Vixen 03

by Clive Cussler

  Steiger's eyes reflected doubt. "The water was like ice the day you dived. Perhaps your mind saw something . . ." His voice trailed off but the implication was clear.

  Pitt rose to his feet. "He was here," he said, expecting no further argument and receiving none.

  "Could he have washed out the aft opening during the lift operation?" Steiger offered lamely.

  "Not possible. The divers who swam beside the wreck to the surface would have reported any debris falling free."

  Steiger started to say something, but suddenly his eyes turned uncomprehending at a strangled gasping sound that emitted from the forward end of the compartment. "What in God's name is that?"

  Pitt wasted no time in answering. He knew.

  He found Admiral Bass lying on the wet floor, fighting for breath, his skin bathed in cold sweat. The unbearable severity of the pain contorted his face into a tormented mask.

  "His heart!" Pitt called out to Steiger. "Find Giordino and tell him to get that helicopter back here."

  Pitt began tearing the clothing away from the admiral's neck and chest. Bass reached up and grasped Pitt's wrist. "The . . . the warheads," he rasped.

  "Rest easy. We'll soon have you on your way to a hospital."

  "The warheads . . ." Bass repeated.

  "All safe in their canisters," Pitt reassured him.

  "No ... no ... you don't understand." His voice was a hoarse whisper now. "The canisters ... I counted them . . . twenty-eight."

  Bass's words were becoming barely audible, and Pitt had to place his ear at the tremoring lips.

  Giordino rushed up carrying several blankets. "Steiger gave me the word," he said tensely. "How is he?"

  "Still hanging in there," Pitt said. He released the viselike grip from his wrist and gently squeezed Bass's hand. "I'll see to it, Admiral. That's a promise."

  Bass blinked his dulled eyes and nodded in understanding.

  Pitt and Giordino had covered him and cushioned his head with the blankets when Steiger reappeared, followed by two airmen carrying a stretcher. Only then did Pitt rise to his feet and step aside. The helicopter had already returned and landed when they carried the still-conscious Bass from Vixen 03.

  Steiger took Pitt's arm. "What was he trying to tell you?"

  "His inventory of the warhead canisters," Pitt answered. "He counted twenty-eight."

  "I pray the old guy makes it," Steiger said. "At least he had the satisfaction of knowing the monstrosities were retrieved. Now all that's . left is to dump them in the ocean. End of horror story."

  "No, I'm afraid it's only the beginning."

  "You're talking in riddles."

  "According to Admiral Bass, Vixen 03 did not depart Buckley Field carrying twenty-eight warheads filled with the Quick Death agent."

  Steiger sensed an icy dread in Pitt's tone. "But his inventory . . . the count came to twenty-eight."

  "He should have tallied thirty-six," Pitt said ominously. "Eight warheads are missing."

  4

  No Return Ticket

  42

  Washington, D.C.- December 1988

  The National Underwater and Marine Agency building, a tubular structure sheeted in green reflective glass, rose thirty stories above an East Washington hill.

  On the top floor Admiral James Sandecker sat behind an immense desk made from a refinished hatch cover salvaged from a Confederate blockade runner in Albemarle Sound. His private line buzzed.

  "Sandecker."

  "Pitt here, sir."

  Sandecker pushed a switch on a small console that activated a holo-graphic TV camera. Pitt's lifelike image materialized in three-dimensional depth and color in the middle of the office.

  "Raise the camera from your end," said Sandecker. "You've chopped off your head."

  Through the miracle of satellite holography Pitt's face seemed to grow from his shoulders, and his projected self, including voice and gestures, became identical to the original. The major difference, which never ceased to amuse Sandecker, was that he could pass a hand through the image because it was totally lacking in matter.

  "That better?" asked Pitt.

  "At least you're whole now." Sandecker wasted no more words. "What's the latest on Walter Bass?"

  Pitt looked tired as he sat on a folding chair beneath a large pine tree, his ebony hair tossed by a stiff breeze.

  "The heart specialist at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver reports his condition as stable. If he survives the next forty-eight hours, his chances for recovery look good. As soon as he's strong enough for the trip, they're going to transfer him to Bethesda Naval Hospital."

