Deep Six (11 page)

“Are you a party girl?”

“Only when the occasion demands,” she replied, coming back on even keel. “And this is definitely not the occasion.”

He threw up his arms and then let them drop dejectedly. “A sad day for Pitt, a lucky day for NUMA.”

“Why NUMA?”

“The contamination is on dry land. No need for an underwater salvage job. My crew and I can pack up and head for home.”

Her helmet nodded imperceptibly. “A neat sidestep, Mr. Pitt, dropping the problem straight into the Army’s lap.”

“Do they know?” he asked seriously.

“Alaskan Command was alerted seconds after you reported discovering the
Pilottown.
A chemical warfare disposal team is on its way from the mainland to remove the agent.”

“The world applauds efficiency.”

“It’s not important to you, is it?”

“Of course it’s important,” Pitt said. “But my job is finished, and unless you have another spill and more dead bodies, I’m going home.”

“Talk about a hard-nosed cynic.”

“Say ‘yes.’ “

Thrust, parry, lunge. He caught her on an exposed flank. She felt trapped, impaled, and was annoyed with herself for enjoying it. She answered before she could form a negative thought. “Yes.”

The men in the hold stopped their work amid enough poison to kill half the earth’s population and clapped muted gloves together, cheering and whistling into their transmitters. She suddenly realized that her stock had shot up on the Dow Jones. Men admired a woman who could ramrod a dirty job and not be a bitch.

Later, Dover found Pitt thoughtfully studying a small open hatchway, shining his flashlight inside. The glow diminished into the darkness within, reflecting on dull sparkles on the oil-slicked water rippling from the cargo hold.

“Got something in mind?” Dover asked.

“Thought I’d do a little exploring,” Pitt answered.

“You won’t get far in there.”

“Where does it lead?”

“Into the shaft tunnel, but it’s flooded nearly to the roof. You’d need air tanks to get through.”

Pitt swung his light up the forward bulkhead until it spotlighted a small hatch at the top of a ladder. “How about that one?”

“Should open into cargo hold four.”

Pitt merely nodded and began scaling the rusty rungs of the ladder, closely followed by Dover. He muscled the dog latches securing the hatch, swung it open and clambered down into the next hold, again followed by Dover. A quick traverse of their lights told them it was bone empty.

“The ship must have been traveling in ballast,” Pitt speculated out loud.

“It would appear so,” said Dover.

“Now where?”

“Up one more ladder to the alleyway that runs between the fresh water tanks into the ship’s storerooms.”

Slowly they made their way through the bowels of the
Pilottown,
feeling like gravediggers probing a cemetery at midnight. Around every corner they half expected to find the skeletons of the crew. But there were no bones. The crew’s living quarters should have looked like an anniversary sale at Macy’s—clothes, personal belongings, everything that should have been strewn about by a crew hastily abandoning ship. Instead, the pitch-black interior of the
Pilottown
looked like the tunnels and chambers of a desert cavern. All that was missing were the bats.

The food lockers were bare. No dishes or cups lined the shelves of the crew mess. Even the toilets lacked paper. Fire extinguishers, door latches, furnishings, anything that could be unbolted or was of the slightest value was gone.

“Mighty peculiar,” muttered Dover.

“My thought too,” Pitt said. “She’s been systematically stripped.”

“Scavengers must have boarded and carried away everything during the years she was adrift.”

“Scavengers leave a mess,” Pitt disagreed. “Whoever was behind this job had a fetish for neatness.”

It was an eerie trip. Their shadows flitted on the dark walls of the alleyways and followed alongside the silent and abandoned machinery. Pitt felt a longing to see the sky again.

“Incredible,” mumbled Dover, still awed by what they’d found, or rather not found. “They even removed all the valves and gauges.”

“If I was a gambling man,” said Pitt thoughtfully, “I’d bet we’ve stumbled on an insurance scam.”

“Wouldn’t be the first ship that was posted missing for a Lloyd’s of London payday,” Dover said.

“You told me the crew claimed they abandoned the
Pilottown
in a storm. They abandoned her all right, but they left nothing but a barren, worthless shell.”

