Trojan Odyssey

24

If there was one small benefit to Hurricane Lizzie, it was that she had swept the brown crud away from Navidad Bank. The water over the coral was blue-green again, with visibility at neatly two hundred feet. Along with the clean water, the fish had returned to their habitat and took up residence again as if no tempest had cast them out.

Another research vessel replaced Sea Sprite for the investigation of the sunken structure. Built and designed specifically as a dive support vessel for archaeological exploration in shallow water, Sea Yesteryear rarely worked out of sight of the shore. Her projects had included the underwater ruins of the Alexandria Library in Egypt, the. Chinese fleet sunk by kamikaze winds off Japan, early Swedish and Russian trade ships in the Baltic and a host of other historical events her team of scientists had surveyed.

She featured four-point mooring capabilities and both saturation and surface gas/air diving system configurations. A moon pool in the center of her hull was fully equipped for diving operations and robotic vehicle launch and recovery, and included machinery for retrieving artifacts from the seafloor. A spacious laboratory occupied the entire bow section of the boat and incorporated the most up-to-date scientific equipment for the analysis and conservation of recovered ancient artifacts.

Short by most research ship standards at one hundred and fifty-one feet in length, she was broad and roomy with an overall breadth of forty-five feet. Two big diesel engines moved her through the water at twenty knots, and she carried a crew of four and a team of ten scientists. Those who had served aboard Sea Yesteryear were proud of the times they had rewritten maritime history. And, as the Navidad Bank exploration proceeded, they were certain they were on the verge of the greatest discovery yet.

At first, the marine archaeologists who examined the rooms of stone were not even certain the structures were man-made. Nor did the area produce an abundance of artifacts. Except for the contents of the stone bed and the cauldron, the only others found came from the kitchen. But as the investigation continued, more and more incredible archaeological treasures were recorded. One revelation that the geologists on the team discovered was that the structure once sat in the open above a small hill. This came to light when the encrustation on one six-inch-square piece of wall in the bedroom was delicately brushed away and it became obvious the rooms were not carved from the rock but constructed of stone fitted on stone when Navidad Bank was an island rising above the water.

Dirk stood in the laboratory with his sister at his side, examining the artifacts that had been carefully transported to the ship's laboratory and immersed in trays of seawater in preparation for the lengthy conservation process. He very gently held up an exquisite gold torque, the neck chain that had been found on the stone bed.

"Every relic we've removed from the bed and the cauldron has belonged to a woman."

"It's even more intricate than much of the jewelry produced today," said Summer, admiring the chain as the gold reflected the sun coming through the ship's ports.

"Until I can make a comparison with archaeological records in European archives, I'd have to date it as Middle Bronze Age." The voice was soft and punctuated, like a mild summer shower on a metal roof. It belonged to Dr. Jeffrey Parks, who carried himself like a wary wolf, with his face low and thrust out. He was six feet eight inches in height and constantly bent over from the stratosphere. A collegiate all-star basketball player, he was sidelined because of a serious knee injury and never played again. Instead, he studied marine archaeology, eventually gaining a doctorate with his thesis on ancient underwater cities. He had been invited on the expedition by Admiral Sandecker because of his specialized expertise.

Parks walked past the long table fitted with open tanks that held the ancient relics and stopped at a large board mounted on a bulkhead that displayed more than fifty photos taken of the interior of the underwater edifice. He paused and with the eraser end of a pencil tapped a montage of photos showing the floor plan. "What we have is not a city or a fortress. No structures that extend beyond the rooms of your original discovery are apparent. Call it a mansion for its time or a small palace that became the tomb of an elite woman. Perhaps a queen or a high priestess who was rich enough to commission her own jewelry."

"Pity there is nothing left of her," said Summer. "Not even an indication of her skull. Even her teeth are gone."

Parks gave a slight twist of his mouth. "Her bones disappeared centuries ago, along with all her garments, soon after the structure was inundated by the sea." He moved to a large photograph taken before the artifacts were removed from the stone bed and tapped the pencil again on a close-up picture of the bronze body armor. "She must have been a warrior who led men into battle. The cuirass in the photo looks made of one piece and had to be put on over the head like a metal sweater."

Summer tried to imagine how the cuirass would fit on her. She had read that the Celts were large people for their time, but the armor looked far too small for her torso. "How in the world did she come to be here?"

"I haven't a clue," said Parks. "As a traditional archaeologist who isn't supposed to believe in diffusion, the contact between the Americas and other parts of the world before Columbus, I'm required to say that this is an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the Spanish sometime after fifteen hundred."

Summer frowned. "You can't really believe that?"

Parks gave a tiny smile. "Not really. Not after what we've seen here. But until we can prove without doubt how these artifacts came to be on Navidad Bank, the controversy will shake the world of ancient history."

Summer made her case. "But it was possible for ancient seafarers to cross the sea."

"No one says it was impossible. People have crossed the Atlantic and Pacific in everything from boats made out of cowhides to six-foot sailboats. It's entirely conceivable that fishermen from Japan or Ireland were blown by storms to the Americas. Archaeologists admit there are many curious bits and pieces of evidence that suggest European and Asian influence throughout Central and South American art and architecture. But no legitimate object from this side of the pond has been found over there."

"Our father found proof of the Vikings' presence in the United States," argued Summer.

"And he and Al Giordino discovered artifacts from the Alexandria Library in Texas," added Dirk.

Parks shrugged. "The fact still remains that artifacts proven to have come from the Americas have yet to turn up from excavations in Europe or Africa."

"Ah," said Summer, shooting her arrow, "what about the traces of nicotine and cocaine that have been found in Egyptian mummies? Tobacco and cocoa leaves came only from the Americas."

"I thought you'd bring that up," Parks said, with a sigh. "Egyptologists are still fighting over that one."

Summer frowned thoughtfully. "Could the answers still be down in the rooms?"

"Maybe," Parks admitted. "Our marine biologists are running tests on the encrustation found on the walls, while our phytochemist examines studies about the remains of plant life in an effort to determine a time line for how long the building was covered by the sea."

Summer looked lost in thought. "Could there be any inscriptions under the encrustation, something the archaeologists might have missed?"

Parks laughed. "The early Celts left behind no art or written records depicting their culture. Finding carved inscriptions would be implausible, unless, of course, we're wrong in our dating of Navinia."

"Navinia?"

Parks stared at a computer printout of the architecture of the sunken structure as it might have looked when built. "It's as good a name as any, don't you think?"

"As good as any," Dirk echoed. He looked at Summer. "Why don't you and I dive first thing tomorrow morning and search the walls for inscriptions? Besides, I think it only fitting that we pay our respects to our high priestess for the last time."

"Don't linger too long," said Parks. "The captain has given notice that the anchors come up at noon. He wants to transport the artifacts to Fort Lauderdale as soon as possible."

As they exited the laboratory, Summer looked at Dirk with a curious gleam in her eye. "Since when are you overcome with nostalgia?"

"There is a practical method to my madness."

"Oh, and what is that?" she asked dryly.

He stared back at her with a crooked little grin. "I have an idea something important was missed."

Now that they knew where to continue the search, they swam straight to the anteroom. The ancient compartments were empty now. Only yesterday it had looked like an airport waiting room. The ship's scientists were probing every nook and cranny. Now, with all the artifacts removed and under preservation aboard Sea Yesteryear, and their investigation all but finished, they were back on board, compiling and evaluating their findings. Dirk and Summer had the submerged rooms all to themselves. Now that there were no archaeologists looking over their shoulders, they saw little reason to treat the walls with gloves of velvet.

As planned, they began their search in the entry chamber, Summer examining one wall while Dirk took the other, scraping away any sea growth or encrustation with putty knives until they reached bare stone, knowing they were committing sacrilege in the eyes of a conscientious archaeologist. They worked the walls, scraping in long horizontal bands, concentrating from four to five feet from the floor. Because the average height of people three thousand years ago was several inches shorter than in the present, their eye level would have been lower. Using this historical fact, Dirk and Summer decided to compress their search area.

It was slow going. After an hour of fruitless inspection, they returned to Sea Yesteryear to replace their nearly empty air tanks. Although all NUMA dive support vessels carried hyperbaric chambers, Dirk meticulously checked the repetitive dive tables with his computer to avoid decompression sickness.

Twenty minutes into their second dive, after they moved from the antechamber deeper into a long hallway, Summer suddenly tapped the handle of her putty knife on the wall to attract Dirk's attention. He immediately swam to her side and stared at the section on the wall she had scraped and was excitedly pointing at.

She had scraped the letters pictographs in the growth.

Dirk nodded and gave a thumbs-up in elation. Together, they began feverishly cleaning the encrusted stones with their gloved hands and fingers, working cautiously so they did not damage the precious relic that slowly materialized in the gloom. Finally, the carved images in the stone were exposed. Brother and sister felt a sense of triumph in knowing they had outfoxed the professionals and were looking at something no other human had laid eyes on in three thousand years.

The pictographs offered a much-sought-after clue to the mystery of the sunken house. Dirk turned his dive light on the stone depictions to highlight their details. Further investigation revealed that the images traveled down both sides of the hallway in two bands two feet wide and about five feet off the floor. The pattern was similar in design to the Bayeux Tapestry that illustrated the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Dirk and Summer hung in the water and stared in almost religious awe at the sculpted carvings that depicted men sailing in ships. They were strange-looking men, with large round eyes and thick beards. Their weapons consisted of long daggers, short swords with an angle and battle-axes with curved edges. Several of the soldiers rode in chariots alone, but most fought on foot.

Battle scenes with much carnage were rendered. The scenes seemed to portray several battles in a protracted war. There were also images of women with bared breasts throwing spears into their enemy.

Summer lightly ran one gloved hand over the female figures. She turned to Dirk and smiled a superior feminine smile.

The ornamental scenes began with ships leaving a burning city. Farther along, the ships were tossed about by storms, followed by land battles with odd-looking creatures. Near the bottom, there was only one ship left of the fleet, the rest having been destroyed. Then it too was depicted sinking in a storm. Near the end, an image showed a man and woman embracing before he sailed away on what looked like a raft with a sail.

They had found a classic chronicle carved in stone by an ancient artisan that had stood unseen by human eyes under the sea for thousands of years. Dirk and Summer gazed at each other through their face masks in exhilaration, never imagining that they would find anything so incredible and so extraordinary.

Dirk motioned toward the doorway leading out into the reef. The dive light blinked out, and they turned and swam toward the surface, leaving the precious treasure exposed for those who would soon follow and photograph and reveal the pictographs in their full glory.

25

Poco Bonito passed through the mouth of the Rio Colorado in the early afternoon in water that changed from the traces of the brown crud to the algae green of the river. Burly white clouds splashed the blue sky, some dropping light showers as they blocked out the sun. The NUMA crew stood on the deck and waved to the fleet of small fishing boats that darted past, outboard motors buzzing like a swarm of hornets, fishermen proudly displaying their catch of tarpon, snook and barracuda. One boat celebrated with raised bottles of beer as they passed the crippled research boat. Two of the anglers held up a tarpon that looked as if it weighed more than a hundred pounds.

Gunn ran Bonito in slowly, keeping to one side of the river out of the way of the little fiberglass fishing boats, skirting the buoys and angling around a slight bend. He made a half turn on the wheel, setting the bow on a heading past the Rio Colorado Lodge and beyond, to a dock that led to a covered walkway bordered by flowers that trailed up to a large house set under a grove of palm trees.

"It looks heavenly," said Renee, admiring the lush beauty of the tropical forest surrounding the house that was built from lava rock with a large thatched palm frond roof.

"A fisherman's paradise," Gunn said from the pilothouse. "Built by an old friend from my academy days, Jack McGee. If you enjoy seafood, you'll get your fill of exotically prepared fish here. He's accumulated thousands of recipes from around the world and has written several books on the subject."

Pitt jumped to the dock and took the lines thrown by Giordino and tied them to the cleats. By law, they stayed close to the boat until their papers were checked by the local border guards, who were surprised at the damage suffered by Poco Bonito. Renee used her Spanish to spin a wild story of how they escaped a fleet of drug-smuggling pirates, as cutthroat as any of their ancestors who pillaged the Spanish Main.

Since the incident happened in Nicaraguan waters, the guards didn't request a report. Rita Anderson, on the other hand, would have created a sticky problem. She had no papers, and since Pitt and Gunn had no wish to explain her presence on board their boat, Renee bound and gagged her before she and Giordino crammed Rita into a storage closet in the engine room. The guards made a cursory inspection of the boat, and had no desire to stain their starched and neatly pressed uniforms in the engine room after seeing Giordino looking like James Dean after the oil well came in in Giant.

After the guards had walked up the dock out of earshot, Dodge turned to Pitt. "Why are we treating Mrs. Anderson like a criminal and keeping her as a prisoner? Her husband was murdered and her yacht seized by pirates."

"She's not what you think," said Renee curdy.

Pitt kept his eyes trained on the guards as they climbed into a Land Rover and drove from the dock over a dirt road muddied from rain. "Renee is right. Mrs. Anderson is no pawn. She's mixed up to her ears in shady business. Admiral Sandecker has contacted Costa Rican law authorities, who agreed to take her into custody and launch an investigation. They should be along any time."

Renee stepped down the ladder to the cabin. "I'd better get our princess ready for her incarceration."

She had no sooner dropped out of sight than a man strode briskly down the walkway and onto the dock. Jack McGee was a ruddy-faced man in his late forties. His hair was blond without a trace of gray, as was his Wyatt Earp mustache. The adobe brown eyes set far apart gave him the look of an animal on constant lookout for a predator. He wore navy blue shorts with a flowered shirt and a tired old Navy officer's cap that looked like it had seen action in World War II.

Gunn stepped forward and they shook hands before embracing. "Jack, you age ten years every time we meet."

"That's because we only meet every ten years." McGee greeted Gunn in a voice that sounded like he sang bass in a choir.

Gunn made the introductions. Giordino merely waved from the engine room hatch. "We have one more of our crew for you to meet, Renee Ford. She's handling a little matter below."

McGee smiled knowingly. "Your unexpected guest?"

Gunn nodded. "Rita Anderson, the lady I mentioned over the satellite phone when I announced our dropping in."

"Police Inspector Gabriel Ortega is an old friend," said McGee. "He'll require you to come down to the station and fill out a report, but I think you'll find him most courteous and considerate."

"Are you plagued by piracy in these waters?" asked Pitt.

McGee laughed and shook his head vigorously. "Not in Costa Rica. But they sprout like weeds to the north in Nicaragua."

"Why there and not here?"

"Costa Rica is the success story of Central America. The standard of living is higher than in most other Latin nations. Although largely agricultural, tourism is booming and, surprisingly, they're a big exporter of electronics and microprocessors. In contrast, Nicaragua has gone through thirty years of revolution that's left the infrastructure in ruins. After the government finally stabilized, most of the rebels, who possessed no job skills other than fighting guerrilla warfare, refused to take up farming or menial labor jobs. They found drug smuggling more profitable. This led to piracy, since they had to build a fleet of cocaine runners."

"Have you heard any rumors about the brown crud?" McGee gave a little shake of his head. "Only that it exists north and east out in the Caribbean. Between the bandits, the missing ships and the contamination, the fishing industry off Nicaragua has died an unnatural death." McGee turned and doffed his hat as a uniformed police official came down from the house and stepped onto the dock. "Ah, Gabriel, there you are."

"Jack, old friend," said Ortega. "What mischief have you gotten yourself into now?"

"Not me," McGee laughed. "My friends from the States here." Though decidedly Latin, Ortega looked like Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot — the same black, slicked-back straight hair and thin, immaculately trimmed black mustache, the soft dark eyes that missed nothing. He spoke in English, with just a bare trace of Spanish. He revealed perfectly capped teeth when he smiled during the introductions.

"Your Admiral Sandecker alerted me of your situation," he said. "I hope you will accommodate me with a detailed report of your adventures with the pirates."

Pitt nodded. "Count on it, Inspector."

"Where is this woman you saved from the pirate ship?"

"Down below." A concerned frown crossed Pitt's forehead. He turned to Giordino. "Al, why don't you drop below and see what's keeping Renee and our guest?"

Giordino wiped his hands on an oily rag without comment and disappeared below. He was back in less than a minute, his face a mask of wrath, his dark eyes bleak. "Rita is gone and Renee is dead," he said, his face a mask of anger. "Murdered."

26

During those initial moments of shock, everyone stood there stunned with disbelief. They stared at Giordino stupidly, not understanding what he'd said. It took another five seconds for the implication to sink in.

Then Dodge blurted, "What are you saying?"

"Renee is dead," Giordino repeated simply. "Rita murdered her."

Pure rage flooded Pitt. "Where is she?" he demanded.

"Rita?" Giordino's face had the look of someone who had woken up from a nightmare. "She's gone."

"Impossible. How could she leave the boat without being seen?"

"She's not to be found," Giordino said.

"May I see the body?" Ortega asked, with official dispassion.

Pitt was already dropping down the ladder, almost falling on Giordino, who leaped off to one side. "This way, Inspector. The women were in my cabin below."

Inwardly, Pitt felt a flood of guilt at not recognizing Rita as a woman who was capable of murder. He cursed himself for not accompanying Renee, for sending her alone to release her killer.

He muttered, "Oh God, no!" under his breath at the sight of Renee, stripped nude, lying on the bed with her legs together, arms outstretched in the position of a cross. The image of the Odyssey logo, the Celtic White Horse of Uffington, had been carved into her stomach.

Rita had acted compliant and docile when Renee removed the duct tape from around her arms. But when Renee, innocently unaware that her life was in jeopardy with five men less than ten feet away, knelt to remove the duct tape from Rita's legs and ankles, the witch clenched her hands and brought them down in a vicious chop to the nape of the neck. Renee dropped without uttering a sound.

