Another silence and an echo. "Why do you ask?"
"Just curious."
"Where did you obtain your information?"
Pitt couldn't resist. "Better you learn later."
Then he closed the connection.
19
Gunn guided Poco Bonito through the black water separating the high-bluffed straits. The water was deserted of all shipping as he kept the bow aimed straight down the middle of the channel. The lights on the top of the buoys that marked the entrance to the harbor swayed with the waves in the distance, one with a blinking green light, the opposite showing red.
As Pitt was sitting in the lounge chair enjoying the tropical evening at sea and watching the yellow glow of Bluefields fade into the darkness astern, the memory of the spy on the dock stayed in his mind and spread, like a plant with roots. There was an indefinite thought that seemed distant and unfocused. He was not concerned that they had been observed as they cast off their moorings. That part of the intrigue seemed inconsequential. The pickup truck with odyssey painted on the door measured no more than two points on his trepidation scale. It was the haste of the driver when she shot off the dock that puzzled him. There had been no need for a quick getaway. So she was made by the NUMA crew? So what? They'd made no move to approach her. The answer had to lie somewhere else.
And then it all crystallized when he recalled the driver's wet hair.
Gunn's right hand was poised above the twin throttles leading to the big fuel-injected engines in readiness to ease them forward and send the boat whipping over the low swells rolling in from the Caribbean. Abruptly, Pitt sat up in his lounge chair and shouted.
"Rudi, stop the boat!"
Gunn half turned. "What?"
"Stop the boat! Stop it now!"
Pitt's voice was as sharp as a fencing saber, and Gunn quickly complied, pulling the throttles back to their stops. Then Pitt yelled at Giordino, who was down below in the galley with Ford and Dodge, savoring pie and coffee. "Al, bring up my dive gear!"
"What's this all about?" asked Gunn in confusion as he stepped from the side door of the pilothouse. Looking bewildered, Renee and Dodge also appeared on deck to see what all the fuss was about.
"I can't be certain," explained Pitt, "but I suspect we might have a bomb on board."
"What brought you to that conclusion?" asked Dodge skeptically.
"The driver of the truck couldn't wait to get away. Why the hurry? There must be a reason."
"If you're right," spoke up Dodge, seeing the light, "we'd better find it."
Pitt nodded decisively. "My thoughts exactly. Rudi, you, Renee and Patrick search every inch of the cabins. Al, you take the engine room. I'm going over the side on the possibility it was attached under the hull."
"Let's get a move on," said Al. "The explosives could be on a timer set to detonate as soon as we cleared the harbor and moved into deep water."
Pitt shook his head. "I don't think so. There was always the chance we might have hung around the dock until morning. Impossible for anyone to predict the precise time we'd cast off and reach the open sea. My guess is that when we pass the entrance, a transmitter attached to one of the channel buoys will activate a receiver connected to the explosives."
"I believe you have an overactive gray matter," Renee said dubiously. "I can't for the life of me imagine who has a motive to kill all of us and destroy the boat."
"Somebody is afraid of what we might find," Pitt continued. "And for now the Odyssey mob is our prime suspect. Their intelligence-gathering must be good if they saw through the admiral's scheme to smuggle the five of us and the boat into Bluefields."
Giordino appeared from below with Pitt's dive gear. He didn't require intuition to accept Pitt's theory. From their many years together since elementary school, he knew Pitt rarely if ever misinterpreted events. Their trust in each other's vision was more than a simple bond. Many times in the past their minds had acted as one.
"We better move quickly," Pitt advised strongly. "The longer we hang around, the sooner our friends know we're onto them. They'll be expecting to see a fireworks display in the next ten minutes."
The message came through. No one needed any urging. They quickly coordinated their efforts and assigned themselves sections of the boat to search while Pitt stripped to his shorts and strapped on his air tanks and regulator. He didn't bother, nor did he take the time, to slip into a wet suit. Without its buoyancy he felt no necessity to be hindered by a weight belt. Inserting the regulator's mouthpiece between his teeth, he strapped a small tool kit around his left leg, gripped a dive light in his right hand and stepped over the stern.
The water felt warmer than the air above. Visibility was almost diamond clear. Shining the light downward, he could make out a flat, sandy, nondescript bottom eighty feet below. Pitt felt remarkably comfortable as the tepid water pressed against his body. The hull below the waterline was free of growth, having been dry-docked and scraped clean before Sandecker ordered Poco Bonito south.
He moved from the rudder and propellers toward the bow, swinging the light from port to starboard and back. There was always the danger of a curious shark, nosing its way toward the light, but in all his years of diving Pitt had seldom crossed paths with the murder machines of the deep. He concentrated instead on the object caught in the beam of his dive light, protruding like a tumor from the keel amidships. His suspicions confirmed, he stroked his fins slowly until he was staring at what he knew without the slightest doubt was an explosive device no more than ten inches in front of his face mask.
