Shock Wave dp-13

by Clive Cussler

  To Maeve, Pitt said, “Take several deep breaths and get as much oxygen as you can into your bloodstream. Exhale and then inhale as we go over the side.”

  “I bet I can swim underwater farther than you,” she said with gutsy resolve.

  “Here’s your chance to prove it,” he said admiringly.

  “Don’t waste time waiting for an air pocket. Go out the windows on your right and swim under the pier as soon as the water stops surging inside the bus.”

  Pitt reached behind the driver’s seat, unzipped his overnight bag, retrieved a nylon packet and stuffed it down the front of his pants, leaving a larger-than-life bulge.

  “What in the world are you doing?” asked Maeve.

  “My emergency goody bag,” explained Pitt. “I never leave home without it.”

  “They’re almost on us,” Giordino announced calmly.

  Pitt slipped on a leather coat, zipped it to his collar, turned and gripped the wheel. “Okay, let’s see if we can get high marks from the judges.”

  He revved up the engine and shifted the automatic transmission into sow. The battered bus jerked forward, right front tire flapping, steam billowing so thick he could hardly see ahead, gathering speed for the plunge. There was no railing along the pier, only a low, wooden horizontal beam that acted as a curb for vehicles. The front wheels took the brunt of the impact. The already weakened front suspension tore away as the wheelless chassis ground over it, the rear tires tearing rubber as they spun, pushing what was left of the Toyota bus over the side of the pier.

  The bus seemed to fall in slow motion before the heavier front end dropped and struck the water with a great splash. The last thing Pitt remembered before the windshield fell inward and the seawater surged through the open passenger door was the loud hiss of the overheated engine as it was inundated.

  The bus bobbed once, hung for an instant and they sank into the green water of the bay. All Dorsett’s security people saw when they ran to the edge of the dock and looked down, was a cloud of steam, a mass of gurgling bubbles and a spreading oil slick. The waves created by the impact spread and rippled into the pilings beneath the pier. They waited expectantly for heads to appear, but no indication of life emerged from the green depths.

  Pitt guessed that if the docks could accommodate large cargo ships the water depth had to be at least fifteen meters. The bus sank, wheels down, into the muck on the bottom of the harbor, disturbing the silt, which burst into a rolling cloud. Pushing away from the wheel, he stroked toward the rear of the bus to make sure Maeve and Giordino were not injured and had exited through a window. Satisfied they had escaped, he snaked through the opening and kicked into the blinding silt. When he burst into the clear, visibility was better than he had expected, the water temperature a degree or two colder. The incoming tide brought in fairly clean water, and he could easily distinguish the individual pilings under the pier. He estimated visibility at twenty meters.

  He recognized the indistinct shapes of Maeve and Giordino about four meters in front, swimming strongly into the void ahead. He looked up, but the surface was only a vague pattern of broken light from a cloudy sky. And then suddenly the water darkened considerably as he swam under the pier and between the pilings. He temporarily lost the others in the shadowy murk, and his lungs began to tighten in complaint from the growing lack of air. He swam on an angle toward the surface, allowing the buoyancy of his body to carry him upward, one hand raised above his head to ward off imbedding something hard and sharp in his scalp. He finally surfaced in the midst of a small sea of floating litter. He sucked in several breaths of salty air and swung around to find Maeve and Giordino bobbing in the water a short distance behind him.

  They swam over, and his regard for Maeve heightened when he saw her smiling. “Show-off,” she whispered, aware that voices could be heard by the Dorsett men above. “I bet you almost drowned trying to outdistance me.”

  “There’s life in the old man yet,” Pitt murmured.

  “I don’t think anyone saw us,” muttered Giordino. “I was almost under the dock before I broke free of the silt cloud.”

  Pitt motioned in the general direction of the main dock area. “Our best hope is to swim under the pier until we can find a safe place to climb clear.”

  “What about boarding the nearest ship we can find?” asked Giordino.

  Maeve looked doubtful. Her long blond hair floated in the water behind her like golden reeds on a pond. “If my father’s people picked up our trail, he’d find a way to force the crew to turn us over to him.”

