"I can't picture you expiring in a nursing home."
"The gunslinger Doc Holliday did. His last words were 'I'll be damned' when he looked at his bare feet and realized he wasn't dying with his boots on."
"What do you want on your tombstone?" Pitt asked, not without humor.
" 'It was a great party while it lasted. I trust it will continue elsewhere.' "
"I'll remember when your time comes--"
Suddenly, Pitt went silent as the instrument displays came to life and began detecting traces of chemical pollution in the water.
"Looks like we're picking up something."
Giordino turned for the stairway leading to the crew's cabins. "I'll wake Dodge."
A few minutes later, a yawning Dodge climbed to the pilothouse and began scanning the computer monitors and recordings. Finally, he stood back, seemingly perplexed. "This doesn't look like any man-made pollution I've ever seen."
"What do you make of it?" asked Pitt.
"I'm not sure yet till I run some tests, but it appears to be a veritable cocktail of minerals flowing from the chemical element chart."
Excitement began to mount as Gunn and Renee, aroused by the sudden activity in the pilothouse, joined them and offered to make breakfast. There was an underlying current of expectation and optimism as Dodge quietly began assembling the incoming data and analyzing the numbers.
The eastern sun was still three hours from sliding over the horizon when Pitt went out on deck and studied the black sea flowing past the hull. He lay on the deck, leaned through the railing and trailed his hand in the water. When he pulled it back and raised it before his eyes, the palm and fingers were covered with a brown slime. He reentered the pilothouse, held up his hand and announced, "We're in the crud now. The water has turned a dull brownish muck almost as if the bottom silt was stirred up."
"You're closer to the mark than you think," said Dodge, speaking for the first time in half an hour. "This is the wildest concoction I've ever seen."
"Any clues to its recipe?" asked Giordino, waiting patiently as Renee filled his plate with bacon and scrambled eggs.
"The ingredients are not what you might think."
Renee looked puzzled. "What type of chemical pollutants are we talking about?"
Dodge looked at her solemnly. "The crud is not derived from manufactured toxic chemicals."
"Are you saying man is not the culprit?" inquired Gunn, pushing the chemist into a corner.
"No," Dodge answered slowly. "The culprit in this case is Mother Nature."
"If not from chemicals, then what?" Renee insisted.
"A cocktail," replied Dodge, pouring himself a cup of coffee. "A cocktail containing some of the most toxic minerals found in the earth. Elements that include barium, antimony, cobalt, molybdenum and vanadium that are obtained from toxic minerals such as stibnite, barytine, patronite and mispickel."
Renee's finely defined eyebrows lifted. "Mispickel?"
"The mineral arsenic is obtained from."
Pitt looked at Dodge, soberly, speculatively. "How is it possible that such a heavily concentrated toxic mineral cocktail, as you call it, can multiply, since it's impossible for it to reproduce itself?"
"The accumulation comes from constantly being replenished," replied Dodge. "I might add that there are heavy traces of magnesium, an indication of dolomitic lime that has dissolved in unheard-of concentrations."
"What does that suggest?" queried Rudi Gunn.
"The presence of limestone, for one thing." Dodge answered directly. He paused a few moments to study a readout from a printer. "Another factor is the gravitational force that pulls minerals or chemicals in alkaline water toward true magnetic north. Minerals attract other minerals to form rust or oxidation. Chemicals in alkaline water pull other chemicals toward their surface to form toxic waste or gas. That is why most of the brown blob has moved north toward Key West."
Gunn shook his head. "That doesn't explain why Dirk and Summer were able to study sections of the blob on Navidad Bank on the other side of the Dominican Republic out in the Atlantic."
Dodge shrugged. "A portion must have been carried by wind and currents through the Mona Passage between Dominica and Puerto Rico before drifting onto Navidad Bank."
"Whatever the cocktail," said Renee, waving her environmentalist flag, "it's turned the water harmful and dangerous to all life that uses it--humans, animals, reptiles, fish, even the birds that land in it, not to mention the microbial world."
"What puzzles me," muttered Dodge, continuing as if he hadn't heard Renee, "is how something with the consistency of silt can bind together in a cohesive mass that floats over a great distance in a cloud no deeper than a hundred and twenty feet from the surface." As he spoke, he made notations in a notebook. "I suspect sea salinity plays a part in the spread, which might explain why the crud doesn't sink to the bottom."
"That's not the only odd part of the puzzle," said Giordino.
"Make your point?" Pitt softly probed.
"The water temperature is seventy-eight, a good five degrees below normal for this part of the Caribbean."
"Another problem to solve," muttered Dodge wearily. "A drop that low is a phenomenon that doesn't go by the book."
"You've accomplished a lot," Gunn complimented the chemist. "Rome wasn't built in a day. We'll collect specimens and let the NUMA lab in Washington find answers to the rest of the enigma. Our job now is to track down the source somehow."
"We can only do that by following a trail leading to the highest concentrations," said Renee.
