Shock Wave

WHERE DREAMS COME FROM

Admiral Sandecker seldom used the large boardroom for conferences. He reserved it mainly for visiting congressmen and -women, and respected scientists, foreign and American. For internal NUMA business, he preferred a smaller workroom just off his office. It was an extremely comfortable room, uniquely his own, sort of a hideaway for him to hold informal but confidential meetings with his NUMA directors. Sandecker often used it as an executive dining room, he and his directors relaxing in the soft leather chairs set around a three-meter-long conference table built from a section of a wooden hull salvaged from a schooner on the bottom of Lake Erie and solidly set in a thick turquoise carpet in front of a fireplace surrounded by a Victorian mantelpiece.

Unlike the modern design and decor of the other offices in the NUMA headquarters building, which were encased in soaring walls of green-tinted glass, this room looked as if it was straight out of an antiquated London gentlemen’s club. All four walls and ceiling were richly paneled in a satiny teak, and there were paintings of United States naval actions hung in ornate frames.

There was a beautifully detailed painting of the epic battle between John Paul Jones in the woefully armed Bonhomme Richard and the new British fifty-gun frigate, Serapis. Next to it the venerable American frigate Constitution was demasting the British frigate Java. On the opposite wall the Civil War ironclads Monitor and Virginia, better known as the Merrimac, slugged it out. Commodore Dewey destroying the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and a flight of dive bombers taking off from the carrier Enterprise to bomb the Japanese fleet during the Battle of Midway were mounted side by side. Only the painting above the fireplace lacked a sea battle. It was a portrait of Sandecker in casual uniform before he was promoted and thrown on the beach. Below the portrait, in a glass-enclosed case, sat a model of his last command, the missile cruiser Tucson.

After Sandecker’s retirement, a former President of the United States picked him to organize and establish a newly funded government agency dedicated to research of the sea. Beginning in a rented warehouse with a staff of fewer than a dozen people, including Pitt and Giordino, Sandecker had built NUMA into a huge organization that was the envy of oceanographic institutions around the world, manned by two thousand employees, and with a huge budget rarely questioned and almost always approved by Congress.

Sandecker fought advancing age with a passion. Now in his early sixties, he was a fitness nut who jogged, lifted weights and engaged in any kind of exercise so long as it brought about sweat and an increased heartbeat. The results of strenuous workouts and a nutritious diet were readily apparent in his honed and trim shape. He was slightly under what would be called average height, and his flaming red hair was still full, cut close and slicked down, with a razor-edge part on the left side. The taut, narrow shape of his face was accented by piercing hazel eyes and a Vandyke beard that was an exact match in color for the hair on his head.

Sandecker’s only vice was cigars. He loved to smoke ten grandly large cigars a day, specially selected and wrapped to his personal taste. He stepped into the conference room in a cloud of smoke as if he were a magician materializing on a fog-shrouded stage.

He walked to the head of the table and smiled benignly at the two men seated to his left and right. “Sorry to keep you so late, gentlemen, but I wouldn’t have asked you to work overtime unless it was important.”

Hiram Yaeger, the chief of NUMA’s computer network and overseer to the world’s most expansive data library on marine sciences, leaned his chair back on two legs and nodded toward Sandecker. Whenever a problem needed solving, Sandecker always started with Yaeger. Unperturbed in bib overalls and a ponytail, he lived with his wife and daughters in a ritzy section of the capital and drove a nonproduction BMW. “It was either respond to your request,” he said with a slight twinkle in his eye, “or take my wife to the ballet.”

“Either way, you lose,” laughed Rudi Gunn, NUMA’s executive director and second in command. If Dirk Pitt was Sandecker’s ace troubleshooter, Gunn was his organizational wizard. Thin with slim hips and narrow shoulders, humorous as well as bright, he peered through thick horn-rimmed glasses from eyes that suggested an owl waiting for a field mouse to run under his tree.

Sandecker slid into one of the leather chairs, dropped an ash from his cigar into a dish made from an abalone shell and flattened a chart of the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula on the surface of the table. He tapped his finger on a marked circle with a series of small red crosses drawn within its circumference and labeled by number. “Gentlemen, you’re all familiar with the tragic situation in the Weddell Sea, the latest in a series of kill sites. Number one is the position where Ice Hunter found the dead dolphins. Two, the seal kills off South Orkney Island. Three, Seymour Island, the site of mass slaughter of men women, penguins and seals. And four, the approximate position of Polar Queen when the scourge struck.”

Yaeger studied the perimeter of the circle. “Looks to be about ninety kilometers in diameter.”

“Not good,” Gunn said, a deep frown creasing his forehead. That’s twice the size of the last kill zone, near Chirikof Island off the Aleutians.

“The count was over three thousand sea lions and five fishermen in that disaster,” said Sandecker. He lifted a small remote control from the table, aimed it at a panel in the far wall and pressed a button. A large screen slowly dropped from the ceiling. He pressed another button and a computer-generated chart of the Pacific Ocean appeared in three-dimensional holograph. Several blue, neonlike globes, displaying animated fish and mammals, were projected seemingly from outside the screen and spaced in different areas of the chart. The globe over Seymour Island off the Antarctic Peninsula as well as one near Alaska included human figures. “Until three days ago,” Sandecker continued, “all the reported kill zones have been in the Pacific. Now with the sea around Seymour Island, we have a new one in the South Atlantic.”

“That makes eight appearances of the unknown plague in the past four months,” said Gunn. “The occurrences seem to be intensifying.”

Sandecker studied his cigar. “And not one lead to the source.”

“Frustration is mine,” Yaeger said holding his palms up in a helpless gesture. “I’ve tried a hundred different computer-generated projections. Nothing comes close to fitting the puzzle. No known disease or chemical pollution can travel thousands of miles, pop up out of the blue and kill every living thing within a limited area, before totally vanishing without a trace.”

“I’ve got thirty scientists working on the problem,” said Gunn, “and they have yet to stumble on a clue indicating a source.”

“Anything from the pathologists on those five fishermen the Coast Guard found dead on their boat off Chirikof Island?” asked Sandecker.

“Preliminary postmortem examinations show no tissue damage from poison, inhaled or ingested, nor any fast acting disease that’s known to medical science. As soon as Colonel Hunt over at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center has completed his report, I’ll have him call you.”

“Dammit!” Sandecker burst out. “Something killed them. The skipper died in the wheelhouse, his hands gripped on the helm, while the crew went down on deck in the act of bringing in their nets. People just don’t drop dead without cause, certainly not hardy men in their twenties and thirties.”

Yaeger nodded in agreement. “Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place. It has to be something we haven’t considered.”

Sandecker idly stared at his cigar smoke as it spiraled toward the paneled ceiling. He seldom laid all his cards on the table, preferring to turn them over slowly, one at a time. “I was talking to Dirk just before our meeting.”

“Anything new at his end?” asked Gunn.

“Not from the biologists on board Ice Hunter, but Dirk has a theory, pretty farfetched he admits, but one none of us had thought of.”

“I’d like to hear it,” said Yaeger.

“He came up with a type of pollution.”

Gunn looked at Sandecker, his eyes skeptical. “What type of pollution could he possibly suggest that we missed?”

Sandecker grinned like a sniper sighting through his scope. “Noise,” he answered flatly.

“Noise,” repeated Gunn. “What kind of noise?”

“He thinks there might be deadly sound waves that travel through water for hundreds perhaps thousands of miles, before they surface and loll everything within a certain radius.” Sandecker paused and studied his subordinates for their reaction.

Yaeger was not a cynical man, but he inclined his head and laughed. “I’m afraid old Pitt is hitting his special brand of tequila too hard and too fast.”

Oddly, there was not a hint of doubt on Gunn’s face. He peered intently at the projected image of the Pacific Ocean for a few moments. Then he said, “I think Dirk is onto something.”

Yaeger’s eyes narrowed. “You do?”

“I do,” Gunn replied earnestly. “Rogue underwater acoustics might very well be our villain.”

“I’m happy to hear another vote,” said Sandecker.

“When he first laid it on me, I thought Dirk’s mind was sluggish from exhaustion. But the more I considered his theory, the more I came to believe in its possibilities.”

“Word has it,” said Yaeger, “that he single-handedly saved Polar Queen from running onto the rocks.”

Gunn nodded. “It’s true. After Al dropped him from a helicopter onto the ship, he steered it away from certain destruction.”

“Back to the dead fishermen,” Sandecker said, returning the conference to a more somber note. “How long before we have to turn their bodies over to local Alaskan authorities?”

“About five minutes after they learn we have them,” replied Gunn. “The crewmen on the Coast Guard cutter that discovered the ship drifting in the Gulf of Alaska will surely talk once they dock at their station in Kodiak and come ashore.”

“Even after their captain has ordered them to remain quiet,” said Sandecker.

“We’re not at war, Admiral. The Coast Guard is highly regarded in northern waters. They won’t enjoy being party to a cover-up against men whose lives they are committed to saving. A couple of drinks at the Yukon Saloon and they’ll break the news to anyone who will listen.”

Sandecker sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Commandant MacIntyre was not happy about the secrecy. It wasn’t until he received a direct order from the secretary of’ defense that he caved in and turned the bodies over to NUMA scientists.”

Yaeger gave Sandecker a knowing look. “I wonder who got to the secretary of defense?”

Sandecker smiled slyly. “After I explained the seriousness of the situation, he was most cooperative.”

“Much hell will erupt,” Yaeger prophesied, “once the local brotherhood of fishermen and the dead crew’s family members discover that the bodies were found and autopsies performed a week before they were notified.”

“Especially,” Gunn added, “when they learn we shipped the bodies to Washington for the postmortem.”

“We were too early in the hunt for the news media to play havoc with wild stories about how an entire crew and their pet parrot were found dead on a ship under mysterious circumstances. At the time, we didn’t need another unexplained-phenomena blitz while we were groping in the dark ourselves.”

Gunn shrugged. “The proverbial cat’s out of the bag now. There’s no hiding the Polar Queen disaster. After tonight it will be the lead news story on every TV news program around the world.”

Sandecker nodded at Yaeger. “Hiram, you delve into your library and extract every piece of data dealing with underwater acoustics. Search out any experiments, commercial or military, involving high-energy sound waves through water, their cause and effects on humans and underwater mammals.”

“I’ll start on it immediately,” Yaeger assured him.

Gunn and Yaeger rose from their chairs and left the conference room. Sandecker sat there, slouched in his chair and puffing on his cigar. His eyes moved from sea battle to sea battle, lingering for several moments on each before moving to the next. Then he closed his eyes tightly as he collected his thoughts.

It was the uncertainty of the dilemma that clouded his mind. After a while, he opened his eyes and stared at the computer-generated chart of the Pacific Ocean. “Where will it strike next?” he spoke aloud to the empty room. “Who will it kill?”

Colonel Leigh Hunt sat at his desk in his basement office-he disliked the more formal administration offices on the upper floors of Walter Reed-and contemplated a bottle of Cutty Sark. Out the window, darkness had settled over the District of Columbia, the streetlights had come on, and the rush-hour traffic was beginning to dwindle. The postmortems on the five fishermen fished from the cold waters of the Northwest were completed, and he was about to head home to his cat. The decision was whether to take a drink or make a final call before leaving. He decided to do both at the same time.

He punched the numbers on his telephone with one hand while he poured the scotch into a coffee cup. After two rings, a gruff voice answered.

“Colonel Hunt, I hope that’s you.”

“It is,” replied Hunt. “How’d you know?”

“I had a gut feeling you’d call about now.”

“Always a pleasure to talk to the Navy,” said Hunt affably.

“What can you tell me?” asked Sandecker.

“First, are you sure these cadavers were found on a fishing boat in the middle of the sea?”

“They were.”

“And the two porpoises and four seals you also sent over here?”

“Where else would you expect to find them?”

“I’ve never performed postmortem examinations on aquatic creatures before.”

“Humans, porpoises and seals are all mammals under the skin.”

“You, my dear admiral, have a very intriguing case on your hands.”

“What did they die from?”

Hunt paused to empty half the cup. “Clinically, the deaths were caused by a disruption of the ossicular chain that consists of the malleus, incus and the stapes of the middle ear, which you may recall from your high school physiology class as the hammer, anvil and stirrup. The stapedial foot plate was also fractured. This caused debilitating vertigo and extreme tinnitus, or a roaring in the ears, all culminating in a rupture of the anterior inferior cerebellar artery and causing hemorrhaging into the anterior and middle cranial fossae inside the base of the skull.”

“Can you break that down into simple English?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘infarction’?” asked Hunt.

“It sounds like slang.”

“Infarction is a cluster of dead cells in organs or tissue that results from an obstruction, such as an air bubble, that cuts off circulating blood.”

“Just where in the bodies did this thing take place?” inquired Sandecker.

“There was swelling of the cerebellum with compression of the brain stem. I also found that the vestibular labyrinth—”

“Come again?”

“Besides relating to other bodily cavities, ‘vestibular’ also pertains to the central cavity of the bony labyrinth of the ear.”

“Please go on.”

“The vestibular labyrinth appeared to be damaged by violent displacement. Somewhat as in a fall into deep water, where the hydraulic compression of air perforates the tympanic membrane as water is forced into the external ear canal.”

“How did you arrive at this conclusion?”

“By applying a standard protocol to my investigation, I used magnetic resonance imaging and computer tomography, a diagnostic technique using X-ray photographs that eliminate the shadows of structures m front of and behind the section under scrutiny. Evaluation also included hematologic and serologic studies and lumbar puncture.”

“What were the symptoms at the onset of the disorder?”

“I can’t speak for the porpoises or seals,” explained Hunt. “But the pattern among the humans was consistent. The sudden and intense vertigo, a dramatic loss of equilibrium, vomiting, extreme paroxysmal cranial pain and a sudden convulsion that lasted less than five minutes, all resulting in unconsciousness and then death. You might compare it to a stroke of monster proportions.”

“Can you tell me what caused this trauma?”

Hunt hesitated. “Not with any degree of accuracy.”

Sandecker was not to be put off. “Take a wild guess.”

“Since you’ve put my back to the wall, I’d venture to say your fishermen, the porpoises and seals expired from extreme exposure to high-intensity sound.”

January 22, 2000

Near Howland Island, South Pacific

To the crew lining the rails of Mentawai, an Indonesian freighter bound from Honolulu to her next port of call, Jayapura in New Guinea, the sight of an awkward-looking craft in the middle of the ocean was highly unusual if not downright remarkable. Yet the Ningpo-design Chinese junk sailed serenely through the one-meter-high swells that rolled against her bow from the east. She looked magnificent, her brightly colored sails filled with a southwesterly breeze, her varnished wood sparkling under a golden-orange rising sun. Two large eyes that I crossed when sighted head-on were painted on her bows, born from the traditional faith that they would see her through fog and stormy seas.

The Tz’u-hsi, named after the last Chinese dowager empress, was the second home of Hollywood actor Garret Converse, never a nominee for an Academy Award but the biggest box-office action hero on the silver screen. The junk was twenty-four meters in length with a beam of six meters, built from top to bottom of cedarand teakwood. Converse had installed every amenity for the crew’s accommodations and the latest in navigational technology. No expense was spared. Few yachts were as luxuriously embellished. A master adventurer in the mode of Errol Flynn, Converse had sailed Tz’u-hsi from Newport Beach on a round-the-world cruise and was now running on the final leg across the Pacific, passing within fifty kilometers of Howland Island, Amelia Earhart’s destination when she disappeared in 1937.

As the two ships plodded past each other on opposite courses, Converse hailed the freighter over the radio.

“Greetings from the junk Tz’u-hsi. What ship are your”

The freighter’s radio operator replied, “The freighter Mentawai out of Honolulu. Where are you bound?”

“Christmas Island, and then to California.”

“I wish you clear sailing.”

“The same to you,” Converse answered.

The captain of Mentawai watched the junk slip astern and then nodded toward his first officer. “I never thought I’d see a junk this deep in the Pacific.”

The first officer, a man of Chinese descent, nodded disapprovingly. “I crewed on a junk when I was a young boy. They’re taking a great risk sailing through the breeding grounds of typhoons. Junks are not built for heavy weather. They ride too high and have a tendency to roll crazily. Their huge rudders are easily broken off by a rough sea.”

“They’re either very brave or very mad to tempt the fates,” said the captain, turning his back on the junk as it grew smaller in the distance. “As for me, I feel more comfortable with a steel hull and the solid beat of engines under my decks.”

Eighteen minutes after the freighter and junk crossed paths, a distress call was heard by the United States container carrier Rio Grande, bound for Sydney, Australia, with a cargo of tractors and agricultural equipment. The radio room was directly off the spacious navigation bridge, and the operator had only to turn to address the second officer, who stood the early morning watch.

“Sir, I have a distress signal from the Indonesian cargo freighter Mentawai.”

The second officer, George Hudson, picked up the ship’s phone, punched a number and waited for an answering voice. “Captain, we’ve picked up a distress signal.”

Captain Jason Kelsey was about to take his first forkful of breakfast in his cabin when the call came from the bridge. “Very well, Mr. Hudson. I’m on my way. Try and get her position.”

Kelsey wolfed down his eggs and ham, gulped half a cup of coffee and walked through a short passageway to the navigation bridge. He went directly to the radio room.

The operator looked up, a curious look in his eyes. “Very strange signal, Captain.” He handed Kelsey a notepad.

Kelsey studied it, then stared at the radio operator. “Are you sure this is what they transmitted?”

“Yes, sir. They came in quite clearly.”

Kelsey read the message aloud. “All ships come quick. Freighter Mentawai forty kilometers south-southwest of Howland Island. Come quick. All are dying.” He looked up. “Nothing more? No coordinates?”

The radio operator shook his head. “They went dead, and I haven’t been able to raise them again.”

“Then we can’t use our radio direction-finding systems.” Kelsey turned to his second officer. “Mr. Hudson, lay a course for Mentawai’s last reported position southwest off Howland Island. Not much to go on without exact coordinates. But if we can’t make a visual sighting, we’ll have to rely on our radar to spot them.” He could have asked Hudson to run the course numbers through the navigation computer, but he preferred working by the old rules.

Hudson went to work on the chart table with parallel rulers, attached by swinging hinges, and a pair of dividers, and Kelsey signaled the chief engineer that he wanted Rio Grande to come to full speed. First Officer Hank Sherman appeared on the bridge, yawning as he buttoned his shirt.

“We’re responding to a distress call?” he asked Kelsey.

The captain smiled and passed him the notepad. “Word travels fast on this ship.”

Hudson turned from the chart table. “I make the distance to Mentawai approximately sixty-five kilometers, bearing one-three-two degrees.”

Kelsey stepped over to the navigation console and punched in the coordinates. Almost immediately the big container ship began a slow swing to starboard as the computerized electronics system steered her onto a new course of 132 degrees.

“Any other ships responding?” he asked the radio operator.

“We’re the only one who attempted a reply, sir.”

Kelsey stared at the deck. “We should be able to reach her in a shade less than two hours.”

Sherman continued staring at the message in bewilderment. “If this isn’t some kind of hoax, it’s very possible that all we’ll find are corpses.”

They found Mentawai a few minutes after eight in the morning. Unlike Polar Queen, which had continued steaming under power, the Indonesian freighter appeared to be drifting. She looked peaceful and businesslike. Smoke curled from her twin funnels, but no one was visible on the decks, and repeated hails through a loudspeaker from the bridge of Rio Grande brought no response.

“Quiet as a tomb,” said First Officer Sherman ominously.

“Good Lord!” muttered Kelsey. “She’s surrounded by a sea of dead fish.”

“I don’t much like the look of it.”

“You’d better collect a boarding party and investigate,” ordered Kelsey.

“Yes, sir. On my way.”

Second Officer Hudson was peering at the horizon through binoculars. “There’s another ship about ten kilometers off the port bow.”

“Is she coming on?” asked Kelsey.

“No, sir. She seems to be moving away.”

“That’s odd. Why would she ignore a ship in distress? Can you make her out?”

“She looks like a fancy yacht, a big one with sleek lines. The design you see moored in Monaco or Hong Kong.”

Kelsey moved to the threshold of the radio-room doorway and nodded to the operator. “See if you can raise that boat in the distance.”

After a minute or two, the radio operator shook his head. “Not a peep. They’ve either closed down, or they’re ignoring us.”

The Rio Grande slackened speed and glided slowly toward the freighter rolling slowly in the low swells. They were very close to the lifeless ship now, and from the bridge wing of the big container ship, Captain Kelsey could look straight down on her decks. He saw two inert figures and what he took to be a small dog. He hailed the wheelhouse again, but all was silent.

The boat with Sherman’s boarding party was lowered into the water and motored over to the freighter. They bumped and scraped alongside as they heaved a grappling hook over the railing and rigged it to pull up a boarding ladder. Within minutes, Sherman was over the side and bending over the bodies on the deck. Then he disappeared through a hatch below the bridge.

Four of the men had followed him while two remained in the boat and motored away from the hull a short distance, waiting for a signal to return and pick them up. Even after Sherman made certain the men lying on the deck were dead, he still half expected some of the freighter’s crew to be waiting for him. After entering the hatch, he climbed a passageway to the bridge and was overwhelmed with a sense of unreality. All hands from the captain to the mess boy were dead, their corpses strewn about the deck where they fell. The radioman was found with his eyes bulging and his hands clasped around his set as if he were afraid of falling.

Twenty minutes passed before Sherman eased Mentawai’s radio operator to the floor and called over to the Rio Grande. “Captain Kelsey?”

“Go ahead, Mr. Sherman. What have you found?”

“All dead, sir, every one of them, including two parakeets found in the chief engineer’s cabin and the ship’s dog, a beagle with its teeth bared.”

“Any clue as to the cause?”

“Food poisoning seems the most obvious. They look like they threw up before they died.”

“Be careful of toxic gas.”

“I’ll keep my nostrils open,” said Sherman.

Kelsey paused, contemplating the unexpected predicament. Then he said, “Send back the boat. I’ll have it return with another five men to help you get the ship under way. The nearest major port is Apia in the Samoa Islands. We’ll turn the ship over to authorities there.”

“What about the bodies of the crew? We can’t leave them lying around, certainly not in the tropical heat.”

Without hesitation, Kelsey replied, “Stack them in the freezer. We want them preserved until they can be examined by—”

Kelsey was abruptly cut off in midsentence as Mentawai’s hull shuddered from an explosion from deep inside her bowels. The hatches above the cargo holds were thrown skyward as flame and smoke erupted from below. The ship seemed to heave herself out of the water before splashing back and taking on a sharp list to starboard. The roof of the wheelhouse collapsed inward. There was another deep rumble inside the freighter, followed by the screeching sound of tearing metal.

Kelsey watched in horror as the Mentawai began to roll over on her starboard side. “She’s going down!” he shouted over the radio. “Get out of there before she goes under!”

Sherman was flat on the deck, stunned from the concussion of the blast. He looked around, dazed, as the deck slanted steeply. He slid into one corner of the shattered radio compartment and sat there in shock, staring dumbly as water surged through the open door to the bridge wing. It was an unreal picture that made no sense to his stunned mind. He took one long gasping breath that was the last he ever took, and tried feebly to rise to his feet, but it was too late. He was buried under the warm, green water of the sea.

Kelsey and the crew of Rio Grande stood frozen in shock as Mentawai rolled over with her hull showing above the water like some giant, rusting metal turtle. Except for the two men in the boat who were crushed by the hull, Sherman’s boarding party was trapped inside the ship when the explosions occurred. None escaped to dive over the side. With a great roar of inrushing water and expelled air, the freighter dived beneath the surface as if anxious to become one more unsolved enigma of the sea.

No one on board Rio Grande could believe the freighter could go so quickly. They stared in horror at the wreckage mixed with wisps of smoke that swirled around her watery crypt, unable to believe their shipmates were locked inside a steel coffin hurtling toward eternal darkness at the bottom of the sea.

Kelsey stood there for nearly a full minute, the grief and outrage etched in his face. Somehow a tiny thought in the back of his mind finally mushroomed and emerged through the shock. He turned from the whirlpool of death, picked up a pair of binoculars and stared through the forward windows at the yacht vanishing in the distance. Now only a white speck against a blue sky and an azure sea, it was moving away at great speed. The mysterious vessel had not ignored the distress signal, he realized. It had come and gone and was now purposely running away from the disaster.

“Damn whoever you are,” he spat in anger. “Damn you to hell.”

Thirty-one days later, Ramini Tantoa, a native of Cooper Island in the Palmyra Atoll chain, awoke, and as was his usual routine went for a morning swim in the warm waters of the East Lagoon. Before he took two steps in the white sand outside his small bachelor hut, he was astonished to see what he recognized as a large Chinese junk that had somehow sailed through the outer reef channel during the night and was now grounded broadside on the beach. The port beam was already high and dry and imbedded in the sand, while the opposite side of the hull was lapped by the gentle waves of the lagoon.

Tantoa shouted a hello, but no one appeared on deck or echoed a reply. The junk looked deserted. All sails were set and fluttering under a light breeze, and the flag that flapped on the stern was the Stars and Stripes of the United States. The varnish on the teak sides looked shiny, as if it hadn’t had time to fade under the sun. As he walked around the half-buried hull Tantoa felt as if the painted eyes on the bows followed him.

He finally worked up his nerve and climbed the huge rudder and over the stern railing onto the quarterdeck. He stood there disconcerted. From stem to stern the main deck was deserted. Everything seemed in perfect order, all lines coiled and in place, the rigging set and taut. Nothing lay loose on the deck.

Tantoa climbed below and walked fearfully through the interior of the junk, half expecting to find bodies. Thankfully he saw no signs of death or disorder. Not a single soul was on board.

No ship could sail from China, halfway across the Pacific Ocean, without a crew, Tantoa told himself. His imagination took hold, and he began to envision ghosts. A ship sailed by a spectral crew. Frightened, he rushed up the stairs onto the deck and leaped over the railing onto the warm sand. He had to report the derelict to the council of Cooper Island’s little village. Tantoa ran up the beach to what he believed was a safe distance before staring over his shoulder to see if he was followed by some unspeakable horror.

The sand around the junk was deserted. Only the allseeing eyes on the bows glared at him malevolently. Tantoa raced off toward his village and never looked back.

The atmosphere in the Ice Hunter’s dining room had a strange mood of subdued festivity. The occasion was a farewell party thrown by the crew and scientists for the survivors of the Polar Queen tragedy. Roy Van Fleet and Maeve had been working day and night, shoulder to shoulder, for the past three days, examining the remains of the penguins, seals and dolphins collected for study and filling notebooks full of observations.

Van Fleet had grown fond of her, but he stopped short of demonstrating any kind of affection; the vision of his pretty wife and three children was seldom out of his mind. He was sorry they couldn’t have continued working together. The other scientists in the lab agreed that they made a great team.

The Ice Hunter’s chef did himself proud with an incredible gourmet dinner featuring filets of deep-sea cod with mushroom and wine sauce. Captain Dempsey looked the other way while the wine flowed. Only the officers standing watch over the operation of the ship had to remain dry, at least until they came off duty and it was their turn to party.

Dr. Mose Greenberg, the shipboard wit, made a long speech laced with banal puns about everyone on board. He might have kept pontificating for another hour if Dempsey hadn’t signaled for the chef to bring out a cake especially baked for the occasion. It was shaped like the continent of Australia, with icing picturing the more notable landmarks including Ayres Rock and Sydney Harbor. Maeve was truly touched, and tears moistened her eyes. Deirdre appeared bored with it all.

As captain, Dempsey sat at the head of the longest table, the women sitting in honor at his elbows. Because he was head of NUMA’s special-projects division, Pitt was allotted the chair at the opposite end of the table. He tuned out the conversations flowing around him and focused his attention on the two sisters.

They couldn’t have come out of the womb more unalike, he thought. Maeve was a warm and wild creature, a light brightly glowing with life. He fantasized her as a friend’s untamed sister washing a car, clad in a tight T-shirt and cutoff shorts while displaying her girlish waist and shapely legs to great advantage. She had changed since he first met her. She talked exuberantly, her arms swaying for effect, vivacious and unpretentious. And yet her manner seemed oddly forced, as if her thoughts were elsewhere and she were under some unknown stress.

She wore a short-skirted red cocktail dress that fit her figure as if it were sewn on after she was in it. Pitt thought at first it was loaned to her by one of the women scientists on board who wore a smaller size, and then he recalled seeing her return with Deirdre from Polar Queen on Ice Hunter’s shore boat with their luggage stacked in the bow. She wore yellow coral earrings that matched the necklace around her bare neck. She glanced in his direction and their eyes met, but only for an instant. She was in the midst of describing her pet dingo in Australia, and she quickly looked back at her audience as if she hadn’t recognized him.

Deirdre, on the other hand, exuded sensuality and sophistication, traits sensed by every man in the room. Pitt could easily picture her stretched out on a bed covered with silk sheets, beckoning. The only drawback was her imperious manner. She had seemed retiring and vulnerable when he’d found her on Polar Queen. But she too had transformed, into a cool and aloof creature. There was also a flinty hardness Pitt had not recognized before.

She sat in her chair straight-backed and regal in a brown sheath dress that stopped discreetly above her silk-stockinged knees. She wore a scarf around her neck that accented her fawn eyes and copper hair, which was drawn severely back in a huge knot. As if sensing that Pitt was studying her, she slowly turned and stared back at him without expression, and then the eyes became cool and calculating.

Pitt found himself engaged in a game of wills. She was not about to blink even as she carried on a conversation with Dempsey. Her eyes seemed to look through him and, finding nothing of interest, continued on to a picture hanging on the wall behind. The brown eyes that were locked on opaline green never wavered. She obviously was a lady who held her own against men, Pitt reasoned. Slowly, very slowly, he began to cross his eyes. The comical ploy broke the spell and Deirdre’s concentration. Thrusting her chin up in a haughty gesture, she dismissed Pitt as a clown and turned her attention back to the conversation at her end of the table.

