Night Probe!

by Clive Cussler

  "Yes . . ." Pitt said sullenly. "I've got it now. And while you're at it, thank the President and his little group for letting me know at the last minute."

  "Would it have mattered otherwise?"

  "No, I guess not."

  "Where can Heidi get in touch with you?"

  "I'll keep the De Soto moored at the bridge site as a command post. All calls can be relayed from there."

  There was nothing more to say. So Sandecker simply said, "Good luck."

  "Thanks," Pitt came back. And then the line went dead.

  Sandecker had the number of Heidi's hotel in less than a minute. He dialed direct and waited for the connection.

  "Good evening, Gramercy Park Hotel," a sleepy female voice answered.

  "Commander Milligan's room, please."

  A pause. "Yes, room three sixty-seven. I'll ring."

  "Hello," a man answered.

  "Is this Commander Milligan's room?" Sandecker demanded impatiently.

  "No, sir, this is the assistant manager. The commander is out for the evening."

  "Any idea when she'll return?"

  "No sir, she didn't stop at the desk when she left."

  "You must have a photographic memory," said Sandecker suspiciously.

  "Sir?"

  "Do you recognize all your guests when they pass through the lobby?"

  "When they're very attractive ladies who stand six feet tall and wear a cast on one leg, I do."

  "I see."

  "May I give her a message?"

  Sandecker thought a moment. "No message. I'll call again later."

  "One minute, sir. I think she passed by and entered the elevator while we've been talking. If you'll hold on, I'll have the switchboard ring her room and transfer your call."

  In room 367 Brian Shaw laid down the receiver and walked into the bathroom. Heidi lay in the tub, covered by a blanket of bubbles, her cast-enclosed leg propped awkwardly on the edge of the tub. Her hair was covered by a plastic shower cap and she lazily held an empty glass in one hand.

  "Venus, born of the foam and the sea." Shaw laughed. "I wish I had a picture of this."

  "I can't reach the champagne," she said, pointing to a magnum of Tattinger brut reserve vintage in an ice bucket perched on the washbasin. He nodded and filled her glass. Then he poured the remainder of the chilled champagne over her breasts.

  She yelped and tried to splash him, but he ducked nimbly back through the doorway. "I owe you for that," she shouted.

  "Before you declare war, you've got a call."

  "Who is it?"

  "I didn't ask. Sounds like another dirty old man." He nodded at a wall phone mounted between the tub and the commode. "You can take it here. I'll hang up the extension."

  As soon as her voice came on the line, Shaw clicked the connection and then kept his ear pressed to the receiver. When Heidi and Sandecker finished their conversation, he waited for her to hang up. She didn't.

  Smart girl, he thought. She didn't trust him.

  After ten seconds he finally heard the disconnect as she placed the handset in its cradle. Then he dialed the hotel switchboard.

  "May I help you?"

  "Yes, could you ring room three sixty-seven in a minute and ask for Brian Shaw? Please don't say who you are."

  "Nothing else?"

  "When Shaw himself answers, just punch off the connection. "Yes, sir."

  Shaw returned to the bathroom and peered around the door. "Truce?"

  Heidi looked up and smiled. "How'd you like it if I did that to you?"

  "The sensation wouldn't be the same. I'm not built like you. "Now I'll reek of champagne."

  "Sounds delicious." The phones in the suite jangled.

  "Probably for you," he said casually.

  She reached over and answered, then held the handset toward him. "They asked for Brian Shaw.

  Perhaps you'd like to take it in the other room."

  "I have no secrets," he said, grinning slyly.

  He muttered through a one-sided conversation and then hung up. He made an angered expression.

  "Damn, that was the consulate. I have to meet with someone."

  "At this time of night?" she asked.

  He leaned down and kissed her toes that protruded from the end of the cast. "Revel in anticipation. I'll be back in two hours.

  The curator of the Long Island Railroad Museum was an elderly retired accountant who nourished a lifelong passion for the iron horse. He walked yawning through the relics on display while grumbling incessantly about being abruptly awakened in the dead of night to open the building for an FBI agent.

  He came to an antique door whose glass was etched with an elk standing on a mountain, looking down on a diamond stacked locomotive puffing a great billow of smoke as it rounded a sharp curve. He fished around with a large ring until he found the right key. Then he unlocked the door, swung it open and switched on the lights.

  He paused and stuck out an arm, blodking Shaw's way. "Are you sure you're an FBI man?"

  Shaw sighed at the stupid wording of the question and produced a hastily forged ID card for the third time. He waited patiently for the curator to read the fine print again.

  "I assure you, Mr. Rheinhold."

  "Rheingold. Like the beer."

  "Sorry, but I assure you the bureau wouldn't have put you to all this bother if the matter wasn't most urgent."

  Rheingold looked up at him. "Can you tell me what this is all about?"

  "Afraid not."

  "An Amtrak scandal. I bet you're investigating an Amtrak scandal."

  "I can't say."

  "A train robbery maybe. Must be pretty confidential. I haven't seen any mention on the six o'clock news."

