“Seriously, where will you be?”
“A short fact-finding junket on a Russian cruise ship sailing the Caribbean.”
“Of course,” Pitt said. “I’d forgotten you chair the committee for merchant marine transport.”
Loren nodded and patted her mouth with her napkin. “The last cruise ship to fly the Stars and Stripes was taken out of service in 1984. To many people this is a national disgrace. The President feels strongly that we should be represented in ocean commerce as well as naval defense. He’s asking Congress for a budget outlay of ninety million dollars to restore the S.S. United States, which has been laid up at Norfolk for twenty years, and put her back in service to compete with the foreign cruise lines.”
“And you’re going to study the Russian method of lavishing their passengers with vodka and caviar?”
“That,” she said, looking suddenly official, “and the economics of their government-operated cruise ship.”
“When do you sail?”
“Day after tomorrow. I fly to Miami and board the Leonid Andreyev. I’ll be back in five days. What will you do?”
“The admiral has given me time off to pursue the Pilottown investigation.”
“Does any of this information help you?”
“Every bit helps,” he said, straining to focus on a thought that was a distant shadow on the horizon. Then he looked at her. “Have you heard anything through the congressional grapevine?”
“You mean gossip? Like who’s screwing who?”
“Something heavier. Rumors of a missing party high in government or a foreign diplomat.”
Loren shook her head. “No, nothing quite so sinister. The Capitol scene is pretty dull while Congress is in recess. Why? You know of a scandal brewing I don’t?”
“Just asking,” Pitt said noncommittally.
Her hand crept across the table and clasped his. “I have no idea where all this is taking you, but please be careful. Fu Manchu might get wise you’re on his scent and lay in ambush.”
Pitt turned and laughed. “I haven’t read Sax Rohmer since I was a kid. Fu Manchu, the yellow peril. What made you think of him?”
She gave a little shrug. “I don’t really know. A mental association with an old Peter Sellers movie, the Sosan Trading Company and the Korean crew of the Buras, I guess.”
A faraway look came over Pitt’s eyes and then they widened. The thought on the horizon crystallized. He hailed the waiter and paid the bill with a credit card.
“I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls,” he explained briefly. He kissed her lightly on the lips and hurried onto the crowded sidewalk.
32
Pitt quickly drove to the NUMA building and closed himself in his office. He assembled his priorities for several moments and dialed Los Angeles on his private phone line. On the fifth ring a girl answered who couldn’t pronounce her r’s.
“Casio and Associates Investigatahs.”
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Casio, please.”
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“My name is Pitt.”
“He’s with a client. Can you call back?”
“No!” Pitt growled menacingly. “I’m calling from Washington and it’s urgent.”
Suitably intimidated, the receptionist replied, “One moment.”
Casio came on the line almost immediately. “Mr. Pitt. Good to hear from you.”
“Sorry to interrupt your meeting,” said Pitt, “but I need a few answers.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“What do you know about the crew of the San Marino?”
“Not much. I ran a make on the officers, but nothing unusual turned up. They were all professional merchant mariners. The captain, as I recall, had a very respectable record.”
“No ties to any kind of organized crime?”
“Nothing that came to light in the computers of the National Crime Information Center.”
“How about the rest of the crew?”
“Not much there. Only a few had maritime union records.”
“Nationality?” Pitt asked.
“Nationality?” Casio repeated, thought a moment, then said, “A mixture. A few Greek, a few Americans, several Koreans.”
“Koreans?” Pitt came back, suddenly alert. “There were Koreans on board?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Now that you mention it, as I remember, a group of about ten signed on just before the San Marino sailed.”
“Would it be possible to trace the ships and companies they served prior to the San Marino?”
“You’re going back a long time, but the files should be available.”
“Could you throw in the history of the Pilottown’s crew as well?”
“Don’t see why not.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“What are you after exactly?” Casio asked.
“Should be obvious to you.”
“A link between the crew and our unknown parent company, is that it?”
“Close enough.”
“You’re going back before the ship disappeared,” said Casio thoughtfully.
“The most practical way to take over a ship is by the crew.”
“I thought mutiny went out with the Bounty.”
“The modern term is hijacking.”
“You’ve got a good hunch going,” said Casio. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you, Mr. Casio.”
“We’ve danced enough to know each other. Call me Sal.”
“Okay, Sal, and make it Dirk.”
“I’ll do that,” Casio said seriously. “Goodbye.”
After he hung up, Pitt leaned back and put his feet on the desk. He felt good, optimistic that a vague instinct was about to pay off. Now he was about to try another long shot, one that was so crazy he almost felt foolish for pursuing it. He copied a number out of the National University Directory and called it.
“University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology.”
“May I speak to Dr. Grace Perth?”
“Just a sec.”
“Thank you.”
Pitt waited for nearly two minutes before a motherly voice said, “Hello.”
“Dr. Perth?”
“Speaking.”
“My name is Dirk Pitt and I’m with the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Have you got a moment to answer a couple of academic questions for me?”
“What do you wish to know, Mr. Pitt?” Dr. Perth asked sweetly.
