Ascendant

by Sean Ellis

  But deep down she knew there was more to it than that. When she looked at DiLorenzo and felt the stirrings of desire, she could not help but think of the last man she had loved. Curtis Lancet’s death was a wound to her heart that was healing, true, but in DiLorenzo she saw the potential for a replay of that tragedy. The job of a New York City police detective was not exactly the safest career choice, and she wasn’t about to invest her heart in someone who might just that easily be taken from her. Not again.

  Her journey ended without incident. As the last gently sloping hillside gave way to flat coastal plain, she eyed the readout of the handheld global positioning satellite receiver, taped to the handlebars of the motorcycle. According to the GPS unit, she was there. She squeezed the clutch lever and tapped the gear selector with her foot until the bike was in neutral. As it coasted to a stop, she put out her left foot to balance it upright.

  She could hear the sound of the Pacific Ocean, not too distant but hidden behind a curtain of trees. The dirt road on which she traveled was deeply rutted, indicating at least occasional traffic by trucks and buses, but she thought it unlikely that many of the people who lived in the region owned their own vehicles. The track continued parallel to the ocean, then dove into the heart of the forest, presumably toward some kind of seaside settlement. If she allowed for certain tolerances in her estimation of the map coordinates, whatever kind of town lay ahead would certainly make the ideal starting point for her search.

  She started again and emerged from the wind-sculpted forest into the full fury of the blow. She had to gear down in order to make any headway, and as soon as she saw the loose collection of dilapidated buildings, she pulled behind one, grateful for shelter. Dropping the kickstand, she eased off of the big Harley.

  She had purchased the motorcycle, a classic if battered 1958 Harley Davidson XLH, outright in Buenos Aires, bargaining its owner down to where she was paying only fifty percent more than its actual value. Between the motorbike, the gun, and the cost of air-travel to Argentina she had burned up nearly all of the money she had earned since leaving the Agency. Her deal with the Atlas Trust entitled her to a regular stipend, but she was loath to use their money, especially since they were connected, albeit in an indirect manner, to the Trinity. Fortunately, casino winnings were a renewable resource.

  She left the motorcycle behind the first building, with only the fuel cans presenting any sort of target of opportunity for thieves. Everything else was in her nearly empty North Face backpack, which held only her passport and traveler’s cheques, a change of clothing almost identical to what she was currently wearing, extra ammunition for the pistol, a well-provisioned first-aid kit, and a few energy bars, which were all that remained of the food supply she had brought along. She stuffed the GPS unit into the bag, and then slipped her arms through the comfortable padded straps.

  She had not seen a single soul since motoring into the little village and found herself wondering whether it was altogether abandoned. The relentless wind was visibly eating away at the structures, stripping off sideboards and roof shingles with every gust. There were about a dozen buildings in all, lining either side of the dirt road. The forest lay to the rear of the village, on her left, while the ocean pounded the rocky shoreline not far from the structures on her right. She turned toward the shore and discovered a tiny harbor sheltered in a cove etched out of the rock.

  A stairway led down to a rickety wooden pier where two boats, one in surprisingly good shape, rocked back and forth in the swells. Though the cove was protected from the wind, the energy it stirred up on the surface of the water found its way in and repeatedly threw the boats against their moorings. Only the makeshift truck tire bumpers on their gunwales prevented them from being battered into splinters. She made her way to the boats, again thankful for any respite from the wind.

  The pier itself rocked up and down, though it was anchored to pilings at each corner to prevent any lateral movement. Nevertheless, Mira had to find her sea legs in order to approach the nicer of the two boats. The 40-foot-long fiberglass hull was green with algae a meter above the water line, presumably the difference between a hold full of cargo or fish and its present, unladen state. Barnacles were also visible through the murky water, indicating that the boat, though nicer than its companion, had not been especially well cared for.

  She walked along the length of the boat, but saw no evidence of anyone aboard. Hesitant to trespass, she chose instead to survey the other boat. As she crossed over to its moorage, a voice reached her from behind.

