side. They were hanging far out over the water. Even if they could be lunched, there was room enough for only half the passengers. He didn't dare give the. order to abandon ship. Panicstricken passengers would rush to the port side, and there'd be chaos.

He prayed that passing ships had heard their SOS and could find them in the fog.

There was nothing he could do but wait.

Angelo Donatelli had just delivered a trayful of martinis to a raucous table of New Yorkers celebrating their last night aboard the Doria when he glanced toward one of the draped windows that tookup three walls of the elegant Belvedere Lounge. Something, a flicker of movement, had caught his eye.

The lounge was on the . front _ of the boat deck, with its open promenade, and in the daytime or on dear nights firstclass passengers normally had a wide view of the sea. Most passengers had given up trying to see anything through the soft gray wall that enclosed the lounge. It was only dumb luck that Angelo looked up and saw the lights and rails of a big white ship moving through the fog.

Dios mio," " he murmured

The words had barely left his lips when there was an explosion that sounded like a monster firecracker. The lounge was plunged into darkness.

The deck shifted violently. Angelo lost his balance,, fought to regain it, and, with the circular tray clutched in one hand, did a tolerable imitation of the famous Greek statue of a discus thrower. The handsome Sicilian from Palermo was a natural athlete who'd kept his agility tuned to a fine edge weaving in and out of tables and bang drinks.

The emergency lights kicked in as he scrambled to his feet. The three couples at his table had been thrown from their chairs onto the floor. He helped the women up first. No one seemed seriously hurt. He looked around.

The beautiful lounge, with its softly lit tapestries, paintings, and wood carvings and its glossy blond paneling, was in a turmoil. The shiny dance floor, where seconds before couples had been gliding to the strains of "Arrivederci Roma," was a jumble of squirming bodies. The music had stopped abruptly, to be replaced by criesof pain and dismay. Band members extricated themselves from the tangle of instruments. There were broken .bottles and glasses everywhere, and the sir reeked with the smell of alcohol. Vases of fresh flowers had spilled onto the floor.

"What in God's name was that?" one of the men said.

Angelo held his tongue, not sure even now of what he had seen. He looked at the window again and saw only the ,fog.

"Maybe we hit. an iceberg," the man's wife ventured tentatively.

An iceberg? For Chrissakes, Connie, you're talking the coast of Massachusetts. In July. "

The woman pouted. "Well, then; maybe it was a mine."

He looked over at the band and grinned. "Whatever it was, it got their to stop playing that goddamn song."

They all laughed at the joke. Dancers were brushing their clothes off, the musicians inspecting their instruments for damage. Bartenders and waiters rushed about.

"We've got nothing to worry about,"_ another man said. "One of the officers told me they built this ship to be unsinkable."

His wife stopped checking her makeup in the mirror of her compact. "That's what they said about the Titanic," she said with alarm.

Tense silence. Then a quick exchange of fearful glances. As if they'd heard a silent signal, the three couples .hastily made for

the nearest exit like binds flying off a clothesline.

Angelo's first instinct was to dear the table of glasses and wipe it down. He laughed softly. "You've been a waiter too long," he said under his breath.

Most of the people in the room were back on their feet, and they were using them to move toward the exits. The lounge was quickly emptying out. If Angelo didn't leave, he'd be all alone. He shrugged, tossed his dish towel on the floor, then headed for the nearest doorway to find out what was going on.

Black waves threatened to drag Jake Carey under for good. He fought against the dark current tugging at his body, crawled onto the slippery .edge of consciousness, and hung on grimly. He heard a moan and realized it was coming from his own lips. He moaned again, this time on purpose. Good. Dead men don't moan. His next thought was of his wife.

"Myra!' he called out.

He heard a faint stirring in the gray darkness. Hope surged in his breast. He called his wife's name again.

"Over here." Myra's voice was muffled as if coming from a distance.

"Thank God! Are you all. right?"

A pause. "Yes. What happened? I was asleep"

"I don't know. Can you move?"

"No."

"I'll come help you," Carey said. He lay on his left side, arm pinned under his body, a weight pressing on his right side. His legs were locked tight. Icy fear gripped him. Maybe his back was broken. He tried again. Harder. The jagged pain that shot up from his ankle to his thigh brought tears to his eyes; but it meant he wasn't paralyzed. He stopped struggling. He'd have to think this thing through. Carey was an engineer who'd made a fortune building bridges. This was no different from any other problem that could be solved by applications of logic and persistence. And lots of luck.

He pushed with his right, elbow and felt .soft fabric. He was under the mattress. He shoved harder, angling his body for leverage. The mattress gave, then would move no more. Christ, the whole bloody ceiling could be on top of him. Carey took a deep breath, and, using every ounce of strength in his muscular arm,

he pushed again. The mattress slid off onto the floor.

With both arms free he reached down and felt something solid on top of his ankle. Exploring the surface with his fingers; he figured out it was the chest of drawers that had been between the twin beds. The, mattress must have shielded him from pieces of the wall and ceiling. With two hands free, he lifted the dresser a few inches and slid his legs out one at a time. He rubbed circulation gently back into his ankles. They were bruised and painful but not broken. He slowly got up on his hands and knees.

"Jake." Myra's voice again. Weaker.

"I'm coming, sweetheart Hold on."

Something was wrong. Myra's voice seemed to issue from the other side of the cabin wall. He flicked on a light switch. The cabin, remained in darkness. Disoriented, he crawled through the . wreckage. His groping fingers found a door. He cocked his head, listening, to what sounded like surf against the shore and gulls screaming in the background. He staggered to his feet, cleared rubble from around the door, and opened it on a nightmare.

The corridor was crowded with pushing and shoving passengers who were cast in an amber hue by the emergency lighting. Men, women, and children, some fully dressed, some in their nightclothes under their coats, some barehanded, others lugging bags, pushed, shoved, walked, or crawled as they fought their way toward the upper deck. The hallway was filled with dust and smoke and tilted like the floor of a fun house. A few passengers trying to get to their cabins struggled against the human river like salmon swimming against the current.

Carey glanced back at the door he had just come through 'and realized from the numbers that he'd crawled out of the cabin adjoining his. He must have been thrown from one cabin to the other. That night in the lounge he and Myra had talked to the cabin's occupants, an older ItalianAmerican couple returning from a family reunion. He prayed that they hadn't followed their usual practice of retiring early.

Carey muscled his. way through the throng to his cabin door. It was locked. He went back into the cabin he'd just come out of and pushed through the debris toward the wall. Several times he stopped to move furniture and push pieces of ceiling or wall aside. Sometimes he crawled over the wreckage, sometimes he wriggled under it, driven by a new urgency. The tilted deck meant the ship was taking on water. He got to the wall and called out his wife's name again. She replied from fine other side. Frantic now, he groped for any opening in, the barrier, found the bottom was loose, and pulled until he made a hole big enough for him to squeeze through on his belly.

His cabin was in semidarkness, shapes and objects awash in a faint light. He stood up and looked toward the source of the illumination. A cool salty breeze blew against his sweaty face. He couldn't believe his eyes. The outside cabin wall was gone! In its place was a gigantic hole through which he could see moonlight reflected on the ocean. He worked feverishly, and minutes later he was at his wife's side. He wiped the blood off her forehead and cheeks with a corner of his pajama top and tenderly kissed her.

"I can't move," she said almost apologetically.

Whatever it was that had sent him hurling into the next cabin had ripped the steel frame of Myra's bat from the floor and pushed it against the wall like the spring in a mousetrap. Myra was in a near upright position, luckily cushioned from the pressure of the tangle of bedsprings by the mattress but jammed against the wall by the frame. To her back was the steel shaft of a ship's elevator. Her one free arm dangled at her right side.

Carey wrapped his fingers around the edge of the frame. He was in his midfifties but still strong from his days as a laborer.. He pulled with the considerable power of his big body. The frame yielded slightly only to spring back in place soon as he let go, He tried to pry the frame with a length of wood but stopped when Myra called out in pain. He tossed the wood aside in disgust.

"Darling," he said, trying to keep his voice calm, "I'm going to get help. I'll have to leave you. Just a little while. I'll be back. I promise."

"Jake, you have to. save yourself. The ship"

"You're 'not getting rid of me that easily, my love."

"Don't be stubborn, for Godsakes."

He kissed her face again. Her skin, normally so warm to the touch, felt clammy. "Think about sunshine in Tuscany while you're waiting. I'll be back soon. Promise." He squeezed her hand and, unlocking door from the inside, went out into the corridor without the slightest idea what he was going to do. A strong looking heavyset man. came toward him. Jake grabbed the mans shoulder and started to ask for help.

"Outtamyway!" With a whiteeyed stare the man shouldered Jake aside despite Carey's size.

He tried frantically to recruit a couple more men before giving up. No Samaritans here. It was like trying to snag a steer out of a thirstcrazed herd of cattle stampeding for a water hole. He couldn't blame them for running for their lives. He'd be dragging Myra for high ground if she were free. He decided his fellow passengers would be useless. He had to find someone from the crew. Struggling to keep his footing against the slant of the deck, he joined the throng heading for the higher decks.

Angelo had made a quick survey of the ship and didn't like what he saw, especially on the starboard side, which was dipping ever lower toward the sea.

Carry's soiled pajama top so he wouldn't lose him. ,They dashed down one staircase to the upper deck, where most of the firstclass cabins were. By then only a few oilcovered stragglers were making their way along the hallways.

Angelo was shocked when he saw Mrs. Carry. She looked as if she were in a medieval torture rack. Her eyes were dosed, and for an instant he thought she was dead. But at her husband's gentle touch her eyelids fluttered.

"Told you I'd be back, darling," Carry said. "Look, Angelo here has come to, help."

Angelo took her hand and gallantly kissed it. She gave him a melting smile.

Both men grabbed the bed frame and pulled, grunting more with frustration than exertion, ignoring the pain from the sharp metal edge cutting into the flesh of their palms. The frame gave a few inches more than it had earlier. As soon asthey let go, it sprang back into place. With each attempt, Mrs. Carey clamped her eyes and lips tight. Carry cursed. He'd, gotten his way. so often with simple strength, he'd become used to winning. But not this time.

"We need more men," he said, panting.

Angelo shrugged with embarrassment.. "Most of the crew is already on the lifeboats."

"Jeezus," Carry whispered. It had been hard enough finding Angelo. Carey thought for a moment, liking at the problem from an engineer's point of view.

"We could do it, just the two of us," he said finally. "If we had a jack."

"What?" The waiter looked puzzled.

A jack" Carey struggled for the right word, gave up, and made pumping motions with his hand. "For an automobile."

Angelo's dark eyes brightened with understanding. "Ali," he said. A lever. For an auto."

"That's right," Carey said with growing excitement. "Look, we could put it here and pry the frame away from the wall so we'll have space to pull Myra out."

"Si. The garage. I come back."

"Yes, that's right, the garage." Carry glanced at his wife's stricken face. "But you must hurry."

Carry was never a man to take things for granted. Angelo might bolt for the nearest lifeboat as soon as he left the cabin. Carey wouldn't blame him. He gripped Angelo's elbow.

"I can't tell you how much I appreciate this, Angelo. When we get back to New York, I'll make sure you're rewarded."

"Hey Signor. I don't do this for money" He grinned, blew a kiss at Mrs. Carey and disappeared from the cabin, grabbing a life jacket on the way out.

He ran down the hallway, descended a staircase to the foyer deck, and got no farther. The Stockholm's bow had penetrated almost to the chapel, leaving the foyer a mess of twisted metal and shattered glass. He moved away from the main damage area and followed a .central corridor that took him toward the stern, then went down another set of stairs to A Deck. Again, many of the starboard cabins had simply vanished. Once more he made his way down to the next deck using a circuitous route.

Angelo stopped and crossed himself each time before he descended to another deck. The gesture gave him comfort even though he knew it was futile. Not even God would be crazy enough to follow him down to the bowels of a sinking ship.

He paused to get his bearings. He. was on B Deck, where the garage and many of the smaller cabins were located. The fiftycar Grande Autorimessa was sandwiched between the forward touristclass cabins. The airconditioned garage stretched the width of the ship. Doors on both sides allowed cars to drive directly onto the pier. Angelo had only been below once before. One of the garage men, a fellow Sicilian, wanted to show him the wonder car Chrysler was shipping back from Italy The streamlined Norseman had taken a year to design, and Ghia of Turin had spent another fifteen months handbuilding the hundredthousanddollar machine. He could see the breathtakingly beautiful modern lines through openings in the crate that protected it. The two men were more interested in a RollsRoyce that a rich American from Miami Beach was shipping home from his Paris honeymoon. Angelo and his friend took turns pretending they were the Rolls's chauffeur and passenger.

Angelo remembered being told that there were nine cars in the garage. Maybe one would have a jack he could get at. He wasn't hopeful after seeing the extent of the starboard damage.

The other ship would have ripped right through the garage wall. He paused in the gloom to catch his breath and wipe the sweat

from his eyes. Now what? Flight? Mamma mia. What if the lights go out? He'd never find his way. Fear tugged at his legs, tried to

set them in motion.

Wait.

The day he visited the garage his friend showed him another vehicle, an oversized armored truck, in a far corner away from the impact side. No markings had been visible on the shiny black metal body. When Angelo asked about it, his friend simply rolled his eyes and shrugged. Gold maybee. He only knew that it was guarded day and night. Even as they talked, Angelo had seen a man in a dark gray uniform watching them until they left the cargo space.

The deck trembled under his feet. The ship listed another degree or so. Angelo went beyond fear and was now in the throes of genuine terror.

His heartbeat ratcheted up several notches. Slowed as .the ship settled. He wondered how close it was to rolling over. He looked at the life jacket he'd been carrying and laughed. The vest would not do much good if the ship capsized and sank with him deep in its belly. Five minutes. That's all he'd give it. Then it was up to the top deck as quick as a rabbit. He and Carey would work something out. They had to, He found the entrance to the garage. He took a deep .breath, opened the door, and stepped through.

The cavernous space was black except for yellow puddles from the emergency lights in the high ceilings. He glanced toward the starboard side and saw rippling reflections on the floor where the garage was taking on water. Water surged around his ankles. Seawater must be pouring in, and if the garage

't filled yet, it would be so in minutes. Chances were that any cars in the way would have been crushed by the knifing bow. He wouldn't have much time. He started along a wall toward the far corner. He could see the boxy shape in. the shadows and the glint of light off its dark windows. Logic was telling him it would be a dangerous waste of time to go any farther. Get out of the hold and to the top deck. Pronto. Before the garage became a fish tank.

The image came to him of Mrs. Carey; pinned against the wall like a butterfly. The truck was her last chance, yet no chance at all. Most likely the jack would be locked inside. He had convinced himself he would have to leave emptyhanded and stopped to take one last longing look at the truck. That's when he discovered he wasn't alone.

A pencilthin beam spit the darkness near the truck Then another. Flashlights. Then portable lamps flared and were placed on the floor so as to illuminate the truck. In their light he could see people moving around. There appeared to be several men. Some wore gray uniforms, others black business suits. They had the side and back door of the truck open. He couldn't see what they were doing, except that they seemed to be very intent on their work. He was about twothirds of the way across the garage and opened his mouth to call out °Signores." The word never left his lips..

Something was moving in the shadows. Grayclad figures appeared suddenly like actors on a darkened stage. Vanished into the darkness. Appeared again. Four of them, all wearing engine-room coveralls, moving across the breadth of the hold. Something about their furtiveness, like the stealth of a cat stalking a bird, told Angelo to remain quiet. A guard turned, saw the approaching figures, shouted a warning, and reached for the holstered gun at his hip.

The men in coveralls dropped to one knee with military precision and raised the objects they'd been carrying to their shoulders. That smooth, and deliberate motion told Angelo he'd beenmistaken about the tools. You didn't grow up in the home of the Mafia not knowing what a machinegun looked like and how it was aimed.

Four muzzle barrels opened fire simultaneously, concentrating on the immediate threat, the guard, who had his gun out and was aiming it. The fusillade ripped into him, and his gun went flying. His body virtually disintegrated in a scarlet cloud of blood, flesh, and clothing from the impact of hundreds of softnosed bullets. The guard gyrated, caught in a grotesque slowmotion death dance by the stroboscopic effect of the whitehot muzzle blasts.