Pitt tried to picture her in his mind. His initial image was that of a prim, white-haired lady in a tweed suit. He erased it as a stereotype.
“If we take a male between the ages of thirty and forty, of medium height and weight, who was a native of Peking, China, and another male of the same description from Seoul, South Korea, how could we tell them apart?”
“You’re not doing a number on me, are you, Mr. Pitt?”
Pitt laughed. “No, Doctor, I’m quite serious,” he assured her.
“Hmmm, Chinese versus Korean,” she muttered while thinking. “By and large, people of Korean ancestry tend to be more classic, or extreme, Mongoloid. Chinese features, on the other hand, lean more generally to Asian. But I wouldn’t want to make my living guessing which was which, because the overlap is so great. It would be far simpler to judge them by their clothes or behavior, or the way they cut their hair — in short, their cultural characteristics.”
“I thought they might have certain racial features that could separate them, such as you find between Chinese and Japanese.”
“Well now, here the genetic spread is more obvious. If your Oriental male has a fairly dense beard growth, you’d have a rather strong indication that he’s Japanese. But in the case of China and Korea, you’re dealing with two racial groups that have intermixed for centuries, so much so that the individual variations would tend to blur out any distinction.”
“You make it sound hopeless.”
“Awfully difficult, maybe, but not ho
peless,” Dr. Perth said. “A series of laboratory tests could raise your probability factor.”
“My interest is strictly from a visual view.”
“Are your subjects living?”
“No, drowning victims.”
“A pity. With the living individual there are little traits of facial expressions that are culturally acquired and can be detected by someone who has had a lot of experience with both races. A pretty good guess may be made on that basis alone.”
“No such luck.”
“Perhaps if you could define their facial characteristics to me.”
Pitt dreaded the thought, but he closed his eyes and began describing the lifeless heads he’d seen on the Eagle. At first the vision was vague, but soon it focused with clarity and he found himself dissecting each detail with the callous objectivity of a surgeon narrating a heart transplant into a tape recorder. At one point he suddenly broke off.
“Yes, Mr. Pitt, please go on,” said Dr. Perth.
“I just remembered something that escaped me,” Pitt said. “Two of the bodies did in fact have thick facial hair. One had a mustache while another sprouted a goatee.”
“Interesting.”
“So they weren’t Korean or Chinese?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What else could they be but Japanese?”
“You’re leaping before you look, Mr. Pitt,” she said, as if lecturing a student. “The features you’ve described to me suggest a heavy tendency toward the classic Mongoloid.”
“But the facial hair?”
“You must consider history. The Japanese have been invading and marauding Korea since the sixteenth century. And for thirty-five years, from 1910 until 1945, Korea was a colony of Japan, so there was a great blending of their particular genetic variations.”
Pitt hesitated before he put the next question to Dr. Perth. Then he chose his words carefully. “If you were to stick your neck out and give an opinion on the race of the men I’ve described, what would you say?”
Grace Perth came back with all flags flying. “Looking at it from a percentage factor, I’d say your test group’s ancestry was ten percent Japanese, thirty percent Chinese and sixty percent Korean.”
“Sounds like you’ve constructed the genetic makeup of your average Korean.”
“You read it anyway you wish to see it, Mr. Pitt. I’ve gone as far as I can go.”
“Thank you, Dr. Perth,” Pitt said, suddenly exultant. “Thank you very much.”
33
“So that’s Dirk Pitt,” Min Koryo said. She sat in her wheelchair peering over a breakfast tray at a large TV screen in her office wall.
Lee Tong sat beside her watching the videotape of the Hoki Jamoki anchored over the presidential yacht. “What puzzles me,” he said quietly, “is how he discovered the wreck so quickly. It’s as though he knew exactly where to search.”
Min Koryo set her chin in frail hands and bowed her graying head, eyes locked on the screen, the thin blue veins in her temples pulsing in concentration. Her face slowly tightened in anger. She looked like an Egyptian mummy whose skin had somehow bleached white and remained smooth.
“Pitt and NUMA.” She hissed in exasperation. “What are those wily bastards up to? First the San Marino and Pilottown publicity hoax, and now this.”
“It can only be coincidence,” Lee Tong suggested. “There is no direct link between the freighters and the yacht.”
“Better an informer.” Her voice cut like a whip. “We’ve been sold out.”
“Not a valid conclusion, aunumi,” said Lee Tong, amused at her sudden outburst. “Only you and I knew the facts. Everyone else is dead.”
“Nothing is ever immune to failure. Only fools think they’re perfect.”
Lee Tong was in no mood for his grandmother’s Oriental philosophy. “Do not concern yourself unnecessarily,” he said acidly. “A government investigating team would have eventually stumbled onto the yacht anyway. We could not make the President’s transfer in broad daylight without running the danger of being seen and stopped. And since the yacht wasn’t reported after sunrise, simple mathematics suggested that it was still somewhere on or below the river between Washington and Chesapeake Bay.”
“A conclusion Mr. Pitt apparently had no trouble arriving at.”
