As if risen from the dead, Pitt's lips tightened in a crooked little grin. His wet suit was in tatters and the dive mask had been torn from his head, but he was alive. He pointed up, released his hold on Giordino's ankle and kicked toward the surface a short five feet away. They broke the surface at the same time, Giordino grasping Pitt around the shoulders in a great bear hug.
"Damn you!" Giordino shouted. "You're alive."
"Damn me if I'm not," Pitt came back, laughing.
"How in God's name did you do it?"
"Dumb luck. After I heaved my air tank into the hovercraft's lift propeller and dove under the skirt, a stupid move by the way, I got no farther than eight feet when the tank exploded. The explosion blew outward and the resulting blast from the fuel tanks burst upward. I was unscathed until the concussion tore into me. I was blown into the muddy bottom, which cushioned my impact. It was a miracle my eardrums didn't burst. My ears are still ringing. I ache in places I didn't know existed. Every square inch of my body must be black-and-blue. Things went vague and woolly. I was knocked silly for a few moments but quickly recovered when I sucked on my regulator mouthpiece and found only my tongue along with a gush of swamp water. Gagging and retching, I made for the surface and floated around while pulling my mind and body together until I saw your air bubbles trail by."
"I thought for sure you bought the farm this time," said Giordino."Me too," Pitt agreed. He gingerly fingered his nose and a split lip. "Something struck my face when I was mashed into the canal bed-" He broke off and made a grimace. "Broken, my nose is broken. First time ever."
Giordino nodded his head at the devastation, the plantation house that had become a blazing inferno. "Did you ever determine which side of the family passed on your uncanny knack for causing destruction?"
"No pyromaniac ancestors that I know of."
Three security guards were still alive, one crawling away from the house, smoke curling from smoldering holes in the back of his uniform, the second lying dazed on the edge of the bank, weaving back and forth, his hands cupped to ears whose eardrums had burst. Four bodies floated in the flame-lit waters. The rest of the security force had disappeared. The third living guard stood in shock, staring dumbly at the shattered wreckage of the hovercraft with blood from a gash across one cheek flowing down his neck and dyeing his shirt crimson.
Pitt swam to the bank, came to his feet and walked ashore. The guard stared wide-eyed at the black-suited apparition from the canal as if he was an alien creature from the swamp. He convulsively reached for the gun in his side holster, but it had been torn away by the explosions. He turned and tried to run, staggered a few steps and fell. The apparition, with blood streaming from his nose, stared down.
"You speak English, my friend?"
"Yes," the guard nodded, replying in a voice hoarse with shock. "I learned American vocabulary."
"Good. You tell your boss, Qin Shang, that Dirk Pitt wants to know if he still stoops over and picks up bananas. You got that?"
The guard stumbled several times, repeating the sentence, but with Pitt's coaching he finally got it right. "Dirk Pitt wants to know if the esteemed Qin Shang still stoops over and picks up bananas."
"Nice going," Pitt said jovially. "You move to the head of the class."
Then Pitt casually strolled back to the canal and waded out to Giordino, who was waiting in the skiff.
35
JULIA WAS THANKFUL when darkness arrived. Moving through the shadows along the outside deck of the towboat toward the bow, she slipped over the side onto the barge and hid amid the black plastic bags of trash. She was not happy about the faint light thrown by a waning moon, but it enabled her to keep track of crew movements on board the towboat and to observe the countryside for geographical references as to location. She also followed the direction of her progress by glancing up every few minutes at Polaris, the North Star.
Unlike the featureless landscape of the central Atchafalaya Valley, the grassy banks of Bayou Teche supported a thick canopy of live oak trees, interspersed with stately cypresses and lithe willows. But like the edge of a checkerboard, the tree belt opened up every mile to reveal lights of farmhouses and dim, moonlit fields of newly planted crops. Behind fenced pastures, Julia could make out the shapes of cattle grazing. She recognized the sound of a meadowlark and fleetingly wished that she had a family and a home. She knew the day was not far off when her superiors at INS would curtail her hazardous attempts to stop Chinese immigrant-smuggling operations and put her behind a desk.
The towboat and barge passed what seemed a picturesque fishing town that Julia would later learn was Patterson. Docks lined the waterfront with fishing trawlers taking up almost every slip. She made a mental note of how the town was laid out along the bayou as it receded in the distance. The towboat captain blew his air horn as a drawbridge drew into sight. The bridge tender dutifully tooted his horn in reply and raised the span to allow passage.
A few miles above Patterson the towboat slackened its speed and began easing toward the west bank. Peering over the side of the barge, Julia could see a large, warehouselike brick structure with several outer buildings that were spaced around a long dock. A high chain-link fence with barbwire strung along the top encircled the compound. A few scattered floodlights with dim and dusty bulbs in their sockets ineffectually illuminated the open area between the dock and warehouse. The only sign of life Julia could see was a guard who exited a little shack and stood at a closed gate on the end of the dock. She noted that he was wearing the common uniform sold by private security services. Through a window of the shack, she could see the reflected images of a television screen.