“Easy enough to check out,” said Dover. “Two ways to scuttle a ship at sea. Open the sea cocks and let her flood, or blow out the bottom with explosive charges.”

“How would you do it?”

“Flooding through the sea cocks could take twenty-four hours or more. Time enough for a passing ship to investigate. I opt for the charges. Quick and dirty; put her on the seafloor in a matter of minutes.”

“Something must have prevented the explosives from detonating.”

“It’s only a theory.”

“Next question,” Pitt persisted. “Where would you lay them?”

“Cargo holds, engine room, most any place against the hull plates so long as it was below the waterline.”

“No sign of charges in the after holds,” said Pitt. “That leaves the engine room and the forward cargo holds.”

“We’ve come this far,” Dover said. “We might as well finish the job.”

“Faster if we split up. I’ll search the engine room. You know your way around the ship better than I do—”

“The forward cargo holds it is,” Dover said, anticipating him.

The big Coast Guardsman started up a companion-way, whistling the Notre Dame fight song under his breath. His bearlike gait and hulking build, silhouetted by the wavering flashlight in his hand, grew smaller and finally faded.

Pitt began probing around the maze of steam pipes leading from the obsolete old steam reciprocating engines and boilers. The walkway gratings over the machinery were nearly eaten through by rust, and he treaded lightly. The engine room seemed to come alive in his imagination—creaks and moans, murmurings drifting out of the ventilators, whispering sounds.

He found a pair of sea cocks. Their handwheels were frozen in the closed position.

So much for the sea-cock theory, he thought.

An icy chill crept up the back of Pitt’s neck and spread throughout his body, and he realized the batteries operating the heater in his suit were nearly drained. He switched off the light for a moment. The pure blackness nearly smothered him. He flicked it on again and quickly swept the beam around as if he expected to see a specter of the crew reaching out for him. Only there were no specters. Nothing except the dank metal walls and the worn machinery. He could have sworn he felt the grating shudder as if the engines looming above him were starting up.

Pitt shook his head to purge the phantoms in his mind and methodically began searching the sides of the hull, crawling between pumps and asbestos-covered pipes that led into the darkness and nowhere. He fell down a ladder into six feet of greasy water. He struggled back up, out of the seeming clutches of the dead and evil and ugly bilge, his suit now black with oil. Out of breath, he hung there a minute, making a conscious effort to relax.

It was then he noticed an object dimly outlined in the farthest reach of the light beam. A corroded aluminum canister about the size of a five-gallon gas can was wired to a beam welded on the inner hull plates. Pitt had set explosives on marine salvage projects and he quickly recognized the detonator unit attached to the bottom of the canister. An electrical wire trailed upward through the grating to the deck above.

Sweat was pouring from his body but he was shivering from the cold. He left the explosive charge where he found it and climbed back up the ladder. Then he began inspecting the engines and boilers.

There were no markings anywhere, no manufacturer’s name, no inspector’s stamped date. Wherever there had been a metal ID tag it was removed. Wherever there had been letters or numbers stamped into the metal, they were filed away. After probing endless nooks and crannies around the machinery, he got lucky when he felt a small protrusion through his gloved hand. It was a small metal plate partially hidden by grease under one of the boilers. He rubbed away the grime and aimed the light on the indented surface. It read:

PRESSURE                                            220 PSI.

TEMPERATURE                                     450° F.

HEATING SURFACE                    
5,017 SQ. FT.

MANUFACTURED BY THE

ALHAMBRA IRON AND BOILER COMPANY

CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

SER. #38874

Pitt memorized the serial number and then made his way back to where he started. He wearily sank to the deck and tried to rest while suffering from the cold.

Dover returned in a little under an hour, carrying an explosive canister under one arm, as indifferently as if it were a jumbo can of peaches. Cursing fluently and often as he slipped on the oily deck, he stopped and sat down heavily next to Pitt.

“There’s four more between here and the forepeak,” Dover said tiredly.

“I found another one about forty feet aft,” Pitt replied.

“Wonder why they didn’t go off.”