“It changes nothing,” said Lee Tong. “Time is still on our side. Once Lugovoy is satisfied at his results, all that remains for us is to oversee the gold shipment. After that, President Antonov can have the President. But we keep Margolin, Larimer and Moran for insurance and future bargaining power. Trust me, aunumi, the tricky part is past. The Bougainville corporate fortress is secure.”
“Maybe so, but the hounds are getting too close.”
“We’re matching ourselves against highly trained and intelligent people who possess the finest technology in the world. They may come within reach, but they’ll never fully grasp our involvement.”
Mollified somewhat, Min Koryo sighed and sipped at her ever present teacup. “Have you talked to Lugovoy in the past eight hours?”
“Yes. He claims he’s encountered no setbacks and can complete the project in five more days.”
“Five days,” she said pensively. “I think it is time we made the final arrangements with Antonov for payment. Has our ship arrived?”
“The Venice docked at Odessa two days ago.”
“Who is ship’s master?”
“Captain James Mangyai, a trusted employee of the company,” Lee Tong answered.
Min Koryo nodded approvingly. “And a good seaman. He hired on with me almost twenty years ago.”
“He has his orders to cast off and set sail the minute the last crate of gold is loaded aboard.”
“Good. Now we’ll see what kind of stalling tactics Antonov will try. To begin with, he’ll no doubt demand to hold up payment until Lugovoy’s experiment is a proven success. This we will not do. In the meantime, he’ll have an army of KGB agents combing the American countryside, looking for the President and our laboratory facilities.”
“No Russian or American will figure out where we have Lugovoy and his staff hidden,” Lee Tong said firmly.
“They found the yacht,” Min Koryo reminded him.
Before Lee Tong could reply, the video screen turned to snow as the tape played out. He set the control for rewind. “Do you wish to view it again?” he asked.
“Yes, I want to examine the diving crew more closely.”
When the recorder automatically switched off, Lee Tong pressed the “play” button and the picture returned to life.
Min Koryo watched it impassively for a minute and then said, “What is the latest status report on the wreck site?”
“A NUMA salvage crew is bringing up the bodies and preparing to raise the yacht.”
“Who is the man with the red beard talking with Pitt?”
Lee Tong enlarged the scene until both men filled the screen. “That’s Admiral James Sandecker, Director of NUMA.”
“Your man was not seen filming Pitt’s movements?”
“No, he’s one of the best in the business. An ex-FBI agent. He was contracted for the job through one of our subsidiary corporations and told that Pitt is suspected of selling NUMA equipment to outside sources.”
“What do we know about Pitt?”
“I have a complete dossier flying in from Washington. It should be here within the hour.”
Min Koryo’s mouth tightened as she moved closer to the TV. “How could he know so much? NUMA is an oceanographic agency. They don’t employ secret agents. Why is he coming after us?”
“It’ll pay us to find out.”
“Move in closer,” she ordered.
Lee Tong again enlarged the image, moving past Sandecker’s shoulder until it seemed as though Pitt was talking to the camera. Then he froze the picture.
Min Koryo placed a pair of square-lensed glasses over her narrow nose and stared at the weathered but handsome face that stared back. Her dark
eyes flashed briefly. “Goodbye, Mr. Pitt.”
Then she reached over and pushed the “off’ switch, and the screen went black.
The smoke from Suvorov’s cigarette hung heavily in the air of the dining room as he and Lugovoy shared a bottle of 1966 Croft Vintage Port. Suvorov looked at the red liquid in his glass and scowled.
“All these Mongolians ever serve us is beer and wine. What I wouldn’t give for a bottle of good vodka.”
Lugovoy selected a cigar out of a box that was held by one of the Korean waiters. “You have no culture, Suvorov. This happens to be an excellent port.”
“American decadence has not rubbed off on me,” Suvorov said arrogantly.
“Call it what you will, but you rarely see Americans defecting to Russia because of our disciplined lifestyle,” Lugovoy retorted sarcastically.
“You’re beginning to talk like them, drink like them; next you’ll want to murder and rape in the streets like them. At least I know where my loyalties lie.”
Lugovoy studied the cigar thoughtfully. “So do I. What I accomplish here will have grave effects on our nation’s policy toward the United States. It is of far greater importance than your KGB’s petty theft of industrial secrets.”
Suvorov appeared too mellowed by the wine to respond angrily to the psychologist’s remarks. “Your actions will be reported to our superiors.”
“I’ve told you endlessly. This project is underwritten by President Antonov himself.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Lugovoy lit the cigar and blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “Your opinion is irrelevant.”
“We must find a means to contact the outside.” Suvorov’s voice rose.
“You’re crazy,” Lugovoy said seriously. “I’m telling you, no! I’m ordering you not to interfere. Can’t you use your eyes, your brain? Look around you. All this was in preparation for years. Every detail has been carefully planned to carry out this operation. Without Madame Bougainville’s organization, none of this would have been possible.”
“We are her prisoners,” Suvorov protested.
“What’s the difference, so long as our government benefits?”
“We should be masters of the situation,” Suvorov insisted. “We must get the President out of here and into the hands of our own people so he can be interrogated. The secrets you can pry from his mind are beyond comprehension.”
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