Trojan Odyssey (24 page)

Pitt smiled wearily. “That's why we came here—” He broke off suddenly, stiffened and gazed out through the windshield. “That,” he continued quietly, “and our fun visit to Disneyland.”

“You'd better get some sleep,” said Giordino evenly. “You're beginning to babble.”

“This is no Disneyland,” said Renee, suppressing a yawn.

Pitt turned and nodded his head and pointed toward the sea beyond the bow. “Then why are we about to enter the Pirates of the Caribbean?”

All heads turned in unison, and all eyes stared into the dark water that ended where the stars began. They saw a faint yellow glow that slowly increased in brilliance as
Poco Bonito
moved steadily toward it. They stood there frozen in silence as the glow slowly materialized into a nebulous shape of an old sailing ship that became more defined with each passing minute.

For a moment, they thought they were losing touch with reality, until Pitt spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. “I wondered when old Leigh Hunt was going to show up.”

T
HE MOOD ON
board the boat had suddenly changed. For nearly a minute, no one moved. No one spoke as they stared uneasily at the bizarre phenomenon. Finally, Gunn broke the silence.

“The same Hunt the pirate the admiral warned us about?”

“No, Hunt the buccaneer.”

“It can't be real.” Renee stared in awe, refusing to believe what her eyes relayed to her brain. “Are we really looking at a ghost ship?”

Pitt's lips curled in a vague smile. “Only in the eye of the beholder.” Then he paraphrased from
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
“With never a whisper in the sea, oft darts the Odyssey ship.”

“Who was Hunt?” asked Dodge, in a voice close to a quaver.

“A buccaneer who roamed the Caribbean from sixteen sixty-five until sixteen eighty, when he was captured by a British Royal Navy ship and fed to the sharks.”

Not wanting to look at the phantom, Dodge turned away, his mind not functioning, and muttered, “What's the difference between a pirate and buccaneer?”

“Very little,” answered Pitt. “
Pirate
is a general term that covers British, Dutch and French seafarers who captured merchant ships for prize money and treasure. The term
buccaneer
comes from the French for barbecue. The early buccaneers used to grill their meat and dry it. Unlike privateers, who had valid commissions from their government, buccaneers preyed on any ship, mostly Spanish, without papers. They were also known as freebooters.”

The ghostly vessel was only a half a mile away now and closing fast. The eerie yellow glow gave the apparition a sur-realistic image. As it neared and the details of the ship became more distinct, the sounds of men shouting across the water began to be heard aboard the phantom.

She was a square-rigged barque with three masts and a shallow draft, a favorite vessel of pirates before the seventeen hundreds. The foresails and topsails were billowing in a nonexistent breeze. She mounted ten guns, five run out on the main deck on both sides. Men with bandanas around their head were standing on the quarterdeck, waving swords. High on her mainmast, a huge black flag with a fiendishly grinning skull dripping blood stood straight out as if the ship was sailing against a headwind.

The expressions on the faces of those on the
Poco Bonito
varied from growing horror to foreboding to academic contemplation. Giordino looked as if he was staring at cold pizza, while Pitt peered through binoculars at the phantasm with the face of a man enjoying a science fiction movie. Then he lowered the glasses and began to laugh

“Are you mad?” Renee demanded.

He handed her the glasses. “Look at the man in the scarlet suit with the gold sash standing on the quarterdeck and tell me what you see.”

She stared through the lenses. “A man with a feathered hat.”

“What else sets him apart from the others.”

“He has a peg leg and a hook on his right hand.”

“Don't forget the eye patch.”

“Yes. There's that too.”

“All that's missing is a parrot on one shoulder.”

She lowered the binoculars. “I don't understand.”

“A bit stereotyped, don't you think?”

An old Navy man who had served fifteen years on the sea, Gunn read the ghost ship's change of course almost before it turned. “She's going to cross our bow.”

“I hope she isn't planning on giving us a broadside,” Giordino said half in jest, half seriously.

