Treasure dp-9

by Clive Cussler

  She can't be more than a week old."

  "Negative," Stewart's voice came over the radio. "The only ship reported missing during the last six months in this part of the Atlantic is your cruise liner."

  "This ain't no cruise ship," Giordino shot back.

  "Hold for a minute," said Pitt. "I'm going to come around the stern and see if we can make an identification."

  He threw the Deep Rover into a steep bank and glided parali lel to the ship's side. When they reached the stern, he spun sideways to a halt.

  The sub hung there motionless only one meter from the name of the ship painted on beaded welding.

  "Oh, my God," Giordino whispered in incredulous awe.

  "We've been conned."

  Pitt did not sit there in stunned disbelief. He grinned like a madman.

  The puzzle was far from complete, but the vital pieces had fallen into place. The white raised letters on the red steel plates did not read Lady Flamborough.

  They read General Bravo.

  from four hundred meters her designers and shipbuilders would not have recognized the Lady Flamborough. Her funnel had been reconstructed and every square inch of her repainted. To complete the facade, the hull was streaked with simulated rust.

  Her once-beautiful superstructure, stateroom windows and promenade deck were now hidden by great sheets of fiberboard assembled to look like cargo containers.

  Where the cruise liner's modern, rounded bridge featurrs were impossible to remove or hide, they were squared with wooden frwnework and canvas and painted with fake hatches and portholes.

  Before the lights of Punta del Este had dropped astern, every crew member and passenger was drafted into forced labor parties and driven to the point of exhaustion by Ammar's armed hijackers. The ship's officers, cruise directors, the stewards, chefs and waiters, and ordinary deckhands-they all hammered and slaved at assembling the prefabricated containers through the night.

  None of the VIP guests was spared. Senator Pitt and Hala Kamfl, Presidents Hasan and De Lorenzo, along with their cabinet members and staff aides, were all pressed into service as carpenters and painters.

  By the time the cruise liner rendezvoused with the General Bravo, the counterfeit cargo containers were in place and the ship sported a nearly identical configuration and color scheme.

  from the waterline up, the newly disguised Lady Flamborough could have easily passed as the container ship. An overhead inspection from the air would have revealed few discrepancies. Only a close examination from the sea might have detected obvious differences.

  Captain Juu Machado and eighteen crewmen from the General Bravo transferred to the cruise liner after opening all seacocks and cargo doors and detonating strategically placed charges throughout the hull.

  With a series of muffled explosions the container ship slipped beneath the sea with only a few faint gurgles of protest.

  When the eastern sky began to brighten with a new sun, the disguised Lady Flamborough was steaming south toward the advertised destination of the General Bravo. But when the port of San Pablo, Argentina, was forty kilometers off the starboard beam, the liner bypassed the port and continued due south.

  Ammar's ingenious scheme had worked. Three days had passed, and the world was still fooled into believing the Lady Flamborough and her distinguished passengers were lying somewhere on the bottom of the sea.

  Ammar sat at a chart table and marked the ship's latest position. Then he drew a straight line to his final destination and marked it with an X. Smugly complacent, he dropped the pencil and lit a long Dunhill cigarette, exhaling the smoke across the chart like a bank of mist.

  Sixteen hours, he reckoned. Sixteen more hours of sailing time without pursuit and the ship would be securely hidden without the slightest chance of detection.

  Captain Machado stepped into the chart room from the bridge, balancing a small tray on one hand. "Would you like a cup of tea and a croissant?"

  he asked in fluent English.

  "'Thank you, Captain. Come to think of it, I haven't eaten since we departed Punta del Este."

  Machado set the tray on the table and poured the tea. "I know you haven't slept since my crew and I came on board."

  "There is still much to do."

  "Perhaps we should begin by formally introducing ourselves."

  "I know who you are, or at least the name you go by," said Ammar indifferently. "I'm not interested in lengthy biographies."