Pitt was no bomb expert. All he could determine was that some kind of oval-shaped cannister about three feet in length and eight inches wide had been attached to the aluminum hull where it met the keel. Whoever had placed the cannister had anchored it with an adhesive tape impervious to liquid and strong enough to maintain a grip against the drag from the water as the boat cruised through the channel.
There was no way he could tell what type of explosive was being used, but it looked to him like a classic case of overkill. It seemed far more than enough to blast Poco Bonito into a thousand fragments and her crew into tiny shreds of flesh and bone. It was hardly a pretty thought.
He clamped the dive light under an armpit and gently placed both hands on the cannister. One deep breath and he attempted to pull the cannister away from the hull. Nothing happened. He increased his effort, but it was fruitless. Without a firm base to stand on, Pitt could exert too little force to overcome the adhesive. He backed off, reached into the tool kit strapped to his leg and pulled out a small fisherman's knife with a curved blade.
Under the light, he took a quick glance at the orange dial on his ancient Doxa dive watch. He had been down four minutes. He had to hurry before Specter's agent onshore got wise that something was up. Very cautiously slipping the edge of the knife under the cannister as far as he dared, Pitt sliced the blade through the tape as if he was sawing a piece of wood. Whoever had attached the bomb used enough tape to choke a whale. Though he had split the tape in four different areas, the cannister still remained stuck to the hull.
Putting the knife back in the kit, Pitt gripped both ends, curled his body until his finned feet were planted firmly against the keel and heaved, praying that only an electronic signal would set it off. The cannister abruptly came off the hull with such momentum that Pitt was hurled through the water nearly six feet before drifting to a stop. It was then, as he held the explosives in his hands, that he realized he was gasping air from his tank like a pump, while his heart felt like it was trying to beat through his rib cage.
Without waiting for his heart to slow and his breathing to return to normal, Pitt swam along the keel and surfaced beside the rudder at the stern. No one was visible. They were all busily searching the interior of the boat. He spit out his mouthpiece and shouted.
"I could use some help!" He wasn't surprised that Giordino was the first to respond.
The little Italian burst through the engine room
hatch and leaned over the transom. "What have you got?"
"Enough explosives to disintegrate a battleship."
"You want me to lift it on board?"
"No." Pitt gasped, as a wave washed over his head. "Tie a long line to a life raft and throw it over the stern."
Giordino asked no questions as he hurried up a ladder to the roof of the deckhouse. There he feverishly yanked one of the two life rafts out of its cradle, where it was stowed untied so it could float free should the boat sink. Renee and Dodge appeared on the deck just in time to catch the raft as Giordino let it slide over the wheelhouse roof to the deck below.
"What's happening?" asked Renee.
Giordino nodded to Pitt's head bobbing in the water aft of the stern. "Dirk found an explosive device fastened to the hull."
Renee peered over the transom at the cannister revealed under the glow of Pitt's dive light. "Why doesn't he drop it on the bottom?" she murmured, her tone laced with fear.
"Because he has a plan," Giordino answered patiently. "Now give me a hand dropping the raft over the side."
Dodge said nothing, as the three of them manhandled the heavy raft over the railing into the water with a splash that covered Pitt's head. Kicking his fins furiously, he rose out of the water up to his chest, lifted the heavy cannister over his head and carefully lowered it onto the bottom of the raft, terribly aware that he could be overplaying his luck. His only consolation was that he would never realize he was sent to the great beyond until it was over.
Only after the cannister was safely secured inside the raft did Pitt utter a long sigh of relief.
Giordino dropped the boarding ladder and helped Pitt climb on board. As Giordino removed his air tanks, Pitt said, "Pour a few gallons of fuel into the raft, then pay out the line as far as it will go."
"You expect us to tow a raft full of explosives covered in gasoline?" Dodge asked hesitantly.
"That's the idea."
"What happens when it passes the buoy with the transmitter?"
Pitt looked at Dodge and flashed a crooked grin. "Then it will go bang."
20
When entering the harbor from seaward, the port buoy marking the sides of the channel is usually painted green with a matching colored light on top, and is given an odd number. The starboard buoy directly opposite is red, mounts a red light and sports an even number. As Poco Bonito exited Bluefields Harbor, the channel buoys appeared reversed, red to port, green to starboard.
Except for Giordino, who took the helm, everyone huddled on the stern deck and stared expectantly over the top of the transom as the outer harbor buoys came even with Poco Bonito's bow.
Secure in the knowledge that Pitt had discovered the explosives, and having witnessed him placing the cannister in the life raft before allowing it to fall astern, Ford and Dodge still half expected a fiery eruption that would destroy the boat. As they peered warily at the life raft, a small orange shape against the black water a hundred and fifty yards astern, you could have cut the cloud of apprehension with a chain saw until Poco Bonito's hull safely passed the buoys without disintegrating.
Then the tension mounted again, this time even higher as the raft was towed closer and closer to the buoys. Fifty yards, then twenty-five.