  "Might I ask if we can get on with it," Shaw said impatiently. "I'm in a bit of a rush."

  "Okay, just asking," Rheingold said, disappointed.

  He led the way down an aisle bordered by high shelves crammed with bound volumes on railroading, most of them long out of print. He stopped at the end of one bookcase containing large portfolios, peered through the bottom lenses of his bifocals and read the titles aloud.

  "Let's see, track layouts for the New Haven & Hartford, the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, Boston

  & Albany . . . ah, here it is, the New York & Quebec Northern." He carried the portfolio over to a table and untied the strings on the cover. "Great railroad in its day. Over two thousand miles of track. Ran a crack express called the Manhattan Limited. Any particular section of the track you're interested in?"

  "I can find it, thank you," said Shaw.

  "Would you like a cup of coffee? I can make some upstairs in the office. Only take a couple of minutes."

  "You're a civilized man, Mr. Rheingold. Coffee sounds fine."

  Rheingold nodded and walked back down the aisle. He paused and turned when he came to the doorway. Shaw was sitting at the table studying the faded and yellowing maps.

  When he returned with the coffee, the portfolio was neatly tied and replaced in its proper niche on the shelf. "Mr. Shaw?" There was no answer. The library room was empty.

  Pitt felt inspired and determined, even exhilarated.

  A deep sense of knowing he had opened a door that had been overlooked for generations acted on him like a stimulant. With an optimism that was not there before, he stood in a small, empty pasture and waited for the two-engine jet to float in for a landing.

  Under normal procedures the feat would have been impossible: the field was pockmarked by old tree stumps and riddled with dry gullies. The longest flat spot ran no more than fifty feet before ending at a moss-covered rock wall. Pitt had expected a helicopter and he began to wonder if the pilot had a death wish or had brought the wrong aircraft.

  Then he watched in fascination as the wings and engines began to slowly tilt upward while the fuselage and tail remained horizontal. When they reached ninety degrees and were facing skyward the plane stopped its forward motion and began to settle to the uneven ground.


  Soon after the wheels touched the grass, Pitt walked up to the cockpit door and opened it. A boyish face with freckles and red hair broke into a cheery grin. "Morning. You Pitt?"

  "That's right."

  "Climb in."

  Pitt climbed in, secured the door and sat in the copilot's seat. "This is a VTOL, isn't it?"

  "Yeah," the pilot replied. "Vertical takeoff and landing, made in Italy, Scinletti 440. Nice little flier, finicky at times. But I sing Verdi to it and it's putty in my hands."

  "You don't use a helicopter?"

  "Too much vibration. Besides, vertical photography works best from a high-speed airplane." He paused.

  "By the way, the name's Jack Westler." He didn't offer to shake hands. Instead, he eased the throttles toward their stops, and the Scinletti began to rise.

  At about two hundred feet, Pitt twisted in his seat and stared back at the wings as they turned horizontal again. The craft began increasing its forward speed and soon returned to level flight.

  "What area would you like to photo-map?" asked Westler.

  "The old railroad bed along the west bank of the Hudson as far as Albany."

  "Not much left."

  "You're familiar with it?"

  "I've lived in the Hudson River valley all my life. Ever hear of the phantom train?"

  "Spare me," Pitt replied in a weary tone.

  "Oh . . . okay," Westler dropped the subject. "Where do you want to begin rolling the film?"

  "Start at the Magee place." Pitt looked around the rear cabin. It was void of equipment. "Speaking of film, Where is the camera and its operator?"

  "You mean cameras, plural. We use two, their lenses set at different angles for a binocular effect.

  They're mounted in pods under the fuselage. I operate them from here in the cockpit."

  "What altitude will you fly?"

  "Depends on the focal lenses. Altitude is computed mathematically and optically. We're set to make our run at ten thousand feet."

  The view of the valley from above was heady. The landscape unfurled and spread to the horizons, crisp and green, crowned by spring clouds. From five thousand feet the river took on the shape of a huge python crawling through the hills, with low islands sometimes dotting the channel like stepping-stones in a small stream. A vineyard country here, and an orchard land, broken by an occasional dairy farm.

  When the altimeter read ten thousand, Westler made a sweeping turn to slightly west of north. The De Soto crept beneath, looking like a tiny model in a diorama.

  "Cameras are rolling," Westler announced.

  "You make it sound like a movie production," said Pitt.

  "Almost. Each picture overlaps the next by sixty percent. That way, one particular object will show up twice at slightly different angles with varied highlights. You can detect things that are invisible from ground level, remnants of man-made disturbances hundreds or even thousands of years old."

  Pitt could see very clearly the scar of the track bed. Then it abruptly stopped and vanished into a field of alfalfa. He pointed downward.

  "Suppose the target is completely obliterated?"

  Westler peered through the windshield and nodded. "Okay, there's a case in point. When the land over the area of interest was used for agriculture, the vegetation will assume a subtle color difference due to elements foreign to the native soil composition. The change might be missed by the human eye, but the camera optics and enhanced color tone in the film will exaggerate features in the earth beyond reality."

