Crescent Dawn - Dirk Pitt Book 21

by Clive Cussler; Dirk Cussler

  “I can’t believe it. We had the clue to Kitchener’s death right in our hands and it was plucked away by that thief before we had the chance to figure out what it all meant.”

  “Don’t look so depressed. All is not lost,” Summer replied consolingly.

  “But we have so little left to go on. We’ll probably never find out the true meaning of the Manifest.”

  “To quote Aldrich, poppycock,” Summer replied. “We’ve still got Sally,” she added, holding up the doll.

  “What good is that?”

  “Well, our friend may have stolen the left leg, but we’ve still got the right.”

  She held the flayed doll toward Julie, yanking away a small piece of cotton stuffing. Peering inside, the historian could make out the tip of yet another scroll of paper, this one in the right leg.

  She said nothing, her eyes ablaze, as Summer gently worked the object free from the doll’s interior. As Summer laid it on the bench and carefully unrolled it, they could both see that it was not a sheet of parchment or papyrus like the other scroll. Instead, it was simply a typewritten letter, with the heading “University of Cambridge Archaeology Department” emblazoned across the top.

  32

  DIVERS ARE STILL DOWN,” GUNN ANNOUNCED.

  Standing on the bridge of the Aegean Explorer, he peered through a pair of binoculars at an empty Zodiac tied to a drop line that ran down to the Ottoman shipwreck. Every few seconds, he spotted a dual set of air bubbles breaking the surface a few feet from the buoyed line. Gunn swung the glasses past the Zodiac, refocusing the lenses on the large blue Italian yacht that was stationed close by. He noted curiously that its bow was facing him, which put the yacht perpendicular to the current. A partial glimpse of the rear deck showed some men scurrying about in activity, but Gunn’s view was quickly obscured by the vessel’s superstructure.

  “Our nosy friend is still perusing the neighborhood,” he said.

  “The Sultana?” Pitt said, having earlier deciphered the Italian yacht’s name.

  “Yes. Looks like she’s crept a little closer to the wreck site.”

  Pitt looked up from the chart table, where he was examining some documents.

  “He must be rather hard up for entertainment.”

  “I can’t figure out what he’s up to,” Gunn said, setting down the binoculars. “He’s got his side thrusters on, positioning himself crossways to the current.”

  “Why don’t you call him on the radio and ask him?”

  “The captain tried a number of friendly calls last night. Couldn’t even get a response.”

  Gunn stepped over and took a seat at the table opposite Pitt. Lying on the table were two tiny ceramic canisters that had been recovered from the wreck site. Pitt was comparing the items with an archaeological assessment of a merchant ship excavated by famed underwater archaeologist George Bass.

  “Any luck dating these?” Gunn asked, picking up one of the canisters and eyeing it closely.

  “They’re very similar to some pottery found on a merchant ship that sank near Yassi Ada in the fourth century,” Pitt said, showing Gunn a photograph from the report.

  “So Al’s Roman crown isn’t a phony?”

  “No, it would appear legitimate. We’ve got an Ottoman-era wreck that for some reason is carrying Roman artifacts.”

  “A nice find any way you slice it,” Gunn said. “I wonder where the items originated?”

  “Dr. Zeibig is assessing some grain samples that were embedded in one of the potsherds, which may indicate the vessel’s point of origin. Of course, if you’d have let us uncover the rest of your monolith, we might already have an answer.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Gunn protested. “That’s my find, and Rod said I could recover it with him on our next dive. You just keep Al away from it. Which reminds me,” he said, looking at his watch. “Iverson and Tang should be back up anytime now.”

  “Then I better go rouse Al,” Pitt said, rising from the table. “We’re scheduled for the next dive.”

  “I think I saw him napping next to his new toy,” Gunn said.

  “Yes, he’s been anxious to test-dive the Bullet.”

  As Pitt made his way across the bridge, Gunn gave one last warning.

  “Now, remember. You two keep your hands off my monolith,” he cried, waving a finger at Pitt as he departed.

  Pitt retrieved a dive bag from his cabin, then stepped to the rear deck of the ship. In the shadow of a white, aerodynamically shaped submersible, he found Giordino napping on a rolled-up wet suit. Pitt’s approaching presence was enough to wake Giordino, and he cocked open a lazy eyelid.

