Trojan Odyssey (21 page)

“When did this the voyage occur?” Dirk asked.

“Sometime between 520 and 530
A.D.
”

“Fifteen hundred years too late for our find,” said Summer.

Dirk reached down and petted Fritz, who promptly sat up and licked his hand. “We seem to strike out with every pitch.”

Summer looked down and smoothed her dress. “So where do we go from here?”

“The first item on your list of enigmas to be solved,” Perlmutter advised, “is to find out when and if Navidad Bank sat above the surface of the sea three thousand years ago.”

“A geomorphologist who studies the origin and age of land surfaces might come up with some theories,” Summer suggested knowledgeably.

Perlmutter gazed at the model of the famed Confederate submarine
Hunley.
“You might begin with Hiram Yaeger and his computer wizardry. The world's most extensive accumulation of data on marine sciences is in his library. If any scientific study on the geology of Navidad Bank was ever conducted, he'd have a record of it.”

“And if it were compiled by a German or Russian team of scientists?”

“Yaeger will have a translation. You can count on it.”

Dirk came to his feet and began pacing the floor. “Our first stop on returning to NUMA headquarters is to meet with Hiram and ask him to probe his files.”

Summer smiled. “And then what?”

Dirk didn't hesitate. “Next stop, Admiral Sandecker's office. If we want to get to the bottom of this thing, we must persuade him to loan us a crew, research ship and the necessary equipment to conduct a thorough investigation of the sunken chambers and retrieve their artifacts.”

“You mean, go back.”

“Is there any other way?”

“I suppose not,” she said slowly. For some reason she could not fathom, a fear welled up inside her. “But I don't think I could bring myself to look at
Pisces
again.”

“Knowing Sandecker,” said Perlmutter, “he'll save NUMA funds by combining your exploration with another project.”

“You have to agree that's a reasonable assumption,” Dirk said, turning to his sister. “Shall we go? We've taken up enough of St. Julien's time.”

Summer gave Perlmutter a cautious hug. “Thank you for the glorious lunch.”

“Always a joy for an old bachelor to have a pretty young girl for company.”

Dirk shook Perlmutter's hand. “Goodbye and thank you.”

“Give your dad my best and tell him to drop by.”

“We will.”

After the kids had left, Perlmutter sat for a long time lost in his thoughts, until the phone rang. It was Pitt.

“Dirk, your son and daughter just left.”

“Did you steer them in the right direction?” asked Pitt.

“I whetted their appetite a bit. Not a great deal I could offer them. There is little recorded history of the seafaring Celts.”

“I have a question for you.”

“I'm here.”

“Ever hear of a pirate named Hunt?”

“Yes, a buccaneer who achieved minor fame in the late sixteen hundreds. Why do you ask?”

“I'm told he's a restless ghost known as the Wandering Buccaneer.”

Perlmutter sighed. “I've read the reports. Another
Flying Dutchman
fable. Although, several of the ships and boats that radioed that they'd seen his ship disappeared without a trace.”

“So there is cause to be concerned when sailing in Nicaraguan waters?”

“I suppose so. What's your interest?”

“Curiosity.”

“Would you like whatever history I have on Hunt?”

“I'd be grateful if you could send it to my hangar by courier,” said Pitt. “I've a plane to catch first thing in the morning.”

“It's on its way.”

“Thank you, St. Julien.”

“I'm having a little soiree in two weeks. Can you make it?”

“I never miss one of your fabulous parties.”

After he rang off, Perlmutter assembled his papers on Hunt, called a courier service and went to his bedroom, where he stood before a case tightly packed with books. Unerringly, he pulled one from the shelf and walked heavily to his study, where he reclined his bulk on a leather Recamier doctor's couch made in Philadelphia in 1840. Fritz jumped up and lay on Perlmutter's stomach, staring at him through doleful brown eyes.

He opened the book by Iman Wilkens titled
Where Troy Once Stood
and began reading. After an hour, he closed the cover and gazed at Fritz. “Could it be?” he murmured to the dog. “Could it be?”