  "What about the warheads?"

  57

  "We trucked them to a rail siding in Leadville," Pitt answered slowly. "Colonel Steiger volunteered to arrange shipment to Pier Six in San Francisco."

  "Tell Steiger we're grateful for his cooperation. I've ordered our Pacific Coast research ship to be standing by. Instructions were given to the skipper to dump the warheads off the continental shelf in ten thousand feet of water." Sandecker hesitated at posing the next question. "Did you locate the missing eight?"

  Pitt's negative expression answered him even before the image spoke.

  "No luck, Admiral. A thorough search of the lake bed failed to turn up a trace."

  Sandecker read the frustration on Pitt's face. "I fear the time has come to inform the Pentagon."

  "Do you honestly think that a wise course?"

  "What other options do we have?" Sandecker came back. "We don't have the means at our disposal for a large-scale investigation."

  "All we need is a lead," Pitt said, pressing on. "Odds favor the warheads' being stored somewhere, gathering dust. It's even possible the thieves don't know what they really have on their hands."

  "I'll accept that," Sandecker said. "But who would want them in the first place? Christ, they weigh nearly a ton each, and they're easily recognizable in exterior appearance as obsolete naval shells."

  "The answer will also lead us to the murderer of Loren Smith's father."

  "No corpus delicti, no crime," Sandecker said.

  "I know what I saw," Pitt said evenly.

  "It won't alter present circumstances. The dilemma staring us all in the face is how to get a tag on those lost warheads and do it before someone gets it in his head to play demolition expert."

  Suddenly the exhaustion seemed to drop from Pitt. "Something you just said jogged a thought. Give me five days to flush out the warheads. If I turn up nothing, then it's your ball game."

  Sandecker smiled tightly at Pitt's sudden show of intensity. "This happens to be my ball game, any way you look at it," he said sharply. "As the senior government official involved in this mess, it became my unwanted responsibility the day you hijacked a NUMA aircraft and underwater camera system."

  Pitt stared back across the room but remained discreetly silent.

  Sandecker left Pitt stewing for a moment while he rubbed his eyes. Then he said, "All right, against my better judgment I'll take the gam-ble."

  "You'll go along, then?"

  Sandecker caved in. "You've got five days, Pitt. But heaven help us if you come up empty-handed."

  He hit the switch to the holograph and Pitt's image faded and disappeared.

  43

  It was just before sunset when Maxine Raferty turned from her clothesline and spied Pitt walking up the road. She continued her chore, pinning up the last of her husband's shirts before waving a greeting.

  "Mr. Pitt, how nice to see you."

  "Mrs. Raferty."

  "Loren with you up to the cabin?"

  "No, she had to remain in Washington." Pitt looked around the yard. "Is Lee at home?"

  "In the house, fixing the kitchen sink." A brisk breeze was sweeping down the mountains from the west and Maxine thought it odd that Pitt was carrying his Windbreaker over his right hand and arm. "Just go on in."

  Lee Raferty was sitting at the kitchen table, filing burrs from a length of pl
umbing pipe. He looked up as Pitt entered.

  "Mr. Pitt. Hey, sit down; you're just in time. I was about to open a bottle of my private stock of grape squeezin's."

  Pitt pulled up a chair. "You make wine as well as beer?"

  "Gotta be self-sufficient up here in the high country," Lee said, grinning, and pointing a cigar stub at the pipe. "Take this. Cost me a fortune to get a plumber up here from Leadville. Cheaper to do it myself. Leaky gasket. Any kid could fix it."

  Raferty laid the rusty pipe on an old newspaper, rose from the table, and produced two glasses and a ceramic jug from under a cupboard.

  "I wanted to talk with you," Pitt said.

  "Sure thing." Lee poured the glasses to their brims. "Hey, what do you think about all that commotion up at the lake? I hear tell they found an old airplane. Could it be the one you was askin' about?"

  "Yes," Pitt answered, sipping from the wineglass, which he held in his left hand. He was mildly surprised to find the wine quite smooth. "That's part of the reason I'm here. I was hoping you might enlighten me as to why you murdered Charlie Smith."