  “Time for another trip to my soggy royal yacht?” he asked.

  “Yes, King Al. We’ve been assigned to examine grid C-2, which appears to be a ballast mound.”

  “Ballast? How am I to add to my jewelry collection from the ballast mound?” Sitting up, he began slipping into his wet suit while Pitt unzipped his dive bag and followed suit. A few minutes later, Gunn came rushing up with a concerned look on his face.

  “Dirk, the divers were due up ten minutes ago, but they’ve yet to surface.”

  “They might be taking a cautious decompression stop,” Giordino suggested.

  Pitt gazed toward the empty Zodiac moored a short distance away. Iverson and Tang, the two men in the water, were both environmental scientists who Pitt knew to be experienced divers.

  “We’ll take the chase boat and have a look,” Pitt said. “Give us a hand, Rudi.”

  Gunn helped lower a small rigid inflatable that was barely big enough to hold both men and their dive gear. Pitt quickly strapped on his tank, mask, and fins as Giordino started the outboard motor and drove them at full throttle toward the Zodiac. There was no sign of the two divers when they pulled alongside the larger inflatable boat.

  The chase boat was still slowing when Pitt rolled over the side and into the water. He quickly swam over to the drop line, then descended alongside the rope. He expected to find the two men hanging on to the line ten or twenty feet beneath the surface in decompression, but they were nowhere to be seen. Pitt cleared his ears as he approached the fifty-foot mark, then kicked harder, pushing to reach the bottom. In the depths below, he could faintly make out the yellow aluminum excavation grid pegged into the sandy bottom. He flicked on an underwater flashlight as he approached the base of the drop line, where the visibility dimmed to a greenish murk.

  He briefly searched the perimeter around the anchored line, then swam over the grid, following the length of the shipwreck. He hesitated as he crossed over the fourth grid box, noting that there was a large indentation in the sand where Gunn’s beloved stone monolith had previously rested. Scanning ahead, he spotted a blue object near the ballast pile. Thrusting his fins sharply, he quickly kicked over to the prone figure of one of the divers.

  The body was wedged beneath the aluminum grid, with a number of ballast stones rolled onto the chest. A glance into the wide unblinking eyes behind the mask told Pitt that the NUMA scientist named Iverson was quite dead. Pitt searched the man’s equipment and noticed he seemed to be missing his regulator. A few yards away, Pitt spotted it on the seabed, a clean cut in the line indicating that it had been severed.

  Pitt noticed a light above him and was thankful to make out the stout figure of Giordino descending upon him. Approaching within a few feet, Giordino motioned toward the body of Iverson. Pitt responded by shaking his head, then held up the severed regulator, showing where it had been cut. Giordino nodded, then pointed toward the stern of the wreck, and Pitt joined him in swimming aft.

  They found the body of Tang drifting above the seafloor with a finned foot caught in the grid holding him anchored. He had drowned like Iverson, though he appeared to have flailed more wildly in his last moments of life. His mask, weight belt, and one fin had been torn away, and his severed regulator was visible in the nearby sand. Pitt drew his flashlight to the dead man’s face, revealing a large purple welt on the right cheekbone
. The scientist had probably seen what happened to Iverson and tried to defend himself, Pitt thought. Only the assailants had been too powerful or too many. Pitt turned the light to the deep around them, but the waters were empty. The attackers had already returned to the Italian yacht.

  Grabbing hold of Tang’s buoyancy compensator, he gave the corpse a tug upward as Giordino motioned that he would retrieve Iverson’s body. Pitt ascended slowly with his dead companion, kicking toward the drop line as he rose. Nearing the surface, he detected the low rumble of engines come to life. As the sound increased in intensity, he rightly figured that it was the yacht, throttling up, as it proceeded to flee the scene.

  While Pitt’s hunch was correct, he never envisaged the yacht’s path. Rising to the surface, he realized too late that the engines’ roar had grown significantly louder and that a surface shadow was rapidly approaching. He broke the water alongside the Zodiac and chase boat, looking up to see the imposing hull of the yacht screaming toward him at high speed just twenty feet away. The large blue hull slapped against the surface while a fountain of white water sprayed from its churning propellers off the stern.