The others tried to scramble for cover, only to be brought down by ,the merciless hail of lead before they could take a step. The metal walls echoed and reechoed with the ugly chatter and the mad whine of bullets ricocheting off the armored truck and the wall behind it. Even after it was quite clear that no one could have survived, the men with the guns continued to move forward, firing at the supine bodies.

Suddenly all was silent.

A purple pall of smoke hung in the air, which was thick with the smell of cordite and death.

The killers methodically turned over each body. Angelo thought he would go mad. He stood flat against the bulkhead frozen with fear, cursing his luck. He must have stumbled onto a robbery! He expected the killers to start removing sacks of money from the truck. Instead they did a peculiar thing. They lifted the bleeding bodies out of the rising water, dragged them one by one around to the back of the truck. Then they stuffed them inside, slammed the door, and bolted it shut.

Angelo felt a coldness at his feet that had nothing to do with fear. The water had risen to where he stood. He backed away

from the truck, staying in the shadows. As he neared the door he'd come through, the water rose to his knees. Before long it

was up to his armpits. He put on the life jacket he'd been clutch ing like a child's security blanket. Quietly breast stroking, he

made his way to the door. He turned around in the water for one

last look. One of the killers stared briefly in Angelo's direction. Then he and the others cast their weapons aside, waded into the water, and began to swim. Angelo slipped out of the garage, praying they hadn't seen him. The corridor was inundated, and he kept swimming until he felt steps under his feet. His shoes and clothes were leaden with water. With a strength born of unbridled terror, he vaulted up the stairs as if the dark, thin-faced killer who seemed to sense Angelo's presence were right on his heels.

Moments later he burst into the Careys' cabin. "I couldn't get a lever," he sputtered breathlessly. "The garage" He stopped short.

The bed frame had been pried away from the wall, and Carey was gently easing his wife out with the help of the ship's doctor and another crewman. Carey saw the waiter.

"Angela, I was worried' about you."

"She's gonna be all right?" Angela said with concern. Mrs. Carey's eyes were shut. Heir nightgown was wet with blood.

The doctor was taking the, woman's pulse. "She passed out, but she's still alive. There may be internal injuries."

Carey noticed the dripping clothes and empty hands. "These guys found me. I got a jack sent over from one of the rescue ships. Guess you didn't find anything in the garage."

Angelo shook his head.

"My God, man, you're 'soaked. I'm sorry you went through all that." .

Angelo shook his head. "It was nothing."

The doctor jabbed a hypodermic needle into the woman's arm. "Morphine for the pain," he explained. He tried to hide the worry in his eyes. "We've got to get her off the ship as soon as possible."

They wrapped the unconscious woman in a blanket and carried her up, to the promenade deck on the lower side. The fog had miraculously disappeared, and a small flotilla surrounded the ship, blazing lights reflected in the sea. Coast Guard helicopters hovered above like dragonflies. A steady stream of lifeboats plodded back and forth between the stricken liner and rescue ships.

Most of the lifeboat traffic was between the Doria and a huge passenger ship with the words Ile de France on its bow. Searchlights from the Ile were trained on the Doria. Word to abandon ship had never come down. After waiting for two hours, passengers simply went over the side on their own. Women and children and older people were being taken off first. Progress was slow because the only. way they could get off the boat was with ropes and nets.

Mrs. Carey was strapped onto a stretcher that was carefully lowered with lines down the side of the ship to a waiting lifeboat, where friendly hands reached up to receive her.

Carey leaned over the rail watching until his wife was safe, then turned to Angelo. '

"Better get your butt off this ship, my friend. She's gonna go down."

Angelo looked sadly around him. "Pretty soon, Mr. Carey I help a few more passengers first." Smiling, he said, "Remember what I say about my name." When Angelo first met the Careys he'd joked that his name meant "angel," someone who serves others.

"I remember." Carey enveloped the waiter's hand in his. "Thanks. I can never repay you. If you ever need anything, I want you to come to me. Understand?"

Angelo nodded "Grazie. I understand. Please say goodbye to the beta signora. "

Carey nodded, heaved himself over the side, and slid down a rope into the lifeboat. Angelo waved goodbye. He hadn't told Carey or anybody about the wild scene in the garage. This wasn't the time. There might never be a right time. Nobody would believe a fantastic story told by. a lowly waiter: He remembered a Sicilian saying: The bird who sings in the tree ends up in tie cooking pot. .

The death watch was almost over.

The last survivors had been taken off the ship in the pinkish

light of dawn. The captain and a standby crew stayed on the ship until the last minute to keep the liner from being claimed as salvage. Now they, too, slid down ropes into lifeboats.

As the warm morning sun climbed into a cloudless sky, the ship's list became ever sharper. By 9:50 A.M. she lay on her starboard side at a fortyfivedegree angle. The bow was partially submerged.

The Stockholm hove to about three miles away, her prow a twisted mass of metal. Debris littered the oily water. Two destroyer escorts and four Coast Guard cutters stood by Planes and helicopters circled overhead.

The end came around ten o'clock. Eleven hours after the collision, the Doria rolled completely onto her right side. The empty lifeboats that had defied all the crew's efforts to launch them floated away on their free of their davits at last. Foamy geysers exploded around the perimeter of the ship as air trapped in the hull blew out under pressure through the portholes.

Sunlight glinted on the huge rudder and the wet blades of the twin nineteenfoot propellers that had sent her steaming proudly across the ocean. Within minutes water engulfed the bow, the stern lifted at a steep angle, and the ship slid beneath the sea as if she'd been sucked under by the powerful tentacles of a gigantic sea monster.

As she sank, more seawater rushed into the hull and. filled compartments and staterooms. The pressure tearing apart metal and rivets produced that spooky, almost human moaning that used to send chills up the spines of submariners who had just sunk a ship.

The ship plunged toward the bottom in almost the same angle and position at which she sank. Two hundred twentyfive feet below, she came to a jarring stop, then settled levelly onto her sandy bier on her starboard side. Bubbles seething from hundreds of openings transformed the normally dark water around the wreck to a light blue.

Rubbish whirled around a tremendous vortex for at least fifteenteen minutes. As the water returned to normal, a Coast Guard boat moved in and dropped a marker buoy where the ship had been.

Gone from the world's sight was the twomilliondollar cargo of wines, fine fabrics, furniture, and olive oil.

Gone, too, was the incredible artworkthe murals and tapestries, the bronze statue of the old admiral.

And locked deep in the ship's interior was the black armored truck with the bulletriddled bodies and the deadly secret they had died for.

The tall blond man came .down the gangplank of the Ile de France onto Pier 84 and made his way to the customs shed. Wearing a black wool sailor's cap and a long overcoat, he was indistinguishable from the hundreds of passengers who swarmed onto the deck .

Discharging its humanitarian duty had put the French liner thirtysix hours behind schedule. It arrived in New York on Thursday afternoon to a tumultuous welcome, stayed long enough to unload seven hundred thirtythree Doria survivors. After accomplishing its historic rescue, the ship did a quick turnaround, steamed back up the Hudson River and out to sea. Time was money, after all.

' "Next," the customs officer said as he looked up from his table.

The officer wondered for a second if the man in front of him had been injured in the collision and decided the scar had healed long ago. ,

"State Department's waiving passports for survivors. Just sign this blank declaration card. All I need is your name and U.S. address," the customs inspector said.

"Yes, thank you. They told us on the ship." The blond man smiled. Or maybe it was just the scar. "I'm afraid my passport is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean." He said his name was Johnson and that he was going to Milwaukee.

The officer pointed. "Follow that line, Mr. Johnson. The Public Health Service has got to check you for communicable diseases. Shouldn't take long. Next, please."

The health inspection was brief, as promised. Moments later the blond man was through the gate. The crowd of survivors, relatives, and friends had surged from the steamship dock onto the street. There was a traffic jam of slowmoving, hornhonking trafficcars, buses, and taxis. He stopped at the curb and scanned the faces around him until a pair of eyes met his. Then two more and another. He nodded to acknowledge that he had seen his comrades, before they headed off' in different directions:

He moved away from the crowd, toward Fortyfourth Street and flagged down a taxi. He was weary from the night's exertions and looked forward to the chance to rest.

Their work was done. For now.

June 10, 2000

The Moroccan Coast

1 NINA KIROV STOOD AT THE TOP OF the ancient stairway, eyes sweeping the nearly stagnant green waters of the lagoon, thinking she had never seen a coast more barren than this isolated stretch of Moroccan shoreline. Nothing stirred in the oppressive, ovenlike heat. The only sign of human settlement was the duster of puttycolored, barrelroofed tombs that overlooked the lagoon like seaside condominiums for the departed. Centuries of sand drifting through the arched portals had mingled with the dust of the dead. Nina grinned with the delight of a child seeing presents under the Christmas tree. To a marine archaeologist, these bleak surroundings were more beautiful than the white sands and palm trees of a tropical paradise. The very awfulness of the mournful place would have protected it from her biggest fear: site contamination.

Nina vowed to thank Dr. Knox again for persuading her to join the expedition. She had refused the initial invitation, telling the caller from the University of Pennsylvania's respected anthropology department that it would be a waste of time. Every inch of Moroccan coastline must have been explored with a fine-tooth comb by now. Even if someone did discover an underwater site, it would have been buried under tons of concrete by the Romans, who invented waterfront renewal. As much as Nina admired their engineering skills, she considered the Romans Johnny-come-lately spoilers in the grand scheme of history. ,

She knew her refusal had more to do with sour grapes than archaeology. Nina was trying to dig herself out from under a mountain of paperwork generated by a shipwreck project off the coast of Cyprus in waters claimed by the Turks. Preliminary surveys suggested the wreck was of ancient Greek origin, triggering conflicting claims between these old enemies. With national honor at stake, the F16s from Ankara and Athens were warming up their engines when Nina dove on the wreck and identified it as a Syrian merchantman. This brought the Syrians into the mess, but it defused the potential for a bloody encounter. As the owner, president, and sole employee of her marine archaeological consultancy firm, MariTime Research, all the paperwork ended up in Nina's lap.

A few minutes after she told the university she was too busy to accept the invitation, Stanton Knox called.

"My hearing must be going bad, Dr. Kirov," he said in the dry nasal tones she had heard a hundred times issuing from behind his lectern. "I actually thought I heard someone tell me you were not interested in our Moroccan expedition, and of course that can't be true."

Months had passed since she had talked to her old mentor. She smiled, picturing the, snowy shock of hair, the near manic gleam behind the wirerimmed spectacles, and the roue's mustache that curled up at the ends over a puckish mouth.

Nina tried to blunt the inevitable charm offensive she knew was coming.

"With all due respect, Professor Knox, I doubt if there's a stretch of the North African coast that hasn't been overbuilt by the Romans or discovered by somebody else."

"Brava! I'm glad to see that you recall the first three lessons of Archaeology 101, Dr. Kirov."

Nina chuckled at the ease with which Knox donned his professorial robe. She was in her thirties, owner of a successful consulting business, and held almost as many degrees as Knox did., Yet she still felt like a student within his aura. "How could I ever forget? Skepticism, skepticism, and more skepticism."

"Correct," he said with obvious joy. "The three snarling dogs of skepticism who will rip you to pieces unless you present them with a dinner of hard evidence. You'd be surprised at how often my preaching falls on deaf ears." He sighed theatrically, and his tone became more businesslike. "Well, I understand your concern, Dr. Kirov. Ordinarily I would agree with you about site contamination, but this location is on the Atlantic coast well beyond the Pillars of Melkarth, away from Roman influence." '

Interesting. Knox used the Phoenician name for the western end of the Mediterranean where Gibraltar bends low to kiss Tangier. The Greeks and Romans called it the Pillars of Herakles. Nina knew from bitter classroom experience that when it came to names, Knox was as precise as a brain surgeon.

"Well, I'm terribly busy"

"Dr. Kirov, I might as well admit it," Knox interjected. "I need your help. Badly. I'm up to my neck in land archaeologists who are so timid they wear galoshes in the bathtub. We really need to get somebody into the water. It's a small expedition, about a dozen people, and you'd be the only diver.".

Knox's reputation as a skilled fly fisherman was not undeserved. He dangled the Phoenician connection under her nose; set the hook with his sympathetic appeal for help, then reeled her in with the suggestion that as the only diver she would get sole credit for any underwater finds.

Nina could practically see the professor's pink nose twitching with glee. She shuffled the folders on her desk. "I've got a ton of paperwork to finish . .

Knox cut her off at the pass. "I'm well aware of your Cyprus job;" he said. "Congratulations, by the way, for averting a crisis between NATO partners. I've taken care of everything. I have two highly competent teaching fellows who would love to gain experience in dealing with the red tape that is such a substantial part of archaeology these days. This is a preliminary survey. We'll only be a week or ten days. And by then my trusted young Myrmidons will have .dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's.

You don't have to decide this minute. I'll fax you some material. Take a peek at it and get back to me."

"How long do you need, Dr. Knox?"

An hour would do. Cheerio."

Nina put the phone down and laughed out loud. An hour.

Almost immediately, paper began to spew from the fax machine like lava from an erupting volcano. It was the project proposal Knox submitted with his funding request. He wanted money to survey an area for GrecoRoman or possibly other ruins. The standard Knox sales pitch, a tantalizing mix of facts and possibilities, designed to make his project stand out in bold relief from all the others competing for funds.

Nina breezed through the proposal with a practiced eye and shifted her attention to the map. The survey locus was between the mouth of the Draa River and the western Sahara on the Moroccan coastal plain that stretched from Tangier to Essaouria. Tapping her teeth with the tip of her ballpoint pen, she studied an enlarged section of the area. The coastal indentation looked as if the cartographer had hiccupped while drawing the " shoreline. Noting the site's proximity to the Canary Islands, she leaned back in her chair and thought how she needed to get out into the field before she went insane. She picked up the telephone and dialed.

Knox answered in midring. "We leave next week."

Now, as Nina surveyed the lagoon, the lines and squiggles on a map translated themselves into physical features. The basin was roughly circular, embraced by two pincers of blasted brick red rock. Beyond the entrance were shallows that at low tide revealed rippling mud flats. Thousands of years ago the lagoon opened directly onto the ocean. Its naturally sheltered waters would have attracted ancient mariners who commonly anchored on either side of a headland to wait for good weather or daylight. Nearby was a dry riverbed, what the locals called a wadi. Another good sign. Settlements often grew near a river.

From the lagoon a narrow, sandy path led through the dunes and eventually terminated at the ruins of a small Greek temple.

The harbor would have been too tight for Roman ships and their massive jetties. She guessed the Greeks used the inlet as a temporary anchorage. The steep shoreline would have discouraged hauling goods inland. She 'had checked the old maps, and this site was miles from any known ancient settlement. Even today, the nearest village, a sleepy Berber encampment, was ten miles away over a rutted sand road.

Nina shielded her eyes from the sun and stared. over the water at a ship anchored offshore. The vessel's hull was painted from waterline to superstructure in turquoise green. She squinted, just making out the letters NUMA, the acronym for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, emblazoned on the hull amidships. She idly wondered what a vessel belonging to a U.S. government agency was doing off a remote shoreline in Morocco. Then she picked up a large mesh bag and descended a dozen worn stone steps to where the water gently lapped the bottom stair.

As she removed her UPenn baseball cap, sunlight glinted off braids the color of ripe wheat woven together behind her head. She slipped out of an oversized Tshirt. The floral bikini she wore underneath revealed a strong, longlegged body nearly six feet tall.

Nina inherited her first name, her golden hair, her slightly roundish face, and a peasant stamina that could put male counterparts to shame from her greatgrandmother, a sturdy farm worker who found true love in a Ukrainian cotton field with a Tsarist soldier. From Nina's Georgian mother came the bold, almost Asian eyes of stormy gray, high haughty cheekbones, and lush mouth. By the time the family emigrated to the United States, the genetic airbrush had slimmed the Kirov female silhouette, narrowing thick waists and .wide hips, leaving a pleasing width and a healthy bustline.