Though Pitt felt a sensual desire for Deirdre, he felt himself drawn to Maeve. Perhaps it was her engaging smile with the slight gap between the teeth, or the beautiful mass of incredibly blond hair that fell in a cascade behind and in front of her shoulders. He wondered about her shift of manner since he first found her in the blizzard on Seymour Island. The ready smile and the easy laugh were no longer there. Pitt sensed that Maeve was subtly under Deirdre’s control. It was also obvious, to him if to no one else, there was no love lost between them.

Pitt mused about the age-old choice faced by the sexes. Women were often torn between mister nice guy, who generally ended up as father of her kids, and the hellraising jerk who represented offbeat romance and adventure. Men, for all their faults, were occasionally forced to choose between miss wholesome girl-next-door, who generally ended up as mother to his children, and the wild sexpot who couldn’t keep her body off him.

For Pitt there could be no agonized decision. Late tomorrow evening, the ship would dock at the Chilean port of Punta Arenas in Tierra del Fuego, where Maeve and Deirdre would take a commuter flight to Santiago. From there they could book a direct flight to Australia. A waste of time, he thought, to allow his imagination to run amok. He did not dare to hope that he would ever lay eyes on either one of them again.

He slipped a hand below the table and touched the folded fax in his pants pocket. Overcome by curiosity, he had communicated with St. Julien Perlmutter, a close family friend who had accumulated the world’s foremost library of shipwreck information. A well-known partygiver and gourmand, Perlmutter was well connected in Washington circles and knew where most of the skeletons were buried. Pitt had put in a call and asked his friend to check on the ladies’ family background. Perlmutter faxed him a brief report in less than an hour with a promise of a more in-depth account within two days.

These were no ordinary women from common circumstances. If the unmarried men, and maybe even a few of the married, knew that Maeve and Deirdre’s father, Arthur Dorsett, was head of a diamond empire second only to De Beers and the sixth richest man in the world, they might have pulled out all stops in begging the ladies’ hand in marriage.

The section of the report that struck him as odd was a drawing of the Dorsett corporate hallmark that Perlmutter included. Instead of the obvious, a diamond on some sort of background, the Dorsett logotype was a serpent undulating through the water.

The ship’s officer on duty came up alongside Pitt and spoke softly. “Admiral Sandecker is on the satellite phone and would like to talk to you.”

“Thank you, I’ll take the call in my cabin.”

Unobtrusively, Pitt pushed back his chair, rose and left the dining room, unnoticed by all except Giordino.

Pitt exhaled a deep breath, removed his shoes and unlimbered in his leather chair. “Admiral, this is Dirk.”

“About time,” Sandecker grunted. “I could have written my next speech before a congressional budget committee.”

“Sorry, sir, I was attending a party.”

There was a pause. “A party on a NUMA vessel dedicated to scientific research?”

“A farewell get-together for the ladies we rescued from Polar Queen,” Pitt explained.

“I’d better not hear of any questionable actions.” Sandecker was as open and receptive as the next man, but discussing anything less than scientific procedure on board his fleet of research ships was not his strong point.

Pitt took great joy in needling the admiral. “Do you mean hanky-panky, sir?”

“Call it what you may. Just see that the crew plays it straight. We don’t need any exposure in the scandal rags.”

“May I ask the nature of this call, Admiral?” Sandecker never used the phone simply to reach out and touch someone.

“I require the services of you and Giordino here in Washington damned quick. How soon can you fly off Ice Hunter for Punta Arenas?”

“We’re within the helicopter’s range now,” said Pitt. “We can lift off within the hour.”

“I’ve arranged for a military jet transport to be waiting for your arrival at the airport.”

Sandecker was never one to let the grass grow under his feet, Pitt thought. “Then Al and I will see you sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

“We have much to discuss.”

“Any new developments?”

“An Indonesian freighter was found off Howland Island with a dead crew.”

“Did the bodies show the same symptoms as those on Polar Queen?”

“We’ll never know,” answered Sandecker. “It blew up and sank while a boarding party was investigating, killing them as well.”

“That’s a twist.”

“And to add to the mystery,” Sandecker continued, “a Chinese junk luxury yacht owned and sailed by the movie actor Garret Converse is missing in the same area.”

“His legion of fans won’t be happy when they learn he died from unknown causes.”

“His loss will probably get more coverage from the news media than all the dead on the cruise ship,” Sandecker acknowledged.

“How has my theory on sound waves played?” Pitt asked.

“Yaeger’s working it through his computers as we speak. With luck, he’ll have gleaned more data by the time you and Al walk through the door. I have to tell you, he and Rudi Gunn think you may be onto something.”

“See you soon, Admiral,” Pitt said and hung up. He sat motionless and stared at the phone, hoping to God they were on the right track.

The dishes were cleared and the party in the ship’s dining room had become loud with laughter as everyone competed in telling shaggy dog stories. As with Pitt, hardly anyone noticed that Giordino also had departed the festivities. Captain Dempsey entered into the humor of the evening with an old, old joke about a rich farmer who sends his ne’er-do-well son to college and makes him take along the old family dog, Rover. The kid then uses the old mangy dog to con his old man out of spending money by claiming he needs a thousand dollars because his professors claim they can make Rover read, write and talk. By the time he came to the punch line, everybody laughed more from sheer relief it was over than from the humor.

On one wall nearby, a ship’s phone rang, and the first officer answered. Without a word, he nodded in Dempsey’s direction. The captain caught the gesture, came over and took the call. He listened a moment, hung up the receiver and started for the open passageway leading to the stern deck.

“Are you all joked out?” Van Fleet called after him.

“I have to stand by for the helicopter’s departure,” he answered.

“What’s the mission?”

“No mission. Pitt and Giordino have been ordered back to Washington by the admiral, posthaste. They’re flying off to the mainland to catch a military transport.”

Maeve overheard and grabbed Dempsey by the arm. “When are they leaving?”

He was surprised by the sudden strength of her grip. “They should be lifting off about now.”

Deirdre came over and stood next to Maeve. “He must not care enough about you to say good-bye.”

Maeve felt as if a giant hand had suddenly reached inside her and squeezed her heart. Anguish filled her body. She rushed out the door onto the deck. Pitt had only lifted the helicopter a scant three meters off the pad N hen she came running into view. She could clearly see both men through the helicopter’s large windows. Giordino looked down, saw her and waved. Pitt had both hands busy and could only respond with a warm grin and a nod.

He expected to see her smile and wave in return, but her face seemed drawn in fear. She cupped her hands and cried out to him, but the noise of the turbine exhaust and thumping rotor blades drowned out her words. He could only shake his head and shrug in reply.

Maeve shouted again, this time with lowered hands as if somehow willing her thoughts into his mind. Too late. The helicopter shot into the air vertically and dipped over the side of the ship. She sagged to her knees on the deck, head in her hands, sobbing, as the turquoise aircraft flew over the endless marching swells of the sea.

Giordino looked back through his side window and saw Maeve slumped on the deck, Dempsey walking toward her. “I wonder what the fuss was all about,” he said curiously.

“What fuss?” asked Pitt.

“Maeve ... she acted like a Greek mourner at a funeral.”

Concentrating on controlling the helicopter, Pitt had missed Maeve’s unexpected display of grief. “Maybe she hates good-byes,” he said, feeling a wave of remorse.

“She tried to tell us something,” Giordino said vaguely, reliving the scene in his mind.

Pitt did not take a backward glance. He felt deep regret at not having said his farewells. It was rude to have denied Maeve the courtesy of a friendly hug and a few words. He had genuinely felt attracted to her. She had aroused emotions within him that he hadn’t experienced since losing someone very dear to him in the sea north of Hawaii many years ago. Her name was Summer, and not a day passed that he didn’t recall her lovely face and the scent of plumeria.

There was no way for him to tell if the attraction was mutual. There were a multitude of expressions in her eyes, but nothing he saw that indicated desire. And nothing in her conversation had led him to believe they were more than merely two people touching briefly before passing into the night.

He tried to remain detached and tell himself that their affair had nowhere to go. They were bound to lives on opposite sides of the world. It was best to let her fade into a pleasant memory of what might have been if the moon and stars had shone in the right direction.

“Weird,” Giordino said, staring ahead at the restless sea as the islands north of Cape Horn grew in the distance.

“‘Weird’?” Pitt echoed in a tone of indifference.

“What Maeve yelled as we lifted off.”

“How could you hear anything over the chopper’s racket?”

“I couldn’t. It was all in the way she formed the words with her mouth.”

Pitt grinned. “Since when do you read lips?”

“I’m not kidding, pal,” Giordino said in dead seriousness. “I know the message she tried to get across to us.”

Pitt knew from long years of experience and friendship that when Giordino turned profound he worked purely from essentials. You didn’t step into his circle, spar with him and step out unscathed. Pitt mentally remained outside the circle and peered in. “Spit it out. What did she say?”

Giordino slowly turned and looked at Pitt, his deep-set black eyes reflective and somber at the same time. “I could swear she said ‘Help me.’”

The twin-engined Buccaneer jet transport touched down smoothly and taxied to a quiet corner of Andrews Air Force Base, southeast of Washington. Fitted out comfortably for high-ranking Air Force officers, the aircraft flew nearly as fast as the most modern fighter plane.

As the flight steward, in the uniform of an Air Force master sergeant, carried their luggage to a waiting car and driver, Pitt marveled at Admiral Sandecker’s influence in the capital city. He wondered what general the admiral had conned into temporarily lending the plane to NUMA, and what manner of persuasion it took.

Giordino dozed during the drive, while Pitt stared unseeing at the low buildings of the city. The rush-hour traffic had begun streaming out of town, and the streets and bridges leading into the suburbs were jammed. Fortunately, their car was traveling in the opposite direction.

Pitt cursed his idiocy for not returning to Ice Hunter shortly after liftoff. If Giordino had interpreted her message correctly, Maeve was in some sort of trouble. The possibility that he had deserted her when she was calling out to him gnawed at his conscience.

The long arm of Sandecker reached through his melancholy and cast a shroud over his preoccupation with guilt. Never in Pitt’s years with NUMA had he ever placed his personal problems above the vital work of the agency. During the flight to Punta Arenas, Giordino had provided the crowning touch.

“There’s a time for being horny, and this isn’t it. People and sea life are dying by the boatload out there on the water. The sooner we stop this evil, the more lives will be spared to pay taxes. Forget her for now. When this cauldron of crap is over you can take a year off and chase her Down Under.”

Giordino might never-have been hired to teach rhetoric at Oxford, but he seldom failed to fill a book with common sense. Pitt surrendered and reluctantly eased Maeve from his mind, not entirely successfully. The memory of her lingered like a portrait that became more beautiful with the passage of time.

His thoughts were broken as the car rolled over the driveway in front of the tall green, solar-glassed building that housed NUMA’s headquarters. The visitors’ parking lot was covered with television transmitter trucks and vans, emitting enough microwaves to launch a new chicken rotisserie franchise.

“I’ll run you into the underground parking area,” said the driver. “The vultures were expecting your arrival.”

“You sure an ax murderer isn’t roaming the building?” asked Giordino.

“No, the reception is for you. The news media are starved for details of the cruise ship massacre. The Australians tried to put a tight lid on it, but all hell broke loose after the surviving passengers talked when they reached Chile. They were glowing in their praise of how you guys rescued them and saved the cruise ship from going on the rocks. The fact that two of them were daughters of diamond king Arthur Dorsett naturally excited the expose rags.”

“So now they’re calling it a massacre.” Pitt sighed.

“Lucky for the Indians they can’t blame this one on them,” said Giordino.

The car stopped in front of a security guard stationed in front of a small alcove that led to a private elevator. They signed an entry form and took the elevator to the tenth floor. When the doors opened they stepped into a vast room that was Hiram Yaeger’s electronics fiefdom from which the computer wizard directed NUMA’s vast data systems network.

Yaeger looked up from a huge horseshoe-shaped desk in the middle of the room and smiled broadly. No bib overalls today, but he was wearing a faded Levi’s jacket that looked like it had been dragged from Tombstone to Durango by a horse. He jumped to his feet and came from behind the desk, vigorously shaking Pitt’s and Giordino’s hands. “Good to see you two scoundrels back in the building. It’s been as dull as an abandoned amusement park since you skipped to the Antarctic.”

“Always good to be back on a floor that doesn’t rock and roll,” said Pitt.

Yaeger grinned at Giordino. “You look nastier than when you left.”

“That’s because my feet still feel cold as ice,” Giordino replied in his usual burlesque tone.

Pitt glanced about the room crowded with electronic data systems and a crew of technicians. “Are the admiral and Rudi Gunn on hand?”

“Waiting for you in the private conference room,” answered Yaeger. “We assumed you and A1 would go there first.”

“I wanted to catch you before we all sat down.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I’d like to study your data on sea serpents.”

Yaeger raised his eyebrows. “You did say sea serpents?”

Pitt nodded. “They intrigue me. I can’t tell you why.”

“It may surprise you to learn I have a mountain of material on sea serpents and lake monsters.”

“Forget the legendary creatures swimming around in Loch Ness and Lake Champlain,” said Pitt. “I’m only interested in the seagoing variety.”

Yaeger shrugged. “Since most of the sightings are on inland waters, that cuts the search by eighty percent. I’ll have a fat file on your desk tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you, Hiram. I’m grateful as always.”

Giordino peered at his watch. “We’d better move along before the admiral hangs us from the nearest yardarm.”

Yaeger gestured to a nearby door. “We can take the stairway.”

When Pitt and the others entered the conference room, Sandecker and Gunn were studying the region where the latest case of unexplained death was projected on the holographic chart. The admiral and Gunn stepped forward to greet them. For a few minutes they all stood in a tight little huddle and deliberated the turn of events. Gunn anxiously probed Pitt and Giordino for details, but they were both extremely tired, and they condensed the wild series of incidents into brief descriptions.

Sandecker knew better than to crowd them. Full reports could be written at a later time. He motioned to the empty chairs. “Why don’t you sit down, and we’ll get to work.”

Gunn pointed toward one of the blue globes that seemed to float over one end of the table. “The latest kill zone,” he said. “An Indonesian freighter called Mentawai, with a crew of eighteen.”

Pitt turned to the admiral. “The vessel that exploded after another ship’s crew had boarded her?”

“The same,” said Sandecker, nodding. “As I told you aboard Ice Hunter, actor Garret Converse, his crew and his fancy junk were reported sailing in the same area by an oil tanker that went unscathed. The junk and everyone on board appear to have vanished.”

“Nothing on satellite?” inquired Giordino.

“Too much cloud cover, and the infrared cameras won’t pick out a vessel as small as a junk.”

“There is something else to consider,” said Gunn. “The captain of the American container ship that found Mentawai reported a luxury yacht speeding from the site. He can’t swear to it in court, but he’s certain the yacht closed with Mentawai before he arrived, after responding to the freighter’s distress call. He also thinks the crew of the yacht are somehow responsible for the explosives that wiped out his boarding party.”

“Sounds like the good captain has an overactive imagination,” suggested Yaeger.

“To say this man is seeing demons is incorrect. Captain Jason Kelsey is a very responsible seaman with a solid history of skill and integrity.”

“Did he get a description of the yacht?” asked Pitt.

“By the time Kelsey concentrated his attention on it, the yacht was too distant to identify. His second officer, however, observed it earlier through binoculars before it widened the gap. Fortunately, he’s an amateur artist who enjoys sketching ships and boats while in port.”

“He drew a picture of it?”

“He admits to taking a few liberties. The yacht was pulling away from him, and his view was mostly of the stern quarter. But he managed to give us a good enough likeness to trace the hull design to her builders.”

Sandecker lit one of his cigars and nodded toward Giordino. “Al, why don’t you act as lead investigator on this one?”

Giordino slowly pulled out a cigar, the exact mate of Sandecker’s, and slowly rolled it between his thumb and fingers while warming one end with a wooden match. “I’ll get on the trail after a shower and a change of clothes.”

Giordino’s slinky method of pilfering the admiral’s private stock of cigars was a mystery that bewildered Sandecker. The cat-and-mouse game had gone on for years, with Sandecker unable to ferret out the secret and too proud to demand an answer from Giordino. What was particularly maddening to the admiral was that his inventory invariably failed to turn up a count of missing cigars.

Pitt was doodling on a notepad and spoke to Yaeger without looking up. “Suppose you tell me, Hiram. Did my idea of killer sound waves have any merit?”

“A great deal, as it turns out,” replied Yaeger. “The acoustics experts are still working out a detailed theory, but it looks as if we’re looking at a killer that travels through water and consists of several elements. There are multiple aspects to be examined. The first is a source for generating intense energy. The second, propagation, or how the energy travels from the source through the seas. Third, the target or structure that receives the acoustic energy. And fourth, the physiological effect on human and animal tissue.”

“Can you make a case for high-intensity sound waves that kill?” Pitt asked.

Yaeger shrugged. “We’re on shaky ground, but this is the best lead we have at the moment. The only joker in the deck is that sound waves intense enough to kill could not come from an ordinary sound source. And even an intense source could not kill at any great distance unless the sound was somehow focused.”

“Hard to believe that after traveling great distances through water a combination of high-intensity sound and excessive resonance energy can surface and kill every living thing within thirty or more kilometers.”

“Any idea where these sound rays originate?” asked Sandecker.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, we do.”

“Can one sound source actually cause such a staggering loss of life?” asked Gunn.

“No, and that’s the catch,” replied Yaeger. “To produce wholesale murder above and under the sea of the magnitude we’ve experienced, we have to be looking at several different sources on opposite sides of the ocean.” He paused, and shuffled through a stack of papers until he found the one he was looking for. Then he picked up a remote control and pressed a series of codes. Four green lights glowed on opposite corners of the holographic chart.

“By borrowing the global monitoring system of hydrophones placed by the Navy around the oceans to track the Soviet submarine fleet during the Cold War, we’ve managed to trace the source of the destructive sound waves to four different points in the Pacific Ocean.” Yaeger paused to pass printed copies of the chart to everyone seated at the table. “Number one, by far the strongest, appears to emanate from Gladiator Island, the exposed tip of a deep ocean range of volcanic mountains that surfaces midway between Tasmania and New Zealand’s South Island. Number two is almost on a direct line toward the Komandorskie Islands, off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Bering Sea.”

“That’s a fair ways north,” observed Sandecker.

“Can’t imagine what the Russians have to gain,” said Gunn.

“Then we head east across the sea to Kunghit Island, off British Columbia, Canada, for number three,” Yaeger continued. “The final source as traced by a data pattern from the hydrophones is on the Isla de Pascua, or Easter Island as it is better known.”

“Making the shape of a trapezium,” commented Gunn.

Giordino straightened. “A what?”

“Trapezium, a quadrilateral with no two sides that are parallel.”

Pitt rose from the table and moved until he was almost standing inside the three-dimensional chart of the ocean. “A bit unusual for the acoustic sources to all stem from islands.” He turned and stared at Yaeger. “Are you sure of your data? There is no mistake, your electronic gear processed the tracking information from the hydrophone system correctly?”

Yaeger looked as though Pitt had stabbed him in the chest. “Our statistical analysis takes into account the acoustic network receptions and the alternative ray paths due to ocean variations.”

“I stand humbled.” Pitt bowed, making a gesture of apology. Then he asked, “Are the islands inhabited?”

Yaeger handed Pitt a small folder. “We’ve gleaned the usual encyclopedia of data on the islands. Geology, fauna, inhabitants. Gladiator Island is privately owned. The other three are leased from foreign governments for mineral exploration. These have to be considered forbidden zones.”

“How can sound be propagated such great distances underwater?” inquired Giordino.

“High-frequency sound is rapidly absorbed by salts in seawater, but low-frequency acoustic waves ignore the molecular structure of the salts, and their signals have been detected at ranges reaching thousands of kilometers. The next part of the scenario gets hazy. Somehow, in a manner we’ve yet to understand, the high-intensity, low-frequency rays, radiating from the various sources, surface and focus in what is known as a ‘convergence zone.’ It’s a phenomenon the scientists call ‘caustics.’”

“Like in caustic soda?” asked Giordino.

“No, like an envelope formed when the sound rays meet and converge.”

Sandecker held up a pair of reading spectacles to the light, checking for smudges. “And if we were all sitting on the deck of a ship that was in the middle of a convergence zone?”

“If struck by only one sound source,” explained Yaeger, “we’d hear a soft hum and maybe suffer from nothing more than a mild headache. But if four waves converged in the same region at the same time, multiplying the intensity, the structure of the ship would ring or vibrate and the sonic energy would cause enough internal organ damage to kill all of us within a matter of minutes.”

“Judging from the scattered sites of the disasters,” said Giordino grimly, “this thing can run amok and strike anywhere in the sea.”

“Or along shorelines,” Pitt added.

“We’re working on predicting where the ray channels converge,” Yaeger said, “but it’s difficult to come up with a set formula. For the moment, the best we can do is chart tides, currents, sea depths and water temperatures. They all can significantly alter the path of the sound rays.”

“Since we have a vague notion of what we’re dealing with,” said Sandecker, “we can lay out a plan to pull the plug.”

“The question is,” Pitt commented, “except for the mineral exploration companies, what do the islands have in common?”

Giordino stared at his cigar. “Clandestine nuclear or conventional weapons testing?”

“None of the above,” Yaeger replied.

“Then what?” demanded Sandecker.

“Diamonds.”

Sandecker stared at Yaeger queerly. “Diamonds, you say?”

“Yes, sir.” Yaeger checked his file. “The operations on all tour islands are either owned or run by Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited of Sydney, Australia. Second only to De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer.”

Pitt felt as if someone had walked up and suddenly punched him in the stomach. “Arthur Dorsett,” he said quietly, “the chairman of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, happens to be the father of the two women A1 and I rescued in the Antarctic.”

“Of course,” said Gunn, suddenly seeing the light. “Deirdre Dorsett.” Then a quizzical look came into his eyes. “But the other lady, Maeve Fletcher?”

“Deirdre’s sister, who took an ancestral grandmother’s name,” explained Pitt.

Only Giordino saw the humor. “They went to an awful lot of trouble to meet us.”

Sandecker shot him a withering look and turned to Pitt. “This strikes me as more than a mere coincidence.”

Giordino came right back. “I can’t help wondering what one of the world’s richest diamond merchants will have to say when he learns his diggings came within a hair of killing off his darling daughters.”

“We may have a blessing in disguise,” said Gunn. “If Dorsett’s mining operations are somehow responsible for an acoustic death plague, Dirk and A1 have the credentials to walk up to his front door and ask questions. The man has every reason to act the role of a grateful father.”

“From what I know of Arthur Dorsett,” said Sandecker, “he’s so reclusive, he won the hermit trophy from Howard Hughes. As with De Beers diamond mining operations, Dorsett’s properties are heavily guarded against thievery and smuggling. He is never seen in public and he has never granted an interview to the news media. We’re talking about a very private man. I doubt seriously that saving his daughters’ lives will make a dent in this guy. He’s as hard-nosed as they come.”

Yaeger motioned toward the blue globes on the holographic chart. “People are dying out there. Surely he’ll listen to reason should his operations be somehow responsible.”

“Arthur Dorsett is a foreign national with an immense power base.” Sandecker spoke slowly. “We have to consider him innocent of any wrongdoing until we have proof. For all we know at the moment, the scourge is a product of nature. As for us, we’re committed to working through official channels. That’s my territory. I’ll start the ball rolling with the State Department and the Australian ambassador. They can set up a dialogue with Arthur Dorsett and request his cooperation in an investigation.”

“That could take weeks,” argued Yaeger.

“Why not save time,” said Giordino, “cut through the red tape, and see if his mining technology is somehow behind the mass murders?”

“You could knock on the door of his nearest diamond mine and ask to see the excavating operation,” Pitt suggested with the barest hint of sarcasm.

“If Dorsett is as paranoid as you make him out to be,” Giordino said to Sandecker, “he’s not the type of guy to play games with.”

“Al is right,” agreed Yaeger. “To stop the killing and stop it soon, we can’t wait for diplomatic niceties. We’ll have to go clandestine.”

“Not a simple exercise, snooping around diamond mines,” said Pitt. “They’re notoriously well guarded against poachers and any intruders out for a quick buck scavenging for stones. Security around diamond-producing mines is notoriously heavy. Penetrating high-tech electronic systems will require highly trained professionals.”

“A Special Forces team?” Yaeger put on the table.

Sandecker shook his head. “Not without presidential authority.”

“What about the President?” asked Giordino.

“Too soon to go to him,” answered the admiral. “Not until we can produce hard evidence of a genuine threat to national security.”

Pitt spoke slowly as he contemplated the chart. “The Kunghit Island mine seems the most convenient of the four. Since it’s in British Columbia and practically on our doorstep, I see no reason why we can’t do a little exploring on our own.”

Sandecker eyed Pitt shrewdly. “I hope you’re not laboring under the impression our neighbors to the north might be willing to turn a blind eye to an intrusion?”

“Why not? Considering that NUMA found a very profitable oil site off Baffin Island for them several years ago, I figure they won’t mind if we take a canoe trip around Kunghit and photograph the scenery.”

“Is that what you think?”

Pitt looked at the admiral like a kid expecting a free ticket to the circus. “I may have overstated my case slightly, but yes, that’s the way I see it.”

Sandecker puffed meditatively on his cigar. “All right,” he finally sighed. “Do your trespassing. But just remember, if you get caught by Dorsett’s security people, don’t bother to call home. Because nobody will answer the phone.”

A Rolls-Royce sedan rolled soundlessly to a stop beside an ancient aircraft hangar that stood in a weed-grown field on the far perimeter of Washington’s International Airport. Like an elegant dowager slumming on the wrong side of the tracks, the stately old car seemed out of place on a deserted dirt road during the night. The only illumination came from the dim yellow glow of a weathered streetlight that failed dismally at reflecting the silver and green metallic paint of the car.

The Rolls was a model known as the Silver Dawn. The chassis came out of the factory in 1955 and was fitted with a custom body by the coach-builders Hoopers & Company. The front fenders tapered gracefully into the body at the rear until the skirted wheels and sides were perfectly smooth. The engine was a straight six with overhead valves, which carried the car over the roads as quietly as the ticking of an electric clock. Speed with a Rolls-Royce was never a factor. When questioned about horsepower, the factory merely stated that it was adequate.

St. Julien Perlmutter’s chauffeur, a taciturn character by the name of Hugo Mulholand, pulled on the emergency brake, switched off the ignition and turned to his employer, who filled most of the rear seat.

“I have never been comfortable driving you here,” he said in a hollow bass voice that went with his bloodhound eyes. He stared at the rusting corrugated roof and walls that hadn’t seen paint in forty years. “I can’t see why anyone would want to live in such a disreputable shack.”

Perlmutter weighed a solid 181 kilograms. Strangely, none of his body possessed more than a hint of flab. He was remarkably solid for a huge man. He held up the gold knob of a hollow cane that doubled as a brandy flask and rapped it on the walnut table that lowered from the rear of the front seat. “That disreputable shack, as you call it, happens to house a collection of antique automobiles and aircraft worth millions of dollars. The chances of being set upon by bandits are unlikely. They don’t usually roam around airfields in the dead of night, and there are enough security systems to guard a Manhattan bank.” Perlmutter paused to point his cane out the window at a tiny red light that was barely visible. “Even as we speak, we’re being monitored by a video camera.”

Mulholand sighed, stepped around the car and opened the door for Perlmutter. “Shall I wait?”

“No, I’m having dinner here. Enjoy yourself for a few hours. Then return and pick me up at eleven-thirty.”

Mulholand helped Perlmutter from the car and escorted him to the entry door of the hangar. The door was stained and layered with dust. The camouflage was well conceived. Anyone who happened to pass the run-down appearing hangar would assume it was simply a deserted building scheduled for demolition. Perlmutter rapped on the door with his cane. After a few seconds there was an audible click, and the door opened as if pulled by a ghostly hand.

“Enjoy your dinner,” said Mulholand as he slid a cylindrical package under Perlmutter’s arm and held up the handle of a briefcase for him to grasp. Then he turned and walked back to the Rolls.

Perlmutter stepped into another world. Instead of dust, grime and cobwebs, he was in a brilliantly lit, brightly decorated and spotless atmosphere of gleaming paint and chrome. Nearly four dozen classic automobiles, two aircraft and a turn-of-the-century railroad car sat in restored splendor on a highly polished concrete floor. The door closed silently behind him as he walked through the incredible display of exotic machinery.

Pitt stood on a balcony that extended from an apartment and which ran across one end of the hangar a good ten meters above the concrete floor. He gestured at the cylindrical package under Perlmutter’s arm. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he said, smiling.

Perlmutter looked up and gave him a scowl. “I am not Greek and this happens to be a bottle of French Dom Perignon champagne,” he said, holding up the package, “vintage 1983, to celebrate your return to civilization. I would imagine it’s superior to anything in your cellar.”

Pitt laughed. “All right, we’ll test it against my Albuquerque, New Mexico, Gruet brut nonvintage sparkling wine.”

“You can’t be serious. Albuquerque? Gruet?”

“They beat out the best of the California sparkling wines in competition.”

“All this talk about wine is making my stomach growl. Send down your lift.”

Pitt sent down an antique freight elevator with ornate wrought-iron screens around it. As soon as it jangled to a stop, Perlmutter stepped in. “Will this thing take my weigh?”

“I installed it myself to bring up the furniture. But this will be a true load-capacity test.”

“That’s a comforting thought,” muttered Perlmutter as the elevator easily carried him up to Pitt’s apartment.

At the landing they greeted each other like the old friends they were. “Good to see you, Julien.”

