The Mediterranean Caper (17 page)

“I'm psychic,” Pitt said briefly. “When?”

“Tomorrow morning.” Zac looked at Pitt long and consideringly. “Sometime between four and five A.M. Why do you ask?”

“No reason, just curiosity.” Pitt braced himself for the burn and downed the drink. The jolt was almost too much. He shook his head from side to side, blinking away the tears that burst from his eyes.

“My God,” he whispered hoarsely. “That stuff goes down like battery acid.”

The eerie, phosphorescent
froth gradually diminished and fell away from the old straight up and down bow of
Queen Artemisia
as the aging ship slowly lost way and came to a stop. Then the anchor clattered down into ten fathoms of water, and the navigation lights blinked out, leaving a black silhouette resting on an even blacker sea. It was as though the
Queen Artemisia
had never been.

Two hundred feet away, a small wooden packing crate bobbed lazily on the swells. It was a common type of crate, one of empty thousands that float in cast-off neglect on every sea and waterway of the world. To the casual eye, at least, it looked like ordinary flotsam; even the stenciled letters that advertised “THIS END UP” pointed incongruously downward toward the seabed. There was, however, one thing that made this particular crate quite different; it wasn't empty.

There must be a better way, Pitt thought wryly from inside the box as a wave bumped it against the top of his head, but at least this was a damn sight better than swimming in plain view when the morning light appeared. He took a mouthful of salt water and coughed it out. Then he puffed lightly into the mouthpiece of his flotation vest, increasing his buoyancy, and returned his gaze to the ship through a jaggedly cut peephole.

The
Queen Artemisia
lay silent, only the faint hum of her generators and the slap of the waves on her hull betrayed her presence. Gradually the sounds faded away and the ship became a part of the silence. For a long time Pitt listened, but no other sounds traveled across the water to his bobbing outpost. No footsteps on a steel deck, no masculine voices shouting commands, no clank of human-operated machinery, nothing. The silence was total and very puzzling. It was like a phantom ship with a phantom crew.

Then starboard anchor was down, and Pitt made his way toward it, slowly pushing the box from within. The light breeze and the incoming tide worked in his favor, and soon the box gently nudged the anchor chain. He swiftly removed the U.S. Divers airtank and attached its backpack webbing through one of the big steel chain links. Then using the regulator's single air hose as a line, he slipped his fins, mask and snorkel over the second stage mouthpiece and let the whole package dangle just beneath the surface.

Pitt grabbed the chain, looking up at the seemingly endless links that vanished into the darkness, and felt like Jack climbing the beanstalk. He thought of Teri, lying asleep in a cozy bunk back on the
First Attempt
. He thought of her soft and fluid body and he began to wonder what in hell he was doing
here
.

Teri had wondered too, but over a different question. “Why take me to a ship? I can't go out there and meet all those brainy scientists looking like this.” She lifted the hem of her transparent negligee, displaying her legs to the thighs.

“Oh what the hell,” Pitt laughed. “It'll probably be the sexiest thing that's happened to them in years.”

“What about Uncle Bruno?”

“Tell him you went shopping on the mainland. Tell him anything, you're over twenty-one.”

“I guess it would be fun to be naughty,” she giggled. “It's just like a romantic adventure story in the cinema.”

“That's one way to look at it,” Pitt had said. He'd figured she would think that, and he'd been right.

Pitt went up the anchor chain, copying the style of a Polynesian native climbing a palm tree after coconuts. He soon reached the hawserhole and peered over the rail. He hesitated, listening and watching for any movement in the shadows. Not a soul was visible. The foredeck was deserted.

He swung over the side, crouched low and moved silently across the deck to the foremast. The blacked-out ship was a blessing. If the cargo loading lamps had been on, the midships and foredeck would have been bathed in a flood of white light; not the best circumstances for sneaking around unnoticed. Pitt was also thankful that the darkness blotted out his dripping water trail across the foredeck. He paused, waiting for the expected sounds and movements that never came. It was quiet, far too quiet. There was something else about the ship that didn't jell in Pitt's subconscious mind, but he couldn't pin it down. It eluded him for the present.

Pitt reached down, unsheathing the diver's knife strapped to his calf, and moved aft, holding the seven-inch stainless blade well out in front of him.

