The men stepped from the hot and humid storage bay to an equally hot and humid deck. The ship was berthed at a dock, stern first, surrounded on three sides by dense jungle. Only a small patch of blue off the bow showed they had sailed from a larger body of water and backed into a narrow inlet barely large enough for the freighter to fit.
The brightness of early morning stung their eyes, yet Pitt noted the sun was nowhere in sight.
“Someone really likes their jungle around here,” Giordino said, pointing a finger skyward.
Shading his eyes, Pitt saw a jungle canopy overhead. It took him several seconds to realize it was a huge swath of camouflage netting that was strung over the entire dock complex.
“Maybe just privacy nuts,” Pitt said. He looked at the Adelaide, confirming his suspicions. The ship’s name had been repainted Labrador, while the funnel and deck railing had been painted new colors. The hijackers were well versed at theft and concealment on a grand scale.
The prisoners were herded to a gangway and marched off the ship, where they were greeted by a line of armed men in fatigues, several of them partnered with guard dogs. The captives were left standing along the dock for several minutes, which allowed time for Pitt and Giordino to study the facilities. The dock operation was modest, consisting of two small cranes and a conveyor system. Behind it were several large concrete pads, dusted with gray sediment—transfer stations for the raw ore and processed rare earth elements that were transferred in and out of the facility. Beyond the dock area, several low-slung buildings poked through the foliage. Pitt suspected they were separation-and-extraction plants, used to refine the stolen rare earth ores.
The putt-putt of a small motor preceded the appearance of a golf cart bearing a muscular blond man wearing a fitted uniform with a holstered pistol on his hip. A coiled bullwhip dangled from a belt hook on the opposite side. Pitt noticed the guards tense at his arrival.
“Looks like a lion tamer,” Giordino whispered.
“For a circus I want no part of,” Pitt said.
The overseer, Johansson, crossed the dock and spoke to Gomez, who had followed the prisoners off the ship. The Swede examined the freighter with a satisfied gleam.
“She’s carrying a full load of crushed monazite,” Gomez said. “Testing confirmed high concentrates of neodymium, cerium, and dysprosium.”
“Excellent. The extraction facilities have been waiting for new material. We will engage the new prisoners in off-loading the ore.”
“What about the ship?”
“She would make a nice addition to the fleet. Determine what reconfigurations are required to erase her identity, and we’ll discuss it with Bolcke after she’s unloaded.”
Johansson turned his back on Gomez to examine the new captives. He reviewed the men with a caustic eye, paying particular attention to the SWAT team.
“Welcome to Puertas del Infierno,” he said, “the Gates of Hell. You now belong to me.”
He waved his arm across the dock toward the buildings beyond. “This is an ore-refining center. We take raw ore and process it into various minerals of high value. You will be workers in the process. If you work hard, you will live. If you do not complain, you will live. And if you do not attempt escape, you will live.” He stared down the line of weakened men. “Are there any questions?”
A crewman from the Adelaide, one who’d had a difficult time in captivity, cleared his throat. “When will we be released?” he asked.
Johansson approached the man and smiled at him. Then he casually pulled his sidearm and shot the man in the forehead. A swarm of nearby jungle birds screeched at the sound as the man tumbled backward, falling into the water dead.
The other assembled captives gaped in stunned silence.
Johansson grinned. “Are there any more questions?”
Met by barely a heartbeat, he holstered his weapon. “Good. Again, I welcome you to Puerta del Infierno. Now, let’s get to work.”
51
THE DEEP THROB OF THE TOWBOAT’S ENGINE FELL silent, revealing the lesser sound of waves lapping against her hull. Awakened by the absent growl and vibration, Ann arose from her bunk and stretched her arms. She rubbed her wrists, where the handcuffs irritated her skin, and stepped to a tiny porthole on the starboard bulkhead.