“Always happy to dine with my tenth son.” It was one of Perlmutter’s running jokes. He was an old confirmed bachelor, and Pitt was the only son of Senator George Pitt of California.

“There are nine others just like me?” Pitt asked, feigning surprise.

Perlmutter patted his massive stomach. “Before this got in the way, you’d be amazed how many damsels succumbed to my suave manners and honeyed tongue.” He paused to sniff the air. “Is that herring I smell?”

Pitt nodded. “You’re eating basic German farmhand fare tonight. Corned beef hash with salt herring and steamed spiced sauerkraut preceded by lentil soup with pork liver sausage.”

“I should have brought Munich beer instead of champagne.”

“Be adventuresome,” said Pitt. “Why follow the rules?”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Perlmutter. “Sounds wonderful. You’ll make some woman a happy wife with your masterful cooking.”

“I’m afraid a love of cooking won’t make up for all my failings.”

“Speaking of lovely ladies, what do you hear from Congresswoman Smith?”

“Loren is back in Colorado, campaigning to keep her seat in Congress,” explained Pitt. “I haven’t seen her in nearly two months.”

“Enough of this idle talk,” said Perlmutter impatiently. “Let’s open the bottle of champagne and get to work.”

Pitt provided an ice bucket, and they went through the Dom Perignon before the main entree and finished the meal with the Gruet brut during dessert. Perlmutter was mightily impressed with the sparkling wine from New Mexico. “This is quite good, dry and crisp,” he said slyly. “Where can I buy a case?”

“If it was only `quite good,’ you wouldn’t be interested in obtaining a case,” said Pitt, grinning. “You’re an old charlatan.”

Perlmutter shrugged. “I never could fool you.”

As soon as Pitt cleared the dishes, Perlmutter moved into the living room, opened his briefcase and laid a thick sheaf of papers on the coffee table. When Pitt joined him, he was glancing at the pages, checking his notations.

Pitt settled in a leather sofa beneath staggered shelves that held a small fleet of ship models, replicas of ships that Pitt had discovered over the years. “So what have you got on the renowned Dorsett family?”

“Would you believe this represents a shallow scratch on the surface?” Perlmutter replied, holding up the thick volume of over a thousand pages. “From what I’ve researched, the Dorsett history reads like a dynasty out of an epic novel.”

“What about the current head of the family, Arthur Dorsett?”

“Extremely reclusive. Rarely surfaces in public. Obstinate, prejudiced and thoroughly unscrupulous. Universally disliked by all who remotely come in contact with him.”

“But filthy rich,” said Pitt.

“Disgustingly so,” replied Perlmutter with the expression of a man who just ate a spider. “Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited and the House of Dorsett chain of retail stores are wholly owned by the family. No stockholders, shareholders or partners. They also control a sister company called Pacific Gladiator that concentrates on the mining of colored gemstones.”

“How did he get his start?”

“For that story we have to go back 144 years.” Perlmutter held out his glass and Pitt filled it. “We begin with an epic of the sea that was recorded by the captain of a clipper ship and published by his daughter after he died. During a voyage in January of 1856, while he was transporting convicts, a number of them women, to the Australian penal colony at Botany Bay, an inlet south of the present city of Sydney, his ship ran afoul of a violent typhoon while beating north through the Tasman Sea. The ship was called the Gladiator, and she was skippered by one of the most famous clipper captains of the era, Charles `Bully’ Scaggs.”

“Iron men and wooden ships,” murmured Pitt.

“They were that,” agreed Perlmutter. “Anyway, Scaggs and his crew must have labored like demons to save the ship from one of the worst storms of the century. But when the winds died and seas calmed, Gladiator was little more than a derelict. Her masts were swept over the side, her superstructure was destroyed and her hull was taking on water. The ship’s boats were gone or smashed, and Captain Scaggs knew his ship had only hours to live, so he issued orders for the crew and any convicts handy as carpenters to dismantle what was left of the ship and build a raft.”

“Probably the only option open to him,” Pitt commented.

“Two of the convicts were Arthur Dorsett’s ancestors,” Perlmutter continued. “His great-great grandfather was Jess Dorsett, a convicted highwayman, and his great-great-grandmother was Betsy Fletcher, who was given a twenty-year sentence to the penal colony for stealing a blanket.”

Pitt contemplated the bubbles in his glass. “Crime certainly didn’t pay in those days.”

“Most Americans don’t realize that our own colonies were also a dumping ground for England’s criminals until the Revolutionary War. Many families would be surprised to learn their ancestors landed on our shores as convicted criminals.”

“Were the ship’s survivors rescued from the raft?” asked Pitt.

Perlmutter shook his head. “The next fifteen days became a saga of horror and death. Storms, thirst and starvation, and a mad slaughter between the sailors, a few soldiers and the convicts decimated the people clinging to the raft. When it finally drifted onto the reef of an uncharted island and went to pieces, legend has it the survivors were saved from a great white shark by a sea serpent while swimming to shore.”

“Which explains the Dorsett hallmark. It came from the hallucinations of near-dead people.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. Only eight of the original 231 poor souls who left the ship staggered onto a beach-six men and two women more dead than alive.”

Pitt looked at Perlmutter. “That’s 223 lost. A staggering figure.”

“Of the eight,” Perlmutter went on, “a seaman and a convict were later killed after fighting over the women.”

“A replay of the mutiny on the Bounty.”

“Not quite. Two years later, Captain Scaggs and his remaining seaman, luckily for him the Gladiator’s carpenter, built a boat out of the remains of a French naval sloop that was driven on the rocks by a storm with the loss of all hands. Leaving the convicts behind on the island, they sailed across the Tasman Sea to Australia.”

“Scaggs deserted Dorsett and Fletcher?”

“For a very good reason. The enchantment of living on a beautiful island was preferred to the hell of the prison camps at Botany Bay. And because Scaggs felt he owed his life to Dorsett, he told the penal colony authorities that all the convicts had died on the raft so the survivors could be left in peace.”

“So they built a new life and multiplied.”

“Exactly,” said Perlmutter. “Jess and Betsy were married by Scaggs and had two boys, while the other two convicts produced a girl. In time they built a little family community and began trading food supplies to whaling ships that began making Gladiator Island, as it later became known, a regular stopover during their long voyages.”

“What became of Scaggs?” asked Pitt.

“He returned to the sea as master of a new clipper ship owned by a shipping company called Carlisle & Dunhill. After several more voyages to the Pacific, he retired and eventually died, twenty years later, in 1876.”

“Where do diamonds enter the picture?”

“Patience,” said Perlmutter like a schoolteacher. “A little background to better understand the story. To begin with, diamonds, though instigating more crime, corruption and romance than any other of the earth’s minerals, are merely crystallised carbon. Chemically, they’re sister to graphite and coal. Diamonds are thought to have been formed as long ago as three billion years, anywhere from 120 to 200 kilometers deep in the earth’s upper mantle. Under incredible heat and pressure, pure carbon along with gases and liquid rock forced their way toward the surface through volcanic shafts commonly referred to as pipes. As this blend exploded upward, the carbon cooled and crystallized into extremely hard and transparent stones. Diamonds are one of the few materials to touch the earth’s surface from remote depths.”

Pitt stared at the floor, trying to picture nature’s diamond-making process in his mind. “I assume a cross section of the ground would show a trail of diamonds swirling upward to surface in a circular shaft that widens at the surface like a raised’ funnel.”

“Or a carrot,” said Perlmutter. “Unlike pure lava, which raised high, peaked volcanoes when it reached the surface, the mix of diamonds and liquid rock, known as kimberlite pipes after the South African city of Kimberly, cooled rapidly and hardened into large mounds. Some were worn down by natural erosion, spreading the diamonds into what are known as alluvial deposits. Some eroded pipes even formed lakes. The largest mass of crystallized stones, however, remained in the underground pipes or chutes.”

“Let me guess. The Dorsetts found one of these diamond-laden pipes on their island.”

“You keep getting ahead of me,” Perlmutter muttered irritably.

“Sorry,” Pitt said placatingly.

“The shipwrecked convicts unknowingly found not one, but two phenomenally rich pipes in volcanic mounds on opposite ends of Gladiator Island. The stones they found, which were freed from the rock by centuries of rain and wind, simply appeared to be `pretty things,’ as Betsy Fletcher referred to them in a letter to Scaggs. Actually, uncut and unpolished diamonds are dull-looking stones with almost no sparkle. They often feel and look like an oddly shaped bar of soap. It was not until 1866, after the American Civil War, that a U.S. Navy vessel on an exploratory voyage to find possible sites for deepwater ports throughout the South Pacific stopped at the island to take on water. On board was a geologist. He happened to see the Dorsett children playing a game with stones on the beach and became curious. He examined one of the stones and was amazed as he identified it as a diamond of at least twenty carats. When the geologist questioned Jess Dorsett as to where the stone came from, the cagey old highwayman told him he brought it with him from England.”

“And that timely little event launched Dorsett Consolidated Mining.”

“Not immediately,” said Per’ mutter. “After Jess died, Betsy sent her two boys, Jess Junior and Charles, no doubt named after Scaggs, and the daughter of the other two convicts, Mary Winkleman, to England to be educated. She wrote Scaggs for his help and included a pouch of uncut diamonds to pay for this undertaking, which the captain turned over to his friend and former employer, Abner Carlisle. Acting on behalf of Scaggs, who was on his deathbed, Carlisle had the diamonds faceted and polished, later selling them on the London exchange for nearly one million pounds, or about seven million dollars, in the currency of the time.”

“A tidy sum for college tuition for those days,” Pitt said consideringly. “The kids must have had a ball.”

Perlmutter shook his head. “You’re wrong this time. They lived frugally at Cambridge. Mary attended a proper girl’s school outside of London. She and Charles married soon after he took his degree, and they returned to the island, where they directed the mining operations in the dormant volcanoes. Jess Junior remained in England and opened the House of Dorsett in partnership with a Jewish diamond merchant from Aberdeen by the name of Levi Strouser. The London end of the business, which dealt in the cutting and sale of diamonds, had luxurious showrooms for retail sales, elegant offices on the upper floors for larger wholesale trading and a vast workshop in the basement, where the stones from Gladiator Island were cut and polished. The dynasty prospered, helped in no small measure by the fact that the diamonds that came out of the island pipes were a very rare violet-rose color and of the highest quality.”

“The mines have never played out?”

“Not yet. The Dorsetts have been very shrewd in holding back much of their production in cooperation with the cartel to hold up the price.”

“What about offspring?” asked Pitt.

“Charles and Mary had one boy, Anson. Jess Junior never married.”

“Anson was Arthur’s grandfather?” Pitt asked.

“Yes, he ran the company for over forty years. He was probably the most decent and honest of the lot. Anson was satisfied to run and maintain a profitable little empire. Never driven by greed like his descendants, he gave a great deal of money to charity. Any number of libraries and hospitals throughout Australia and New Zealand were founded by him. When lie died in 1910, he left the company to a son, Henry, and a daughter, Mildred. She died young in a boating accident. She fell overboard during a cruise on the family yacht and was taken by sharks. Rumors circulated that she was murdered by Henry, but no investigations were made. Henry’s money made sure of that. Under Henry, the family launched a reign of greed, jealousy, cruelty and ravenous power that continues to this day.”

“I recall reading an article about him in the Los Angeles Times,” said Pitt. “They compared Sir Henry Dorsett to Sir Ernest Oppenheimer of De Beers.”

“Neither was exactly what you’d call a saint. Oppenheimer climbed over a multitude of obstacles to build an empire that reaches out to every continent and has diversified holdings in automobiles, paper and explosives manufacture, breweries, as well as the mining of gold, uranium, platinum and copper. De Beers’ main strength, however, still lies with diamonds and the cartel that regulates the market from London to New York to Tokyo. Dorsett Consolidated Mining, on the other hand, remained totally committed to diamonds. And except for holdings in a number of colored gemstone mines-rubies in Burma, emeralds in Colombia, sapphires from Ceylon—the family never really diversified into other investments. All profits were plowed back into the corporation.”

“Where did the name De Beers come from?”

“De Beers was the South African farmer who unknowing sold his diamond-laden land for a few thousand dollars to Cecil Rhodes, who excavated a fortune and launched the cartel.”

“Did Henry Dorsett join Oppenheimer and the De Beers cartel?” asked Pitt.

“Although he participated in market price controls, Henry became the only large mine owner to sell independently. While eighty-five percent of the world’s production went through the De Beers-controlled Central Selling Organization to brokers and dealers, Dorsett bypassed the main diamond exchanges in London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York so he could market a limited production of fine stones direct to the public through the House of Dorsett, which now numbers almost five hundred stores.”

“De Beers did not fight him?”

Perlmutter shook his head. “Oppenheimer formed the cartel to ensure a stable market and high prices for diamonds. Sir Ernest did not see Dorsett as a threat so long as the Australian didn’t attempt to dump his supply of stones on the market.”

“Dorsett must have an army of craftsmen to support such an operation.”

“Over a thousand employees in three diamond-cutting facilities, two cleaving workshops and two polishing departments. They also have an entire thirty-story building in Sydney, Australia, that houses a host of artisans who create the House of Dorsett’s distinctive and creative jewelry. While most of the other brokers hire Jews to cut and facet their stones, Dorsett hires mostly Chinese.”

“Henry Dorsett died sometime in the late seventies, didn’t he?”

Perlmutter smiled. “History repeated itself. At the age of sixty-eight, he fell off his yacht while in Monaco and drowned. It was whispered that Arthur got him drunk and shoved him into the bay.”

“What’s the story on Arthur?”

Perlmutter checked his file of papers, then peered over the lenses of his reading glasses. “If the diamond-buying public ever had any inkling of the dirty operations Arthur Dorsett has conducted over the past thirty years, they’d never buy another diamond till the day he dies.”

“Not a nice man, I take it.”

“Some men are two-faced, Arthur is at least five-faced. Born on Gladiator Island in 1941, the only child of Henry and Charlotte Dorsett. He was educated by his mother, never going to school on the mainland until the age of eighteen, when he entered the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. He was a big man, towering half a head above his classmates, yet he took no interest in sports, preferring to probe around the old ghost mines that are scattered throughout the Rocky Mountains. After graduation with a degree as a mining engineer, he worked the De Beers diggings in South Africa for five years before returning home and taking over as superintendent of the family mines on the island. During his frequent trips to the Dorsett headquarters building in Sydney, he met and married a lovely young girl, Irene Calvert, who was the daughter of a professor of biology at the university at Melbourne. She gave him three daughters.”

“Maeve, Deirdre and ...”

“Boudicca.”

“Two Celtic goddesses and a legendary British queen.”

“A feminine triad.”

“Maeve and Deirdre are twenty-seven and thirty-one years of age. Boudicca is thirty-eight.”

“Tell me more of their mother,” said Pitt.

“Little to tell. Irene died fifteen years ago, again under mysterious circumstances. It wasn’t until a year after she was buried on Gladiator Island that a Sydney newspaper reporter ferreted out the fact of her death. He ran an obituary on her before Arthur could bribe the managing editor to kill the piece. Otherwise, nobody would have known she was gone.”

“Admiral Sandecker knows something of Arthur Dorsett and says he’s impossible to reach,” said Pitt.

“Very true. He is never seen in public, never socializes, has no friends. His entire life revolves around the business. He even has a secret tunnel for entering and leaving the Sydney headquarters building without being seen. He has cut Gladiator Island off from the outside world completely. To his way of thinking the less known about Dorsett mining operations the better.”

“What about the company? He can’t hide the dealings of a vast business forever.”

“I beg to differ,” said Perlmutter. “A privately owned corporation can get away with murder. Even the governments they operate under have an impossible time trying to probe company assets for tax purposes. Arthur Dorsett may be a reincarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge, but he’s never hesitated to spend big money to buy loyalty. If he thinks it’s beneficial to make a government official an instant millionaire in order to gain leverage and power, Dorsett will go for it.”

“Do his daughters work within the company?”

“Two of them are said to be employed by dear old Dad, the other one...”

“Maeve,” Pitt offered.

“All right, Maeve, cut herself off from the family, put herself through university and came out a marine zoologist. Something of her mother’s father must have come through in her genes.”

“And Deirdre and Boudicca?”

“The gossipmongers claim the two are devils incarnate, and worse than the old man. Deirdre is the Machiavelli of the family, a conniving schemer with larceny in her veins. Boudicca is rumored to be quite ruthless and as cold and hard as ice from the bottom of a glacier. Neither seems to have any interest in men or high living.”

A distant look reflected in Pitt’s eyes. “What is it about diamonds that gives them so much allure? Why do men and women kill for them? Why have nations and governments risen and fallen because of them?”

“Besides their beauty after being cut and polished, diamonds have unique qualities. They happen to be the hardest known substance in the world. Rub one against silk and it produces a positive electrostatic charge. Expose it to the setting sun and it will later glow in the dark with an unearthly phosphorescence. No, my young friend. Diamonds are more than a myth. They are the ultimate creator of illusions.” Perlmutter paused and lifted the champagne bottle from the ice bucket. He poured the final few drops in his glass almost sadly. Then he held it up. “Damn, it appears I’ve run dry.”

After he left the NUMA building, Giordino signed out one of the agency’s turquoise cars and drove to his recently purchased condominium in Alexandria, along the Potomac River. His rooms were an interior decorator’s nightmare. None of the furniture or decor matched. Nothing conformed to the basic rules of taste and style. His succession of girlfriends who moved in and moved out all left their mark, and none of their redecorating blended with the judgment of his next companion. Happily, he stayed close friends with every one of them. They enjoyed his company, but none would have married him on a bet.

He wasn’t a sloppy housekeeper, and he was a fair cook, but he was seldom at home. If he wasn’t chasing around the world on undersea projects with Pitt, he was mounting expeditions to search for anything that was lost, be it ships, aircraft or people. He loved to hunt for the missing. He could never sit around his living room watching TV in the evenings or read a book. Giordino’s mind was constantly traveling, and his thoughts were rarely trained on the lady by his side, a condition that frustrated the gentler sex no end.

He threw his dirty clothes in the washer and took a quick shower. Then he packed an overnight bag and drove to Dulles International, where he caught an early evening flight to Miami. Upon arrival, he rented a car, drove to the city’s port area and checked into a dockside motel. Next he checked the Yellow Pages for marine architects, copying the names, addresses and phone numbers of those who specialized in private motor yachts. Then he began to call.

The first four, who had already left for home, responded with answering machines, but the fifth picked up the call. Giordino was not surprised. He had expected that one of them would be conscientiously working late, creating the construction plans for some rich man’s floating home away from home.

“Mr. Wes Wilbanks?” inquired Giordino.

“Yes, this is Wes. What can I do for you this time of night?” The voice had a soft Southern drawl.

“My name is Albert Giordino. I’m with the National Underwater & Marine Agency. I need your help in identifying the manufacturer of a boat.”

“Is it docked here in Miami?”

“No, sir. It could be anywhere in the world.”

“Sounds mysterious.”

“More than you know.”

“I’ll be in the office tomorrow at around ten.”

“This is a matter of some urgency,” Giordino said with quiet authority.

“Okay, I’ll be wrapping up in about an hour. Why don’t you drop by then? Do you have the address?”

“Yes, but I’m a stranger to Miami.”

Wilbanks gave Giordino directions. The architect’s office was only a few blocks away, so Giordino grabbed a fast dinner at a small Cuban cafe and set off on foot, following the directions he’d received over the phone.

The man who opened the door was in his early thirties, quite tall and dressed in shorts and a flowered shirt. Giordino’s head barely came to Wilbanks’ shoulder, and he had to look up. The handsome face was framed by an abundance of fashionably slicked-back hair that was graying at the temples. He definitely had the look of someone who belonged to the yachting set, Giordino decided.

“Mr. Giordino, Wes Wilbanks. I’m real pleased to meet you.”

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“Come on in. Would you like some coffee? Made this morning, but the chicory keeps it flavorful.”

“Love some.”

Wilbanks led him into an office with a hardwood floor, shelves covering one wall stacked with books on yacht and small-boat design. The other wall was filled with half hull models that Giordino assumed were built from Wilbanks’ plans. The middle of the room contained a large antique drafting table. A desk with a computer sat nestled on a bench in front of a picture window overlooking the port.

Giordino accepted a cup of coffee and laid the sketches from the second officer of the container ship Rio Grande on the drafting table. “I know this isn’t much to go on, but I’m hoping you might point me toward the manufacturer.”

Wilbanks studied the drawings, tilting his head from side to side. After a solid minute, he rubbed his chin and peered over the sketch paper. “At first glance it looks like a basic design from any one of a hundred boatbuilders. But I do believe whoever observed the boat and sketched it was fooled by the angle from which he viewed it. Actually, I believe there are two hulls, not one, mounting a futuristic pod that gives it a space-age look. I’ve always wanted to create something like this but have yet to find a customer willing to stray very far from conventional designs—”

“You sound like you’re talking about a craft for flying to the moon”

“Not far from it.” Wilbanks sat down at his computer and turned it on. “Let me show you with computer graphics what I mean.” He rummaged through a drawer, retrieved a disk and inserted it into his machine. “Here’s a concept I created purely for fun and out of frustration at knowing I’ll never get paid to build it.”

The image of a sleek sport cruiser without any sharp lines or edges filled the monitor. Gone was the traditional angular bow. The entire hull and pod that covered the cockpit were smooth and rounded. Nothing conservative about this craft. It looked like something from fifty years in the future. Giordino was impressed. Through the use of computer graphics, Wilbanks gave him a tour through the interior of the boat, focusing on the bold and unusual design of the appliances and furniture. This was truly imagination and innovation at work.

“You visualize all this from a couple of rough drawings?” Giordino asked in awe.

“Hold on and you’ll see,” said Wilbanks. He ran the sketches through an electronic scanner that transferred the images to his computer monitor. Then he overlaid the images with his own plans and compared them. Except for minor differences in design and dimensions, they were a very close match.

“All in the eyes of the beholder,” Giordino murmured.

“I’m insanely envious that one of my peers got there first,” Wilbanks said. “I’d have sold my kids for a contract to do this baby.”

“Can you give me an idea as to the size and power source?”

“Of mine or yours?”

“The boat in the sketches,” replied Giordino.

“I should say the overall length is somewhere around thirty meters. The beam, just under ten meters. As to power plants, if it were me I would have specified a pair of Blitzen Seastorm turbodiesels. Most likely BAD 98s, which combined could produce more than twenty-five hundred horsepower. Estimated cruising speed with these engines could easily push a boat this size through calm seas at seventy knots or more, much more depending upon the efficiency of the twin hulls.”

“Who has the facilities to build such a boat?”

Wilbanks leaned back and thought a moment. “A boat of this size and configuration calls for pretty radical fiberglass forming. Glastec Boats in San Diego could do the job, as could Heinklemann Specialty Boat Builders in Kiel, Germany.”

“What about the Japanese?”

“They’re not players in the yacht industry. Hong Kong has a number of small boatyards, but they primarily build in wood. Most fiberglass-boat builders stick to tried and proven concepts.”

“Then in your judgment it’s either Glastec or Heinklemann,” said Giordino.

“Those are the two I’d call in to bid on my design,” Wilbanks assured him.

“What about the architect?”

“I can think of at least twenty off the top of my head who specialize in radical design.”

Giordino smiled. “I was lucky in stumbling onto number twenty-one.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Seaside Motel.”

“NUMA doesn’t exactly splurge with their expense accounts, do they?”

“You should meet my boss, Admiral James Sandecker. He and Shylock were bosom buddies.”

Wilbanks laughed. “Tell you what, drop back by my office about ten in the morning. I should have something for you.”

“I’m grateful for your help.”

Giordino shook Wilbanks’ hand, then took a long walk along the waterfront before returning to his motel room, where he read a mystery novel before finally falling asleep.

At ten o’clock on the nose, Giordino entered Wilbanks’ studio. The boat architect was studying a set of plans. He held them up and grinned.

“After you left last night,” he said, “I refined the sketches you gave me and ran off scaled plans. Then I reduced the size and faxed them to San Diego and Germany. Because of the difference in time, Heinklemann had responded before I came in this morning. Glastec replied to my inquiry only twenty minutes before you walked in.”

“Were they familiar with the boat in question?” asked Giordino impatiently.

“Bad news on that end, I’m afraid,” Wilbanks said deadpan. “Neither designed or built your boat.”

“Then it’s back to square one.”

“Not really. The good news is that one of Heinklemann’s engineers saw and studied your boat when it was moored in Monaco about nine months ago. He reports the manufacturer was a French firm, a new one in the industry I wasn’t aware of. Jusserand Marine out of Cherbourg.”

“Then we can fax them a set of your plans,” said Giordino, his hopes on the rise again.

“No need.” Wilbanks waved him off “Though the subject never came up, I assumed your real reason for tracing the boat manufacturer was to learn the identity of the owner.”

“I have no reason to deny it.”

“The Heinklemann engineer who spotted the boat in Monaco was also kind enough to include the owner’s name in the fax. He mentioned that he inquired only after he noticed that the crew looked more like a band of Mafia toughs than polished seamen maintaining and sailing a luxury yacht.”

“Mafia toughs`.”

“He claimed they all packed guns.”

“The name of the owner?”

“A woman, a wealthy Australian. Her family made ii fortune in diamond mining. Her name is Boudicca Dorsett.”

While Pitt was on a flight to Ottawa, Canada, Giordino called his plane and briefed him on the mystery yacht.

“There is no doubt?” asked Pitt.

“Not in my book,” replied Giordino. “It’s almost a dead certainty the boat that fled the death scene belongs to the Dorsett family.”

“The plot thickens.”

“You might also be interested in learning that the admiral asked the Navy to conduct a satellite search of the central and eastern belt of the Pacific Ocean. The yacht was discovered and tracked. It made a brief layover in Hawaii and then continued on toward your goal.”

“Kunghit Island? Then I can kill two stones with one bird.”

“You’re just full of pathetic clichés this morning.”

“What does the yacht look like?”

“Unlike any boat you’ve ever seen before. Strictly a space-age design.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for it,” Pitt promised.

“I know it’s a waste of breath saying this,” Giordino said cynically, “but stay out of trouble.”

“I’ll wire if I need money.” Pitt laughed as he hung up, thankful that he had a caring friend like Albert Cassius Giordino.

After landing and renting a car, Pitt took the bridge across the Rideau River into Ottawa, the Canadian capital city. The weather was colder than the inside of a refrigerator, and the landscape appeared ugly and barren without leaves on the trees. The only havens of color that sprang from a thick sheet of snow covering the ground were scattered stands of green pines. He glanced over the railing at the river below. The river, which ran into the Ottawa River and thence to the mighty St. Lawrence, was flowing under a coating of ice. Canada was an incredibly beautiful country, thought Pitt, but its harsh winters should be sent far to the north, never to return.

As he drove across the bridge over the Ottawa River and into the small city of Hull, he glanced at his map and memorized the streets leading to a group of three upscale buildings that housed several government offices. The one he was looking for was Environment Canada, a department of the government that corresponded to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington.

A security guard at a gatehouse gave him directions and waved him through. Pitt slipped the car into a slot in the visitors’ parking lot and entered the building. A quick glance at the building directory, and he was into the elevator and on his way up to Environment Canada’s offices.

A receptionist nearing retirement looked up and forced a thin smile. “May I help you?”

“My name is Pitt. I have an appointment with Mr. Edward Posey.”

“One moment.” She dialed a number, announced his arrival and then nodded. “Please take the hallway down to the doorway at the end.”

Pitt thanked her and did as he was told. A pretty redhaired secretary met him at the door and ushered him into Posey’s office.

A short man with glasses and a beard rose from his chair, leaned over the desk and pressed Pitt’s extended hand. “A pleasure to see you again, Dirk. How long has it been?”

“Eleven years ago, during the spring of 1989.”

“Yes, the Doodlebug Project. We met at the conference when you gave a report on your discovery of the oil field near Baffin Island.”

“I need a favor, Ed.”

Posey nodded to a chair. “Sit down, sit down. What exactly can I do for you?”

“I’d like your permission to investigate the mining activities being conducted at Kunghit Island.”

“You talking about Dorsett Consolidated’s operations?”

Pitt nodded. “The same. NUMA has reason to believe their excavating technology is having a devastating effect on sea life as far away as the Antarctic.”

Posey gave him a thoughtful look. “This have anything to do with that Australian cruise ship and its dead passengers?”

“Any connection is purely circumstantial at this date.”

“But you have your suspicions?” Posey inquired.

“We do.”

“Natural Resources Canada is who you should talk to.”

“I don’t think so. If your government operates anything like mine, it would take an act of Parliament to allow an investigation onto land that is legally leased by a mining company. Even then, Arthur Dorsett is too powerful to allow that to happen.”

“It would seem you’ve crawled into a pipe with no outlet,” said Posey.

“There is a way out,” Pitt said, smiling, “providing you cooperate.”

Posey looked uneasy. “I can’t authorize you to snoop around Dorsett’s diamond mine, certainly not without hard evidence of unlawful damage to the environment.”

“Maybe, but you can hire my services to check out the spawning habits of cauliflower-nosed salmon.”

“Spawning season is almost over. Besides, I’ve never heard of a cauliflower-nosed salmon.”

“Neither have I.”

“You’ll never fool security at the mine. Dorsett hires the best in the business, British ex-commandos and American Special Forces veterans.”

“I don’t have to climb the fence onto mining property,” explained Pitt. “I can find all I require with instruments while sailing around the inlets of Kunghit Island.”

“In a survey boat?”

“I was thinking of a canoe, local color and all.”

“Forget the canoe. The waters around Kunghit are treacherous. The waves roll in out of the Pacific and pound the rocky shores like you wouldn’t believe.”

“You make it sound unsafe.”