It seemed incredible, but Pitt had a clear view of the bridge and, as far as he could see, it was abandoned. He melted into the shadows and climbed the ladder to the bridge, his feet padding noiselessly on the steel steps. The wheelhouse was dark and empty. The spokes of the wheel reached out in dark loneliness, and the binnacle stood like a mute, brass-plated sentinel. Pitt couldn't make out the wording, but he knew from the angle of the pointers that the telegraph stood at All Stop. In the dim light from the stars he was able to make out a rack attached to the ledge below the port window. His fingers played over the contents; Aldis lamp, flare gun, flares. Then he got lucky. His hand touched the familiar cylindrical shape of a flashlight. He slipped out of his swimtrunks and wrapped them around the lens till the light offered nothing but a faint glow. Then he checked every foot of the wheelhouse; deck, bulkheads, equipment. The tiny indicator lights of the control console showed the only glimmer of life.

The curtains were drawn in the chartroom at the back of the wheelhouse. It was inconceivable that any chartroom could be so clean. The charts lay in orderly stacks, their fields of squares and numbers crossed by precisely drawn pencil lines. Pitt slipped the knife back in its sheath, propped the flashlight against a copy of
Brown's Nautical Almanac
and scanned the chart markings. The lines coincided exactly with the
Queen Artemisia
's known course from Shanghai. He noted the fact that there were no mistakes or erasures by whoever figured the compass corrections. It was neat, too much so.

The logbook was open at the last entry:
03.52 hours—Brady Field Beacon bearing 312°, approximately eight miles. Wind southwest, 2 knots. The God's protect Minerva.
The time showed that this entry had been made less than an hour before Pitt swam out from the beach. But where was the crew? There was no sign of the deck watch and the lifeboats were secure in their davits. The abandoned helm didn't make sense. None of it made sense.

Pitt's mouth was dry—a dusty cavern in which his tongue lay like a rubber sponge. A hammer pounded in his head, blurring his thinking. He left the wheelhouse, softly closing the door behind him, and found an alleyway leading to the captain's cabin. The door was ajar. He gently eased it full open and stepped soundlessly and sideways into the steel cubicle.

A movie set, it looked like a movie set. That was the only way Pitt could describe it. Everything was neat and tidy, and exactly where it should have been. Across the far bulkhead, the
Queen Artemisia
loomed in tranquil splendor from an amateurish oil painting. Pitt shuddered at the choice of colors; the ship sailed on a purple sea. The signature in the lower right corner was signed by a Sophia Remick. There was the usual photograph on the desk with a matronly, round-faced woman staring out of a cheap metal frame. The inscription read:
To the Captain of my heart from his loving wife
. It was unsigned, but obviously written by the same hand that had autographed the painting. And next to the photograph, on an otherwise barren desk top, a carefully laid pipe reposed in an empty ashtray. Pitt picked it up and smelled the blackened bowl; it hadn't been smoked in months. Nothing looked used or handled. It was a museum without dust, a house without odor. And, like the ship herself, quiet as a graveyard.

He returned to the alleyway, closing the door behind him, almost wishing some strange voice, any voice, would shout, “Who goes there?” or “What are you doing here?” The stillness made his sweat run cold. Pitt began to imagine vague shapes in shadowy corners. His heartbeat thumped at an accelerating pace. It couldn't have been more than ten seconds that he stood there not moving a muscle, forcing his mind back into rational control.

It'll be dawn soon, he thought. Hurry, must hurry. He ran down the port alleyway, ignoring any attempt at stealth and secrecy, and threw open the other cabin doors. Each small compartment was like the black Hole of Calcutta. One quick sweep of the hooded light told the same story as the captain's cabin. He also searched the radio cabin. The transmitter was warm and pre-set on a VHF frequency, but the radio operator was conspicuous by his absence. Pitt slipped the door shut and headed aft.

Companionways, port and starboard alleyways, they all seemed to merge into one long, black, underground tunnel. It was an effort not to lose his sense of direction in the maze. A naked man, except for the flotation vest, in a dark nightmare of gray paint and steel walls. He tripped over a bulkhead step and fell, banging a shin and dropping the flashlight—all in harmony with an uttered, “Goddamn!”

