The Mediterranean Caper (22 page)

“Yes, he's all heart,” Pitt said sarcastically. “Isn't he a bit old to be your uncle?”

“Actually, he was my grandmother's brother.”

“Question three: how come you never paid him a visit before now?”

“Whenever I wrote and begged him to let me come to Thasos, he always wrote back and said he was too busy, involved with some vast shipping transaction or something.” She giggled softly. “I fooled him this time, though. I simply popped in and surprised him.”

“What do you know about his past?”

“Nothing really. He talks very little about himself. But I do know he's not a smuggler.”

“Your beloved uncle is the worst scum that a mother ever dropped.” Pitt's voice was tired. He didn't want to hurt her, but he was certain she was lying. “God only knows how many rotting corpses owe their present condition to him; hundreds, thousands more likely. And you're in it with him right up to your lovely little neck. Every rotten dollar you've spent in the last twenty years was soaked in blood. In some cases with the blood of, and yes tears, especially tears, of innocent children. Young girls who were stolen from their parents' arms and who finished their adolescence on a filthy, lice-ridden pile of straw in a North African whorehouse.”

She jumped to her feet. “Things like that don't happen anymore. You're lying, you're lying, you're making this up.” She was scared now, but playing a magnificent scene, Pitt thought. “I told you the truth. I know nothing. Nothing!”

“Nothing? You knew von Till was planning to murder me at the villa. Your tearful little act on the terrace, I admit, had me fooled. But not for long. You missed your calling—you should have been an actress.”

“I didn't know.” Her voice was low and desperate. “I swear I didn't—”

Pitt shook his head. “I can't buy it. You gave yourself away outside the labyrinth when we were arrested by the tourist guide. You weren't just surprised to see me, you were goddamned shocked to see me in one piece.”

She came over and knelt beside him and held his hands in hers. “Please, please…Oh God! What must I do to make you believe me?”

“You might begin by offering me facts.” He raised up from the chair and stood directly over her. Then he tore the soggy bandages from his chest and dropped them in her lap. “Look at me. This is what I got for accepting your invitation to dinner. I was set up as the main course for your uncle's man-eating dog. Look at me!”

She looked. “I think I'm going to be sick.”

Pitt ached to take her in his arms and kiss away the tears that welled in her eyes, and to softly, gently tell her how sorry he was. Instead, he fought to keep his voice firm and even.

She turned and gazed blankly at the metal sink in the head, wondering if she were going to be sick or not, then she forced her tear-brimmed eyes back on Pitt and spoke in a whisper. “You're a devil. You talk about Uncle Bruno. You're worse, much worse. I wish you would have been killed.”

The hate should have been there, but Pitt could only feel a touch of sadness. “Until I say otherwise you'll remain on this ship.”

“You can't keep me here, you have no right.”

“I have no right, true, but I can keep you here. And while we're on the subject: don't get it in your pretty head to try and escape. The men on this ship are expert swimmers. You wouldn't get fifty yards even if you tried real hard.”

“You can't keep me a prisoner forever.” Her face twisted with loathing. A woman had never looked at Pitt like that. It made him feel uneasy.

“If my little caper comes off as planned this afternoon, you'll be out of my hair and in the hands of the gendarmerie by suppertime.”

Suddenly Teri stared at him speculatively. “Is that why you disappeared last night?”

Pitt was ever amazed at the way her huge brown eyes—her devastatingly beautiful eyes—could run through so many emotions in one blink. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I sneaked on board one of your uncle's ships just before dawn. It was a most instructive excursion. You'll never guess what I found.”

He watched her closely, mentally predicting what the next blink would bring.

“I couldn't imagine,” she said dully. “The only ships I've ever been on were ferries.”

He walked over and sat down in the bunk. The soft mattress felt good. He leaned back and crossed his arms behind his head. Then he yawned long and slowly.

“I beg your pardon. That was rude of me.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You were going to tell me what you found on Uncle Bruno's ship.”

Pitt shook his head and grinned. “Female curiosity, once piqued it's insatiable. Since you insist, I found a map to an underwater cave.”

“A cave?”

“Of course. Where else do you think your good uncle conducts his slimy business from?”

“Why are you telling me these stories?” The hurt look was back. “None of them can be true.”

“Oh good God, get some sense in your head. I'm not telling you anything new. Von Till may have hoodwinked INTERPOL, the gendarmerie and the Bureau of Narcotics, but he didn't fool yours truly.”

“You're talking nonsense,” she said slowly.