Her heart gave a leap when she spied a pair of railroad tracks that ran down a concrete culvert under the big warehouse. She believed with growing certainty that this was the main staging center from where the illegals were transported to their predetermined destinations. Once there, they were either enslaved or released into heavily populated metropolitan cities.
She burrowed under the trash bags as the Chinese crew came aboard the barge and tied it to the dock. When the barge was secure, they leaped back on board the towboat. There was no word spoken between the captain, crew and the guard behind the gate. The captain gave a brief blast on his air hom to signal his intentions to a small shrimp boat about to pass by. The towboat slowly reversed away from the barge, swinging its stem wide until a 180-degree turn was completed and the flat-nosed bow was pointing down the bayou. Then the captain engaged FORWARD, increased speed and set the towboat on a course back toward Sungari.
The next twenty minutes were spent in a strange silence that began to frighten Julia. Not from personal fear of her safety, but a dread that perhaps she had made a mistake. The guard had long since returned to his shack and his television. The barge full of trash lay moored to the dock, dismissed and neglected.
Julia had contacted Captain Lewis aboard the Weehawken soon after her leap onto the towboat and informed him of her reckless enterprise. Lewis was not a happy camper when he realized that the woman whose safety was in his hands had taken a terrible risk. Professional that he was, he brushed aside his frustration and ordered a launch full of armed men under Lieutenant Stowe to follow the towboat and barge as a backup to the helicopter. His only order to Stowe was to keep a respectful distance behind the towboat and not arouse suspicion. Julia could hear the whine of the helicopter's engines and see its navigation lights in the night sky.
She well knew the fate that awaited her if Qin Shang's smuggling enforcers apprehended her, and it gave her a warm feeling to know she was being watched over by men who were willing to lay their lives on the line to save her if worst came to worst.
She had long before removed Lin Wan Chu's cook clothes and crammed them into a plastic trash bag, not so much because they were now incongruous but because the white cloth would have made her visible to anyone on the towboat when she stood up to stare over the side of the barge during the journey from Sungari. Underneath, she w
ore simple shorts and a blouse.
For the first time in nearly an hour, she spoke into her miniature radio and hailed Lieutenant Stowe. "The towboat has dropped off the barge and moored it alongside a dock near what looks like a large warehouse."
Lieutenant Jefferson Stowe, in command of the launch, answered quickly over the transmitter and receiver set around his head. "We confirm. The towboat is about to pass us going in the opposite direction. What is your situation?"
"About as exciting as watching a tree become petrified. Except for a security guard on the other side of a tall fence, who's busy watching a TV program in his shack, there isn't another soul in sight."
"Are you saying your objective is a washout?" asked Stowe.
"I need more time for an investigation," answered Julia.
"Not too long, I hope. Captain Lewis is hardly a patient man, and the helicopter only has another hour of fuel left. And that's only the half of it."
"What's the other half?"
"Your decision to jump on the towboat came so fast none of my crew or I got dinner."
"You're joking."
"Not about growing coast guardsmen missing a meal," Stowe said humorously.
"You will stand by, and not desert me."
"Of course," replied Stowe, the humor in his voice quickly fading. "I only hope the towboat didn't simply park the barge overnight in expectation of moving it to a trash fill in the morning."
"I don't think that's the case," said Julia. "One of the buildings has a railroad siding leading in and out of it. This place would make an ideal layout to transport smuggled immigrants to destinations around the country."
"I'll request Captain Lewis to check the railroad company for freight-train schedules that call for stops at the mill," Stowe offered reasonably. "Meanwhile, I'll run the launch into a small inlet across the bayou about a hundred yards south of you. We'll stand by here until I hear otherwise." There was a slight pause. "Ms. Lee."
"Yes."
"Don't get your hopes up," said Stowe evenly. "I've just spotted a shabby, run-down sign that's sitting at a crazy angle on the bank of the bayou. Would you like to know what it says?"
"Yes, do tell me," Julia answered, deliberately robbing her words of irritation.
"Felix Bartholomeaux Sugar Processing Plant Number One. Established 1883. You're apparently moored at a long-abandoned sugar mill. From my vantage point, the complex looks deader than a fossilized dinosaur egg."
"Then why would it be protected by a security guard?"
"I don't know," Stowe replied honestly.
"Hold on!" Julia snapped unexpectedly. "I heard something."
She went quietly, listening, and Stowe cooperated by asking no questions. As if far away, she heard the muted clank of metal against metal. At first, she thought it came from somewhere within the deserted sugar mill, but then she realized the sound was muffled by the water beneath the barge. Furiously, she threw the plastic trash bags aside until she could squirm a passage down to the bottom of the barge's hull. Then she pressed her ear against the damp, rusting metal of the bilge keel.
