The stern of the ferry was about to go under, the water rolling up the deck and flooding into the open hatch. The thumping sound in his ears came louder and he looked up to see Giordino hanging on to a sling, seemingly floating in midair. Then Pitt saw the helicopter. Thank God Nash had a change of heart, he thought in his fogged mind.
He grabbed Giordino around the waist as strong muscular arms gripped him under his shoulders. The ferry slipped away beneath his feet and sank below the waves, just as he was hauled into the air.
"The scientists?" he gasped to Giordino. He saw none in the water.
"Lifted on board the copter," Giordino shouted above the wind and rotor noise. "The guards gave up when Nash and his team showed up and fled in the patrol boat."
"Is everybody off the island?" he asked Nash, who came over and knelt beside him.
"We even evacuated the stray cats and dogs," Nash said with a satisfied grin. "We pulled off the operation ahead of schedule and then came after you. When you didn't surface with the rest of the people, we thought you were a goner, all except Al here. Before I could stop him, he'd dropped down on the lift cable to the ferry deck. Only then did we see you appear out of the hatch."
"Lucky for me you arrived at an opportune moment."
"How long before the finale?" asked Giordino.
"As soon as we evacuated everyone from Ometepe to shore, they were transported by truck and buses to high ground, along with all the residents living within two miles of the lake." Nash paused to read the time on his wristwatch. "I estimate it will take another thirty-five minutes before they reach complete safety. When I receive word all is well, I'll send the signal to the pilot to drop his bomb."
"Did your teams meet up with a small army of uniformed women who put up a resistance?" Pitt inquired.
Nash gave him an odd look and grinned. "Wearing funny-colored jumpsuits?"
"Lavender and green?"
"They fought like Amazons," answered Nash in leftover disbelief. "Three of my men were wounded when they temporarily refrained from shooting at women who were shooting at them. We had no choice but to return fire."
Giordino stared down at the headquarters building as the helicopter passed over the facility. The windows were shattered and smoke was rolling from the tenth floor. "How many did you take down?"
"We counted at least nine bodies." Nash looked mystified. "Most of the women were knockouts, really beautiful. My men took it hard. I don't doubt some will suffer psychological problems when they return to home. They weren't trained to fire on civilian women."
"One of them didn't happen to be wearing a gold jumpsuit?" Pitt asked.
Nash thought a moment and then shook his head. "No, I didn't see anyone fitting that description." There was a pause. "Did she have red hair?"
"Yes, her hair was red."
"So were all those who died, the same red tint on all of them. They fought like crazy fanatics. It was unreal."
The helicopter remained on station over the island. Nash received word that the evacuation was successfully completed almost to the minute of his estimate. Without a second's hesitation, he issued the clearance for the B-52 to drop the bomb.
The bomber was so high in the sky, they could not see it or detect the bomb as it fell from sixty thousand feet. Nor did they see the bomb strike the volcano's slope above the Odyssey facility and penetrate deep below the surface. Seconds later, a great rumble came from the slope of Mount Concepcion. The detonation seemed more like a huge thud than the sharp boom of a bomb exploding on impact with the ground. This was quickly followed by a new sound like rolling thunder, as the slope of the volcano let loose its grip on the cone and began collapsing, picking up speed as it shot downward until it reached an incredible eighty miles an hour.
From the air it looked as if the entire research and development complex with all its buildings, docks and aircraft terminal was sliding under the lake's surface like a monstrous coin thrown by a giant hand. Clouds of debris and dust burst into the sky as an enormous wave built and rose over two hundred feet high. Then the crest curled and swept across the lake at astonishing speed, eventually crashing against the shorelines and inundating everything that stood in its path, before finally dying at its highest penetration and receding almost reluctantly back into the lake bed.
In the time it took to turn two pages in a book, the great research center created by Specter, his female directors and his Odyssey empire had vanished, along with the tunnels that were crushed flat.
The South Equatorial Current would not be diverted into the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf Stream would flow as it had for a million years, and there would be no deep freeze across Europe and North America until the next ice age.
45
The layer of black haze began to merge with a bright white glow. The stars that had soared inside his head faded to a scant few as Dirk slowly returned to consciousness. He felt cold from the damp. Stunned by a sea of pain inside his head, he rose up on his elbows and looked around him.
He found himself in a small rectangular room, no more than five by three feet. The ceiling, floor and three walls were solid concrete. The fourth wall was filled by a rusty iron door. There was no handle on the inside. A small window no larger than a pie plate was embedded in the roof of his cell. Light filtered through it and dimly lit his tiny gray world. There was no bunk or blanket, only a hole in the floor for sanitation.