Rita quickly removed Renee's clothes, laid her out on the bed and pressed a pillow over her face. There was no struggle. Already unconscious, Renee was never aware of being smothered to death. Then Rita took a pair of hair scissors from Pitt's shaving kit in the bathroom and carved the image of the Celtic horse on Renee's stomach. From start to finish, the hideous act took less than four minutes.

Moving quickly toward the forward section of the boat, Rita came up through the bow hatch, shielded by the pilothouse. Out of sight of the men conversing on the stern deck, she climbed over the side and slipped into the water without making a splash. Then she swam underwater to the opposite side of the dock, reached the shore and crawled through the thick vegetation that covered the bank. In the exact moment Giordino discovered Renee's body, Rita disappeared into the jungle.

"The woman cannot get far," said Ortega. "There are no roads leading in and out of Rio Colorado. She cannot flee into the jungle and live. My men will apprehend her before she can obtain air transportation or a boat."

"All she has is the bikini she's wearing," Pitt informed him.

"She took no clothes?"

"Renee's closet is still closed and her clothes are scattered on the deck," said Gunn, pointing to where Rita had thrown them.

"Does she have money?" Ortega asked.

Pitt shook his head. "Not unless Renee had some on her person, which I doubt."

"Without money or a passport, she has no place to run except the jungle."

"Hardly a place a woman could survive in only a bikini," said McGee, who stood in the doorway.

"Please secure the cabin," instructed Ortega. "And do not touch anything."

"Can't we at least dress her?" Pitt requested.

"Not until my forensic staff arrives and conducts a formal examination."

"When can we remove her for a flight to the States?"

"Two days," Ortega replied politely. "In the meantime, please remain here and enjoy Mr. McGee's hospitality until you can all be questioned and reports filled out." He paused to look down at Renee indifferently. "She is from your country?"

Dodge could not bear to look at Renee and turned away. "She lives in Richmond, Virginia," he whispered in a voice that choked.

Pitt looked at Gunn. "We'd better inform the admiral."

"He won't take this sitting down. If I know him, he'll demand Congress declare war and send in the Marines."

For the first time, Ortega's eyes widened. "He would do what, senor?"

"A play on words," said Pitt, ignoring the police inspector and drawing a blanket over Renee.

Rita hurriedly made her way through the jungle, staying close to the riverbank until she reached the Rio Colorado Sport Fishing Lodge. She followed the signs on the walkway to the swimming pool. Wearing her bikini, she fit right in with the other fishing widows lying around the pool while their husbands indulged themselves trolling for tarpon and snook in the river.

Ignoring the stares from the pool attendants and waiters, she snatched up a towel from an empty lounge chair and draped it over one shoulder. Then she stepped along the walkway between the lodge's rooms. Finding one where the maid was cleaning the room, she stepped inside.

"Tome su tiempo." She told the maid to take her time, acting as if it were her room.

"Me casi acaban," the maid replied, as she carried the dirty towels to her cart on the walkway and closed the door.

Rita sat at the desk, picked up a phone and requested an open line. When a voice answered, she said, "This is Flidais."

"One moment."

Then came another voice. "The line is clear. Please go ahead."

"Flidais?"

"Yes, Epona, I'm here."

"Why are you calling on an open line from a hotel?"

"We have an unexpected problem."

"Yes?"

"A NUMA research boat looking for the source of the brown crud was not deceived by the hologram and destroyed our yacht."

"Understood," said the woman called Epona, without the slightest trace of emotion. "Where are you?"

"After our yacht sank, I was captured by the NUMA people, who held me prisoner. I escaped and am now sitting in a room at the Rio Colorado Lodge. It's only matter of minutes before the local police trail me here."

"Our crew?"

"Some were killed. The rest escaped in the helicopter and abandoned me."

"They will be dealt with." The voice paused. "Did they interrogate you?"

"They tried, but I gave them a phony story and told them my name was Rita Anderson."

"Keep the line open and wait."

Flidais, alias Rita, went to the closet and found a flowered-print summer dress that was a size ten to her size eight. Close enough, she thought. Better large than too small. She pulled it on over her bikini and found a scarf, which she tied around her head to hide her red hair. It didn't bother her in the least that she was stealing another woman's clothes and running up a large phone bill, certainly not after having killed Renee. Next she pulled on open sandals that were a close fit. A pair of sunglasses were sitting on a bed stand, so she slipped them on.

She smiled to herself as she searched the drawers of the dresser and found the room occupant's purse. Why women never used any creativity in hiding their valuables was a mystery to Flidais. It was well known among hotel thieves that women invariably hid their purses, including their wallets, under their clothes in a drawer. She found eight hundred dollars American and a few Costa Rican colones. With an exchange rate of 369,000 colones to the dollar, most monetary transactions in Costa Rica were handled in foreign currency.

Barbara Hacken was the name below the picture of the face on the driver's license and the photo inside the passport. Except for a different hair color and a few years' difference in age, they might have passed for sisters. Flidais cracked the door to see if the room's occupant was coming up the walkway, when Epona came back on the line. "All is arranged, sister. I'm sending my private plane to pick you up at the airport. It will be waiting on the tarmac when you arrive. Do you have transportation?"

"The hotel should have a car to carry guests to and from the airport."

"You may have to show identification to get past airport security."

"All is established on that score," answered Flidais, slinging the purse strap over her shoulder. "I'll see you and our sisters at the ritual in three days."

Then she hung up and walked to the hotel lobby past two local uniformed policemen who were checking the grounds. Looking for a woman last seen in a bikini, they gave her a quick glance, thinking she was a guest of the lodge, and passed on. She spotted Barbara Hacken sunning at the pool. She looked to be dozing. When Flidais reached the lobby, the owner of the lodge was standing behind the desk and smiled when she asked for a car.

"You and your husband are not leaving us, I hope."

"No," she said vaguely, scratching her nose to cover her face. "He's still out on the river after the big ones. I'm meeting some friends who are dropping in at the airport to refuel before continuing on to Panama City."

"We'll see you for dinner?"

"Of course," Flidais said, turning away. "Where else would I eat?"

When her car reached the airport gate to the tarmac, the driver stopped, as the security guard stepped from a small office.

"Are you leaving Rio Colorado?" he asked Flidais through the open window.

"Yes, I'm flying to Managua."

"Passport, please?"

She handed him Barbara Hacken's passport and sat back looking out the opposite window.

The guard went by the book. He took a long moment comparing the passport photo with Flidais's facial features. The hair was covered by a scarf, but a few red strands seeped from under the silk. He was not concerned. Women seldom tinted their hair the same color they wore the month before. The face seemed similar, but he could not see the eyes behind the sunglasses.

"Please open your luggage."

"Sorry, I don't have luggage. Tomorrow is my husband's birthday. I forgot to buy him a gift, so I'm on a shopping trip to Managua. I intend to return in the morning."

Satisfied, the guard handed back the passport and waved the car through.

Five minutes later, everyone within a mile of the airport stared in awe as a lavender-colored aircraft that looked too large to land on the airstrip came in low over the trees and set down smoothly. Reversing engines and braking, it stopped a hundred yards short of the runway's north end. Then it turned and taxied to where Flidais was waiting in the car. Five minutes later, she was aloft on the Beriev Be-210 bound for Panama City.

27

The two men casually lolling in what the native villagers called a panga looked like any of the local men who fished the Rio San Juan. They wore baggy white shorts and T-shirts with soft white baseball-style caps. Two outriggers hung over the panga's stern on an angle, their lines trolling for the fishermen's next dinner.

Except for a passing experienced fisherman who bothered to notice, no one on shore would have guessed the lines carried no hooks. In a waterway teeming with fish, no hook went without a bite more than a few seconds after it dropped under the surface.

The skiff was propelled by a thirty-horsepower Mariner outboard steered by cables running to a center console-column surmounted by an automobile steering wheel. The flat-bottomed, twenty-foot panga moved smartly up the calm river through the tropical rain forest under a light shower. They were traveling in the middle of the long rainy season that began in May and lasted through January. The jungle vegetation was so thick along the shore it seemed that every plant was in constant battle against its neighbor for a glimpse of the sun that beamed down infrequently through the never-ending mass of clouds.

Pitt and Giordino had purchased the panga, whose bow was painted with the name Greek Angel, along with fuel and supplies, within hours after the NUMA jet had taken off for Washington with Rudi Gunn, Patrick Dodge and Renee Ford's body. The repair crew that was flown into Barra Colorado had beached Poco Bonito at low tide and were working efficiently to make her seaworthy for the voyage north.

Jack McGee threw them a going-away party and insisted on stocking their boat with enough beer and wine to start a saloon. Inspector Ortega was on hand, graciously expressing his appreciation for their cooperation in his investigation, and his sorrow for Renee's senseless murder. He was also irritated and regretful that the woman they knew as Rita Anderson had eluded his dragnet. Once Ortega's team learned of Barbara Hacken's missing passport, and they interrogated the owner of the lodge and the security guard at the airport gate, they were certain Rita had fled Costa Rica to the United States. Pitt added a piece to the puzzle when he heard the aircraft was painted lavender. This fact placed Rita squarely in the Odyssey camp. Now Ortega vowed to pursue Renee's murder internationally and to seek the cooperation of American law enforcement.

Pitt sat relaxed, leaned back in a raised chair in front of the wheel column, and steered the boat with one foot as they passed quiet picturesque lagoons that opened onto the river. Giordino had borrowed a lounge chair and pad from McGee, and reclined with his feet hanging over the bow, warily eyeing the occasional eighteen-foot crocodile that he spotted sunning itself on the bank.

Wise to the ways of a rain forest, Giordino shrouded himself with mosquito netting. Not usually mentioned in the travel brochures, in this part of the world the little bloodsuckers were nearly as prolific as raindrops. Not wanting to hinder his movements, Pitt soaked his exposed skin with repellent.

The first twenty miles took them northwesterly along the Rio Colorado until it eventually met the muddy waters of the Rio San Juan that served as the meandering borderline between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. From here, it was another eighty kilometers up the river until they reached the town of San Carlos on Lake Cocibolca, better known simply as Lake Nicaragua.

"I've yet to see any signs of construction," said Giordino, studying the shoreline through a pair of binoculars.

"You've already seen it," said Pitt, watching the multicolored birds nesting in the trees whose branches reached over the flowing water.

Giordino twisted in his lounge chair, pulled down his sunglasses and stared at Pitt over the rims as if he were looking at a bookie giving hundred-to-one odds on a favorite to win the next race. "Run that by me again."

"Your friend Micky Levy. Remember her?"

"The name rings a bell," muttered Giordino, still trying to follow Pitt's tack.

"Over dinner she talked about plans to build an 'underground bridge,' a railroad tunnel system that was designed to travel through Nicaragua between the oceans."

"She also said the project was never launched because Specter pulled out."

"A deception."

"A deception," Giordino parroted.

"After the engineers and geologists, like your friend, Micky, finished their survey, Odyssey officials insisted they sign confidentiality agreements never to reveal any information about the proposed project. Specter threatened to withhold any payment until they agreed. Then they announced that after studying the reports, they decided the project was not practical, and cost-prohibitive."

"How do you know all this?"

"I called your friend Micky just before we left Washington and after she faxed me the site plans," Pitt said casually.

"Go on."

"I asked her a few more questions regarding Specter and the underground bridge. Didn't she tell you?"

"I guess she forgot," said Giordino pensively.

"Anyway, as it turns out, Specter never had any intention of dumping the project. His Odyssey engineers have been digging furiously for more than two years. This is borne out by the port we passed, with containerships unloading what was probably mining equipment."

"Wasn't it I who said, 'A neat trick if he could hide millions of tons of excavated rock and muck?'"

"And you were right, it is a neat trick."

A light suddenly flashed on in Giordino's head. "The brown crud?"

"The million-dollar answer," Pitt acknowledged. "Satellite photos never showed construction activity because there was none to be seen. The only way to hide millions of tons of dirt and rock was to build a large tube, mix the muck with water and pump it a couple of miles offshore into the sea."

Giordino opened a Costa Rican beer and wiped the humidity-induced sweat with a towel across his face under the mosquito net. He rolled the cold can across his forehead. "Okay, mister smart guy, why the secrecy? Why would Specter go to such great lengths to cover up the project? Where is the gain if it was created and built to transport goods and materials from sea to shining sea and no one knows it's there?"

Pitt took a beer thrown by Giordino and pulled the tab. "If I knew that, we wouldn't be swimming in our own sweat cruising up the river admiring the wildlife."

"What do we hope to find?"

"An entrance, for one thing. They can't completely hide men and equipment going in and out of the tunnels."

"You think we'll find it on the jungle ride through hell on the African Queen?"

Pitt laughed. "Not on, but under. According to Micky's site plan, the excavation would have run under a town called El Castillo halfway up the river."

"So what's the attraction in El Castillo?"

"Tunnels of extreme length require ventilation shafts to supply air to the workers, cool or heat the air as required and bleed off exhaust fumes from the excavation equipment and smoke in the event of a fire."

Giordino stared uneasily at a huge crocodile swiveling off the bank into the water. Then his gaze turned to the impenetrable jungle along the north bank. "I hope you don't have any plans to hike in there. Mama Giordino's sonny boy would never be seen again."

"El Castillo is an isolated community on the river with no roads in or out. The main attraction is an old Spanish fortress."

"And you think a ventilation shaft pops up where everybody in town can see it," Giordino said dubiously. "Seems to me the jungle is a more ideal hiding place for ventilator shafts. It's so thick no aircraft or satellite photo could spot a shaft from above."

"No doubt most are hidden in the jungle, but I'm counting on them constructing one that comes up near civilization in case they have to use it for an emergency evacuation."

The scenery along the river was so spectacular, the two men drifted off into silence as they absorbed the beauty of the vegetation and the varied species of wildlife. It was like a boating wildlife safari through untouched tropical splendor. They spotted white-faced spider monkeys jabbering at jaguars which lurked under the trees. Anteaters as large as blue-ribbon state fair sows ambled through the brush, keeping a safe distance inshore from the caimans and crocodiles. Colorfully beaked toucans and multihued feathered parrots flew amid rainbows of butterflies and orchids. The jungles around the Rio San Juan had been described by Mark Twain when he journeyed down the river as an earthly paradise, the most enchanted land to be experienced anywhere.

Pitt kept the Greek Angel at a steady and smooth five knots. This was not water to speed through and cause waves from your wake to wash over the environmentally perfect shoreline. The fabulous three thousand acres of virgin rain forest was preserved as the Indio Maiz Biological Reserve. Three hundred species of reptiles, two hundred species of mammals and over six hundred species of birds called it home.

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when they turned off the Rio San Juan onto the Rio Bartola and cruised a short distance before docking at the Refugio Bartola Lodge and Research Center. Nestled in the rain forest, the compound had eleven rooms with private baths and mosquito nets. Pitt and Giordino each registered for a room.

After cleaning up, they headed for the bar and restaurant. Pitt had a tequila on the rocks whose brand was unknown to him. Giordino, claiming he had seen over a dozen Tarzan movies crawling with Englishmen on safari, opted for gin. Pitt noticed a fat man in a white suit sitting by himself at a table near the bar. There was an air about the man that suggested he was a respected local resident of the river, someone who might be a wealth of information.

Pitt approached the man. "Pardon me, sir, but I wondered if you might like to join my friend and me."

The man looked up and Pitt could see he was quite elderly, approaching his eighties. His face was flushed and he sweated freely, but miraculously managed not to stain his white suit. He wiped a handkerchief over his bald head and nodded. "Of course, of course, I'm Percy Rathbone. Please, it might be easier if you joined me," he said, pointing at his girth that amply filled his wicker chair.

"My name is Dirk Pitt and my friend here is Al Giordino."

The handshake was firm but sweaty. "Pleased to meet you. Sit down, sit down."

Pitt was amused that Rathbone had a habit of repeating his words. "You have the look of a man who knows and enjoys the jungle."

"It shows, it shows, does it?" said Rathbone, with a short laugh. "Lived along the river in Nicaragua and Costa Rica most all my life. My family came here during World War Two. My father was an agent for the British, keeping an eye on Germans who tried to operate hidden facilities in the lagoons to service and refuel their U-boats."

"If I may ask, how does someone earn a living on a river in the middle of nowhere?"

Rathbone looked at Pitt slyly. "Would you, would you believe I rely on tourism?"

Pitt wasn't sure he believed him, but played along. "Then you own a local business."

"Right on, right on. I make a tidy income off fishermen and nature lovers who come to visit the refuge. I have a small chain of resorts between Managua and San Juan del Norte. You gentlemen should look me up on my website when you get home."

"But this refuge is owned and run by the wildlife refuge."

Rathbone seemed to stiffen slightly at Pitt's perception. "True, true. I'm on holiday. I like to get away from my own ventures and relax here where I'm not bothered by guests. How about you fellows? Come for the fishing?"

"That, and the wildlife. We began our cruise at Barra Colorado and intend to reach Managua eventually."

"A marvelous tour, a marvelous tour," said Rathbone. "You'll enjoy every minute of it. There's nothing like it in the hemisphere."

A round of drinks came and Giordino signed for them on his room. "Tell me, Mr. Rathbone, why is a river that runs almost from the Pacific to the Atlantic known to so few outsiders?"

"The river was world-famous until the Panama Canal was built. Then the Rio San Juan fell into the dustbin of history. A Spanish conquistador named Hernandez de Cordoba sailed up the San Juan in 1524. He made it all the way into Lake Nicaragua and established the colonial city of Granada on the opposite end. The Spanish who followed Cordoba built forts bristling with guns throughout Central America to keep the French and English out. One was El Castillo a few miles up the river from here."