From the bag .Nina took a Nikon digital camera in a custom-built Ikelight plastic housing and checked the strobe light. Next came an air tank and US. Divers buoyancy compensator, a blackandpurple Henderson wetsuit, booties, gloves, hood, weight belt, and mask and snorkel. She suited up and on her head attached a Niterider Cyclops light that would keep her hands free, then fastened the quickrelease buckles of her BC and snapped on her weight belt. Finally, she strapped a seven-inch Divex titanium knife to her thigh. After dipping a collection bag to a utility hook, she set. the time on her latest toy, an Aqualand dive watch with a depth display.

With no dive buddy to check her equipment, Nina went through the routine predive inspection twice. Satisfied with the results, she sat on the stair and worked her feet into her fins, then she slipped off the step before the blistering North African sun cooked her inside the wetsuit. The tepid water seeped between her skin and the neoprene wetsuit and quickly warmed to body temperature. She tested her main and extra regulators, then pushed away from the stairs, turned, and slowly breaststroked into the pondlike lagoon.

There was virtually no wave motion, and the slimy water was slightly brackish, but even with the surface scum Nina reveled in her freedom. She glided along with gentle fin flutters, pitying the expedition's land archaeologists as they crawled on sore knees wielding trowels and whisk brooms, eyes stinging with sweat-caked dust. Nina could maneuver in comfortable coolness like a plane making an aerial survey

A lowlying island topped by an anorexic scraggle of stunted pines guarded the entrance. She planned to swim directly toward the island and bisect the lagoon: She would explore each half separately, making a series of parallel runs at. right angles to the baseline. The search pattern was similar to that used to find a wreck in the open ocean. Her eyes would take the place of a sidescan sonar or magnetometer. Precision measurements came later. She simply wanted to get a feel for what lay underwater.

Once below the clouded surface, the water was relatively clear, and Nina could see to the bottom, a depth of no more than twenty feet. This meant she could snorkel and conserve air. A series of intersecting straight lines materialized and formed into rectangles created by carefully fitted stone blocks.

The stairway had continued down underwater to an old quay. It was a significant discovery because it indicated the lagoon was once a real port and not a temporary anchorage. The bottom was likely to be covered with layers of civilization over a long period of time instead of junk tossed over the side by transient sailors.

Soon she picked out thicker lines and piles of rubble. Building ruins. Bingo! Storage sheds, housing, or headquarters for a dock and harbormaster. Definitely not an overnight anchorage.

Darkness loomed, and she thought she was at the end of the quay. She passed over a large square opening and wondered if it could be a fish tank, what the ancients, called a piscine. Far too big. The size of an Olympic swimming pool.

Nina spit out the snorkel, bit down on the regulator mouthpiece, and dove straight down. She moved along one side of the yawning cavity. Coming to a corner, she turned and followed another edge, swimming until she had covered the entire perimeter. It was around one hundred by one hundred fifty feet.

Nina flicked her headlamp on and dove into the opening. The muddy floor was perfectly flat and about eight feet below the quay level. The light's narrow beam picked out broken pottery and debris. Using her knife, she pried potsherds from the mud and put them into the collection bag after carefully marking their positions. She discovered a channel and followed it seaward until it broke out into the lagoon. The opening was easily big enough to allow for the passage of an ancient ship. The space cut into the quay had all the characteristics of an artificial harbor known as a cothon. She discovered several slipways, each big enough to accommodate ships more than fifty feet long, and a true piscine, which confirmed her theory about the cothon.

Leaving the quay, she continued on her baseline course using the land spit to her right as a reference point. She swam between the island and the mainland until she found a submerged mole or breakwater a few yards below the surface, constructed of paralleJ stone walls filled with rubble. In a drier time it would have connected the mainland and the island.

Coming to the island, she shed her dive gear and walked across thorncovered slabs of rock to the other side. The island was more than fifty feet wide, almost twice as long, and mostly flat. The trees she had seen from shore barely came up to her chin.

Near the lagoon entrance were piles of stones, probably foundations, and a circle of blocks. It was the perfect spot for a lighthouse or a watchtower, offering a sharpeyed sentinel a panoramic view of ship traffic. Defenders could be summoned from the mainland whenever a sail was sighted.

Stepping inside the circle, Nina climbed onto a fragmented stair and looked out at the anchored ship she had seen earlier. Again she wondered what would bring an American government vessel to this arid and lonely coast. After a moment she retrieved her scuba equipment. The cooling and weightless environment back in the water was refreshing, and she decided her fishy ancestors had made a big mistake when they crawled from the sea onto dry land.

Nina swam across the lagoon entrance. The other peninsula started low from the land, gradually widening as it rose to a knobby crag. The sheer reddish rocks dropped straight into the water like the ramparts of a fortress. Nina dove until she was at the base of the blank wall, looking for a footpath. Finding none, she continued underwater to the seaward end of the promontory which terminated in a rocky shelf. A. perfect defensive position where archers could set up a murderous cross fire to rake the decks of any invader entering the harbor.

A horizontal slab protruded like a Stone Age awning from the rock face near the platform. Beneath the slab was a rectangular opening the size and shape of a doorway. Drifting closer, Nina squinted through her face mask lens and tried to pierce the menacing blackness. She remembered her headlamp and switched it on. The shaft of light fell on a whirl of ghostly movement. She drew back in alarm. Then a laugh bubbled from her regulator The silverscaled school of fish that had made the tunnel its home was more startled than she was.

As her pulse returned to normal she recalled Dr. Knox's warning: Don't risk your neck for a nugget of knowledge that would end up in a dusty tome read by a few. With fiendish delight he'd relate in grim detail the fates of scientists who went too far. Furbush was devoured by cannibals. Rozzini was consumed by malaria. ONeil dropped into a bottomless crevasse.

Nina was convinced Knox made the names up, but she took his point. She was alone, without a lifeline to unreel behind her. Nobody knew where she was. The very element of danger that should have repelled her was seductive in its appeal. She checked her pressure gauge. By snorkeling, she'd used her. air supply sparingly and still had time left.

She made a pact with herself to stop just inside the opening and go no farther. The tunnel couldn't be very long. Primitive tools, not diamond drills, had been used to cut through the rock. She shot some pictures of the entrance, then moved forward.

Incredible!

The floor was almost perfectly flat, the walls smooth except for shaggy marine growth.

She went in deeper, forgetting her pact and Knox's sage advice as well. The tunnel was the most beautiful artifact she had ever seen. It was already longer than a similar passageway at the submerged city of Apollonia.

The smooth sides ended abruptly, becoming a roughsided cave that narrowed and widened, meandering in more or less of a straight line, with smaller passages branching off. Sconces for lamps were set into the carbonblackened walls. The tunnel borers had extended the natural cave by making an artificial one. Nina marveled at the skill and determination of long dead Bronze Age sandhogs.

The passageway once again became wider and more polished. Nina squeezed over the top of a pile of rubble, encouraged by a greenish glow in the distance. She swam to the light, which became brighter the nearer she came.

In pursuit of knowledge Nina had crawled through piles of bat guano and lairs guarded by badtempered scorpions. As wondrous as the tunnel was, she was anxious to be out of it and drew a sigh of relief when the passage ended. She floated up a stairway and through an archway, emerging into an open space surrounded by crumbled foundations.

Nina suspected Dr. Knox had an idea of what she might find in the lagoon, but he couldn't have known the extent of it. Nobody could. Hold on, girl. Order your thoughts. Assess the details. Start acting like a scientist, not like Huckleberry Finn.

She sat underwater on a waisthigh stone block and pondered her findings. The port was probably a combined military and trading post that kept out foreign traders and guarded commercial shipping. There was a growl in her ear The dogs of skepticism were hungry for their dinner of solid scientific fact. Before she made her findings definitive, every square foot of the port would have to be explored and evaluated.

She ventured a guess that the port had sunk from a shifting of tectonic plates. Maybe during the big earthquake of A.D. 10. Quakes were not as common here as in the Mediterranean, but it could happen. Growl. I know, I know. No conclusion until all the evidence is in. She watched the bubbles from her exhalations rise to the surface, thinking there might be a quicker way to get to the truth.

Nina had a talent that went beyond the ordinary and the explainable. She had discussed it with only a few dose friends, and then in forensic terms comparing herself to an FBI criminal scene profiler who reads a crime scene like an eyewitness. Nothing psychic about it, she had convinced herself. Only a superb command of her subject combined with a photographic memory and a vivid imagination. Something like the way dowsers find water veins with a forked twig.

She discovered her talent accidentally on her first trip to Egypt. She had pressed her hands against one of the huge foundation blocks on the Great Pyramid of Kufu. It was a natural gesture, a tactile attempt to comprehend the enormity of the incredible pile of stones, but something strange and frightening happened. Her every sense was assaulted by images. The pyramid was only half as high, its leveled summit crowded with hundreds of dark men in breechcloths hoisting blocks with a primitive scaffolding. The sweat on their skin gleamed in the sun. She could hear shouts. The squeak of pullies. She yanked her hand away as if the rock had turned red hot.

A voice was saying, "Camel ride, missy?"

She blinked her eyes. The pyramid soared in a point toward the sky again. The dark men were gone. In their place was a camel driver. Grinning broadly, he leaned onthe pommel of his saddle. "Camel ride, missy? I give you good price."

"Shukran. Thank you. Not today" The driver nodded sadly and loped off. Nina pulled herself together and went back to the hotel, where she sketched out the block and pulley arrangement. Later she showed it to an engineer friend. He had stared at her drawing, muttering, "Damned ingenious." He asked if he could steal the idea to use on a crane project he had been working on.

Since Giza there had been similar experiences. It wasn't something she could turn on and off at will. If she got a long distance call from the past every time she picked up an artifact, she'd be in an insane asylum. She had to be drawn to something like an iron filing to a magnet. At a smaller version of the Coliseum, located at an imperial resort outside Rome, the images of pain and terror were so strong, the bloodsoaked sand, severed limbs, and cries of the dying so vivid, that she retched. For a while she thought she had lost her mind. She didn't sleep for several nights. Maybe that's why she didn't like the Romans.

This was no Roman amphitheater, she rationalized. Before she talked herself out of it, she swam to the edge of the quay, placed her palms on the fitted stones, and closed her eyes. She could picture the longshoremen hauling amphorae filled with wine or oil, and the slap of sails against wooden masts; but these were only imaginings. She breathed a sigh of relief. Served her right for trying to shortcut the scientific process.

Nina shot a few photographs, disappointed only that she hadn't found a shipwreck. She collected more pottery, found a halfburied stone anchor, and was taking a few last shots when she saw the roundish protuberances rising from where the bottom was sandy.

She swam over and brushed the sand away. The lump was part of a larger object. Intrigued, she got down on her knees and cleared more covering from a large stone nose, part of a huge carved face about eight feet from its blunt chin to the top of the scalp. The nose was flat and wide and the mouth broad, with fleshy lips.

The head was covered by a skullcap or closefitting helmet. The expression could best be described as a glower. She stopped digging and ran her forgers over the black stone.

The fleshy lips seemed to curl as if in speech.

Touch me. 1 have much to tell you.

Nina drew back and stared at the impassive face. The features were as before. She listened for the voice. Touch me. Fainter now, lost in the metallic burble of her breath going through the regulator.

Girl, you've been underwater way too long.

She pressed the valve on her BC. Air hissed into the inflatable vest. Heart still pounding, she ascended slowly back to her own world.

2 THE SWARTHY THICKSET MAN SAW Nina approaching the circle of tents and ran over with his hand extended. In his thick Spanish accent, Raul Gonzalez said, "May I help you carry your bag, Dr. Kirov?"

"I'm fine" Nina was used to hauling her gear around, and in fact preferred to keep a tight rein on it.

"It would be no trouble," he said gallantly, displaying his painted on grin to the fullest. Too weary to argue and not wanting to hurt his feelings, Nina handed the load over. He took the heavy bag as if it were full of feathers.

"You had a productive day?" he said.

Nina wiped the sweat out of her eyes and downed a swig from a warm bottle of lime Gatorade. Nina was no absentminded professor. In a field where a bead or a button can be a major discovery, an archaeologist is trained to look for the tiniest of details. She couldn't figure Gonzalez. She had noticed little things about him, especially when he thought nobody was looking. She had caught him studying her, the bigtoothed grin absent, the eyes under the fleshy brow as hard as marbles. Nina was an attractive woman and often drew sidelong glances from men. This was more like a lion watching a gazelle. Finally, there was just the way he was always there looking over your shoulder. Not only her. He seemed to be stalking everyone on the expedition.

Nina's elation at her discoveries overcame her normal caution. "Yes, thank you," she said. "It was productive. Very productive."

"I would expect no less of such a knowledgeable scientist. I'm very much looking forward to hearing about it." He carried the bag over to her tent and placed it out front, then wandered about the encampment as if he were an inspector general making his rounds.

Gonzalez told people he had retired early on the money he made selling Southern California real estate and was indulging his lifelong amateur love of archaeology. He looked to be in his midforties or early fifties, shorter than Nina by several inches, with a thick, powerful blacksmith's body. His slicked down hair was as shiny and black as a bowling ball. He had joined the expedition through Time-Quest, an organization that placed paying volunteers on archaeological digs. Anybody with a couple of thousand dollars could get a week's worth of spooning dirt through a sieve with a child's plastic shovel. The third degree sunburn was thrown in at no extra cost.

Counting herself and Dr. Knox, there were ten people in the party. Gonzalez, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Bonnell, an older American couple from Iowa who had come in with another pay-as-you-go organization. And to Nina's regret, there was the insufferable Dr. Fisel from the Moroccan Department of Antiquities, who was said to be a cousin of the king. Completing the party were Fisel's young assistant, Kassim, a cook, and two Berber drivers who did double duty working on the dig.

The expedition had assembled from various parts of the world in Tarfaya, an oil port on the southern coast. The Moroccan government arranged for the lease from an oil company of three nine-passenger Renault vans to carry people and equipment. The vehicles had made their way along dusty but serviceable roads, following the coastal plain for a couple of hundred miles.

Even today, much of the country was desolate and uninhabited except for small Berber settlements here and there. The territory had been largely unexplored until Mobil and a few other companies started looking for offshore oil deposits.

The camp was behind the dunes, in a parched field dotted with prickly pear at the edge of a featureless plain that rolled off to a distant high plateau. A few pitiful olive trees sucked enough moisture from the dry soil to maintain their wretched existence. What shade they cast was mostly psychological. The site was dose to piles of masonry and fallen columns where the land excavations were being conducted.

Nina made her way to one of the colorful nylon domes pitched in a circle on a flat sandy area. She washed the salt out of her face and changed into dean shorts and Tshirt. Taking her sketch pad to a folding chair, she sat outside the tent and in the afternoon light made drawings of her findings. She had covered several pages when people began straggling in from the dig.

Dr. Knox's khaki shorts and shirt were sweatstained and caked with dust, and his knees were scraped raw from crawling on hard ground. His nose was shrimp pink and starting to peel. The transformation from the halls of academia was amazing. In the classroom Knox was impeccable in his dress. But in the field he literally threw himself into an excavation like a child in a sandbox. With his pith helmet, his baggy shorts, and epaulets on his thin shoulders, he looked as if he had stepped out of an old National Geographic magazine.

"What a day," he fumed, slipping his helmet off. "I truly believe we'll have to burrow down another twenty feet before we find anything dating back any earlier than the Rif rebellion! And if you think working with me is a bloody trial, I dare you to go a few rounds with that pompous ass Fisel." The glee in his voice at being on a dig belied the grumbling. "Well, you certainly look comfortable," he said accusingly. "How did it? Never mind, I can see it in your eyes. Tell me quickly, Nina, or I'll assign you extra homework."

Knox's use of her first name recalled her days as a student. Nina saw her chance to avenge the gentle taunts she had endured in the classroom. "Wouldn't you like to freshen up first?" she said.

"No, I would not. For heaven's sakes don't be a sadist, young lady; it doesn't become you."

"I learned my craft from a good teacher," she said with a smile. "Don't despair, professor, While you drag your chair over, I'll pour us some iced tea and tell you the whole story."

Minutes later Knox sat attentively by her side, head inclined slightly as he listened. She described her explorations from the moment she stepped into the water, omitting only the discovery of the sculpted head. She felt inexplicably uneasy discussing it Later, maybe.

Knox was silent during the entire account except when Nina paused for breath, when he'd impatiently urge, "I knew it, I knew it. Yes, yes, go on."