  The only reaction was the slight lift of one gray eyebrow. "Me ... murder old Charlie? What on earth are you talking about?"

  "A falling-out of partners who thought they'd discovered a pot of gold deep in a mountain lake."

  He stared at Pitt and tilted his head questioningly. "You're talking like a crazy man."

  "The last thing you expected was a stranger appearing on your doorstep asking questions about a lost airplane. You'd already made a mistake by not disposing of the oxygen tank and nose gear. I pay homage to you and your wife's theatrical talents. I swallowed your country-bumpkin act with all the gullibility of a tourist. After I left, you covered my every move, and when you saw me dive in the lake, you were dead certain I had discovered the aircraft and Charlie Smith's bones. At that point you made an irreversible blunder: you panicked and removed Charlie, in all probability burying his bones deep in the mountains. If you'd left him strapped to that sunken cargo floor, the sheriff would have been hard pressed to tie you to a three-year-old murder."

  "You'll pay hell proving anything," Lee said, calmly relighting his cigar stub, "without a body."

  "Not in a court of law," Pitt said casually. "Innocent until proven guilty, but the story is a worn classic. Kill thy neighbor for profit; there's your title. Suppose we begin at chapter one with an eccentric inventor named Charlie Smith who was testing his latest brainstorm, an automatic fishing-pole caster. On one cast the sinkers took the hook deep and it snagged on an object. Charlie, an experienced angler, thought he had hooked a submerged log and expertly worked the line until the tension gave and it pulled free.

  58

  But he felt a drag; something was surfacing with the hook. And then he saw it: an aircraft oxygen tank. Its mounts had torn loose, eroded over the years of submersion, and Charlie's tugs were all the tank needed to break away and rise to the lake's surface.

  "The practical course would have been to call the sheriff. Unluckily for Charlie, he was the curious sort. He had to prove to himself there was a plane down there, so he scrounged a rope and grappling iron and began dragging the lake bottom. On one pass he must have caught and yanked up the shattered nose gear, which must have broken out of its housing. Suspicions confirmed, Charlie then became greedy and sniffed the sweet smell of treasure. So instead of playing Honest John Citizen and reporting his discovery, he headed straight for Lee Raferty."

  "Why would Charlie come to me?"

  "A retired Navy man, a deep-water diver; you were made to order. I venture to guess the diving equipment and air compressor you and Charlie scrounged are sitting in your garage right now. A hundred-and-forty-foot dive must have been child's play for a man of your experience, wearing hard-hat gear. The strange cargo in the aircraft stirred the juices of your imagination. What did you expect to find inside the canisters? Old atomic bombs, perhaps? I can only envision the backbreaking work it took for two men nearing seventy to dive in frigid waters and wrench weights of two thousand pounds from the lake depths to shore. I give you both credit for guts. I can only hope I'm in half the physical shape when I reach your age."

  "Not so tough." Lee smiled; he seemed to have no fear of Pitt at all. "Once Charlie devised a small explosive charge to enlarge the already cracked opening on the fuselage, it was a simple matter for me to attach a cable to a canister while he towed it to shore with the four-wheel-drive."

  "Where there's a will," Pitt said. "What then, Lee? Once the canister was removed, it was obvious to an ex-Navy man and a former demolitions expert that you were looking at a prize that could have only warmed the cockles of an old battleship admiral's heart. But what was the value at today's prices? What was the demand for an outdated naval shell, except for scrap?"

  Lee Raferty casually resumed filing the rough edges of the pipe. "Pretty slick guesswork, Mr. Pitt. I admit it. Not one hundred percent, mind you, but a passing grade. You underestimated a pair of foxy veterans, though. Hell, we knew them things in the canisters weren't armor-piercing projectiles the minute we laid eyes on one. Took Charlie all of ten minutes to peg it as a poison-gas carrier."

  Pitt was stunned. Two old men had made fools of them all. "How?" he asked tersely.

  "Outwardly it looked like standard naval ordnance, but we saw it was rigged the same as a star shell. You know the kind: after reaching a preset altitude, a parachute is released while a small explosive charge splits the head, igniting a wad of phosphorus.