"Were the Spanish successful?" asked Pitt.

"Indeed yes, indeed yes," Rathbone said, waving his hands. "But not entirely. Henry Morgan and Sir Francis Drake sailed up the river, but never made it past El Castillo into the lake. A hundred or more years later, they were followed by Horatio Nelson when he was a mere captain. He sailed a small fleet of ships up the San Juan and attacked El Castillo, which still stands. His assault failed. The only time in his career he lost a battle. He was reminded of the embarrassment the rest of his life."

"Why is that?" asked Giordino.

"Because he lost an eye during the attack."

"Right or left?"

Rathbone thought a moment, not getting the joke, then shrugged. "I don't remember."

Pitt savored a sip of the tequila. "How long did the Spanish control the river?"

"Until the early eighteen fifties and the California gold rush. Commodore Vanderbilt, the railroad and shipping tycoon, saw a golden opportunity. He made a deal with the Spanish for his ships to provide ferry service for eager prospectors who had booked his steamers in New York and Boston for the long voyage to California. His passengers changed from oceangoing ships to river steamers at San Juan del Norte. Then they steamed up the San Juan and across the lake to La Virgen. From there, it was only a short twelve-mile wagon ride to the little Pacific port of San Juan del Sur, actually only a couple of docks, where they reboarded Vanderbilt steamers that carried the gold-hungry miners onto San Francisco. Not only did they cut off hundreds of miles by not sailing around Cape Horn, but they saved another thousand miles bypassing the isthmus at Panama to the south."

"When did river traffic die?" asked Pitt.

"The Accessory Transit Company, as Vanderbilt called it, faded away with the construction of the Panama Canal. The Commodore built a huge mansion in San Juan del Norte, which still stands, although it is abandoned and overgrown with weeds. For eighty years the river lay forgotten, until the nineteen nineties when it emerged as a tourist attraction."

"Seems like it was a more logical route for a canal than Panama."

Rathbone shook his head sadly. "By far, by far, but a complicated game of politics played by your President Teddy Roosevelt put it in hundreds of miles out of the way to the south."

"They could still dig a canal through here," said Giordino thoughtfully.

"Too late. Big business interests in the Panama Canal, environmentalists and ecologists would all fight the project tooth and nail. Even if the Nicaraguan government gave its blessing, no one would put up the money."

"I heard there were plans afoot to build a railroad tunnel through Nicaragua between the oceans."

Rathbone stared out over the river. "There were rumors circulating up and down the river for months, but nothing ever came of it. Surveyors came with transits and tramped through the jungles. Helicopters were buzzing all over the place. Geologists and engineers filled my lodges and drank my whiskey, but after nearly a year they packed up their equipment, went home and that was the end of that."

Giordino finished off his scotch and ordered another. "None ever came back?"

Rathbone shook his head. "Not that I'm aware of."

"Did they give a reason for not pursuing the project?" Pitt queried.

Again, a shake of the head. "None seemed to know more than I did. Their contracts were finished and they were paid off. It all seemed very cloak-and-dagger. I got one of the engineers drunk the night before he was to depart, but all I got out of him was that he and his fellow engineers were all sworn to secrecy."

"Was the general contractor called Odyssey?"

Rathbone stiffened slightly. "Yes, that was it, that was it, Odyssey. The head man even came and stayed at my lodge in El Castillo. A huge fellow. Must have weighed four hundred pounds. Called himself Specter. Very strange. Never did get a good look at his face. He was always surrounded by an entourage, mostly women."

"Women?" Giordino perked up.

"Most attractive, but business executive types. Very aloof, very efficient. Never talked or offered to be friendly with any of the local people."

"How did they arrive?" Pitt put to Rathbone.

"Landed and took off on the river in a big amphibian airplane painted like an orchid."

"Lavender?"

"I guess you could call it that."

Giordino swirled his scotch around the ice cubes. "Did you ever get a hint about why the project never got off the ground?"

"Rumor, gossip and hearsay came up with at least fifty reasons, but none made any sense. My friends in the government at Managua acted as amazed as everyone along the river. They claimed the fault was not theirs. They offered Odyssey every benefit, every advantage, since the project would have greatly enhanced Nicaragua's economy. My own opinion is that Specter found other more profitable projects for the Odyssey Corporation and simply moved on."

At that moment, it felt as if the earth was twitching and the ice in their glasses tinkled, and the contents quivered as if invisible raindrops were falling on it. The tops of the trees in the jungle swayed in unison with the birds squawking and the moan of unseen animals.

"Earthquake," Giordino said indifferently.

"More like a slight earth tremor," Pitt agreed, taking another sip from his drink.

"You fellows don't seem upset at our local ground movement," said Rathbone in mild surprise.

"We grew up in California," Giordino explained.

Pitt exchanged glances with Giordino. Then he said, "I wonder if we'll experience any tremors on the rest of our voyage up the river."

Rathbone looked uneasy. "I doubt it. They come and go like thunder, but very infrequently and have yet to cause any damage. The natives are a superstitious lot. They believe the ancient gods of their ancestors have returned and are living in the jungle."

He slowly, with some effort, rose from his chair and stood unsteadily. "Gentlemen, thank you for the drinks. It was indeed, indeed, most delightful talking with you. But with age comes an urge to go to bed early. Will I see you again tomorrow?"

Pitt came to his feet and shook Rathbone's hand. "Perhaps. We'll probably take a nature hike in the morning and continue our journey later in the afternoon."

"We'd like to spend a day in El Castillo and see the ruins of the fortress before we head upriver into Lake Nicaragua," added Giordino.

"I'm afraid you can only see the fortress from a distance," said Rathbone. "Government police have put it off-limits to all locals and visiting tourists. They claimed it was deteriorating under the crowds wandering the ruins. So much humbug in my book. The rain does far more damage than the feet of a few tourists."

"Are Nicaraguan police guarding the walls?"

"More security than a nuclear bomb factory. Security cameras, guard dogs and a ten-foot fence around the fort, with barbwire running along the top. One resident of El Castillo, a fellow by the name of Jesus Diego, became curious and tried to penetrate the security. Poor fellow was found hanging in a tree on the riverbank."

"Dead?"

"Very dead." Rathbone quickly changed the subject. "If I were you, I wouldn't go near the place."

"We shall take your advice," said Pitt.

"Well, gentlemen, it was a pleasure. Good evening."

As they watched the old man shuffle away, Giordino said to Pitt, "What do you think?"

"Not what he appeared," Pitt said briefly. "He made no mention of the container port."

"You caught the dainty hands too."

"The skin was too smooth and free of blemishes for a man over seventy."

Giordino motioned to a waiter. "Did you pick up on the voice? It sounded unnatural, as if it was a recording."

"Apparently, Mr. Rathbone was handing us a bill of goods."

"It would be nice to know what game he's playing."

When the waiter brought over another round of drinks and asked them if they were ready to be seated for dinner, they both nodded and followed him into the dining room. As they were seated, Pitt asked the waiter, "What is your name?"

"Marcus."

"Marcus, do you often experience earth tremors here in the jungle?"

"Oh, si, senor. But not until three, maybe four, years ago when they began moving up the river."

"The tremors move?" asked Giordino, puzzled.

"Si, very slowly.

"In what direction?"

"They started at the mouth of the river at San Juan del Norte. Now they shake the earth in the jungle above El Castillo."

"Definitely not an eerie phenomenon caused by Mother Nature."

Giordino sighed. "Where is Sheena the Jungle Queen when you need her?"

"The gods will never let man find their secret, not in the jungle," said Marcus, looking around him as if expecting an assassin to creep up on him. "No man who goes in, comes out alive."

"When did men start disappearing in the jungle?" asked Pitt.

"About a year ago, a university expedition went in to study the wildlife, and vanished. No trace of them was ever found. The jungle guards its secrets well."

For the second time that evening, Pitt looked at Giordino and they both cracked tight smiles. "Oh, I don't know," Pitt said slowly. "Secrets have an intriguing habit of becoming revealed."

28

The fortress commanded the top of an isolated hill that looked more like a huge grassy mound surrounded by several different varieties of trees. El Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepcion, castle of the immaculate conception, was designed along the lines of a Vauban fortification, with bastions on each of its four corners. It was in amazingly good shape after withstanding the onslaught of torrential rains for four hundred years.

"I guess you know," said Giordino as he lay on his back and stared up at the carpet of stars, "that breaking and entering are not in our line of work."

Pitt was stretched out beside him, peering through a nightscope at the fence surrounding the fortress of El Castillo. "Not only that, but NUMA doesn't give us hazard pay."

"We had better call the admiral and Rudi Gunn and give them an update on our adventures. Once we go underground, the phone will be useless."

Pitt took the satellite phone from his knapsack and began dialing a number. "Sandecker is an early riser, so he hits the bed early. Rudi should be handy, since we're only an hour behind Washington."

Five minutes later, Pitt closed the connection. "Rudi is going to have a helicopter standing by at San Carlos if we have to beat a hasty exit."

Giordino returned his attention to the fortress. "I don't see any stairways, only ramps."

"Stone slopes were more efficient for hauling cannons up and down from the ramparts," said Pitt. "Builders in those days knew as much about building strongholds as contractors today know about constructing skyscrapers."

"See anything that resembles an air vent to a tunnel?"

"It must come up through the central battlement."

Giordino was glad there was no moon. "So how do we get over the fence, past the security cameras, security alarms, security guards and the dogs?"

"First things first. We can't deal with the security until we penetrate the fence," Pitt replied, quietly absorbed in studying the fortress grounds.

"And how do we do that? It must be ten feet high."

"We could try pole-vaulting over it."

Giordino looked at Pitt queerly. "You must be kidding."

"I am." Pitt pulled a coil of rope from his knapsack. "Can you still climb a tree or does your arthritis limit any physical activity?"

"My aging joints aren't half as stiff as yours."

Pitt slapped his old friend on the shoulder. "Then let's see if two old fogeys can still perform daring feats of agility."

After breakfast at the lodge, and true to their word with Rathbone, Pitt and Giordino had latched on to a tour guide who was leading a dozen tourists through the wildlife reserve, and took a nature hike. They hung in the back of the group, talking between themselves as the tour progressed, hardly noticing the abundance of wildly colored birds and strange animals.

When they returned to the lodge, Pitt made some discreet inquiries about the old man and, as he suspected, the employees of the lodge said that as far as they knew, Rathbone was simply a guest who had showed a Panamanian passport when he registered. If he owned a chain of lodges up and down the river, it was news to them.

At noon, they loaded up the Greek Angel with their gear and a few sandwiches from the kitchen and shoved off into the river. The engine caught on the first flick of the starter and they headed out of the lagoon into the main current of the San Juan. The virgin jungle gave way to more open land enhanced by green rolling hills, with trees neatly spaced as if planted by a landscaper in a vast park.

El Castillo was only six kilometers upriver and they had crawled along at a pace just slightly above idle, rounding the final bend an hour later before passing under the colonial fortress that loomed above the town. Moss spread over the ancient lava rock ruins, giving it the appearance of an ugly blot on an otherwise gorgeous landscape, while the picturesque little town below, with its roofs of red tin and colorfully painted pangas littering the riverbank, seemed an inviting oasis.

Except for river traffic, the village of El Castillo was completely detached from the rest of the world. There were no roads in or out, no cars and no airport. The residents subsisted by farming the encircling hills, fishing and working in the sawmill or palm oil factory twenty kilometers up the river.

Pitt and Giordino wanted to be seen coming and departing from the little fishing community as they continued their cruise up the river toward Lake Nicaragua, so they tied up the panga at a small dock and walked about fifty yards up a dirt road toward a little hotel with a bar and restaurant. They passed several gaily painted wooden houses and waved to three freshly scrubbed little girls in yellow dresses who were playing barefoot on a porch.

They saved their sandwiches from the kitchen of the Refugio Bartola for the coming night excursion and ordered a lunch of fresh fish from the river, downed by the local beer.

The owner, whose name was Aragon, waited on their table. "May I recommend the gaspar. It's not often caught, and when prepared with my special sauce, it is a great delicacy."

"Gaspar," repeated Giordino. "Never heard of that one."

"A living relic millions of years old with armored scales, a snout and fangs. I promise you'll never be able to enjoy it anyplace but here."

"I'm always game for an adventure in gourmet dining," said Pitt. "Bring on the gaspar."

"I'm only going along with great trepidation," Giordino muttered.

"Too bad about the fortress being off-limits," said Pitt conversationally. "I hear the museum was worth a visit."

Aragon stiffened slightly and looked furtively through a window at El Castillo. "Si, senor, it is a pity you must miss it. But the government closed it down as too dangerous for tourists."

"Looks pretty sturdy to me," said Giordino.

Aragon shrugged. "All I know is what the police from Managua told me."

"Do its guards stay in town?" asked Pitt.

Aragon shook his head. "They set up a barracks inside the fortress and are rarely seen except when they are relieved by helicopter from Managua."

"None leave the fort, even for food, drink or pleasure?"

"No, senor. They do not socialize with us. Nor do they allow anyone within ten meters of the fence."

Giordino poured his bottle of beer into a glass. "First time I ever heard of a government keeping tourists out of a museum because it might fall down."

"Do you gentlemen wish to stay at the hotel tonight?" asked Aragon.

"No, thank you," answered Pitt. "I'm told there are rapids upriver and we'd like to pass through while it's still light."

"You shouldn't have a problem if you stay inside the channel. Boats rarely overturn in the rapids if people are careful. It's the crocodiles in calm water that present a problem to anyone who falls over the side."

"Does your restaurant serve steak?" Pitt inquired.

"Si, senor. Do you wish more to eat?"

"No, we'd like to take the meat with us for later. Once we pass through the rapids, my friend and I will camp onshore and cook dinner over a fire."

Aragon nodded. "Be sure and camp inland from the banks of the river or you might become food for a hungry crocodile."

"Feeding a croc wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Pitt said, with a broad smile.

Departing late in the afternoon, they cruised through the rapids above El Castillo without mishap until they were out of sight of the town. Seeing no other pangas but their own between bends in the river, they drove the Greek Angel onto the bank, raised the outboard motor and pulled it into the lush underbrush until it was completely hidden from all water traffic.

While it was still light, they found a narrow path that headed toward the town. Then they ate their sandwiches and relaxed and slept till after midnight. Moving cautiously along the path while using their nightscope to penetrate the night, they skirted the little houses and made their way into a thicket of bushes, where they lay now and studied the security surrounding the fortress, spotting and marking the TV security cameras in their minds.

A light drizzle began to fall and soon their thin clothes were soaked through. Standing in a rain in the tropics was like standing in a shower at home. The water temperature was as comfortable to the skin as if it had been preset on a faucet.

When ready, Pitt, followed by Giordino, climbed into a high jatoba tree that towered more than a hundred feet high with a trunk diameter of four feet. The tree stood within several feet of the fence around the fortress, and its lower limbs stretched far over the fence top that was circled with a razor-sharp spiral of steel. Throwing a looped rope around a thick branch ten feet above, Giordino climbed up onto a higher limb before crawling through the smaller branches until he was beyond the fence and twelve feet above the ground. There he paused and swept the ground below with the nightscope.

Using the rope, Pitt hauled his body upward with his hands while his feet walked the tree trunk. Reaching the limb, he crept through the branches until he was even with Giordino's booted feet. "Any sign of the guards and their dogs?" he whispered.

"The guards are lazy," Giordino replied. "They loosed the dogs to run by themselves."

"A wonder they haven't scented us by now."

"You spoke too soon. I see three of them staring in our direction. Oh, oh, here they come on the run."

Before the dogs began barking, Pitt reached into the knapsack on his back, grabbed the steaks from the restaurant and heaved them onto a ramp leading to the nearest bastion. They landed with a distinct plop sound that the dogs heard and homed in on.

"Are you sure this will work?" Giordino murmured.

"It always does in the movies."

"Now there's cheery assurance," Giordino groaned.

Pitt dropped down off the tree limb to the ground and stayed on his feet. Giordino followed, casting a wary eye on the dogs, who chewed their raw meat in happy delirium without paying the least attention to the two intruders.

"I may never doubt you again," Giordino said under his breath.

"I won't forget you said that."

Pitt led the way toward one of the stone ramps, using the night-scope to see when the nearest TV camera swung to its widest arc. When he signaled with a whistle, Giordino ran under the camera's blind side and sprayed the lens with black paint. Moving on, they paused outside the closed and darkened museum, listening for suspicious sounds. Muted voices could be heard over the ramparts inside the main courtyard, where the guards' temporary barracks had been constructed. They entered what was once a storeroom. The stonewalls were still solid, but the wooden beams and roof were long gone.

Pitt motioned toward a central turret that rose above the rest of the fort. It was built like a pyramid with the upper half sliced off at the middle. "If there is a vertical ventilator shaft from below, it has to come out there," he said softly.

"The only logical place," Giordino agreed. Then he cocked an ear. "What's that racket?"

Pitt paused, listening, his senses alert, his ears piercing the night. Then he nodded in the darkness. "That whirring sound must be coming from the ventilator fans."

Keeping in the darkened shadows, they climbed a narrow ramp of stones that protruded from the walls of the turret and ended at a small access door. A rush of cool air through the narrow opening struck them with nearly the force of a wind tunnel. Bending low against the draft, Pitt entered and found himself standing at the base of a large wire-mesh cage. The whirring noise from the fan blades beating the air below the mesh opening magnified and tore at their eardrums.

"Noisy devil," yelled Giordino.