Then he allowed the lingering effects of the vintage Chardonnay to put him to sleep.

P
ITT AND
G
IORDINO
left for Nicaragua the next day on a NUMA Citation jet to Managua. There, they switched to a commercial Spanish-built Cassa 212 turboprop for the hour-and-ten-minute flight over the mountains and across the lowlands to the Caribbean sea and over an area known as the Mosquito Coast. They could have made the short flight in the NUMA jet, but Sandecker thought it best they arrive like ordinary tourists, in order to blend in.

The setting sun in the west bathed the mountain peaks gold before the rays were lost in shadows on the eastern slopes. It was hard for Pitt to imagine a canal crossing such difficult terrain, and yet throughout history Nicaragua was always considered the better route for an interoceanic channel than Panama. It had a healthier climate, the surveyed route was easier to excavate, and the canal would have been three hundred miles closer to the United States; six hundred miles, if you consider the mileage down and up from the Panama passage.

Before the turn of the century, as with too many far-reaching and historic turning points, politics crawled out of its lair and came to a bad verdict. Panama had a powerful lobby and worked hard to push their cause and disrupt relations between Nicaragua and the U.S. government. For a while, it was a toss-up, but with Teddy Roosevelt working behind the scenes to hammer out a sweet deal with the Panamanians, the pendulum swung the extra mile away from Nicaragua when Mount Pelee, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique, erupted, killing more than thirty thousand people. In a case of incredibly bad timing, the Nicaraguans issued a series of stamps advertising the country as the land of volcanos, one of them depicting an eruption behind an illustration of a wharf and a railroad. That clinched it. The Senate voted for Panama as the site of the U.S.-built canal.

Pitt began studying a report on the Mosquito Coast soon after takeoff from Washington. Nicaragua's Caribbean lowlands were isolated from the more populated western side of the country by the rugged mountains unfolding below and dense tropical rain forests. The people and the region were never a part of the Spanish empire but came under British influence until 1905, when the entire coast fell under the jurisdiction of the Nicaraguan government.

His destination, Bluefields, was Nicaragua's main Caribbean port, named after the infamous Dutch pirate who used to hide his ship in the coastal lagoon near the city. The population of the area was made up of Miskitos, the dominant group whose diverse ancestors came from Central America, Europe and Africa; the Creoles, who are the black descendants of colonial-era slaves; and the Mestizos, whose blood-lines are a mixture of Indian and Spanish.

The economy, based on fishing, was big business along the coast. The primary catch came mostly from shrimp, lobster and turtle. A large plant in town processed the fish for export while extensive maintenance facilities serviced, fueled and supplied the international fishing fleets.

When he looked up from the report, the sky had turned as black as coal. The drone of the propellers, the whine of the engines, took his mind and sent it on a journey into the land of nostalgia. The face he was seeing every morning in the mirror no longer revealed the smooth skin he'd seen twenty-five years earlier without the craggy lines. Time and adventurous living and the onslaught of the elements had taken its toll.

As he stared through the window into nothingness, his mind traveled back to where it had all begun on that lonely stretch of beach at Kaena Point on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. He was lying on the sand in the sun, gazing idly past the breakers out to sea, when he spotted a yellow cylinder floating in the water. Swimming through treacherous riptides, he retrieved the cylinder and struggled back to shore. Inside was the message from the captain of a missing nuclear submarine. From that moment on, his life took a new turn. He met the woman who became his first love from the moment he laid eyes on her. He had carried her vision in his memory, always believing she had died, never knowing that she had survived, until Dirk and Summer showed up on his doorstep.

The body had weathered time well, perhaps the muscles were not as hard as they once were, but his joints had yet to encounter the aches and pains that come with age. The black hair was still thick and wavy, with streaks of gray that were starting to spread on the temples. The mesmeric opaline green eyes still gleamed with intensity. His love of the sea and his work with NUMA still consumed his time. Memories of his exploits, some pleasant, some nightmarish, and more than a few physical scars, had yet to fade with the years.