“Lay on the throttles and ram her amidships,” Pitt instructed Gunn.

“No!” Renee gasped, staring at Pitt stupidly, stunned. “That's suicide!”

“I'm with Dirk,” Giordino said loyally. “I say stick our bow in the sucker.”

A smile began to creep across Gunn's face as he became aware of what Pitt was silently implying. He stood at the helm and punched the engines, laying on full power and lifting the bow three feet out of the water. The
Poco Bonito
leaped forward like a racehorse prodded in the rump with a pitchfork. Within a hundred yards, she was flying across the water at fifty knots straight toward the port side of the pirate ship. The cannon muzzles, already poking through the gun ports, opened fire, spouts of flames bursting from their muzzles, accompanied by the sound of a thunderous blast that echoed over the water.

One quick glance at the radar screen and Pitt dashed to his cabin to retrieve his nightscope. He returned to the open deck in less than a minute and motioned for Giordino to follow him up a ladder to the roof of the pilothouse. Without the slightest hesitation, Giordino climbed after him. They lay flat on the roof, elbows braced to steady the nightscope they passed back and forth. Oddly, they did not stare directly at the luminescent phantom, but eyed the darkness ahead and astern of it.

Wondering if the two NUMA men were losing touch with all reality, Dodge and Renee instinctively ducked down on the deck behind the pilothouse. Above them, Pitt and Giordino ignored the approaching disaster.

“I've got mine,” declared Giordino. “Looks like a small barge to the west about three hundred yards.”

“I have my target too,” Pitt followed. “A yacht, a big one well over a hundred feet in length, the same distance to the east.”

A hundred yards, fifty, on a collision course with the unknown. Then
Poco Bonito
lunged into and through the opaque shape of the ancient barque. For an instant the yellow glow burst like orange lasers at a rock concert and shrouded the little research boat. Renee and Dodge could see the pirates moving above them on the main deck, firing their guns with a vengeance. Oddly, none of them took the slightest notice of the vessel plunging through their ship.

Then
Poco Bonito
was speeding alone over a velvet black sea. In her wake, the yellow glow abruptly blinked out and was gone, and the sounds of the guns melted into the night. It was as if the ghostly vision had never been.

“Stay on the throttles,” Pitt advised Gunn. “It's not healthy around here.”

“Were we hallucinating?” Renee muttered, her face white as a paper towel. “Or did we really run through a ghost ship?”

Pitt put his arm around her. “What you saw, dear heart, was a four-dimensional image—height, depth, width and motion—all recorded and projected in a hologram.”

Renee still seemed dazed as she stared into the night. “It looked so real, so convincing.”

“About twice as real as its phony captain with his
Treasure Island
Long John Silver peg leg,
Peter Pan
hook and Horatio Nelson eye patch. And then there was the flag. Blood was dripping in all the wrong places.”

“But why?” asked Renee to no one in particular. “Why such a production in the middle of the sea?”

Pitt's eyes were staring through the pilothouse doorway at the radar screen. “What we have here is a case of contemporary piracy.”

“But who projected the holographic image?”

“I'm in the dark, too,” added Dodge. “I saw no other vessels.”

“Your eyes and mind were focused on the apparition,” said Giordino. “Dirk and I observed a large yacht to our port and a barge to the starboard, both three hundred yards away. Neither showing any lights.”

A light went on in Renee's mind. “They projected the beam for the hologram?”

Pitt nodded. “They cast the illusion of a phantom ship and crew doomed to sail the sea forever. But their projection was one huge cliché. They must have created Hunt's ship and crew after watching too many old Errol Flynn movies.”

“Judging from the radar, the yacht is giving chase,” Giordino alerted them.

Standing at the helm, Gunn appraised the two blips on the screen. “One is stationary, which must be the barge. The yacht is following in our wake about half a mile astern, but is losing ground. They must be crazy mad at seeing an old fishing boat leave them in the foam.”

Giordino threw a wet blanket over the relief and joy. “We'd better pray that they don't carry mortars or rockets.”