"That's because we're right on top of it. Be a lot worse if it didn't have silencers installed. As it is, the noise is pretty well muted outside the turret."

"I didn't bargain for a gale-force wind," said Giordino, as he examined the thickness of the wire-mesh cover.

"The fans are designed to produce a computer-calculated volume of air at an efficient pressure."

"There you go again with the lecture. Don't tell me you took a basic course in tunnel construction."

"Have you forgotten the summer between semesters at the Air Force Academy when I worked in a silver mine in Leadville, Colorado?" retorted Pitt.

"I remember," said Giordino, smiling. "I spent my summer as a lifeguard in Malibu." Giordino peered through the wire mesh. A glow of light rose from the opening. He walked around the mesh until he found a bolt holding it to a latch. "Locked from the inside," he observed. "We'll need to cut through the mesh."

Pitt produced a small pair of wire cutters from his backpack. "I thought we might need these if we ran into barbwire."

Giordino held them up to the light from below. "They should do nicely. Now please stand back while the master creates an entrance."

It looked easy, but wasn't. Giordino was sweating rivers twenty-five minutes later when he finally cut a hole high and wide enough for them to crawl through. He handed the cutters back to Pitt, pulled the mesh apart and peered into the shaft. The square-cut ventilator shaft, acting as the passage for the expelled air from the tunnel far below, was fifteen feet wide. A circular metal tube filled one corner. This was the access shaft, with a ladder that seemed to vanish into a bottomless pit.

"For maintenance in case the ventilator system needs repair," Pitt volunteered loudly over the fan noise. "It also serves as an emergency exit for the mine workers should there be a fire or a roof collapse in the main tunnel."

Giordino entered the shaft feet first onto the lower rungs of the ladder. He paused and looked up at Pitt sourly. "I hope I won't regret this!" he shouted over the roar of the fans, as he began his descent.

Pitt was thankful the shaft was lit. After dropping down the ladder fifty feet, he paused and looked below. All he could see was the ladder stretching into infinity, like the tracks of a railroad. No sign of the bottom was visible.

He pulled out a paper towel from a pocket, tore it into two small pieces, wadded them up and stuffed them in his ears as plugs against the irritating noise level of the fans. Besides the main fan system, booster fans had been installed every hundred feet to maintain the required pressure to vent the tunnel to the surface.

After what seemed half a lifetime, and what Giordino estimated was a drop of five hundred feet, he stopped his descent and waved a hand. The bottom of the ladder was in view. Slowly, cautiously, he turned until he was upside-down. Then he crawled downward until his eyes could see under what was now the roof of a small control center that monitored and detected the gasses, carbon monoxide, temperature and fan system operations.

Pitt and Giordino had passed far below the main fan system and could now converse in low tones. Giordino raised up until he was on his feet again and spoke to Pitt, who had slid down the ladder beside him.

"What's the status?" Pitt asked softly.

"The ladder runs through a ventilator systems control center that sits about fifteen feet above the floor of the tunnel. A man and a woman are sitting at computer consoles. Luckily, they're facing away, with their backs to the ladder. We should be able to take them out before they know what hit them."

Pitt looked into Giordino's dark eyes, only inches away. "How do you want it?"

Giordino's lips parted in a conniving grin. "I'll take the man. You're better at incapacitating women than I am."

Pitt glared at him. "You big chicken."

They wasted no more time and dropped down the ladder into the control booth silently without being detected. The system operators — the man wearing black coveralls, the woman in white — were intent on monitoring their computers and did not see the reflection of their assailants in their screens until it was too late. Giordino came in from the side and slugged the man with a right hook to the jaw. Pitt opted for striking the back of the woman's neck just below her skull. Both went out with no more than slight moans.

Keeping unseen below the windows, Pitt pulled a roll of duct tape from his knapsack and tossed it to Giordino. "Bind them up while I remove their coveralls."

In less than three minutes the unconscious ventilation systems operators were bound and gagged in their underwear and rolled under counters out of sight from anyone passing by below. Pitt slipped on the black coveralls, which were a loose fit, while Giordino burst the seams of the white coveralls that came off the woman. They found matching hard hats on a shelf and put them on. Pitt casually carried his knapsack over one shoulder, while Giordino looked official with a clipboard and pencil. One after the other, they dropped down the ladder to the tunnel floor.

When they got their bearings and stared around their surroundings, Pitt and Giordino stood spellbound in awe, as they stared at the immense spectacle, their eyes narrowing under the glare of an unending array of lights.

This was no ordinary railroad tunnel. It was no railroad tunnel at all.

29

The horseshoe-shaped tunnel was far more immense than either he or Giordino had imagined. Pitt felt as though he was standing in a Jules Verne fantasy. He estimated the bore at fifty feet in diameter; far wider than any tunnel ever constructed. The diameter of the Chunnel that ran between France and England was twenty-four feet and the Seikan Tunnel that connected Honshu with Hokkaido was thirty-two.

The whirr of the ventilator fans was replaced with a buzzing sound that echoed up and down the tunnel. Above them, mounted on a series of steel beams, a huge conveyor belt traveled continuously toward the eastern end of the tunnel. Instead of rocks twelve to eighteen inches in size, the muck had been crushed almost to sand.

"There's the source of your brown crud," said Pitt. "They grind down the rock until it has the consistency of silt so it can be pumped through a pipe into the Caribbean."

A railroad track and a parallel concrete roadway ran beneath the conveyor belt. Pitt knelt and studied the rails and ties. "Electric-powered, like the subways of New York."

"Mind the third rail," warned Giordino. "No telling how much voltage is running through it."

"They must have generator substations every few miles to provide power."

"You going to put a penny on the track?" Giordino asked in jest.

Pitt stood and stared into the distance. "No way these tracks could handle high-speed two-hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour trains carrying cargo containers. The rails are not of superior quality and the metal ties are laid too far apart. On top of all that, standard railroad gauge between rails is four feet eight and a half inches. These measure about three feet, which makes it a narrow-gauge railroad."

"Laid as equipment support and supply transport for a tunnel-boring machine."

Pitt's eyebrows rose. "Where did you come up with that?"

"I read about TBMs in a book somewhere."

"You move to the head of the class. This tunnel was excavated by a boring machine, a big one."

"Maybe they intend to replace the tracks later," Giordino speculated.

"Why wait until the entire tunnel is dug? Tracklaying men and equipment should follow in the wake of the boring machine to save time." Pitt slowly shook his head pensively. "A tunnel this size wasn't built for train traffic. It must serve another purpose."

They turned as a large double-decker bus painted lavender silently passed, its driver waving. They turned away and acted as if they were discussing something on Giordino's clipboard as workers sitting inside, wearing different-colored jumpsuits and hard hats, passed by. All were wearing sunglasses. Pitt and Giordino also noted the Odyssey name and horse logo on the side of the bus. The driver slowed, not sure if they wanted a ride, but Pitt waved him on.

"Electric-powered," said Giordino.

"Eliminates carbon monoxide exhaust pollution."

Giordino walked over to a pair of empty battery-powered golf carts that looked like miniature sports cars. "Nice of them to provide us with transportation." He climbed behind the wheel. "Which way?"

Pitt thought a moment. "Let's follow the excavated muck on the conveyor belt. This may well be our only chance to confirm if that's the source of the brown crud."

The cavernous tunnel seemed to trail off forever. The road traffic looked to be restricted to transporting mine workers, while the narrow-gauged railroad carried only muck and cargo. The golf cart's panel held a speedometer, and Pitt clocked the speed of the conveyor belt. It was traveling at the rapid clip of twelve miles an hour.

Pitt turned his attention to the upper works of the tunnel. After the boring machine had passed, the miners had installed rock bolt support systems to strengthen the rock's natural tendency to reinforce itself. Then a thick lining of shotcrete or gunite was sprayed on the tunnel pneumatically at high velocity. Conveying the concrete for long distances would have been accomplished by booster pumps spaced from the entrance source to the recently excavated area behind the boring machine. This would have been followed by an injection of fluid grout under pressure to seal off leaks from groundwater. Besides ensuring water tightness from without, the shotcrete and grout would also improve the flow of fluid through the tunnel, a phenomenon that Pitt began to believe was a distinct possibility.

The overhead lights illuminated the tunnel so brilliantly it almost hurt the eyes. Both men could now understand why the workers in the bus had worn sunglasses against the glare. Almost as if they timed their actions, Pitt and Giordino put on their own sunglasses.

An electric locomotive pulling several flatbed cars and carrying open crates of rock bolts passed, headed in the opposite direction toward the ongoing excavation. The train crew all waved at the two men in the golf cart, who responded by waving back.

"Everyone is real down-home friendly in these parts," remarked Giordino.

"Did you notice the men wear black jumpsuits and the women either white or green?"

"Specter must have lived a former life as an interior decorator."

"More like some sort of caste identification system," said Pitt.

"I'd cut off an ear before I wore lavender," muttered Giordino, suddenly becoming aware that he was covered in white. "I think I'm out of uniform."

"Stuff something in your chest."

Giordino said nothing, but his bitter stare at Pitt said it all.

A sober look crossed Pitt's face. "I wonder if those miners have any idea of the toxic mineral content of the muck they're pouring into the sea."

"They will," added Giordino, "when their hair starts falling out and their internal organs dissolve."

They continued on, conscious of an unnatural atmosphere deep below the earth and sea. They passed several smaller crosscut tunnels leading off to their left that aroused their curiosity. Another parallel tunnel appeared to be linked by the crosscuts every thousand yards. Pitt assumed it was a service tunnel for electrical conduits.

"There's the explanation for the earth tremors on the surface," said Pitt. "They didn't use a big tunnel-boring machine for these small tunnels. They were excavated by drilling and blasting."

"Shall we turn in?"

"Later," replied Pitt. "Let's push ahead and follow the muck on the conveyor belt."

Giordino was stunned at the power of the golf cart. He got it up to fifty miles an hour and he soon began overhauling other vehicles on the concrete road.

"Better slow down," cautioned Pitt. "We don't want to arouse suspicion."

"You think they got traffic cops down here?"

"No, but big brother is watching," Pitt countered, discreetly nodding at a camera mounted above on the overhead lighting system.

Giordino reluctantly slowed and settled behind a bus traveling in the same direction. Pitt began timing the bus schedule and quickly calculated that the buses ran twenty minutes apart and stopped at work sites when and wherever miners waited to board or requested to get off. He glanced at the hands on his watch. It was only a question of time before the technicians on the replacement shift entered the ventilator control room and found their coworkers duct-taped to the floor. So far, no alarms had been sounded, nor had they seen security guards cruising up and down the tunnel as if searching for someone.

"We're coming up on something," Giordino alerted Pitt.

A thumping sound became stronger as they moved closer to what Pitt quickly identified as a giant pumping station. The rock that had been crushed to sand was sent from the conveyor belt into a monstrous bin. From there, pumps the size of a three-story building thrust it into huge pipes. As Pitt had concluded, the contaminated muck was then propelled into the sea where Poco Bonito had run aground on the accumulation. Beyond the pumping stations were giant steel doors.

"The enigma goes deeper," said Pitt thoughtfully. "Those pumps are monumental, far more capable of pumping ten times the excavated muck. They must serve another purpose."

"They'll probably dismantle them when the tunnel is finished."

"I don't think so. They look permanent."

"I wonder what's on the other side of those doors," said Giordino.

"The Caribbean," answered Pitt. "We must be miles from shore and deep beneath the surface of the sea."

Giordino's eyes never left the doors. "How in the world did they dig this thing?"

"They began with an open excavation onshore by digging a portal. First, a starter tunnel was launched with a different type of machine called a roadheader excavator. When it reached a calculated depth, the big boring machine was brought in and assembled in the excavated tunnel. It worked east under the sea, then it must have been disassembled and reassembled so it could begin excavating in the opposite direction toward the west."

"How could an operation this size be kept secret?"

"By paying the miners and engineers big bucks to keep their mouths shut, or perhaps by threats and blackmail."

"According to Rathbone, they don't hesitate to kill intruders. Why not workmen with loose tongues?"

"Don't remind me about intruders. Anyway, suspicions confirmed," Pitt said slowly. "The brown crud is spread into the sea by man without the slightest consideration for the terrible consequences."

Giordino shook his head slowly. "A contaminated dump operation that puts all others to shame."

Pitt reached into his knapsack again and lifted out a small digital camera and began taking pictures of the giant pumping operation.

"I don't suppose your magical kit can produce any food and drink?" probed Giordino.

Pitt reached inside and produced a pair of granola bars. "Sorry, that's the best I can do."

"What else is in there?"

"My trusty old Colt forty-five."

"I guess we can always shoot ourselves before they hang us," Giordino said glumly.

"We've seen what we came for," said Pitt. "Time to go home."

Giordino was pressing his foot on the accelerator before Pitt finished his sentence. "The sooner we're out of here, the better. We're on borrowed time as it is."

Pitt continued snapping pictures as they drove. "One more detour, I want to see what's inside those crosscut tunnels."

As he accelerated, Giordino sensed that heading off into a side tunnel was only part of Pitt's plan. He was dead certain that Pitt wanted to check out the other end of the tunnel and observe the big boring machine in action. Pictures were taken of every piece of equipment they passed. No small detail of the tunnel's construction went unrecorded.

Giordino swung right into the first crosscut he reached without slowing down, taking the turn on two wheels. Pitt hung on and gave him a waspish look, but said nothing. They had traveled less than two hundred feet when abruptly the golf cart shot into another tunnel. They came to a fast stop and stared in total astonishment.

"Mind-boggling," Giordino muttered under his breath in awe.

"Don't stop," ordered Pitt. "Keep going."

Giordino acquiesced and drove the golf cart at top speed into another tunnel. He didn't hesitate or wait for Pitt to urge him forward. His foot never came off the pedal as they charged through the crosscut into a fourth tunnel. At last they could go no farther, and Giordino braked the cart before they struck the far wall. They sat there for several moments, staring left and right into eternity, taking in the immensity of what they were seeing.

The gargantuan proportions of the tunnel network became even more spectacular when Pitt and Giordino in stunned disbelief forced themselves to accept the fact that there was not one but four immense interconnected tunnels of equal size.

Giordino didn't astound easily, but he was shamelessly overwhelmed. "This can't be real," he said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

Carefully, Pitt steeled himself, shutting out all inclinations to fog his mind from the impact and blind his concentration. There had to be an explanation for the Herculean undertaking. How was it possible that Specter had built four massive tunnels under the mountains of Nicaragua without exposure by international intelligence or the media? How could such a vast project have gone unnoticed for more than four years?

"How many railroads does Specter intend to operate?" Giordino muttered dazedly.

"These tunnels weren't built to run cargo across the land by rail," Pitt mused.

"Barge transportation, maybe?"

"Not cost-efficient. There has to be another objective behind it all."

"There has to be a colossal bonanza at the end of the rainbow for such an expensive undertaking."

"The cost must have easily run more than the estimated seven billion."

Their voices reverberated up and down the cavernous tunnel that was completely empty of men and vehicles. If not for the perfectly arched walls and roof and the smooth concrete surface, they could have imagined themselves in an immense natural grotto.

Pitt tilted his head down at the floor of the tunnel. "So much for a rapid transit cargo system. They removed the railroad tracks."

Giordino nodded discreetly at a security camera mounted on a post that was aimed directly at them. "We'd better beat a hasty retreat back to the main tunnel and find another means of transportation. This cart is too conspicuous."

"Good thinking," said Pitt. "If they haven't figured out that they have unwelcome intruders by now, they must be brain-dead."

They retraced their journey through the three empty tunnels, stopping just short of the fourth, where they had started. They parked the golf cart in the crosscut tunnel beyond a security camera and nonchalantly walked down the roadway until they reached a stop where eight other miners were standing around waiting for the bus. Close up and through their sunglasses, Pitt could see their eyes. They were all Asian.

Pitt nudged Giordino, who got the message.

"Ten will get you twenty, they're Red Chinese," whispered Pitt.

"I won't take the bet."

No sooner had the double-decker bus arrived than a fleet of carts with red and yellow lights flashing sped past and into the crosscut tunnel they'd just deserted.

"Once they find the cart, it will take them all of ten seconds to know we're on this bus," said Giordino.

Pitt's eyes were on a train that was approaching from the east sector of the tunnel. "My thoughts exactly." He held up a hand and motioned for the bus driver to continue after the waiting miners had boarded. The door closed with a hiss and the bus moved on.

"When was the last time you chased a freight train?" Pitt asked Giordino, as they hurried across the road and stood talking in detachment as the locomotive passed by, the engineer inside the cab reading a magazine.

"Several years ago in the Sahara Desert, the train carrying toxic chemicals to Fort Foureau."

"As I remember, you almost fell off."

"I hate it when you make sport of me," said Giordino, with a downward twist of his lips.

The instant the locomotive passed by, they sprinted along the track. Pitt had already clocked the train's speed at twenty miles an hour, and they judged their running speed accordingly. Giordino was fast for his size. He put his head down and charged after a flatbed car as if he was carrying a football toward the end zone. He grabbed the hand ladder as it passed, held on and was literally swept onto the car. Pitt also used the momentum of the train to swing himself aboard.

The flatbed car was loaded with two pickup trucks of unknown origin powered by an electrical motor. Shiny new, they looked to be fresh off the boat. Without a word between them, Pitt and Giordino threw open a door and slipped into one of the truck's cabs, crouching down below the windows and the dashboard. Their timing couldn't have been more perfect, as two security patrol cars came screaming past the train, lights flashing as they raced after the bus.

Pitt looked pleased. "Our little maneuver was missed by the cameras or they'd have come after us instead of the bus."