  "That's how it is?"

  "Yes."

  "Mind letting me in on your plans?" said Machado. "I was informed of nothing beyond our transfer to your ship after scuttling the General Bravo. I'd be most interested in hearing about the next step of the mission, especially the part on how our combined crews intend to abandon the ship and evade arrest by international military forces."

  "Sorry, I've been too busy to enlighten you."

  "Now might be a good time," Machado pressed.

  Characteristically, Ammar calmly sipped at his tea and finished off the croissant beneath his mask before answering. Then he looked across the chart table at Machado without expression.

  "I don't intend to abandon the ship just yet," he said evenly. "My instructions from your leader and mine are to mark time and delay the final destruction of the Lady Flamborough until they both have time to assess the situation and turn it to their advantage."

  Slowly Machado relaxed, looked through the mask into the cold, dark eyes of the Egyptian, and he knew this was a man solidly in control. "I have no problem with that." He held up the pot. "More tea?"

  Ammar passed his cup. "What do you do when you're not sinking ships?"

  "I specialize in political assassinations," said Machado conversationally. "The same as you, Suleiman Aziz Ammar."

  Machado could not see the wary frown behind Ammar's mask, but he knew it was there.

  "You were sent to kill me?" Ammar asked, casually flicking an ash from his cigarette while lining up a tiny automatic pistol that suddenly appeared in his palm like a magic trick.

  Machado smiled and crossed his arms, keeping his hands in open view.

  "You can relax. My orders were to work in total harmony with you."

  Animar replaced the gun in a spring-operated device under his right sleeve. "How do you know me?"

  "Our leaders have few secrets between them."

  Damn Yazid, Ammar thought angrily. Yazid had betrayed him by giving away his identity. He wasn't taken in for an instant by Machado's lie.

  Once President Hasan was out of the way, the reincarnated Muhammad had no further use for his hired killer. Ammar was not about to reveal his escape plans to the Mexican hit man. He clearly realized his counterpart had no option but to form an alliance of expediency. Ammar was quite comfortable in knowing he could kill Machado at any time, while the Mexican had to wait until survival was assured.

  Ammar knew exactly where he stood.

  He raised his teacup. "To Akhmad Yazid."

  Machado stiffly raised his. "To Topiltzin."

  Hala and Senator Pitt had been locked in a suite along with President Hasan. They were grimy and splattered with paint, too exhausted to sleep. Their hands were blistered and their muscles ached from physical labor none had been conditioned for. And they were hungry.

  After the frenzied remodeling of the cruise liner's outer structure since leaving Uruguay, the hijackers had not allowed them any food.

  Their only liquid intake came from the faucet in the bathroom. And to make their condition worse, the temperature had been steadily dropping and no heat was coming through the ventilators.

  President Hasan was stretched out on one of the beds in abject misery.

  He suffered from a chronic back problem, and the strain from ten hours of uninterrupted bending and stretching had left him in a torrent of pain which he endured stoically.

  for all the movement they made, Hala and the Senator might have been carved from wood. Hala sat at a table with her head lowered in her hands. Even in her
disheveled state, she still looked serene and beautffid.

  Senator Pitt reclined on a couch, staring pensively at a light fixture in the ceiling. Only his eyes showed that he was alive.

  Finally Hala raised her head and looked at him. "If only we could do something," she said, barely above a whisper.

  The Senator rose stiffly to a sitting position. for his age, he was still in good physical shape. He was sore from neck to feet, but his he was beat as soundly as if he was twenty years younger.

  "That devil with the mask doesn't miss a trick," he said. "He won't feed us so we'll stay weak; everyone is locked away separately so we can't communicate or cooperate in a counter-takeover; and, he and his terrorists have not made any contact with us for two days. All calculated to keep us on edge and in a state of helplessness."

  "Can't we at least try to get out of here?"

  "There's probably a guard at the end of the hallway waiting to blast the first body that breaks through a door. And even if we somehow got past him, where could we go?"