"That's the story," she said, finishing her tale.

"Well done. Conclusion."

"I think this was a very old port," she said.

"Of course it's old," he replied with mock annoyance. "I knew that when I saw the aerial photos of your little pond from an oil company survey. Every bloody thing within a hundred meters of where we're sitting is old. But how old?"

"Remember the hungry dogs of skepticism," she reminded him

Knox rubbed his hands together, enjoying the game. "Let's assume the dogcatcher has captured the annoying creatures and for the time being they languish happily in a pound. What, dear lady, is your educated guess?"

'As long as you put it that way, my guess is that it's a Phoenician military and trading post." She handed over her sketch pad and pieces of the pottery she'd found.

Knox studied the potsherds, lovingly running his fingers along the ragged edges. He put them aside and looked at the sketches, puckering his mouth so that the mustache did a little dance on his lip. "I think," he said with obvious and melodramatic relish, "that we should run your story by the esteemed Dr. Fisel."

Gamiel Fisel sat under a large umbrella. His round body practically hid the chair it was perched on, and with his tan slacks, shirt, and matching complexion, he resembled a large caramel apple. On the table in front of him was a scattering of potsherds from the dig. He was peering through a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass at one fragment. At his side was his assistant, Kassim, a pleasant young man, supposedly a university student, who served primarily as Fisel's tea boy.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Fisel. Dr. Kirov made some interesting observations today" Knox said with undisguised pride.

Fisel looked up as if an annoying mosquito had just landed on the tip of his nose. He was not unused to women in the workplace. Many Moroccan women worked as professionals. He simply had trouble dealing with a female who was his equal in academic rank, his superior in the number of degrees held, and at least a foot taller. As a nondiver, Fisel was at Nina's mercy on the underwater site, and he didn't like not being totally in control.

Nina cut right to the chase. "I think there was a small but important port here, and that it was Phoenician."

Fisel said, "More tea, Kassim." The young man hurried over to the camp's cooking area. Fisel turned to Knox as if Nina were not there. "Your assistant has a vivid imagination. You've told her, of course, that our excavations at the primary site have produced Greek and Roman artifacts." He had a quick, nervous way of speaking, firing off sentences like bursts from a machine gun.

Nina had deferred to Fisel, but she could ignore his rudeness no longer. "First of all, I'm not Dr. Knox's assistant," she said coolly. "I'm his colleague. And second, while I have no doubt of Greco-Roman influence, the main center of activity was in the water, not on dry land. And it was Phoenician."

The sketch pad plopped onto the table, and Nina tapped the drawing of the cothon. "The Phoenicians were the only ones who cut artificial harbors like this out of dry land. I believe these shards will provide the dating to back me up:"

She dumped out her pottery fragments, not caring that they might be mixed with the others. Taking his time, Fisel picked up a piece, examined it, then studied another one. After a few minutes he looked up. His moist brown eyes boggled behind the thicklensed glasses, but he was trying hard not to show his excitement.

He cleared his throat and addressed Knox. "Surely you're not going to accept this as definitive proof of Dr. Kirov's theory."

"Of course not, Dr. Fisel. There's much work to be done, and Dr. Kirov knows that as well as we do. You must admit it's an intriguing beginning, however.

Assuming he had detected a crack in Knox's advocacy, Fisel's putative scowl turned into a fourteenkarat smile. "I am compelled to admit nothing until the case is made."

Kassim arrived with a glass of hot tea. Fisel nodded and picked up his magnifies The audience with the cousin of the king had ended.

Nina seethed with anger as she and Knox walked away from Fisel's tent. "Imperious little bastard! He knows damned well that I'm right."

Knox gave an avuncular chuckle. "My guess is that Fisel agrees entirely with your findings and will waste no time reporting them."

She grabbed the professor's arm and peered into his dusty face. "I don't understand. Why the act?"

"Oh, it's perfectly dear. He wants to claim the credit for discovering your Phoenician port."

"That's it!' She started back toward Fisel's tent. "If he thinks he's going to get away"

"Hold on, my dear. I promised you'd get credit for all underwater finds, and I meant it. Remember, we hold the important cards. You're the only one on this expedition who knows how to dive."

"He can bring in other divers."

"Yes, he can. Short, plump, bald, and nearsighted though he may be, Fisel swings a lot of weight, figuratively and literally, within his antiquities department. He can bring in all the resources he will need. In the meantime, I want you to finish your sketches, classify what you've found, and continue your survey using scientific methods."

She was still unconvinced. "What if he tries to stop me from diving?"

"This is a joint expedition. I am equal in command to him. He can only go so far until he gets permission. It will take days. If you think our red tape is formidable, remember Morocco is heavily influenced by the French, who invented the word bureaucrat. I will massage his ego, but I want you to do a very difficult thing. Consider giving Fisel some credit for this coup, if it truly turns out to be Phoenician. This is his country that we're digging up, after all. He may have some Phoenician forebears." .

Nina calmed down and allowed herself a laugh. "You're right. I'm sorry for the outburst. It's been a long day."

"No need for an apology. He is a bastard, but I'll remind him that if he doesn't have our cooperation in making this a joint find, he will have the credit taken from him by one of his own bastards at a higher level."

Nina thanked the professor, kissed him on the cheek, and returned to her tent. She worked on her sketches until the dinner bell rang. Fisel avoided her eyes at the table. The Iowa couple, who had dug up an intact water jug handle, held center stage. No one paid attention when Nina excused herself and went back to her tent.

After she finished writing a report of her findings on an IBM laptop computer, Nina propped up her noted and shot some pictures of the sketches with her digital camera. Then she fed images from the camera into the computer. The photos and sketches were razor sharp.

"Okay Fisel, let me see you try to get a jump on this. "

The computer was hooked up to a small suitcase that contained a satellite phone. The solarpowered package cost her an arm and a leg, but it put her in touch with her home base from anywhere in the world. She punched out a number and sent the electronic packet of words and photos winging through the ether until it bounced off a loworbit Inmarsat global communications satellite, which inlayed it to a dish that fed the information at the speed of light into the database at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nina clicked off her computer, satisfied that her reports and pictures were safely in the databank at the university. She was unaware that even on the 'information highway, there are such things as dangerous detours.

San Antonio, Texas

3 ON OFFICIAL BLUEPRINTS THE WINDOWLESS room near the top of the glass office tower overlooking the peaceful waters of the San Antonio River did not exist. Even the city inspectors had no idea it was there. The subcontractors who installed the soundproof walls, the separate electrical conduits, and the voiceactivated security locks were paid well to keep their mouths zipped. If they thought it strange to build a secret door through the shower stall of a private bathroom, they kept their opinions to themselves.

The room's decor was as clinically functional as a laboratory. Uncluttered beige walls. A bank of oversized IBM computer monitors and hard drives, a document safe, and a center worktable. A man sat in front of a computer, his hardened face washed by the cold light from the oversized monitor. He scrolled down several pages of type and photos and stopped at a series of line drawings.

With a click of the cursor he enlarged one particular sketch and zoomed in on a section of the screen, hard blue eyes taking in every detail. Satisfied he had seen the entire file, he saved it on a floppy disk and pressed the print command. As the highspeed printer whirred away, he put the disk in an envelope and locked it in the safe. He gathered the printed file into a manila folder, stepped through the shower stall, went through another door into his office, and switched on an intercom.

"I'll need a few minutes. Right away" he said.

"He has time now," a female voice replied. "Ten minutes in between appointments."

He left his office with the folder and walked through a maze of thickly carpeted hallways. He was tall, at least six feet, no longer young, but the only concession to age was his close-cropped silver hair and a slight stoop to his muscular shoulders. His athletic body was still limber and rock hard thanks to a Spartan regimen of diet and exercise. Because he rarely smiled or frowned, his face was relatively unlined around the mouth and eyes, as if the skin had been lifted off and stretched over the square jaw and high cheekbones.

The floor held the company's administrative offices arid could be entered only by those with hand and voice ID: The work spaces were all on other levels, and he saw nobody until he came to the spacious reception area.

The highceiling space was done in burnt red, brown, and green earth colors, repeating a stylized arrow and square Indian pattern on floor and walls. Behind the receptionist was a semiabstract mural whose brownskinned figures and giant sprouting quetzal feathers were so intertwined it was hard to tell whether the painting depicted a human sacrifice or a cocktail party. The receptionist sat at a desk that seemed to float on a carpeted sea of burnt orange, unmindful of the painted drama behind her head.

The man stopped in front of the desk and without speaking glanced toward a thick, darkwood door carved with dozens of writhing figures being tormented in a peasant artist's depiction of hell.

"Mr. Halcon will see you," said the receptionist, a middle-aged woman chosen for her blandness; efficiency, and unquestioning loyalty.

The carved door opened into a corner office that was almost as big as the reception area and repeated the Central American theme. Halcon stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, his back to the door.

"Sir, if you have a moment"

Halcon halfturned, displaying the aquiline nose, set in a pale, narrow face, the profile that had earned him his nickname in the bullring. "Come here, Guzman," he said.

Guzman crossed the room as ordered and stood beside the younger man. Halcon was in his forties, taller than Guzman by an inch or two. He was ascetically lean, almost delicatelooking. Like everything else about Halcon, appearances were deceiving. In a concession to his role as a businessman he had long ago cut off the matador's pigtail, trimmed the Valentino sideburns, and set aside the glittering uniform of the bullring. Yet under his expensive tailored suit still lurked the cruel body of the matador known as the Hawk, who had used his quickness and power to dispatch dozens of brave bulls. If there had been any complaint from the aficionados who followed his brief but illustrious career, it was that the Hawk's kills were coldly efficient and lacked passion. In another age he would have been a deadly swordsman whose blade would have found the beating hearts of men, not bulls.

"Do you know why I chose to build this particular office in this particular location, Guzman?"

"If I would venture a guess, Don Halcon, it offers a good view of many of your company's holdings."

Halcon chuckled at the response. An honestly blunt answer, as I would expect from my old guardian, but hardly a flattering one. I am not some burgher keeping an eye on his fields."

"My apologies, Don Halcon, I did not mean to offend."

"No offense taken. It was a natural assumption, but an erroneous one." His smile vanished, and his words took on the quiet, steely edge dangerous people give their voices. "I chose this office for one reason: the view it offers of the Mission San Antonio de Valero. It reminds me of what. is past, what is present, and what will be." He gestured out at the sprawl of the city visible through the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows. "I often stand here and think of how history can veer off in unexpected directions, drastically changed by the actions of the few. The Alamo was a defeat for its defenders, but it was the beginning of the end for Santa Anna. He was captured at San Jacinto, and in one decisive engagement Texas became independent from Mexico. The lesson of history is clear, is it not?"

"It wouldn't be the first time the death of martyrs brought down the powerful."

"Precisely. Nor will it be the last. What happened once can happen again. The Alamo had one hundred eighty three defenders against six thousand Mexican troops, showing that the determined few can transform the world for the many" He paused, alone with his thoughts, staring out at the sprawling city. After a moment he turned to Guzman like a man emerging from a dream.

"Why did you want to see me?"

"There's a matter of some importance, sir. I just intercepted this transmission from Morocco to the University of Pennsylvania." He handed the file over.

Halcon leafed through the material, finally fastening on the sketch, and murmured, Astounding." He looked up. "There can be no mistake?"

"Our surveillance system is practically foolproof. As you know, every archaeological expedition in the world sends proposals to our Time-Quest foundation asking for funds and volunteers. Those with serious potential are assigned priority. The computers automatically access all transmissions from the field to their home base and search for preprogrammed keywords, or fax, telex, and email messages."

"Los Hermanos has a watcher on site?"

"Yes. Gonzalez is there."

"Excellent," Halcon said. "He knows what he has to do."

Guzman nodded and clicked his heels softly As he turned to go his lips seemed to curl in a lopsided smile. But it was only a trick of the light and shadow caused by the white scar that ran from his right cheekbone to the corner of his mouth.

Morrocco

4 NINA BROUGHT THE CAMERA UP TO her face mask, framed the foundation wall in the viewfinder, and squeezed . the shutter release on the waterproof housing. The motor drive whirred softly. The last shot she needed for the photomosaic. Finally.

With a quick, sharp expulsion of air she cleared the water from her snorkel. Using an easy sidestroke, she swam toward the stairs. Mapping the bottom singlehanded had been tedious.. She first laid out a number of small, spherical plastic buoys in a tic-taetoe pattern as a guide. Then it was swim, stop, shoot. Again and again. She carried a mental blueprint of the port in her head. Had the water miraculously receded, she could have strolled blindfolded on the old quay and not bumped into a wall or fallen into a piscina or cothon

The task of assembling dozens of photos into a composite map would be formidable. She had tried to match the photos using the buoys coupled with distinctive bottom landmarks. A crude system at best, but fine for now. Nina wasn't looking for scientific precision, she wanted a dramatic package that would have the tightfisted bean counters who controlled expeditionary money dreaming of frontpage headlines in USA Today and feature stories in Time and on Unsolved Mysteries.

She hoisted herself onto the steps and got out of her dive gear. As she toweled her body dry, she looked out over the lagoon and decided to put off the buoy removal until the morning. She'd be as wrinkled as a white raisin if she spent any more time in the water. Minutes later she was loping along the path to the camp with a discernible jauntiness in her stride. There was good reason to be pleased. She had accomplished an incredible amount of work in a short time.

People were still working on the excavation, and the camp was deserted. Well, almost. As she neared the tents she saw Gonzalez at the periphery of the campsite talking to someone in a Jeep. As she approached, the Jeep drove off before she got a look at the driver's face.

"Who was that?" she said, watching the dust cloud thrown out by the departing vehicle.

The automatic Gonzalez smile clicked on as if somebody had pressed a switch. "Someone who was lost. I gave him directions."

Lost?. What was Gonzalez talking about? This wasn't like taking a wrong turn off a freeway The camp was miles from anywhere or anything. It was lonely country with nothing to attract anyone except a bunch of crazy bonediggers. You'd have to want to get lost out here. When she first saw the man in the Jeep she thought he might have been called in by Fisel, so while she didn't buy the explanation, she was relieved to hear it.

At breakfast Dr. Fisel had announced the expected arrival of Moroccan divers within a few days. He strongly "advised" Nina to curtail her explorations so as not to disturb the site. Nina leaned over the table and stuck her chin right in his fare. A camera was hardly intrusive, she said quietly, but with such cold fury in her gray eyes that Dr. Knox complained after breakfast that icicles had formed on his mustache. Fisel prissily reminded everyone of . his responsibility to his cousin the king, then retreated into an unconvincing apology about only wanting to preserve the integrity of the site.

Nina had to admit she was being somewhat devious herself. She was removing artifacts from the site, a big nono, and had told neither Fisel nor Nox. Nor was Fisel aware that her preliminary findings were sent winging off to UPenn's cybervault. The stone head still remained her secret as well. She rationalized her uncharacteristic behavior. Drastic times call for drastic measures.

Kassim, Feel's tea boy, gave her a friendly wave. Dumb as a fencepost but not a bad kid when you got to know him. Savoring the tranquility, Nina went into her tent, slipped out of her bathing suit and into dry clothes. She switched on her computer and saw the email icon blinking. The message was from Dr: Elinor Sanford, the faculty member at UPenn to whom she had directed her computer transmission.

Sandy Sanford and Nina had been undergraduate classmates before branching into their own specialties. Sandy went into Mesoamerican studies, explaining that her preferences had more to do with cuisine than with cultures. She preferred burritos to couscous. Her culinary tastes might be open to question, but her scholarship was not. She had just been appointed a faculty curator at the university's museum. Nina scrolled down her message:

Congratulations, Nina! You don't have to bring me Hannibal's head to convince me you've hit a Phoenician port! Wish I could show tire fabulous stuff you transmitted to the Jurassic set here in the hidebound halls of archaeological academia. Could start another Punic War. But I'll abide by you wishes to keep things quiet What does El Grando Professoro think? Can't watt to see you. Stay dry. Love, Say

There was more.

RS. Re sketch of the big stone head. Some kind of joke, right? I get it, you're just testing me. Check your fax line.