“If the sea doesn’t get you,” Posey said seriously, “Dorsett’s goon squad will.”

“So I’ll use a bigger boat and carry a harpoon,” Pitt said cynically.

“Why don’t you simply go on the property with a bona fide team of Canadian environmental engineers and blow the whistle on any shady operations?”

Pitt shook his head. “A waste of time. Dorsett’s foreman would only close down the mine until they left. Better to investigate when their guard isn’t up.”

Posey stared past Pitt out the window for several seconds. Then he shrugged. “Okay, I’ll arrange for you to work under contract with Environment Canada to investigate the kelp forest around Kunghit Island. You’re to study any possible damage to the kelp from chemicals running into the sea from the mining operations. How does that sound?”

“Thank you,” Pitt said sincerely. “How much do I get paid?”

Posey picked up on the joke. “Sorry, you’re not in the budget. But I might be persuaded to buy you a hamburger at the nearest fast-food joint.”

“Done.”

“One more thing.”

“Are you going it alone?”

“One does not look as suspicious as two.”

“Not in this case,” said Posey grimly. “I strongly advise you take along one of the local Indians as a guide.

That will give you more of an official look. Environment Canada works closely with the tribes to prevent pollution and save forested land. A researcher and a local fisherman working on a project for the government should dilute any doubts by Dorsett security.”

“Do you have a name in mind?” asked Pitt.

“Mason Broadmoor. A very resourceful guy. I’ve hired him before on a number of environmental projects.”

“An Indian with the name of Mason Broadmoor?”

“He’s a member of the Haida who live on the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Most of them took British names generations ago. They’re excellent fishermen and are familiar with the waters around Kunghit Island.”

“Is Broadmoor a fisherman?”

“Not really. But he’s very creative.”

“Creative at what?”

Posey hesitated for a few moments, straightened some papers on his desk and then stared at Pitt rather sheepishly.

“Mason Broadmoor,” he said finally, “carves totem poles.”

Arthur Dorsett stepped out of the private elevator to his penthouse suite as he did every morning at precisely seven o’clock, like a bull charging into the ring at Seville, huge, menacing, invincible. He was a giant of a man, brawny shoulders brushing the sides of the doorframe as he ducked under the lintel. He had the hairy, muscular build of a professional wrestler. Coarse and wiry sandy hair swirled about his head like a thicket of brambles. His face was ruddy and as fierce as the black eyes that stared from beneath heavy, scraggly brows. He walked with an odd rocking motion, his shoulders dipping up and down like the walking beam of a steam engine.

His skin was rough and tanned by long days in the sun, working in the open mines, driving his miners for higher production, and he could still fill a muck bucket with the best of them. A huge mustache curled downward past the corners of lips that were constantly stretched open like a moray eel’s, revealing teeth yellowed from long years of pipe smoking. He radiated contempt and supreme arrogance. Arthur Dorsett was an empire unto himself who followed no laws but his own.

Dorsett shunned the limelight, a difficult feat with his incredible wealth and the $400 million jewelry trade building he built in Sydney. Paid for without bank loans, out of his own coffers, the Trump Towers-like building housed the offices of diamond brokers, traders and merchants, cutting and faceting laboratories and a polishing factory. Known as a major player among diamond producers, Arthur Dorsett also played a highly secret role behind the scenes of the colored gemstone market.

He strode into the large anteroom, past four secretaries without acknowledging their presence, into an office that was located in the center of the building, with no windows to allow a magnificent panoramic view of modern Sydney sprawling outward from its harbor. Too many men who had been crossed in business deals with Dorsett gladly would have hired a sniper to take him out. He entered through a steel door into an office that was plain, even Spartan, with walls two meters thick. The entire room was one gigantic vault where Dorsett directed the family mining ventures and where he had collected and now displayed the largest and most opulent stones dug from his mines and faceted by his cutting workshops. Hundreds of incredibly beautiful stones were laid out on black velvet in glass cases. It was estimated this one room alone held diamonds worth close to $1.2 billion.

Dorsett didn’t need a millimeter gauge to measure stones and a diamond scale to weigh them, nor a loupe to detect the flaws or dark spots of carbon within. There was no more practiced eye in the business. Of all the incredible diamonds arrayed for his personal satisfaction, he always came and stared down at the largest, most precious and perhaps the most highly prized gem in the world.

It was D-grade flawless with tremendous luster, perfect transparency, strong refraction and a fiery dispersion of light. An overhead light beam excited a burst of radiant fire in an eye-dazzling display of the stone’s violet-rose color. Discovered by a Chinese worker at the Gladiator mine in 1908, it was the largest diamond ever found on the island, originally weighing in at 1130 carats when rough. Cutting reduced it to 620. The stone was double rose-cut in ninety-eight facets to bring out its brilliance. If any diamond ignited the imagination with thoughts of romance and adventure, it was the Dorsett Rose, as Arthur had modestly named it. The value was inestimable. Few even knew of its existence. Dorsett well knew there were a good fifty men somewhere around the world who would dearly love to murder him in order to gain ownership of the stone.

Reluctantly, he turned away and sat down behind his desk, a huge monstrosity built of polished lava rock with mahogany drawers. He pressed a button on a console that alerted his head secretary that he was now in his office.

She came back over the intercom almost immediately. “Your daughters have been waiting nearly an hour.”

Indifferent, Dorsett replied with a voice that was as hard as the diamonds in the room. “Send the little darlin’s in.” Then he sat back to watch the parade, never failing to enjoy the physical and personal differences of his daughters.

Boudicca, a statuesque giantess, strode through the doorway with the self-assurance of a tigress entering an unarmed village. She was dressed in a ribbed-knit cardigan with matching sleeveless tunic and truffle-and-parchment striped pants stuffed inside a pair of calfskin riding boots. Far taller than her sisters, she towered over all but a very few men. Staring up at her Amazon beauty never failed to inspire expressions of awe. Only slightly shorter than her father, she had his black eyes, but more ominous and veiled than fierce. She wore no makeup, and a flood of reddish-blond hair fell to her hips, loose and flowing. Her body was not given to fat but well proportioned. Her expression was half contemptuous, half evil. She easily dominated anyone in her presence except, of course, her father.

Dorsett saw Boudicca as a son he had lost. Over the years he had begrudgingly accepted her secret lifestyle, because all that truly mattered to him was that Boudicca was as strong willed and unyielding as he was.

Deirdre seemed to float into the room, poised and nonchalant, fashionable in a simple but elegant claret wool double-breasted coatdress. Undeniably glamorous, she was not a woman who invented herself. She knew exactly what she was capable of doing. There was no pretense about her. Delicate facial features and supple body aside, she had definite underlying masculine qualities. She and Boudicca dutifully sat down in two of three chairs placed in front of Dorsett’s desk.

Maeve followed her sisters, moving as gracefully as pond reeds in a light breeze, and wearing an indigo plaid wool zip-front shirt with matching skirt over a white ribbed turtleneck. Her long blond hair was soft and glowing, her skin flushed red and her blue eyes blazing with anger. She moved in a straight line between her seated sisters, chin up firmly, staring deeply into her father’s eyes, which reflected intrigue and corruption.

“I want my boys!” she snapped. It was not a plea but a demand.

“Sit down, girl,” her father ordered, picking up a briar pipe and pointing it like a gun.

“No!” she shouted. “You abducted my sons, and I want them back or by God I’ll turn you and these two conniving bitches over to the police, but not before I’ve exposed you all to the news media.”

He looked at her steadily, calmly appraising her defiance. Then he called his secretary over the intercom. “Will you please connect me with Jack Ferguson?” He smiled at Maeve. “You remember Jack, don’t you?”

“That sadistic ape you call your superintendent of mines. What about him?”

“I thought you’d like to know. He’s baby-sitting the twins.”

The anger fled from Maeve’s face and was replaced with alarm. “Not Ferguson?”

“A little discipline never hurt growing boys.”

She started to say something, but the intercom buzzed and Dorsett held up his hand for silence. He spoke through a speakerphone on his desk. “Jack, you there?”

There was the sound of heavy equipment in the background as Ferguson replied over his portable phone. “I’m here.”

“Are the boys nearby?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got them loading muck that’s spilled from the cars.”

“I’d like you to arrange an accident—”

“No!” Maeve screamed. “My God, they’re only six years old. You can’t murder your own grandchildren!” She was horrified to see that Deirdre had an expression of complete indifference on her face, while Boudicca wore a look as cold as a granite tomb.

“I don’t consider those bastards my grandchildren,” Dorsett roared back.

Maeve was overcome with sickening fear. It was a battle she could not win. Her sons were in deadly danger, and she saw clearly that her only hope of saving them was to submit to her father’s will. She was achingly aware of her helplessness. Somehow she had to stall for time until she devised a plan to save her boys. Nothing else mattered. If only she had gotten her plight across to the man from NUMA. He might have thought of a way to help her. But he was thousands of kilometers away.

She sagged into an empty chair, beaten but still defiant, her emotions in upheaval. “What do you want from me?”

Her father relaxed and pushed a button on the phone, ending the call. The deep creases that ran from the corners of his eyes widened. “I should have beaten you when you were young.”

“You did, Daddy dear,” she said, remembering. “Many times.”

“Enough sentiment,” he growled. “I want you to return to the United States and work with their National Underwater & Marine Agency. Watch them carefully. Observe their methods in attempting to discover the cause of the unexplained deaths. If they begin to get close to an answer, do what you can to stall them. Sabotage or murder, whatever it takes. Fail me and those dirty little urchins you whelped in the gutter will surely die. Do well, and they’ll live in wealth.”

“You’re mad,” she gasped, stunned at what she’d heard. “You’d murder your own flesh and blood as if it meant nothing—”

“Oh, but you’re very wrong, dear sister,” Boudicca interrupted. “Twenty billion dollars is far more than nothing.”

“What insane scheme have you hatched?” asked Maeve.

“If you hadn’t run away from us, you’d know,” said Deirdre nastily.

“Daddy is going to collapse the world diamond market,” revealed Boudicca as unruffled as if she were describing a new pair of shoes.

Maeve stared at him. “That’s impossible. De Beers and the rest of the cartel will never permit a drastic fall in the price of diamonds.”

Dorsett seemed to bulk even larger behind his desk. “Despite their usual manipulation of the laws of supply and demand, in another thirty days the collapse will be a reality, when a tidal wave of stones hits the market at prices any child can afford from his or her allowance.”

“Even you can’t dictate the diamond market.”

“You’re dead wrong, Daughter,” said Dorsett smugly. “The overhyped prices on diamonds have traditionally depended on manufactured scarcity. To exploit the myth of diamond rarity, De Beers has propped up the values by buying into new mines in Canada, Australia, Africa, and then stockpiling the production. When Russia opened up their mines in Siberia and filled a five-story warehouse with thousands of tons of stones, De Beers could hardly allow them to flood the market. So they worked out a deal together. De Beers makes billion-dollar trade loans to the new state of Russia and is paid back in diamonds, thus maintaining high prices in the best interests of the producers and dealers. Many are the mines the cartel has purchased, then closed to keep the supply down. The American pipe in the state of Arkansas is a case in point. If mined, it has every potential of becoming one of the world’s leading producers of diamonds. Instead, De Beers bought the property and turned it over to the U.S. Park Service, which only allows tourists to dig around the surface for a small charge.”

“They used the same methods with the owners of mining companies from Tanzania to Brazil,” said Deirdre. “You taught us well, Daddy. We’re all familiar with the behind-the-scenes intrigues of the diamond cartel.”

“I’m not,” snapped Maeve at Dorsett. “I was never interested in the diamond trade.”

“A pity you turned a deaf ear to Daddy’s lectures,” said Boudicca, “It would have been in your best interests to have been more attentive.”

“What has all this to do with causing the market to fall?” asked Maeve. “A collapse in prices would wipe out Dorsett Consolidated Mining too. How could you possibly profit from such a disaster?”

“Better you not know until after the event,” Dorsett said, clamping his stained teeth on the stem of the empty pipe. “Unlike Boudicca and Deirdre, you can’t be trusted to keep silent.”

“Thirty days. That’s your timetable?”

Dorsett sat back, folded his huge hands across his chest and nodded. “I’ve had our mining crews working three shifts, twenty-four hours a day for the past ten years. In another month I will have accumulated a stockpile of over $2 billion worth of stones. With the worldwide economy flat, diamond sales to consumers have temporarily stagnated. All of the enormous sums the cartel has spent in advertising have failed to push sales. If my instincts are right, the market will reach bottom in thirty days before it rebounds. I intend to attack when it’s down.”

“What are you doing in the mines that causes death throughout the ocean?” demanded Maeve.

“About a year ago, my engineers developed a revolutionary excavator using high-energy pulsed ultrasound to carve through the blue clay that contains the major deposits of diamonds. Apparently, the subterranean rock under the islands we mine creates a resonance that channels into the surrounding water. Though a rare event, it occasionally converges with the resonance from our other mining operations, near Siberia, Chile and Canada. The energy intensifies to a level that can kill animals and humans. However unfortunate, I cannot allow these aberrant side effects to throw off my time schedule.”

“Don’t you understand?” pleaded Maeve. “Don’t you care about the sea life and hundreds of people your greed has killed? How many more must die before this madness is satisfied?”

“Only after I have destroyed the diamond market will I stop,” Dorsett said coldly. He turned to Boudicca. “Where is the yacht?”

“I sent it on to Kunghit Island after I debarked in Honolulu and flew home. My chief of security there has informed me that the Canadian Mounties are becoming suspicious. They’ve been flying over the island, taking photographs and asking questions of the nearby inhabitants. With your permission, I would like to rejoin the yacht. Your geophysicists are also predicting another convergence approximately five hundred kilometers west of Seattle. I should be standing by to remove any possible wreckage to frustrate investigation by the American Coast Guard.”

“Take the company jet and return as soon as possible.”

“You know where the deaths will occur next?” Maeve demanded in dismay. “You must warn ships to stay out of the area.”

“Not a practical idea,” Boudicca answered, “letting the world in on our secret. Besides, Daddy’s scientists can only give rough estimates for where and when the sound waves will strike.”

Maeve stared at her sister, her lips slowly tightening. “You had a pretty good idea when you put Deirdre on the Polar Queen to save my life.”

Boudicca laughed. “Is that what you think?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“I lied to keep you from informing the NUMA people,” said Deirdre. “Sorry, sister dear, father’s engineers made a slight miscalculation in time. The acoustic plague was estimated to strike the ship three hours earlier...”

“Three hours earlier ...” Maeve murmured as the awful truth slowly dawned on her. “I would have been on the ship.”

“And you would have died with the others,” said Deirdre as if disappointed.

“You meant for me to die!” Maeve gasped, contempt and horror in her expression.

Her father looked at her as if he were examining a stone he’d picked up at his mine. “You turned your back on your sisters and me. To us, you no longer existed. You still don’t.”

A strawberry-red floatplane with Chinook Cargo Carriers painted in white block letters on the side of the fuselage rocked gently in the water beside a refueling dock near the Shearwater Airport in British Columbia. A short, brown-haired man with an unsmiling face, dressed in an old-fashioned leather flight suit, was holding a gas nozzle in one of the wing tanks. He looked down and examined the man who walked casually along the dock, carrying a backpack and a large black case. He was dressed in jeans with a skier’s down vest. A cowboy hat was set square on his head. When the stranger stopped beside the aircraft and looked up, the pilot nodded at the widebrimmed hat.

“A Stetson?”

“No, it was custom-shade by Manny Gammage out of Austin, Texas.”

The stranger studied the floatplane. It looked to have been built prior to 1970. “A de Havilland, isn’t she?”

The pilot nodded. “De Havilland Beaver, one of the finest bush planes ever designed.”

“An oldie but goody.”

“Canadian-built in 1967. She’ll lift over four thousand kilograms off a hundred meters of water. Revered as the workhorse of the North. Over a hundred of them are still flying.”

“Don’t see big radial engines much anymore.”

“You a friend of Ed Posey?” the pilot asked abruptly.

“I am,” answered Pitt without introducing himself.

“A bit breezy today.”

“About twenty knots, I should judge.”

“You a flyer?”

“I have a few hours in the air.”

“Malcolm Stokes.”

“Dirk Pitt.”

“I understand you want to fly to Black Water Inlet.”

Pitt nodded. “Ed Posey told me that’s where I could find a totem carver by the name of Mason Broadmoor.”

“I know Mason. His village sits at the lower end of Moresby Island, across the Houston Stewart Channel from Kunghit Island.”

“How long a flight?”

“An hour and a half across Hecate Strait. Should get you there in time for lunch.”

“Sounds good,” said Pitt.

Stokes gestured at the black case. “What you got in there, a trombone?”

“A hydrophone, an instrument for measuring underwater sound.”

Without further discussion, Stokes capped the fuel tank and inserted the nozzle back into the gas pump as Pitt loaded his gear on board. After untying the mooring lines and pushing the plane away from the dock with one foot, Stokes made his way to the cockpit.

“Care to ride up front?” he asked.

Pitt smiled inwardly. He saw no passenger seats in the cargo section. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Pitt strapped himself into the copilot’s seat as Stokes started and warmed up the big single radial engine and checked his gauges. Already the receding tide had carried the aircraft three meters from the dock. After a visual check of the channel for other boats or planes, Stokes eased the throttle forward and took off, banking the Beaver over Campbell Island and heading west. As they climbed, Pitt recalled the report Hiram Yaeger had given him before leaving Washington.

The Queen Charlotte Islands are made up of about 150 islands running parallel to the Canadian mainland 160 kilometers to the east. The total area of the islands comes to 9,584 square kilometers. The population of 5,890 is made up mostly of Haida Indians, who invaded the islands in the eighteenth century. The Haida used the abundant red cedars to build huge dugout canoes and. multifamily plank houses supported by massive portal poles, and to carve splendid totem poles as well as masks, boxes and dishes.

The economy is based on lumber and fishing as well as the mining of copper, coal and iron ore. In 1997, prospectors working for Dorsett Consolidated Mining Ltd., found a kimberlite pipe on Kunghit Island, the southernmost island in the Queen Charlotte chain. After drilling a test hole, 98 diamonds were found in one 52-kilogram sample. Although Kunghit Island was part of the South Moresby National Park Reserve, the government allowed Dorsett Consolidated to file a claim and lease the island. Dorsett then launched an extensive excavation operation and closed off the island to all visitors and campers. It was estimated by New York brokers C. Dirgo & Co. that the mine could bring out as much as $2 billion in diamonds.

Pitt’s thoughts were interrupted by Stokes. “Now that we’re away from prying eyes, how do I know you’re Dirk Pitt with the National Underwater & Marine Agency?”

“Do you have the authority to ask?”

Stokes took a leather case from his breast pocket and flipped it open. “Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Criminal Intelligence Directorate.”

“So I’m addressing Inspector Stokes.”

“Yes, sir, that is correct.”

“What would you like to see, credit cards, driver’s license, NUMA ID, a blood donor card?”

“Just answer one question,” said Stokes, “dealing with a shipwreck.”

“I have my reasons for wanting to land. Reason one. To allow the cameras encased in the floats to take close-up pictures during landing and takeoff.”

“Somehow I have the impression they hate uninvited visitors. What makes you think we won’t be stood against a privy and shot?”

“Reason two,” said Stokes, brushing off Pitt’s objections. “My superiors are hoping for just such an event. Then they can come swooping in here and close the bastards down.”

“Naturally.”

“Reason three. We have an undercover agent working in the mines. We’re hoping he can pass me information while we’re on the ground.”

“We’re just full of devious little plots, aren’t we?” said Pitt.

“In a more serious vein, if worse comes to worst, I’ll let Dorsett’s security people know I’m a Mountie before they offer us a cigarette and a blindfold. They’re not so stupid as to risk invasion by a small army of law officers running about the place searching for the body of one of their finest.”

“You did notify your team and superiors we’d be dropping in?”

Stokes looked hurt. “Any disappearance is timed to make the evening newspapers. Not to worry, Dorsett’s mine executives abhor bad publicity.”

“When exactly do we pull off this marvel of Royal Mounted Police planning?”

Stokes pointed down to the island again. “I should begin my descent in about five minutes.”

Pitt could do little but sit back and enjoy the view. Below he could see the great volcanic cone with its central pipe of blue ground that contained the rough diamonds. What looked like a giant bridge of steel girders stretched over the open core, with a myriad of steel cables that raised and lowered the excavated debris. Once they reached the top, the buckets then moved horizontally like ski gondolas across the open pit to buildings where the diamonds were extracted from the tailings, which were then dumped onto a huge mound that enclosed the diggings. The mound also acted as an artificial barrier to discourage anyone from entering or leaving, a reality Pitt found obvious from the total absence of any entrances except one, a tunnel that opened to a road that led to a dock on a small bay. He knew from his map that the bay was called Rose Harbour. As he watched, a tug with an empty barge in tow was pulling away from the dock and heading toward the mainland.

A series of prefabricated buildings grouped between the mound and the pit were apparently used for offices and living quarters for the miners. The enclosure, easily two kilometers in diameter, also accommodated the narrow airstrip with a hangar. The entire mining operation looked like a gigantic scar on the landscape from the air.

“That’s one big pockmark,” said Pitt.

Without looking down, Stokes said, “That pockmark, as you call it, is where dreams come from.”

Stokes leaned out his fuel mixture and starved his big 450-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-985 Wasp engine until it began to miss and backfire. Already, a voice was coming over the radio warning him away from the property, but he ignored it. “I have a fuel blockage and must borrow your airstrip for an emergency landing. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it can’t be helped.” Then he switched off the radio.

“Don’t you just hate dropping in unannounced?” said Pitt.

Stokes was concentrating on landing the plane, with the engine coughing and barely turning over, and did not reply. He lowered a pair of small wheels through the forward center of the two large pontoons and lined up with the runway. A crosswind caught the plane, and Stokes overcompensated. Pitt tensed slightly as he observed that Stokes lacked full control. The Mountie was reasonably competent but hardly an expert pilot. The landing was rough, and he almost ground-looped.

Before the plane rolled to a stop in front of the airstrip’s hangar, it was surrounded by nearly ten men in blue combat fatigues, holding Bushmaster customized M-16 assault rifles with suppressors. A tall, gaunt man in his early thirties and wearing a combat helmet stepped up on one of the floats and opened the door. He entered the aircraft and made his way to the cockpit. Pitt noticed the guard rested his hand on a holstered nine-millimeter automatic.

“This is private property, and you are trespassing,” he said in a perfectly friendly voice.

“Sorry,” said Stokes. “But the fuel filter clogged. The second time this month. It’s this damned stuff they’re passing off as gas nowadays.”

“How soon can you make repairs and be on your way?”

“Twenty minutes, no more.”

“Please hurry,” said the security official. “You’ll have to remain by your plane.”

“May I borrow a bathroom?” Pitt asked politely.

The security guard studied him for a moment, then nodded. “There’s one in the hangar. One of my men will escort you.”

“You don’t know how grateful I am,” Pitt said as if in minor agony. He jumped out of the plane and set off toward the hangar with a security guard close at his heels. Once inside the metal structure, he turned as if waiting expectantly for the guard to direct him to the door leading to the bathroom. It was a ploy; he’d already guessed the correct door, but it gave him a brief instant to glance at the aircraft resting on the hangar floor.

A Gulfstream V, the latest development in business jets, was an imposing aircraft. Unlike the earlier Learjet—so eagerly purchased and flown by the rich and famous—whose interior barely had enough room to turn around in, the G V was spacious, giving passengers plenty of elbowroom and enough height for most tall men to stand up straight. Capable of cruising 924 kilometers per hour at an altitude of just under 11,000 meters, with a range of 6,300 nautical miles, the aircraft was powered by a pair of turbofan jets built by BMW and Rolls-Royce.

Dorsett spared no expense for his transportation fleet, thought Pitt. An aircraft like this cost upward of $33 million.

Parked just in front of the main hangar door, menacing and sinister in dark blue-black paint, were a pair of squat looking helicopters. Pitt recognized them as McDonnell Douglas 530 MD Defenders, a military aircraft designed for silent flying and high stability during abnormal maneuvers. A pair of 7.62-millimeter guns were mounted in pods under the fuselage. An array of tracking gear sprouted from the underside of the cockpit. These were scout models specially modified for tracking diamond smugglers or other unwelcome intruders on the ground.

After he came out of the bathroom, he was motioned by the guard into an office. The man who sat at a desk was small, thin, fastidiously attired in a business suit, suave, cool and completely satanic. He turned from a computer monitor and studied Pitt, his deep-set eyes gray and unreadable. Pitt found the man slimy and repellant.

“I am John Merchant, chief of security for this mine,” he said with a distinctive Australian accent. “May I see some identification, please?”

Silently, Pitt handed over his NUMA ID and waited.

“Dirk Pitt.” Merchant rolled the name on his tongue and repeated it. “Dirk Pitt. Aren’t you the chap who found an immense cache of Inca treasure in the Sonoran Desert a few years ago?”

“I was only one member of the team.”

“Why have you come to Kunghit?”

“Better you ask the pilot. He’s the one who landed the plane on your precious mining property. I’m only a passenger along for the ride.”

“Malcolm Stokes is an inspector with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He’s also a member of the Criminal Investigation Directorate.” Merchant gestured toward his computer. “I have an entire data file on him. It’s you who are in question.”

“You’re very thorough,” said Pitt. “Taking into account your close contacts in the Canadian government, you probably already know I’m here to study the effects of chemical pollution on the local kelp and fish populations. Would you care to see my documents?”

“I already have copies.”

Pitt was tempted to believe Merchant, but he knew Posey well enough to trust his confidence. He decided Merchant was lying. It was an old Gestapo ploy, to make the victim think the accuser knew all there was to know. “Then why bother to inquire?”

“To find if you are in the habit of inaccurate statements.”

“Am I under suspicion for some hideous crime?” asked Pitt.

“My job is to apprehend smugglers of illicit diamonds before they traffic their stones to European and Middle Eastern clearinghouses. Because you came here uninvited, I have to consider your motives.”

Pitt observed the reflection of the guard in the windows of a glass cabinet. He was standing slightly behind Pitt, to his right, automatic weapon held across his chest. “Since you know who I am and claim to have bona fide documentation for my purpose for coming to the Queen Charlotte Islands, you cannot seriously believe that I’m a diamond smuggler.” Pitt rose to his feet. “I’ve enjoyed the conversation, but I see no reason to hang around.”

“I regret that you must be detained temporarily,” Merchant said, brisk and businesslike.

“You have no authority.”

“Because you are a trespasser on private property under false pretenses, I have every right to make a citizen’s arrest.”

Not good, Pitt thought. If Merchant dug deeper and connected him to the Dorsett sisters and the Polar Queen, then no lies, no matter how creative, could explain his presence here. “What about Stokes? Since you claim you know he’s a Mountie, why not turn me over to him?”

“I prefer turning you over to his superiors,” Merchant said almost cheerfully, “but not before I can investigate this matter more thoroughly.”

Pitt didn’t doubt now that he would not be allowed off the mining property alive. “Is Stokes free to leave?”

“The minute he finishes his unnecessary repairs to the aircraft. I enjoy observing his primitive attempts at surveillance.”

“It goes without saying that he’ll report my seizure.”

“A foregone conclusion,” said Merchant dryly.

Outside the hangar came the popping sound of an aircraft engine firing up. Stokes was being forced to take off without his passenger. If he was going to act, Pitt figured that he had less than thirty seconds. He noted an ashtray on the desk with several cigarette butts and assumed Merchant smoked. He threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat.

“If I’m to be detained against my wishes, do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

“Not at all,” said Merchant, pushing the ashtray across the desk. “I may even join you.”

Pitt had stopped smoking years before, but he made a slow movement as if to reach in the open breast pocket of his shirt. He doubled up his right hand into a fist and clasped it with his left. Then in a lightning move, pulling with one arm and pushing with the other for extra strength, he jammed his right elbow into the security guard’s stomach. There came an explosive gasp of agony as the guard doubled over.

Merchant’s reaction time was admirable. He pulled a small nine-millimeter automatic from a belt holster and unsnapped the safety in one well-practiced motion. But before the muzzle of the gun could clear the desktop, he found himself staring down the barrel of the guard’s automatic rifle, now cradled in Pitt’s steady hands, lined up on Merchant’s nose. The security chief felt as though he were staring through a tunnel with no light at the other end.

Slowly, he placed his pistol on the desk. “This will do you no good,” he said acidly.

Pitt grabbed the automatic and dropped it in his coat pocket. “Sorry I can’t stay for dinner, but I don’t want to lose my ride.”

Then he was through the door and sprinting across the hangar floor. He threw the rifle in a trash receptacle, cleared the door and slowed to a jog as he passed through the ring of guards. They stared at him suspiciously, but assumed their boss had allowed Pitt to leave. They made no move to stop him as Stokes opened the throttle and the floatplane began moving down the runway. Pitt leaped onto a float, yanked open the door against the wash from the propeller and threw himself inside the cargo bay.

Stokes looked dumbfounded as Pitt slipped into the copilot’s seat. “Good Lord! Where did you come from?”

“The traffic was heavy on the way to the airport,” Pitt said, catching his breath.

“They forced me to take off without you.”

“What happened to your undercover agent?”

“He didn’t show. Security around the plane was too tight.”

“You won’t be happy to learn that Dorsett’s security chief, a nasty little jerk called John Merchant, has you pegged as a snooping Mountie from the CID.”

“So much for my cover as a bush pilot,” Stokes muttered as he pulled back on the control column.

Pitt slid open the side window, stuck his head into the prop blast and looked back. The security guards appeared to be wildly scurrying about like ants. Then he saw something else that caused a small knot in his stomach. “I think I made them mad.”

“Could it be something you said?”

Pitt pulled the side window closed. “Actually, I beat up a guard and stole the chief of security’s side arm.”