"About time we had some luck."

"Stay put," instructed Pitt. "I'll be right back."

He opened the door on the side of the train away from the road and lowered himself to his hands and knees. Crawling from front to back, he removed the chocks and tie-down chains that held the pickup truck to the rail car. Then he scrambled back inside.

Giordino looked at him strangely. "I can read your mind, and I can't see how we're going to drive off a moving train into a tunnel that's blocked on both ends."

"We'll worry about it when the time comes," Pitt tossed off placidly.

There is nothing on earth that remotely resembles a big tunnel-boring machine.

The TBM that dug the tunnels under Nicaragua from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific shore stretched over one hundred and twenty yards in length, followed by another hundred yards of its equipment train.

An incredibly complicated monster that looked like the first stage of a Saturn rocket, it was driven by an electric variable-speed drive that eliminated any hydraulic oil leakage and pollution. The Specter TBM fractured flakes of bedrock by the continuous rotation of a series of carbide cutters mounted on a massive steel cutter head that could cut a circular tube through hard rock fifty-two feet in diameter at the rate of one hundred and fifty feet a day. The body that enclosed the cutter head also contained the drive motors that provided the enormous power it took to thrust the cutter's teeth into the rock, and the hydraulic presses that exerted the immense pressure it took to force the TBM into solid wall and grind away the rock.

The giant machine was articulated, and its operator, who was positioned at the front of the machine, could automatically steer it with the use of a laser while he monitored the operation. The excavated muck was transported to the rear section of the TBM and passed through a rock crusher that mashed the rock into fine sand. From there, the conveyor belt carried it back toward the opposite end of the tunnel, where it was pumped out into the sea.

The train stopped two hundred yards behind the TBM and beneath the overhead conveyor to unload at a supply depot and terminal. A series of large freight elevators ran out of sight through the roof of the tunnel. A group of women in white jumpsuits exited one of the elevators and climbed into a bus. Pitt angled close to them and overheard one woman say the inspection had to be finished in eight hours so a report-could be sent to company headquarters above.

It made no sense to Pitt. Headquarters? Where above?

No one seemed to mind as he casually drove the truck from the flatbed onto the loading dock and down a ramp to the concrete road. Then he pulled over and stopped behind a row of three other electric trucks.

Giordino looked around the busy area, where at least thirty miners were engaged in operating the mass of machinery. "That was too easy."

"We're not home yet," said Pitt. "We've got to find a way out of here."

"We could always climb out through another ventilator."

"Not if we're under Lake Nicaragua."

"How about the one we came from?"

"I think we can safely forget that plan."

Giordino was absorbed, watching the operation of the big TBM. "Okay, mastermind, what's your next scenario?"

"We can't escape from this tunnel, because it isn't completed yet. Our only hope is to sneak out the Pacific side from one of the other three tunnels' ventilators."

"And if it proves impossible?"

"Then I'll have to come up with another plan."

Giordino pointed down the loading dock, where security guards were checking the ID passes of the miners. "Time to shove off. We don't exactly fit our descriptions."

Pitt held up the ID clamped to the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and stared at it with amusement. "I'm in trouble. This guy is five foot two. I'm six-three."

"What about me?" Giordino said with a sly smile. "How will I ever produce a head of long hair and a set of boobs?"

Pitt cracked the door and looked up and down the far side of the loading dock and found it deserted. "Out this way."

Giordino followed Pitt and slid across the front seat of the pickup. They hit the loading dock crouched and running before cutting into an open door of a warehouse. Sneaking around unopened crates containing replacement parts for the various equipment and TBM, they found a rear passage that took them out of the warehouse and back along the railroad track. They paused behind a row of Porta Pottis and took stock.

"It'd help if we had transportation," said Giordino, wrinkling his nose distastefully.

"Wishing will make it so," Pitt said with a big grin.

Without waiting for Giordino, he stood up, walked from behind the Porta Pottis and casually approached one of the security guards' vehicles that was parked unattended. He settled behind the wheel, turned the ignition to the electric motor and pressed his foot on the accelerator, as Giordino leaped through the opposite door. The electrical power from the batteries flowed through the front-wheel-drive, direct-coupled differential and the car silently moved away.

The Pitt luck still held. The security guards were so busy examining the miners' IDs that they did not notice their patrol car being stolen. Not only was the electric car whisper quiet, but the noise and clatter of the TBM made it impossible for them to hear the workers trying to call their attention to the car theft.

To make it look official, Giordino reached toward the dashboard and flicked the switch to the revolving lights on the forward edge of the roof. As soon as they came to the first crosscut tunnel, Pitt hung a hard left and repeated the maneuver, swinging into the main tunnel and heading toward its western portal.

Pitt assumed that the four tunnels had been excavated under Lake Nicaragua to come up beyond the narrow stretch of land separating the lake from the ocean at the old port of San Juan del Sur. Here the ventilators had to be placed before the tunnels continued out from shore.

But Pitt was wrong.

After driving several miles, they came to a massive set of pumps like the ones they had encountered on the eastern end of the tunnel network. Then the tunnel abruptly ended at another pair of gigantic doors. The trickles of water that seeped around their edges and down the tunnel gave proof that they were not surfacing near San Juan del Sur but had come to a dead end far out under the Pacific Ocean.

30

After Admiral Sandecker's morning run from his Watergate condominium to NUMA headquarters, he went directly to his office without stopping off at the agency gym to shower and change into a business suit. Rudi Gunn was waiting for him, a grim expression on his hawklike face. He stared over his horn-rim glasses as Sandecker sat down at his desk, wiping the sweat from his face and neck with a towel.

"What's the latest word from Pitt and Giordino?"

"Nothing in the last eight hours." Gunn was uneasy. "Not since they entered what they described as a ventilator shaft leading to a deep underground tunnel that Pitt reckoned ran through the jungle of Nicaragua from the Pacific to the Caribbean."

"No contact at all?"

"Only silence," answered Gunn. "Impossible to communicate by phone when they're deep underground."

"A tunnel running from sea to sea," murmured Sandecker, his voice dubious.

Gunn nodded slightly. "Pitt was certain of it. He also reported that the builder was the Odyssey conglomeration."

"Odyssey?" Sandecker looked at Gunn in confusion. "Again?"

Gunn nodded again.

"They seem to crop up everywhere." Sandecker rose from his desk and gazed out the window overlooking the Potomac River. He could just see the furled red sails of his little schooner docked at a marina downriver. "I'm not aware of any tunnel being dug through Nicaragua. There was talk about building an underground railroad to transport cargo on high-speed trains. But that was several years ago, and as far as I know nothing ever came of it."

Gunn opened a file, pulled out several photos and spread them on the admiral's desk. "Here are satellite photos taken over a period of several years of a sleepy little port called San Juan del Norte."

"Where did these come from?" asked Sandecker with interest.

Gunn smiled. "Hiram Yaeger tapped his library of satellite photos from the various intelligence services and programmed them into NUMA's data files."

Sandecker adjusted his glasses and began examining the photos, his eyes touching on the dates they were taken, printed on the bottom borders. After a few minutes, he looked up. "Five years ago, the port looked deserted. Then it looks like heavy equipment was barged in and dock facilities built for cargo containerships."

"You'll notice that any and all supply and equipment containers were immediately moved into prefabricated warehouses, and never came out."

"Incredible that such a vast undertaking has gone unnoticed for so long."

Gunn laid a file on the desk beside the photos. "Yaeger also obtained a report on the Odyssey's programs and operations. Their financial dealings are sketchy. Because they're headquartered in Brazil, they are not required to release profit-and-loss statements."

"What about their stockholders? Surely they must receive annual reports."

"They're not listed on any of the international stock markets because the company's wholly owned by Specter."

"Could they have funded such a project on their own?" asked Sandecker.

"As far as we can tell, they have the resources. But Yaeger believes that on a project of this magnitude, they were likely funded by the People's Republic of China, which has bankrolled Specter's Central American developments in the past."

"Sounds logical. The Chinese are investing heavily in the area and are building a sphere of influence."

"Another factor in the secrecy," explained Gunn, "is the opportunity to sidestep all environmental, social and economic impacts. Opposition by Nicaraguan activists and any problems dealing with right-of-way would simply be ignored by their government while the work progressed covertly."

"What other projects are Specter and the Red Chinese working on together?"

"Port facilities on both sides of the Panama Canal and a bridge that will cross it, scheduled to open early next year."

"But why all the secrecy?" muttered Sandecker, as he returned to his chair. "What is to be gained from it?"

Gunn threw up his hands helplessly. "Without more intelligence, we're in the dark on that score."

"We can't just sit on this thing."

"Shall we contact Central Intelligence and the Pentagon about our suspicions?" asked Gunn.

Sandecker looked pensive for a moment. Then he said, "No, we'll go direct to the president's national security advisor."

"I agree," said Gunn. "This could prove to be a very serious situation."

"Damn!" Sandecker blurted in frustration. "If only we'd hear from Pitt and Giordino. Then we might have a clue as to what's going on down there."

Having reached the dead end, Pitt and Giordino had no option but to turn around and speed back in the direction they'd come. The fourth of the four tunnels appeared deserted and devoid of all equipment. It was as empty as though men had never created it. Only the pumps on both ends, standing eerily silent, revealed a veiled purpose that Pitt was at a loss to explain.

What was also strange was that no fleet of security guard cars, lights flashing, came hurtling though the empty and darkened tunnel after them. Nor were there any security cameras. They had all been removed when the tunnel was completed.

The answer quickly became obvious.

"I can see now," said Giordino calmly, "why the security guards are in no hurry to grab us."

"We have no place to go," Pitt finished answering the puzzle. "Our little venture into the bizarre is over. All Specter's security people have to do is wait until we get hungry and thirsty, then welcome us back into the main tunnel when we give ourselves up in hope of a last meal before we're hung."

"They would probably prefer to let us rot in here."

"There is that."

Pitt wiped a sleeve across his forehead to blot the sweat that suddenly began streaming into his eyes. "Have you noticed the temperature in this tunnel is much higher than the others?"

"It's beginning to feel like a steam bath in here," said Giordino, his face glistening.

"The air like sulfur."

"Speaking of hunger. How's your supply of granola bars?"

"Fresh out."

Abruptly, the thought crossed their minds at the same time, and they turned to each other and uttered two words in unison.

"Ventilator shaft."

Giordino suddenly became sober. "Maybe not. I didn't see any raised control booths in the outer tunnels."

"They would have been removed along with the railroad tracks and the overhead lighting and sealed, since they were no longer essential to remove pollution from the excavation."

"Yes, but the ladder rungs were embedded in the tunnel walls. I'll bet next month's pay, if I live to spend it, that they didn't bother to remove them."

"We'll know soon enough," said Pitt, as Giordino hit the accelerator and the cart leaped forward, its headlights probing the darkness ahead.

After covering nearly twenty miles, Giordino spotted the rungs of a ladder crawling up one wall. He parked about thirty feet away so the headlights would illuminate a wider area of the tunnel wall. "The rungs go up to where a ventilator shaft control booth once hung," he said, rubbing the stubble that had sprouted on his cheeks and chin.

Pitt stepped from the cart and began climbing the rungs. It had been a year or more since the tunnel was completed and stripped down. The rungs were slimy with dampness and flaked with rust. He reached the top and found a round manholelike iron cover sealing the entrance to the ventilator shaft above. There was a sliding bolt holding it against bottom stops.

Wrapping one hand through a rung for balance, he used both hands to grip the bolt and pull. It slid out of its clamp with little resistance. Then Pitt leaned to the side until his shoulder was pressed against the cover, and heaved.

It moved a millimeter at most.

"It's going to take the two of us," he called down.

Giordino came up the ladder until he was standing one rung up from Pitt to compensate for the difference in their heights. It was the wolf matching strength with the bear. With two shoulders against the heavy iron cover, they both put their strength into the effort.

The cover fought back, budged less than an inch and froze in place.

"Stubborn devil," grunted Giordino.

"At least it moved and isn't welded," Pitt replied.

Giordino grinned. "Once more with feeling."

"On three."

They stared at each other briefly and nodded.

"One," said Pitt, "two and threeeee."

They both thrust upward with every ounce of strength they possessed. For an instant, the cover resisted. Then it slowly gave, and with a loud screech it abruptly swung open and clanged against one wall of the ventilator shaft. They stared upward into the ominous black cavity as if it was a stairway to paradise.

"I wonder where it comes out," murmured Giordino between breaths.

"I have no idea, but we're going to find out."

Giordino gave Pitt's arm a light squeeze. "Hold on. In case the Specter goons come looking for us, let's give them something to chase."

He dropped down the ladder and climbed in the electric security guard car. He removed the belt off his shorts and tied the steering wheel so the front tires were positioned straight ahead. Then he pulled the front seat out of the car and stood it on end, using it to press the accelerator against the floorboard. Finally, he turned on the ignition and stepped back.

The car shot down the tunnel, its headlights carving weird patterns through the darkness. Within a hundred yards, it yawed against one wall of the tunnel, then careened against the other side in its wild ride, bouncing back and forth with a rending screech of tortured metal far into the distance.

"I wonder how Specter will explain that to his insurance adjuster," said Giordino. He turned, but Pitt was already scaling the ladder.

In the tension and stress of the past several hours, Pitt was surprised at how stiff and cramped his muscles had become. He climbed slowly, conserving his strength. With no lights, he felt a touch of claustrophobia as he ascended in the pitch-blackness. Me began counting the rungs and paused whenever he reached the fiftieth to catch his breath. They were spaced twelve inches apart, so it was a matter of simple arithmetic to calculate the distance they had climbed. Climbing down the ventilator shaft into the control booth from El Castillo, assisted by gravity, seemed like a swim in the bathtub in comparison. At rung three hundred and fifty, Pitt stopped and waited for Giordino to catch up. "Does this never end?" Giordino gasped.

"Pardon the pun," Pitt muttered between heavy breaths, "but there is light at the end of the tunnel."

Giordino looked upward and saw a tiny glow in the distance. It looked ten miles away to him. "Is there any way it could come to us?"

"Just hope it doesn't move farther away."

They continued on, increasingly conscious of the eeriness of the shaft. The glow above grew larger and magnified with agonizing slowness. Water dripped down the walls and onto the rungs. Their hands pulling and scraping against the rust on the rungs as they struggled upward soon became red and raw, the skin scoured as if by sandpaper.

At long last, the glow became a bright light and the nearness renewed their strength. Pitt began climbing two rungs at a time, using up his failing strength at an increased rate. But the end was only a few short feet away now.

With a final effort that cast him over the edge of exhaustion, he came to the wire mesh that covered the top of the shaft, hanging there with breaths coming in great heaves, blood trickling from his palms and fingers. "Made it," he gasped.

Giordino soon joined him. "I'm not up to cutting through that stuff again," he panted.

As soon as the numbness and aches subsided, Pitt reached into the knapsack, retrieved the wire cutters and wearily began snipping at the wire mesh. "We'll take turns and spell each other as we tire."

Pitt cut only a few inches in as many minutes before he could no longer squeeze the handles of the wire cutters. He moved aside and handed the cutters to Giordino. Because of the blood on his hands, they nearly slipped from his fingers. Pitt held his breath, but Giordino barely caught them before they fell out of sight into the darkness below.

"Keep a tight grip," Pitt said, with a grim smile. "You wouldn't want to make the climb all over again."

"I'd die first," Giordino muttered bravely. He cut almost ten minutes before he let Pitt relieve him.

It took the two of them almost an hour before they cut an opening large enough to crawl through. Once past the mesh that had shaded the exterior light, Pitt's eyes were blinded by the sunlight that streamed all around him. Putting on his sunglasses to relieve the glare from eyes accustomed to darkness, he found himself in a round room whose walls were glass from floor to ceiling.

While Giordino squirmed through the opening, Pitt walked around the glass-enclosed room and gazed down at a spectacular three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of a huge lake and surrounding islands.

"Where did we come up?" asked Giordino.

Pitt turned and looked at him with a bemused expression. "You're not going to believe this, but we're at the top of a lighthouse."

"A lighthouse!" burst Sandecker at Pitt's description over his speakerphone. His voice betrayed his elation at hearing Pitt and Giordino were alive and safe.

"Yes, sir," Pitt's voice came back over his satellite phone. "Specter built it as a folly."

"A folly?"

"A structure built to look like the ruins of an ancient castle or historic structure," Gunn explained. He leaned over the speakerphone. "You're saying the lighthouse was built to hide a ventilator shaft rising from the tunnel."

"Exactly," answered Pitt.

Sandecker twisted one of his cigars. "Your story sounds fantastic."

"All true down to the last item," said Pitt.

"A tunnel-boring machine that can cut through a mile of rock a day?"

"Which explains how Specter was able to excavate four tunnels, each nearly a hundred and fifty miles in length, in four years."

"If not for railroads," said Gunn, "for what purpose?"

"Al and I can't even make a good guess. The pumps on each end of the tunnels suggest they'll be used to drive water through them, but that doesn't make a lot of sense."

"I've taped your brief report," acknowledged Sandecker, "and will give it to Yaeger to come up with possible concepts until you can arrive and make a more comprehensive report."

"I also have photos taken with a digital camera."

"Good, we'll need every piece of evidence you collected."

"Dirk?" probed Gunn.

"Yes, Rudi."

"I plot your location as only thirty miles from San Carlos. I'll charter a helicopter. They should be in the air and over your lighthouse in another two hours."

"Al and I can't wait to clean up and eat a decent meal."

"No time for luxuries," snapped Sandecker. "The copter will take you direct to the airport in Managua, where a NUMA jet will be waiting. You can wash and eat after you arrive."

