“I don’t have the vaguest idea of what you’re talking about.” She turned to Merchant and Crutcher. “This man is dangerous. He is a menace to Dorsett Consolidated Mining. Get him off my boat and do with him whatever you think is necessary to ensure he doesn’t bother us again.”
Pitt made one last toss of the dice. “Garret Converse, the actor, and his Chinese junk, the Tz’u-hsi. David Copperfield would be proud of the way you made Converse, his entire crew and boat disappear.” The expected reaction was all there. The strength and the arrogance evaporated.
Boudicca suddenly looked lost. Then Pitt threw in the clincher. “Surely you haven’t forgotten the Mentawai. Now there was a sloppy job. You mistimed your explosives and blew up the boarding party from the Rio Grande who were investigating what appeared to be an abandoned ship. Unfortunately for you, your yacht was seen fleeing the scene and later identified.”
“A most intriguing tale.” There was scorn in Boudicca’s voice, but a scorn disputed by a deep foreboding in her face. “You might almost say spellbinding. Are you quite finished, Mr. Pitt, or do you have an ending?”
“An ending?” Pitt sighed. “It hasn’t been written yet. But I think it’s safe to say that very soon Dorsett Consolidated Mining Limited will be only a memory.”
He had gone one step too far. Boudicca began to lose control. Her anger swelled, and she came close to Pitt, her face tight and cold. “My father can’t be stopped. Not by any legal authority or any government. Not in the next twenty-seven days. By then, we’ll have closed down the mines of our own accord.”
“Why not do it now and save God only knows how many lives?”
“Not one minute before we’re ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“A pity you can’t ask Maeve.”
“Why Maeve?”
“Deirdre tells me that she became quite friendly with the man who saved her.”
“She’s in Australia,” said Pitt.
Boudicca shook her head and showed her teeth. “Maeve is in Washington, working as an agent for our father, feeding him whatever information NUMA has collected on the deathly sound waves. Nothing like having a trusted relative in the enemy camp to keep one out of trouble.”
“I misjudged her,” Pitt said brusquely. “She led me to believe that protecting sea life was her life’s work.”
“Any moral indignation flew out the window when she learned my father was holding her twin sons as insurance.”
“Don’t you mean hostages?” The mist began to lift. Pitt began to see that Arthur Dorsett’s machinations went far beyond mere greed. The man was a bloodthirsty cutthroat, a predator who thought nothing of using his own family as pawns.
Boudicca disregarded Pitt’s remark and nodded at John Merchant. “He’s yours to dispose of as you will.”
“Before we bury him with the others,” said Crutcher with seeming anticipation, “we’ll persuade him to fill in any details he might have purposely left out.”
“So I’m to be tortured and then executed,” Pitt said nonchalantly, helping himself to another shot of tequila while his mind desperately created and discarded a dozen useless plans for escape.
“You’ve condemned yourself by coming here,” said Boudicca. “If, as you say, officials of NUMA suspected our excavation operations were responsible for sending deadly sound waves throughout the ocean, there would have been no need for you to clandestinely spy on Dorsett property. The truth is, you have learned the answers within the past hour and have yet to pass them on to your superiors in Washington. I compliment you, Mr. Pitt. Slipping through our, security and entering the mine was a masterstroke. You could not have done it alone. Explanations will be forthcoming after Mr. Merchant motivates you to share your secrets.”
She nailed me good, Pitt thought in defeat. “You will give Maeve and Deirdre my best wishes.”
“Knowing my sisters, they’ve probably already forgotten you.”
“Deirdre maybe, not Maeve. Now that I’ve met all of you, it’s evident that she’s the most virtuous of the three.”
Pitt was surprised at the look of hatred that flashed in Boudicca’s eyes. “Maeve is the outcast. She has never been close to the family.”
Pitt grinned, a natural grin, mischievous and challenging. “It’s easy to see why.”