“That would do it.”

“They’re coming after us in one of those armed helicopters.”

“I know the type,” Stokes said uneasily. “They’re a good forty knots faster than this old bus. They’ll overhaul us long before we can make it back to Shearwater.”

“They can’t shoot us down in front of witnesses,” said Pitt. “How far to the nearest inhabited community on Moresby Island?”

“Mason Broadmoor’s village. It sits on Black Water Inlet, about sixty kilometers north of here. If we get there first, I can make a water landing in the middle of the village fishing fleet.”

His adrenaline pumping, Pitt gazed at Stokes through eyes flashing with fire. “Then go for it.”

Pitt and Stokes quickly became aware they were in a no win situation from the very start. They had little choice but to take off toward the south before banking on a 180-degree turn for Moresby Island to the north. The McDonnell Douglas Defender helicopter, manned by Dorsett’s security men, had merely to lift vertically off the ground in front of the hangar, turn northward and cut in behind the slower floatplane even before the chase shifted into first gear. The de Havilland Beaver’s airspeed indicator read 160 knots, but Stokes felt as if he were flying a glider as they crossed the narrow channel separating the two islands.

“Where are they?” he asked without taking his eyes from a low range of cedar- and pine-covered hills directly ahead and the water only a hundred meters below.

“Half a kilometer back of our tail and closing fast,” Pitt answered.

“Just one?”

“They probably decided knocking us down was a piece of cake and left the other chopper home.”

“But for the extra weight and air drag of our floats, we might be on equal footing.”

“Do you carry any weapons in this antique?” asked Pitt.

“Against regulations.”

“A pity you didn’t hide a shotgun in the floats.”

“Unlike your American peace officers, who think nothing of packing an arsenal, we’re not keen to wave guns around unless there is a life-threatening situation.”

Pitt glanced at him incredulously. “What do you call this mess?”

“An unforeseen difficulty,” Stokes answered stoically.

“Then all we have is the nine-millimeter automatic I stole, against two heavy machine guns,” said Pitt resignedly. “You know, I downed a chopper by throwing a life raft into its rotor blades a couple of years ago.”

Stokes turned and stared at Pitt, unable to believe the incredible calm. “Sorry. Except for a pair of life vests, the cargo bay is bare.”

“They’re swinging around on our starboard side for a clear shot. When I give the word, drop the flaps and pull back the throttle.”

“I’ll never pull out if I stall her at this altitude.”

“Coming down in treetops beats a bullet in the brain and crashing in flames.”

“I never thought of it quite like that,” Stokes said grimly.

Pitt watched intently as the blue-black helicopter pulled parallel to the floatplane and seemed to hang there, like a hovering falcon eyeing a pigeon. They were so close that Pitt could discern the expressions on the faces of the pilot and copilot. They were both smiling. Pitt opened his side window and held the automatic out of sight under the frame.

“No warning over the radio?” said Stokes disbelievingly. “No demand we return to the mine?”

“These guys play tough. They wouldn’t dare kill a Mountie unless they’ve got orders from someone high up in Dorsett Consolidated.”

“I can’t believe they expect to get away with it.”

“They’re sure as hell going to try,” Pitt said quietly, his eyes locked on the gunner. “Get ready.” He was not optimistic. Their only advantage, which was really no advantage at all, was that the 530 MD Defender was better suited for ground attack than air-to-air combat.

Stokes held the control column between his knees as one hand embraced the flap levers and the other gripped the throttle. He found himself wondering why he placed so much trust in a man he had known less than two hours. The answer was simple. In all his years with the Mounties he had seen few men who were in such absolute control of a seemingly hopeless situation.

“Now!” Pitt shouted, raising and firing off the automatic in the same breath.

Stokes rammed the flaps to the full down position and slapped back the throttle. The old Beaver, without the power of its engine and held by the wind resistance against the big floats, slowed as abruptly as if it had entered a cloud of glue.

At almost the same instant, Stokes heard the rapid-fire stammer of a machine gun and the thump of bullets on one wing. He also heard the sharp crack of Pitt’s automatic. This was no fight, he thought as he frantically threw the near-stalling plane around in the air, this was a high school quarterback facing the entire defensive line of the Arizona Cardinals football team. Then suddenly, for some inexplicable reason the shooting stopped. The nose of the plane was dropping, and he pushed the throttle forward again to regain a small measure of control.

Stokes stole a glance sideways as he leveled out the floatplane and picked up speed. The helicopter hard veered off. The copilot was slumped sideways in his seat behind several bullet holes in the plastic bubble of the cockpit. Stokes was surprised to find that the Beaver still responded to his commands. What surprised him even more was the look on Pitt’s face. It was sheer disappointment.

“Damn!” Pitt muttered. “I missed.”

“What are you talking about? You hit the copilot.”

Pitt, angry at himself, stared at him. “I was aiming at the rotor assembly.”

“You timed it perfectly,” Stokes complimented him. “How did you know the exact instant to give me the signal and then shoot?”

“The pilot stopped smiling.”

Stokes let it go. They weren’t out of the storm yet. Broadmoor’s village was still thirty kilometers away.

“They’re coming around for another pass,” said Pitt.

“No sense in attempting the same dodge.”

Pitt nodded. “I agree. The pilot will be expecting it. This time pull back on the control column and do an Immelmann.”

“What’s an Immelmann?”

Pitt looked at him. “You don’t know? How long have you been flying, for God’s sake?”

“Twenty-one hours, give or take.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” Pitt groaned. “Pull up in a half loop and then do a half roll at the top, to end up going in the opposite direction.”

“I’m not sure I’m up for that.”

“Don’t the Mounties have qualified professional pilots?”

“None who were available for this assignment,” Stokes said stiffly. “Think you might hit a vital part of the chopper this time?”

“Not unless I’m amazingly lucky,” Pitt replied. “I’m down to three rounds.”

There was no hesitating on the part of the Defender’s pilot. He angled in for a direct attack from above and to the side of his helpless quarry. A well-designed attack that left little room for Stokes to maneuver.

“Now!” Pitt yelled. “Put your nose down to gain speed and then pull up into your loop.”

Stokes’ inexperience caused hesitation. He was barely coming to the top of the loop in preparation for the half roll when the 7.62 millimeter shells began smashing into the floatplane’s thin aluminum skin. The windshield burst into a thousand pieces as shells hammered the instrument panel. The Defender’s pilot altered his aim and raked his fire from the cockpit across the fuselage. It was an error that kept the Beaver in the air. He should have blasted the engine.

Pitt fired off his final three rounds and hurled himself forward and down to make himself as small a target as possible in an act that was pure illusion.

Remarkably, Stokes had completed the Immelmann, late to be sure, but now the Beaver was headed away from the helicopter before its pilot could swing his craft around 180 degrees. Pitt shook his head in dazed incredulity and checked his body for wounds. Except for a rash of small cuts on his face from slivers that had flown off the shattered windshield, he was unscathed. The Beaver was in level flight, and the radial engine was still roaring smoothly at full revolutions. The engine was the only part of the plane that hadn’t been riddled with bullets. He looked at Stokes sharply.

“Are you okay?”

Stokes slowly turned and gazed at Pitt through unfocused eyes. “I think the bastards just shot me out of my pension,” he murmured. He coughed and then his lips were painted with blood that seeped down his chin and trickled onto his chest. Then he slumped forward against his shoulder harness, unconscious.

Pitt took the copilot’s control wheel in his hands and immediately threw the floatplane around into a hard 180-degree bank until he was heading back on a course toward Mason Broadmoor’s village. His snap turn caught the helicopter’s pilot off guard, and a shower of bullets sprayed the empty air behind the floatplane’s tail.

He wiped away the blood that had trailed into one eye and took stock. Most of the aircraft was stitched with over a hundred holes, but the control systems and surfaces were undamaged and the big 450 Wasp engine was still pounding away on every one of its cylinders.

Now what to do?

The first plan that ran through his mind was to make an attempt at ramming the helicopter. The old take ’em with you routine, Pitt mused. But that’s all it could have been, an attempt. The Defender was far more nimble in the air than the lumbering Beaver with its massive pontoons. He’d stand as much chance as a cobra against a mongoose, a fight the mongoose never failed to win against the slower cobra. Only when it came up against a rattlesnake did the mongoose go down to defeat. The crazy thought running through Pitt’s mind became divine inspiration as he sighted a low ridge of rocks about half a kilometer ahead and slightly to his right.

There was a path toward the rocks through a stand of tall Douglas fir trees. He dove between the trees, his wingtips brushing the needles of the upper branches. To anyone else it would have seemed like a desperate act of suicidal madness. The gambit misled the Defender’s pilot, who broke off the third attack and followed slightly above and behind the floatplane, waiting to observe what looked like a certain crash.

Pitt kept the throttle full against its stop and gripped the control wheel with both hands, eyes focused on the wall of rocks that loomed ahead. The airstream blasted through the shattered windshield, and he was forced to turn his head sideways in order to see. Fortunately, the gale swept away the trickling blood and the tears that it pried from his squinting eyes.

He flew on between the trees. There could be no misjudgment, no miscalculation. He had to make the right move at the exact moment in time. A tenth of a second either way would spell certain death. The rocks were rushing toward the plane as if driven from behind. Pitt could clearly see them now, gray-and-brown jagged boulders with black streaks. He didn’t have to look to see the needle on the altimeter registering on zero or the needle on the tachometer wavering far into the red The old girl was hurtling toward destruction just as fast as she could fly.

“Low!” he shouted into the wind rushing through the smashed windshield. “Two meters low!”

He barely had time to compensate before the rocks were on him. He gave the control column a precisely measured jerk, just enough to raise the plane’s nose, just enough so the tips of the propeller whipped over the ridge, missing the crest by centimeters. He heard the sudden crunch of metal as the aluminum floats smashed into the rocks and tore free of the fuselage. The Beaver shot into the air, as graceful as a soaring hawk released from its tether. Unburdened by the weight of the bulky floats, which lay smashed against the rocks, and with the drag on the aircraft decreased by nearly half, the ancient plane became more maneuverable and gained another thirty knots in airspeed. She responded to Pitt’s commands instantly, without a trace of sluggishness as she chewed the air, fighting for altitude.

Now, he thought, a satanic grin on his lips, I’ll show you an Immelmann. He threw the aircraft into a half loop and then snapped it over in a half roll, heading on a direct course toward the helicopter. “Write your will, sucker!” he shouted, his voice drowned out by the rush of wind and the roar of the engine’s exhaust. “Here comes the Red Baron.”

Too late the chopper’s pilot read Pitt’s intentions. There was nowhere to dodge, nowhere to hide. The last thing he expected was an assault by the battered old floatplane. But here it was closing on a collision course at almost two hundred knots. It came roaring at him at a speed he didn’t believe possible. He made a series of violent maneuvers, but the pilot of the old floatplane anticipated his moves and kept coming on. He angled the helicopter’s nose toward his opponent in a wild attempt to blast the punctured Beaver out of the sky before the imminent crash.

Pitt saw the helicopter turn head-on, saw the flash from the guns in the pods, heard the shells punching into the big radial engine. Oil suddenly spurted from under the cowling, streaming onto the exhaust stacks and causing a dense trail of blue smoke to streak behind the plane. Pitt held up a hand to shield his eyes from the hot oil splattering against his face in stinging torrents from the airstream.

The sight that froze in his memory a microsecond before the impact was the expression of grim acceptance on the face of the helicopter’s pilot.

The prop and engine of the floatplane smashed squarely into the helicopter just behind the cockpit in an explosion of metal and debris that sheared off the tail rotor boom. Deprived of its torque compensation, the main body of the helicopter was thrown into a violent lateral drift. It spun around crazily for several revolutions before plummeting like a stone, five hundred meters to the ground. Unlike special-effects crashes in motion pictures, it didn’t immediately burst into flames after crumpling into an unrecognizable mass of smoldering wreckage. Nearly two minutes passed before flames flickered from the debris and a blinding sheet of flame enveloped it.

Pieces of the Beaver’s shattered propeller spun into the sky like a fireworks pinwheel. The cowling seemed to burst off the engine and fluttered like a wounded bird into the trees. The engine froze and stopped as quickly as if Pitt had turned off the ignition switch. He wiped the oil from his eyes, and all he could see over the exposed cylinder heads was a carpet of treetops. The Beaver’s airspeed fell off, and she stalled as he braced himself for the crash. The controls were still functioning, and he tried to float the plane down into the upper tree limbs.

He almost made it. But the outer edge of the right wing collided with a seventy-meter-tall red cedar, throwing the aircraft into an abrupt ninety-degree turn. Now totally out of control and dead in what little sky was left, the plane plunged into a solid mass of trees. The left wing wrapped itself around another towering cedar and was torn away. Green pine needles closed over the red plane, blotting it out from any view from above. The trunk of a fir tree, half a meter wide, rose in front of the battered aircraft. The propeller hub struck the tree head-on and punched right through it. The engine was pulled from its mountings as the upper half of the tree fell across the careening aircraft and knocked off the tail section What remained of the wreckage plowed into the moist compost earth of the forest floor before finally coming to a dead stop.

For the next few minutes the ground below the trees was as silent as a cemetery. Pitt sat there, too stunned to move. He stared dazedly through the opening that was once the windshield. He noticed for the first time that the entire engine was gone and wondered vaguely where it went. At last his mind began to come level again, and he reached over and examined Stokes.

The Mountie shuddered in a fit of coughing, then shook his head feebly and regained a small measure of consciousness. He stared dumbly over the instrument panel at the pine branches that hung into the cockpit. “How did we come down in the forest?” he mumbled.

“You slept through the best part,” Pitt muttered, as he tenderly massaged a gang of bruises.

Pitt didn’t require eight years of medical school to know Stokes would surely die if he didn’t get to a hospital. Quickly, he unzipped the old flying suit, ripped opened the Mountie’s shirt and searched for the wound. He found it to the left of the breastbone, below the shoulder. There was so little blood and the hole was so small, he almost missed it. This wasn’t made by a bullet, was Pitt’s first reaction. He gently probed the hole and touched a sharp piece of metal. Puzzled, he looked up at the frame that once held the windshield. It was smashed beyond recognition. The impact of a bullet had driven a splinter from the aluminum frame into Stokes’ chest, penetrating the left lung. Another centimeter and it would have entered the heart.

Stokes coughed up a wad of blood and spit it out the open window. “Funny,” he murmured, “I always thought I’d get shot in a highway chase or in a back alley.”

“No such luck.”

“How bad does it look?”

“A metal splinter in your lung,” Pitt explained. “Are you in pain?”

“More of a throbbing ache than anything else.”

Pitt stiffly rose out of his seat and came around behind Stokes. “Hang on, I’ll get you out of here.”

Within ten minutes, Pitt had kicked open the crumpled entry door and carefully manhandled Stokes’ deadweight outside, where he gently laid him on the soft ground. It took no small effort, and he was panting heavily by the time he sat next to the Mountie to catch his breath. Stokes’ face tightened in agony more than once, but he never uttered so much as a low moan. On the verge of slipping into unconsciousness, he closed his eyes.

Pitt slapped him awake. “Don’t black out on me, pal. I need you to point the way to Mason Broadmoor’s village.”

Stokes’ eyes fluttered open, and he looked at Pitt questioningly, as if recalling something. “The Dorsett helicopter,” he said between coughs. “What happened to those bastards who were shooting at us?”

Pitt stared back at the smoke rising above the forest and grinned. “They went to a barbecue.”

Pitt had expected to trudge through snow in January on Kunghit Island, but only a light blanket of the white stuff had fallen on the ground, and much of that had melted since the last storm. He pulled Stokes along behind him on a travois, a device used for hauling burdens by American Plains Indians. He couldn’t leave Stokes, and to attempt carrying the Mountie on his back was inviting internal hemorrhaging, so he lashed two dead branch poles together with cargo tie-down straps he scrounged in the wreckage of the aircraft. Rigging a platform between the poles and a harness on one end, he strapped Stokes to the middle of the travois. Then throwing the harness end over his shoulders, Pitt began dragging the injured Mountie through the woods. Hour followed hour, the sun set and night came on as he struggled north through the darkness, setting his course by the compass he’d removed from the aircraft’s instrument panel, an expedient he had used several years previously when trekking across the Sahara Desert.

Every ten minutes or so Pitt asked Stokes, “You still with me?”

“Hanging in,” the Mountie repeated weakly.

“I’m looking at a shallow stream that runs to the west.”

“You’ve come to Wolf Creek. Cross it and head northwest.”

“How much farther to Broadmoor’s village?”

Stokes replied in a hoarse murmur. “Two, maybe three kilometers.”

“Keep talking to me, you hear?”

“You sound like my wife...”

“You married?”

“Ten years, to a great lady who gave me five children.”

Pitt readjusted the harness straps, which were cutting into his chest, and pulled Stokes across the stream. After plodding through the underbrush for a kilometer, he came to a faint path that led in the direction he was headed. The path was grown over in places, but it offered relatively free passage, a godsend to Pitt after-having forced his way through woods thick with shrubs growing between the trees.

Twice he thought he’d lost the path, but after continuing on the same course for several meters, he would pick it up again. Despite the freezing temperature, his exertions were making him sweat. He dared not allow himself to stop and rest. If Stokes was to live to see his wife and five children again, Pitt had to keep going. He kept up a one-way conversation with the Mountie, fervently trying to keep him from drifting into a coma from shock. Concentrating on keeping one foot moving ahead of the other, Pitt failed to recognize anything strange.

Stokes whispered something but Pitt couldn’t make it out. He turned his head, cocked an ear and paused. “You want me to stop?” Pitt asked.

“Smell it...?” Stokes barely whispered.

“Smell what?”

“Smoke.”

Then Pitt had it too. He inhaled deeply. The scent of wood smoke was coming from somewhere ahead. He was tired, desperately tired, but he leaned forward against the harness and staggered on. Soon his ears picked up the sound of a small gas engine, of a chain saw cutting into wood. The wood smell became stronger, and he could see smoke drifting over the tops of the trees in the early light of dawn. His heart was pounding under the strain, but he wasn’t about to quit this close to his destination.

The sun rose but remained hidden behind dark gray clouds. A light drizzle was falling when he stumbled into a clearing that touched the sea and opened onto a small harbor. He found himself staring at a small community of log houses with corrugated metal roofs. Smoke was rising out of their stone chimneys. Tall cylindrical totem poles were standing in different parts of the village, carved with the features of stacked animal and human figures. A small fleet of fishing boats rocked gently beside a floating dock, their crews working over engines and repairing nets. Several children, standing under a shed with open sides, were observing a man carving a huge log with a chain saw. Two women chatted as they hung wash on a line. One of them spotted Pitt, pointed and began shouting at the others.

Overcome by exhaustion, Pitt sank to his knees as a crowd of a dozen people rushed toward him. One man, with long straight black hair and a round face, knelt down beside Pitt and put an arm around his shoulder. “You’re all right now,” he said with concern. He motioned to three men who gathered around Stokes and gave them an order. “Carry him into the tribal house.”

Pitt looked at the man. “You wouldn’t by chance be Mason Broadmoor?”

Coal-black eyes stared at him curiously. “Why, yes, I am.”

“Boy,” said Pitt as he sagged bone weary to the soft ground, “am I ever glad to see you.”

The nervous giggle of a little girl roused Pitt from a light sleep. Tired as he was, he’d only slept four hours. He opened his eyes, stared at her a moment, gave her a bright smile and crossed his eyes. She ran out of the room, yelling for her mother.

He was in a cozy room with a small stove radiating wondrous heat, lying in a bed made up of bear and wolf hides. He smiled to himself at the recollection of Broadmoor standing in the middle of an isolated Indian village with few modern conveniences, calling over his satellite phone for an air ambulance to transport Stokes to a hospital on the mainland.

Pitt had borrowed the phone to contact the Mountie office at Shearwater. At the mention of Stokes’ name, he was immediately put through to an Inspector Pendleton, who questioned Pitt in detail about the events commencing the previous morning. Pitt ended the briefing by giving Pendleton directions to the crash site so the Mounties could send in a team to retrieve the cameras inside the pontoons if they had survived the impact.

A seaplane arrived before Pitt had finished a bowl of fish soup that was thrust on him by Broadmoor’s wife. Two paramedics and a doctor examined Stokes and assured Pitt the Mountie had every chance of pulling through. Only after the seaplane had lifted off the water on its flight back to the mainland and the nearest hospital had Pitt gratefully accepted the loan of the Broadmoor family bed and fallen dead asleep.

Broadmoor’s wife entered from the main living room and kitchen. A woman of grace and poise, stout yet supple, Irma Broadmoor had haunting coffee eyes and a laughing mouth. “How are you feeling, Mr. Pitt? I didn’t expect you to wake up for another three hours at least.”

Pitt checked and made sure he still wore his pants and shirt before he threw back the covers and dropped his bare feet to the floor. “I’m sorry to have put you and your husband out of your bed.”

She laughed, a light musical laugh. “The time is a little past noon. You’ve only been asleep since eight o’clock.”

“I’m most grateful for your hospitality.”

“You must be hungry. That bowl of fish soup wasn’t enough for a big man like you. What would you like to eat?”

“A can of beans will be fine.”

“People sitting around a campfire eating canned beans in the north woods is a myth. I’ll grill some salmon steaks. I hope you like salmon”

“I do indeed.”

“While you’re waiting, you can talk to Mason. He’s working outside.”

Pitt pulled on his socks and hiking boots, ran his hands through his hair and faced the world. He found Broadmoor in the open shed, chiseling away on a five-meter-long red cedar log that lay horizontal on four heavy-duty sawhorses. Broadmoor was attacking it with a round wooden mallet shaped like a bell and a concave chisel called a fantail gouge. The carving was not far enough along for Pitt to visualize the finished product. The faces of animals were still in the rough stage.

Broadmoor looked up as Pitt approached. “Have a good rest?”

“I didn’t know bearskins were so soft.”

Broadmoor smiled. “Don’t let the word out or they’ll be extinct within a year.”

“Ed Posey told me you carved totem poles. I’ve never seen one in the works before.”

“My family have been carvers for generations. Totems evolved because the early Indians of the Northwest had no written language. Family histories and legends were preserved by carving symbols, usually animals, on red cedar trees.”

“Do they have religious significance?” asked Pitt.

Broadmoor shook his head. “They were never worshiped as icons of gods, but respected more as guardian spirits.”

“What are the symbols on this pole?”

“This is a mortuary pole, or what you might call a commemorative column. The pole is in honor of my uncle, who passed away last week. When I finish the carvings, they will illustrate his personal crest, which was an eagle and a bear, along with a traditional Haida figure of the deceased. After completion it will be erected, during a feast, at the corner of his widow’s house.”

“As a respected master carver, you must be booked up for many months in advance.”

Broadmoor shrugged modestly. “Almost two years.”

“Do you know why I’m here?” Pitt asked, and the abrupt question caught Broadmoor with the mallet raised to strike the fantail gouge.

The wood-carver laid his tools aside and motioned for Pitt to follow him to the edge of the harbor, where he stopped beside a small boathouse that extended into the water. He opened the doors and stepped inside. Two small craft floated within a U-shaped dock.

“Are you into Jet Skis?” asked Pitt.

Broadmoor smiled. “I believe the term is now watercraft.”

Pitt studied the pair of sleek Duo 300 WetJets by Mastercraft Boats. High-performance craft that could seat two people, they were vividly painted with Haida animal symbols. “They look like they can almost fly.”

“Over water, they do. I modified their engines to gain another fifteen horsepower. They move along at almost fifty knots.” Broadmoor suddenly changed the subject. “Ed Posey said you wanted to circle Kunghit Island with acoustic measuring equipment. I thought the watercraft might be an efficient means of conducting your project.”

“They’d be ideal. Unfortunately, my hydrophone gear was badly damaged when Stokes and I crashed. The only other avenue left open to me is to probe the mine itself.”

“What do you hope to discover?”

“The method of excavation Dorsett is using to retrieve the diamonds.”

Broadmoor picked up a pebble at the waterline and threw it far out into the deep green water. “The company has a small fleet of boats patrolling the waters around the island,” he said finally. “They’re armed and have been known to attack fishermen who venture too close.”

“It seems Canadian government officials didn’t tell me all I needed to know;” said Pitt, cursing Posey under his breath.

“I guess they figured since you were under their license to do field research, you wouldn’t be harassed by the mine’s security.”

“Your brother. Stokes mentioned the assault and burning of his boat.”

He pointed back toward the partially carved totem pole. “Did he also tell you they killed my uncle?”

Pitt shook his head slowly. “No. I’m sorry.”

“I found his body floating eight kilometers out to sea. He had lashed himself to a pair of fuel cans. The water was cold, and he died of exposure. All we ever found of his fishing boat was a piece of the wheelhouse.”

“You think Dorsett’s security people murdered him.”

“I know they murdered him,” Broadmoor said, anger in his eyes.

“What about the law?”

Broadmoor shook his head. “Inspector Stokes only represents a token investigative force. After Arthur Dorsett sent his prospecting geologists swarming all over the islands until they found the main diamond source on Kunghit, he used his power and wealth to literally take over the island from the government. Never mind that the Haida claim the island as tribal sacred ground. Now it is illegal for any of my people to set foot on the island without permission or to fish within four kilometers of its shore. We can be arrested by the Mounties who are paid to protect us.”

“I see why the mine’s chief of security has so little regard for the law.”

“Merchant, ‘Dapper John’ as he’s called,” Broadmoor said, pure hatred in his round face. “Lucky you escaped. Chances are you’d have simply disappeared. Many men have attempted to search for diamonds in and around the island. None were successful and none were ever seen again.”

“Has any of the diamond wealth gone to the Haida?” Pitt asked.

“So far we’ve been screwed,” answered Broadmoor. “Whether wealth from the diamonds will come to us has become more a legal than a political issue. We’ve negotiated for years in an attempt to get a piece of the action, but Dorsett’s attorneys have stalled us in the courts.”

“I can’t believe the Canadian government allows Arthur Dorsett to dictate to them.”

“The country’s economy is on the ropes, and the politicians close their eyes to payoffs and corruption while embracing any special interest that slips money into the treasury.” He paused and stared into Pitt’s eyes as if trying, to read something. “What is your interest, Mr. Pitt? Do you want to shut the mine down?”

Pitt nodded. “I do, providing I can prove their excavation is causing the acoustic plague responsible for the mass killing of humans and sea life.”

He looked at Pitt. “I will take you inside the mining property.”

Pitt considered the offer briefly. “You have a wife and children. No sense in risking two lives. Put me on the island and I’ll figure a way to get over the mound without being seen.”

“Can’t be done. Their security systems are state-of-the-art. A squirrel can’t get past them, as proven by their little bodies that litter the mound, along with those of hundreds of other animals that inhabited the island before Dorsett’s mining operation gutted what was once a beautiful environment. And then there are the Alsatian police dogs that can smell out a diamond-smuggling intruder at a hundred meters.”

“There’s always the tunnel.”

“You’ll never get through it alone.”

“Better that than your wife becoming another widow.”

“You don’t understand,” Broadmoor said patiently; his eyes burned with consuming flames of revenge. “The mine pays my tribal community to keep their kitchen stocked with fresh fish. Once a week my neighbors and I sail to Kunghit and deliver our catch. At the docks we load it on carts and transport the fish through the tunnel to the office of the head cook. He serves us breakfast, pays us in cash-not nearly what the catch is worth and then we leave. You’ve got black hair. You could pass for a Haida if you wear fisherman’s work clothes and keep your head down. The guards are more concerned with diamonds smuggled out of camp than fish coming in. Since we only deliver and take nothing, we’re not suspect.”

“Are there no good paying jobs for your people at the mine?”

Broadmoor shrugged. “To forget how to fish and hunt is to forget independence. The monies we make stocking their kitchen goes toward a new school for our children.”

“There’s a small problem. Dapper John Merchant. We’ve met and struck up a mutual dislike. He had a close look at my face.”

Broadmoor waved a hand airily. “Merchant recognizing you is not a problem. He’d never soil his expensive Italian shoes by hanging around the tunnel and kitchens. In this weather he seldom shows his face outside his office.”

“I won’t be able to gather much information from the kitchen help,” said Pitt. “Do you know any miners you can trust to describe the excavation procedures?”

“All the mine workers are Chinese, illegally brought in by criminal syndicates. None speak English. Your best hope is an old mining engineer who hates Dorsett Consolidated with a passion.”

“Can you contact him?”

“I don’t even know his name. He works the graveyard shift and usually eats breakfast about the same time we deliver our fish. We’ve talked a few times over a cup of coffee. He’s not happy about the working conditions. During our last conversation, he claimed that in the past year over twenty Chinese workers have died in the mines.”

“If I can get ten minutes alone with him, he might be of great help in solving the acoustics enigma.”

“No guarantee he’ll be there when we make the delivery,” said Broadmoor.

“I’ll have to gamble,” Pitt said thoughtfully. “When do you deliver your next catch?”

“The last of our village fleet should be docking within a few hours. We’ll ice and crate the catch later this evening and be ready to head for Kunghit Island at first light.”

Pitt wondered if he was physically and mentally primed to lay his life on the line again. Then he thought of the hundreds of dead bodies he’d seen on the cruise ship, and there wasn’t the slightest doubt about what he must do.

Six small fishing boats, painted in a variety of vivid colors, sailed into Rose Harbour, their decks stacked with wooden crates filled with fish packed in ice. The diesel engines made a soft chugging sound through tall exhaust stacks as they turned the shafts to the propellers. A low mist covered the water and turned it a gray green. The sun was half a globe on the eastern horizon, and the wind was less than five knots. The waves showed no whitecaps, and the only foam came from the prop wash and the bows of the boats as they shouldered their way through gentle swells.