“Am I?” he asked thoughtfully. “At precisely 4:30 this morning your uncle's ship, the
Queen Artemisia,
anchored off the coast below the villa. The ship was loaded to the gills with heroin. Surely you must know about the heroin. Everyone else does. It has to be the worst kept secret of the year. I've got to hand it to your uncle, he's a master of the old magician's routine: dazzle the audience with one hand while you perform the trick with the other. His little act is about to end, however. I have a little trick of my own that will bring down the curtain.”

She was silent for a moment. “What are you going to do?”

“What any red-blooded All American boy would do. I'm going to take Giordino and a couple of other men and dive along the shore until I find the cave. It most likely lies at the base of the cliffs directly under the villa. Once we discover the entrance we will enter, seize any equipment and evidence, make a citizen's arrest of your uncle and then call the gendarmerie.”

“You're insane,” she said again, only with much more feeling this time. “The whole caper, or whatever you call it, is idiotic. You can't go through with it. Please, please believe me. It won't work.”

“It's no use begging. You can kiss your uncle and his rotten money good-bye. We hit the water at one.” Pitt yawned again. “Now if you will kindly excuse me, I'd like to get a little shut-eye.”

The tears were back. She shook her head slowly from side to side. “It's idiotic,” she whispered over and over, turned and walked into the head, slamming the door behind her.

Pitt lay there, staring at the overhead. She was right, of course, he thought. It did sound like an idiotic caper. But then, what else could she think, she only knew the half of it.

The restless sea
curled to a tall crest and beckoned like the ominous finger of doom before it rammed into the unyielding gray cliffs. The air was warm and clear and stirred by a faint breath from the southwest. A ghost, or so the
First Attempt
seemed—a white steel ghost—glided at slow speed closer and closer to the boiling cauldron, until it looked like disaster was inevitable. At the last instant, no sooner, Gunn spun the helm to starboard, sending the
First Attempt
on a parallel course to the rocky cliff base. He kept glancing warily from the needle, traveling across the fathometer's graph paper, to the surfline, a scant fifty yards away, and back again.

“How's that for curb service?” he asked without turning. The voice was soft and controlled; he was as calm as a fisherman in a rowboat on a placid Minnesota lake.

“Your old seamanship instructor at Annapolis would be proud of you,” Pitt replied. Unlike Gunn, he was staring straight ahead.

“It's not half as grim as it looks,” Gunn said, gesturing at the fathometer. “The bottom is a good ten fathoms below our keel!”

“Sixty feet in less than a hundred yards; that's quite a drop-off.”

Gunn lifted one hand from the helm and took off his gold-braided Navy cap, swiping a few beads of sweat that hung from his hairline.

“It's not an uncommon occurrence in an area that's free of outer reefs.”

“It's a good sign,” Pitt said thoughtfully.

“How so?”

“Plenty of room for a sub to maneuver without surface detection.”

“At night maybe,” Gunn said. “Too obvious during the day. The water visibility is almost a hundred feet. Anyone standing on the bluffs within a mile in either direction could easily look down and spot a three-hundred-foot hull that was crawling over the bottom.”

“It shouldn't be too difficult to spot a diver either.” Pitt turned and gazed up at the villa, nestled like a fortress on the craggy side of the mountain.

“You're mad to take a chance like this,” Gunn said slowly. “Von Till can see any movement you make. I'll bet a dime to a donut that he's had a pair of binoculars trained on us every second since we upped anchor.”

“I'm betting on it too,” Pitt murmured. He lost himself for a moment in the beauty of the scene. The azure arms of the Aegean encircled the ancient island seascape in a dazzling reflection of sun and water. Only the voice of the crashing surf answered the steady hum of the ship's engines, punctuated occasionally by the shriek of a solitary gull. Above the rocky cliffs, a herd of cattle grazed on a sloping green pasture, like tiny immovable shapes in a Rembrandt landscape. And below, in sheltered coves among the lesser cliffs, piles of sun-bleached driftwood lay dead and still on tiny shell-carpeted beaches.

Pitt nearly lingered too long. He tugged his mind back to the job at hand. That mysterious area of calm water was coming up now, only three quarters of a mile away off the port bow. He laid a hand on Gunn's shoulder and pointed.

“The flat pond.”

Gunn nodded. “OK, got it. At our present speed we should be alongside in ten minutes. Is your team ready?”

“All set and primed,” Pitt answered briefly. “They know what to expect. I've got them stationed along the starboard cabin deck; out of sight to any prying eyes from the villa.”

Gunn replaced his cap. “Be sure you order them to leap plenty clear of the hull. Getting sucked into a prop can be a very messy business.”