Boudicca stood up, looking even taller due to the heels of her boots, and stared down at Pitt, enraged at the laughter she read in his opaline green eyes. “By the time we close the mine, Maeve and her bastard sons will be gone.” She spun around and glared at Merchant. “Get this scum off my boat,” she said. “I don’t want to see him again.”
“You won’t, Ms. Dorsett,” said Merchant, motioning for Crutcher to push Pitt from the salon. “I promise, this will be your last look at him.”
With Pitt between them and Elmo bringing up the rear, Merchant and Crutcher escorted their captive down the gangway and walked across the dock toward a waiting van. As they passed by the large containers of supplies and equipment that had been off loaded from the cargo ship, the loud exhaust from the diesel engines operating the cranes drowned out a dull thud. Only when Crutcher suddenly crumpled to the planking of the dock did Pitt spin around in a defensive crouch, just in time to see Merchant’s eyes roll up into his head before he dropped like a sack of sand. Several steps behind them, Elmo lay stretched out like a dead man, which he was.
The whole operation hadn’t taken ten seconds from the killing blow to the back of Elmo’s neck to the concussion of John Merchant’s skull.
Mason Broadmoor grabbed Pitt’s arm with his left hand, his right still gripping a massive steel wrench. “Quick, jump!”
Confused, Pitt hesitated. “Jump where?”
“Off the dock, you idiot.”
Pitt needed no further urging. Five running steps and they both flew through the air and landed in the water a few meters in front of the bow of the cargo ship. The ice-cold water shocked every nerve ending in Pitt’s body before his adrenaline took over and he found himself swimming beside Broadmoor.
“Now what?” he gasped, breathing steam over the icy water while shaking the water from his face and hair.
“The watercraft,” answered Broadmoor after snorting water from his nose. “We sneaked them off the fishing boat and hid them under the pier.”
“They were on the boat? I didn’t see them.”
“A hidden compartment I built myself,” Broadmoor said, grinning. “You never know when you’ll need to skip town ahead of the sheriff.” He reached one of the Duo 300 WetJets that were floating beside a concrete piling and climbed aboard. “You know how to ride a watercraft?”
“Like I was born on one,” said Pitt, pulling himself aboard and straddling the seat.
“If we keep the cargo ship between us and the dock, we should be blocked from their line of fire for a good half kilometer.”
They punched the starters, the modified engines roared to life, and with Broadmoor less than a meter in the lead, they burst from under the dock as if shot from a cannon. They stuck the noses of their watercraft in a hard turn and sliced around the bows of the cargo ship, using the hull as a shield. The engines accelerated with no hint of hesitation. Pitt never looked back. He hunched over the handlebars and pressed the trigger throttle to its stop, half expecting a hail of gunfire to pepper the water around him at any second. But their getaway was clean, they were far out of range before the rest of John Merchant’s security team was alerted.
For the second time in nearly as many days, Pitt was making a wild escape from the Dorsett mine for Moresby Island. The water sped past in a blue-green blur. The bright colors and the Haida designs on the watercraft glittered radiantly in the bright sun. Pitt’s senses sharpened at the danger, and his reactions quickened.
From the air the channel between the islands seemed little more than a wide river. But from the surface of the sea, the inviting safety of the trees and rocky hills of Moresby appeared like a speck on the far horizon.
He jumped Broadmoor’s wake, pulled even until they were hurtling across the water virtually side by side and shouted, “We’ll be dead meat if they come after us!”
“Not to worry!” Broadmoor yelled back. “We can outrun their patrol boats!”
Pitt turned and peered over his shoulder at the rapidly receding island. He cursed under his breath as he spotted the remaining Defender helicopter rising above the mound surrounding the mine. In less than a minute it was sweeping across the channel, taking up the chase and following their wakes.
“We can’t outrun their helicopter,” Pitt informed Broadmoor loudly.