"You're a hard man, Admiral."

"Learn from it," Sandecker said, with a canny grin. "You might be sitting in my chair someday."

As Pitt closed the connection, he was totally in the dark concerning Sandecker's insinuation. He sat down next to Giordino, who was dozing, not happy about telling his friend he wasn't going to eat anytime soon.

31

After communications with Pitt ended, Sandecker waited patiently while Gunn arranged for a helicopter to pick up his special projects director at the phony lighthouse. Then they exited the admiral's office and dropped down a floor to the conference room, where Sandecker had arranged a meeting to discuss the Celtic discoveries on Navidad Bank.

Sitting around a huge oval table built of teak and resembling the deck of a ship was Hiram Yaeger, Dirk and Summer Pitt and St. Julien Perlmutter. Seated next to Summer was historian Dr. John Wesley Chisholm, professor of ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania. Everything about Chisholm's appearance was average. The height and weight were average. The hair a medium average brown that matched the eyes. But there was nothing average about his personality. He smiled constantly and was extremely warm and courteous. His mind went far above the level of ordinary.

Everyone was paying rapt attention to Dr. Elsworth Boyd, who stood in front of a large monitor displaying a montage of photos and lectured on the artifacts and images of the stone carvings recovered and recorded at Navidad Bank. The story that was coming together was so startling, so fabulous, that everyone seated around the spacious table sat in awed silence as Boyd described the artifacts, their approximate dates and original source. All this before shifting to the stone carvings.

Boyd, a limber man with the body of an acrobat, sinewy and nimble in the full vigor of his early forties, stood erect, occasionally brushing back a forelock of yellow-red hair, and gazed at his rapt audience through eyes as gray as a pigeon wing. A professor emeritus of classics at Trinity College, Dublin, he devoted his energies to researching the early history of the Celts. He had published numerous books on every aspect of the complex Celtic society. When invited by Admiral Sandecker to fly to Washington and study the artifacts under conservation, he was on the next plane from Dublin. When he saw the relics firsthand and a photo montage of the wall sculptures, he came within an inch of going into complete shock.

At first, Boyd refused to believe what he was seeing were not forgeries from an elaborate hoax, but after twenty hours straight of examining the artifacts, he became convinced of their authenticity.

Summer experienced a tingling of excitement as she took in every word of Boyd's lecture, transcribing it with a lightning display of the lost art of shorthand on a legal-sized tablet.

"Unlike the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans," explained Boyd, "the Celts have been sidetracked by most historians, despite the fact that they were the keystone of Western civilization. Much of our heritage — religious, political, social and literary traditions — was born within Celtic culture. Industry too, since they were the first to produce bronze and then iron."

"So why aren't we more aware of Celtic influence?" asked Sandecker.

Boyd laughed. "There lies the rub. Three thousand years ago, the Celts transmitted all their information, gossip and knowledge orally. Their rituals, customs and ethics were passed down through succeeding generations by word of mouth. Not until the eighth century B.C. did they begin to write anything down. Much later, when Rome swept over Europe, they considered the Celts little more than uncouth barbarians. And what little the Romans wrote about them was anything but flattering."

"And yet they were inventive," added Perlmutter.

"Contrary to what many people think, the Celts were advanced in more ways than the early Greeks. They only lagged in a written language and elaborate architecture. Actually, their culture and civilization predates the Greeks by several hundred years."

Yaeger leaned forward in his chair. "Does your dating of the artifacts agree with my computer calculations?"

"In the ballpark, I'd say," Boyd replied, "if you consider plus or minus a hundred years a chronologically tight case. I also believe the pictographs give us an excellent time frame for Navinia."

Summer smiled. "I love that name."

Boyd held a remote and flashed an image on a huge monitor covering one wall of the conference room. A three-dimensional perspective of the underwater structure as it might have looked when built filled the screen. "What is interesting," Boyd continued, "is that the structure was not only the dwelling of a very important woman, comparable to a tribal queen or high priestess, but it also became her tomb."

"When you say 'high priestess,' " said Summer, "like in Druid?"

"A Druidess," Boyd answered, nodding. "The intricate carvings and the gold of her ornaments indicate that she very likely held a high position in the sacred world of Celtic Druidism. Her bronze cuirass body armor is especially revealing. There is only one other known to have come from a woman, which is dated between the eighth and eleventh century B.C. At one time or another, she must have fought in battle. When she was alive, she was probably revered as a goddess."

"A living goddess," Summer said softly. "She must have led an interesting life."

"I also found this interesting." Boyd pulled up a photo taken of the foot of the stone funeral bed, with the carved image of a stylistic horse. "Here you see a sophisticated and modern-looking pictograph of a galloping horse. Called the White Horse of Uffington, it was carved into a chalk hillside in Berkshire, England, in the first century a.d. It represents the Celtic horse goddess, Epona. She was worshiped throughout the Celtic world and what would later become Gaul."

Summer studied the horse. "You think our goddess was Epona?"

Boyd shook his head. "No, I don't think so. Epona was worshiped as the goddess of horses, mules and oxen during the Roman era. It's thought that a thousand years earlier she may have been a goddess of beauty and fertility, with the power to throw a spell over men."

"I wish I had her clout," Summer said, laughing.

"What brought down the Druids?" asked Dirk.

"As Christianity gradually took hold and spread throughout Europe, it ridiculed Celtic religion as paganism. Women especially were not accorded the respect they had under the Druids. The heads of the church could not allow any irreverence or opposition to masculine authority. The Romans particularly made a crusade of stamping out the Druid religion. Druidesses were reduced to the category of witches. Women of power were recast as creatures of evil who took up with the devil. Women rulers were especially targeted for exclusion, and were cast from mother goddess to male-oriented domination."

Gunn's academic mind was soaking up every word of Boyd's discourse. "The Romans themselves worshiped pagan gods and goddesses. Why were they driven to erase the Druids?"

"Because the Romans saw the Druids as a source of rebellion against Rome. They were also disgusted by Druid ritual savagery."

"What form of savagery?" asked Sandecker.

"Early Druids conducted human sacrifice. It's claimed that their pagan cult knew no barbaric bounds. Sacrificial blood rites were not uncommon. Another infamous legend concerns 'The Wicker Man.' The Romans recounted events where condemned men and women were placed in huge cane effigies and burned to death."

Summer looked unconvinced. "Were Druidesses known to have participated in these barbaric rituals?"

Boyd made a noncommittal shrug. "It can only be assumed they were as responsible as the Druid priests."

"Which brings us back to the question we've asked ourselves a hundred times," said Dirk. "How did a high-ranking Celtic Druidess come to be entombed on what was once an island in the Caribbean five thousand miles from her homeland in Europe?"

Boyd turned and nodded at Chisholm. "I believe my colleague John Wesley may have some extraordinary answers to your question."

"But first," interrupted Sandecker — he turned to Yaeger—"have you and Max been able to discover how the structure came to be standing under fifty feet of water?"

"Early geological records for the Caribbean are all but nonexistent," replied Yaeger, fanning out a file of loose papers on the table in front of him. "We know more about prehistoric meteor strikes and land movement millions of years ago than we know about geological upheavals three thousand years ago. The best projections from leading geologists whom we've questioned is that Navidad Bank, once an island, sank during an underwater earthquake somewhere between eleven hundred and one thousand b.c."

"How did you arrive at that date?" asked Perlmutter, shifting his huge bulk in a chair too small for him.

"Through various chemical and biological studies, scientists can read how old the encrustations are and how long they took to form on the rock walls, the amount of corrosion and deterioration of the artifacts and the age of the coral surrounding the structure."

Sandecker, reaching in his breast pocket for a cigar and not finding one, began tapping a pen on the table. "The hype-mongers will have a field day claiming Atlantis has been found."

"Not Atlantis." Chisholm shook his head and smiled. "I tossed that one in the air for years. My own opinion is that Plato wrote a fictitious account of the disaster using the eruption of Santorini in sixteen fifty b.c. as background material."

"You don't think Atlantis was in the Caribbean?" said Summer somewhat facetiously. "People claim to have found sunken roads and cities deep under the water."

Chisholm did not look amused. "Geological formations, nothing more. If Atlantis had existed somewhere in the Caribbean, why hasn't one" — he paused for effect—"just one potsherd or artifact of ancient origin been discovered? Sorry, Atlantis did not exist on this side of the ocean."

"According to paleontology records in my library," offered Yaeger, "the Arawak Indians found by the Spanish when they arrived in the New World were the first humans into the West Indies. They had migrated from South America around twenty-five hundred B.C., or fourteen hundred years before the lady was laid to rest in her tomb."

"Somebody always gets there first," said Perlmutter. "Columbus reported seeing the hulks of large European-built ships abandoned on an island beach."

"I can't tell you how she got there," said Chisholm. "But I might shed some light on who she was."

He pressed a button on the remote and the first image on the stone-carved montage found by Dirk and Summer appeared on the monitor. The scene showed what appeared to be a fleet of ships in procession landing on a shoreline. They looked similar to the Viking longboats, but much stubbier, with flat bottoms that enabled them to travel in shallow coastal waters and rivers. Single masts supported square sails that appeared to be made of hides so they wouldn't shred under the onslaught of Atlantic gales. The hulls had high bows and sterns for sailing through rough seas. Banks of oars extended through locks on the top rails of the hulls.

"The first scene from the stone panel shows a fleet of ships unloading fighting men, horses and chariots." He pressed another button on the remote, creating a montage. "Scene Two, the opposing army is seen rising from a huge ditch surrounding a citadel on a steep hill. The next panel has them charging across a flat plain and attacking the enemy before they can unload their ships. Scene Four is the battle to repel the fleet."

"If it wasn't for all the earthen works and the citadel looking as if it was built of wood," said Perlmutter, "I'd say we were looking at the Trojan War."

Chisholm had the look of a wolf watching a herd of sheep approach his den. "You are looking at the Trojan War."

Sandecker fell into the trap. "Strange-looking Greeks and Trojans. I always thought they grew beards, not bushy mustaches."

"That's because they were not Greeks or Trojans."

"Who, then?"

"Celts."

Perlmutter's face wore an expression of genuine satisfaction. "I've also read Iman Wilkens."

Chisholm nodded. "Then you know his remarkable revelations about ancient history's greatest misconception."

"Could you please enlighten the rest of us?" Sandecker asked impatiently.

"I'll be happy to oblige," Chisholm replied. "The battle for Troy…"

"Yes?"

"Did not take place on the west coast of Turkey on the Mediterranean Sea."

Yaeger stared at him, looking puzzled. "If not Turkey, then where?"

"Cambridge, England," Chisholm answered simply, "near the North Sea."

32

Everyone, with the exception of Perlmutter, gave Chisholm a look of pure disbelief.

"The skepticism in your eyes is obvious," Chisholm challenged. "The world has been misled for a hundred and twenty-six years, when a German merchant named Heinrich Schliemann declared emphatically that he had found Troy by using Homer's Iliad as his guide. He claimed that the ancient mound called Hisarlik was the perfect location for the fortified city of Troy."

"Don't most archaeologists and historians back Schliemann's case?" Gunn queried.

"It's still a hotly debated subject," said Boyd. "Homer was a man of great mystery. There is no proof that he actually existed. All legend tells us is that a man called Homer took epic poems of a great war that had been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and recorded them in a series of adventure tales in what became the world's earliest written literature. Was he one man or a group, who over the centuries refined the poems until the Iliad and the Odyssey became history's greatest classics? The truth will never be known. Besides the enigma of his identity, the great puzzle he left behind is whether the Trojan War was fable or fact. And if it really occurred in the Early Bronze Age, were the Greeks the true enemies of the Trojans, or did Homer write about an event that took place more than a thousand miles away?"

Perlmutter grinned broadly. Boyd and Chisholm were affirming what he had always believed. "What no one considered until Wilkens was that, instead of being Greek, Homer was a Celtic poet who wrote about a legendary battle that occurred four hundred years earlier, not in the Mediterranean but in the North Sea."

Gunn looked adrift. "Then the epic voyage of Odysseus…"

"Took place in the Atlantic Ocean."

Summer's mind was spinning. "Are you implying that Helen's face didn't launch a thousand ships?"

"What I was about to suggest," Boyd countered with a tired smile, "is that the truth behind the myth was not about a conflict fought because of a king's rage for revenge over the abduction of his wife by her lover. Hardly an excuse for thousands of men to fight and die for a promiscuous woman, is it? Wise old Priam, the king of Troy, would never have risked his kingdom nor the lives of his people merely to allow a wayward son to live with a woman, who, if the truth were known, willingly left her husband for another man. Nor was it a quest for the treasures of Troy. Rather, realistically, the conflict was fought over a soft crystalline metallic element called tin."

"St. Julien gave Summer and me a lecture about how the Celts ushered in the Bronze and Iron Ages," said Dirk, looking up from diligently taking notes.

Chisholm nodded in agreement. "To be sure, they launched the industry, but no one can say with any degree of certainty who actually discovered that mixing ten percent tin with ninety percent copper forged a metal twice as hard as anything known before. Even the exact dating is hazy. The best guess is that it appeared around two thousand B.C."

"Smelting copper was known as far back as five thousand B.C. in central Turkey," said Boyd. "Copper was in abundance throughout the ancient world. Mining took place on a grand scale in Europe and the Middle East. But when bronze came along, there was a problem. Tin ore is rare in nature. Like later gold rushes, prospectors and traders spread throughout the ancient world in search of the ore. They eventually found the largest deposits in Southwest England. The British Celtic tribes quickly cashed in and built an international marketplace for dealing in tin that they mined, smelted into bars and traded throughout the ancient world."

"Due to the high demand, the ancient Brits quickly developed a monopoly and commanded high prices from foreign traders," added Chisholm. "Though traders from rich empires such as Egypt could afford to trade in expensive goods, the Celts of Central Europe had only handmade objects and an abundant supply of amber to offer. Without a bronze industry, they had little hope of going beyond an agricultural society."

"So they decided to band together and seize the tin mines from the Brits," Yaeger anticipated.

"Precisely," Boyd replied. "The Celtic tribes on the continent formed an alliance to invade southern England and seize the mines in a territory then known as the Troad, or later Troy. The capital city was called Ilium."

"So the Achaeans were not Greeks," said Perlmutter.

Boyd gave a slight nod of his head. "Achaean was a loose term for allies. The Trojans generally referred to themselves as Dardanians. Just as Egypt was not the title for the Land of the Pharaohs."

"Hold on," said Gunn. "Then where did the name Egypt come from?".

"Before Homer, it was known as Al-Khem, Misr or Kemi. Not until hundreds of years later, when the Greek historian Herodotus gazed upon the pyramids and the temple of Luxor, did he call the fading empire Egypt, from a land described in Homer's Iliad. From then on, the name stuck."

"What evidence does Wilkens give for his theory?" asked Sandecker.

Boyd looked expectantly at Chisholm. "Do you want to take the ball, Doctor?"

"You probably know as much about it as I do," Chisholm said, with a pleased smile.

"May I jump in?" asked Perlmutter. "I've studied Wilkens's book Where Troy Once Stood."

"Be our guest," Boyd acquiesced.

"There is a mountain of evidence," Perlmutter began. "For one thing, almost nothing that Homer described in his epic works stands up to scrutiny. Nowhere does he call the invading fleet 'Greeks.' During eleven hundred B.C., when the war supposedly took place, Greece was sparsely populated. There were no major cities that could support a large fleet of fighting ships and crews. The early Greeks were not considered seafaring people. Homer's reports of the ships and the men who rowed them across the sea seems better suited to the Vikings two thousand years later. Also, his descriptions of the sea more closely match the Atlantic European coastline than the Mediterranean.

"Nor do his climate narratives jibe. Homer recounts heavy, constant rain, thick mists or fog and sleet. Weather conditions more common for England than southern Turkey, which is just across the Med from the Sahara Desert."

"And there is the vegetation," Boyd prompted.

"To be sure," Perlmutter said with a modest nod. "Most all the trees Homer details are better suited to the damper atmospheres of Europe than the more arid land of Greece and Turkey. He talks mostly of deciduous green-leafed trees, while Greeks would be more familiar with evergreen conifers. And then we have horses. The Celts were a horse-loving people. The use of horses by ancient Greeks in battle was unheard of. The Egyptians and the Celts used chariots as fighting platforms, but not the Greeks or Romans. They preferred to fight on foot, using chariots only for transport and races."

"Any differences on the subject of food?" inquired Gunn.

"Homer mentions eels and oysters. Eels start from their breeding ground in the Sargasso Sea and migrate to the cold waters around Europe. He used the term diving for oysters, which are far more prevalent in the oceans outside the Mediterranean. If a Greek dove, it would have been for sponges, which were common in Greece at the time."

"What about the gods?" Sandecker put forth. "The Iliad and Odyssey are filled with the interference of the gods on both the Trojan and Greek armies."

"The Celts were there first. Classical scholars have concluded that the gods Homer portrayed were originally Celtic and inherited from Homer's works by later Greeks." Perlmutter paused and then added: "Another interesting point. Homer stated the Greeks and Trojans cremated their dead. This was a custom of the Celts. People around the Mediterranean generally interred their deceased."

"Intriguing hypothesis," said an unconvinced Sandecker. "But conjecture just the same."

"I was coming to the best part." Perlmutter showed his teeth in a wide smile. "Wilkens's most extraordinary revelations prove convincingly that the cities, islands and nations that Homer wrote about in his epic poems either did not exist or were called something completely different. The geography and the topography in the Iliad simply do not match with the existing land and seascapes around the Mediterranean. Wilkens discovered that Homer's names for towns, regions and rivers have their source in continental Europe and England. The Greek names do not fit the neighborhood of both Troy and the kingdoms of the Greek heroes, nor do the descriptions of settings match geophysical reality."