This time she heard muffled voices whose vibrations telegraphed through the steel. She could not distinguish words, but what she heard came through as men shouting harshly. Julia fought her way back to the top of the trash-bag pile, checked to see the guard was still occupied and then leaned over the side of the barge, peering down into the water. There were no telltale lights in the depths, and it was too dark to see more than a few inches past the surface.
"Lieutenant Stowe," she said softly.
"I'm here."
"Can you see anything in the water between the dock and the barge?"
"Not from here. But I have you in view."
Julia instinctively turned and stared across the bayou, but all she saw was darkness. "You can follow my actions?"
"Through a night-vision scope. I didn't want anybody sneaking up on you without you knowing about it."
Good old faithful Lieutenant Stowe. Another time, another place, she might have felt a growing affection for him. But any thought of love, no matter how fleeting, created an image of Dirk Pitt in her mind. For the first time in her life she was infatuated with a man, and her independent spirit was not sure how to accept the situation. Almost reluctantly, she refocused her concentration on discovering the covert methods of Qin Shang's smuggling operation.
"I believe there must be another vessel or compartment connected to the bottom of the barge," she reported.
"What are the indications?" asked Stowe.
"I heard voices through the keel. That would explain how the Chinese were able to smuggle the illegal immigrants through Sungari and past immigration, customs and the Coast Guard."
"I'd like to buy your theory, Ms. Lee, but an underwater compartment that is carried across two oceans from China and then shifted under a barge for a voyage up a Louisiana bayou to a railroad terminal in an abandoned sugar mill may get you an award for literary fiction, but it won't score you any points with pragmatic minds."
"I'll stake my career on it," Julia said positively.
"May I ask your intent?" Stowe's tone went from friendly to official.
"I intend to gain entry into the mill and make a search."
"Not a smart move. Better to wait until morning."
"That may be too late. The immigrants could be herded into freight cars and transported away by then."
"Ms. Lee," said Stowe coldly. "I strongly urge you to think this thing out and back off. I'll swing the launch across the bayou and pick you up off the barge."
Julia did not feel that she had come this far suddenly to walk away. "No thank you, Lieutenant Stowe. I'm going in. If I find what I hope to find, you and your men can come running."
"Ms. Lee, I must remind you that although you're under the protection of the Coast Guard, we are not a Justice Department SWAT team. My advice, if you wish to take it, is to wait until daylight, obtain a search warrant from a parish judge and then send in the local sheriff to investigate. You'll score more points with your superiors that way."
It was as though Julia had not heard Stowe. "
lease ask Captain Lewis to notify Peter Harper in Washington and alert the INS office in New Orleans. Good night, Lieutenant Stowe. Let's do lunch tomorrow."
Stowe tried several times to raise Julia, but she had turned off her little radio. He looked across the bayou through his night-vision scope and saw her jump from the barge and run the length of the dock, disappearing around a moss-covered oak tree outside the chain-link fence.
Julia stopped when she reached the oak and hid for a few minutes under the moss that hung from the branches above. Her eyes slowly panned around the seemingly deserted buildings of the sugar mill. No lights inside the doors and windows leaked through the weathered cracks. She listened but only heard the rhythmic whine and rasp of cicadas, an indication that summer was just around the corner. The balmy air lay heavy and damp with no breeze to cool skin moist with sweat.
The main building in the complex, solid and substantial, stood three stories tall. The founder must have been influenced by medieval architecture. Ramparts traveled around the roof with four turrets that once held the company's offices. The walls showed only enough windows to provide daylight for the interior, but to the men and women who had once labored there, the lack of ventilation must have caused incredibly oppressive working conditions. The red-clay bricks looked as if they had long defied the mugginess, but green moss and climbing vines were slowly invading their mortared seams, loosening their grip. Already, a large number of them had fallen to the damp earth below. To Julia the unearthly scene of a once-thriving business humming with activity, crowded with people but now abandoned, wore the expectant air of a place long overdue for the wrecker's ball.
She worked her way through the shadows of the vegetation growing along the fence until she came to the railroad tracks leading through a heavily padlocked gate, down the culvert and ending at a massive wooden door o
pening into the basement of the main warehouse. She bent down and studied the rails under a light on a nearby pole. The steel was shiny and free of rust. Her cocksure conviction was now becoming more firmly established.
She continued her reconnaissance, flitting silently with the grace of a cat through the underbrush until she came to a small drainage pipe two feet in diameter that ran under the fence before emptying in a ditch parallel to the old mill. She made a quick survey of the immediate area to check that she was still unobserved and began crawling into the pipe, pushing herself feet first so she could scramble forward if it proved to be a dead end.
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