His mind relived the many times he had cheated the old man with the scythe. The hazardous journey down the underground river in search of Inca Gold, the fight in the Sahara against overwhelming odds in the old French Foreign Legion fort, the battle in the Antarctic with the giant old snowmobile and the raising of the
Titanic.
The contentment and fulfillment that came with two decades of achievements gave him warm satisfaction, and made him feel his life had been worthwhile after all.

But it was the old drive, the lust of challenging the unknown, that had faded. He had a family now, and responsibility. The wild days were counting down. He turned and looked over at Giordino, who could enter a deep sleep in adverse conditions as easily as if he was in his own goose-down bed in his Washington condo. Their exploits together had become almost mythical, and although they were not particularly close in their personal lives, once they faced what seemed like overwhelming adversity and disaster, they came together as one, each playing off the physical and mental virtues of the other until they either won, or occasionally lost, which wasn't often.

He smiled to himself at remembering what a reporter wrote about him, in one of the few times his feats had gained distinction. “There is a touch of Dirk Pitt in every man whose soul yearns for adventure. And because he
is
Dirk Pitt, he yearns more than most.”

 

T
HE LANDING GEAR
dropped on the Cassa and pulled Pitt back from his reverie.

The landing lights were reflecting off the water of the rivers and lagoons surrounding the city's airport when he leaned toward the window and stared downward. A light rain was falling as the plane set down and taxied toward the main terminal. A fresh five-mile-an-hour wind blew the raindrops on an angle, giving the air a smell of humid freshness. Pitt followed Giordino down the boarding steps and was mildly surprised to find the temperature in the low seventies; he had expected it to be at least ten degrees higher.

They hurried across the tarmac and entered the terminal, where they waited twenty minutes for their luggage to appear on a cart. Their instructions from Sandecker only said that a car would be waiting at the terminal entrance. Pitt pulled two suitcases on wheels while Giordino shouldered a big duffel bag, heavy with diving gear. They walked fifty yards up a paved pathway to the road. Waiting for passengers were five cars and ten taxis, their drivers hustling for a fare. Waving away the cabbies, they stood expectantly for a minute, before the last car in line—a battered, scratched and dented old Ford Escort—blinked its lights. Pitt walked up to the passenger's window, leaned in and started to ask, “Are you waiting for…”

That was as far as he got before going silent in surprise. Rudi Gunn exited the driver's side and came around the car to greet and shake hands. He grinned. “We can't go on meeting like this.”

Pitt stared blankly. “The admiral never mentioned you'd be in on the project.”

Giordino stared blankly. “Where did you come from and how did you get here before us?”

“I was bored sitting behind a desk so I sweet-talked Sandecker into letting me come along. I left for Nicaragua soon after our meeting. I guess he didn't bother to warn you.”

“He must have forgot,” Pitt said cynically. He put his arm around the shoulder of the little man. “We've had wild times together, Rudi. It's always a pleasure to work by your side.”

“Like the time in Mali on the Niger River when you threw me off the boat?”

“As I recall, that was a necessity.”

Both Pitt and Giordino respected NUMA's deputy director. He may have looked and acted like an academic school-teacher, but Gunn wasn't afraid to get down and dirty if that's what it took to carry a NUMA project to a successful conclusion. The guys especially admired him because, no matter how much mischief they got into, Gunn never squealed on them to the admiral.

They threw their luggage in the trunk and climbed inside the tired Escort. Gunn snaked around the cars waiting outside the terminal and turned on the road leading from the airport to the main dock. They drove along the big bay of Bluefields that was surrounded by wide beaches. The Escondido River delta split off into several channels that ran around the city and then through the Straits of Bluffs to the sea. The lagoon, inlets and harbor were crowded with deserted and silent fishing boats.