Broadmoor came up to Pitt, who was sitting in the stern, watching the gulls that dipped and soared over the boat’s wake in hope of a free meal. “Time to go into your act, Mr. Pitt.”

Pitt could never get Broadmoor to call him Dirk. He nodded and pretended to carve a nose on a half-finished mask the Haida had loaned him. He was dressed in yellow oilskin pants with suspenders that were slung over a heavy woolen sweater knitted by Irma Broadmoor. He wore a stocking cap pulled down over his thick, black eyebrows. Indians are not known for five o’clock shadows so he had given his face a close shave. He did not look up as he lightly scraped the dull side of the knife over the mask, staring out of the corners of his eyes at the long dock-not a small pier but a true landing stage for big ships, with anchored pilings-that loomed larger as the boats entered the harbor. A tall crane moved on rails along one side of the dock to unload heavy equipment and other cargo from oceangoing ships.

A large craft with unusually smooth lines and a globular-shaped superstructure, unlike any luxury yacht Pitt had ever seen, lay moored to the dock. Her twin high performance fiberglass hulls were designed for speed and comfort. She looked capable of skimming the sea at over eighty knots. Going by Giordino’s description of a seagoing, space-age design, this was the boat seen running from the freighter Mentawai. Pitt looked for the name and port, normally painted across the transom, but no markings marred the beauty of the yacht’s sapphire-blue hull.

Most owners are proud of their pet name for their boat, Pitt thought, and its port of registry. He had a pretty good idea why Arthur Dorsett didn’t advertise his yacht.

His interest kindled, he stared openly at the’ windows with their tightly drawn curtains. The open deck appeared deserted. None of the crew or passengers were about this early in the morning. He was about to turn his attention from the yacht and focus on half a dozen uniformed security guards standing on the dock, when a door opened and a woman stepped out onto the deck.

She was incredibly stunning, Amazon tall, strikingly beautiful. Shaking her head, she tossed a long, unbrushed mane of red-blond hair out of her face. She was wearing a short robe and looked as if she had just risen from bed. Her breasts looked plump but oddly out of proportion, and were completely covered by the robe that shielded any hint of cleavage. Pitt perceived an untamed, ferocious look about her, as undaunted as a tigress surveying her domain. Her gaze swept over the little fishing fleet, then fell on Pitt when she caught him openly staring at her.

The everyday, devil-may-care Pitt would have stood up, swept off his stocking cap and bowed. But he had to play the role of an Indian, so he looked at her expressionless and merely nodded a respectful greeting. She turned away and dismissed him as if he were simply another tree in the forest, while a uniformed steward approached and held out a cup of coffee on a silver tray. Shivering in the cold dawn, she returned inside the main salon.

“She’s quite impressive, isn’t she?” said Broadmoor, smiling at the look of awe on Pitt’s face.

“I have to admit she’s unlike any woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Boudicca Dorsett, one of Arthur’s three daughters. She shows up unexpectedly several times a year on that fancy yacht of hers.”

So this was the third sister, Pitt mused. Perlmutter had described her as ruthless and as cold and hard as ice from the bottom of a glacier. Now that he had laid eyes on Dorsett’s third daughter, Pitt found it hard to believe Maeve had come out of the same womb as Deirdre and Boudicca. “No doubt to demand higher production from her slave laborers and count the take.”

“Neither,” said Broadmoor. “Boudicca is director of the company’s security organization. I’m told she travels from mine to mine, inspecting the systems and personnel for any weaknesses.”

“Dapper John Merchant will be particularly vigilant while she’s probing for cracks in his security precautions,” said Pitt. “He’ll take special pains to ensure his guards look alert to impress his boss.”

“We’ll have to be extra cautious,” Broadmoor agreed. He nodded toward the security guards on the dock, waiting to inspect the fishing boats. “Look at that. Six of them. They never sent more than two on any other delivery. The one with the medallion around his neck is in charge of the dock. Name is Crutcher. He’s a mean one.”

Pitt gave the guards a cursory glance to see if he recognized any that had gathered around the floatplane during his intrusion with Stokes. The tide was out, and he had to stare up at the men on the dock. He was especially apprehensive about being recognized by the guard he’d laid out in John Merchant’s office. Luckily, none looked familiar.

They carried their weapons slung over one shoulder, muzzle pointing forward in the general direction of .the Indian fishermen. It was all for show and intimidation, Pitt quickly perceived. They weren’t about to shoot anyone in front of observing seamen on a nearby cargo ship. Crutcher, a cold-faced, arrogant young man of no more than twenty-six or -seven, stepped up to the edge of the dock as Broadmoor’s helmsman eased the fishing boat along the pilings. Broadmoor cast a line that fell over the guard’s combat boots.

“Hi there, friend. How about tying us up?”

The cold-faced guard kicked the rope off the dock back onto the boat. “Tie up yourself,” he snapped.

A dropout from a Special Forces team, that one, Pitt thought as he caught the line. He scrambled up a ladder onto the dock, and purposely brushed against Crutcher as he looped the line around a small bollard.

Crutcher lashed out with his boot and kicked Pitt upright, then grabbed him by his suspenders and shook him violently. “You stinking fish head, mind your manners.”

Broadmoor froze. It was a trick. The Haida were a quiet people, not prone to quick anger. He thought with fearful certainty that Pitt would shake himself loose and punch the contemptuous guard.

But Pitt didn’t bite. He relaxed his body, rubbed a hand over a blossoming bruise on his buttocks and stared at Crutcher with an unfathomable gaze. He pulled off his stocking cap as if in respect, revealing a mass of black hair whose natural curls had been greased straight. He shrugged with a careless show of deference.

“I was not careful. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t look familiar,” said Crutcher coldly.

“I make this trip twenty times,” Pitt said quietly. “I’ve seen you lots before. Your name is Crutcher. Three deliveries back, you punched my gut for unloading the fish too slow.”

The guard studied Pitt for a moment, then gave a short laugh, a jackal laugh. “Get in my way again, and I’ll boot your ass across the channel...”

Pitt registered a look of friendly resignation and jumped back onto the deck of the fishing boat. The rest of the fishing fleet was slipping into the openings at the dock between the supply ships. Where there was no room, the boats tied together parallel, end to end, the crew of the outer boat transferring their cargo of fish across the deck of the one moored to the dock. Pitt joined the fishermen and began passing crates of salmon up to one of Broadmoor’s crew, who stacked them on flatbed trailers that were hitched to a small tractor vehicle with eight drive wheels. The crates were heavy, and Pitt’s biceps and back soon ached in protest. He gritted his teeth, knowing the guards would suspect he didn’t belong if he couldn’t heave the ice-filled fish crates around with the ease of the Haida.

Two hours later the trailers were loaded, then four of the guards and the crews of the fishing boats piled aboard as the train set off toward the mining operation’s mess hall. They were stopped at the tunnel entrance, herded into a small building and told to strip to their underwear. Then their clothes were searched and they were individually X-rayed. All passed scrutiny except one Haida who absentmindedly carried a large fishing knife in his boot. Pitt found it strange that instead of merely confiscating the knife, it was returned and the fisherman sent back to his boat. The rest were allowed to dress and reboard the trailers for the journey to the excavation area.

“I would think they’d search you for concealed diamonds when you came out rather than entering,” said Pitt.

“They do,” explained Broadmoor. “We go through the same procedure when we exit the mine. They X-ray you going in as a warning that it doesn’t pay to smuggle out a handful of diamonds by swallowing them.”

The arched concrete tunnel that penetrated the mound of mine tailings was about five meters high by ten wide, ample room for large trucks to transport men and equipment back and forth from the loading dock. The length stretched nearly half a kilometer, the interior brightened by long rows of fluorescent lighting. Side tunnels yawned about halfway through, each about half the size of the main artery.

“Where do those lead?” Pitt asked Broadmoor.

“Part of the security system. They circle the entire compound and are filled with detection devices.”

“The guards, the weapons, the array of security systems. Seems like overkill, just to prevent a few diamonds from being smuggled off the property.”

“Only the half of it. They don’t want the illegal laborers escaping to the mainland. It’s part of the deal with corrupt Canadian officials.”

They emerged at the other end of the tunnel amid the busy activity of the mining operation. The driver of the tractor curled the train of trailers onto a paved road that circled the great open pit that was the volcanic chute. He pulled up beside a loading dock that ran along a low concrete building in the shape of a quonset hut, and stopped.

A man wearing the white attire of a chef under a furtrimmed overcoat opened a door to a warehouse where foodstuffs were stored. He threw a wave of greeting to Broadmoor. “Good to see you, Mason. Your arrival is timely. We’re down to two cases of cod.”

“We’ve brought enough fish to grow scales on your workers.” Broadmoor turned and said in a low voice to Pitt, “Dave Anderson, the head cook for the miners. A decent guy but he drinks too much beer.”

“The frozen-food locker is open,” said Anderson. “Mind how you stack the crates. I found salmon mixed in with flounder your last trip. It screws up my menus.”

“Brought you a treat. Fifty kilos of moose steaks.”

“You’re okay, Mason. You’re the reason I don’t buy frozen fish from the mainland,” the cook replied with a wide smile. “After you’ve stored the crates, come on into the mess hall. My boys will have breakfast waiting for your people. I’ll write a check as soon as I’ve inventoried your catch.”

The wooden crates of fish were stacked in the frozen food locker, and the Haida fishermen, followed by Pitt, thankfully tramped into the warmth of the mess hall. They walked past a serving line and were dished up eggs, sausages and flapjacks. As they helped themselves to coffee out of a huge urn, Pitt looked around at the men sitting at the other tables. The four guards were conversing under a cloud of cigarette smoke near the door. Close to a hundred Chinese miners from the early morning graveyard shift filled up, most of the room. Ten men who Pitt guessed to be mining engineers and superintendents sat at a round table that was set off in a smaller, private dining room.

“Which one is your disgruntled employee?” he asked Broadmoor.

Broadmoor nodded toward the door leading into the kitchen. “He’s waiting for you outside by the garbage containers...”

Pitt stared at the Indian. “How did you arrange that?”

Broadmoor smiled shrewdly. “The Haida have ways of communicating that don’t require fiber optics.”

Pitt did not question him. Now was not the time. Keeping a wary eye on the guards, he casually walked into the kitchen. None of the cooks or dishwashers looked up as he moved between the ovens and sinks through the rear door and dropped down the steps outside. The big metal garbage containers reeked of stale vegetables in the sharp, crisp air.

He stood there in the cold, not sure what to expect.

A tall figure moved from behind a container and approached him. He was wearing a yellow jumpsuit. The bottoms of the legs were smeared with mud that had a strange bluish cast to it. A miner’s hardhat sat on his head, and his face was covered by what Pitt took for a mask with a breathing filter. He clutched a bundle under one arm. “I understand you’re interested in our mining operation,” he said quietly.

“Yes. My name is—”

“Names are unimportant. We don’t have much time if you are to leave the island with the fishing fleet.” He unfolded a jumpsuit, a respirator mask and a hard hat and handed them to Pitt. “Put these on and follow me.”

Pitt said nothing and did as he was told. He did not fear a trap. The security guards could have taken him anytime since he set foot on the dock. He dutifully zipped up the front of the jumpsuit, tightened the chin strap of the hard hat, adjusted the respirator mask over his face and set out after a man he hoped could show him the source behind the violent killings.

Pitt followed the enigmatic mining engineer across a road into a modern prefabricated building that housed a row of elevators that transported the workers to and from the diggings far below. Two larger ones carried the Chinese laborers but the smaller one on the end was for the use of company officials only. The lift machinery was the latest in Otis elevator technology. The elevator moved smoothly, without sound or sensation of dropping.

“How deep do we go?” asked Pitt, his voice muffled by the breathing mask.

“Five hundred meters,” replied the miner.

“Why the respirators?”

“When the volcano we’re standing in erupted in the distant past, it packed Kunghit Island with pumice rock. The vibration that results from the excavating process can churn up pumice dust, which raises hell with the lungs.”

“Is that the only reason?” asked Pitt slyly.

“No,” replied the engineer honestly. “I don’t want you to see my face. That way, if security gets suspicious, I can pass a lie-detector test, which our chief of security uses with the frequency of a doctor giving urine tests.”

“Dapper John Merchant,” Pitt said, smiling.

“You know John?”

“We’ve met.”

The older man shrugged and accepted Pitt’s claim without comment.

As they neared the bottom of the run, Pitt’s ears were struck by a weird humming sound. Before he could ask what it was, the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. He was led through a mineshaft that opened onto an observation platform perched fifty meters above the vast excavation chamber below. The equipment at the bottom of the pit was not the typical type of machinery one might expect to encounter in a mine. No cars filled with ore pulled over tracks by a small engine; no drills or explosives, no huge earth-moving vehicles. This was a well-financed, carefully designed anal organized operation that was run by computers aided in a small way by human labor. The only obvious mechanization was the huge overhead bridge with the cables and buckets that lifted the diamond-bearing blue rock-clay to the surface and carried it to the buildings where the stones were extracted.

The engineer turned and stared at him through green eyes over the mask. “Mason did not tell me who you are or who you represent. And I don’t want to know. He merely said you were trying to trace a sound channel that travels underwater and kills.”

“That’s true. Untold thousands of various forms of sea life and hundreds of people have already died mysteriously in the open sea and along shorelines.”

“You think the sound originates here?”

“I have reason to believe the Kunghit Island mine is only one of four sources.”

The engineer nodded knowingly. “Komandorskie in the Bering Sea, Easter Island, Gladiator Island in the Tasman Sea, being the other three.”

“You guessed?”

“I know. They all use the same pulsed ultrasound excavation equipment as we do here.” The engineer swept his hand over the open pit. “We used to dig shafts, in an attempt to follow the largest concentration of diamonds. Much like miners following a vein of gold. But after Dorsett scientists and engineers perfected a new method of excavating that produced four times the production in one third the time, the old ways were quickly abandoned.”

Pitt leaned over the railing and stared at the action across the bottom of the pit. Large robotic vehicles appeared to ram long shafts into the blue clay. Then came an eerie vibration that traveled up Pitt’s legs to his body. He gazed questioningly at the engineer.

“The diamond-bearing rock and clay are broken up by high-energy pulsed ultrasound.” The engineer paused and pointed to a large concrete structure with no obvious windows. “See that building on the south side of the pit?”

Pitt nodded.

“A nuclear generating plant. It takes an enormous amount of power to produce enough energy at ten to twenty bursts a second to penetrate the rock-hard clay and break it apart.”

“The crux of the problem.”

“How so?” asked the engineer.

“The sound generated by your equipment radiates into the sea. When it converges with the energy pulses from the other Dorsett mines scattered around the Pacific, its intensity increases to a level that can kill animal life within a large area.”

“An interesting concept as far as it goes, but a piece is missing.”

“You don’t find it plausible?”

The engineer shook his head. “By itself, the sound energy produced down below could not kill a sardine three kilometers from here. The ultrasound drilling equipment uses sound pulses with acoustic frequencies of 60.000 to 80,000 hertz, or cycles per second. These frequencies are absorbed by the salts in the sea before they travel very far.”

Pitt stared into the eyes of the engineer, trying to read where he was coming from, but other than the eyes and a few strands of graying hair that trailed from under the hard hat, all he could readily see was that the stranger was the same height and a good twenty pounds heavier. “How do I know you’re not trying to throw me off the track?”

Pitt could not see the tight smile behind the respirator mask, but he guessed it was there. “Come along,” said the engineer. “I’ll show you the answer to your dilemma.” He stepped back into the elevator, but before he pushed the next button on the panel, he handed Pitt an acoustic-foam helmet. “Take off your hard hat and set this over your head. Make certain it’s snug or you’ll get a case of vertigo. It contains a transmitter and receiver so we can converse without shouting.”

“Where are we headed?” asked Pitt.

“An exploratory tunnel, cut beneath the main pit to survey the heaviest deposit of stones.”

The doors opened and they stepped out into a mineshaft carved from the volcanic rock and shored up with heavy timbers. Pitt involuntarily lifted his hands and pressed them against the sides of his head. Though aft sound was muffled, he felt a strange vibration in his eardrums.

“Do you hear me all right?” asked the engineer.

“I hear you,” answered Pitt through the tiny microphone. “But through a humming sound.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“What is it?”

“Follow me a hundred meters up the shaft and I’ll show you your missing piece.”

Pitt trailed in the engineer’s footsteps until they reached a side shaft, only this one held no shoring timbers. The volcanic rock that made up its rounded sides was almost as smooth as if it had been polished by some immense boring tool.

“A Thurston lava tube,” Pitt said. “I’ve seen them on the big island of Hawaii.”

“Certain lavas such as those basaltic in composition form thin flows called pahoehoe that run laterally, with smooth surfaces,” clarified the engineer. “When the lava cools closer to the surface, the deeper, warmer surge continues until it flows into the open, leaving chambers, or tubes as we call them. It is these pockets of air that are driven to resonate by the pulsed ultrasound from the mining operation above.”

“What if I remove the helmet?”

The engineer shrugged. “Go ahead, but you won’t enjoy the results.”

Pitt lifted the acoustic-foam helmet from his ears. After half a minute he became disoriented and reached out to the wall of the tube to keep from losing his balance. Next came a mushrooming sensation of nausea. The engineer reached over and replaced the helmet on Pitt’s head. Then he circled an arm around Pitt’s waist to hold him upright.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

Pitt took a long breath as the vertigo and nausea quickly passed. “I had to experience the agony. Now I have a mild idea of what those poor souls suffered before they died.”

The engineer led him back to the elevator. “Not a pleasant ordeal. The deeper we excavate, the worse it becomes. The one time I walked in here without protecting my ears, my head ached for a week.”

As the elevator rose from the lava tube, Pitt fully recovered except for a ringing in his ears. He knew it all now. He knew the source of the acoustic plague. He knew how it worked to destroy. He knew how to stop it—and was buoyed by the knowledge.

“I understand now. The air chambers in the lava resonate and radiate the high-intensity sound pulses down through rock and into the sea, producing an incredible burst of energy.”

“There’s your answer.” The engineer removed his helmet and ran a hand through a head of thinning gray hair. “The resonance added to the sound intensity creates incredible energy, more than enough to kill.”

“Why did you risk your job and maybe your life showing me this?”

The engineer’s eyes burned, and he shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jumpsuit. “I do not like working for people I cannot trust. Men like Arthur Dorsett create trouble and tragedy-if you two should ever meet, you can smell it on him. This whole operation stinks, as do all his other mining operations. These poor Chinese laborers are driven until they drop. They’re fed well but paid nothing and forced to slave in the pit eighteen hours a day. Twenty have died in the past twelve months from accidents, because they were too exhausted to react and move out of the way of the equipment. Why the need to dig diamonds twenty-four hours a day when there is a worldwide surplus of the damned stones? De Beers may head a repugnant monopoly, but you have to give them credit. They hold production down so prices remain high. No, Dorsett has a rotten scheme to harm the market. I’d give a year’s pay to know what’s going on in his diabolic mind. Someone like you, who understands the horror we’re causing here, can now work to stop Dorsett before he kills another hundred innocent souls.”

“What’s stopping you from blowing the whistle?” asked Pitt.

“Easier said than done. Every one of the scientists and engineers who direct the digging signed ironclad contracts. No performance, no pay. Dorsett’s attorneys would throw up a smoke screen so thick you couldn’t cut it with a laser if we sued. Just as bad, if the Mounties learned of the carnage among the Chinese laborers, and the cover-up, Dorsett would claim ignorance and make damned certain we’d all stand trial for conspiracy. As it is, we’re scheduled to leave the island in four weeks. Our orders are to shut down the mine the week before. Only then are we to be paid off and sent on our way.”

“Why not get on a boat and leave now?”

“The thought crossed our minds until the chief superintendent tried exactly that,” said the engineer slowly. “According to letters we received from his wife, he never arrived home and was never seen again.”

“Dorsett runs a tight ship.”

“As tight as any Central American drug operation.”

“Why shut down the mine when it still produces?”

“I have no idea. Dorsett set the dates. He obviously has a plan he doesn’t intend to share with the hired help.”

“How does Dorsett know none of you will talk once you’re on the mainland?”

“It’s no secret that if one of us talks, we all go to jail.”

“And the Chinese laborers?”

He stared at Pitt over the respirator clamped around the lower part of his face, his eyes expressionless. “I have a suspicion they’ll be left inside the mine.”

“Buried?”

“Knowing Dorsett, he wouldn’t bat an eye when he gave the order to his security flunkies.”

“Have you ever met the man?” asked Pitt.

“Once was enough. His daughter, The Emasculator, is as bad as he is.”

“Boudicca.” Pitt smiled thinly. “She’s called The Emasculator?”

“Strong as an ox, that one,” said the engineer. “I’ve seen her lift a good-sized man off the ground with one arm.”

Before Pitt could ask any more questions, the elevator reached the surface level and stopped in the main lift building. The engineer stepped outside, glancing at a Ford van that drove past. Pitt followed him around the corner of the mess hall and behind the garbage containers.

The engineer nodded at Pitt’s jumpsuit. “Your gear belongs to a geologist who’s down with the flu. I’ll have to return it before he discovers it missing and wonders why.”

“Great,” Pitt muttered. “I probably contacted his flu germs from the respirator.”

“Your Indian friends have returned to their boats.” The engineer gestured at the food-storage loading dock. The tractor and trailers were gone. “The van that just passed by the elevator building is a personnel shuttle. It should return in a couple of minutes. Hail the driver and tell him to take you through the tunnel.”

Pitt stared at the old engineer dubiously. “You don’t think he’ll question why I didn’t leave with the other Haida?”

The old engineer took a notebook and a pencil from a pocket of his jumpsuit and scribbled a few words. He tore off the sheet of paper, folded it and passed it to Pitt. “Give him this. It will guarantee your safe passage. I have to return to work before Dapper John’s muscle boys begin to ask questions.”

Pitt shook his hand. “I’m grateful for your help. You took a terrible risk by revealing Dorsett Consolidated secrets to a perfect stranger.”

“If I can prevent future deaths of innocent people, any risk on my part will have been well worth it.”

“Good luck,” said Pitt.

“The same to you.” The engineer began to walk away, thought of something and turned back. “One more thing, out of curiosity. I saw the Dorsett gunship take off after a floatplane the other day. It never returned.”

“I know,” said Pitt. “It ran into a hill and burned.”

“You know?”

“I was on the floatplane.”

The engineer looked at him queerly. “And Malcolm Stokes?”

Pitt quickly realized that this was the undercover man Stokes had mentioned. “A metal splinter in one lung. But he’ll live to enjoy his pension.”

“I’m glad. Malcolm is a good man. He has a fine family.”

“A wife and five children,” said Pitt. “He told me after we crashed.”

“Then you got clear only to jump back in the fire.”

“Not very bright of me, was it?”

The engineer smiled. “No, I guess it wasn’t.” Then he turned and headed back into the elevator building, where he disappeared from Pitt’s view.

Five minutes later, the van appeared and Pitt waved it to a stop. The driver, in the uniform of a security guard, stared at Pitt suspiciously. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

Pitt handed him the folded note and shrugged wordlessly.

The driver read the note, wadded it up, tossed it on the floor and nodded. “Okay, take a seat. I’ll run you as far as the search house at the other end of the tunnel.”

As the driver closed the door and shifted the van into drive, Pitt took a seat behind him and casually leaned down and picked up the crumpled note. It read:

The driver stopped the van in front of the security building, where Pitt was explored from head to feet by X ray for the second time that morning. The doctor in charge of anatomical search nodded as he completed a checklist.

“No diamonds on you, big boy,” he said, stifling a yawn.

“Who needs them?” Pitt grunted indifferently. “You can’t eat stones. They’re a curse of the white man. Indians don’t kill each other over diamonds.”

“You’re late, aren’t you? Your tribesmen came through here twenty minutes ago.”

“I fell asleep,” said Pitt, hurriedly throwing on his clothes.

He took off at a dead run and rushed onto the dock. Fifty meters from the end he came slowly to a stop. Concern and misgiving coursed through him. The Haida fishing fleet was a good five kilometers out in the channel. He was alone with nowhere to go.

A large freighter was unloading the last of its cargo across the dock from the Dorsett yacht. He dodged around the big containers that were hoisted from the cargo holds on wooden skids and tried to lose himself amid the activity while moving toward the gangway in an attempt to board the ship. One hand on the railing and one foot on the first step was as far as he got.

“Hold it right there, fisherman.” The calm voice spoke from directly behind him. “Missed your boat, did you?”

Pitt slowly turned around and froze as he felt his heart double its beat. The sadistic Crutcher was leaning against a crate containing a large pump as he casually puffed on the stub of a cigar. Next to him stood a guard with the muzzle of his M-1 assault rifle wavering up and down Pitt’s body. It was the same guard Pitt had struck in Merchant’s office. Pitt’s heart went on triple time as Dapper John Merchant himself stepped from behind the guard, staring at Pitt with the cold authority of one who holds men’s lives in the palms of his hands.

“Well, well, Mr. Pitt, you are a stubborn man.”

“I knew he was the same one who punched me the minute I saw him board the shuttle van.” The guard grinned wolfishly as he stepped forward and thrust the gun barrel into Pitt’s gut. “A little payback for hitting me when I wasn’t ready.”

Pitt doubled over in sharp pain as the narrow, round muzzle jabbed deeply into his side, badly bruising but not quite penetrating the flesh. He looked up at the grinning guard and spoke through clenched teeth. “A social misfit if I’ve ever seen one.”

The guard lifted his rifle to strike Pitt again, but Merchant stopped him. “Enough, Elmo. You can play games with him after he’s explained his persistent intrusion.” He looked at Pitt apologetically. “You must excuse Elmo. He has an instinctive drive to hurt people he doesn’t trust.”

Pitt desperately tried to think of some way to escape. But except for jumping in the icy water and expiring from hypothermia or— and this was the more likely option of the two-being blasted into fish meal by Elmo’s automatic rifle, there was no avenue open.

“You must have an active imagination if you consider me a threat,” Pitt muttered to Merchant as he stalled for time.

Merchant leisurely removed a cigarette from a gold case and lit it with a matching lighter. “Since we last met, I’ve run an in-depth check on you, Mr. Pitt. To say you are a threat to those you oppose is a mild understatement. You are not trespassing on Dorsett property to study fish and kelp. You are here for another, more ominous purpose. I rather hope you’ll explain your presence in vivid detail without prolonged theatrical resistance.”

“A pity to disappoint you,” said Pitt, between deep breaths. “I’m afraid you won’t have time for one of your sordid interrogations.”

Merchant was not easily fooled. But he knew that Pitt was no garden-variety diamond smuggler. A tiny alarm went off in the back of his mind when he saw the utter lack of fear in Pitt’s eyes. He felt curious yet a trifle uneasy. “I freely admit I thought more highly of you than to expect a cheap bluff.”

Pitt stared upward and scanned the skies. “A squadron of fighters from the aircraft carrier Nimitz, bristling with air-to-surface missiles, should be whistling over at any moment.”

“A bureaucrat with an obscure governmental agency with the power to order an attack on Canadian soil? I don’t believe so.”

“You’re right about me,” said Pitt. “But my boss, Admiral James Sandecker, has the leverage to order an air strike.”

For an instant, a brief eye blink in time, Pitt thought Merchant was going to buy it. Hesitation clouded the security chief’s face. Then he grinned, stepped forward and wickedly backhanded Pitt across the mouth with a gloved hand. Pitt staggered backward, feeling the blood springing from his lips.

“I’ll take my chances,” Merchant said dryly. He wiped a speck of blood from his leather glove with a bored expression of distaste. “No more stories. You will speak only when I ask for answers to my questions.” He turned to Crutcher and Elmo. “Escort him to my office. We’ll continue our discussion there.”

Crutcher pushed a flat-handed palm into Pitt’s face and sent him staggering across the dock. “I think we’ll walk instead of ride to your office, sir. Our nosy friend could use a little exercise to soften him up ...”

“Hold on there!” came a sharp voice from the deck of the yacht. Boudicca Dorsett was leaning against the rail, watching the drama below on the dock. She was wearing a wool cardigan over a white turtleneck and a short pleated skirt. Her white-stockinged legs were encased in a pair of high calfskin riding boots. She tossed her long hair over her shoulders and gestured to the gangway leading from the dock to the yacht’s promenade deck. “Bring your intruder on board.”

Merchant and Crutcher exchanged indulgent glances before hustling Pitt on board the yacht. Elmo prodded him viciously in the lower back with the assault rifle, forcing him through a teak doorway into the main salon.

Boudicca sat on one edge of a desk carved from driftwood with an Italian-marble top. Her skirt, taut under her legs, rose to mid-thigh. She was a robust woman, almost masculine in her movements, yet exuding sensuality and an unmistakable aura of wealth and polish. She was used to intimidating men, and she frowned when she saw Pitt clinically appraising her.

A first-class performance, Pitt observed. Most men would have been awed and cowed. Merchant, Crutcher and Elmo couldn’t keep their eyes off her. But Pitt refused to play on her turf. He ignored Boudicca’s obvious charms and forced his eyes to travel over the luxurious furnishings and decor of the yacht’s salon.

“Nice place you have here,” he said impassively.

“Shut your mouth in front of Ms. Dorsett,” Elmo snapped, raising the butt of his weapon to strike Pitt again.

Pitt whirled on his feet, knocked away the approaching rifle with one hand and rammed his other fist into Elmo’s gut just above the groin. The guard groaned in pain and anger and doubled over, dropping the rifle, both hands clutched at the point of impact.

Pitt scooped up the rifle from the salon’s thick carpet before anyone could react and calmly handed the weapon to a stunned Merchant. “I’m tired of being on the receiving end of this cretin’s sadistic habits. Please keep him under control.” Then he turned to Boudicca. “I realize it’s early, but I could use a drink. Do you stock tequila on board this floating villa?”