In contrast to a grim-faced Pitt, Mason Broadmoor looked as enthusiastic and bright eyed as a boy warming up for his first track meet. His brown features were flushed with excitement. He stood on the footrests and glanced back at the pursuing aircraft. “The dumb bastards don’t stand a chance,” he said grinning. “Follow in my wake.”
They were rapidly overhauling the homeward-bound fishing fleet, but Broadmoor made a hard turn toward Moresby Island, giving the boats a wide berth. The shore was only a few hundred meters away, and the helicopter had pulled to within a kilometer. Pitt could see waves sluicing and heaving in constant motion as they hurled against the rocks below a shore of steep, jagged cliffs, and he wondered if Broadmoor had a death wish as he aimed his watercraft toward the swirling breakers. Pitt turned his attention from the approaching helicopter and put his faith in the Haida totem carver. He stuck the nose of his watercraft into the rooster tail shooting up behind the front-runner and hung in the foaming wake, as they ran flat out through a cauldron of waves thrashing against a fortress of offshore rocks.
To Pitt it looked as if they were on a direct course toward the wave-hammered cliffs. He gripped the handlebars, braced his feet in the padded footwells and hung on to keep from being pitched off. The rumble of the breakers came like thunderclaps, and all he could see was a gigantic curtain of spray and foam. The image of the Polar Queen, drifting helpless toward the barren rock island in the Antarctic flickered through his mind. But this time, he was aboard a speck in the sea instead of an ocean liner. He plunged on despite a growing certainty that Broadmoor was certifiably insane.
Broadmoor cut around a huge rock. Pitt followed, instantly setting up the turn, shifting his body back and outside to slightly weight the front inside of the hull, then hanging on, the hull biting into the water as he carved the turn in Broadmoor’s wake. They rocketed over the crest of a huge roller and smashed down in the trough before ascending on the back of the next one.
The helicopter was almost upon them, but the pilot stared in dumb fascination at the suicidal course set by the two men on the watercraft. Astonished, he failed to line up and fire his twin 7.62 guns. Wary of his own danger, he pulled the aircraft up in a steep vertical climb and swept over the palisades. He banked sharply to come around for another look but the watercraft had already been out of sight for a critical ten seconds. When he circled back over the water, his quarry had vanished.
Some inner instinct told Pitt that in another hundred meters he would be pulped against the unyielding wall rising out of the water and that would be the end of it. The choice was to veer off and take his chances with the firepower from the helicopter, but he remained inflexibly on course. His life was passing in front of him. Then he saw it.
A tiny crevice in the lower face of the cliffs suddenly yawned open like the eye of a needle, no wider than two meters. Broadmoor swept into the narrow opening and was gone.
Pitt grimly followed, swearing that the ends of his handlebars brushed the sides of the entrance, and abruptly found himself in a deep grotto with a high, inverted V-shaped ceiling. Ahead of him, Broadmoor slowed and glided to a stop beside a small rock landing, where he jumped off his machine, tore off his coat and began stuffing it with a bundle of dead kelp that had washed into the grotto. Pitt immediately saw the wisdom of the Indian’s scheme. He hit the stop switch on the handlebar and matched Broadmoor’s actions.
Once the coats were filled to simulate headless torsos, they were thrown in the water at the entrance to the grotto. Pitt and Broadmoor stood there watching as the dummies were swept back and forth before being carried by the backwash into the maelstrom outside.
“You think that will fool them?” asked Pitt.
“Guaranteed,” answered Broadmoor confidentially. “The wall of the cliff slants out, making the opening to the grotto impossible to see from the air.” He cocked an ear at the sound of the helicopter outside. “I’ll give them another ten minutes before they head back to the mine and tell Dapper John Merchant, if he’s regained consciousness, that we bashed our brains out on the rocks.”
Broadmoor was prophetic. The sound of the helicopter echoing into the grotto gradually died and faded away. He checked the fuel tanks of the watercraft and nodded comfortably. “If we run at half speed we should have just enough fuel to reach my village.”