Renee instinctively ducked and placed her hands over her ears. Dodge crouched and turned his back toward the stern while Pitt and Giordino calmly gazed aft, as if waiting for a shooting star to dart through the stars.
"Soon as she blows," Pitt said to Dodge, "switch off our running lights so they think we've evaporated."
He had no sooner finished giving the order than the life raft vaporized.
The sound of the explosion thundered and echoed through the straits between the bluffs as the concussion rolled across the water, slapped their faces and rocked the boat. The darkness became a nightmare of flame and fiery debris as a great boiling upthrust of white water twenty feet wide burst out of a crater in midchannel. The fuel that Pitt had used to fill the life raft burst into a column of flame. The crew of Poco Bonito stared as if hypnotized at the atomized wreckage of the raft raining down from the sky like streaking meteors. Tiny bits and pieces splattered down on the boat without injuring anyone or doing damage.
Then, just as suddenly, the night went silent and the water astern the boat closed over the crater and was empty again.
The woman sat in the pickup truck and checked her watch a dozen times from the time the boat pulled away from the dock, and exhaled a deep breath of satisfaction when at last she heard the distant rumble and saw the brief flash in the blackness nearly two miles away. It had taken longer than she estimated. Eight minutes late, by her calculation. Perhaps the helmsman was cautious and sent the boat slowly through the black waters of the narrow channel. Or, perhaps there was a mechanical problem and the crew stopped the boat for a quick fix. Whatever the reason, it no longer mattered. She could inform her colleagues that the job was accomplished successfully. Rather than head directly for the airport and a waiting Odyssey corporate jet, she decided to go into the shabby downtown of Blue-fields and enjoy a glass of rum. For her work tonight, she felt entitled to a little rest and relaxation.
It had started to rain again, and she switched on the windshield wipers as she drove off the wharf and headed toward town.
The channel was cleared and they were outward bound. A heading was set for Punta Perlas and the Cayos Perlas Islands beyond. The skies were clearing and the stars appeared through the clouds as they picked up a light southerly breeze. Pitt volunteered to take the midnight to three a.m. watch. He manned the pilothouse and let his thoughts wander while the computerized automated controls precisely followed the programmed course. For the first hour, it took all his willpower not to fall asleep.
His mind began to create a vision of Loren Smith. Theirs was an on-again, off-again relationship that had lasted almost twenty years. At least twice they had come within a shadow of marrying, but both were already wed to their jobs: Pitt to NUMA, Loren to Congress. But now that Loren expressed a desire not to run for a fifth term, perhaps it was time for him to retire to a less demanding job that didn't take him to the far reaches of the oceans. He had experienced too many brushes with death that had left scars both physical and mental. Chances were, he was now on borrowed time. His luck couldn't last forever. If he hadn't been suspicious of the woman in the Odyssey truck and struck by a sudden revelation about the explosives, he, his friend Giordino and the others would all be dead now. Maybe it was time to retire. After all, he was a family man now, with two grown children and responsibilities he'd never imagined two years earlier.
The only problem was that he loved the sea, above and below. There was no way he could simply turn his back and give it up. Somewhere there had to be a compromise.
He refocused on the current problem of the brown crud. Still only minor traces of it were on the chemical detection instruments, whose delicate sensors were mounted under the hull. Despite the fact that no ship's lights showed on the horizons, he picked up a pair of binoculars and idly scanned the darkness ahead.
At a comfortable cruising speed of twenty knots, Poco Bonito had left the Cayos Perlas Islands behind over an hour ago. Laying down the glasses and then studying a navigation chart, Pitt estimated that they were about thirty miles off the town of Tasbapauni on the Nicaraguan coast. He glanced at the instruments again. Their needles and digital numbers still stood unwavering on zero, and he began to wonder if they were on a wild-goose chase.
Giordino joined him with a cup of coffee. "Thought you might like a little something to keep you awake."
"Thank you. You're an hour early for your watch."
Giordino shrugged. "I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep."
Pitt gratefully sipped at the coffee. "Al, how come you never got married?"
The dark eyes squinted with curiosity. "Why ask me that now?"
"I've had nothing but time on my brain and it wanders to strange subjects."
"What's the
old line?" Giordino said with a shrug. "I never found the right girl."
"You came close once."
He nodded. "Pat O'Connell. We both had our reservations at the last minute."
"What if I told you I'm thinking about retiring from NUMA and marrying Loren?"
Giordino turned and looked at Pitt as if he'd taken an arrow through one lung. "Say again?"
"I think you get the drift."
"I'll believe that when the morning sun rises in the west."
"Haven't you ever wondered about packing it in and taking it easy?"
"Not really," said Giordino thoughtfully. "I've never entertained any great ambitions. I'm happy at what I do. The husband and father routine never turned me on. Besides, I'm away from home eight months out of the year. What woman would put up with that? No, I guess I'll keep things just as they are until they wheel me into a nursing home."