He never experienced a hangover to match the throb inside his head. There was a knot above the left ear that felt as big as a computer mouse. Rising to his feet was a major effort. If nothing else but to satisfy his curiosity, he pushed on the door. He might as well have tried to knock over an oak tree. All he wore when he went to sleep on the boat were a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Looking down, he saw that his shirt and shorts were gone and he was wearing a white silk bathrobe. It seemed so out of place with his surroundings that he could not begin to imagine its significance.
Then his thoughts turned to Summer. What had happened to her? Where was she? He could remember nothing except watching a half-moon rise over the sea before falling asleep on the boat. The ache in his head began to subside slightly. He came to realize that someone must have clubbed him on the head, then carried him ashore and put him in this cell. But what of Summer. What had happened to her? Desperation began to seep into his mind. His situation looked hopeless. He could do nothing trapped in a concrete box. Escape seemed impossible.
It was sometime late in the afternoon when Dirk heard a sound outside his cell. There came the click of a lock turning and the door swung outward. A woman with blond hair, blue eyes and wearing a green jumpsuit stood with a large automatic pistol in her hand, aimed squarely at his chest.
"You will come with me," she said softly, without the slightest harsh quality.
In another setting Dirk would have found her quite attractive, but here, she seemed as nasty as the Wicked Witch of the West. "Where to?" he asked.
She prodded him in the back with the muzzle of her gun without replying. He was marched down a long corridor past several iron doors. Dirk wondered if Summer was behind one of them. They came to a stairway at the end and he began climbing without being told. At the top, they passed through a door into a marble-floored entry with walls embedded with millions of pieces of mosaic gold tile. The chairs were covered in lavender-dyed leather and the tables with inlaid lavender-stained wood. He thought it gaudy and overdone.
The female guard escorted him to a huge pair of gold-gilded doors, knocked and then stood aside as they were opened from within. She motioned for him to enter.
Dirk was stunned at the sight of four beautiful women with flowing red hair in lavender and gold gowns sitting around a long conference table carved from a solid block of red coral. Summer was also sitting at the table, but attired in a white gown. He rushed over to her and grasped her by the shoulders.
"Are you all right?"
She turned slowly and looked up at him as if in a trance. "All right? Yes, I
'm all right."
He could see that she was heavily drugged. "What have they done to you?"
"Please sit down, Mr. Pitt," ordered the woman seated at the head of the table, who was attired in a gold gown. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and musical, but touched with arrogance.
Dirk sensed a movement behind him. The guard had withdrawn from the room and closed the door. For a brief instant, he thought that even though the women outnumbered him, he could do enough damage to incapacitate them and make a run for it with Summer, but he could see that she was so heavily sedated that she couldn't run anywhere. He slowly pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down. "Can I inquire as to your intentions regarding my sister and me?"
"You may," said the woman obviously in charge. Then she ignored him and turned to the woman on her right. "You searched their boat?"
"Yes, Epona. We found dive gear and underwater detection equipment."
"I apologize for any intrusion," said Dirk, "but we thought the island was deserted."
Epona stared at him, her eyes hard and cold. "We have ways of dealing with trespassers."
"We were on an archaeological expedition to find ancient shipwrecks. Nothing more."
She glanced at Summer, then back to Dirk. "We know what you were searching for. Your sister was most cooperative in providing us with a full report."
"After you drugged her," said Dirk, maddened within an inch of coming across the table after the woman.
It was as if she read his mind. "Do not think of resisting, Mr. Pitt. My guards will respond in an instant."
Dirk forced himself to relax and act indifferent. "So what did Summer tell you?"
"That you and she work for the National Underwater and Marine Agency and that you were here looking for Odysseus' lost fleet that Homer described as being sunk by the Laestrygonians."
"You have read Homer."
"I live and breathe Homer the Celt, not Homer the Greek."
"Then you know the true story of Troy and of Odysseus' voyage across the ocean."
"The reason my sisters and I are here. Ten years ago, through long years of research, we concluded that it was the Celts and not the Greeks who fought the Trojans, and not for the love of Helen but the tin deposits in Cornwall to make bronze. Like you, we retraced Odysseus' wake across the Atlantic. You might be interested in learning that his fleet was not destroyed by huge rocks thrown by the Laestrygonians, but was destroyed by a hurricane."
"And the treasure from his lost fleet?"
"Salvaged eight years ago and used to build our Odyssey financial empire."
Dirk sat quite still, but his hands were trembling out of sight under the table. A warning light blinked on inside his head. These women might allow Summer to live, but he doubted they would let him see another sunrise. "May I ask what the treasure consisted of?"
Epona shrugged. "I see no reason to conceal the results. There is no mystery to our achievement. Our salvage teams recovered over two tons of golden objects, plates, sculptures and other decorative Celtic objects. They were masters of intricate metalworking. These, along with thousands of other ancient artifacts, we sold on the open market around the world, netting just over seven hundred million dollars."