The flashlight had fallen on the hard deck, shattering the lens and blinking out. He knelt on his hands and knees, muttering additional curses and searching frantically. After agonizing seconds his hands grasped the aluminum-plated case. The glass of the lens tinkled with grim foreboding inside the cloth cover. He picked it up and pushed the switch forward. The bulb blinked on as dull as ever. Pitt uttered a gasp of relief and shined the subdued beam down the passage. It dimly illuminated a door that was titled
Fire Passage—Number Three Hold
.

The great chambers of Carlsbad Caverns couldn't have looked much less formidable than Number Three Hold. All that Pitt's light showed was a vast steel cave crammed with countless sacks and stacked from deck to hatch cover on wooden tiers. The air was permeated with a sweet incense kind of odor. The cocoa from Ceylon, Pitt surmised. He took the diver's knife and cut a small half-inch hole in the coarse cloth of one of the sacks. A flow of stony hard beans fell to the deck, bouncing and rattling like hail on a quonset hut. A quick examination under the flashlight proved the parchment skinned beans to be the genuine article.

Suddenly he heard a noise. It was faint and indistinct, but it was there. He froze, listening. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had come, and silence once more gripped the haunted ship; a deserted ship with all its dark and hidden secrets. Maybe it's a ghost ship after all, Pitt mused. Another
Mary Celeste
or
Flying Dutchman
. All that was missing was a stormy sea with rain lashing the top decks and lightning flashing in the night and a gale shrieking through the derricks.

There was nothing more to see in the hold. Pitt left and headed for the engine room. He lost a precious eight minutes finding the right companionway. The heart of the ship was warm from the heat of the engines and smelled of hot oil. He stood on the catwalk above the huge and lifeless machinery and searched for a sign that would indicate bona fide human activity. The flashlight caught the gleam of burnished pipes that snaked across the bulkheads in geometric parallel lines, ending in a mass fusion of valves and gauges. Then the faint beam fell on a carelessly wadded oily rag. Above the rag was a shelf containing several coffee-stained cups, and to the left of those, a tray of scattered tools with greasy finger marks. At least someone was working this part of the ship, he thought, quite relieved. He knew that most engine rooms were kept as clean as a hospital ward, but this one was messy. But where was the chief engineer and his oilmen? They couldn't have evaporated into the Aegean atmosphere.

Pitt started to leave, then he stopped. There it was again; the same mysterious sound, echoing through the ship's hull. He stood stock-still, holding his breath for what seemed a lifetime. It was an odd, uncanny sound, like the scraping of a ship's keel over a submerged rock or coral reef. Pitt involuntarily shivered. It also reminded him of the way chalk squeaked across a blackboard. The sound lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then it was punctuated with the dull clank of metal against metal.

Pitt had never sat bathed with cold sweat in a cell on San Quentin's death row, waiting for the warden and the prison guards to escort him to the gas chamber. Nor did he have to be there to describe the experience for he knew exactly what it felt like. To be alone in a claustrophobic atmosphere, expecting the footsteps of death to come treading from the black unknown, was a blood-chilling business. When in doubt, he thought, run like a son of a bitch. And run like a son of a bitch he did. Back through the alleyways, back up the companion-stairs, until at last his lungs were greeted by the pure, wholesome air on deck.

The early morning was still dark and the derricks reached toward the velvet ceiling of a sky that was alive with a dazzling array of stars. There was scarcely a stir of wind. Over the bridge, the radio mast swayed back and forth across the Milky Way, and below Pitt's feet, the hull creaked from the rolls of the gentle swells. He hesitated a moment, gazing at the dark line of the Thasos coast, yet a bare mile away. Then he looked down at the smooth black surface of the water. It looked so inviting, so peaceful.

The flashlight still glowed. Pitt cursed his stupidity for not switching it off when he reached the open deck. Might as well have advertised my presence with a neon sign, he thought. He quickly doused the light. Then carefully, so as not to cut himself on the broken glass, he unwrapped his swim trunks and removed the remains of the lens. He hurled the tiny slivers over the railing and listened till the faint splash, like rain on a pond, reached his ears. He was tempted to deep-six the flashlight too, but his mind shifted into gear and rejected the impulse. Leaving the rack in the wheelhouse void of the flashlight would be about as clever as sending the captain, if there was a captain, a telegram and saying, “Just before dawn, there was a prowler on board your ship who ransacked it from stem to stern.” It very definitely wasn't a smart move, not with people like these who had outfoxed nearly every law enforcement agency in the world. The fact that the lens was missing would be a gamble that Pitt would have to take.