  Except this devil was set to unleash a bundle of tiny bomblets filled with lethal gas instead."

  "Charlie figured they contained gas merely by looking at it?"

  "He discovered the parachute-escape-hatch cover. That gave him his first clue. Then he came around front, dismantled the head, disconnected the charge, and peeked inside."

  "Dear God!" Pitt murmured in near despair. "Charlie opened the warhead?"

  "So what's the big deal? Charlie was a master at demolitions."

  Pitt took a deep breath and pitched the obvious question. "What did you do with the warheads?"

  "The way I saw it, it was finders, keepers."

  "Where are they?" Pitt demanded.

  "We sold them."

  "You what?" he gasped. "To whom?"

  "The Phalanx Arms Corporation, in Newark, New Jersey. They buy and sell weapons on an international front. I contacted the vice-president, a screwy sort of duck, looks more like a hardware peddler than a death merchant. Name's Orville Mapes. Anyway, he flew out to Colorado, checked over the projectile, and offered us five thousand bucks for every one we could ship to his warehouse. No questions asked."

  "I can guess the rest," Pitt said. "It occurred to Charlie that if those shells were detonated, he would be responsible for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths. You were more callous, Lee. The money meant more to you than conscience. You two argued, then fought, and Charlie lost. You hid his body in the sunken aircraft. Then you set off a few sticks of dynamite, tossed a boot and his thumb in the debris, and cried all the way to his funeral."

  Raferty displayed no reaction to Pitt's accusation. His mellow eyes never left the pipe. His hands slowly, placidly filed away at the threaded ends. He was far too nonchalant, Pitt thought. Raferty wasn't acting like a man about to be turned in for murder. The look of a cornered rat was nowhere apparent.

  "A shame Charlie didn't see things my way." Raferty shrugged almost sadly. "Contrary to what you may think, Mr. Pitt, I am not a greedy man. I did not attempt to sell off the projectiles in one swoop. You might say I looked upon them as a sort of savings account. When Max and I needed a few dollars, I'd make a one-at-a-time withdrawal, you might say, and call Mapes. He'd send a truck to pick up the merchandise and pay me in cash. A clean-cut, nontaxable transaction."

  "I'd like to hear how you murdered Charlie Smith."

  "Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Pitt, but I don't have it in me to take a human life." Raferty leaned forward and hi
s wrinkled face seemed to leer. "Max is the stronger one. She handles the killing. Shot old Charlie in the heart as neat as can be."

  "Maxine?" The shock that swelled within Pitt did not come so much from the sudden disclosure as it did from the realization that he had committed a sad mistake.

  "Throw a dime in the air at twenty paces and Max will make change," Raferty continued, nodding over Pitt's shoulder. "Let Mr.

  Pitt know you're there, honey."

  Two metallic clicking sounds answered Raferty, followed by a gentle thud.

  "The cartridge striking the floor should tell you Max's old lever-action Winchester is loaded and cocked," said Raferty. "Any doubts?"

  Pitt braced both feet squarely on the floor and flexed his hand under the Windbreaker jacket. "Nice try, Lee."

  "Then see for yourself. But I warn you-no sudden moves."

  Pitt gradually turned to face Maxine Raferty, whose kindly blue eyes were staring over the sights of a repeating rifle. The barrel was pointed, rock steady, at Pitt's head.

  "Sorry, Mr. Pitt," she said sadly. "But Lee and I ain't of a mind to spend our few remaining years in jail."

  59

  "Another murder on your hands won't save you," said Pitt. He tightened his leg muscles as he gauged the distance between himself and Maxine. It was five feet. "I brought my own witnesses."

  "Did you see anybody, honey?" asked Lee.

  Maxine shook her head. "He came up the road alone. I kept watch after he entered the house. No one followed him."

  "I figured as much," Lee Raferty said, and sighed. "You've been playing a bluffing hand, Mr. Pitt. If you had any solid evidence against Maxine and me, you'd have brought the sheriff."

  "Oh, but I did." Pitt smiled and appeared to relax. "He's sitting in a car about half a mile away, with two deputies hanging on our every word."

  Raferty tensed. "Damn you, you're lying!"