Boudicca remained calm and aloof, staring at Pitt with renewed curiosity. She looked at Merchant. “Where did he come from?” she demanded. “Who is this man?”

“He penetrated our security by posing as a local fisherman. In reality he’s an American agent.”

“Why is he snooping around the mine?”

“I was taking him back to my office for the answers when you called us to come aboard,” replied Merchant.

She rose to her full height and stood taller than any man in the salon. Her voice became incredibly deep and sensuous, and her eyes were cool as they flicked over Pitt. “Your name, please, and your business here.”

Merchant began to answer. “His name is—”

“I want him to tell me,” she cut Merchant off.

“So you’re Boudicca Dorsett,” Pitt said, brushing off her question and returning her gaze. “Now I can say I know all three.”

She searched his face for a moment. “All three?”

“Arthur Dorsett’s lovely daughters,” answered Pitt.

Anger at being toyed with flashed in her eyes. She took two steps, reached out, grasped Pitt’s upper arms and squeezed as she leaned forward, crushing him against one wall of the salon. There was no expression in the giantess’ black eyes as they stared unblinkingly into Pitt’s, almost nose-to-nose. She said nothing, only stood there increasing the pressure and pushing upward until his feet were barely touching the carpet.

Pitt resisted by tensing his body and flexing his biceps, which felt as if they were clamped in ever-tightening vises. He could not believe any man, much less a woman, could be so strong. His muscles began to feel as if they were mashed to pulp. He clenched his teeth and bleeding lips together to fight the rising pain. The restricted blood flow was numbing and turning his hands white when Boudicca finally released her grip and stepped back.

“Now then, before I encircle your throat, tell me who you are and why you’re prying into my family’s mining operation.”

Pitt stalled for a minute while the pain subsided and feeling returned to his lower arms and hands. He was stunned by the woman’s inhuman strength. Finally, he gasped out, “Is that any way to treat the man who rescued your sisters from certain death?”

Her eyes widened questioningly, and she stiffened. “What are you talking about? How do you know my sisters?”

“My name is Dirk Pitt,” he said slowly. “My friends and I saved Maeve from freezing to death and Deirdre from drowning in the Antarctic.”

“You?” The words seemed to boil from her lips. “You’re the one from the National Underwater & Marine Agency?”

“The same.” Pitt walked over to a lavish bar with a copper surface and picked up a cocktail napkin to dab away the blood that dripped from a cut lip. Merchant and Crutcher looked as stunned as if a horse they had bet their life savings on had run out of the money.

Merchant gazed blankly at Boudicca. “He must be lying.”

“Would you like me to describe them in detail?” asked Pitt carelessly. “Maeve is tall, blond, with incredibly blue eyes. Strictly a camp-on-the-beach type.” He paused to point at a portrait of a young blond woman, wearing an old-fashioned dress with a diamond the size of a quail’s egg set in a pendant around her neck. “That’s her in the painting.”

“Not even close.” Boudicca smirked. “That happens to be a portrait of my great-great-great-grandmother.”

“Neither here nor there,” Pitt said with feigned indifference, unwilling to tear his eyes away from the incredible likeness of Maeve. “Deirdre, on the other hand, has brown eyes and red hair and walks like a runway model.”

After a long pause, Boudicca said, “He must be who he says he is.”

“That doesn’t explain his presence here,” Merchant persisted.

“I told you during our last meeting,” said Pitt. “I came here to study the effects of the chemicals and pollution flowing into the sea from the mine.”

Merchant smiled thinly. “An inventive story, but far from the truth.”

Pitt could not relax for a moment. He was in the company of dangerous people, cunning and shrewd. He had felt his way, assessing the reaction to his line of approach, but he realized it was only a matter of a minute or two before Boudicca figured out his game. It was inevitable. She had enough pieces to fill in the borders of the puzzle. He decided he could better control the situation by telling the truth.

“The gospel you want, the gospel you’ll get. I’m here because the pulsed ultrasound you use to excavate far diamonds causes an intense resonance that channels great distances underwater. When undersea conditions are optimal these pulses converge with those from your other mining operations around the Pacific and kill any living organism in the area. But of course I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

He’d caught Boudicca off balance. She stared at Pitt as if he had stepped off an alien spaceship. “You’re quite good at creating a scene.” she said hesitantly. “You should have gone into the movies.”

“I’ve considered it,” said Pitt. “But I don’t have James Woods’ talent or Mel Gibson’s looks.” He discovered a bottle of Herradura silver tequila behind the bar on a glass shelf backed by a gold-tinted mirror and poured himself a shot glass. He also found a lime and a salt shaker. He let Boudicca and the others stand there and watch as he dabbed his tongue on the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger before sprinkling salt on it. Then he downed the tequila, licked the salt and sucked on the lime. “There, now I feel ready to face the rest of the day. As I was saying, you know more about the horrors of the acoustic plague, as it’s come to be called, than I do, Ms. Dorsett. The same killer that came frighteningly close to killing your sisters. So it would be foolish of me to waste my time attempting to enlighten you.”

“I don’t have the vaguest idea of what you’re talking about.” She turned to Merchant and Crutcher. “This man is dangerous. He is a menace to Dorsett Consolidated Mining. Get him off my boat and do with him whatever you think is necessary to ensure he doesn’t bother us again.”

Pitt made one last toss of the dice. “Garret Converse, the actor, and his Chinese junk, the Tz’u-hsi. David Copperfield would be proud of the way you made Converse, his entire crew and boat disappear.” The expected reaction was all there. The strength and the arrogance evaporated.

Boudicca suddenly looked lost. Then Pitt threw in the clincher. “Surely you haven’t forgotten the Mentawai. Now there was a sloppy job. You mistimed your explosives and blew up the boarding party from the Rio Grande who were investigating what appeared to be an abandoned ship. Unfortunately for you, your yacht was seen fleeing the scene and later identified.”

“A most intriguing tale.” There was scorn in Boudicca’s voice, but a scorn disputed by a deep foreboding in her face. “You might almost say spellbinding. Are you quite finished, Mr. Pitt, or do you have an ending?”

“An ending?” Pitt sighed. “It hasn’t been written yet. But I think it’s safe to say that very soon Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited will be only a memory.”

He had gone one step too far. Boudicca began to lose control. Her anger swelled, and she came close to Pitt, her face tight and cold. “My father can’t be stopped. Not by any legal authority or any government. Not in the next twenty-seven days. By then, we’ll have closed down the mines of our own accord.”

“Why not do it now and save God only knows how many lives?”

“Not one minute before we’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“A pity you can’t ask Maeve.”

“Why Maeve?”

“Deirdre tells me that she became quite friendly with the man who saved her.”

“She’s in Australia,” said Pitt.

Boudicca shook her head and showed her teeth. “Maeve is in Washington, working as an agent for our father, feeding him whatever information NUMA has collected on the deathly sound waves. Nothing like having a trusted relative in the enemy camp to keep one out of trouble.”

“I misjudged her,” Pitt said brusquely. “She led me to believe that protecting sea life was her life’s work.”

“Any moral indignation flew out the window when she learned my father was holding her twin sons as insurance.”

“Don’t you mean hostages?” The mist began to lift. Pitt began to see that Arthur Dorsett’s machinations went far beyond mere greed. The man was a bloodthirsty cutthroat, a predator who thought nothing of using his own family as pawns.

Boudicca disregarded Pitt’s remark and nodded at John Merchant. “He’s yours to dispose of as you will.”

“Before we bury him with the others,” said Crutcher with seeming anticipation, “we’ll persuade him to fill in any details he might have purposely left out.”

“So I’m to be tortured and then executed,” Pitt said nonchalantly, helping himself to another shot of tequila while his mind desperately created and discarded a dozen useless plans for escape.

“You’ve condemned yourself by coming here,” said Boudicca. “If, as you say, officials of NUMA suspected our excavation operations were responsible for sending deadly sound waves throughout the ocean, there would have been no need for you to clandestinely spy on Dorsett property. The truth is, you have learned the answers within the past hour and have yet to pass them on to your superiors in Washington. I compliment you, Mr. Pitt. Slipping through our, security and entering the mine was a masterstroke. You could not have done it alone. Explanations will be forthcoming after Mr. Merchant motivates you to share your secrets.”

She nailed me good, Pitt thought in defeat. “You will give Maeve and Deirdre my best wishes.”

“Knowing my sisters, they’ve probably already forgotten you.”

“Deirdre maybe, not Maeve. Now that I’ve met all of you, it’s evident that she’s the most virtuous of the three.”

Pitt was surprised at the look of hatred that flashed in Boudicca’s eyes. “Maeve is the outcast. She has never been close to the family.”

Pitt grinned, a natural grin, mischievous and challenging. “It’s easy to see why.”

Boudicca stood up, looking even taller due to the heels of her boots, and stared down at Pitt, enraged at the laughter she read in his opaline green eyes. “By the time we close the mine, Maeve and her bastard sons will be gone.” She spun around and glared at Merchant. “Get this scum off my boat,” she said. “I don’t want to see him again.”

“You won’t, Ms. Dorsett,” said Merchant, motioning for Crutcher to push Pitt from the salon. “I promise, this will be your last look at him.”

With Pitt between them and Elmo bringing up the rear, Merchant and Crutcher escorted their captive down the gangway and walked across the dock toward a waiting van. As they passed by the large containers of supplies and equipment that had been off loaded from the cargo ship, the loud exhaust from the diesel engines operating the cranes drowned out a dull thud. Only when Crutcher suddenly crumpled to the planking of the dock did Pitt spin around in a defensive crouch, just in time to see Merchant’s eyes roll up into his head before he dropped like a sack of sand. Several steps behind them, Elmo lay stretched out like a dead man, which he was.

The whole operation hadn’t taken ten seconds from the killing blow to the back of Elmo’s neck to the concussion of John Merchant’s skull.

Mason Broadmoor grabbed Pitt’s arm with his left hand, his right still gripping a massive steel wrench. “Quick, jump!”

Confused, Pitt hesitated. “Jump where?”

“Off the dock, you idiot.”

Pitt needed no further urging. Five running steps and they both flew through the air and landed in the water a few meters in front of the bow of the cargo ship. The ice-cold water shocked every nerve ending in Pitt’s body before his adrenaline took over and he found himself swimming beside Broadmoor.

“Now what?” he gasped, breathing steam over the icy water while shaking the water from his face and hair.

“The watercraft,” answered Broadmoor after snorting water from his nose. “We sneaked them off the fishing boat and hid them under the pier.”

“They were on the boat? I didn’t see them.”

“A hidden compartment I built myself,” Broadmoor said, grinning. “You never know when you’ll need to skip town ahead of the sheriff.” He reached one of the Duo 300 WetJets that were floating beside a concrete piling and climbed aboard. “You know how to ride a watercraft?”

“Like I was born on one,” said Pitt, pulling himself aboard and straddling the seat.

“If we keep the cargo ship between us and the dock, we should be blocked from their line of fire for a good half kilometer.”

They punched the starters, the modified engines roared to life, and with Broadmoor less than a meter in the lead, they burst from under the dock as if shot from a cannon. They stuck the noses of their watercraft in a hard turn and sliced around the bows of the cargo ship, using the hull as a shield. The engines accelerated with no hint of hesitation. Pitt never looked back. He hunched over the handlebars and pressed the trigger throttle to its stop, half expecting a hail of gunfire to pepper the water around him at any second. But their getaway was clean, they were far out of range before the rest of John Merchant’s security team was alerted.

For the second time in nearly as many days, Pitt was making a wild escape from the Dorsett mine for Moresby Island. The water sped past in a blue-green blur. The bright colors and the Haida designs on the watercraft glittered radiantly in the bright sun. Pitt’s senses sharpened at the danger, and his reactions quickened.

From the air the channel between the islands seemed little more than a wide river. But from the surface of the sea, the inviting safety of the trees and rocky hills of Moresby appeared like a speck on the far horizon.

Pitt was awed by the stability of the WetJet’s V-hull and the torque of its modified big-bore, long-stroke engine, which drove the craft with a ferocious low snarl through the low swells with hardly a bounce. Fast, agile, the variable-pitch impeller delivered incredible thrust. These were truly machines with muscle. Pitt couldn’t know with any certainty, but he estimated he was whipping over the sea at close to sixty knots. It was almost like riding a high-performance motorcycle over water.

He jumped Broadmoor’s wake, pulled even until they were hurtling across the water virtually side by side and shouted, “We’ll be dead meat if they come after us!”

“Not to worry!” Broadmoor yelled back. “We can outrun their patrol boats!”

Pitt turned and peered over his shoulder at the rapidly receding island. He cursed under his breath as he spotted the remaining Defender helicopter rising above the mound surrounding the mine. In less than a minute it was sweeping across the channel, taking up the chase and following their wakes.

“We can’t outrun their helicopter,” Pitt informed Broadmoor loudly.

In contrast to a grim-faced Pitt, Mason Broadmoor looked as enthusiastic and bright eyed as a boy warming up for his first track meet. His brown features were flushed with excitement. He stood on the footrests and glanced back at the pursuing aircraft. “The dumb bastards don’t stand a chance,” he said grinning. “Follow in my wake.”

They were rapidly overhauling the homeward-bound fishing fleet, but Broadmoor made a hard turn toward Moresby Island, giving the boats a wide berth. The shore was only a few hundred meters away, and the helicopter had pulled to within a kilometer. Pitt could see waves sluicing and heaving in constant motion as they hurled against the rocks below a shore of steep, jagged cliffs, and he wondered if Broadmoor had a death wish as he aimed his watercraft toward the swirling breakers. Pitt turned his attention from the approaching helicopter and put his faith in the Haida totem carver. He stuck the nose of his watercraft into the rooster tail shooting up behind the front-runner and hung in the foaming wake, as they ran flat out through a cauldron of waves thrashing against a fortress of offshore rocks.

To Pitt it looked as if they were on a direct course toward the wave-hammered cliffs. He gripped the handlebars, braced his feet in the padded footwells and hung on to keep from being pitched off. The rumble of the breakers came like thunderclaps, and all he could see was a gigantic curtain of spray and foam. The image of the Polar Queen, drifting helpless toward the barren rock island in the Antarctic flickered through his mind. But this time, he was aboard a speck in the sea instead of an ocean liner. He plunged on despite a growing certainty that Broadmoor was certifiably insane.

Broadmoor cut around a huge rock. Pitt followed, instantly setting up the turn, shifting his body back and outside to slightly weight the front inside of the hull, then hanging on, the hull biting into the water as he carved the turn in Broadmoor’s wake. They rocketed over the crest of a huge roller and smashed down in the trough before ascending on the back of the next one.

The helicopter was almost upon them, but the pilot stared in dumb fascination at the suicidal course set by the two men on the watercraft. Astonished, he failed to line up and fire his twin 7.62 guns. Wary of his own danger, he pulled the aircraft up in a steep vertical climb and swept over the palisades. He banked sharply to come around for another look but the watercraft had already been out of sight for a critical ten seconds. When he circled back over the water, his quarry had vanished.

Some inner instinct told Pitt that in another hundred meters he would be pulped against the unyielding wall rising out of the water and that would be the end of it. The choice was to veer off and take his chances with the firepower from the helicopter, but he remained inflexibly on course. His life was passing in front of him. Then he saw it.

A tiny crevice in the lower face of the cliffs suddenly yawned open like the eye of a needle, no wider than two meters. Broadmoor swept into the narrow opening and was gone.

Pitt grimly followed, swearing that the ends of his handlebars brushed the sides of the entrance, and abruptly found himself in a deep grotto with a high, inverted V-shaped ceiling. Ahead of him, Broadmoor slowed and glided to a stop beside a small rock landing, where he jumped off his machine, tore off his coat and began stuffing it with a bundle of dead kelp that had washed into the grotto. Pitt immediately saw the wisdom of the Indian’s scheme. He hit the stop switch on the handlebar and matched Broadmoor’s actions.

Once the coats were filled to simulate headless torsos, they were thrown in the water at the entrance to the grotto. Pitt and Broadmoor stood there watching as the dummies were swept back and forth before being carried by the backwash into the maelstrom outside.

“You think that will fool them?” asked Pitt.

“Guaranteed,” answered Broadmoor confidentially. “The wall of the cliff slants out, making the opening to the grotto impossible to see from the air.” He cocked an ear at the sound of the helicopter outside. “I’ll give them another ten minutes before they head back to the mine and tell Dapper John Merchant, if he’s regained consciousness, that we bashed our brains out on the rocks.”

Broadmoor was prophetic. The sound of the helicopter echoing into the grotto gradually died and faded away. He checked the fuel tanks of the watercraft and nodded comfortably. “If we run at half speed we should have just enough fuel to reach my village.”

“I suggest we relax till after sunset,” said Pitt. “No—sense in showing our faces in case the pilot of the helicopter has a suspicious disposition. Can you navigate home in the dark?”

“Blindfolded in a straitjacket,” Broadmoor said indisputably. “We’ll leave at midnight and be in bed by 300 A.M.”

For the next several minutes, worn out from the excitement of the hard run across the channel and the near brush with death, they sat in silence, listening to the reverberating roar of the surf outside the grotto. Finally, Broadmoor reached into a small compartment on his WetJet and retrieved a canvas-covered half-gallon canteen. He pulled out a cork stopper and handed the canteen to Pitt.

“Boysenberry wine. Made it myself.”

Pitt took a long swallow and made a strange face. “You mean boysenberry brandy, don’t you?”

“I admit that it does have a nice kick.” He smiled as Pitt passed back the canteen. “Did you find what you were looking for at the mine?”

“Yes, your engineer led me to the source of the problem.”

“I am glad. Then it has all been worth it.”

“You paid a high price. You’ll not be selling any more fish to the mining company.”

“I felt like a whore taking Dorsett money anyway,” said Broadmoor with a disgusted expression.

“As a consolation, you’ll also be interested to learn that Boudicca Dorsett claimed her daddy was going to close down the mine a month from now.”

“If it’s true, my people will be happy to hear it,” said Broadmoor, handing back the canteen. “That calls for another drink.”

“I owe you a debt I can’t repay,” said Pitt quietly. “You took a great risk to help me escape.”

“It was worth it to bash Merchant and Crutcher’s skulls,” Broadmoor laughed. “I’ve never felt this good before. It is I who must thank you for the opportunity.”

Pitt reached out and shook Broadmoor’s hand. “I’m going to miss your cheery disposition.”

“You’re going home?”

“Back to Washington with the information I’ve gathered.”

“You’re okay for a mainlander, friend Pitt. If you ever need a second home, you’re always welcome in my village.”

“You never know,” said Pitt warmly. “I just might take you up on that offer someday.”

They departed the grotto long after dark as insurance against chance discovery by Dorsett security patrol boats. Broadmoor draped the chain of a small shaded penlight around his neck so that it was hanging on his back.

Fortified by the boysenberry wine, Pitt followed the tiny beam through the surf and around the rocks, amazed at the ease with which Broadmoor navigated in the dark without mishap.

The image of Maeve, forced to work as a spy under the boot of her father, blackmailed by his seizure of her twin sons, made him boil with anger. He also felt a stab in his heart, a feeling that had not coursed through him in years. His emotions stirred with the memories of another woman. Only then did he realize it was possible to feel the same love for two different women from different times, one living, one dead.

Driven and torn by conflicting emotions of love and hate and a determination to stop Arthur Dorsett no matter the cost and consequences, he gripped the handlebars till his knuckles gleamed white under the light from a quarter-moon as he forged through the cataract from Broadmoor’s wake.

For most of the afternoon the wind blew steadily out of the northeast. A brisk wind, but not enough to raise more than an occasional whitecap on the swells that topped out at one meter. The wind brought with it a driving rain that fell in sheets, cutting visibility to less than five kilometers and striking the water as if its surface was churned by millions of thrashing herring. To most sailors it was miserable weather. But to British seamen like Captain Ian Briscoe, who spent their early years walking the decks of ships plowing through the damp of the North Sea, this was like old home week.

Unlike his junior officers, who remained out of the gusting spray and stayed dry, Briscoe stood on the bridge wing of his ship as if recharging the blood in his veins, staring out over the bow as if expecting to see a ghost ship that didn’t appear on radar. He noted that the mercury was holding steady and the temperature was several degrees above freezing. He felt no discomfort in his oilskins except that caused by the occasional drops of water that snaked their way through the strands of his precisely cut red beard and trickled down his neck.

After a two-week layover in Vancouver, where she participated in a series of naval exercises with ships of the Canadian Navy, Briscoe’s command, the Type 42 destroyer HMS Bridlington, was en route home to England via Hong Kong, a stopover for any British naval ship that was sailing across the Pacific. Although the ninety-nine-year lease had run out and the British Crown Colony was returned to China in 1997, it became a matter of pride to occasionally show the Cross of Saint George and to remind the new owners of who were the founders of the financial Mecca of Asia.

The door to the wheelhouse opened, and the second officer, Lieutenant Samuel Angus, leaned out. “If you can spare a few moments from defying the elements, sir, could you please step inside?”

“Why don’t you come out, my boy?” Briscoe roared over the wind. Soft. That’s the trouble with you young people. “You don’t appreciate foul weather.”

“Please, Captain,” Angus pleaded. “We have an approaching aircraft on radar.”

Briscoe walked across the bridge wing and stepped into the wheelhouse. “I see nothing unusual in that. You might say it’s routine. We’ve had dozens of aircraft fly over the ship.”

“A helicopter, sir? Over twenty-five hundred kilometers from the American mainland and no military vessels between here and Hawaii.”

“The bloody fool must be lost,” Briscoe growled. “Signal the pilot and ask if he requires a position fix.”

“I took the liberty of contacting him, sir,” replied Angus. “He speaks only Russian.”

“Who do we have who can understand him?”

“Surgeon Lieutenant Rudolph. He’s fluent in Russian.”

“Call him up to the bridge.”

Three minutes later, a short man with blond hair stepped up to Briscoe, who was sitting in the elevated captain’s chair, peering into the rain. “You sent for me, Captain?”

Briscoe nodded curtly. “There’s a Russian helicopter muddling about in the storm. Get on the radio and find out why he’s flying around an empty sea.”

Lieutenant Angus produced a headset, plugged it into a communications console and handed it to Rudolph. “The frequency is set. All you have to do is talk.”

Rudolph placed the earphones over his ears and spoke into the tiny microphone. Briscoe and Angus waited patiently while he carried on what seemed a one-way conversation. Finally, he turned to the captain. “The man is terribly upset, almost incoherent. The best I can make of it, is that he’s coming from a Russian whaling fleet.”

“Then he’s only doing his job.”

Rudolph shook his head. “He keeps repeating, `they’re all dead’ and wants to know if we have helicopter landing facilities on the Bridlington. If so, he wants to come aboard.”

“Impossible,” Briscoe grunted. “Inform him that the Royal Navy does not allow foreign aircraft to land on Her Majesty’s ships.”

Rudolph repeated the message just as the helicopter’s engines became audible and it suddenly materialized out of the falling rain, half a kilometer off the port bow at a height of no more than twenty meters above the sea. “He sounds on the verge of hysteria. He swears that unless you shoot him down, he’s going to set down on board.”

“Damn!” The oath fairly exploded from Briscoe’s lips. “All I need is for some terrorist to blow up my ship.”

“Not likely any terrorists are roaming about this part of the ocean,” said Angus.

“Yes, yes, and the Cold War’s been over for ten years. I know all that.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Rudolph, “I read the pilot as scared out of his wits. I detect no indication of threat in his tone.”

Briscoe sat silent for a few moments, then flicked a switch on the ship’s intercom. “Radar, are your ears up?”

“Yes, sir,” a voice answered. “Any ships in the area?”

“I read one large vessel and four smaller ones, bearing two-seven-two degrees, distance ninety-five kilometers.”

Briscoe broke off and pressed another switch. “Communications?”

“Sir?”

“See if you can raise a fleet of Russian whaling ships ninety-five kilometers due west of us. If you need an interpreter, the ship’s doc can translate.”

“My thirty-word Russian vocabulary should get me by,” the communications officer answered cheerfully.

Briscoe looked at Rudolph. “All right, tell him permission is granted to set down on our landing pad.”

Rudolph passed on the word, and they all watched as the helicopter angled in from the starboard beam and began a shallow power-glide approach over the landing pad just forward of the stern in readiness for a hovering descent.

To Briscoe’s practiced eyes, the pilot was handling the aircraft erratically, failing to compensate for the brisk wind. “That idiot flies like he’s got a nervous disorder,” snapped Briscoe. He turned to Angus. “Reduce speed and order an armed reception committee to greet our visitor.” Then as an afterthought. “If he so much as scratches my ship, shoot him.”

Angus grinned amiably and winked at Rudolph behind the captain’s back as he ordered the helmsman at the ship’s console to reduce speed. There was no insubordination intended in their shared humor. Briscoe was admired by every man of the crew as a gruff old sea dog who watched over his men and ran a smooth ship. They were wet) aware that few ships in the Royal Navy had a captain who preferred sea duty to promotion to flag rank.

The visitor was a smaller version of the Ka-32 Helix Russian Navy helicopter, which was used for light transport duty and air reconnaissance. This one, used by a fishing fleet for locating whales, looked badly in need of maintenance. Oil streaked from the engine cowlings and the paint on the fuselage was badly chipped and faded.

The British seamen waiting under the protection of steel bulkheads cringed as the helicopter flared out barely three meters above the pitching deck. The pilot sharply decreased his engine rpms too early, and the craft dropped heavily to the deck, bounced drunkenly back into the air and then smacked down hard on its wheels before finally settling like a chastised collie into motionless submission. The pilot shut down his engines, and the rotor blades swung to a stop.

The pilot slid open an entry door and stared up at the Bridlington’s huge radar dome before turning his eyes to the five advancing seamen, automatic weapons firmly clutched in their hands. He jumped down to the deck and peered at them curiously before he was taken roughly by the arms and hustled through an open hatch. The seamen escorted him up three decks through a wide companionway before turning into a passageway that led to the officers’ wardroom.

The ship’s first officer, Lieutenant Commander Roger Avondale, had joined the reception committee and stood off to one side with Lieutenant Angus. Surgeon Lieutenant Rudolph waited at Briscoe’s elbow to interpret. He studied the Russian pilot’s eyes and read terror numbed by fatigue in the wide pupils.

Briscoe nodded at Rudolph. “Ask him what in hell made him assume he can board a foreign naval vessel any time he chooses.”

“You might also inquire as to why he was flying alone,” added Avondale. “Not likely he’d scout for whales by himself.”

Rudolph and the pilot began a rapid-fire exchange that lasted for a solid three minutes. Finally the ship’s doctor turned and said, “His name is Fyodor Gorimykin. He is chief pilot in command of locating whales for a whaling fleet from the port of Nikolayevsk. According to his story, he and his copilot and an observer were out scouting for the catcher ships—”

“Catcher ships?” inquired Angus.

“Swift-moving vessels about sixty-five meters in length that shoot explosive harpoons into unsuspecting whales,” explained Briscoe. “The whale’s body is then inflated with air to keep it afloat, marked with a radio beacon that sends out homing signals and left while the catcher continues its killing spree. Later, it returns to its catch and tows it back to the factory ship.”

“I had drinks with a captain of a factory ship in Odessa a few years ago,” said Avondale. “He invited me aboard. It was an enormous vessel, nearly two hundred meters in length, totally self-sufficient, with high-tech processing equipment, laboratories and even a well-staffed hospital. They can winch a hundred-ton blue whale up a ramp, strip the blubber like you’d peel a banana and cook it in a rotating drum. The oil is extracted and everything else is ground and bagged as fish— or bonemeal. The whole process takes little more than half an hour.”

“After being hunted to near extinction, it’s a wonder there are any whales left to catch,” muttered Angus.

“Let’s hear the man’s story,” Briscoe demanded impatiently.

“Failing to locate a herd,” Rudolph continued, “he returned to his factory ship, the Aleksandr Gorchakov. After landing, he swears they found the entire crew of the vessel, as well as the crews on the nearby catcher ships, dead.”

“And his copilot and observer?” Briscoe persisted.

“He says he panicked and took off without them.”

“Where did he intend to go?”

Rudolph questioned the Russian and waited for the answer to pour out. “Only as far away from the mass death t as his fuel would take him.”

“Ask him what killed his shipmates.”

After an exchange, Rudolph shrugged. “He doesn’t know. All he knows is that they had expressions of agony on their faces and appeared to have died in their own vomit.”

“A fantastic tale, to say the least,” observed Avondale.

“If he didn’t look as if he’d seen a graveyard full of ghosts,” said Briscoe, “I’d think the man was a pathological liar.”

Avondale looked at the captain. “Shall we take him at his word, sir?”

Briscoe thought for a moment, then nodded. “Lay on another ten knots, then signal Pacific Fleet Command. Apprise them of the situation and inform them we are altering course to investigate.”

Before action could be taken, a familiar voice came over the bridge speaker system. “Bridge, this is radar.”

“Go ahead, radar,” acknowledged Briscoe.

“Captain, those ships you ordered us to track.”

“Yes, what about them?”

“Well, sir, they’re not moving, but they’re beginning to disappear off the scope.”

“Is your equipment functioning properly?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

Briscoe’s face clouded in bafflement. “Explain what you mean by ‘disappearing.’”

“Just that, sir,” answered radar officer. “It looks to me as if those ships out there are sinking.”

The Bridlington arrived at the Russian fishing fleet’s last known position and found no ships floating on the surface. Briscoe ordered a search pattern, and after steaming back and forth a large oil slick was spotted, surrounded by a widely scattered sea of flotsam, some of it in localized clusters. The Russian helicopter pilot rushed to a deck railing, gestured at an object in the water and began crying out in anguish.

“Why is he babbling?” Avondale shouted to Rudolph from the bridge wing.