  Giordino looked at her, “You don’t think the crew would hold us until we were under the protection of local authorities?”

  Pitt shook his head, flinging drops of water in a spiral. “If you were the captain of a ship or the commander in charge of dock police, would you believe a trio of half drowned rats or the word of someone representing Arthur Dorsett?”

  “Probably not us,” Giordino admitted.

  “If only we could reach the Ocean Angler.”

  “That would be the first place they’d expect us to go,” said Maeve.

  “Once we were on board, Dorsett’s men would have a fight on their hands if they tried to drag us off,” Pitt assured her.

  “A moot point,” Giordino said under his breath. “We haven’t the foggiest idea where the Ocean Angler is berthed.”

  Pitt stared at his friend reproachfully. “I hate it when you’re sober minded.”

  “Has she a turquoise hull and white on the cabins above like the Ice Hunter?” asked Maeve.

  “All NUMA ships have the same color scheme,” Giordino answered.

  “Then I saw her. She’s tied to Pier 16.”

  “I give up. Where’s Pier 16 from here?”

  “The fourth one north of here,” replied hid.

  “How would you know that?”

  “The signs on the warehouses. I noticed number 19 before I drove off of Pier 20.”

  “Now that we’ve fixed our location and have a direction, we’d best get a move on,” Giordino suggested. “If they have half a brain they’ll be sending down divers to look for bodies in the bus.”

  “Stay clear of the pilings,” cautioned Pitt. “Beneath the surface, they’re packed with colonies of mussels. Their shells can cut through flesh like a razor blade.”

  “Is that why you’re swimming in a leather jacket?” asked Maeve.

  “You never know who you’ll meet,” Pitt said dryly.

  Without a visual sighting, there was no calculating how far they had to go before reaching the research ship. Conserving their strength, they breaststroked slowly and steadily through the maze of pilings, out of sight of Dorsett’s men on the dock above. They reached the based Pier 20, then passed beneath the main dockyard thoroughfare, which connected to all the loading docks, be, fore turning north toward Pier 16. The better part of as hour crept by before Maeve spotted the turquoise hull reflected in the water beneath the pier.

  “We made it,” she cried out happily.

  “Don’t count your prize money,” Pitt warned her. “The dock might be crawling with your father’s muscle patrol.”

  The ship’s hull was only two meters from the pilings. Pitt swam until he was directly beneath the ship’s boarding ramp. He reached up, locked his hands around across member that reinforced the pilings and pulled himself out of the water. Climbing the slanting beams until he reached the upper edge of the dock, he slowly raised his; head and scanned the immediate vicinity. .

  The area around the boarding ramp was deserted, but a Dorsett security van was parked across the nearest entry onto the pier. He counted four men lined across an open stretch between stacks of cargo containers and several parked cars alongside the ship moored in front of the Ocean Angler.

  He ducked below the edge of the dock and spoke to Maeve and Giordino. “Our friends are guarding the entrance to the pier about eighty meters away, too far to stop us from making it on board.”

  No more conversati
on was necessary. Pitt pulled both of them onto the beam he was standing on. Then, at his signal, they all climbed over the beam that acted as a curb, dodged around a huge bollard that held the mooring lines of the ship, and with Maeve in the lead, dashed up the boarding ramp to the open deck above.

  When he reached the safety of the ship, Pitt’s instincts began working overtime. He had erred badly, and the mistake couldn’t be undone. He knew when he saw the men guarding the dock begin walking slowly and methodically toward the Ocean Angler as if they were out for stroll through the park. There was no shouting or confusion. They acted as though they had expected them quarry to suddenly appear and reach the sanctuary of the ship. He knew when he looked over decks devoid of human activity that something was very, very wrong. Someone on the crew should have been in evidence on a working ship. The robotic submersibles, the sonar equipment, the great winch for lowering survey systems into the depths were neatly secured. Rare was the occasion when an engineer or scientist wasn’t fussing with hi prized apparatus. And he knew when a door opened from a companionway leading to the bridge and a familiar figure stepped out onto the deck that the unthinkable had happened.

  “How nice to see you again, Mr. Pitt,” said John Merchant, snidely. “You never give up, do you?”