"The list goes on," said Chisholm. "Homer describes Menelaus with red hair, Odysseus with reddish brown and Achilles as blond. Also, some warriors were depicted with fair skin. None of these are characteristic of Mediterranean people. It's almost as if they came from another time and dimension."

"The invading Achaean tribes came from the bronze-making regions of France, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Norway, Holland, Germany and Austria. Their fleet probably assembled at what is now Cherbourg and sailed across the Sea of Helle, which gave its name to the Hellespont in Turkey and is now known as the North Sea. They landed in a large bay once called the Thracian Sea, which is now labeled on present-day maps simply as the Wash in Cambridgeshire. The waters touched the shores of the East Anglian plain."

Boyd added another plus to Perlmutter's report. "Homer mentioned fourteen rivers in and around Troy. There is an amazing correlation with the fourteen rivers near the East Anglian plain. Wilkens discovered that even after thirty centuries their names remained very similar in spelling and could easily be compared. In Greek, for example, Homer alludes to the Temese River. This translates to the Thames."

"And the Trojans?" queried Sandecker, still not totally convinced.

"Their army came from all over England, Scotland and Wales," Perlmutter moved on. "They were also aided by allies from Brittany and Belgium on the continent. And now that we have the bay and the plain we can begin zeroing in on the battleground and defenses. Two immense parallel ditches still exist northeast of Cambridge. Wilkens believes they were built by the invaders, much like the trenches of World War One, to keep the defenders from attacking the camp and ships."

"Then where was the citadel of Troy?" Sandecker persisted.

Perlmutter took up the challenge. "The best bet goes to the Gog Magog Hills, where large earthworks of round fortifications with deep defensive ditches have been discovered and excavated, which revealed evidence of wooden palisades and many bronze artifacts. Funeral urns and vast numbers of skeletons that showed signs of mutilation have also been uncovered."

"Where did the odd name of Gog Magog come from?" asked Summer.

"Many years ago, as residents began accidentally uncovering an army of bones, they referred to it as the site of a great battle or war with immense slaughter. They were reminded of Ezekiel's biblical conjuring up of evil spirits in a war launched by King Gog of Magog."

Sandecker looked from Boyd to Chisholm. "All right, now that we've heard how the Trojan War was fought in southern England over tin mines, what has it got to do with the Celtic discoveries by Dirk and Summer on Navidad Reef?"

The two scholars exchanged amused looks. Then Boyd said, "Why, everything, Admiral. Now that we're reasonably sure the true battle site of the Trojan War was in England, we can begin to tie Odysseus' great voyage of adventure to Navidad Bank."

You could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the conference room. The bombshell was so unexpected that it was nearly half a minute before anyone could bring themselves to respond.

"What are you saying?" asked Gunn, trying to digest what he had just heard.

Sandecker turned slowly to Perlmutter. "St. Julien, do you go along with this craziness?"

"Not crazy at all," said Perlmutter, with a broad grin. "It was written in Homer's epics that Odysseus was king of the island of Ithaca. But the Greek island never had a kingdom nor does it have any significant ruins. Wilkens shows, to my satisfaction, at least, that Odysseus' kingdom was not in Greece. A Belgian attorney from Calais, France, Theophile Cailleux, after much research, claimed that Cadiz, Spain, was the site of Homer's Ithaca. And although the land has filled in over the past three thousand years, geologists can show the outline of several islands that are now part of the mainland. Cailleux and Wilkens have identified most of Odysseus' ports of call, none of which are in the Mediterranean."

"I have to agree," said Yaeger. "By using all the known information on Odysseus' itinerant voyage, Homer's descriptions, Cailleux and Wilkens's theories, Bronze Age navigation methods, tides and currents, Max and I have arrived at a travel plan for his ports of call."

Yaeger picked up the remote and pressed a numbered code. A chart of the north Atlantic Ocean filled the screen. A red line traveled down the coast of Africa from southern England before it crossed over the water past the Cape Verde Islands into the isles of the Caribbean. He used a laser beam as a pointer and began to trace Odysseus' journey from England.

"Odysseus' first landfall after being swept out to sea was what he described as the Land of the Lotus Eaters. According to Wilkens, this was probably the West Coast of Africa at Senegal. Lotus here is a genus of the pea family and readily consumed by the natives for thousands of years, since it has a narcotic effect. From there, the winds took him west to the Cape Verde Islands, which is the logical choice for the island of the Cyclops, because Odysseus' description matches them almost perfectly."

"That land of one-eyed people," Sandecker said with a tight smile.

"Nowhere does Homer suggest all of the people had one eye," Yaeger explained. "They had two, only Polyphemus had one, and it wasn't in the middle of his forehead."

"If I recall my Odyssey," said Gunn, "after escaping the Cyclops, Odysseus was then blown west across the sea to the Aeolian Isle."

Yaeger merely nodded. "By computing the prevailing winds and currents, I put Odysseus' next landfall somewhere on one of the many islands south of Martinique and north of Trinidad. From there, he and his fleet were driven by a storm to the Land of the Laestrygonians. Here, one of the small islands called Branwyn, off Guadeloupe, fits the bill. The high cliffs on each side of the narrow channel he described his ship entering matches the island geography to a T."

"This is where the Laestrygonians destroyed Odysseus' fleet," added Perlmutter.

"If that were true," said Yaeger, "the ships loaded with treasure would still lie in the silt of the harbor."

"What is the name of the island?"

"Branwyn," responded Yaeger, "was a Celtic goddess and one of the three matriarchs of Britain."

"What country owns the island?" asked Dirk.

"It's privately owned."

"Do you know by whom?" asked Summer. "A rock star, an actor, maybe some wealthy businessmen?"

"No, Branwyn is owned by a wealthy woman." He paused to check his notes. "Her name is Epona Eliade."

"Epona is the name of the Celtic goddess," said Summer. "Now there's a coincidence."

"Maybe more than mere serendipity," said Yaeger. "I'll check it out."

"Where was Odysseus' next port?" asked Sandecker.

"Now with only one ship out of twelve," Yaeger continued, "he sailed to the island of Circe, called Aeaea, which computes as Navidad Bank, a spot Homer placed on the edge of the world."

"Circe!" Summer gasped. "Circe was the woman who lived and died in the structure we found?"

Yaeger shrugged. "What can I say? This is all conjecture, which is next to impossible to prove."

"But what brought her across the ocean so many centuries ago?" Gunn wondered aloud.

Perlmutter placed his folded hands on his ample stomach. "There was more travel back and forth between the continents than anyone has envisioned."

"I'd be interested in learning where you place Hades," said Sandecker to Yaeger.

"The best guess is the Santo Tomás caverns on Cuba."

Perlmutter daintily blew his nose, then asked, "After he left Hades, where did he meet with the Sirens, Scylla the monster and Charybdis the whirlpool?"

Yaeger threw up his hands. "I have to write those events off to Homer's wild imagination. No geographical location works for any of them this side of the Atlantic." He paused a moment before picking up Odysseus' journey on the chart again. "Next, Odysseus sails eastward until he reaches Calypso's island of Ogygia, which Wilkens and I agree is St. Miguel in the Azores."

"Calypso was the beautiful sister goddess of Circe," said Summer.

"They were women of the very highest rank. Didn't Odysseus and Calypso spend a romantic interlude together in a virtual garden paradise after his affair with Circe on her island?"

"He did," Yaeger replied. "After Odysseus leaves a tearful Calypso on the shore, his final stop is a detour by adverse winds to the palace of King Alcinous, which works out to be Lanzarote Island in the Canaries. After relating his adventures to the king and his family, he is given a ship and finally makes his way home to Ithaca."

"Where do you put Ithaca?" inquired Gunn.

"As Cailleux said, the port of Cadiz in southwestern Spain."

There came a few moments of silence around the table as everyone assimilated the classic tale and the multitude of theories. How much was remotely close to the truth? Only Homer knew, and he hadn't spoken for three thousand years.

Dirk smiled at Summer. "You have to give Odysseus credit for masculine charisma, having affairs with the two most beautiful and influential women of his time. Before he came along and seduced them, both ladies were chaste and inaccessible."

"If the truth be known," said Chisholm, "neither lady was a goddess nor pure as the driven snow. They were both described as incredibly beautiful women with magical personalities. Circe was a sorceress, Calypso an enchantress. As a mere mortal, Odysseus could have never satisfied either one. Chances are they were Druidesses who took part in all manner of wild and perverse rituals. And as such, they intimately conducted human sacrifice, which they considered necessary for eternal life."

Summer shook her head. "It's still hard to believe."

"But true," replied Chisholm. "Druidesses were known to have drawn men into sacrificial rites and orgies. And as leaders of their feminine cult, they had the power to control their worshipers into waging whatever acts they desired."

Yaeger nodded. "Lucky for us, Druidism died out a thousand years ago."

"There lies the catch," said Chisholm. "Druidism is still very much with us in the present. There are cults throughout Europe that follow the ancient rituals."

"Except for the human sacrifice," Yaeger said with a grim smile.

"No," Boyd said seriously. "Despite it being a crime of murder, human sacrifice among the underground Druid cults still takes place."

After the others had left, Sandecker called Dirk and Summer into his office. As soon as they were all seated, he came quickly to the point.

"I'd like you two to conduct an archaeology project."

Summer and Dirk swapped confused looks. They had no idea where the admiral was leading them.

"You want us to go back to Navidad Bank?" asked Dirk.

"No, I want you to fly down to Guadeloupe and survey the harbor on the island of Branwyn."

"Since it's privately owned, won't we need permission?" asked Summer.

"As long as you don't step ashore, you won't be trespassing."

Dirk looked at Sandecker skeptically. "You want us to search for the treasure lost in the land of the Laestrygonians by Odysseus' fleet?"

"No, I want you to find the ships and their artifacts. If successful, they would be by far the oldest shipwrecks found in the Western Hemisphere and alter recorded ancient history. If it can be done, I want it done by NUMA."

Summer folded her hands on the table nervously. "You must realize, Admiral, the odds of making such an incredible find are a million to one."

"The one chance is worth the effort. Better to have tried than sit on our hands and never know."

"Do you have a timetable?"

"Rudi Gunn will arrange a NUMA plane. You'll leave tomorrow morning. After your plane lands at the airport near the town of Pointe-a-Pitre in Gaudeloupe, you'll be met by a NUMA representative by the name of Charles Moreau. He has charted a boat for you to sail to Branwyn Island, which lies to the south. You'll have to carry your own dive equipment. Rudi will arrange to airfreight a subbottom profiler to read any anomalies you might find under the silt and sand."

"Why the rush?" demanded Dirk.

"If word gets out about this, and it will, every treasure hunter in the world will swarm over the island. I want NUMA to get in quick, survey the seabed and get out. If you're successful, we can work with the French who own Guadeloupe to secure the area. Any questions?"

Dirk took Summer's hand. "What do you think?"

"Sounds exciting."

"Somehow I knew you'd say that," Dirk said wearily. "What time do you want us at the NUMA terminal, Admiral?"

"Better you get an early start. Your plane will take off at six."

"In the morning?" asked Summer, losing some of her enthusiasm.

Sandecker grinned jovially. "With luck, you might even hear a rooster crowing on the way to the airport."

33

After the MEETING, Yaeger took the elevator down to his domain on the tenth floor. Never one for power lunches in Washington's established restaurants, he carried an old-fashioned lunch pail that contained fruit and vegetables and a thermos filled with carrot juice.

He was a slow starter in the morning and didn't have the momentum to jump into work with both feet. Yaeger sat and slowly sipped from a cup of herbal tea he brewed in a cabinet beside his desk, before leaning back and reading the Wall Street Journal to check on the status of his investments. Finally, he laid the paper aside and read the transcribed report from Sandecker's office regarding Pitt and Giordino's discovery of huge underground tunnels crossing Nicaragua. Then he ran a program that copied the typed report onto a computer disc. One more sip of his tea and he punched up Max.

She slowly materialized wearing a brief blue silk robe with a yellow sash, blue stars and an emblem across the back that read wonder woman. "How do you like my threads?" she asked in a syrupy voice.

"Where did you find that?" Yaeger demanded. "In a Goodwill reject box?"

"I surf Internet catalogs in my spare time. I charged it to your wife's Neiman Marcus account."

"You wish." Yaeger smiled. Max was a hologram. There was no way she could order, wear or pay for material objects. He shook his head in amazement at Max's nebulous yet vivacious temperament. There were times when he thought that programming Max with his wife's appearance and personality might have been a mistake. "If you're through showing off, Wonder Woman, I have a little job for you."

"I'm ready, master," she replied, mimicking Barbara Eden in the old I Dream of Jeannie TV show.

Yaeger programmed the disc contents into Max's memory. "Take your time and see what you make of this."

Max stood unblinking for a few moments and then asked, "What do you wish to know?"

"The question is, what possible motive do Odyssey and the Red Chinese have for digging four massive tunnels across Nicaragua from the Atlantic to the Pacific?"

"That's easy. The conundrum doesn't even warm my circuits."

Yaeger looked at her apparition. "How can you have an answer? You haven't analyzed the problem yet."

Max patted her mouth in a yawn. "This is so elementary. I'm constantly astounded that humans can't think beyond their noses."

Yaeger was certain he had made a mistake in the program. Her response was far too quick. "All right, I'm eager to hear your solution."

"The tunnels were built to transfer a vast amount of water."

"I don't count that as a dazzling revelation." He began to feel she had gotten off track. "A series of tunnels leading into the oceans, and mounting huge pumps, makes that an obvious conclusion."

"Ah," Max said, holding up one hand with the index finger raised. "But do you know why they want to pump massive amounts of water through the tunnels?"

"For a huge desalinization program, an irrigation project? Hell, I don't know."

"How can humans be so dense?" Max said in frustration. "Are you ready, master?"

"If you would be so kind."

"The tunnels were created to divert the South Equatorial Current that flows from Africa into the Caribbean Sea."

Yaeger was confused. "What kind of environmental threat would that provoke?"

"Don't you see it?"

"There's more than enough water in the Atlantic Ocean to make up for the loss of a few million gallons."

"Not funny."

"What, then?"

Max threw up her hands. "By diverting the South Equatorial Current, the temperature of the Gulf Stream would drop almost eight degrees by the time its flow reached Europe."

"And?" Yaeger probed.

"An eight-degree drop in the water that warms Europe would send the continent into a weather pattern equal to northern Siberia's."

Yaeger could not immediately grasp the enormity of Max's words, nor the unthinkable consequences. "Are you sure about this?"

"Have I ever been wrong?" Max pouted.

"Eight degrees seems like an excessive decrease," Yaeger persisted, doubtfully.

"We're only talking maybe a three-degree drop in the water temperature as the Gulf Stream cuts past Florida. But when the icy Labrador Current moves down from the Arctic and meets it after the Stream arcs past the Canadian Maritime Provinces, the temperature drop is magnified. This in turn greatly influences a further temperature decrease across Europe, altering the weather patterns and causing a disruption in the atmosphere from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean."

The horrendous scheme suddenly became crystal clear to Yaeger. Very slowly, he picked up the phone and dialed Sandecker's office. The admiral's secretary put Yaeger right through.

"Did Max come up with any answers?" asked Sandecker.

"She did."

"And?"

"Admiral," Yaeger began in a hoarse voice, "I'm afraid we have a catastrophe in the making."

34

Waiting for the helicopter that was over an hour late, Giordino happily slipped into dreamland while Pitt peered over the waters of Lake Nicaragua surrounding the lighthouse through his binoculars. The shoreline to the west was less than three miles away and he could make out a small village. He checked his map and determined that it was the town of Rivas. He then turned his attention to a large majestic island in the shape of a figure eight, no more than five miles to the west, that looked to be quite fertile and thickly forested. Pitt estimated the total area of land to be roughly one hundred and fifty square miles.

According to his map, it was called Isle de Ometepe. Pitt focused in on two volcanic mountains tied together by a narrow isthmus a couple of miles in length. The volcano on the northern end of the island rose over five thousand feet and appeared to be active by the wisp of steam that issued through the cone on top of the crater and touched the billowy clouds passing over the summit.

The southern volcano formed a perfect cone and sat dormant. Pitt judged it to be a good thousand feet lower than its mate to the north. He also estimated that the four underground tunnels ran directly under the isthmus of the island near the base of the northern volcano. That would explain, he thought, the unusual rise in temperature that he and Giordino had experienced inside the fourth tunnel.

A quick glance at the map revealed that the active volcano was named Concepcion, while its mate was labeled Madera. He swung the glasses and totally unexpectedly found himself staring at what looked to be a vast industrial enterprise spreading over the southern slopes of Concepcion just above the isthmus. He guessed that it covered over five or six hundred acres. It struck him as being in an out-of-the-way location. It hardly seemed a practical place for a business to pour millions of dollars into an industrial complex nowhere near major transportation facilities. Unless, he mused, it was cloaked in secrecy.

Then he observed an aircraft appear from the north and line up on a runway that ran across the isthmus to the entrance of the complex. It banked around the peak of the Madera volcano and landed, taxiing to a large terminal at the end of the runway.

Pitt lowered the glasses, an expression on his face as if he was seeing something he didn't want to see. A look of deep concentration clouded his green eyes. He cleaned the lenses of the binoculars with a few drops of water from his canteen and wiped them with the tail of his shirt from under the Odyssey jumpsuit. Then he raised the glasses again, and as if to reassure himself, refocused on the aircraft.