Pitt smiled wearily. "That's why we came here--" He broke off suddenly, stiffened and gazed out through the windshield. "That," he continued quietly, "and our fun visit to Disneyland."
"You'd better get some sleep," said Giordino evenly. "You're beginning to babble."
"This is no Disneyland," said Renee, suppressing a yawn.
Pitt turned and nodded his head and pointed toward the sea beyond the bow. "Then why are we about to enter the Pirates of the Caribbean?"
All heads turned in unison, and all eyes stared into the dark water that ended where the stars began. They saw a faint yellow glow that slowly increased in brilliance as Poco Bonito moved steadily toward it. They stood there frozen in silence as the glow slowly materialized into a nebulous shape of an old sailing ship that became more defined with each passing minute.
For a moment, they thought they were losing touch with reality, until Pitt spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. "I wondered when old Leigh Hunt was going to show up."
21
The mood on board the boat had suddenly changed. For nearly a minute, no one moved. No one spoke as they stared uneasily at the bizarre phenomenon. Finally, Gunn broke the silence.
"The same Hunt the pirate the admiral warned us about?"
"No, Hunt the buccaneer."
"It can't be real." Renee stared in awe, refusing to believe what her eyes relayed to her brain. "Are we really looking at a ghost ship?"
Pitt's lips curled in a vague smile. "Only in the eye of the beholder." Then he paraphrased from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. "With never a whisper in the sea, oft darts the Odyssey ship."
"Who was Hunt?" asked Dodge, in a voice close to a quaver.
"A buccaneer who roamed the Caribbean from sixteen sixty-five until sixteen eighty, when he was captured by a British Royal Navy ship and fed to the sharks."
Not wanting to look at the phantom, Dodge turned away, his mind not functioning, and muttered, "What's the difference between a pirate and buccaneer?"
"Very little," answered Pitt. "Pirate is a general term that covers British, Dutch and French seafarers who captured merchant ships for prize money and treasure. The term buccaneer comes from the French for barbecue. The early buccaneers used to grill their meat and dry it. Unlike privateers, who had valid commissions from their government, buccaneers preyed on any ship, mostly Spanish, without papers. They were also known as freebooters."
The g
hostly vessel was only a half a mile away now and closing fast. The eerie yellow glow gave the apparition a surrealistic image. As it neared and the details of the ship became more distinct, the sounds of men shouting across the water began to be heard aboard the phantom.
She was a square-rigged barque with three masts and a shallow draft, a favorite vessel of pirates before the seventeen hundreds. The foresails and topsails were billowing in a nonexistent breeze. She mounted ten guns, five run out on the main deck on both sides. Men with bandanas around their head were standing on the quarterdeck, waving swords. High on her mainmast, a huge black flag with a fiendishly grinning skull dripping blood stood straight out as if the ship was sailing against a headwind.
The expressions on the faces of those on the Poco Bonito varied from growing horror to foreboding to academic contemplation. Giordino looked as if he was staring at cold pizza, while Pitt peered through binoculars at the phantasm with the face of a man enjoying a science fiction movie. Then he lowered the glasses and began to laugh "Are you mad?" Renee demanded.
He handed her the glasses. "Look at the man in the scarlet suit with the gold sash standing on the quarterdeck and tell me what you see."
She stared through the lenses. "A man with a feathered hat."
"What else sets him apart from the others."
"He has a peg leg and a hook on his right hand."
"Don't forget the eye patch."
"Yes. There's that too."
"All that's missing is a parrot on one shoulder."
She lowered the binoculars. "I don't understand."
"A bit stereotyped, don't you think?"
An old Navy man who had served fifteen years on the sea, Gunn read the ghost ship's change of course almost before it turned. "She's going to cross our bow."
"I hope she isn't planning on giving us a broadside," Giordino said half in jest, half seriously.
"Lay on the throttles and ram her amidships," Pitt instructed Gunn.
"No!" Renee gasped, staring at Pitt stupidly, stunned. "That's suicide!"
"I'm with Dirk," Giordino said loyally. "I say stick our bow in the sucker."
A smile began to creep across Gunn's face as he became aware of what Pitt was silently implying. He stood at the helm and punched the engines, laying on full power and lifting the bow three feet out of the water. The Poco Bonito leaped forward like a racehorse prodded in the rump with a pitchfork. Within a hundred yards, she was flying across the water at fifty knots straight toward the port side of the pirate ship. The cannon muzzles, already poking through the gun ports, opened fire, spouts of flames bursting from their muzzles, accompanied by the sound of a thunderous blast that echoed over the water.
One quick glance at the radar screen and Pitt dashed to his cabin to retrieve his nightscope. He returned to the open deck in less than a minute and motioned for Giordino to follow him up a ladder to the roof of the pilothouse. Without the slightest hesitation, Giordino climbed after him. They lay flat on the roof, elbows braced to steady the nightscope they passed back and forth. Oddly, they did not stare directly at the luminescent phantom, but eyed the darkness ahead and astern of it.