It was still dark. Scattered lights dotted the shore a mile or so across the river, indicating they had docked on its eastern bank. The river, she was certain, was the Mississippi. From their starting point in Paducah, there was only one way to go downriver, taking the Ohio to its confluence with the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois. The night before, she had peered out to see the glowing lights of a large city, wondering if they shined from Memphis. As she watched the silhouette of a large freighter pass upriver, she guessed they were somewhere near New Orleans.
She rinsed her face in a basin and again searched the cramped cabin for a potential weapon. It was a hopeless exercise she had performed at least twenty times before, but at least it kept her mind working. She got only as far as an empty bureau when she heard the lock jiggle and the cabin door open. Pablo stood in the doorway, a bemused look in his eyes and a baseball bat in his hands.
“Come along,” he said, “we are changing vessels.”
He led her onto the towboat’s deck, where he slipped the bat across her back, wedging it into the crooks of her elbows.
“There will be no swimming exhibition this time.” Keeping one hand firmly grasping the bat, he led her off the towboat.
The contortion made Ann’s shoulders ache as they stepped onto a dimly lit dock. Pablo guided her past the barge, where a mobile dock crane had hoisted the flatbed trailer from the deck. Stray wisps of hay fluttered through the air as Pablo and Ann followed the crane, which crept down an embedded rail track toward a small freighter. In the faint light, she could make out the ship’s name on the transom. Salzburg. Though the dock was deserted save for the crane operator, several armed men wearing fatigues lined the freighter’s rail.
“Please let me go,” Ann said with exaggerated fear.
Pablo laughed. “Not before we make our delivery. Then, perhaps, you can win your freedom,” he added with a leer.
He marched her up the freighter’s forward gangway and across the deck. A large rectangular dish mounted to a wheeled platform blocked their path. Next to it, a crewman was checking cables at a control station mounted with power generators and computer displays. As they passed, the man looked up, briefly locking eyes with Ann.
She gave him a submissive look, pleading with her eyes for help.
He smiled as they passed. “Don’t get cooked,” he said.
Pablo pushed Ann ahead, guiding her to the superstructure at the stern and up two flights to the crew’s quarters. Her new cabin was slightly larger than the last but featured a similarly minuscule porthole.
“I hope you are pleased with the accommodations,” Pablo said, removing the baseball bat from her arms. “Perhaps later in the voyage we can spend some time together.” He stepped from the cabin and locked the door from the outside.
Ann sat on the hard bunk and glared at the door. Despite her act with Pablo, most of her fears had been replaced by anger. Clearly the freighter was leaving the country, taking both the Sea Arrow’s motor and its plans. She would be trapped in the cabin for days, or even weeks. Rather than lament, she contemplated how it had all been pulled off.
Her analytical mind went to work, stewing over the thefts. Acquiring the Sea Arrow’s plans and motor had been all too easy for Pablo. He must have had inside help. The involvement of the two men who had abducted her, and then were killed, indicated as much. And what about her? Why had she been abducted?
She could draw only one conclusion, that she must have been getting close to identifying the source. She racked her brains, reviewing the contractors and persons of interest. She kept r
eturning to Tom Cerny. Could the White House aide have been alerted to her inquiry?
She paced the small cabin, noticing several cigarette burns on the corner desk. The marks made her think of the crewman and his odd greeting.
“Don’t get cooked,” she repeated. The words nagged at her until suddenly their meaning struck like a bolt of lightning.
“Of course!” she said, disgusted that it hadn’t come to her sooner. “Don’t get cooked indeed.”
52
A LATE-NIGHT COMMERCIAL FLIGHT FROM DURBAN via Johannesburg proved the quickest way back to Washington for Dirk and Summer. They were bleary-eyed when they staggered off the plane early the next morning at Reagan National Airport. Remarkably, Summer walked freely through the terminal, showing stiffness from the flight but no lingering paralysis from her decompression sickness.