“The timer must have screwed up.”

“Timer?”

“The crew had to jump ship before the bottom was blown out. Trace the wires leading from the canisters and you’ll find they all meet at a timing device hidden somewhere on the deck above. When the crew realized something was wrong, it must have been too late to re-board the ship.”

“Or they were too scared it would go up in their faces.”

“There’s that,” Pitt agreed.

“So the old
Pilottown
began her legendary drift. A deserted ship in an empty sea.”

“How is a ship officially identified?”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Just curious.”

Dover accepted that and stared up at the shadows of the engines. “Well, ID can be found most anywhere. Life jackets, lifeboats, on the bow and stern the name is often bead welded, outlining the painted letters. Then you have the builder’s plates, one on the exterior of the superstructure, one in the engine room. And, oh, yeah, the ship’s official number is burned into a beam around the outer base of the hatch covers.”

“I’ll wager a month’s pay that if you could dig the ship from under the mountain you’d find the hatch number burned off and the builder’s plate gone.”

“That leaves one in the engine room.”

“Missing too. I checked, along with all the manufacturer’s markings.”

“Sounds devious,” said Dover quietly.

“You’re damn right,” Pitt replied abruptly. “There’s more to the
Pilottown
than a marine insurance rip-off.”

“I’m in no mood to solve mysteries now,” Dover said, rising awkwardly to his feet. “I’m freezing, starved and tired as hell. I vote we head back.”

Pitt looked and saw Dover was still clutching the canister of explosives. “Bringing that along?”

“Evidence.”

“Don’t drop it,” Pitt said with a sarcastic edge in his voice.

They climbed from the engine room and hurried through the ship’s storerooms, anxious to escape the damp blackness and reach daylight again. Suddenly Pitt stopped in his tracks. Dover, walking head down, bumped into him.

“Why’d you stop?”

“You feel it?”

Before Dover could answer, the deck beneath their feet trembled and the bulkheads creaked ominously. What sounded like the muffled roar of a distant explosion rumbled closer and closer, quickly followed by a tremendous shock wave. The
Pilottown
shuddered under the impact and her welded seams screeched as they split under enormous pressure. The shock flung the two men violently against the steel bulkheads. Pitt managed to remain on his feet, but Dover, unbalanced by his heavy burden, crashed like a tree to the deck, embracing the canister with his arms and cushioning its fall with his body. A grunt of pain passed his lips as he dislocated his shoulder and wrenched a knee. He dazedly struggled to a sitting position and looked up at Pitt.

“What in God’s name was that?” he gasped.

“Augustine Volcano,” Pitt said, almost clinically. “It must have erupted.”

“Jesus, what next?”

Pitt helped the big man to his feet. He could feel Dover’s arm tense through the heavy suit. “You hurt?”

“A little bent, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”

“Can you make a run for it?”

“I’m all right,” Dover lied through clenched teeth. “What about the evidence?”

“Forget it,” Pitt said urgently. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Without another word they took off through the storerooms and into the narrow alleyway between the freshwater tanks. Pitt slung his arm around Dover’s waist and half dragged, half carried him through the darkness.

Pitt thought the alleyway would never end. His breath began to come in gasps and his heart pounded against his ribs. He struggled to stay on his feet as the old
Pilottown
shook and swayed from the earth’s tremors. They reached cargo hold number four and scrambled down the ladder. He lost his grip and Dover fell to the deck. The precious seconds lost manhandling Dover over to the opposite ladder seemed like years.

Pitt had barely set foot on the scaly rungs when there was a crack like thunder and something fell past him and struck the deck. He threw the light beam up. At that instant the hatch cover disintegrated and tons of rock and debris cascaded into the hold.

“Climb, damn it, climb!” he yelled at Dover. His chest heaved and the blood roared in his ears. With an inner strength he thrust Dover’s 220 pounds up the ladder.

Suddenly a voice shouted. The light showed a figure leaning through the upper hatch, his hands grabbing Dover and pulling him through into the aft hold. Pitt instinctively knew it was Giordino. The burly little Italian had a keen sense of arriving at the right place at the right moment.