  In an instant, the yacht burst upon the two small boats, instantly crushing the Zodiac with its battering hull and dicing propellers while batting the small chase boat across the waves like an insect. The demolished Zodiac quickly sank to the bottom as the yacht broke toward the horizon, surging like a bolt of lightning.

  In the yacht’s wake, the drop-line buoy slowly found its way back to the surface after being pummeled to the depths. Cut free from its line, it bobbed gently amid a foaming boil of sea that was colored crimson with human blood.

  33

  GIORDINO SAW THE SHADOW OF THE YACHT PASS OVERhead and surfaced a few yards from the buoy, the body of Iverson still in tow. He manually inflated the dead man’s buoyancy compensator as he watched the mangled remains of the Zodiac sink nearby. In the distance, he spotted the partially deflated chase boat drifting rapidly away with the aid of a light breeze. He quickly scanned the waters around him but saw no sign of Pitt. It was then that he noticed a dark spot in the water near the drifting buoy.

  Fearing the worst, he let go of Iverson and swam toward the buoy, intending to submerge and search for Pitt underwater. Reaching the buoy, he felt his stomach drop when he realized the darkened water nearby was created by human blood that pooled bright red. The center of the pool was suddenly disrupted by the rising presence of a wet suit-clad body. The body floated facedown, its head and extremities submerged, concealing its identity. The torso clearly displayed the source of the blood in the water. Sliced and mangled like it had been run over with a lawnmower, the body’s back side was a gruesome mix of shredded flesh and neoprene, mutilated by the yacht’s churning propellers.

  Giordino fought back his revulsion and swam hurriedly to the body. Dreading what he would find, he gently grabbed the torso and eased the head out of the water.

  It wasn’t Pitt.

  He nearly jumped out of his wet suit when he immediately felt a firm tap on his shoulder. Spinning around, he came face-to-face with Pitt, who had surfaced right behind him. Giordino noticed a faint streak of white paint on Pitt’s hood and shoulder.

  Spitting out his regulator, Giordino asked, “You okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Pitt replied, though Giordino could see a tint of anger in his friend’s eyes.

  “You and Tang were in the way of that freight train?” Giordino asked.

  Pitt nodded. “Tang saved my life.”

  When he’d surfaced in the path of the speeding yacht, Pitt had just seconds to react. He quickly tucked an arm through Tang’s buoyancy compensator and pulled the dead man to his chest, then leaned back and attempted to submerge. By then, the yacht was already upon them, slapping down hard onto Tang, and Pitt beneath him. Together, they were pummeled beneath the hull until they passed the wildly spinning propellers. Pitt had just been able to keep Tang above him, and the dead man’s body bore the brunt of the slicing blades.

  Pitt felt revulsion and anger at having to use the scientist’s body as a human shield, but he knew that he would have otherwise been cut to ribbons.

  “They killed him twice today,” Giordino said somberly.

  “They . . .” Pitt muttered, gazing toward the receding profile of the yacht racing toward the horizon. His mind was already churning over the question of who would commit murder over an old shipwreck, and why?

  “We better get him out of here before every shark in the Mediterranean shows up for lunch,” Giordino said, grabbing hold of Tang’s arm.

  The Aegean Explorer had already weighed anchor and was creeping up to the men in the water. A group of deckhands lowered a crane and quickly hoisted the dead men aboard, then helped pull up Giordino and Pitt. The ship’s captain and doctor scurried to the scene, followed closely by Gunn. The NUMA Deputy Director had a dazed look about him as he held an ice pack to his head.

  “They both died in the water,” Pitt said as the doctor kneeled down and quickly examined each man. “Drowned.”

  “Both accidental?” the captain asked.

  “No,” Pitt said as he stripped off his wet suit. He pointed to a severed air hose extending from Iverson’s dive tank.

  “Somebody cut their air lines.”

  “The same people that tried to iron us with the bottom of their rich Italian hull,” Giordino added.