Nina called up her fax function. A photo of a stone face appeared on the screen. At first she thought it was the carving in the lagoon. But next to it for comparison was the sketch she had sent. She stared at the screen. The sculptures were identical. She scrolled some more. Other stone heads came into view They all could have been carved by the same sculptor. Except for slight details, primarily in their headgear, they shared the same brooding stare, broad nose, and impassive fleshy lips. Below the Pictures was another note from Sandy:

Hello again. Welcome to are of the most enduring of all Mesoarnerican mysteries. In 1938 the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian sent an expedition to Mexico to investigate reports of giant basalt heads buried up to their eyebrows. They found eleven Africantype rock figures like this at three sites in and around La Venta, sacred center of Olmec culture. Eighteen miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Six to nine feet high, up to forty tons each. Not bad considering the quarry site was ten miles away and they were carried overland without the use of the wheel or draft animals. All had that funny helmet that makes them look like they belong in the NFL. Dating figures at 800 to 700 B.C. Say, what's a nice girl like you doing messing around in Meso?

Nina typed out a quick reply:

Thanks for info. Most interesting! Due home next week. Will fill you in. : )

Love, Nina

She hit the Send key, turned the laptop off, and sat back in her chair, stunned.

A Mexican Olmec head! Calm down, lady. Go over the facts. The figure she found had African characteristics. Big deal. This Is Africa, after all. Of course, that didn't explain the match with the Mexican figures thousands of miles away. A couple of possibilities could explain the similarities. The la Venta figures might have been carved in Africa and transported to Mexico. Unlikely Not at forty tons apiece. The alternative theory wasn't much better. That a La Venta figure was carved in Mexico and transported to Africa. With either scenario, there was still the problem with the dating. The heads were carved hundreds of years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Ouch, Nina thought, I'm thinking like a diffusionist.

She looked over her shoulder as if someone were eavesdropping on her thoughts. Admitting to an open mind on diffusionism was a oneway ticket to oblivion for a mainstream archaeologist. Diffusionists believe cultures didn't evolve in isolation, that they diffused from one place to another. The similarities between the Old and New Worlds had always intrigued Nina. The UFO and Atlantis enthusiasts muddied up the waters, suggesting that the pyramids and Nazca lines were the products of aliens from outer space or beings from lost continents. A female diffusionist was a double loser in this business. She had enough problems just being a woman in a man's world.

The diffusionist theory had always faced a major hurdle: the absence of scientifically verified evidence that would prove contact between one hemisphere and another before Columbus. People could yack all they wanted about how Egyptian pyramids and Cambodian temples and Mexican mounds resembled one another. But nobody had discovered the artifact to connect them: Until now. And in a Phoenician port. Oh, Christ.

This was going to stir up one hell of a mess. It could be the biggest discovery since King Tut's tomb. The archaeological establishment would be turned topsyturvy. The thing in the lagoon proved a link existed between the Old World and the New two thousand years before Christopher Columbus conned the Spanish royals out of three ships. Enough! Nina jammed on her mental brakes before she went over the precipice. She needed to think this through with a clear head. She swatted a couple of flies and lay down on the cot. She tried to put all thoughts out of her mind and concentrate on her breathing. The next thing she knew, she was being awakened by the dinner bell.

Yawning and rubbing her eyes, she stumbled outside. A magnificent purple and gold sunset was in the making. She walked to the mess tent and sat at the opposite end of the table from Fisel, who was holding court. The same old blahblah. She tuned him out and enjoyed a chat with the Iowa couple. Excusing her. self before dessert, she went back to her tent and plunked down in front of her laptop.

Working late into the night, Nina typed up a summary to go with her mosaic photos. By the time she quit, the camp had settled down for the evening. She put on a flannel nightie, congratulating herself for her prescience in packing it. Days were hot and dry, but at night a cool breeze came in off the ocean. She slipped under her blanket and lay there listening to the laughter and Arabic conversation as the mess crew cleaned up after dinner. Before long the voices were silent and the camp was asleep.

Except for Nina. She lay on the cot wishing she hadn't taken a nap. Sandy's fax had wound her up as well. She tossed and turned, finally falling into a light slumber, only to be awakened by the sharp crackling of the fire. Her eyes blinked open, and she stared into space. Sleep wasn't meant to be.

Wide awake once more, Nina wrapped the blanket around her shoulders like a Navajo, pulled on her Teva sandals, and slipped outside. A branch of burning olive tree exploded in little red spark showers on the smoky fire. The only other illumination was from propane-powered lanterns hung outside the tents in case somebody felt the call of nature during the night.

Nina looked up at the black sky. The crystal air was so dear that it seemed she could see distant nebulae with her naked eye. Impulsively Nina grabbed a flashlight from her knapsack and set off toward the lagoon. The tombs gleamed like pewter in the light of the half moon. Coming to the staircase, she sat down on the top step and gazed out at the moonglade reflection on the lagoon.

Yellow pinpoints glowed on the ocean. The NUMA ship with the turquoise hull must still be offshore. She took a deep breath. The night smelled of stagnant water, rotting vegetation, marsh, and incredible age. She closed her eyes and listened. In her imagination clicking reeds became the slap of hide sails against wooden masts, and frog snorts the grunts of breechclothclad sailors hoisting amphorae filled with wine and oil. Before long, slivers of cold air penetrated the blanket. She shivered, realizing she had lost track of time. With a parting glance at the still lagoon, she started back.

As she crested the ridge of dunes a strange noise came from the camp. It sounded like a bird or animal crying out under the attack of a hunting predator She heard it again. This was no bird or animal. It was human. Someone in terrible fear or pain.

She picked up her pace to a trot, emerging from the dunes where she could see the camp.

It was like a scene out of Dante where faceless demons herd new arrivals to their hellish punishment. Expedition members in their night clothes were being prodded and pushed by guncarrying figures dressed in black. The Iowa couple came into view. The woman stumbled and fell. An intruder grabbed her long white hair, and she was dragged along the ground screaming in terror. Her husband tried to intervene only to be dubbed to the ground, where he lay bloodied and unmoving.

Still in his flannel pajamas, Professor Knox burst from his tent and looked around. Nina was dose enough to see the expression on his face. He appeared more bewildered than frightened. Dr. Fisel's unmistakably rotund form appeared, and someone pushed him into Knox. . Fisel shouted defiantly, although Nina couldn't hear what he said against the growing background of cries and yells. Most of the expedition people were outside now, crowded into a terrified group. Nina caught a glimpse of the drivers and cook. Gonzalez must have been with the others, but she couldn't see him.

The assailants stopped their brutal attack and moved back from the huddled assembly. Knox had regained his dignity and stood with head high. He seemed frozen in stone; his face looked a thousand years old. Fisel saw what was coming. He shouted in Arabic, but his words were lost in the ugly chatter of gunfire

The hail of bullers mowed Fisel and the others down like a scythe blade through grass. Incredibly, despite the intensity of the killing fire, pitiful moans came from the pile of bodies. Any hope Nina had of survivors vanished when two intruders stepped over the carnage. Seven shots rang out a few seconds apart. The groaning stopped. The only sound was the faint crackle of the wood fire.

Nina could hardly breathe. Her mouth felt as if it were full of sawdust, Her heart hammered madly. Her dinner rose in her throat, and she gagged as she fought her urge to vomit. She wanted to run. It was only a matter of time before the killers saw her standing at the edge of the clearing. Yet she was rooted to the spot, too scared to save her own life.

A figure broke from the shadows behind a tent and ran in her direction. Kassim! He must have been outside when the killers struck. The killers saw him trying to escape and lifted their weapons. They held their fire when one of their number dashed in pursuit of the tea boy.

Mad with fear, Kassim ran directly toward Nina without seeing her. He would have bowled her over if he hadn't tripped on a root and fallen. He tried to scramble to his feet, but his assailant was on him quicker than a falcon on a rabbit. He reached under Kassim's chin and jerked the boy's head back.

Light glinted on cold steel. Like someone cutting a pineapple, he drew the knife across the boy's throat in a swift slashing motion. Kassim's scream died in a wet gargle as his lungs filled and he drowned in his own blood.

His murderous deed accomplished, the killer stood and saw Nina. He was dressed entirely in black. A turban was wrapped around his head covering everything except eyes that burned with a murderous hate. They widened as they saw Nina, then narrowed just before he lunged, the bloodied knife held high above his head.

Nina yanked the heavy blanket from her shoulders and, wielding it in two hands like a great woolen club, she whipped it across the attacker's face. He hesitated and put his left arm up to ward off the blow, not expecting resistance from this helpless victim. Nina brought the blanket down like a hood over the killer's head and, while he was temporary blinded, drove her knee into his crotch.

Aaaaiiee!"

The scream told her she was on target. She did it again with every intention of driving her knee to his chin. She must have nearly succeeded because he crashed to the ground and writhed in pain.

The other blackclad figure saw their comrade fall and started toward Nina, but the delay gave her an advantage. She bolted like a startled deer and, long legs racing, feet pounding the ground, outdistanced her pursuers.

She could hear shouts behind her. "La mujer! La mujer!"

A sandal flew off, and she kicked the other away. Barefoot now, she was through the dune ridge descending the gradual slope to the water. The rise would hide her for a moment. As she sprinted toward the lagoon her bare foot came down on a piece of wood or sharp stone. A dagger of pain stabbed the tender flesh. She went down on one knee for a second, bit her lip until it bled, stifling the urge to yelp, then was up in a limping run.

As she ran past the darkened tombs she thought of hiding inside but quickly discarded the idea as too obvious. She'd be trapped if the killers found her. She decided instead to run along the shore and backtrack on her pursuers. That plan was shredded by the flashlight beams that lanced the darkness behind her. Her pursuers had anticipated her move. Taking their time, they spread out along the dune ridge to cut off her flanks and catch her in a classic pincers movement.

She ran straight to the lagoon. Seconds later she was standing at the top of the stairway. The killers were closing in on all sides. It was only a matter of seconds before they caught up with her.

Nina's brain worked feverishly. She could dive off the steps and swim underwater, but it would only delay the inevitable. When she came up for air the killers would spray the lagoon until their bullets found her. She had to stay submerged until she was safely out of range. Impossible. No way.

Fool. Of course there's a way. She set off along the rocky shore. Her darting eyes probed the water, searching in the moonlight. She saw the faint gray splotch of a marker buoy.

Lights seemed to be coming from every direction. Soon she'd be caught in the closing net.

Not this fish, she vowed. Gathering her strong legs beneath her like springs, Nina leaped off the rocks, her arms reaching straight out. She hit the water in a distance covering shallow racing dive and swam for the marker buoy with quick hard strokes. The buoy flared into orange brilliance as a light from shore found its reflective surface. The water all around her was covered with shimmering blobs.

A few strokes and she was at the buoy.

A fusillade opened up, and the lagoon's surface erupted in miniature geysers off to her right side.

No time to build up her air supply

She filled her lungs in a frantic gulp, and her supple body jackknifed in a quick surface dive. Directly under the marker, faintly illuminated by the glow of lights from above, was the stone arch. She wriggled under the arch, reached out until she felt a hard vertical edge, and pulled herself into the the lightless bowels of tire tunnel.

As she swam her fingers brushed the smooth wall like a crude, tactile sonar.

Making it to the end of the tunnel was a long shot without air and fins, but even if this damned hole became her tomb, at least she'd have the satisfaction of knowing her pursuers would never learn her fate. She slowed slightly, trying to keep a steady, even pace. Panic would steal oxygen and energy.

She swam deeper. The wall became rough to the touch. She was in the cave. The going would be trickier here. She slowed even more to navigate the twists and turns. Went down a blind alley and had to back out. It felt like hours since she had taken a breath. Her lungs pressed against her ribs as if her chest were going to explode. How long could she hold her breath? A minute? Two? Maybe, if she'd had a chance to hyperventilate and build up capacity. God, how much farther?

Her head slammed into a hard surface. She was sure she felt the plates in her skull shift. She cried out instinctively and lost more air.

Damn. She'd forgotten about the pile of rubble. She groped over the top of the debris and squeezed her way through the opening. She was past the halfway mark!

The wall became smooth again. Good. She was back in the manmade tunnel. Only a few dozen meters. Her lungs were on fire. She let out a small breath as if that would relieve the pressure and started making sounds like a pigeon. God, she didn't want to drown. Not here. She kicked desperately with no attempt to conserve energy.

The lack of oxygen made her dizzy. Next she'd start to black out and swallow water. A painful, excruciating death. Nina stubbornly resisted taking that first fatal breath. She groped for the wall. Nothing. Then felt for the ceiling. Again nothing. Wait! She was out of the tunnel! She arched her body upward, kicked frantically, and broke the surface, where she sucked in great gulps of air.

In time her breathing became almost normal again. She treaded water, looking toward shore, where lights moved like fireflies. Then she struck off around the tip of the promontory and swam parallel to the beach. When she could swim no more, she angled in toward land. Weeds brushed her feet and her toes felt the cool, mucky bottom. She crawled onto the sand but rested only a few minutes before she got to her feet and walked along the beach. She came to the old riverbed, followed the wadi inland a few hundred meters, then climbed the banking and walked across the dunes until she could go no farther. She crawled into a thicket of high grass and lay down.

The horror of the massacre began to play back in her mind. Dr. Knox. Fisel. Kassim. All dead. Why? Who were those men? Why were they after her? Bandits who thought the expedition had discovered treasure? No, the concentrated fury of the attack was too organized for bandits. It was meant to be a massacre.

Shivering with the cold, Nina removed her flannel nightie, wrungthe water from it, and put it back on over her camisole top and underwear: The wet fabric raised goosebumps the size of eggs. She broke off clumps of grass and stuffed them under the nightie until she looked like a scarecrow The primitive insulation was scratchy, but it helped keep the cold air out. The shivering subsided somewhat, and before long she fell asleep.

Near dawn she was awakened by a murmur of voices coming from the direction of the riverbed. Maybe help had arrived and they were searching for her. She held her breath and listened.

Spanish.

Without a second's delay she slithered into the tall beach grass like a frightened salamander.

5. THE SHARP. BRITTLE GRASS STEMS were like a fakir's bed of nails that ripped at Nina's nightgown and tore the skin on her bare arms and legs. Disregarding the pain, she dug her knees and elbows into the sand and kept moving. She had no other choice. If she stood up to run, she'd be dead.

The killers had found her too quickly, almost as if they had followed a map to her hiding place! She cursed in the native tongue of her grandmother. They did have a map. The harborworks diagram she had painstakingly drawn lay in plain sight on her work table. The tunnel had been rendered as two bold lines and dearly labeled. Once the killers discovered her underwater escape route, they had only to search the beach for footprints and follow them into the wadi.

The voices rose in pitch and volume, became more excited, coming from where she had climbed out of the riverbed. The killers must have found where she'd disturbed the banking. Nina made a sharp turn and crawled parallel to her original route, doubling back until she came to the riverbed. She peered from between blades of grass. No one was in the wadi. She slid down the banking and raced with head low toward the beach. The riverbed was churned up by footprints which indicated that a sizable party was tracking her down. Soon she glimpsed the bluegreen of the sea. The turquoise ship was still anchored off-shore. She paused where the waterway once emptied into the ocean. The empty beach beckoned like a highway in both directions.

Voices and the crunch of footsteps came from behind. Again the killers had spread out like hunters trying to flush a quail. She'd be seen whether she went to the right or the left. As on the previous. night, the watery route remained her only choice.

Nina peeled off her ripped and sandcaked nightgown, tossed it aside, and sprinted in camisole and underwear across the hard-packed gravelly delta washed out by centuries of river flow. She hoped the dune ridge would screen her until she reached the water's edge. Still no outcry as she splashed into the shallows. She was aware how vulnerable she was, completely out in the open with no darkness or tunnel to hide her. Any second the killers would crest the dunes, and she'd be an easy target for their bullets.

The kneedeep water covering the salt flats seemed to go on forever, slowing her progress but offering no protection. She pressed on, leaping with long strides, and eventually the water got to waist level. She dove under just as angry lead bees filled the air. The water behind her erupted in a patch of angry foam. Nina dove under and swam off at an angle for as long as she could, surfaced for air, and dove again, porpoisestyle. Once beyond the brownish water over the flats and into the deeper blue ocean, she glanced back and saw maybe a dozen figures on shore. Some had waded into the shallows. The gunfire seemed to have stopped.