“I suggest we relax till after sunset,” said Pitt. “No—sense in showing our faces in case the pilot of the helicopter has a suspicious disposition. Can you navigate home in the dark?”
“Blindfolded in a straitjacket,” Broadmoor said indisputably. “We’ll leave at midnight and be in bed by 300 A.M.”
For the next several minutes, worn out from the excitement of the hard run across the channel and the near brush with death, they sat in silence, listening to the reverberating roar of the surf outside the grotto. Finally, Broadmoor reached into a small compartment on his WetJet and retrieved a canvas-covered half-gallon canteen. He pulled out a cork stopper and handed the canteen to Pitt.
“Boysenberry wine. Made it myself.”
Pitt took a long swallow and made a strange face. “You mean boysenberry brandy, don’t you?”
“I admit that it does have a nice kick.” He smiled as Pitt passed back the canteen. “Did you find what you were looking for at the mine?”
“Yes, your engineer led me to the source of the problem.”
“I am glad. Then it has all been worth it.”
“You paid a high price. You’ll not be selling any more fish to the mining company.”
“I felt like a whore taking Dorsett money anyway,” said Broadmoor with a disgusted expression.
“As a consolation, you’ll also be interested to learn that Boudicca Dorsett claimed her daddy was going to close down the mine a month from now.”
“If it’s true, my people will be happy to hear it,” said Broadmoor, handing back the canteen. “That calls for another drink.”
“I owe you a debt I can’t repay,” said Pitt quietly. “You took a great risk to help me escape.”
“It was worth it to bash Merchant and Crutcher’s skulls,” Broadmoor laughed. “I’ve never felt this good before. It is I who must thank you for the opportunity.”
Pitt reached out and shook Broadmoor’s hand. “I’m going to miss your cheery disposition.”
“You’re going home?”
“Back to Washington with the information I’ve gathered.”
“You’re okay for a mainlander, friend Pitt. If you ever need a second home, you’re always welcome in my village.”
“You never know,” said Pitt warmly. “I just might take you up on that offer someday.”
They departed the grotto long after dark as insurance against chance discovery by Dorsett security patrol boats. Broadmoor draped the chain of a small shaded penlight around his neck so that it was hanging on his back.
Fortified by the boysenberry wine, Pitt
followed the tiny beam through the surf and around the rocks, amazed at the ease with which Broadmoor navigated in the dark without mishap.
The image of Maeve, forced to work as a spy under the boot of her father, blackmailed by his seizure of her twin sons, made him boil with anger. He also felt a stab in his heart, a feeling that had not coursed through him in years. His emotions stirred with the memories of another woman. Only then did he realize it was possible to feel the same love for two different women from different times, one living, one dead.
Driven and torn by conflicting emotions of love and hate and a determination to stop Arthur Dorsett no matter the cost and consequences, he gripped the handlebars till his knuckles gleamed white under the light from a quarter-moon as he forged through the cataract from Broadmoor’s wake.
For most of the afternoon the wind blew steadily out of the northeast. A brisk wind, but not enough to raise more than an occasional whitecap on the swells that topped out at one meter. The wind brought with it a driving rain that fell in sheets, cutting visibility to less than five kilometers and striking the water as if its surface was churned by millions of thrashing herring. To most sailors it was miserable weather. But to British seamen like Captain Ian Briscoe, who spent their early years walking the decks of ships plowing through the damp of the North Sea, this was like old home week.
Unlike his junior officers, who remained out of the gusting spray and stayed dry, Briscoe stood on the bridge wing of his ship as if recharging the blood in his veins, staring out over the bow as if expecting to see a ghost ship that didn’t appear on radar. He noted that the mercury was holding steady and the temperature was several degrees above freezing. He felt no discomfort in his oilskins except that caused by the occasional drops of water that snaked their way through the strands of his precisely cut red beard and trickled down his neck.
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