  "Maybe we could steal a lifeboat," Hala suggested wildly.

  The Senator shook his head and smiled. "Too late for any attempt now.

  Not with the hijacker's force doubled by the crew from that Mexican cargo ship."

  "Suppose we break out the window and leave a trail with furniture, bed linen or whatever else we could throw out," Hala persisted.

  "Might as well toss bottles with notes inside. The currents would carry them a hundred kilometers from our wake by morning." He paused to shake his head. "Searchers would never find them in time."

  "You know as well as I, Senator, no one is looking for us. The outside world thinks our ship sank and everyone died. Search efforts would have been called off by now."

  "I know one man who will never give up."

  She looked at him questioningly. "Who?"

  "My son, Dirk."

  Hala rose and Iimped over to the window and stared vacantly at the outside fiberboard that hid her view of the sea. "You must be very proud of him. He's a brave and resourceful man, but only human. He'll never see through the deception-" She paused suddenly and peered down through a tiny crack that showed a brief span of water. "There's something drifting past the ship."

  The Senator came over and stood beside her. He could just make out several white objects against the blue of the sea. "Ice," he said, stunned. "That explains the cold. We must be heading into the Antarctic."

  Hala sagged against him and buried her face in his chest. "We'll never be rescued now," she murmured in helpless resignation. "No one will think to look for us there."

  No one knew the Sounder could drive so hard. Her decks trembled with the straining throb of her engines and the hull shuddered as it pounded into the swells.

  Launched at a shipyard in Boston during the summer of 1961, she had spent almost three decades chartering out to oceanographic schools for deep-water research projects in every sea of the world. After her purchase by NUMA in 1990, she had been completely overhauled and refitted. Her new 4,000-horsepower diesel engine was designed to push her at a maximum of fourteen knots, but Stewart and his engineers somehow coaxed seventeen out of her.

  The Sounder was the only ship on the trail of the Lady Flamborough, and she stood as much chance of closing the gap as a basset hound after a leopard. Warships of the Argentine Navy and British naval units stationed in the Falkjand Islands might have intercepted the fleeing cruise ship, but they were not alerted.

  After Pitts coded message to Admiral Sandecker announcing the astonishing discovery of the General Bravo instead of the Lady Flamborough, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House intelligence chiefs strongly advised the President to order a tight security lid on the revelation until U.S. Special Operations Forces could reach the area and coordinate a rescue.

  So the old Sounder surged through the sea, alone and without any high official authority, her crew of seamen d scientists caught up in the mad excitement of the chase.

  Pitt and Giordino sat in the ship's dining room, studying a chart of the extreme South Atlantic Ocean that Gunn had laid out on the table and pinned down with coffee cups.

  "You're convinced they headed south?" Gunn said to Pitt.

  "A U-turn to the north would have put the liner back in the search grid," explained Pitt. "And there's no way they would have swung west toward the coastline of Argentina."

  "They might have made a run for the open sea."

  "With a three-day lead they could be halfway to Africa by now," added Giordino.

  "Too risky," said Pitt. "Whoever is running the show doesn't lack for gray matter. Turning east across the ocean would have laid the ship open to exposure by search aircraft and any passing vessels. No, his only option to avoid undue suspicion was to continue on the General Bravo's advertised course to San Pablo on Tierra del Fuego."

  "But the port authorities would have blown the whistle when the container ship was overdue," insisted Giordino.

  "Don't underestimate this guy. What do you want to bet he signaled the San Pablo Harbor Master and said the General Bravo was running late due to engine breakdown?"

  "A neat touch," agreed Giordino. "He could easily gain another forty-eight hours."

  "Okay," said Gunn. "What's left? Where does he go? There are a thousand uninhabited islands he could get lost in around the Straits of Magellan."

  "Or ' Giordino hung on the "or7-"he might sail to the Antarctic, where he figures no one will search."