  “Looking for someone, Miss?”

  The man that stood at the beginning of the pier, like the boat that he doubtless skippered, had seen better days. His accent, though thick with alcohol, sounded Irish at first blush, but she quickly pegged him as an expatriate from Down Under. He stood a hair over six feet and could probably have added to that if not for his slovenly posture. His grizzled head hung over a prodigious beer gut, which strained the tattered fabric of a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, yet despite his run-down appearance, he looked strong and able.

  “I’d like to speak to the owner of one of these boats.”

  “You want to charter a fishing trip?” The man guffawed derisively at the notion.

  “Something like that.”

  The quiet confidence in her voice stopped his sardonic laughter. “Well, then, you’ll want to talk to me. The name’s Muldoon. Hank Muldoon. I own these boats. I own the whole town. So if you want something, you have to take it up with me.”

  She looked at him, feeling a vague hint of despair. There was nothing duplicitous about him, but his general manner and the overall appearance of his operation did not instill her with much confidence. Without any idea of where to begin, asking Muldoon for assistance seemed like the epitome of futility, but what choice did she have? In the absence of an intuitive cue against such a course of action, she would have to trust him.

  “Lovely,” she said through a tight smile. “Let’s get started.”

  Muldoon made his office in a small shack under the stairs that led up to the village main. The word “office” was perhaps too grand for the refuse-strewn room, but it did have at its center a magnificent desk of teak wood, worn and battered, but still an antique of obvious value. Mira suspected it once might have occupied the cabin of a China Clipper captain from before the age of steam. Like everything else that fell within Muldoon’s realm of influence, the desk was suffering from neglect. A scattering of old magazines and newspapers adorned its intricately carved surface, held in place by empty beer bottles. Mira had taken a seat on an upturned banana crate opposite her host at his desk and given a detailed and mostly false explanation of her reasons for visiting the remote location.

  Muldoon listened thoughtfully, never taking his eyes off her, even when he reached into a drawer and brought out a square bottle of brown glass. He waved it toward her without interrupting her narrative and, interpreting her nod as assent, fumbled for a rusty tin cup and splashed in a copious amount of clear liquid. He pushed it across the desk until it was within her reach, then fished around for a second cup.

  Mira finished recounting her cover story—in which she claimed to be on the trail of a scholar who might have visited in years past—as she regarded the offering of spirits apprehensively. Although the cup appeared to be the breeding ground for an unidentifiable black fungal growth, Mira did not doubt that Muldoon’s potent liquor had killed anything organic on contact. That did not necessarily translate into eagerness to drink.

  Muldoon showed no such antipathy, draining his portion in a bored gulp. “Aimes, huh?” He belched thoughtfully. “No, can’t say’s I heard of him. But I can hazard a guess why he’s interested in my little hamlet.”

  Mira watched with growing dread as Muldoon started pawing through the haphazard collection of pornographic magazines and Chilean newspapers on the desk. It seemed doubtful that he could produce anything of merit from such an accumulation. Her suspicions only deepened when he ab
ruptly held up a dog-eared, decades old copy of National Geographic magazine. Muldoon paged through it until he found what he was looking for, then turned the magazine around and pushed it across the desk to her.

  Mira leaned forward on her crate, glancing down at the periodical without touching it. The two pages showed a single photograph, taken underwater, though obviously not by a professional. Through the murky water, a distinct knife-like shape was discernible. Leaving her ambivalence behind, she picked it up and scanned the text printed in the inset. “A submarine. You found a Nazi U-boat?”

  “Oh, aye. And for a while, all kinds of folks were trying to get me to tell where it was. But see, I was too smart for ’em. I gave ’em a phony fix. They never found it. Eventually gave up.”

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t you want them to find it?”

  Muldoon gaped at her, and when he spoke, his voice was strident with emotion. “Salvage is a cutthroat business, lass. As soon as I give up the location, fortune hunters will swoop in like vultures and I won’t get squat for my discovery.”

