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 was 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."
The 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 schoolteacher, 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 hun
dred 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.
Finally, he turned back to the boat. "So this is Poco Bonito."
"Not much to look at, is she?" Gunn said, as he opened the trunk and helped retrieve the bags. "But she's powered by twin thousand-horsepower diesels and carries scientific gear most chemical labs would die for."
"There's a switch," said Pitt.
Gunn looked at him. "How so?"
"This has to be the only vessel in the NUMA fleet that isn't painted turquoise."
"I'm familiar with the smaller Neptune class of NUMA survey ships," said Giordino. "She's also built like an armored car and comfortably stable in heavy seas." He hesitated and looked up and down the wharf at the other fishing boats. "Nice job of disguise. Except for her larger deckhouse, which you can't reduce with a stage set, she fits right in."
"How old is she?" Pitt asked.
"Six months," answered Gunn.
"How did our engineers make her look so ... so used?"
"Special effects," Gunn replied, laughing. "The shabby paint and rust are specially formulated to give that appearance."
Pitt leaped from the dock onto the deck and turned as Giordino passed over their luggage and duffel bag. The sound of feet thumping on the deck alerted a man and a woman, who appeared from the rear door of the deckhouse. The man, in his early fifties with a neatly trimmed gray beard and bushy eyebrows, stepped under the deck light. His head was shaven and gleamed with sweat. He wasn't much taller than Giordino and he stood with slightly hunched shoulders.
The other crew member was nearly six feet tall and willowy, with the anorexic figure of a fashion model. The blond hair, radiant and thick, splashed around her shoulders. Her face was tanned with high cheekbones and when she smiled a greeting she displayed a fine set of white teeth. Like most women who worked in the outdoors, she wore her hair tied back and little makeup, which did not distract from her overall attractiveness. At least not in Pitt's mind. He noted that she did adhere to certain feminine traits of beauty. She painted her toenails.
Both man and woman were dressed in native cotton shirts with vertical stripes over khaki shorts. The man wore sneakers that looked like they had been shot full of holes, while the woman's feet were slipped into wide-strapped sandals.
Gunn made the introductions. "Dr. Renee Ford, our resident fishery's biologist, and Dr. Patrick Dodge, NUMA's leading marine geochemist. I believe you know Dirk Pitt, special projects director, and Al Giordino, marine engineer."
"We've never worked on the same project together," said Renee in a husky voice only a few decibels above a whisper. "But we've sat together in conferences on several occasions."
"Likewise," said Dodge, as he shook hands.
Pitt was tempted to ask if Ford and Dodge shared a garage, but held back from making a bad joke. "Good to see you again."
"I trust we'll have a happy ship." Giordino flashed one of his congenial grins.
"Why wouldn't we?" Renee asked sweetly.
Giordino did not reply. It was another of the rare times he was at a loss for a comeback.
Pitt stood for several moments, listening to the water slapping against the wharf pilings. Not a soul could be seen. The wharf looked deserted. Almost, but not quite.
He dropped down to his cabin in the stern, removed a small black case from his suitcase and eased back up the stairway onto the side of the deck opposite the wharf. Using the deckhouse as a cover, he opened the case and removed what looked like a video camera. He switched on its transformer and it gave off a muted high-pitched whine. Next, he draped a blanket over his head and slowly rose until his eyes could peer over a pile of rope coiled on the deckhouse roof. He pressed his face against the eyepiece of the night-vision monocular as the scope automatically adjusted the amplification, brightness control and infrared illuminator. Then he peered into the darkness across the wharf that was now illuminated in a greenish image that gave him the night vision of an owl.
The Chevrolet pickup truck he'd noticed when arriving at the Poco Bonito was still sitting in the dark. The ambient light from the stars and two dim lights a hundred yards down the wharf were now enhanced twenty thousand times, revealing the driver of the truck as if he were in a well-lit room. But as Pitt studied the driver, he saw that he was a she. Pitt could tell by the way the observer swept her scope back and forth across the lit portholes of the hull that she did not suspect that she had been detected. He could even tell that her hair was wet.
Pitt lowered the scope slightly until it was focused on the pickup truck's driver's door. The snoop was no professional, Pitt thought. Nor was she cautious. Probably a construction worker doing double duty as a spy, since the name of her employer was painted on the side of the door in gold letters:
ODYSSEY
The name stood alone, no "Limited," no "Corporation," no "Company," after it.
Below the name was the stylized image of a horse running with its legs outstretched. It looked vaguely familiar to Pitt, but he couldn't recall where he'd seen it.
Why was Odyssey interested in a NUMA research expedition?
Pitt wondered. What possible threat was a team of ocean scientists? He saw no sense to the stakeout by a giant organization with nothing to gain.
He could not refrain from standing up and walking to the wharf side of the boat and waving to the woman in the pickup, who immediately trained her nightscope on him. Pitt held up his scope to his eyes and stared back. Definitely not a professional snoop, the woman became so shaken that she dropped her scope on the seat, hurriedly kicked over the engine and roared across the wharf into the darkness, spinning her rear tires in a screech of protest.
Renee looked up in unison with Giordino and Dodge. "What was that all about?" asked Renee.
"Someone in a hurry," Pitt said in amusement.
Renee cast off the bow and stern lines while the men looked on. With Gunn manning the pilothouse, the powerful engines sputtered and rumbled into life with a mellow hum, as they gently shivered the deck. Then Poco Bonito slipped away from the wharf and churned into the channel that ran through the Straits of Bluffs to the sea. The course, programed into the computerized navigation equipment, set the bow on a heading toward the northeast. But Gunn--like most airline pilots, who would rather take off and land a commercial airliner than allow a computer to do it--took the wheel and steered the vessel seaward.
Pitt descended a ladder to his cabin, replaced the nightscope in his bag and retrieved a Globalstar tri-mode satellite phone. Then he returned to the deck and relaxed in a tattered lounge chair. He turned and smiled as Renee extended her hand through a porthole of the galley with a cup in her hand.
"Coffee?" she inquired from inside the galley.
"You're an angel," said Pitt. "Thank you."
He sipped at the coffee and then punched a number on the satellite phone. Sandecker answered on the fourth ring. "Sandecker," the admiral snapped briskly.
"Did you forget to tell me something, Admiral?"
"You're not clear."
<
br /> "Odyssey."
There was a silence. Then, "Why do you ask?"
"One of their people was spying on us as we boarded the boat. I'm interested in knowing why."
"Better you learn later," Sandecker said cryptically.
"Has this to do with Odyssey's excavation project in Nicaragua?" Pitt asked innocently.