  "We're all talking in the present tense," said Pitt. "for all we know, he's already moored in some deserted cove."

  "We're on to his tricks now," said Gunn. "The Landsat cameras will be activated on its next pass over, and the Lady Flamborough, alias General Bravo, will be revealed in all her glory. "

  Giordino looked at Pitt for comment, but his old friend was staring off into space. He had picked up on Pitts habit of tuning out and knew the signs all too well.

  Pitt was no longer on the Sounder, he was on the bridge of the Lady Flamborough, attempting to get inside the head of his adversary. It wasn't an easy chore. The man who ramrodded the hijacking had to be the shrewdest customer Pitt had ever come up against.

  "He's aware of that," Pitt said finally.

  "Aware of what?" Gunn asked curiously.

  "The fact he can be detected by satellite photographs."

  "Then he knows he can run, but he can't hide."

  "I think he can."

  "I'd like to know how."

  Pitt stood and stretched. "I'm going to take a little walk."

  "You didn't answer my question." Gunn was anxious now, impatient.

  Pitt swayed and balanced his body with the rock of the ship and looked down at Gunn with a half grin. "If I were him," he said as if talking about a man he knew well, "I'd make the ship disappear a second time."

  Gunn's mouth dropped open as Giordino gave him an "I told you so" look.

  But before he could probe further, Pitt had exited the dining room.

  Pitt made his way aft and dropped down a ladder to the moon pool. He walked around the Deep Rover and stopped in front of the large roll of plastic sheeting they had pulled up from the bottom. It stood on end nearly as tall as Pitt and was secured by ropes against a stanchion.

  He stared at it for nearly five minutes before he rose and patted it with one hand. Intuition, an intuition that grew into a certainty, put a look that could be best described as pure Machiavellian in his eyes.

  He spoke a single word, uttered under his breath so softly that an engineer standing only a few meters away at a workbench didn't hear him.

  "Gotcha!"

  A flood of information on what became known as the Flamborough crisis poured through teletype and computer into the Pentagon's Military Command Center, the State Department's seventh floor Operations Center, and the War Games room in the old Executive Office Building.

  from each of these strategy tanks, the data were assembled and analyzed with almost lightning speed. Th
en the condensed version, fused with recommendations, was rushed to the Situation Room located in the White House basement for final assessment.

  The President, dressed casually in slacks and a woolen turtleneck, entered the room and sat at one end of the long conference table. After being updated on the situation, he would ask for options from his advisers for appropriate action. Though final decisions were his alone, he was heavily reinforced by crisis-management veterans who labored in search of a policy consensus and stood ready to carry it out once he gave it his stamp of approval despite dissenting opinions.

  The intelligence reports from Egypt were mostly all bad. A state of anarrhy was in full swing; the situation was deteriorating by the hour.

  The police and military forces remained in their barracks while thousands of Akhmad Yazid's followers staged strikes and boycotts throughout the country. The only shred of good news was that the demonstrations were not marked by violence.

  Secretary of State Douglas Oates briefly examined a report that was placed in front of him by an aide. "That's all we need," he muttered.

  The President looked at him expectantly in silence.

  "The Muslim rebels have just stormed and taken Cairo's major TV

  station."

  "A-ny appearance by Yazid?"

  "Still a no-show." CIA chief Brogan walked over from one of the computer monitors. "The latest intelligence says he's still holed up in his villa outside Alexandria, waiting to form a new government by acclamation."

  "Shouldn't be long now." The President sighed wearily. "What stance are the Israeli ministers taking?"

  Oates neatly stacked some papers as he spoke. "Strictly a wait-and-see attitude. They don't picture Yazid as an immediate threat."

  "They'll change their tune when he tears up the Camp David Peace Accord." The President turned and coldly stared into Brogan's eyes. "Can we take him out?"

  "Yes."

  Brogan's answer was flat, emphatic.

  "How?"