Wondering if the two NUMA men were losing touch with all reality, Dodge and Renee instinctively ducked down on the deck behind the pilothouse. Above them, Pitt and Giordino ignored the approaching disaster.
"I've got mine," declare Giordino. "Looks like a small barge to the west about three hundred yards."
"I have my target too," Pitt followed. "A yacht, a big one well over a hundred feet in length, the same distance to the east."
A hundred yards, fifty, on a collision course with the unknown. Then Poco Bonito lunged into and through the opaque shape of the ancient barque. For an instant the yellow glow burst like orange lasers at a rock concert and shrouded the little research boat. Renee and Dodge could see the pirates moving above them on the main deck, firing their guns with a vengeance. Oddly, none of them took the slightest notice of the vessel plunging through their ship.
Then Poco Bonito was speeding alone over a velvet black sea. In her wake, the yellow glow abruptly blinked out and was gone, and the sounds of the guns melted into the night. It was as if the ghostly vision had never been.
"Stay on the throttles," Pitt advised Gunn. "It's not healthy around here."
"Were we hallucinating?" Renee muttered, her face white as a paper towel. "Or did we really run through a ghost ship?"
Pitt put his arm around her. "What you saw, dear heart, was a four-dimensional image--height, depth, width and motion--all recorded and projected in a hologram."
Renee still seemed dazed as she stared into the night. "It looked so real, so convincing."
"About twice as real as its phony captain with his Treasure Island Long John Silver peg leg, Peter Pan hook and Horatio Nelson eye patch. And then there was the flag. Blood was dripping in all the wrong places."
"But why?" asked Renee to no one in particular. "Why such a production in the middle of the sea?"
Pitt's eyes were staring through the pilothouse doorway at the radar screen. "What we have here is a case of contemporary piracy."
"But who projected the holographic image?"
"I'm in the dark too," added Dodge. "I saw no other vessels."
"Your eyes and mind were focused on the apparition," said Giordino. "Dirk and I observed a large yacht to our port and a barge to the starboard, both three hundred yards away. Neither showing any lights."
A light went on in Renee's mind. "They projected the beam for the hologram?"
Pitt nodded. "They cast the illusion of a phantom ship and crew doomed to sail the sea forever. But their projection was one huge cliché. They must have created Hunt's ship and crew after watching too many old Errol Flynn movies."
"Judging from the radar, the yacht is giving chase," Giordino alerted them.
Standing at the helm, Gunn appraised the two blips on the screen. "One is stationary, which must be the barge. The yacht is following in our wake about half a mile astern, but is losing ground. They must be crazy mad at seeing an old fishing boat leave them in the foam."
Giordino threw a wet blanket over the relief and joy. "We'd better pray that they don't carry mortars or rockets."
"They'd have opened up on us by now--" Gunn's statement was punctuated by a missile that burst out of the early-morning night and whistled past Poco Bonito, grazing its radar dome, striking the water fifty yards ahead with a great thump.
Pitt looked at Giordino. "I wish you hadn't given them ideas."
Gunn didn't answer. He was too busy spinning the helm and heaving the research boat on a sharp bank to port and then to starboard, weaving unpredictably to avoid the rockets that began to come every thirty seconds.
"Douse our running lights!" Pitt shouted to Gunn.
His reply was instant darkness, as the little NUMA director flicked off the main lighting switch. The swells had risen to three feet and Poco Bonito's beamy hull was now splashing through the crests at almost forty-five knots.
"How are we fixed for weapons?" Giordino asked Gunn calmly.
"Two M4 carbines with attached forty-millimeter grenade launchers."
"Nothing heavier?"
"Easily hidden small arms is all the admiral would allow on board in case we were stopped and searched by a Nicaraguan patrol boat."
"Do we look like drug smugglers?" demanded Renee.
Dodge stared at her with a crooked smile. "What do drug smugglers look like?"
Pitt said, "I've got my old Colt forty-five. How about you, Al?"
"A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic."
"We may not be able to sink them," said Pitt. "But at least we can repel boarders."
"If they don't blast us to smithereens first," grunted Giordino, as another missile landed in Poco Bonito's wake no more than fifty feet astern.
"So long as their rockets aren't equipped with homing devices, they can't hit what they can't see."
Automatic weapons fire began
to wink in the darkness behind them, as the modern pirates aimed by radar in their general direction. Tracers danced over the surface of the sea fifty yards to starboard in a spraying pattern. Gunn, playing the odds, turned the boat to port for a short distance before heading straight again. The tracers ever so slowly spiraled through the night, groping for their prey before falling away into the dark sea where Poco Bonito should have been but wasn't.
Two more rockets arced through the night. The pirates played the odds and fired them almost in parallel at the blip on their radar. They had the right idea, but they fired when Gunn was momentarily heading on a straight course before he feinted port before turning starboard. The rockets landed on opposite sides of the boat within fifty feet, showering the decks with twin cascades of water.