  Mira smiled in spite of his tirade. “And if that happened, you’d have no means to support this extravagant lifestyle.”

  “Laugh if you like, missy. But I’ll have the last laugh when I get my salvage finished. There’s riches down there—Nazi gold! But if I were to show up rich all of a sudden, someone might take note, if you follow my meaning.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Muldoon leaned over the desk, close enough for her to smell the vapors of alcohol still on his breath, and whispered conspiratorially. “Odessa.”

  Mira did a mental back-flip at the all too familiar word. In the context of their discussion, “Odessa” could have meant only one thing; Muldoon lived in fear of something that had existed primarily only in the minds of imaginative espionage novelists. “Odessa,” she echoed. “The organization of escaped Nazi officers who sought refuge in South America after World War II. But it’s been nearly seventy years. How many of them could possibly still be living?”

  “They’ve got heirs. Some say they even cloned themselves to keep the legacy alive. And you can bet they want what I’ve got. Right now, they think I’m just a foolish old pirate who stumbled on the wreck once, but was too drunk to find my way back.”

  Mira rocked back until the crate was square on the floor. She had not expected the map to lead to something so completely unrelated to Aimes’ quest for prehistoric civilizations. Yet it seemed improbable that he could have found another event as significant as Muldoon’s discovery in such a remote location. She swung her gaze back to him. “Have you recovered anything besides gold?”

  “Ah, well. You see, I haven’t actually salvaged anything yet. Keeping a low profile, you understand.”

  Realization dawned, and Mira fixed him with a stare that brooked no further deception. “There isn’t any gold, is there?”

  Muldoon scowled irritably, but did not meet her gaze for long. “Damn it, of course there is. But it’s hidden all clever, see? And the currents—” He looked up again into her unwavering stare and dropped his hands in surrender. “Ah, missy. You found me out. I’ve dived on her a hundred times and not found the gold. Now I’m too old and too broken down to dive on her myself, and I don’t dare take on a partner who’d likely stab me in the back as soon as the treasure was found.”

  The potential significance of the U-boat remained a mystery, but Mira was becoming convinced by degrees that the wreck of the Nazi vessel was indeed the clue that had prompted Aimes to put a pin on his map, pointing the way to Muldoon’s forgotten seaport. The solution to that puzzle would not be found in an old photograph, however. Mira leaned close to the drunken wreck of a man, closer than he had been a moment before.

  “Listen, Hank. I don’t care about your gold, but I want to see what else is on that U-boat. If you’ll take me there, I’ll dive on it, and you can keep whatever gold I find.”

  Muldoon grinned, then grabbed the dark bottle and raised it in a mock toast. “I’ll drink to that, missy.”

  Mira chuckled softly. “My intuition tells me you’ll drink to anything.”

  * * *

  A rare calm visited the Pacific Ocean the following morning. The constant gale, which had rattled the rafters overhead in the draughty hostel where Mira spent the night, had subsided in what her new partner would doubtless have called “the wee early hours.” She had risen shortly after the onset of the calm and hastened down to Muldoon’s boat, rousting him out of an alcoholic slumber. He came awake more easily than she had anticipated; evidently, he had grown accustomed to the effects of the liquor. He had grumbled over the cup of coffee she had thrust into his hands, but showed no other signs of physical impairment.

  With Muldoon at the helm, the forty-footer pulled away from its slip and charged out into the gray waters of the Strait of Magellan. Distant shapes seemed to wink in and out of view on the horizon, islands that formed the final barrier between the South American continent and a stretch of empty water that, if one traveled due west, ended almost six thousand miles later at the twin islands of New Zealand.

  With Muldoon bellowing about his lucidity, Mira left him on the flying bridge and went below to inspect the dive gear. The SCUBA tanks were at least twenty years old, faded from what was once a bright yellow hue and streaked with algae, but otherwise seemed in good repair. The gauge showed one fully filled—roughly eighty cubic feet of air at 3,000 pounds per square inch—and the other was about three-quarters full. The mask and wetsuit were likewise worn but intact. She played with the rubber straps of the mask, adjusting them to fit her head, then turned her attention back to the SCUBA gear.