  Pitt, in those first few moments of bitter frustration, felt an almost tangible wave of defeat wash over him. The fact that they had been effortlessly and completely snared, that Maeve was trapped in the arms of her father, that there was every likelihood that he and Giordino would be murdered, was a heavy pill to swallow.

  It was all too painfully obvious that with advance warning from their agent inside NUMA, Dorsett’s men had arrived at the Ocean Angler first, and through some kind of subterfuge had temporarily subdued the captain and crew and taken over the ship just long enough to trap Pitt and the others. It had all been so predestined, so transparent that Arthur Dorsett had been certain to do something beyond the bounds of the ordinary, as a backup strategy in the event that Pitt and Giordino had slipped through his fingers and somehow come on board. Pitt felt he should have predicted it and come up with an alternate plan, but he’d underestimated the shrewd diamond tycoon. Pirating an entire ship while it was docked within stone’s throw of a major city had not crossed Pitt’s mind.

  When he saw a small army of uniformed men appear from their hiding places, some with police clubs, a few leveling rubber-pellet guns, he knew hope was lost. But not irretrievably lost. Not so long as he had Giordino at his side. He looked down at Giordino to see how he was reacting to the terrible shock. As far as he could tell, Giordino looked as though he was enduring a boring classroom lecture. There was no reaction at all. He stared at Merchant as though measuring the man for a coffin, a stare, Pitt observed, that was strangely like the one with which Merchant was appraising Giordino.

  Pitt put his arm around Maeve, whose brave front began to crumble. The blue eyes were desolate, the wide, waxen eyes of one who knows her world is ending. She bowed her head and placed it in her hands as her shoulders sagged. Her fear was not for herself but for what her father would do to her boys now that it was painfully obvious she had deceived him.

  “What have you done with the crew?” Pitt demanded of Merchant, noting the bandage on the back of his head.

  “The five men left on board were persuaded to remain in their quarters.”

  Pitt looked at him questioningly. “Only five?”

  “Yes. The others were invited to a party in their honor by Mr. Dorsett, at Wellington’s finest hotel. Hail to the brave explorers of the deep, that sort of tiring. As a mining company, Dorsett Consolidated has a vested interest in whatever minerals are discovered on the seafloor.”

  “You were well prepared,” said Pitt coldly. “Who in NUMA told you we were coming?”

  “A geologist, I don’t know his name, who keeps Mr. Dorsett informed of your underwater mining projects He’s only one of many—who provide the company with inside information from businesses and governments around the world”

  “A corporate spy network.”

  “And a very good one. We’ve tracked you from the minute you took off from Langley Field in Washington.”

  The guards who surrounded the three made no move to restrain them. “No shackles, no handcuffs?” asked Pitt.

  “My men have been commanded to assault and maim only Miss Dorsett should you and your friend attempt to escape.” Merchant’s teeth fairly gleamed under the sun between his thin lips. “Not my wish, of course. The orders came direct from Ms. Boudicca Dorsett.”

  “A real sweetheart,” Pitt said acidly. “I’ll bet she tortured her dolls when she was little.”

  “She has some very interesting plans for you, Mr. Pitt.”

  “How’s your head?”

  “Not nearly injured enough to keep me from flying over the ocean to apprehend you.”

  “I can’t stand the suspense. Where do we go from here?”

  “Mr. Dorsett will arrive shortly. You will all be transferred to his yacht.”

  “I thought his floating villa was at Kunghit Island.”

  “It was, several days ago.” Merchant smiled, removed his glasses and meticulously polished the lenses with a small cloth. “The Dorsett yacht has four turbocharged diesel engines connected to water jets that produce a total of 18,000 horsepower that enable the 80-ton craft to cruise at 120 kilometers an hour. You will find Mr. Dorsett is a man of singularly high taste.”

  “In reality, he probably has a personality about as Interesting as a cloistered monk’s address book,” said Giordino readily. “What does he do for laughs besides count diamonds?”

  Just for a moment, Merchant’s eyes blazed at Giordino and his smile faded, then he caught himself and the lifeless look returned as if it had been applied by a makeup artist.