The sun shone between a pair of clouds, bathing Isle de Ometepe in bright light. Though the aircraft seemed no larger than an ant through the glasses, there was no mistaking the lavender color reflected by the sunlight on the fuselage and wings.

"Odyssey," he muttered to himself, his mind in turmoil. Only then did he realize the facility sat directly above the tunnels. That explained the freight elevators he and Giordino saw at the rail supply terminal. Whatever its purpose, the facility may have been connected to the tunnels, but its size dictated that it had to be a separate operation.

As he swept his gaze past the buildings rising around the base of the volcano, he paused, spotting what looked like an extensive dock area behind a row of warehouses. The warehouse roofs shielded the docks, but he could discern four cargo-loading cranes against the blue sky and realized that the complex didn't require an outside transportation system. It was totally self-sufficient.

Then three things happened almost simultaneously that alerted him to trouble.

The lighthouse began inexplicably to sway like a hula dancer. As he'd told Percy Rathbone, having grown up in California, he was familiar with earthquakes. He'd once been in a thirty-story office building on Wilshire Boulevard when a quake hit and the building began to rock and oscillate. Fortunately, the base of the building rested on giant concrete roller bearings deep underground for just such an event. This felt much the same, except the lighthouse trembled and reeled like a palm tree caught in opposing winds.

Pitt immediately turned and gazed at the Concepcion volcano, thinking that it might have erupted, but the peak appeared peaceful, with no sign of smoke or ash. He glanced down at the water and saw the surface ripple as if being shook from below by some unseen giant vibrator. One minute and what seemed an eternity later, the quake faded. Not surprisingly, it did not wake up Giordino.

The second danger came from a small lavender patrol boat that was coming from the island and headed directly toward the lighthouse. The security guards on board must have been confident of their trapped quarry. They were traveling over the water at a leisurely pace.

The third and final danger came from below their feet. What probably saved their lives in the next few seconds was an almost scarcely heard sound: a slight clink of metal against metal coming from the shaft leading to the tunnel deep below.

Pitt kicked Giordino. "We have callers. It seems they picked up our trail."

Giordino came instantly awake and pulled the .50 caliber Desert Eagle automatic from inside his belt under the white jumpsuit, as Pitt retrieved the ancient Colt .45 from his carry bag.

Crouched beside the shaft, Pitt shouted down without looking over the edge. "Stay where you are…!"

What happened next was not totally unexpected. His reply was a hail of automatic fire that burst from the shaft and peppered the metal roof of the lighthouse with enough holes to turn it into a colander. The blast was so intense that Pitt and Giordino withheld their fire so as not to risk poking a hand over the edge and having their fingers shot off.

Pitt crawled over to one of the lighthouse windows and pounded on the glass with the butt of the Colt. The panes were thick and it took several hammerlike blows to shatter the glass. Most of the shards fell to the sea below, but Pitt quickly extended his arm outside and smashed the remaining fragments onto the floor inside. Pushing them into piles with his feet, he kicked them over the edge of the shaft, where they fell like a deluge of razor-edged knives. Shouts and cries of pain erupted from the shaft, as the fire fell off.

Taking advantage of the lull, Pitt and Giordino blindly fired their automatics down the shaft, their bullets ricocheting against the concrete walls and causing havoc among the Odyssey security guards climbing the ladder. Their cries of pain ended and were replaced by the sickening thud of bodies hurtling down the shaft to the tunnel far below.

"That should put a crimp in their plans," said Giordino, in a voice devoid of remorse while he inserted a full clip.

"We still have unwanted guests to deal with," said Pitt, pointing at the patrol boat speeding toward the lighthouse, its bow lifted above the water, a rooster tail rising in its wake.

"It's going to be close." Giordino nodded out the shattered glass toward a blue helicopter that was skimming over the lake from the north.

Swiftly figuring the distance the boat and helicopter had to travel, Pitt allowed himself a tight grin. "The bird is faster. It should arrive a good mile ahead of the boat."

"Pray they don't mount rocket launchers," Giordino said, throwing cold water on Pitt's confidence.

"We'll know shortly. Get ready to grab the harness when it's dropped."

"Take too long for it to haul us up one at a time," said Giordino. "I strongly suggest we bid a tearful goodbye to the lighthouse together."

Pitt nodded. "I'm with you."

They stepped out onto a narrow balcony that ran around the top of the lighthouse. Pitt recognized the helicopter as a Bell 430 with twin Rolls-Royce engines. It was painted yellow and red, with Managua airways lettered across the sides. He watched intently as the pilot took a no-nonsense approach once around the lighthouse, while a crewman began lowering a harness attached by a cable to a winch out the open side door.

Taller by almost a foot than Giordino, Pitt leaped up and snagged the harness on the first pass as it swung in circles under the rotor wash. He looped it around Giordino's shoulders.

"You're built tougher than I am. You take the strain and I'll hold on to you."

Giordino looped his hands through the opening and clutched them around the cable as Pitt gripped him tightly around the waist. The crewman, unable to be heard above the exhaust whine of the turbines, waved frantically, trying to signal them that he could lift only one man at a time.

His warning came too late. Pitt and Giordino were dragged off the balcony of the lighthouse and dangled a hundred feet above the water as a gust of wind struck the copter. The pilot was surprised as the aircraft suddenly tilted to starboard from the combined weight of both men. He quickly corrected and hovered on an even keel as his crewman watched the overloaded winch strain to pull both men aboard.

Fortune prevailed and the pursuing boat did not fire missiles. However, a pair of heavy-caliber guns mounted on the bow began a staccato burst. Fortunately, the boat was still too far away, and with the keel bouncing over the water, the gunner's aim was fifty yards wide.

The pilot, horrified at seeing himself shot at, forgot about the men he had come to rescue and threw the helicopter on its side away from the boat and beat a hasty retreat toward the safety of the shore. With twenty feet to go, Pitt and Giordino were crazily windmilling beneath the craft. Giordino felt as if his arms were coming out of their shoulder sockets. Pitt, suffering no pain, could do little but clutch Giordino in a death grip and shout at the crewman to speed up the lift.

Pitt could see the strain of the agony on Giordino's face. For perhaps two minutes that were the longest minutes he had ever experienced, he was almost tempted to let go and fall, but one look at the water now nearly five hundred feet below his dangling feet quickly changed his mind.

Then he was looking into the dazed eyes of the crewman only five feet away. The crewman turned and shouted to the pilot, who deftly banked the copter just enough for Pitt and Giordino to fall inside the cargo section. The side door was rapidly slammed closed and locked.

The still-shocked crewman stared at the two men sprawled on the floor. "You hombres are loco," he grunted with a heavy Spanish accent. "Lift only for mail sacks weighing one hundred pounds."

"He speaks English," Giordino observed.

"Not very well," added Pitt. "Remind me to write a letter of recommendation to the company who manufactured the winch." He came to his feet and hurried into the cockpit, where he stared out a side window until he spotted the patrol boat. It had cut the chase and was circling back to the island.

"What in hell was that all about?" demanded the pilot. He was genuinely angry. "Those clowns were actually shooting at us."

"We're lucky they're bad shots."

"I didn't count on trouble when I took this charter," said the pilot, still keeping a wary eye on the boat. "Who are you guys and why was that patrol boat after you?"

"Like your charter says," Pitt answered. "My friend and I are with the National Underwater and Marine Agency. My name is Dirk Pitt."

The pilot removed one hand from the controls and extended it over his shoulder. "Marvin Huey."

"You're American. Montana, judging from your accent."

"Close. I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming. After twenty years flying these things in the Air Force, and after my wife left me for an oilman, I retired down here and started a small charter company."

Pitt shook the hand and gave the pilot a cursory look. He looked short behind the controls, with thinning red hair leaving a widow's peak. He was wearing faded Levi's with a flowered shirt and cowboy boots. The eyes were pale blue and looked like they had seen too much. He looked to be slightly on the downside of fifty.

Huey looked up at Pitt curiously. "You haven't told me why the big getaway."

"We saw something we shouldn't," Pitt answered, without elaborating.

"What's to see in an abandoned lighthouse?"

"It isn't what it seems."

Huey wasn't buying, but he didn't pursue the issue. "We'll be on the ground at our field in Managua in another twenty-five minutes."

"The sooner the better." Pitt motioned to the empty copilot's seat. "Do you mind?"

Huey gave a slight nod. "Not at all."

"I don't suppose you could make a pass over the Odyssey facility on the island?"

Huey turned fractionally and shot Pitt a look usually reserved for the insane. "You're joking. That place is guarded tighter than Area 51 at Groom Lake, Nevada. I couldn't fly within five miles without a security aircraft chasing me away."

"What goes on down there?"

"Nobody knows. The installation is so secret, the Nicaraguans deny it exists. What began as a small facility underwent vast expansion in the past five years. The security measures go beyond extreme. Huge warehouses, and what some people think are assembly areas, were constructed. Rumor has it there is a housing section accommodating three thousand people. The native Nicaraguans used to grow coffee and tobacco on the islands. Alta Garcia and Moyogalpa, the main towns, were torn down and burned after the Nicaraguan government forced the people off their land and relocated them in the mountains to the east."

"The government must have a heavy investment in the facility."

"I don't know about that, but they've been extremely cooperative in allowing Odyssey to operate without interference."

"No one has ever sneaked through Odyssey security?" asked Pitt.

Huey smiled tautly. "Nobody who lived."

"It's that tough to penetrate?"

"The entire island's beaches are patrolled by vehicles equipped with high-tech surveillance gear. Patrol boats circle the island, assisted by helicopters. Remote sensors detect movement along every path and road leading to the complex. It's said Odyssey engineers perfected sensory equipment with the ability to smell a human approaching the buildings, and distinguish them from animals."

"There must be satellite photos?" Pitt persisted.

"You can buy them from the Russians, but they won't tell you what goes on inside the maze of buildings."

"There must be rumors."

"Sure, lots of them. The only one that has any substance is that it's a research and development installation. What they research is anybody's guess."

"It must have a name."

"Only what the locals call it."

"Which is?" Pitt had to prompt.

"In English," Huey finally replied, "house of the invisible ones."

"Any reason?"

"They say it's because everybody who goes in is never seen again."

"The local officials never investigate?" asked Pitt.

Huey shook his head. "Nicaraguan bureaucrats keep a hands-off policy. The word is that Odyssey management has bought off every politician, judge and police chief in the country."

"How about the Red Chinese? Are they involved?"

"They're everywhere in Central America these days. They contracted with Odyssey about three years ago to build a short canal through Lake Nicaragua's western shoreline at Pena Blanca, so deep-water cargo ships can enter and exit."

"The nation's economy should have profited."

"Not really. Most all of the ships that use the canal are from a Chinese cargo fleet."

"COSCO?"

Huey nodded. "Yeah, that's the one. They always dock at the Odyssey facility."

Pitt spent the rest of the trip in silence, his mind sifting through the myriad of contradictions and unknowns of Odyssey, its strange founder and even stranger operations. As soon as Huey set the helicopter down at his company hangar two miles outside Managua, Pitt walked off by himself and called Admiral Sandecker.

As was his style, Sandecker minced no words. "Haven't you taken off for Washington yet?"

"No," Pitt replied smartly. "And we're not going to."

Sandecker knew something was on Pitt's mind and he went into neutral. "I assume you have a good reason."

"Are you aware of a huge secret facility built and owned by Odyssey on an island in Lake Nicaragua that sits directly over the tunnels?"

"The closest I can come is a report I read on Odyssey expanding a canal from the ocean into the lake to allow entry for cargo ships." Sandecker paused. "Come to think of it, the report was vague on the dock facilities the Nicaraguans were building at the port city of Granada a few miles east of Managua."

"The report was vague because the dock facilities were built at Odyssey's complex on the island of Ometepe for their private use only."

"What have you got in mind?" asked Sandecker, as if already reading Pitt's mind.

"I propose Al and I go into the complex and investigate their operation."

Sandecker hesitated. "After your narrow escape from the tunnels, you're pushing your luck."

"We're getting good at breaking and entering."

"Not funny," Sandecker said sharply. "Their security must be very tight. How do you plan to sneak inside?"

"We'll come in from the water."

"Don't you think that they have underwater sensors?"

"Actually," Pitt said pontifically, "I'd be surprised if they didn't."

35

Ten minutes after Sandecker conversed with Pitt, the admiral was staring at Hiram Yaeger in abject incredulity. "Are you sure about this? Your data must be in error."

Yaeger was immovable. "Max is not infallible a hundred percent of the time, but on this one I believe she's right on the mark."

"It's beyond belief," said Gunn, reading over Max's projections.

Sandecker slowly shook his head, jarred by what he read. "You're saying the tunnels were built to divert the South Equatorial Current, which would in turn cause the temperature of the Gulf Stream to drop."

"According to Max's computer model, eight degrees by the time it reaches Europe."

Gunn looked up from the data files. "The effects on European climate would be cataclysmic. The entire continent would go into a deep freeze for eight months out of the year."

"Let us not forget the effect of the Gulf Stream on the east coast of the United States, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada," added Sandecker. "Every state east of the Mississippi and along the Atlantic shore could suffer a cold as bitter as that in Europe."

Gunn said sarcastically. "Now there's a happy thought."

"The Atlantic Drift's warm surface water is controlled by temperature and salinity," Yaeger explained. "As its tropical waters move north, it mixes with the cold water coming down from the Arctic, where it becomes dense and sinks southeast of Greenland. This is called a thermohaline circulation. Then it gradually warms again and rises to the surface as it reaches Europe. The Gulf Stream's sudden drop in temperature could also cause the thermohaline circulation to collapse, a state that would accent the crises and last for several centuries."

"What would be the most immediate results of such an event?" asked Sandecker.

Yaeger spread several papers across Sandecker's desk and began quoting the data. "Death and disruption would run rampant. In the beginning, thousands of homeless people would die from frostbite or hypothermia. Many more thousands might also die when the heating supplies quickly disappear because of the staggeringly high demand. All vital river traffic would come to a standstill, locked in ice. Ports would freeze throughout the Baltic and the North Sea, stranding ships carrying oil and liquefied natural gas used for heating, not to mention millions of tons of food imported from other countries. Most agriculture yields would be cut in half. Food shortages would be magnified because of the shortened growing season. Auto transportation would come to a halt because of freezing road conditions and heavy snowfall and a lack of fuel. Airports and railroads would be paralyzed for weeks at a time. People would be more susceptible to colds, flu and pneumonia. Tourism would vanish overnight. The European economy would go into complete chaos, with no end in sight. And that's only half the story."

"So much for French winemaking and Dutch tulips," Gunn muttered.

"What about the gas sent through the pipelines from the Middle Bast and Russia?" said Sandecker. "Can't the flows be increased to alleviate the suffering?"

"A drop in the bucket when you calculate the demand, not to mention the electrical power shortages that would come with severe winter storms. Max estimates at least thirty million homes throughout Europe would be left without heat."

Gunn looked up from taking notes. "You said that was only half the story."

"Further disruption and misery would come with the rising temperatures in the late spring," Yaeger continued. "This terrible scenario will be enhanced by heavy rains and high winds. Violent and massive flooding will be the result. Rivers swelled by massive amounts of melted snow would burst their banks and flood thousands of cities and towns, destroying vital bridges as well as millions of homes. Avalanches and mud slides would bury entire towns and destroy vast stretches of highway. The loss of life following such an appalling cataclysm cannot be imagined."

Gunn and Sandecker remained silent for a few moments. Then Sandecker broke the silence.

"Why?" he asked briefly.

Gunn spoke the single thought on everyone's mind. "What do Specter and the Red Chinese have to gain by such an atrocious scheme?"

Yaeger showed the palms of his hands in a helpless gesture. "Max has yet to come up with an answer."

"Can it be Specter controls the gas coming into Europe?" queried Sandecker.

"We asked the same question and ran profiles on all the major gas producers that supply the continent," replied Yaeger. "The response was negative. Odyssey has no natural gas or oil holdings anywhere in the world. The only minerals in which Specter has an interest is a group consisting of platinum, palladium, iridium and rhodium. For those, he owns the major deposits and producing mines in South Africa, Brazil, Russia and Peru. He'd have a monopoly on the world's reserves if he could gain control of the Hall mine in New Zealand that produces as much as the other countries put together — but the mine's owner, Westmoreland Hall, has refused all offers to sell."

"If I remember my high school chemistry class," Sandecker said slowly, "platinum is used mostly for electrodes like automobile spark plugs and jewelry."

"It's also in high demand in chemistry laboratories because of its high resistance to heat."

"I fail to see a connection between his mining operations and his plot to send Europe back to the glacial age."

"There has to be a rationale," said Gunn. "The return on investment for digging those tunnels would have to astronomical to pay for the excavation. If he doesn't profit from the demand in energy, what can he possibly gain?"

Sandecker turned and stared thoughtfully out his window down at the Potomac River. Then he turned back and looked at Yaeger. "Those pumps, fed by the immense water pressure — could they be used to supply electricity? If so, they'd produce enough energy to power most of Central America."

Yaeger said, "Pitt's report made no mention of generators. He and Giordino would have certainly recognized a power source when they saw one."

Sandecker stared through his authoritative blue eyes at Gunn. "You're aware of the mischief those two want to carry out."

"No, I'm not." Gunn stared back at Sandecker, unintimidated. "I was under the impression that they're on a flight back to Washington."

"There's been a change in plans."

"Oh?"

"They advised me that they were going to make a clandestine inspection of a secret installation Odyssey has built on an island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua."

"Did you give your permission?" Gunn asked, with an astute grin. "Since when did you know them to take a 'no' answer from me?"

"They just might come up with some answers to our dilemma."

"Maybe," Sandecker said grimly. "They also may get themselves killed."