  In no time at all, it seemed to Pitt, they were approaching the southern outskirts of New York State's capital. He gazed down at the oceangoing cargo ships docked at the port of Albany. Acres of railroad tracks fanned out from the storage warehouses like a giant spider's web. Here the old railbed disappeared for good under the heavy foot of modern development. "Let's make another run," said Pitt.

  "Coming around," acknowledged Westler.

  Five more times they swept the fading New York & Quebec Northern tracks, but the faint, fragile line through the countryside still looked solitary, undivided by discernible offshoots.

  Unless the cameras spotted something he couldn't detect, the only hope he had of finding the Manhattan Limited was Heidi Milligan.

  The maps had vanished from the portfolio in the railroad museum, and Heidi had no doubt who had stolen them.

  Shaw had returned to the hotel later that night, and they had made fluid and gentle love until early morning. But when she awoke, he was gone. Too late she realized that he had listened in on her conversation with Admiral Sandecker. More than once, during their lovemaking, she had thought of Pitt.

  It was very different with him. Pitt's style was consuming and savage and impelled her to respond with savage intensity. Their time in bed had been a competition, a tournament that she never won. Pitt had drowned her, left her floating in a haze of exhausted defeat. Deep down it galled her independent ego and her mind refused to accept his superiority, and yet her body hungered for it with sinful abandon.

  With Shaw the act was tender and almost respectful, and she could control her responses. Together they nurtured each other; apart they were like two gladiators circling, scheming for an opening to defeat the other. Pitt always left her spent and with a feeling she'd been used. Shaw was using her too, only for a different purpose, but strangely it didn't seem to matter. She longed to come back to him like someone returning from a stormy voyage.

  She sat back in a chair in the library room of the museum and closed her eyes. Shaw thought he had forced her into a dead end by stripping the records. But there were other sources of railroad lore, other archives, private collections or historical societies. Shaw knew she could not afford the time-consuming journeys to check them out. So now she had to think of another avenue to explore. And what Shaw couldn't know, couldn't project in his scheming mind, was that she wasn't trapped at all.

  "Okay, Mr. Smart-Ass," she muttered to the silent bookshelves, "here's where you get yours."

  She called over the yawning curator, who was still grumbling about inconsiderate FBI agents.

  "I'd like to see your old dispatch records and logbooks."

  He nodded cordially. "We have cataloged samplings of old dispatch material. Don't have them all, of course. Too voluminous to store. Just tell me what you want and I'll be happy to search it out for you."

  Heidi told him, and by lunchtime she had found what she was looking for.

  Heidi stepped off the plane at the Albany airport at four o'clock in the afternoon. Giordino was there waiting for her. She brushed off an offer of a wheelchair and insisted on walking on her crutches to the car.

  "How are things going?" she asked as Giordino pulled the car into traffic and turned south.

  "Doesn't look encouraging. Pitt was poring over aerial photographs when I left the boat. No trace of a branch track showed up anywhere."

  "I think I've found something."

  "We could damn well use a piece of luck, for a change," Giordino muttered.

  "You don't sound enthusiastic."

  "My school spirit has been bled out of me."

  "Things that bad?"

  "Figure it out. The President goes before the Canadian Parliament tomorrow afternoon. We're dead. No way in hell we'll come up with a treaty by then . . . even if one exists, which I doubt."

  "What does Pitt think?" she asked. "About the train being someplace else besides buried in the river, I mean?"

  "He's convinced it never reached the bridge."

  "What do you believe?"

  Giordino gazed expressionless down the road. Then he smiled. "I believe it's a waste of breath to argue with Pitt."

  "Why, because he's stubborn?"

  "No," Giordino answered. "Because he's usually right."

  For hours Pitt had stared through binocular glasses at the photo blowups, his brain interpreting the detail in three dimension.

  The zigzag rail fences separating pastures from bordering woodlands, the automo
biles and houses, a red-and-yellow hot-air balloon that made a colorful splash against the green landscape-they were all revealed in amazing clarity. Even an occasional railroad tie could be distinguished on the weed strewn track bed.

  Time after time he retraced the almost arrow-straight line between the destroyed bridge and the outskirts of Albany's industrial section, his eyes straining to pick out a minute detail, the tiniest suggestion of an abandoned rail spur.

  The secret stayed kept.

  He finally gave in and was leaning back in a chair resting his eyes when Heidi and Giordino entered the De Soto's chartroom. Pitt stood tiredly and embraced her. "How's the leg?" he asked.

  "On the mend, thank you."

  They helped her to a chair. Giordino took her crutches and leaned them against a bulkhead. Then he set her briefcase on the deck beside her. "Al tells me you've drawn a blank," she said.

  Pitt nodded. "Looks that way."

  "I have some more bad news for you." He said nothing, waiting. "Brian Shaw knows everything," she said simply.

  Pitt read the embarrassment in her eyes. "Everything covers a lot of territory."

  She shook her head in frustration. "He stole the maps of the old rail line from the museum before I had a chance to study them."

  "Do him damned little good unless he'd got a clue to their value."