Pivoting, Nina fixed her eye on the ship, concerned that it would weigh anchor and leave her between the devil and the deep blue sea. A swim to the Canary Islands wasn't in her plans. Rolling onto her back, she looked up at the puffy gilt-edged clouds and caught her breath. At least it was a good day for a swim. She rested only a minute. She had to get the blood moving in her body again.

Pace yourself, rest when necessary, and count your blessings. Calm sea and no wind or currents. No different from the swim phase of a triathlon, except for one thing: if she lost this race, she would die. Taking a bead on the ship's main mast, she threw one arm in front of the other.

Without her wristwatch, there was no telling how long she swam. The water grew colder the deeper it got, and she counted strokes to take her mind off the energy-sapping chill. Waving at the ship would be a waste of time. Her arm would look like tire neck of a floating seabird.

She tried singing sea chanteys. The old shipboard work songs helped keep the rhythm of strokes.

Her repertoire was slim, and after she'd sung "Blow the Man Down" for the fiftieth time she simply chopped away at the sea. She drew closer to the ship, but her strokes were becoming sloppy, and she stopped to rest more often. At one point she spun around and was pleased to see she was leaving the low brown shore far behind her. To give herself courage she imagined climbing aboard the ship and washing away the salty dryness of her mouth with a steaming mug of hot coffee.

The deep thrumming sound was so faint she didn't notice it at first. Even when she stopped to listen Nina thought it might be water pressure in her head, or maybe even the noise of a ship generator. She rolled one ear in the water and listened.

The droning was louder.

Nina slowly wheeled around. A dark object was racing in her direction from shore. She thought it was a boat at first, but as it grew quickly in size Nina made out a squat ugly black hull she recognized as that of a large hovercraft, an amphibious vehicle that moves across land and sea on a cushion of air.

It moved back and forth in a series of sharpangled turns, but Nina sensed this was no rescue boat executing a search pattern. Its course was too determined, too aggressive. All at once it stopped zigzagging and came straight at her like a bullet. She must have been spotted. Rapidly it closed the distance and was practically on top of her when she dove as deep as she could go.

The hovercraft skimmed overhead on its teninch cushion, churning the water into a wild frenzy. When she could stay under no longer, Nina surfaced and sucked in air, only to cough as the purple exhaust fumes filled her lungs. The hovercraft spun around and made another pass.

Again she dove. Again she was tossed and buffeted only to fight her way back to the surface, where she bobbed in the wake.

The hovercraft stopped, settling down into the water with its engines purring, facing Nina like a big cat toying with a mouse. A weary and waterlogged mouse. Then the engines came to life, the hovercraft rose up on invisible legs and charged again.

Nina dove and was tumbled like a rock in a polishing machine. Her brain was numb; blood thundered in her ears. She was reacting on pure instinct. The game would end soon. The damned thing could turn on a dime. Each time she surfaced she had less time to take in air, and the craft was closer than before.

The blunt hull was coming at her again, although she could hardly see it with the exhaust cloud and her eyes bleary and stinging from salt water. She was too exhausted to dive and wouldn't have the strength to fight her way up from the sea again. She made a pitiful attempt to swim out of the way, but after a few strokes she turned to face her attacker as if she could beat it back with her fists.

The hovercraft was nearly on top of her, its flatulent roar filling her ears. She clenched her jaw and waited.

The horror of the past several hours was nothing compared to what happened next. The hovercraft was only seconds away when her ankles were clutched in a viselike grip and she was dragged down into the cold depths of the sea.

6 ARMS FLAILING LIKE A WINDMILL IN a gale, Nina struggled to break free, but the iron lock on her ankles never let up even as the maelstrom created by the hovercraft whipped the water around her to a wild frenzy. She emptied her lungs in one last defiant gesture, an angry, frustrated scream that came out as a muted explosion of bubbles.

The grip on her legs relaxed, and a vaguely human form began to take shape in the turbulent cloud of bubbles kicked up by the hovercraft. Like some alien cyclops from a UFO the amorphous shape came closer and solidified until the plexiglass of a diver's mask was only inches from her face. Peering from behind the lens were piercing light blue eyes that projected strength and reassurance rather than menace.

A gloved hand came up, wagged a regulator back and forth in front of her nose, and pressed the purge button so the belching mouthpiece would get her attention. Nina grabbed the regulator and hungrily bit down. No flowerscented breath of summer was ever sweeter than the lifegiving compressed air that flowed into her lungs. The leveled hand was moving up and down.

Take it easy. Slow down.

Nina nodded to show she understood the diver's signal and felt a gentle squeeze on her shoulder. She continued to breathe off the "octopus" backup emergency hose until eventually her panic passed and her breathing became more rhythmical.

Another hand signal. The forefinger and thumb formed into a vague O.

Okay?

Nina imitated the gesture.

I'm Okay.

Behind the mask a blue eye winked. She didn't know who this aquaman was or where he came from, but at least he was friendly. The diver's head was covered by his closefitting hood and a combined helmetmask arrangement. She could see only that he was a big man with wide shoulders.

Nina looked up. The light was shredded in the wake of the hovercraft's violent passage, and engines rumbled through the water. They were still looking for her.

Pressure on her shoulder again. Aquaman pointed toward the surface and clenched his hand in a fist.

Danger.

She nodded vigorously. The thumb pointed downward. She looked below her dangling legs into the gloomy depths. Even the unknown was preferable to the real dangers that lurked above. She nodded again and gave the okay signal. He clasped one hand in the other.

Hold hands.

Nina took his proffered glove, and slowly they began to descend.

The water changed from cobalt to indigo as they continued their measured plunge, becoming so dark that Nina felt the cold bottom muck before she saw it.

From his belt the diver produced a small but powerful high-intensity Tektite strobelight and held it above his head. She dosed her eyes so as not to be blinded by the intense silvery-white flash she knew was coming. When she looked again an undersea firefly was blinking in the distance.

The diver put his forefingers together.

Swim side by side in that direction.

Again holding hands, they swam toward the pulsating light until they neared a second diver. He saw the swimmers coming his way, switched off the strobe he was holding, and his hand went to the microphone button of his Aquacom headset.

"I can't take you anywhere," he said. "I let you out of my sight for a minute, and you show up with a real live mermaid."

The first diver let his eyes travel over Nina's body and decided the description wasn't far off the mark. With her golden tresses, long legs, and minimal covering, Nina easily could have passed for a mythical sea sprite, except for one thing.

"Mermaids are half fish," he said.

"I like the new improved model better. What's her name?"

"Good question. We haven't been formally introduced yet. I bumped into her when I went up top to check on the ship. She was in a bit of trouble, so I gave her a hand. Two hands, actually"

Nina had never used underwater communicators herself, but she recognized the equipment and knew they must be talking about her. As grateful as she was, she wished they would cut their conversation short. She was freezing If she didn't move soon, she'd pass out. She crossed her arms in front of her chest.

I am cold.

The diver she had dubbed Aquaman nodded. With the protection of his drysuit, he had forgotten how cool it must be for an unprotected body.

"Let's get our mermaid back to the ship before she turns into a frozen fish stick."

The other diver checked his compass and led the way. Nina's new friend signaled her once more to swim side by side and gently took her hand. She assumed they were heading for the ship, but in her cold and exhausted condition she wasn't sure she could make it. The diver seemed to sense her struggle to follow with no fins on her feet and squeezed her hand several times in encouragement.

They swam for only a few minutes before they glided down again. A pair of yellow objects sat on the bottom. They were made of plastic and shaped like fat miniature torpedoes with ears. Nina recognized them as DPVs, diver propulsion units, or sea scooters as they were more commonly called.

The divers each picked up a DPV and squeezed the throttles. There were low whines as the battery-driven twin motors in the Stingrays kicked their twin propellers into action. Aquaman pointed to his back. Nina grabbed onto his shoulders, and they ascended to midwater where it was marginally warmer.

As they glided along Nina's diver called the ship and asked if anyone could see a big hovercraft in the vicinity. He wasn't one to take chances.

"There was a hovercraft around earlier," the message came back. "It headed for land and seems to have disappeared."

"Roger. Please be prepared for a female visitor."

There was a slight pause. "Say again?"

"Never mind. Just be prepared to treat hypothermia."

They surfaced near the ship and swam around to the stern. A welcome party awaited to help Nina aboard and wrap her in towels and blankets. Nina's face was mottled, and her lips were blue. She refused the stretcher but was glad for a helping hand as she walked with wobbly legs, teeth chattering, to the infirmary. She limped on the foot she'd injured escaping the assassins.

The two divers eased out of their gear and lost no time getting to the infirmary. They waited patiently outside the dosed door like expectant fathers. Before long the physician's mate, an attractive and trim young woman who served as the ship's doctor, came out into the passageway

"Is she all right?" the bigger man said.

The mate smiled. "That's one tough lady" she said, admiration in her voice. "I've put antiseptic on her cuts and bruises. She was practically hypothermic, so I just want her to stay warm for now She can have a cup of bouillon soon."

"Can we see her?"

"Sure. You guys keep her entertained while I see if I can round up some clothes and square away a bunk in my cabin where she can get some rest in privacy."

"What's her name?"

The mate raised an eyebrow. "You don't know? You gentlemen must be spending too much time underwater, especially you, Zavala. I thought you'd know her telephone number and what kind of flowers and restaurants she likes by now"

Jose "Joe" Zavala's reputation had followed him from Washington, which was not surprising, since he had once dated the physician's mate. Always charming with the ladies, he was much in demand by many single women for his young Ricardo Montalban good looks. A slight, almost shy smile played around his lips. "I must be slipping," he said.

"That'll be the day" She smirked and hurried briskly off on her quest.

Nina was sitting on an examination table when the two men stepped into the room. She was wearing a baggy navy sweatsuit, and a thick woolen blanket was wrapped around her shoulders. Although her eyes were redrimmed from saltwater immersion and her long hair was matted, color had returned to her face, and her lips had lost their bluish tinge. Her hands were cupped around a ceramic coffee mug, enjoying its warmth: She looked up and saw the tall man filling the doorway. With his husky physique and the contrast between his walnut skin and near-white hair color, he looked like a Norse hero from a Wagnerian opera. Yet his voice was quite gentle when he spoke.

"Hope we're not intruding," he said tentatively.

Nina brushed a long wavy strand out of her face. "Not at all. Come on in."

He stepped inside, followed by the dark-complexioned man with a nice smile. "My name is Kurt Austin, and this is Joe Zavala."

"I'm Nina Kirov" Nina recognized the Aquaman's eyes she had seen behind the face mask. They reminded her of the color of a coral reef beneath smooth water. "I think we've already met."

Austin grinned, pleased at the recognition. "How are you feeling?"

"Not bad, thanks. I'll be better after a hot shower." She looked around. "What ship is this?"

"The NUMA research vessel Nereus."

"You're with the National Underwater and Marine Agency?"

"That's right. I'm head of the NUMA Special Assignments Team. Joe is the team's marine engineer."

"I like to think of myself as the team's propulsionist," Zavala said.

"Joe's being modest. He is the one who keeps us moving on, under and above the sea."

Zavala, in fact, was a professional in every kind of propulsion. He could repair, modify, or restore any engine, be it steam, diesel, or electric and whether it was in an automobile, ship, or aircraft. Zavala never hesitated to get his hands greasy when confronted with a mechanical problem. He had designed and directed constriction of numerous underwater vehicles, manned and unmanned, including some aboard the research vessel. His talents extended to the sky as well. He had two thousand hours as a pilot in helicopters and small jet and turbo prop aircraft.

"You say you're with a special assignments team."

"That's right. Four of us form the team's nucleus. We've got a deep ocean geologist and a marine biologist, but they're on other assignments. Basically we handle jobs outside the realm of NUMAs ordinary tasks." And outside the realm of government oversight, he might have added.

"What on earth is your ship doing here?"

"We're on a shakedown cruise on our way from the Mediterranean," Austin said. "The Moroccan government is worried offshore oil drilling is affecting its sardine fishery. Nereus was going to be in the area, so we said we'd do a quick bottom survey."

"Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea," Nina murmured, cocking her head in thought. "There's a quote from Hesiod, the Greek poet: 'A trusty and gentle god who thinks just and kindly thoughts and never lies.' "

Austin glanced at Zavala. Maybe Nina really was a mermaid. She was certainly lovely enough. "I don't know if the ship qualifies as the Old Man of the Sea. The Nereus was launched only a couple of months ago, but Hesiod was right about not lying. This ship is packed from stern to stem with state-of-theart survey gear."

"The ship's designer says we scientific types are only on board as ballast," Zavala said.

Nina was having a hard time reconciling the broad-shouldered Austin and his softspoken companion with the scholarly scientists she was used to. She sized the two men up with an analytical eye. At six-foo-tone and two hundred pounds, none of it fat, the broadshouldered Austin was built like a professional football player. He had the deeply tanned face of someone who spent most of his time outdoors, with the metallic burnishing look that comes with constant exposure to the sea. Except for the laugh lines around his mouth and eyes, the skin was unwrinkled. Even though he was only pushing forty, Austin's hair was a premature steely gray, almost platinum white.

At five-foot-ten, the darkly handsome Zavala was less powerfully built than Austin, yet his one-hundred-seventy-five-pound frame was flexibly muscular, particularly around the arms and neck, and there were traces of scar tissue around his eyebrows, the legacies of having financed his way through college by boxing professionally as a middleweight. He won twenty-two fights, twelve by knockouts, and lost six. His straight black hair was combed straight back. The humorous, slight smile she had seen when he first came into the examination room hadn't left his lips. Remembering the mate's comment, she could see how a woman could be drawn to the soulful brown eyes.

Their gentlemanly manners couldn't disguise a rough-and-ready quality. The brawnier Austin was positively genial now, but she remembered his fierce determination when he'd yanked her out of the way of the hovercraft. Behind Zavala's gregariousness lurked a flinty hardness, she suspected. The way the two men meshed, like gears in a well-oiled machine, as they got her safely to the ship demonstrated that they were used to working as a team.

"Sorry for being so rude," she said, remembering her rescue. "I haven't thanked you both."

"My apologies for sneaking up on you with the jaws routine," Austin said. "It must have been frightening."

"Not half as frightening as having that ugly boat playing water polo with my head. I can never thank you enough. Please sneak' up and pull me out of danger any time you want." She paused. "One dumb question, though. Do you normally swim around in the Atlantic Ocean waiting for damsels in distress?"

"Dumb luck," he said with a shrug. "Joe and I were puttering around below. I surfaced to get a bearing on the ship and saw you playing dodge 'em with the hovercraft. My turn to ask a question. What was that all about?"

Her smile vanished. "Simple. They were trying to kill me."

"I think that was fairly obvious, but why?"

"I don't know," she said in a monotone, her eyes glazed. .

Austin sensed she was trying to avoid talking about something. "You haven't told us where you came from," he said gently.

It was like pulling a plug. "Dear God," Nina whispered. "The expedition. Dr. Knox."

"What expedition?" Austin said.

She stared into space as if trying to remember a dream.

"I'm a marine archaeologist. I was with a University of Pennsylvania party working an excavation not far from here."

She related the story of the massacre and her escape. The tale was so fantastic Austin might not have believed it if he hadn't seen the hovercraft attack or the unmitigated fear in Nina's face. When the narrative was finished Austin turned to Zavala.

"What do you think?"

"I think we ought to go take a look for ourselves."

"Me, too. We'll call the Moroccan authorities first. Ms. Kirov, do you think you can give us directions to your camp?"

Nina had been fighting off the survivor's guilt at being the only one who escaped certain death. She needed to do some. thing. She slidoff the table and stood on unsteady legs.

"Better than that," she said with a steely edge to her voice. "I'll show you."

7 CAPTAIN MOHAMMED MUSTAPHA OF the Moroccan Royal Gendarmerie leaned against the sun-warmed fender of his Jeep and watched the tall American woman walk slowly back and forth across the sandy clearing, her head bent toward the ground.

Like most of the country's rural policemen, the captain occupied his days chasing down truants among the village schoolchildren, filling out traffic accident reports, or checking papers of strangers, of whom there were pitifully few. The disappearance of a camel he investigated last year stirred up exciting possibilities of rustling before it was determined to be nothing more than a runaway. Yet that was the closest he'd come to tracking down a vanished archaeological expedition.