“It looks as if the entire fishing fleet is in town,” observed Pitt.

“Thanks to the brown crud, fishing has come to a standstill,” replied Gunn. “The shrimp and lobster are dying off and the fish have migrated to safer waters. International fishing fleets like the commercial vessels from Texas have moved to more productive waters.”

“The local economy must be down the sewer,” said Giordino, slouched comfortably in the backseat.

“It's a disaster. Everyone living in the lowlands in some way depends on the sea for their livelihood. No fish, no money. And that's only half the misery. Like clockwork, Bluefields and the surrounding shoreline are struck by major hurricanes every ten years. Hurricane Joan destroyed the harbor in nineteen eighty-eight and what was rebuilt was wiped out by Hurricane Lizzie. But unless the brown crud dissipates or is neutralized, a lot of people are going to starve.” He paused. “Things were bad enough before the storm. Unemployment was sixty percent. Now it's closer to ninety. Next to Haiti, the west coast of Nicaragua is the poorest stepchild of the Western Hemisphere. Before I forget, have you guys eaten?”

“We're good,” answered Giordino. “We had a light dinner at the airport in Managua.”

Pitt smiled. “You forgot the two rounds of tequila.”

“I didn't forget.”

The Escort rolled through the primitive city, bouncing in potholes that looked deep enough to strike water. The architecture on the crumbling buildings that seemed little more than derelicts was a style of mixed English and French. At one time they had been painted in bright colors, but none had seen a paintbrush in decades.

“You weren't kidding when you said the economy was a disaster,” said Pitt.

“Much of the poverty is inspired by a complete lack of infrastructure, and local leaders who just don't get it,” Gunn lectured. “Girls with no options go into prostitution as young as fourteen, while boys sell cocaine. None can afford electricity, so they hook wires from the hovels up to streetlights. There are no sewage facilities, and yet the governor took the entire yearly budget and used it to build a palace because she thought it was more important to put on a good face for visiting dignitaries. There is a big drug industry here, but none of the locals are getting rich off the smuggling that takes place mostly offshore or in secluded coves.”

Gunn drove into the commercial dock area at El Bluff, the entrance of the lagoon and across the bay from Bluefields. The stench of the harbor was overpowering. Refuse, oil and sewage mingled together in the filthy water. They passed ships unloading at the docks that looked as though they might crumble and fall into the dirty water any minute. The roofs on most of the warehouses looked as if they had been torn away. Pitt noticed that one containership was unloading large crates with farm machinery stenciled on their wooden sides. The huge, immaculate, shiny semitrucks and -trailers being loaded with the cargo seemed out of place in such a sleazy background. The name of the ship, just visible under the ship's work lights, read:
Dong He.
The letters
COSCO
stretched along the center of the hull. Pitt knew it stood for the China Ocean Shipping Company.

He could only wonder what was inside the cases labeled farm machinery.

“This is their port facility?” asked Giordino incredulously.

“All that's left after Lizzie got through with it,” answered Gunn.

Four hundred yards later the Escort rolled onto an old wooden wharf crowded with darkened and forlorn fishing boats. Gunn braked to a stop at the only one whose lights illuminated its decks. The boat appeared to have seen better days. Under the yellow glow, her black paint looked faded. Rust streaks ran from the deck and hull hardware. Fishing gear lay carelessly cluttered around the work deck. To a passerby on the dock, she looked uncompromisingly utilitarian, another fishing boat in a world full of fishing boats, with the same character as the vessels anchored and moored around her.

As Pitt's eyes swept the beamy vessel from stem to stern, where the Nicaraguan flag hung limp with its twin horizontal blue stripes bordering one of white, he reached inside his shirt and felt the small folded silk bundle, reassuring himself it was still there.

He turned slightly and glanced briefly sideways at a lavender-colored pickup truck that was parked in the shadows of a nearby warehouse. It was not empty. He could see a dark shape behind the wheel and the red glow of a cigarette through the rain-streaked windshield.