"Wasn't that risky?" asked Dirk. "The French, who own Guadeloupe, the Greeks and the nations of Europe that were once ruled by the Celts, didn't they step in and demand ownership of the treasures?"
"The secret was well-kept. All the buyers of the artifacts wished to remain anonymous and all the transactions were discreetly completed, including the gold, which was placed in depositories in China."
"You mean the People's Republic of China, of course."
"Of course."
"What about the salvage operators and their divers? They would have expected a share of the spoils, and keeping them quiet would not have been easy."
"They received nothing," said Epona, with a sardonic inflection, "and the secret died with them."
The innuendo was not lost on Dirk. "You murdered them?" He said it as if it was a fact rather than an assumption.
"Let's simply say, they joined Odysseus' crews who were lost," she hesitated and then smiled enigmatically. "Nobody who ever came to this island lived to tell of it. Even tourists who anchored their boat in the harbor or simple fishermen who became too curious. They could not tell what they have seen."
"So far I haven't seen anything worth dying for."
"And you won't."
Dirk felt a moment of uneasiness. "Why the fiendishness? Why murder innocent people? Where are you sociopaths coming from, and what do you hope to accomplish?"
There was just the slightest edge of anger in Epona's voice. "You are quite correct, Mr. Pitt. My sisters and I are all sociopaths. We conduct our lives and our fortunes without emotion. That is why we have come so far and accomplished so much in such a few short years. If left to their own devices, sociopaths could rule the world. They are not possessed by morality, nor influenced or hindered by ethics. Complete absence of sentiment makes it easier to achieve their goals. Sociopaths enjoy the highest level of genius and nothing else matters. Yes, Mr. Pitt, I am a sociopath and so is our sisterhood of goddesses."
"The sisterhood of goddesses," Dirk repeated very slowly, accenting each word. "So you have elevated yourselves to deities. Being mortal isn't good enough for you."
"The great leaders of the past were all sociopaths and a few came very close to ruling the world."
"Like Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun and Napoleon. The mental institutions are overflowing with inmates who have dreams of grandeur."
"They all failed because they overestimated their power. We do not intend to make that mistake."
Dirk looked around the table at the beautiful women. It did not go unnoticed that his sister's red hair matched theirs as well. "Despite the fact you have the same hair color, you can't all be blood siblings."
"No, we are not actually related."
"When you say we, who do you include?"
"The women of the sisterhood. We, Mr. Pitt, are of the Druid religion. We follow the long-lost teachings of the Celtic Druids handed down through the centuries."
"The ancient Druids were more myth than fact."
Irritation flickered at the corners of Epona's lips. "They have existed for five thousand years."
"They're only the stuff of which legends are made. No records of their religion and rituals existed until one hundred years before Christ."
"No written records, but their knowledge and spheres of power were handed down by word of mouth through hundreds of generations. The Druids originated in the ancient Celtic tribes. Circled around the campfires at night, they offered their people dreams of happiness amid the day-to-day toil to stay alive. They conceived their mysticism, philosophy and perception. They became gifted at creating a religion that inspired and enlightened the Celtic world. They acted as doctors, magicians, seers, mystics, advisors and, perhaps most important, they became teachers who aroused a desire for learning. Because of them, a higher intelligence began to spread throughout the Western world. To become a Druid, young men and women studied up to twenty years until they became walking encyclopedias. Diogenes the Greek said the Druids were the world's wisest philosophers. Many Druids were women who became goddesses and were worshiped throughout Celtic culture."
Dirk shrugged. "Druidism was a pathetic illusion. It was also evil. They held human sacrifice then, and today you conduct murder and go about your business as if the people you killed never existed. Druidism died centuries ago and you won't accept it."
"Like most men, you have stone for a brain. Druidism, though ancient in concept, is as relevant and alive today as it was five thousand years ago. What you don't realize, Mr. Pitt, is that we are experiencing a Renaissance. Because Druidism has a timeless wisdom and is spiritual and charismatic, it has been reborn around the world."
"Does it still include human sacrifice?"
"If the ritual calls for it."
r /> Dirk was repulsed by the thought that these women could actually believe in and take part in religious sacrifice as an excuse for murder. He began to see that if he couldn't take Summer and flee the island, the same fate was likely in store for them. He stared at the polished surface of the table, composing himself, and noted there was a long metal curtain rod that would make a good weapon.
Epona paused. "By adhering to the principles of Druidism, my sisters and I have helped raised a formidable business that reaches around the world in real estate, construction and development, fields that men traditionally dominate, but we found that collectively we could outsmart them at every turn. Yes, we built an empire, one so powerful that soon we will control the economy of most of the Western world through our development of fuel cell technology."