  “I knew they were lying when they came aboard,” Captain Kenfield said, shaking his head. “But I certainly didn’t suspect they would resort to murder.”

  Pitt noticed a lump on Gunn’s head that he was rubbing with the ice pack.

  “What happened to you?”

  Gunn grimaced as he lowered the pack.

  “While you were down, the yacht sent over a small launch filled with armed thugs. Claimed they were with the Turkish Ministry of Culture.”

  “Policing the high seas in a luxury yacht?” Giordino asked skeptically.

  “I asked for their identification, but was shown the stock of a rifle instead,” Gunn said, repositioning the ice pack to the knot on his head.

  “They told us in no uncertain terms that we had no authority to be working on a shipwreck of the Ottoman Empire,” the captain said.

  “Interesting, that they knew what the wreck was,” Giordino noted.

  “What else did they want?” Pitt asked.

  “They demanded all of the artifacts that we had removed from the wreck,” Kenfield said. “I told them to get off my ship, but that didn’t go over too well. They marched Rudi and me onto the bridge wing and threatened to kill us. The crew had no choice but to acquiesce.”

  “Did they take everything?” Giordino asked.

  Gunn nodded. “They cleared out the lab, then beat it back to their yacht just before you guys surfaced.”

  “But not before ordering us off the site and threatening us to stay off the radio,” Kenfield added.

  “I hate to tell you they didn’t just take all our artifacts, Rudi,” Pitt said. “They also dug up your monolith from the wreck site.”

  “That’s the least of our losses,” he said grimly. “They’ve got Zeibig.”

  The captain nodded. “They asked who was in charge of the wreck excavation. Dr. Zeibig happened to be in the lab, and they forced him to go with them.”

  “After what they did to Iverson and Tang, we know they won’t hesitate to kill him, too,” Giordino said quietly.

  “Have you tried contacting anyone yet?” Pitt asked the captain.

  “I just got off the satellite phone with the Turkish Ministry of Culture. They confirmed that they possess no yachts and have no policing resources assigned to this region. I also contacted the Turkish Coast Guard. Unfortunately, they don’t have any vessels in the immediate area, either. They have directed us to their base at Izmir to file a report.”

  “In the meantime, the bad guys are able to disappear completely with Zeibig,” Pitt said.

  “I’m afraid there isn’t
much else we can do,” the captain said. “That yacht is at least twice as fast as the Aegean Explorer. There’s no way we could try pursuing them with any hopes of catching up. And once in port, we can alert our own government authorities as well.”

  Giordino loudly cleared his throat as he stepped forward. “I know something that could keep pace with that yacht.”

  He turned toward Pitt and gave him a confident wink.

  “You sure she’s ready?” Pitt asked.

  “She’s as ready,” Giordino said, “as a hungry alligator in a duck pond.”

  PREVIOUSLY PREPARED FOR LAUNCH, it took only a few minutes to check that all systems were operational before Giordino’s new submersible was lowered over the side. Seated at side-by-side controls, Giordino performed a quick safety check while Pitt radioed the bridge of the Aegean Explorer.

  “Explorer, please give me a current fix on our target,” he asked.

  “Radar shows she’s holding on a steady course of zero-one-two degrees,” replied the voice of Rudi Gunn. “She’s now approximately ten miles north of us.”

  “Roger, Explorer. Please follow at speed while we go try to catch the fox. Bullet out.”

  Pitt was wary of the notion of playing chase in a submersible. Normally reliant on battery power for propulsion, research submersibles were historically slow, plodding vehicles designed for limited range. But the Bullet had broken the rules of submersible development.

  Named for the vessel’s speed rather than shape, the Bullet was based on a design by Marion Hyper-Subs. The NUMA prototype mated a steel submersible cabin to a high-performance powerboat hull. As a submersible, the Bullet was capable of diving to depths of a thousand feet. On the surface, separate propulsion motors in a pressurized engine compartment along with a 525-gallon fuel tank allowed the Bullet to travel long distances at high speed. The design permitted the sub to reach remote dive sites without the need for an accompanying support vessel.

  “Ready to engage surface drive,” Giordino announced, then reached over and pressed the starter buttons for a pair of turbocharged diesel engines.