  “Humor, gentlemen, has its price. As Miss Dorsett can tell you, her father lacks a fondness for satiric wit. 1 venture to say that by this time tomorrow you will have precious little to smile about.”

  Arthur Dorsett was nothing like Pitt had pictured him. He expected one of the richest men in the world, with three beautiful daughters, to be reasonably handsome, with a certain degree of sophistication. What Pitt saw before him in the salon of the same yacht he’d stood in at Kunghit Island was a troll from Teutonic folklore who’d just crawled from an underworld cave.

  Dorsett stood a half a head taller than Pitt and was twice as broad from hips to shoulders. This was not a man who was comfortable sitting behind a desk. Pitt could see from whom Boudicca had gotten the black, empty eyes. Dorsett had weathered lines in his face, and the rough, scarred hands indicated that he wasn’t afraid of getting them dirty. The mustache was long and scraggly with a few bits of his lunch adhering to the strands of hair. But the thing that struck Pitt as hardly befitting a man of Dorsett’s international stature was the teeth that looked like the ivory keys of an old piano, yellowed and badly chipped. Closed lips should have covered the ugliness, but oddly, they never seemed to close, even when Dorsett was not talking.

  He was positioned in front of the driftwood desk with the marble top, flanked by Boudicca, who stood on his left, wearing denim pants and a shirt that was knotted at her midriff but, oddly, buttoned at the neck, and Deirdre, who sat in a patterned-silk chair, chic and fashionably dressed in a white turtleneck under plaid shirt and skirt. Crossing his arms and sitting on his desk with one foot on a carpeted deck, Dorsett smiled like a monstrous old hag. The sinister eyes examined every detail of Pitt and Giordino like needles, probing every centimeter from hair to shoelaces. He turned to Merchant, who was standing behind Maeve, his hand resting inside a tweed sport coat on a holstered automatic slung under one arm.

  “Nicely done, John.” He beamed. “You anticipated their every move.” He lifted a matted eyebrow and stared at the two men standing before him, wet and bedraggled, turned his eyes to Maeve, stringy damp hair sticking to her forehead and cheeks, grinned hideously and nodded at Merchant. “Not all wen
t as you expected, perhaps? They look like they fell in a moat.”

  “They delayed the inevitable by trying to escape into the water,” Merchant said airily. The self-assurance, the pomposity, were mirrored in his eyes. “In the end they walked right into my hands.”

  “Any problems with the dockyard security people?”

  “Negotiations and compensation came off smoothly,” Merchant said buoyantly. “After your yacht came alongside the Ocean Angler, the five crewmen we detained were released. I’m confident that any formal complaint filed by NUMA officials will be met with bureaucratic indifference by local authorities. The country owes a heavy debt to Dorsett Consolidated for its contribution to the economy.”

  “You and your men are to be commended.” Dorsett nodded approvingly. “A liberal bonus will be forthcoming to all involved.”

  “That is most kind of you, sir,” Merchant purred.

  “Please leave us now.”

  Merchant stared at Pitt and Giordino warily. “They are men who should be watched carefully,” he protested mildly. “I do not advise taking chances with them.”

  “You think they’re going to try and take over the yacht?” Dorsett laughed. “Two defenseless men against two dozen who are armed? Or are you afraid they might jump overboard and swim to shore?” Dorsett motioned through a large window at the narrow tip of Cape Farewell, on New Zealand’s South Island, which was rapidly disappearing in the wake behind the yacht. “Across forty kilometers of sea infested with sharks? I don’t think so.”

  “My job is to protect you and your interests,” said Merchant as he slid his hand from the gun, buttoned his sport coat and stepped quietly toward the door. “I take it seriously.”

  “Your work is appreciated,” Dorsett said, abruptly becoming curt with impatience.

  As soon as Merchant was gone, Maeve lashed out at her father. “I demand you tell me if Sean and Michael are all right, unharmed by your rotten mine superintendent.”

  Without a word, Boudicca stepped forward, reached out her hand in what Pitt thought was a show of affection, but brought it viciously across Maeve’s cheek, a blow with such force it almost knocked her sister off her feet. Maeve stumbled and was caught by Pitt as Giordino stepped between the two women.