Timely immersion in the Alexandria’s deco chamber had proved her salvation. While the NUMA ship rushed from the tip of Madagascar to Durban, Summer and Dirk had been pressurized to an equivalent depth of four hundred feet. The paralysis in Summer’s leg promptly disappeared. The ship’s medical team slowly relieved the pressure in the chamber, allowing the nitrogen bubbles in their tissues to dissipate. When they were released from the chamber almost two days later, Summer found she could walk with only a faint lingering ache.
Since flying could aggravate the symptoms, the ship’s doctor insisted they not board an airplane for twenty-four hours. Fortunately, their steaming time to Durban occupied the full duration. Free of the chamber, they had time to brief the others on their work in the submersible, inspect its damage, and book their flight home, before racing to Durban’s King Shaka International Airport the moment the Alexandria touched the dock.
After collecting their bags at Reagan, they took a cab across the tarmac to their father’s hangar. Letting themselves in, they stored their bags and cleaned themselves up in the loft apartment.
“You think Dad would mind if we borrowed one of his cars to run to the office?” Summer asked.
“He’s always given us a standing offer to drive what we like,” Dirk said. He pointed to a silver-and-burgundy roadster parked near a workbench. “He said in an e-mail before he left for the Pacific that he just got that Packard running strong. Why don’t we take it?”
He checked to see that it had plenty of gas while Summer opened a garage door. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he pulled the choke and adjusted the throttle lever mounted on the steering wheel and hit the starter button. The big straight-eight engine murmured to life. Letting it warm up for a moment, he pulled the car outside and waited for Summer to lock the hangar.
She jumped into the passenger seat with a travel bag in tow, not noticing a white van parked across an adjacent field. “What’s with the funky seats?” she asked.
The Packard roadster’s tight cockpit held two rigid seats. Summer’s passenger seat was permanently offset a few inches farther from the dash than Dirk’s driver’s seat.
“More room for the driver to turn and shift at high speed,” Dirk explained, pointing to the floor-mounted gear lever.
“I’ll gladly take the extra legroom.”
Built in 1930, the Model 734 Packard chassis carried one of the factory’s rarest bodies, a sleek boattail speedster. The trunk line tapered to an angular point, giving the car a highly streamlined appearance. Sporting dual side-mounted spare tires, the body gleamed with metallic pewter paint, contrasted by burgundy fenders and a matching body-length stripe. Narrow Woodlite headlights on the prow, combined with an angled windshield, added to the sensation that the car was in motion even while parked.
Dirk drove north onto the George Washington Parkway, finding that the Packard loped along easily with the highway traffic. It was only a ten-minute drive to the NUMA headquarters, a tall glass structure that bordered the Potomac. Dirk parked in the underground garage, and they took an employee elevator to the top floor and Rudi Gunn’s office. His secretary directed them to the computer resource center, so they dropped down three flights to the high-tech lair of Hiram Yaeger.
They found Gunn and Yaeger parked in front of a wall-sized video screen, examining satellite photos of an empty sea. With bedraggled hair and circles under their eyes, both looked as if they hadn’t slept in days. But the men perked up at the sight of Pitt’s children. “Glad to have you back,” Gunn said. “You gave us quite a scare when your submersible went missing.”
Summer smiled. “Us, too.”
“I thought we were going to have to sedate Rudi,” Yaeger said. “Your leg okay, Summer?”
“Just fine. I think the coach seat from Johannesburg was more painful than the bends.” She eyed a collection of dirty coffee cups on the table before breaking the mood. “What’s the latest on Dad and Al?”
Both men turned grim. “Unfortunately, there’s not much to report,” Gunn said. He described Pitt’s mission of protecting the ore carrier, while Yaeger dialed up a map of the eastern Pacific.
“They boarded the Adelaide about a thousand miles southeast of Hawaii,” Yaeger said. “A Navy frigate on exercise out of San Diego was scheduled to meet them when they neared the coast and escort them to Long Beach. The Adelaide never appeared.”