Mustapha was familiar with the area the Berbers called the Place of the Dead for the old tombs, and he was aware of the nearby ruins. It was far off the beaten track in a patrol territory that covered hundreds of square miles. He had visited the lonely spot once and stayed only long enough to decide he would not come back unless he had to.

The woman stopped and stood for a moment, hands on hips as if she were lost, then she walked over to the Jeep. "I don't understand it," she said, her brow wrinkled in puzzlement. "We were camped right here. The tents, the. vans. Everything has vanished."

The captain turned to the broadshouldered man whose hair was the color of the snow on the Atlas Mountains. "Perhaps Mademoiselle is mistaken about the location."

Nina glared at the police offices "Mademoiselle is not mistaken."

He sighed. "These people who attacked you. Bandits?"

She considered the suggestion. "No, I don't think they were bandits."

Mustapha gave a Gallic shrug worthy of a Parisian boulevardier, lit up a Gauloise, and pushed his visor back over his black hair. He was somewhat uncomfortable at being in the presence of a woman who had her legs and arms uncovered, but he was not an insensitive man. He'd have to be blind not to see the lacerations that streaked her skin, and she was clearly distraught. Yet he could observe with his own eyes that there were no tents, no pile of dead bodies, no vehicles. In fact, there was nothing to indicate the story was true.

The officer took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke out his nostrils. "I was notified, of course, that an expedition was near the Place of the Dead. Perhaps they left without telling you."

"Great," Nina snapped. "Of all the cops in Morocco, I get a Berber Inspector Clousseau."

Nina's frayed nerves had made her irritable. Austin couldn't blame her for being shorttempered with the policeman's obtuseness after all she'd been through but decided it was time to intervene. "Nina, you said there was a big campfire. Could you show me about where it was?"

With the police officer trailing leisurely after them, Nina led the way to the approximate center of the clearing and drew an X in the dirt with the tip of her shoe.

About here, I'd say"

"Do you have a shovel?" Austin asked the policeman.

"Yes, of course. It is a necessary tool for driving in the desert."

Mustapha sauntered over to his Jeep, and from a tool chest he produced a folding shorthandled army-issue spade. Austin took the spade and knelt at Nina's feet, where he began to dig a series of parallel trenches about six inches deep. The first two produced nothing of interest, but the third hit pay dirt, literally.

Austin scooped a handful of blackened earth and smelled it. Ashes from a fire." He placed his palm on the ground. "Still warm," he said.

Nina was only halflistening. She was staring behind Austin at a patch of ground that seemed to be moving,

"There," she whispered.

The dark blot was formed by thousands of tiny swarming creatures. With the edge of the shovel blade Austin cleared a space in the shiny duster of ants and started to dig. Half a foot below the surface he turned up a spadeful of dark redstained earth. He expanded the hole. More reddish stain. The ground was soaked with it. Nina got down on her knees beside him. The cloying smell of dried blood filled her nostrils.

"This is where they were shot," she said, her voice tight with restrained emotion.

Captain Mustapha had been staring dreamily off into space, wondering when he'd be able to get home to his wife and children and a good meal. Sensing the change in atmosphere, he threw his cigarette aside and came over to kneel beside Nina. His nut brown face turned a shade lighter as he realized the significance of the discolored soil.

Allah be praised," he murmured. Seconds later he was at his Jeep talking in rapid Arabic into the radio.

Nina was still on her knees, her body rigid, gazing at the earth as if the horrible events of the night before were gushing out of the shallow hole. Austin figured that she would fall apart if he didn't tear her away. He took her arm and helped her to her feet. "I'd be interested in a look around the lagoon, if you don't mind."

She blinked like a sleeper suddenly awakened. "That's a good idea. Maybe there's something there . . ." She led the way through the dunes. The Zodiac inflatable that had transported them from the NUMA ship was pulled up onto the stone stairway

Nina scanned the lagoon that was so peaceful now. "I can't believe they even took my marker buoys," she said with bitter humor. With Austin a step behind, she walked along the rocky shoreline describing the unseen tunnel and cothon. Austin pointed out a dozen or so fish floating on the otherwise featureless surface.

"Probably oxygen deprivation," Nina said. "The lagoon isn't terribly healthy for living things." She smiled at the unintentional irony. "There was something else I didn't mention before." She briefly described the stone head she found. Austin was unable to hide his disbelief.

"Olmec! Here?" He chewed his lower lip, trying without success to think of a polite way to express his doubt. "Not a chance."

"I wouldn't believe it either if I hadn't seen it. I bet you'll change your mind after a short swim. I'll show you." She kicked off her borrowed sneakers. Austin wouldn't mind a chance to cool off, and the swim would take Nina's mind off the grim find back at the clearing. Their shorts and T-shirts would dry quickly in the sun.

Nina dove in, and Austin followed. They swam a short distance until Nina stopped to take a bead on a couple of landmarks. She breaststroked with her head underwater. After a minute or so, she jackknifed in a surface dive and went straight down. Near the bottom she swam in a circle, then shot to the surface, with Austin right behind hex ,

"It's gone," she shouted breathlessly. "The figure is gone!"

"You're sure this is the right spot?"

"No mistake. I lined up two landmarks when I set a buoy here. The damned thing has disappeared. C'mon, I'll show you." Without another word she dove again.

When Austin caught up with her, she was swimming back and forth near the bottom, pointing at what looked like a moon crater. She picked something from the mud, and they headed up again to face each other, treading water.

"They blew it up," she said, waving a piece of blackened rock in the air. "They blew the stone head to pieces." She began to swim toward land.

Zavala was waiting for them at the stairway He'd been checking the camp's perimeter.

"The captain says to tell you he called his brigade headquarters," he said. "They're going to get in touch with the Surete Nationale in Rabat. The Surete handles the big criminal investigations."

Nina handed her find to Austin. "It's basalt, volcanic. I'm sure it's from the figure."

Austin studied the rock. "The edges are ragged and charred. This piece has been in a recent explosion." He squinted at the lagoon. "That explains those dead fish."

"It doesn't make sense," Nina said with a shake of her head. "They kill everybody, try to kill me. Then, instead of running off, they go to the trouble of blowing up an artifact. why?"

A silence followed in which nobody offered an answer. Austin suggested they check in with the captain and get back to the ship. They started walking back to the campsite with Nina taking the lead. Zavala purposely lagged behind and walked beside Austin. Speaking in a low tone so Nina wouldn't hear, he said, I told the captain that maybe he'd like to have someone dig around the excavation."

Austin raised an eyebrow

"Nina said the expedition had been working for several days," Zavala added. "Yet there was no open excavation. Every trench had been filled in. That suggest anything to you?"

"Afraid it does. It might have been a case of the victims unknowingly digging their own graves."

Zavala handed Austin a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The round lenses were shattered. "I found these near the dig."

Austin glanced at the eyeglasses and without a word slipped them into his pocket.

As the Zodiac pulled up beside the research vessel, Nina's eyes appreciatively appraised the meld of function and form built into the sleek bluegreen hull.

"When I saw the Nereus from shore yesterday, I thought it was a magnificent ship. It's even more beautiful up close."

"She's more than beautiful," Austin said, helping Nina onto the stern deck. "She's the most advanced research vessel in the world, two hundred fifty feet from stem to stern, with miles of fiberoptics and highspeed data communications in between. The Nereus has bow thrusters so she can turn on a dime or keep steady in a rough sea, and the latest in submersible vehicles. We've even got a hullmounted sonar system to map the bottom without getting our toes wet."

Austin pointed out the tall cubeshaped structure behind the bridge. "That high superstructure is the science storage area. Inside are wet labs with running seawater. We keep the submersibles, camera sleds, and dive gear there. The ship was built to run with a small crew, around twenty. We can accommodate more than thirty scientists."

With Nina still limping from her foot injury of the night before, they went up three decks into a passageway and stopped at a cabin door. "This is where you'll bunk for the next couple of days."

"I don't want to put anyone out."

"You won't. We've got an odd number of female crew aboard, and there's an empty bunk in the physician's mate cabin. You're conveniently located right next to the library and close to the most important part of ship. C'mon, I'll show you."

He led the way along the passageway to the galley, where Zavala sat at a table drinking espresso and reading a faxed version of The New York Times. The airconditioned sterility was a potent antidote to the desolation at the Place of the Dead. The galley was the standard shipboard decor, Formica and aluminum tables and chairs bolted to the deck. But the aromas coming from the kitchen were not the usual smells of bacon and burger grease that clung to most ships' galleys.

Nina sat down, happy to take the weight off her sore foot. "I must be famished," she said, lifting her chin to inhale. "It smells like a four-star restaurant in here."

Zavala put the paper down. Five-star. We underpaid NUMA types must endure many hardships. The wine list is excellent, but you'll find only California vintages in our cellar."

"This is a U.S. vessel," Austin said in exaggerated apology. "It wouldn't do to have a Bordeaux or Burgundy aboard, though our chef did graduate from Cordon Bleu, if that makes you feel better."

"The dinner choices tonight are steak au poivre and halibut au beurre blanc," Zavala added. "I must apologize for the chef. He's from Provence and tends to go heavy on the basil and olive oil."

Nina looked around at the functional surroundings and shook her head in amazement. "I think I'll survive."

With Nina relaxed, Austin decided it was a good time to bring up an unpleasant subject. First he brought her a tall glass of iced tea. "If you're okay discussing last night again, I'd like to go over what we know in case we missed something," Austin said.

She took a sip of tea as if the brew would fortify her. "I'll be all right," she said, and began to recount again the story of what happened the night before.

Austin listened, eyes half dosed in a sleeping lion imitation, absorbing every word and inflection, tumbling the facts over in his mind, looking for inconsistencies with the first account.

When she had finished he said, "I think you're right not going with Captain Mustapha's bandit theory. Bandits might have killed some of your people trying to rob them, but from what you described this was a deliberate massacre."

"What about Muslim fundamentalist terrorists?" Zavala ventured. "They've killed thousands of people in Algiers."

"Maybe, but terrorists usually like to advertise what they've done. This bunch went out of its way to hide evidence. Why would fundamentalists destroy the stone figure? That's another thing that bothers me, by the way. They'd need specialized explosives to do that."

"Which means they would have known about the statue ahead of time," Zavala said.

"That's right. They came prepared for underwater demolition."

"Impossible," Nina responded. Then, less sure, she said, "I don't see how they could have known about it."

"Me neither," Zavala said. "You're certain they spoke Spanish?"

She nodded emphatically

Austin said, "You can practically walk to Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar from Tangier, and that's not far from here."

Zavala shook his head. "Doesn't mean a thing. I speak Spanish, but I'm a Mexican American who's never been to Spain."

Nina remembered something. "Oh, that reminds me. I forgot about Gonzalez."

"Who is Gonzalez?" Austin said.

"He was a volunteer on the expedition. Actually, he paid to be on it through a nonprofit organization called Time-Quest. I saw him talking to a man, a stranger in a Jeep, yesterday afternoon. Gonzalez said the man was lost. At the time I thought it was peculiar."

"You thought right," Austin said. "It could be nothing, but we'll run a check on Time-Quest and see if they have anything on Gonzalez. I assume he was killed with the others."

"I didn't see him, but I don't know how he could have escaped."

"What about the hovercraft that chased Nina?" Zavala asked Austin. "Maybe there's a lead there."

"From what I could see at water level, it looked like a custom model. Maybe a Griffon made in England. I called NUMA earlier and asked them to run a check on the owners of all

Griffon hovercraft. There can't be too many of them in the world. My guess is they bought it through a dummy corporation."

"Which means they've made it hard to trace."

"Maybe even impossible, but it's worth a try." He stared off into space, thinking. "We're still faced with the main question: why would anybody want to wipe out a harmless archaeological expedition?"

Nina had been sitting with her chin resting on her hand. "Maybe it wasn't so harmless," she ventured.

"What do you mean?"

"I keep coming back to the Olmec figure. It's at the center of things."

I'm still having a problem with the Olmec part. Especially since it was turned into a load of gravel."

"It's not just my evaluation. You've got to remember it was Sandy who ID'd it. She's one of the most respected Meso-american specialists in the country. Sanford's done papers and field work on all the big sites like Tikal and a lot of lesserknown but important finds."

"Okay, let's say you and Sandy are right. Why is the figure significant?"

"It could shake up the archaeological and historical community. For years people have wondered whether there was contact between the Old and New Worlds before Columbus."

"Like Leif Eriksson and the Vikings? I thought there was pretty conclusive evidence of that," Zavala said.

"There is, but it's been begrudgingly accepted. I'm talking about transatlantic contact hundreds of years before the Vikings. The problem has been the lack of any scientifically proven artifact. The Olmec head would have been that artifact."

Austin lifted an eyebrow. "Well, so what?"

"Pardon me?" she said, almost affronted.

"Say this figure does conclusively prove pre-Columbian contact. Fascinating, and certainly controversial. But how important could it be except to archaeologists, historians, and the Knights of Columbus? What makes it something to kill for, in other words?"

"Oh, I see your point," she said, somewhat mollified, "but I can't answer you, other than to say I think my discovery precipitated the attack in some way"

"No one in the camp knew about your find."

"No. They would have known about it in time: Ethically, I should have told Dr. Knox and Fisel the moment I found it I suspected right away that it was Mexican Olmec, but it seemed so fantastic, I wanted corroboration before I stuck my neck out. That's when I contacted Sandy."

"Except for you, your colleague back at the university was the only other person who had seen evidence of the find?"

"Yes, but Sandy would never tell anybody. Thank goodness the preliminary data are secure in her hands." She paused. "I have to get home as soon as possible."

"We're heading to the Yucatan peninsula to check out the impact area of the asteroid that may have wiped out the dinosaurs. We've got another day of survey here before we leave," Austin said. "We'd love you to be our guest for that time, then we can drop you off at Marrakech, where you can catch a plane to New York It would give you some time to rest and consolidate your thoughts."

"Thank you," Nina said. "I'm still pretty jittery, but I feel safe here."

"You'll be more than safe, you'll be well fed."

"There is one thing. I've got to notify the university about the expedition and Dr. Knox. The anthropology department will be devastated. Dr: Knox was an institution. Everybody loved him."

"No problem," Zavala said. "I'll take you to the radio room."

Austin got a glass of iced coffee and brought it back to the table. He poured in a dollop of half-and-half and stared at the dark liquid as if the answer to Nina's puzzle lay in the swirling curlicues. None of the story made much sense, and he was no nearer enlightenment when Zavala returned with Nina a few minutes later.

"That was fast," Austin said. "Didn't you get through to the university?"

Zavala was uncharacteristically somber. "We got through immediately, Kurt."

Austin noticed Nina's eyes were moist with tears.

"I talked to the administration," Nina said, her face ashen. "They didn't want to tell me at first, but I knew they were holding back something." She paused. "Good God! What is happening?"

"I don't understand," Austin said, although he suspected what was coming and wasn't totally surprised when Nina said:

"It's Sandy. She's dead.

8 AUSTIN LAY IN HIS BUNK AND stared at the ceiling, listening with envy to Zavala's soft snores from across the cabin. As predicted, the chef had gone heavy on the herbs and oil, but Austin's stomach was fine. It was his brain keeping him awake. Like a busy file clerk, it was sorting out the day's events and wasn't about to let him rest.

The shakedown cruise on the Nereus was supposed to be a milk run, a chance to take a break from the NUMA team's more strenuous probes into the strange and sinister enigmas on and under the world's oceans. Then Nina appeared with the hounds of hell snapping at her heels and practically ran into his arms. Maybe he was really being kept awake by thoughts of the lovely young woman in the next cabin.

He glanced at the glowing hands of his Chronosport wristwatch. Three o'clock. Austin remembered a doctor telling him that three A.M. was when most deathly ill people give up the ghost. That got him out of bed. He pulled on a pair of heavy sweatpants and a nylon windbreaker and slipped into battered boat shoes that fit like gloves. Quietly leaving Zavala to his slumber, he stepped into the passageway and went up four decks to the bridge.

The wheelhouse door was open to admit the night air. Austin stuck his head inside. A young crewman named Mike Curtis was on the early morning watch. He sat in a chair with his nose buried in a book

"Hi, Mike," Austin said. "Couldn't sleep. How would you like some company?"