  The regulator seemed to function correctly, and a cautious breath showed no indication of dry rot in the lines. However, the twin tanks did not seem adequate for an extended dive, and this concerned her. There was no compressor to refill an empty bottle, which meant that one and three-quarters tanks was the limit on her dive time. Depending on the depth there might not even be time to reach the wreck, let alone explore it and still observe decompression tables. Muldoon had offered no clue as to the depth at which they would find the wreck, but the article in the National Geographic issue he had showed her the previous day told of a harrowing descent to depths of “inky blackness.”

  Setting aside the matter, she knelt beside the tanks and unlaced her boots. She had not brought along any sort of bathing suit, so in order to have dry clothes to change back into, she would have to make the dive with nothing at all between her skin and the heavy wetsuit. She tried not to think about the suit’s usual occupant as she pulled on the neoprene garment, one leg at a time.

  The wetsuit was an awkward fit in almost every way, bunching up in clumsy ripples of excess material, but there was nothing to be done about it. Though it would hamper her swim strokes, the insulating properties of the suit would not be greatly affected. Once her body heat warmed the thin layer of sea water trapped against her skin, it would keep her, if not exactly comfortable, at least comfortably away from hypothermia. A pair of dive booties that fit like clown shoes completed the ensemble.

  Mira went back up to the deck to check on their progress. She found Muldoon consulting a chart and compass and realized with a start that the boat was no longer heading west, but rather north, parallel to the coastline. The magazine article had led her to believe they would find the wreck of the U-boat far to the west, in open water. She shook her head in amazement as Muldoon’s deception became clear to her.

  For close to thirty years, the old man had been telling tales of a dangerous dive in the Pacific depths. He had taken journalists and treasure hunters far out to sea and swept the area where he claimed to have first laid eyes on the wreck with every sort of detection device available, but the dark waters had yielded nothing. The repeated failures convinced the relentless fortune seekers that the U-boat wreck was a clever fraud, designed to bilk them out of their money, and after a while, they left him alone.

  It had
all been part of his plan. Paranoid that the descendants of the Third Reich would murder him and steal his treasure, he had intentionally misled two decades’ worth of treasure seekers into believing that he was delusional.

  Muldoon noticed her expression. “Almost there, missy. Right where I left it.”

  “No one ever thought to look for it this close to the mainland?”

  “Ah, there was one or two. But treasure hunting is a flavor that sours quickly.”

  Mira grinned. “Not if you’re doing it right.”

  As she had expected, the rush of cold water into the ample cavity between the wet suit and her naked skin was bracing, to say the least. Her muscles involuntarily constricted, followed by a tooth chattering spasm of shivers that lasted several seconds. She bobbed upright in the water, feebly raising a hand to return Muldoon’s wave, then slipped the airflow regulator between her lips and ducked her head beneath the chilly waters. Breathing pressurized air, with a faint oily taste, she began kicking and stroking into the deep.

  Depth was a relative term. Muldoon had dropped anchor over an uncharted seamount where the ocean floor rose to within twenty fathoms of the surface. It was upon the spine of this rise that the U-boat had reefed herself, rupturing the pressure hull and flooding all compartments before a single man could think to blow the ballast tanks or attempt a free ascent. More importantly, it was a depth that could be reached and explored without overextending her limited supply of air.

  Following the creation of their partnership, Muldoon had produced a surprisingly accurate diagram of the U-boat. It was drawn from his own experience rather that any technical information relating to the Walter XXI Electric Undersea Boat design. During the previous night, Mira had used her Internet-capable satellite telephone to do a little research on the history and design of the model XXI; experimental U-boats fielded toward the end of the war. The actual record of service for the XXI boats was somewhat less spectacular and, according to the available documents, all of them were accounted for. Evidently, however, those records were incomplete. If Muldoon was correct, then at least one of the submarines had carried out an unknown mission, which had brought it to its final resting place off the coast of Chile.