Pacific Vortex! Part 11

"Or she might have buried her hull in soft sediment," Denver added. "Finding one little s.h.i.+p in an area that large is as tough as finding a penny in the Salton Sea."

"My friend," Pitt said smiling, "you just spoke the magic words."

Denver looked at Pitt blankly.

"One little s.h.i.+p," Pitt repeated. "In all your searching, you couldn't find one little s.h.i.+p."

"So?" Hunter's tone was icy.

"Don't you see? Your search pattern was supposed to be right in the middle of the Pacific Vortex. Maybe you didn't hit on the Starbuck, but you should have stumbled on to something. After all, you had nearly thirty other sunken derelicts to choose from."

"d.a.m.n!" Hunter's self-confidence was shaken. It never occurred to us ..."

" I see your point," Boland said. "But what does it prove?"

"It proves," Pitt replied, "that you searched the wrong area. It proves that Dupree's message was a clever counterfeit And it proves that the Starbuck's last radioed positions were an even cleverer case of fraud. In short, gentlemen, the place to find your missing submarine is not to the northeast, but a one-hundred-eighty-degree reverse course to the southwest."

Hunter, Boland, and Denver stared at Pitt in stunned silence, enlightenment spreading across their features.

Denver spoke first. It fits," he said simply. Hunter's face began to glow with an enthusiasm that he hadn't shown for months. He gazed long and hard at the wall map for nearly half a minute. Then, he swung abruptly and fastened his gaze on Boland. "How soon can the Martha Ann get underway?" "Hoist the helicopter on board, finish refueling, make a final check of the detection instruments; I'd say 2100 hours this evening, sir."

Hunter glanced at his watch. "That doesn't leave us much time to plot a search area." He turned to Denver. "This is your realm. I suggest you begin programming a search grid immediately."

"The primary data is already on the tapes, Admiral. It's only a matter of reversing the location input"

Hunter rubbed his eyes. "Okay, gentlemen, it's all yours. I'd give up half these stripes to come with you. By the way, Mr. Pitt, I hope you won't mind taking an extended ocean voyage?"

Pitt smiled at him. "I have nothing else planned at the moment."

"Good." Hunter rolled a cigarette around in his mouth. "Tell me something; how did an Air Force officer ever become a departmental head of the government's top oceanographic agency?"

"I shot down Admiral Sandecker and his staff over the China Sea."

Hunter stared at Pitt with a strange believing look indeed. With this man, almost anything is possible, Admiral Sandecker had told him earlier.

It was one hour after sunset when the AC slipped into a parking stall in the Honolulu dock area. As the front wheels made contact with a wooden tire stop, the engine died and the headlights blinked out. Pitt swung the door open and gazed across the harbor into the inky water.

As the breeze changed direction it carried a heavy odor to his nostrils: the undeniable bouquet of the waterfront. It smelled of oil, gasoline, tar, and smoke, with a tinge of salt.w.a.ter thrown in. It exhilarated Pitt, carrying the nostalgic sensation of faraway exotic ports.

Pitt pulled himself from the car and glanced about the parking lot in search of any sign of human activity. There was none. Only a seagull, perched on a wooden piling, returned his stare. Pitt reached into the car and pulled the towel-wrapped Mauser from behind the seat Then he inhaled the harbor night air, tucked the gun under his arm, and began walking along the pier.

If anyone had been loitering around the docks they would hardly have noticed anything unusual about Pitt's appearance. He was dressed in a well-worn khaki s.h.i.+rt over a faded pair of gabardine pants. His feet were encased by a pair of badly scuffed brogans, tied with heavy twine. The cast-off clothing, a gift from the 101st Fleet's Security Officer, was a size too small and bulged at the seams. He felt like a toss-up between a bindle stiff and a skid row derelict. A quart of muscatel in a brown paper bag was all that was missing. Or better yet, a bottle of Grand Marnier Yellow Ribbon: just the right touch of cla.s.s to go with the rags.

One hundred yards later, Pitt stopped and looked up at the huge black hulk that loomed in the darkness. The only light that beamed down on the weathered and tarred planking came from a few scattered green-shaded lamps that hung awkwardly from the corrugated metal sides of an old warehouse. The eerie glow of the lamps, coupled with the deathly stillness of the evening, only added to the already ghostlike appearance of the monster in the water.

She was an old s.h.i.+p with a straight up-and-down bow and a square, boxlike shape to her superstructure; this was topped by an old-fas.h.i.+oned vertical smokestack that sported a faded blue stripe. Rising from her decks stood a maze of cluttered derricks and masts. At some tune in the distant past she had been painted black with the usual red waterline, but now she was grimy, dirty, and rusty. Pitt moved closer until he was standing under her stern. She was large, probably in the neighborhood of twelve thousand tons. He stared up at the dim white lettering just below the fantail. The name was so battered and streaked with rust he could barely make it out in the dim light:

MARTHA ANN-SEATTLE.