“Any sign of debris?” Dirk asked.
“No,” Gunn said. “We’ve had search-and-rescue craft from Hawaii and the mainland overflying the area for days. The Navy has dispatched two vessels to the scene, and the Air Force has even sent in some long-range reconnaissance drones. They’ve all come up empty.”
Dirk noted a white horizontal line beginning at the left edge of the screen that ended when it intersected a red line from Hawaii. “Is that the Adelaide’s track?”
“Her AIS beacon provided her track to that point shortly after your dad and the SWAT team went aboard,” Yaeger said. “After that, the AIS signal went dead.”
“So she sank?” Summer asked, her voice breaking.
“Not necessarily,” Gunn said. “She could have simply disengaged the tracking system, which would be an obvious move after a hijacking.”
“We’ve drawn a couple of big circles around her last reported position to see where she could have gone.” Yaeger replaced the ocean map with a split screen of two satellite ocean photos. At the bottom was overlaid a stock photo of a large green bulk carrier labeled Adelaide. “We’re looking at coastal satellite photos to see if she might have popped up somewhere.”
“Hiram has accessed every public and not-so-public source of satellite reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the point of disappearance is smack in the middle of a large dead zone in satellite coverage, so we’re jumping to the coastlines.”
“North, South, and Central America, for starters.” Yaeger stifled a yawn. “Should keep us busy till Christmas.”
“How can we help?” Summer asked.
“We’ve got satellite images for most of the major West Coast ports from the past four days. I’ll divvy them up and see if anyone can spot a ship resembling the Adelaide.”
Yaeger set up two laptops and downloaded the images. Everyone went to work, scouring the photos for a large green cargo ship. They worked all through the day, studying image after image, until their eyes burned. Yet hopes were raised as they pegged eleven ships from the sometimes fuzzy and obscured photos that appeared to fit the Adelaide’s profile.
“Three in Long Beach, two in Manzanillo, four to the Panama Canal, and one each to San Antonio, Chile, and Puerto Caldera, Costa Rica,” Yaeger said.
“I can’t imagine any of the Long Beach vessels would be ours,” Dirk said, “unless they ran to another port to off-load first.”
Gunn looked at his watch. “It’s still early out west. How about we break for dinner? When we reconvene, we can begin calling the port authorities at each location. They should be able to confirm if the Adelaide cleared their local facilities.”
“Just a second,” Summer said. “Before we break, I need a quick favor from Hiram, and then I’ll need your help in making a delivery.” She picked up her travel pack, which clinked with the sound of bottles inside.
“I’m pretty hungry. Can we grab a bite on the way?”
“Where we’re headed,” she said, “I can positively guarantee there will be something good to eat.”
53
THE PACKARD ROARED OUT OF THE PARKING garage and skirted past a white van at the edge of the outside lot before merging into the evening rush-hour traffic. Dirk crossed into Georgetown as an evening breeze tousled Summer’s hair in the open car. Turning down a shady residential street filled with elegant homes, Dirk stopped in front of a former carriage house that ages ago had been transformed into a courtly freestanding residence.
They had barely rung the bell when the front door was thrown open by a gargantuan man sporting an overflowing gray beard. St. Julien Perlmutter’s eyes twinkled as he greeted Dirk and Summer and invited them inside.
“I nearly ate without you,” he said.
“You were expecting us?” Dirk asked.
“Of course. Summer e-mailed me with the particulars of your Madagascar mystery. I insisted you both come by for dinner the instant you returned. Don’t you two talk to each other?”
Summer smiled sheepishly at her brother, then followed Perlmutter through a book-infested living room and into a formal dining area, where an antique cherrywood table sat overloaded with food. Perlmutter was a marine historian, one of the best on the planet, but he had a second love as a gourmand. His eyes lit up when Summer opened her bag and offered him three bottles of wine from South Africa.
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