“They'd have opened up on us by now—” Gunn's statement was punctuated by a missile that burst out of the early-morning night and whistled past
Poco Bonito,
grazing its radar dome, striking the water fifty yards ahead with a great thump.

Pitt looked at Giordino. “I wish you hadn't given them ideas.”

Gunn didn't answer. He was too busy spinning the helm and heaving the research boat on a sharp bank to port and then to starboard, weaving unpredictably to avoid the rockets that began to come every thirty seconds.

“Douse our running lights!” Pitt shouted to Gunn.

His reply was instant darkness, as the little NUMA director flicked off the main lighting switch. The swells had risen to three feet and
Poco Bonito
's beamy hull was now splashing through the crests at almost forty-five knots.

“How are we fixed for weapons?” Giordino asked Gunn calmly.

“Two M4 carbines with attached forty-millimeter grenade launchers.”

“Nothing heavier?”

“Easily hidden small arms is all the admiral would allow on board in case we were stopped and searched by a Nicaraguan patrol boat.”

“Do we look like drug smugglers?” demanded Renee.

Dodge stared at her with a crooked smile. “What do drug smugglers look like?”

Pitt said, “I've got my old Colt forty-five. How about you, Al?”

“A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic.”

“We may not be able to sink them,” said Pitt. “But at least we can repel boarders.”

“If they don't blast us to smithereens first,” grunted Giordino, as another missile landed in
Poco Bonito
's wake no more than fifty feet astern.

“So long as their rockets aren't equipped with homing devices, they can't hit what they can't see.”

Automatic weapons fire began to wink in the darkness behind them, as the modern pirates aimed by radar in their general direction. Tracers danced over the surface of the sea fifty yards to starboard in a spraying pattern. Gunn, playing the odds, turned the boat to port for a short distance before heading straight again. The tracers ever so slowly spiraled through the night, groping for their prey before falling away into the dark sea where
Poco Bonito
should have been but wasn't.

Two more rockets arced through the night. The pirates played the odds and fired them almost in parallel at the blip on their radar. They had the right idea, but they fired when Gunn was momentarily heading on a straight course before he feinted port before turning starboard. The rockets landed on opposite sides of the boat within fifty feet, showering the decks with twin cascades of water.

Then the firing stopped and it seemed as though a mantle of stillness had been drawn over the boat. Only the beat of the mighty engines straining in their mounts, the growl of the exhaust and the water sloshing past the bow broke the silence.

“Have they given up?” Renee murmured hopefully.

Staring at the radar, Gunn spoke happily through the pilot-house door, “They're turning away and reversing course.”

“But who
are
they?”

“Local pirates don't use holograms or fire missiles from yachts,” Giordino said flatly.

Pitt stared pensively out the back of the boat. “Our friends from Odyssey are the most likely suspects. No way they could have known our bodies weren't lying on the bottom of the sea. We simply walked into an ambush set for any boat or ship that wandered into this particular area.”

“They won't be happy campers,” said Dodge, “when they learn we're the ones who got away, not once but twice.”

Renee felt even more lost. “But why us? What did we do to be murdered?”

“I suspect we're trespassing on their hunting grounds,” Pitt said, taking a logical course. “There has to be
something
in this part of the Caribbean they don't want us or anyone else to see.”

“A drug-smuggling operation, perhaps?” offered Dodge. “Could it be Specter is involved with the drug trade?”

“Maybe,” said Pitt. “But from what little I know, his empire makes vast profits in excavation and construction projects. Drug running wouldn't be worth their time or effort, even as a side operation. No, what we have here goes far beyond drug smuggling or piracy.”

Gunn set the helm on autopilot, stepped from the pilot-house and wearily dropped into the lounge chair. “So what heading do we program into the computer?”

There was a long silence.

Pitt was not happy about further endangering everyone's lives, but they were here and they had a mission. “Sandecker sent us to find the truth behind the brown blob. We'll continue searching for the highest concentration of its contamination in the hope it will lead us to the source.”