The gangplank looked like a tunnel leading upward into a forbidding void. Only the muted hum of the generators deep within the hull, and a thin wisp of smoke curling from the funnel betrayed human presence.

Pitt placed his hand on the coa.r.s.e railing rope of the gangplank and, leaning forward to compensate for the thirty-degree angle, began the ascent to the Martha Ann's deck. The fading light from the warehouse lamps ceased at the last step of the ramp. Pitt hesitated upon reaching the seemingly deserted deck and peered into the shadows.

"Mr. Pitt?" came a voice from the gloom.

"Yes, I'm Pitt"

"May I see your identification, please?"

"You may, if only I could see who in h.e.l.l to hand it to."

"Please lay your ID on the deck, sir, and step back."

Pitt grumbled to himself. He was aware that it was normal military procedure to examine identification papers during alerts and emergencies, but why all the fuss to come aboard this old rivet-dangling sea bucket? Setting the Mauser gently on the deck, he pulled out his wallet and groped for his ID. His eyes could not penetrate the blackness so he ran his fingers over a stack of a.s.sorted plastic cards until he found one that lacked the telltale raised lettering of a credit card and threw it a few paces in front of his feet. A pencil-thin shaft of light beamed on the card and then touched Pitt's face.

"Sorry to trouble you, sir, but Admiral Hunter ordered strict security all around the s.h.i.+p." A black shadow pa.s.sed the ID back to Pitt. "If you take the first stairway to your right, you'll find Commander Denver in the chart room."

"Thanks," Pitt grunted. He retrieved the gun and straggled up the stairway toward the bridge. At the top he found the darkened wheelhouse empty so he walked through the deserted enclosure and cautiously cracked open a door. Here at last he was greeted by a flood of bright light.

"h.e.l.lo, Dirk," Denver said warmly. He had a cigarette between his fingers and as he waved a greeting to Pitt, the ash fell in a tiny heap on the chart table. He was wearing a black pullover sweater and a pair of soiled denims. "Welcome aboard the U.S. Navy's only floating fossil."

Pitt tossed him an offhand salute. "I'didn't expect to find you here, Burdette. I thought you were remaining in Operations with the admiral."

Denver smiled. Til get there. But I couldn't resist coming down and wis.h.i.+ng you and Paul good hunting."

"Well need it. If the choice was up to me, I'd take the old-fas.h.i.+oned needle in a haystack any day."

"Do you think this is a strange phenomenon?" Denver asked him.

"Like your boss said, our job is to find and raise the Starbuck. Any ghost-catching is strictly a side benefit. Besides, our NUMA scientists and engineers do not make a habit of researching Bermuda triangles or Pacific vortices. We leave that up to imaginative writers with a knack for exaggeration. Any unexplain-able discoveries are purely accidental, and afterward, they're quietly filed away."

"Could you give me an example?" Denver asked softly.

Pitt stared vacantly at a half-opened chart on the table.

"There was one instance about nine months ago that smacked of Jules Verne. Two of our oceanographic s.h.i.+ps were conducting subbottom profiling and underwater acoustical tests in the Kurile Trench off j.a.pan when their instruments detected the sound of a vessel traveling at a high rate of speed in very deep water. Both s.h.i.+ps immediately heaved to, closing down all engines and turning all instruments to whatever it was that was down there."

"Could an instrument or one of the operators have been mistaken?" Denver murmured.

"Not likely," Pitt answered. "Those researchers were the tops in their respective fields. And, when you consider that two different s.h.i.+ps with two sets of precision instruments traced and recorded identical readings, you pretty much eliminate any percentage of error. No mistake about it, the thing, the submarine, the sea monster, whatever you wish to call it, was there. And it was moving at one hundred ten miles an hour in a depth of nineteen thousand feet."

Denver slowly shook his head. Incredible. It's beyond understanding."

"That's only the half of it," Pitt said. "Another s.h.i.+p working over the Cayment Trench off Cuba came up with an identical contact I've seen both the Cayment and Kurile data. The sonar graphs agree to the millimeter."

"Was the Navy notified?"

"No way. The Navy doesn't want to hear about weird undersea sightings any more than the Air Force wants to hear about Unidentified Flying Objects. But then, what real proof was there other than a ma.s.s of scraggly lines on a few sheets of graph paper?" Pitt leaned back in a chair, propping his feet on the table and bracing the back of his head in his hands. "There was one instance though when we came within a whisker of getting one of the sea's unknown residents on videotape. A NUMA zoologist was studying and recording fish sounds off the Continental slope near Iceland where he'd dropped a microphone in ten thousand feet of water to pick up noises made by the rarely seen benthos. For several days he recorded the usual clicks and creaking sounds with pretty much the same tones as surface-dwelling fish. He also noted the continuous cracking noise made by shrimps.