“He’s saying his ship is gone, all his friends are gone, his copilot and observer are gone.”

“What is he pointing at?” asked Briscoe.

Rudolph peered over the side and then looked up. “A flotation vest with Aleksandr Gorchakov stamped on it.”

“I have a floating body,” announced Angus, peering through binoculars. “Make that four bodies. But not for long. There are shark fins circling the water around them.”

“Throw a few shells from the BOFORS at the bloody butchers,” Briscoe ordered. “I want the bodies in one piece so they can be examined. Send out boats to retrieve whatever debris they can find. Somebody, somewhere, is going to want as much evidence as we can collect.”

As the twin forty-millimeter BOFORS guns opened up on the sharks, Avondale turned to Angus. “Damned queer goings on, if you ask me. What do you make of it?”

Angus turned and gave the first officer a slow grin. “It would seem that after being slaughtered for two centuries, the whales finally have their revenge.”

Pitt sat behind the desk in his office for the first time in nearly two months, his eyes distant, his hand toying with a Sea Hawk dive knife he used as a letter opener. He said nothing, waiting for a response from Admiral Sandecker who sat across from him.

He had arrived in Washington early that morning, a Sunday, and gone directly to the empty NUMA headquarters building, where he spent the next six hours writing up a detailed report on his discoveries on Kunghit Island and offering his suggestions on how to deal with the underwater acoustics. The report seemed anticlimactic after the exhausting rigors of the past few days. Now he resigned himself to allowing other men, more qualified men, to deal with the problem and come up with the proper solutions.

He swung around in his chair and gazed out the window at the Potomac River and envisioned Maeve standing on the deck of Ice Hunter, the look of fear and desperation in her face. He felt furious with himself for deserting her. He was certain Deirdre had divulged the kidnapping of Maeve’s children by her father on board Ice Hunter. Maeve had reached out to the only man she could trust, and Pitt had failed to recognize her distress. That part of the story Pitt had left out of his report.

Sandecker closed the report and laid it on Pitt’s desk. “A remarkable bit of fancy footwork. A miracle you weren’t killed.”

“I had help from some very good people,” Pitt said seriously.

“You’ve gone as far as you can go on this thing. I’m ordering you and Giordino to take ten days off. Go home and work on your antique cars.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” said Pitt, massaging the bruises on his upper arms.

“Judging from your narrow escape, Dorsett and his daughters play tough.”

“All except Maeve,” said Pitt quietly. “She’s the family outcast.”

“You know, I assume, that she is working with NUMA in our biology department along with Roy Van Fleet.”

“On the effects of the ultrasound on sea life, yes, I know.”

Sandecker studied Pitt’s face, examining every line in the weathered yet still youthful-looking features. “Can we trust her? She could be passing along data on our findings to her father.”

Dirk’s green eyes registered no sign of subtlety. “Maeve has nothing in common with her sisters.”

Sensing Pitt’s reluctance to discuss Maeve, Sandecker changed the subject. “Speaking of sisters, did Boudicca Dorsett give you any indication as to why her father intends to shut down his operations in a few weeks?”

“Not a clue.”

Sandecker rolled a cigar around in his fingers pensively. “Because none of Dorsett’s mining properties are on U.S. soil, there is no rapid-fire means to stop future killings.”

“Close one mine out of the four,” said Pitt, “and you drain the sound waves’ killing potency.”

“Short of ordering in a flight of B-1 bombers, which the President won’t do, our hands are tied.”

“There must be an international law that applies to murder on the high seas,” said Pitt.

Sandecker shook his head. “Not one that covers this situation. The lack of an international law-enforcement organization plays in Dorsett’s favor. Gladiator Island belongs only to the family, and it would take a year or more to talk the Russians into closing the mine off Siberia. Same with Chile. As long as Dorsett pays off high-ranking government officials, his mines stay open.”

“There’s the Canadians,” said Pitt. “If given the reins, the Mounties would go in and close the Kunghit Island mine tomorrow, because of Dorsett’s use of illegal immigrants for slave labor.”

“So what’s stopping them from raiding the mine?”

Pitt recalled Inspector Stokes’ words about the bureaucrats and members of Parliament in Dorsett’s wallet. “The same barriers; paid cronies and shrewd lawyers.”

“Money makes money,” Sandecker said heavily. “Dorsett is too well financed and well organized to topple by ordinary methods. The man is an incredible piece of avaricious machinery.”

“Not like you to embrace a defeatist attitude, Admiral. I can’t believe you’re about to forfeit the game to Arthur Dorsett.”

Sandecker’s eyes took on the look of a viper about to strike. “Who said anything about forfeiting the game?”

Pitt enjoyed prodding his boss. He didn’t believe for an instant that Sandecker would walk away from a fight. “What do you intend to do?”

“Since I can’t order an armed invasion of commercial property and possibly kill hundreds of innocent civilians in the process, or drop a Special Forces team from the air to neutralize all Dorsett mining excavations, I’m forced to take the only avenue left open for me.”

“And that is?” Pitt prompted.

“We go public,” Sandecker said without a flicker or change in his expression. “First thing tomorrow I call a press conference and blast Arthur Dorsett as the worst monster unleashed on humanity since Attila the Hun. I’ll reveal the cause of the mass killings and lay the blame on his doorstep. Next I’ll stir up members of Congress to lean on the State Department, who in turn will lean on the governments of Canada, Chile and Russia to close all Dorsett operations on their soil. Then we’ll sit back and see where the chips fall.”

Pitt looked at Sandecker in long, slow admiration, then he smiled. The admiral was sailing in stormy waters without giving a damn for the torpedoes or the consequences. “You’d take on the devil if he looked cross-eyed at you.”

“Forgive me for blowing off steam. You know as well as I there will be no press conference. Without solid, presentable evidence I would gain nothing but a quick trip into a mental institution. Men like Arthur Dorsett are self-regenerating. You cannot simply destroy them. They are created by a system of greed that leads to power. The pathetic thing about such men is that they don’t know how to spend their wealth nor give it away to the needy.” Sandecker paused and lit his cigar with a flourish. Then he said coldly, “I don’t know how, but I swear by the Constitution I’m going to nail that slime bag to the barn so hard his bones will rattle.”

Maeve put on a good face through her ordeal. At first she had wept whenever she was alone in the small colonial house in Georgetown that her father’s aides had leased for her. Panic swept her heart at thoughts of what might be happening to her twin boys on Gladiator Island. She wanted to rush to their sides and sweep them away to safety, but she was powerless. She actually saw herself with them in her dreams. But the dreams of sleep became nightmares on awakening. There wasn’t the least hope of fighting the incredible resources of her father. She never detected anyone, but she knew without doubt that his security people were watching her every move.

Roy Van Fleet and his wife, Robin, who had taken Maeve under her wing, invited her to join them in attending a party thrown by a wealthy owner of an undersea exploration company. She was loath to go, but Robin had pushed her, refusing to take no for an answer and insisting she put a little fun in her life, never realizing the torment Maeve was going through.

“Loads of capital bigwigs and politicians will attend,” Robin gushed. “We can’t miss it.”

After applying her makeup and pulling her hair tightly back in a bun, Maeve put on a brown Empire-waist dress of silk chiffon and embroidered net with beaded bodice and a short three-tier skirt that came to several inches above her knees. She had splurged on the outfit in Sydney, thinking it quite stylish at the time. Now she wasn’t so sure. She suddenly suffered pangs of shyness at showing too much leg at a Washington party.

“The devil with it,” she said to herself in front of a full-length mirror. “Nobody knows me anyway.”

She peered through the curtains at the street outside. There was a light layer of snow on the ground, but the streets were clear. The temperature was cold but not frigid. She poured herself a short glass of vodka on ice, put on a long black coat that came down to her ankles and waited for the Van Fleets to pick her up.

Pitt showed the invitation he’d borrowed from the admiral at the door of the country club and was passed through the beautiful wooden doors carved with the likenesses of famous golfers. He dropped off his topcoat at the cloakroom and was directed into a spacious ballroom paneled in dark walnut. One of Washington’s elite interior decorators had created a stunning undersea illusion in the room. Cleverly designed paper fish hung from the ceiling, while hidden lighting gave off a soft wavering blue-green glow that provided an eye-pleasing watery effect.

The host, president of Deep Abyss Engineering, his wife and other company officials stood in a receiving line to greet the guests. Pitt avoided them and dodged the line, heading straight for one dim corner of the bar, where he ordered a tequila on the rocks with lime. Then he turned, leaned his back against the bar and surveyed the room.

There must have been close to two hundred people present. An orchestra was playing a medley from motion picture musical scores. He recognized several congressmen and four or five senators, all on committees dealing with the oceans and the environment. Many of the men wore white dinner jackets. Most were in the more common black evening clothes, some with vividly patterned cummerbunds and bow ties. Pitt preferred the old look. His tux sported a vest with a heavy gold chain draped across the front, attached to a pocket watch that had once belonged to his great-grandfather, who had been a steam locomotive engineer on the Santa Fe Railroad.

The women, mostly wives with a few mistresses mixed in, dressed elegantly, some in long dresses, some in shorter skirts complemented by brocaded or sequined jackets. He could always tell the married from the single couples. The married stood beside each other as if they were old friends; the single couples were constantly touching each other.

Pitt wall-flowered at cocktail parties and did not enjoy mingling to make small talk. He was easily bored and seldom stayed more than an hour before heading back to the apartment above his aircraft hangar. Tonight was different. He was on a quest. Sandecker had informed him that Maeve was coming with the Van Fleets. His eyes wandered the tables and the crowded dance floor but found no sign of her.

Either she changed her mind at the last minute or hadn’t arrived yet, he figured. Never one to compete for the attention of a gorgeous girl surrounded by admirers, he picked out a plain woman in her thirties who weighed as much as he. She was sitting alone at a dinner table and was thrilled when a good-looking stranger walked up and asked her to dance. The women other men ignored, the ones who lost out in the natural-born beauty department, Pitt discovered to be the smartest and most interesting. This one turned out to be a ranking official at the State Department, who regaled him with inside gossip on foreign relations. He danced with two other ladies who were considered by some to be unattractive, one a private secretary to the party’s host and the other a chief aide to a senator who was chairman of the Oceans Committee. Having performed his pleasurable duty, Pitt returned to the bar for another tequila.

It was then that Maeve walked into the ballroom.

Just looking at her, Pitt was pleasantly surprised to find a warm glow settling over his body. The entire room seemed to blur, and everyone in it faded into a gray mist, leaving Maeve standing alone in the center of a radiant aura.

He came back down to earth as she stepped away from the receiving line ahead of the Van Fleets and paused to gaze at the crowded mass of partygoers. Her long blond hair, pulled back in a bun to reveal every detail of her face, highlighted her fabulous cheekbones. She self-consciously raised a hand and held it to her, between her breasts, fingers slightly spread. The short dress showed off her long, tapered legs and enhanced the perfect molding of her body. She was majestic, he thought with a trace of lust. There was no other word to describe her. She was poised with the grace of an antelope on the edge of flight.

“Now there’s a lovely sweet young thing,” said the bartender, staring at Maeve.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Pitt.

Then she was walking with the Van Fleets to a table, where they all sat down and ordered from a waiter. Maeve was no sooner settled in her chair when men, both young and old enough to be her grandfather, came up and asked her to dance. She politely turned down every request. He was amused to see that no appeals moved her. They quickly gave up and moved on, feeling boyishly rejected. The Van Fleets excused themselves to dance while they waited for the first course. Maeve sat alone.

“She’s choosy, that one,” observed the bartender.

“Time to send in the first team,” Pitt said as he set his empty glass on the bar.

He walked directly across the dance floor through the swaying couples without stepping left or right. A portly man Pitt recognized as a senator from the state of Nevada brushed against him. The senator started to say something, but Pitt gave him a withering stare that cut him off.

Maeve was people watching out of sheer boredom when she became vaguely aware of a man striding purposefully in her direction. At first she paid him little notice, thinking he was only another stranger who wanted to dance with her. In another time, another place, she might have been flattered by the attention, but her mind was twenty thousand kilometers away. Only when the intruder approached her table, placed his hands on the blue tablecloth and leaned toward her did she recognize him. Maeve’s face lit with inexpressible joy.

“Oh, Dirk, I thought I’d never see you again,” she gasped breathlessly.

“I came to beg your forgiveness for not saying goodbye when A1 and I abruptly left the Ice Hunter.”

She was both surprised and pleased at his behavior. She thought he held no affection for her. Now it was written in his eyes. “You couldn’t have known how much I needed you,” she said, her voice barely audible above the music.

He came around the table and sat beside her. “I know now,” he said solemnly.

Her face turned to avoid his gaze. “You could not begin to understand the scrape I’m in.”

Pitt took Maeve’s hand in his. It was the first time he had deliberately touched her. “I had a nice little chat with Boudicca,” he said with a slight sardonic grin. “She told me everything.”

Her poise and grace seemed to crumble. “You? Boudicca? How is that possible?”

He stood and gently pulled her from her chair. “Why don’t we dance, and I’ll tell you all about it later.”

As if by magic, here he was, holding her tightly, pressing her close as she responded and burrowed into his body. He closed his eyes momentarily as he inhaled the aroma of her perfume. The scent of his masculine aftershave, no cologne for Pitt, spread through her like ripples on a mountain lake. They danced cheek to cheek as the orchestra played Henry Mancini’s “Moon River.”

Maeve softly began singing the words. “Moon River, wider than a mile. I’m crossing you in style someday.” Suddenly, she stiffened and pushed him back slightly. “You know about my sons?”

“What are their names?”

“Sean and Michael.”

“Your father is holding Sean and Michael hostage on Gladiator Island so he can extort from you information on any breakthroughs by NUMA on the slaughter at sea.”

Maeve stared up at him in confusion, but before she could ask any further questions, he pulled her close again. After a few moments he could feel her body sag as she began to cry softly. “I feel so ashamed. I don’t know where to turn.”

“Think only of the moment,” he said tenderly. “The rest will work itself out.”

Her relief and pleasure at being with him pushed aside her immediate problems, and she began murmuring the lyrics of “Moon River” again. “We’re after the same rainbow’s end, waitin’ round the bend, my huckleberry friend, Moon River and me.” The music faded and came to an end. She leaned back against his arm, which was around her waist, and smiled through the tears. “That’s you.”

He gave her a sideways look. “Who?”

“My huckleberry friend, Dirk Pitt. You’re the perfect incarnation of Huckleberry Finn, always rafting down the river in search of something, you don’t know what, around the next bend.”

“I guess you could say that old Huck and I have a few things in common.”

They kept moving around the dance floor, still holding each other as the band took a break and the other couples drifted back to their tables. Neither was the least bit self-conscious at the amused stares. Maeve started to say, “I want to get out of here,” but her mind lost control of her tongue and it came out, “I want you.”

As soon as she spoke the words a wave of embarrassment swept over her. Blood flushed her neck and face, darkening the healthy tan of her complexion. What must the poor man think of me? she wondered, mortified.

He smiled broadly. “Say good night to the Van Fleets. I’ll get my car and meet you outside the club. I hope you dressed warm.”

The Van Fleets exchanged knowing looks when she said she was leaving with Pitt. With her heart pounding madly, she hurried across the ballroom, checked out her coat and ran through the doors to the steps outside. She spotted him standing by a low red car, tipping the valet parking attendant. The car looked like it belonged on a racetrack. Except for the twin bucket seats, there was no upholstery. The small curved racing windscreen offered the barest protection from the airstream. There were no bumpers, and the front wheels were covered by what Maeve thought were motorcycle fenders. The spare tire was hung on the right side of the body between the fender and the door.

“Do you actually drive this thing?” she asked.

“I do,” he answered solemnly.

“What do you call it?”

“A J2X Allard,” Pitt answered, holding open a tiny aluminum door.

“It looks old.”

“Built in England in 1952, at least twenty-five years before you were born. Installed with big American V-8 engines, Allards cleaned up at the sports car races until the Mercedes 300 SL coupes came along.”

Maeve slipped into the Spartan cockpit, her legs stretched out nearly parallel to the ground. She noticed that the dashboard did not sport a speedometer, only four engine gauges and tachometer. “Will it get us where we’re going?” she asked with trepidation.

“Not in drawing room comfort, but she comes close to the speed of sound,” he said, laughing.

“It doesn’t even have a top.”

“I never drive it when it rains.” He handed her a silk scarf. “For your hair. It gets pretty breezy sitting in the open. And don’t forget to fasten your seat belt. The passenger door has an annoying habit of flying open on a sharp left turn.”

Pitt eased his long frame behind the wheel, as Maeve knotted the ends of the scarf under her chin. He turned the ignition-starter key, depressed the clutch and shifted into first gear. There was no ear-shattering roar of exhaust, or scream of protesting tires. He eased out into the country club’s driveway as quietly and smoothly as if he were driving in a funeral procession.

“How do you pass NUMA information to your father?” he asked in casual conversation.

She was silent for a few moments, unable to meet his eyes. Finally, she said, “One of Father’s aides comes by my house, dressed as a pizza delivery boy.”

“Not brilliant, but clever,” Pitt said, eyeing a late model Cadillac STS sedan parked by the side of the drive, just inside the main gate of the country club. Three dark figures were sitting in it, two in front, one in the rear seat. He watched in the rearview mirror as the Cadillac’s headlights blinked on and it began following the Allard, keeping a respectable distance. “Are you under surveillance?”

“I was told I’d be closely watched, but I have yet to catch anyone at it.”

“You’re not very observant. We have a car following us now.”

She clutched his arm tightly. “This looks like a fast car. Why don’t you simply speed away from them?”

“Speed away from them?” he echoed. He glanced at her, seeing the excitement flashing in her eyes. “That’s a Cadillac STS behind us, with a three-hundred-plus-horsepower engine that will hurl it upwards of 260 kilometers an hour. This old girl also has a Cadillac engine, with dual four-throat carburetors and an Iskenderian three-quarter cam.”

“Which means nothing to me,” she said flippantly.

“I’m making a point,” he continued. “This was a very fast car forty-eight years ago. It’s still fast, but it won’t go over 210 kilometers an hour, and that’s with a tailwind. The bottom line is that he’s got us outclassed in horsepower and top speed.”

“You must be able to do something to lose them.”

“There is, but I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

Pitt waited until he had climbed a sharp hill and dropped down the other side before he mashed the accelerator against its stop. Momentarily out of sight, he gained a precious five-second lead over the driver of the Cadillac. With a surge of power, the little red sports car abruptly leaped over the asphalt road. The trees lining the shoulder of the pavement, their leafless branches stretching over the road like skeletal latticework, became a mad blur under the twin headlight beams. The sensation was one of falling down a well.

Peering into the tiny rearview mirror perched on a small shaft mounted on the cowling, Pitt judged that he had gained a good 150 meters on the Cadillac before the driver crested the hill and realized his quarry had sprinted away. Pitt’s total lead was now about a third of a kilometer. Allowing for the Cadillac’s superior speed, Pitt estimated that he would be overtaken in another four or five minutes.

The road was straight and rural, running through a swanky region of Virginia just outside of Washington that was occupied by horse farms. Traffic was almost nonexistent this time of night, and Pitt had no trouble passing two slower cars. The Cadillac was pressing hard and gaining with every kilometer. Pitt’s grip on the steering wheel was loose and relaxed. He felt no fear. The men in the pursuing car were not out to harm either him or Maeve. This was not a life-or-death struggle. What he did feel was exhilaration as the tach needle crept into the red, a nearly empty road stretched out in front of him, and the wind roared in his ears in concert with the deep, throaty exhaust that blasted out of big twin pipes mounted under the sides of the Allard.

He took his eyes off the road for an instant and glanced at Maeve. She was pressed back in the seat, her head tilted up slightly as if to inhale the air rushing over the windscreen. Her eyes were half closed and her lips partly open. She looked almost as if she were in the throes of sexual ecstasy. Whatever it was, the thrill, the fury of the sounds, the speed, she was not the first woman to fall under the exciting spell of adventure. And what such women desired on the side was a good man to share it with.

Until they came into the outskirts of the city, there was little Pitt could do but crush the accelerator pedal with his foot and keep the wheels aimed alongside the painted line in the center of the road. Without a speedometer, he could only estimate his speed by the tachometer. His best guess was between one-ninety and two hundred kilometers per hour. The old car was giving it everything she had.

Held by the safety belt, Maeve twisted around in the bucket seat. “They’re gaining!” she shouted above the roar.

Pitt stole another quick peek in the rearview mirror. The chase car had pulled up to within a hundred meters. The driver was no slouch, he thought. His reflexes were every bit as fast as Pitt’s. He turned his attention back on the road.

They were coming into a residential area now. Pitt might have tried to lose the Cadillac on the house-lined streets, but it was too dangerous to even consider. He could not risk running down a family and their dog out for a late night stroll. He wasn’t about to cause a fatal accident involving innocent people.

It was only a matter of another minute or two before he would have to slow down and merge with the increased traffic for safety’s sake. But for the moment the road ahead was deserted, and he maintained his speed. Then a sign flashed past that warned of construction on a county road leading west at the next junction. The road, Pitt knew, was winding with numerous sharp curves. It ran about five kilometers through open country before ending on the highway that ran by the CIA headquarters at Langley.

He jerked his right foot off the accelerator and jammed it on the brake pedal. Then he spun the steering wheel to the left, snapping the Allard broadside before tearing down the middle of the road, the tires smoking and screaming across the asphalt. Before the car drifted to a stop, the rear wheels were spinning and the Allard leaped onto the county road, which led into the pitch-black of the countryside.

Pitt had to focus every bit of his concentration on the curves ahead. The old sealed-beam headlights did not illuminate the road as far ahead as the more modern halogen units, and he had to use his sixth sense to prepare for the next bend. Pitt loved corners, ignoring the brakes, throwing the car into a controlled skid, then maneuvering into setting up for a straight line until the next curve.

The Allard was in its element now. The heavier Cadillac was stiffly sprung for a road car, but its suspension was no match for the lighter sports car, which was built for racing. Pitt had a love affair with the Allard. He had an exceptional sense of the car’s balance and gloried in its simplicity and big, pounding engine. A taut grin stretched his lips as he threw the car into the curves, driving like a demon without touching the brakes, downshifting only on the hairpin turns. The driver of the Cadillac fought on relentlessly but rapidly lost ground with every turn.

Yellow warning lights were flashing on barricades ahead. A ditch opened up beside the road where a pipeline was in the midst of being laid. Pitt was relieved to see that the road carried through and was not blocked completely. The road turned to dirt and gravel for a hundred meters, but he never took his foot off the accelerator. He reveled at the huge cloud of dust he left in his wake, knowing it would slow their pursuer.

After another two minutes of her exciting breakneck ride, Maeve pointed ahead and slightly to her right. “I see headlights,” she said.

“The main highway,” Pitt acknowledged. “Here is where we lose them for good.”

Traffic was clear at the intersection, no cars approaching from either direction for nearly half a kilometer. Pitt burned rubber in a hard turn to the left, away from the city.

“Aren’t you going the wrong way?” Maeve cried above the screeching tires.

“Watch and learn,” Pitt said as he snapped the wheel back, gently braked and eased the Allard around in a U turn and drove in the opposite direction. He crossed the junction with the county road before the lights of the Cadillac were in view and picked up speed as he drove toward the glow of the capital city.

“What was that all about?” asked Maeve.

“It’s called a red herring,” he said conversationally. “If the hounds are as smart as I think they are, they’ll follow my tire marks in the opposite direction.”

She squeezed his arm and snuggled against him. “What do you do for your finale?”

“Now that I’ve dazzled you with my virtuosity, I’m going to arouse you with my charm.”

She gave him a sly look. “What makes you think I haven’t been frightened out of any desire for intimacy?”

“I can climb into your mind and see otherwise.”

Maeve laughed. “How can you possibly read my thoughts?”

Pitt shrugged cavalierly and said, “It’s a gift. I have Gypsy blood running in my veins.”

“You, a Gypsy?”

“According to the family tree, my paternal ancestors, who migrated from Spain to England in the seventeenth century, were Gypsies.”

“And now you read palms and tell fortunes.”

“Actually, my talents run in other directions, like when the moon is full.”

She looked at him warily but took the bait. “What happens when the moon is full?”

He turned and said with the barest hint of a grin, “That’s when I go out and steal chickens.”

Maeve stared warily into the blackness as Pitt drove along a darkened dirt road on the edge of Washington’s International Airport. He approached what looked like an ancient, deserted aircraft hangar. There was no other building nearby. Her uneasiness swelled and she instinctively crouched down in the seat as Pitt pulled the Allard to a stop under dim, yellowed lights on a tall pole.

“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

He looked down at her as if bemused. “Why, my place, of course.”

Her face took on an expression of womanly distaste. “You live in this old shed?”

“What you see is a historic building, built in 1936 as a maintenance hangar for an early airline long since demised.”

He pulled a small remote transmitter from his coat pocket and punched in a code. A second later a door lifted, revealing what seemed to Maeve a yawning cavern, pitch-black and full of evil. For effect, Pitt turned off the headlights, drove into the darkness, sent a signal to close the door and then sat there.

“Well, what do you think?” he teased in the darkness.

“I’m ready to scream for help,” Maeve said with growing confusion.

“Sorry.” Pitt punched in another code and the interior of the hangar burst into bright light from rows of fluorescent lamps strategically set around the hangar’s arched ceiling.

Maeve’s jaw dropped in awe as she found herself looking at priceless examples of mechanical art. She could not believe the glittering collection of classic automobiles, the aircraft and early American railroad car. She recognized a pair of Rolls-Royces and a big convertible Daimler, but she was unfamiliar with the American Packards, Pierce Arrows, Stutzes, Cords and the other European cars on display, including a Hispano-Suiza, Bugatti, Isotta Fraschini, Talbot Lago and a Delahaye. The two aircraft that hung from the ceiling were an old Ford Tri-motor and a Messerschmitt 262 World War II fighter aircraft. The array was breathtaking. The only exhibit that seemed out of place was a rectangular pedestal supporting an outboard motor attached to an antique cast-iron bathtub.

“Is this all yours?” she gasped.

“It was either this or a wife and kids,” he joked.

She turned and tilted her head coquettishly. “You’re not too old to marry and have children. You just haven’t found the right woman.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Unlucky in love?”

“The Pitt curse.”

She gestured to a dark blue Pierce Arrow travel trailer. “Is that where you live?”

He laughed and pointed up. “My apartment is up those circular iron stairs, or if you’re lazy, you can take the freight elevator.”

“I can use the exercise,” she said softly.

He showed her up the ornate wrought-iron spiral staircase. The door opened into a living room-study filled with shelves stacked with books about the sea and glass encased models of ships Pitt had discovered and surveyed while working for NUMA. A door on one side of the room led into a large bedroom decorated like the captain’s cabin of an old sailing ship complete with a huge wheel as a backboard for the bed. The opposite end of the living room opened into a kitchen and dining area. To Maeve, the apartment positively reeked of masculinity.

“So this is where Huckleberry Finn moved after leaving his houseboat on the river,” she said, kicking off her shoes, settling onto a leather couch and curling up her legs on the cushions.

“I’m on water most of the year as it is. These rooms don’t see me as often as I’d like.” He removed his coat and untied his bow tie. “Can I offer you a drink?”

“A brandy might be nice.”

“Come to think of it, I carried you away from the party before you had a chance to eat. Let me whip you up something.”

“The brandy will-do just fine. I can gorge tomorrow.”

He poured Maeve a Remy Martin and sat down on the couch beside her. She wanted him desperately, wanted to press herself into his arms, to just touch him, but inside herself she was seething with turmoil. A sudden wave of guilt swept over her as she visualized her children suffering under the brutal hand of Jack Ferguson. She could not push aside the enormity of it. Her chest felt tight, and the rest of her body, numb and weak. She ached for Sean and Michael, who were to her still babies. To allow herself to fall into a sensual adventure was little short of a crime. She wanted to scream with despair. She set the brandy on the coffee table and abruptly began to weep uncontrollably.

Pitt held her tightly. “Your children?” he asked.

She nodded between sobs. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mislead you.”

Strangely, female emotions had never been a big mystery with Pitt as with most men, and he was never confused or mystified when the tears came. He looked upon women’s sometimes emotional behavior more with compassion than discomfort. “Put a woman’s concern for her offspring against her sex drive, and motherly concern wins every time.”

Maeve would never comprehend how Pitt could be so understanding. To her, he didn’t seem human. He certainly was unlike any man she’d ever known. “I’m so lost and afraid. I’ve never been more helpless in my life.”

He rose from the couch and came back with a box of tissues. “Sorry I can’t offer you a handkerchief, but I don’t carry them much anymore.”

“You don’t mind ... my disappointing you?”

Pitt smiled as Maeve wiped her eyes and blew her nose with a loud snort. “The truth is, I had ulterior motives.”

Her eyes widened questioningly. “You don’t want to go to bed with me?”

“I’d turn in my testosterone card if I didn’t. But that’s not entirely why I brought you here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I need your help in consolidating my plans.”

“Plans for what?”

He looked at her as if he was surprised she asked. “To sneak onto Gladiator Island, of course, snatch your boys and make a clean getaway.”

Maeve made nervous gestures of incomprehension with her hands. “You’d do that?” she gasped. “You’d risk your life for me?”

“And your sons,” Pitt added firmly.

“But why?”

He had an overpowering urge to tell her she was lithe and lovely and that he harbored feelings of deep affection for her, but he couldn’t bring himself to sound like a lovesick adolescent. True to form, he swerved to the light side.

“Why? Because Admiral Sandecker gave me ten days off, and I hate to sit around and not be productive.”

A smile returned to her damp face, and she pulled him against her. “That’s not even a good lie.”

“Why is it,” he said just before he kissed her, “that women always see right through me?”