The crewman grinned and put the book aside. "Wouldn't mind a bit. Things get pretty boring up here. Want some coffee?"

"Thanks. I like mine black."

While Mike poured two steaming mugs Austin picked up the geology book "Pretty heavy reading for the graveyard shift."

"I was just boning up for the Yucatan survey. Do you really think that a meteor or comet wiped out all the dinosaurs?"

"When an object as big as Manhattan slams into the earth, it's going to shake things up. Whether the big lizards were already on the verge of extinction is another question. This plankton survey should settle a lot of arguments. It's ironic in a way, having little one-celled animals telling us what happened to the biggest life form ever."

They chatted until Mike went to attend to routine duties. Austin drained, his mug and walked through the radio shack to the chartroom at the rear of the bridge. With its big wrap-around windows the space doubled as an aft control room the crew could use when maneuvering the ship in reverse.

Austin spread a chart of the Moroccan coast on the navigation table and marked an X in pencil to show the ship's present position. Lips pursed in thought, he studied the chart, letting his eyes travel along the 'occipital bulge in the skullshaped African continent from Gibraltar to the Sahara. After a few minutes of study he shook his head. The chart told him nothing. A hovercraft could have come from land or sea.

He dragged a chair over, put his feet up on the table, and read the entries in the ship's log from the start of the trip. It had been a picture-perfect cruise up to now. A swift and uneventful voyage across the Atlantic, a brief stopover in London to pick up a batch of European scientists, a pleasant couple of weeks in the Mediterranean testing the submersible, and then the Moroccan stopover two days ago.

Nina's story was bizarre by any measure. The hovercraft attack and the bloodsoaked evidence at the campsite had convinced him the tale was true. The terrible news about her colleague's death removed all shreds of doubt. A car accident. Convenient. These assassins had a long reach. They had erased the data Nina sent to UPenn. Now Nina was the only one who had firsthand knowledge of the mysterious Olmec artifact and the veracity to be believed. He was glad she was in her cabin safely asleep, thanks to the mild sedative provided by her roommate.

Austin walked outside and leaned on the rail of a small platform behind the chartoom. The ship was in darkness except for a few floods illuminating sections of the white superstructure and low-level runway lights along the decks. Beyond the range of the lights was a vast velvet blackness. The smell of rotting vegetation that came to his nostrils was, the only evidence of the great land mass that lay less than a league away. Africa. He wondered how many expeditions like Nina's had vanished into the heart of darkness. Maybe the truth would never be known.

Enough philosophizing. Austin yawned and pondered whether to go back to the bridge, return to his cabin, or stay where he was and watch the sun come up. He lingered, savoring the beauty of the night. The Nereus was like a behemoth at rest. He loved the feel of a sleeping vessel, the hum of idling electrical systems, and the creaks and groans of a ship at anchor.

Tunk.

Austin leaned forward and cocked his. ear. The clinking noise had come from below Metal on metal.

Tunk. There it was again.

Not loud, but out of sync against the background of usual ship sounds. Curious now, Austin quietly descended to the first level and made his way along the deserted deck, his hand running lightly along the damp rail. He paused. His fingers had hit a hard lump. He looked closer and saw the prong of a grappling iron, covered in cloth to muffle sound. Exploring further with his fingers, he felt the bare metal of the shaft, which must have caused the clinking sound when it hit the side of the ship.

He stepped away from the light and peered over the rail. From down at the waterline came the sound of faint rustlings. They could have been caused by ripples of water against the hull. He cupped a hand to his ear.

Whispered voices separated themselves from the sea sounds. He could see moving shadows.

Austin didn't wait to ask if the boarders were friend or foe. The answer was obvious in his mind. He sprinted for the nearest stairway and climbed back to the cabin level. Moments later he was shaking Zavala awake. His roommate slept as if he were drugged, but he had an uncanny ability to snap himself fully alert as if an internal electrical switch were turned on. Zavala knew Austin wouldn't wake him unless it was important. Grunting to let Austin know he was getting ready for action, he rolled out of bed and yanked on a pair of shipboard shorts and a T shirt.

Austin had thrown back the cover of his foot locker and was rummaging through his belongings. He pulled out a leather holster, and a second later the snake wood grips of a Ruger Redhawk filled his hand. With its fat, four-inch barrel, the .375 Magnum revolver, custom-built by Bowen, was compact yet packed a wallop.

Zavala called the Bowen "Kurt's Cannon" and claimed it used railroad spikes for ammunition. Actually, the gun fired a special load of .50caliber bullets. '

"We've got company" Austin said as he checked the five-shot cylinder chamber. "Starboard side, coming aboard with grapnels. Those are the ones I know about. There may be others. We'll need weapons."

Zavala glanced around the cabin and grumbled, "Just my luck I recall someone telling me this was going to be like a Love Boat cruise. I didn't even bring a cap pistol. I didn't know we'd be repelling Barbary pirates."

Austin slung the holster over his shoulder. "Neither did I.

That's why I didn't bring a reload. I've got five shots and that's it"

Zavala brightened. "What about your London purchase?"

Austin dug into the locker again and lifted out a shiny flat wooden case. "My Joe Manton specials? Hell, why not?"

Zavala took a diver's sheath knife out of a drawer. "This toothpick is it for my arsenal," he said.

"Not exactly what I'd call overwhelming firepower. We'll have to improvise as we go along."

"It wouldn't be the first time," Zavala said with a shake of his head.

Austin started for the door. "My guess is that they're after Nina. I'll get her and wake everyone on this level. You can get below and roust the rest of the crew and scientists. We'll have them squeeze into the bow thruster room forward of the crew quarters."

"That's going to be tight quarters."

"I know, but they can secure the watertight door and buy us some time. We can't have a bunch of unarmed PhDs and deck hands running around where they can be hurt or taken hostage. Unfortunately the Nereus is a research vessel, not a warship."

"I'm beginning to wish it was a warship," Zavala said. As swiftly as a thought he disappeared down a stairway that led below.

A sleepy-eyed physician's mate answered Austin's knock on the door of the adjoining cabin. Without elaborating, Austin told her to get dressed while he woke Nina. She was still groggy from her medication, but when she saw the intensity in Austin's face her fluttering eyelids snapped open like window shades.

"They're back, aren't they?" she said, her voice hoarse from sleep.

Austin nodded. Moments later he and the two women were in the hallway making their way from cabin to cabin. Soon more than a dozen grumpy people were gathered in the narrow passage. They were dressed in a variety of nightwear or hastily pulled-on mismatches of clothing.

"No questions now," Austin said in a tone that showed he meant it.

He directed the sleepy-faced group down the stairs to the lowest deck level. Zavala was waiting for him with the others. Like cowpokes on a cattle drive, they herded the reluctant throng into the bow section forward of the crew quarters, where crew and scientists jostled for space with the bow thrusters that were used to stabilize the ship in heavy seas.

Austin wasted no time summing up the situation "I'm got to make this short and sweet. The ship's being boarded by armed attackers. Don't open this door unless you know it's Joe or me."

A researcher piped up: "What are you going to do?"

Damned scientific minds, Austin thought, always asking questions. This wasn't the time for his usual blunt honesty.

"Don't worry. Joe and I have a plan," he said with confidence. "We'll be back" He quickly stepped into the bunkroom and closed the door on the frightened faces.

"You sounded like the Terminator in there," said Zavala, who was right behind him. "It's good to hear we've got a plan. Hope you don't mind telling me what it is."

Austin damped a big hand on Zavala's shoulder. "Simple, Joe. You and I are going to kick these bastards off our ship."

"That's a plan?"

"Maybe you'd like to ask them politely to leave."

"Why do it the easy way? Okay, deal me in. Where do we start?"

"We get up to the bridge in a hurry. That's where our uninvited guests will go first. I hope they're not already there."

"How do you know they'll go for the bridge?"

"It's what I'll do. They can cut off communications and take control of the ship in one fell swoop." Austin hustled toward the nearest stairway. "Try to stay out of sight. If it's the same gang that wiped out the expedition, my popgun won't stand a chance against automatic weapons."

Using interior .stairways they went up the six decks to the bridge. They stopped at each level before proceeding to the next but saw no sign of the intruders. At the deck below the bridge they split up. Zavala went ahead to warn the watch. Austin woke the captain, who was asleep in his cabin under the wheelhouse, gave him a condensed account of the status quo, and suggested he take cover.

Captain Joe Phelan was a craggy-faced, tough-as-barnacles NUMA veteran in his fifties. He answered Austin's suggestion with a snarl.

"I was there when they laid the keel of the Nereus," he snapped, anger dancing in his hazel eyes. "I waited thirty years to take the helm of a vessel like this. Damned if I'm going to hide in a closet while these guys have the run of my ship."

Phelan could make the Nereus move with the agility of a ballet dancer, but Austin wasn't sure how he'd be at close combat, which was what things might come down to. On the other hand, it might be risky now for the captain to get down to the bow section. The boarders could be swarming all over the ship.

Phelan zipped up the front of a navy jumpsuit and lifted a pump-action shotgun off a wall rack.

"Only a .410," he apologized. "Never know when you're going to have to put down a mutiny" Noting Austin's quizzical frown, he chuckled. "Sometimes I shoot skeet off the deck."

"This time around the skeet will be shooting back," Austin said grimly

Phelan produced two boxes of shotgun shells and threw them into a canvas bag with the wooden case Austin had been carrying. Then they hurried up to the bridge.

Before they entered the wheelhouse, Austin called out in a low voice, "Joe, it's us."

The warning was well advised because when they stepped through the door they were staring down the barrel of a flare gun.

Zavala lowered the gun. "Mike's sending off an SOS."

The young crewman Austin had coffee with earlier stepped into the wheelhouse from the radio room. "The signal is on automatic and will broadcast our positron until someone shuts it off."

Austin didn't have much hope of the cavalry galloping in for a rescue. The ship was many miles from civilization. .They would have to do what had to be done without outside help.

"Guess you won't be bored for a while," Austin told the wide-eyed crewman.

"Guess not. What should I do?"

"It's .too late for you to go below with the others, so I'm going to put you to work. Climb up on top of the bridge where you get a good view of the ship. Captain, when I give you the signal, I want the News lit up like Broadway and Forty-second Street, but keep the bridge in darkness."

With a quick nod and no questions Phelan went over to a console and put his hand on a panel of buttons. Austin and Mike went onto the starboard wing, and Zavala took up a position on the port wing.

As Mike started up the ladder to the bridge roof, Austin said, "When the fights go on I want you to count every stranger you see and remember where you saw them. We'll do the same down here. Remember, keep your head low."

As soon as everyone was in place, Austin called in to the captain.

"Showtime, skipper."

The ship was equipped with floodlights at every angle, so the crew and scientists could work at night as easily as during the day. Phelan's forgers danced over the console. In an instant the Nereus lit up like a Caribbean cruise ship; every deck was bathed in light from one end to another.

Two decks below, Austin saw a trio of figures freeze, then scurry for cover like startled roaches in a pantry.

"Cut!" he called.

The lights blinked off.

Mike called down. "I saw three guys on top of the submersible garage. Heading our way. None forward."

"You flatten down and stay put for now" Austin stepped into the wheelhouse as Zavala came in from the other wing.

"Three on my side, three decks below. Dressed like Ninjas."

"Same with me. Mike saw three coming from the aft deck That makes nine. That we know of. Captain, can Joe borrow your shotgun? He's had a little more experience shooting, ah, skeet."

The captain knew there was a big difference between picking off clay targets and shooting to kill. He handed the shotgun to Zavala. "Safety's off," he said calmly. At Austin's suggestion, he stepped into the radio room where he would be out of the way.

Austin and Zavala stood back-to-back in the middle of the darkened wheelhouse, the guns pointed toward the open doors on each side. They only had to wait a few minutes before their unwelcome company arrived.

9 A PAIR OF SILHOUETTES MATERIALIZED in the starboard doorway, where they were framed against the blue darkness, one behind the other, making no attempt at concealment. It was a fatal mistake. Seizing his opportunity, Austin lined his sits up on the lead intruder and squeezed the trigger: The Bowen's thunderous roar rattled the wheelhouse windows as it sent a heavy .50caliber slug smashing into the first attacker's sternum, shattering it to bony splinters before the bullet burst from his nib cage and ripped through the heart of the second figure. The force of the impact threw the intruders back, and their bodies crashed over the rail.

The shotgun boomed. Austin spun around with his ears ringing and through the haze of smoke saw another attacker step boldly through the portside door. Zavala's shot had gone off to one side, and the shotgun pellets gouged a headlevel chunk from the door jamb. Zavala rapidly pumped another shell into the chamber and got off a second shot. This time the pellets found their mark. The intruder yelped and drew back, but not before squeezing off a quick unaimed burst of machinegun fire. The rounds went wild except for one.

The bullet grazed Austin's ribs, passing through the flesh under his left armpit. He felt as if he'd been lashed with redhot barbed wire.

Zavala was shaking his head in disgust and didn't see Austin go down on one knee. "I aimed right at him," he said incredulously. "Point-blank range. I couldn't miss."

The captain came out of the radio room and slammed a fist into his palm.

"Damn! I forgot to tell you that old gun pulls right. You've got to aim it an inch left."

Zavala turned and saw that Austin was down. "Kurt," he said with alarm, "are you all right?"

"I've been better," Austin said, clenching his teeth.

Years at sea had given Captain Phelan a hair-trigger reflex in emergencies. He brought over a first-aid kit, and while Zavala kept guard, pacing from one door to the other, the captain fashioned a compress that stemmed the bleeding.

"Looks like your lucky day" he said, rigging a sling. "They missed the bone."

"Too bad I don't have time to play the lottery" With the captain helping, Austin got back on his feet. "I nailed two with one shot. Unfortunately they took their guns over the side with them."

"Showing me up again," Zavala said peevishly. "I think I only wounded my guy."

"My guess is that they figured they'd catch us asleep and unarmed, so they got too cocky for their own good. It won't happen again. They'll test us next time, draw our fire to see what we've got. They'll see real fast that the ship is mostly deserted and will concentrate all they've got on the bridge. We'd better be gone by then."

"We can move around through the ship's conduits," the captain offered. "I know them better than my own living room."

"Good idea. Our guerrilla operation will be a lot more effective if we can pop up where they least expect us. Be careful, these guys are dangerous but not invincible. They fouled up when they let Nina get away, twice, and just now they got a little overanxious and it cost them. So they make mistakes."

"So do we," Zavala said.

"There's one difference. We can't afford our mistakes."

They secured the wheelhouse doors and went into the radio shack. The SOS was still broadcasting mindlessly into the night. Austin wondered who would hear it and what they would make of the message. He paused and lifted the Bowen with his good arm. The weight was too much for one hand, and the revolver wavered from side to side.

"My aim's shaky. You'll have to use it."

He passed the revolver to Zavala, who tucked the flare gun into his waistband. Zavala handed the shotgun to the captain and told him to watch the door. "Remember, it pulls to the right." He hefted the revolver. "Two birds with one stone. Good shooting. With four shots left we can take out eight guys."

"We can do it with one shot if they all line up, but I wouldn't count on it," Austin said. He picked up the slim darkwood case he'd dug out of his luggage. "All is not lost. We've got the Mantons."

The ends of Zavala's lips twitched. "Poor bastards won't stand a chance against your single-shot dueling pistols," he said with bleak humor.

"Ordinarily I might say you're right, but these aren't just, aiy dueling pistols."

A matched pair of antique flintlock dueling pistols lay inside the box snugly cushioned in compartments covered with green baize. The gleaming brownish barrels were octagonal and the highly polished butts rounded like the head of a cane.

During the ship's stopover in London, Austin had gone to a Brompton Street antique dealer whom he'd had good luck with before. The brace of pistols had come into the shop as part of an estate liquidation, said the proprietor, an older man named Mr. Slocum. From their high finish and lack of ornamentation Austin would have known who made the pistols even if he hadn't seen the Joseph Manton label inside the case. Manton and his brother John were the most renowned eighteenth-century gun makers in England, where the best dueling pistols were made. Manton pistols were short on decoration and long on what really counted in matters of honor:mechanical precision. When Austin heard the astronomical price he balked.