“I doubt that they have to be ordered,” Pitt said quietly. “They're all good men. You told me so yourself.”

“Damn right,” Gunn snorted. He turned to Pitt. “I'm going to keep the ship close-in to the shoreline for another three miles. We might fool von Till into thinking we're on a routine sounding course to chart the shallows. It might work, I don't know. For your sake I hope he's taken in.”

“We'll soon find out.” Pitt checked his watch against the ship's chronometer. “What time do you make your rendezvous?”

“I'll run a series of doglegs on the return course and arrive back here at 1410. That gives you exactly fifty minutes to find the sub and get out.” Gunn dug a cigar out of a breast pocket and lit it. “You and my men be waiting for the ship, you hear me?”

Pitt didn't answer immediately. A broad smile broke across his lips, and his vivid green eyes seemed to be laughing.

Gunn looked puzzled. “What did I say that's so funny?”

“For a moment you reminded me of my mother. She always used to say that when my ship came in I'd probably be waiting at the bus depot.”

Gunn ruefully shook his head. “If you don't come back at least I'll know where to look. Well, let's get on with it. You had better climb into your diving gear.”

Pitt simply waved in acknowledgment, left the hot confine of the wheelhouse and dropped down the ladder to the
First Attempt
's starboard cabin deck. He found five deeply tanned men waiting for him, probably, Pitt reflected, the five most eager and intelligent men he'd ever known. Like himself, they wore only black bikini swim trunks. All were busily engaged in adjusting breathing regulators and strapping on airtanks; each man rechecked the other's equipment, making certain the tank valves and harness webbing were in their proper position.

The nearest diver, Ken Knight, looked up at Pitt's arrival. “I have your gear all ready for you, Major. I hope a single hose regulator will be OK, NUMA didn't issue us any doubles this trip.”

“A single hose will do fine,” Pitt replied. He pulled on a pair of fins and strapped a knife to his right calf; then he slipped a mask over his head and adjusted the snorkel. The mask was the wide-angle type that gave the wearer a one hundred and eighty degree range of vision. Next came the airtank and the regulator. He was about to struggle with the tank harness when suddenly the forty-pound outfit was swept from the deck and held at his back by two massive, hairy arms.

“How you could ever get through a day without my services,” said the voice of Giordino pompously, “is a mystery to me.”

“The real mystery is why I put up with your jackhammer mouth and overabundant ego,” Pitt said sourly.

“There you go, picking on me again.” Giordino tried to sound wounded but couldn't quite pull it off. He turned and looked down at the passing water and, after a long pause, muttered very slowly: “Christ! Look at the clarity of that water! It's sharper than a goldfish bowl.”

“So I've noticed.” Pitt unsheathed the barbed tip of a six-foot pole spear and checked the elasticity of the rubber sling attached to the butt end. “Have you studied your lesson?”

“The old gray matter,” Giordino said, pointing to his head, “has all the answers filed and indexed.”

“As usual, it's comforting to know you're so sure of yourself.”

“Sherlock Giordino knows all, sees all. No secret can escape my probing mind.”

“Your probing mind better be well oiled,” Pitt said earnestly. “You've got a tight schedule to keep.”

“Just leave it to me,” Giordino said, straight-faced. “Well, it's about that time. I wish I was coming along. Enjoy your swim and have fun.”

“I intend to,” Pitt murmured. “I intend to.”

Two chimes from the ship's bell sounded Gunn's one-minute warning signal. Pitt, walking awkwardly in his fins, moved onto a small platform that extended over the side of the hull.

“At the sound of the next tone, gentlemen, we go!” He said no more, partly because each man knew what he had to do, partly because there was nothing else to say that had any meaning.

The divers gripped their spearguns a little tighter and silently exchanged glances. One thought and only one thought was on all their minds at this minute: if the jump isn't far enough, a leg could be lost in the whirling propeller. At a gesture from Pitt, they arranged themselves in a line behind the platform.

Before he lowered the mask over his eyes, Pitt took another look at the men around him and for the tenth time studied their identifying features, features he would be able to recognize at a distance underwater. The man nearest him, Ken Knight, the geophysicist, was the only blond in the group; Stan Thomas, the short, runty ship's engineer, wore blue fins and was the only member, Pitt surmised, who could probably handle himself in a tough fight. Next came a red-bearded marine biologist, Lee Spencer, then Gustaf Hersong, a lanky six-foot-six marine botanist—both those men seemed to be grinning at each other over a private joke. The anchor man was the expedition's photographer, Omar Woodson, as true a deadpan character as Pitt had ever seen and who genuinely appeared bored by the whole show. Instead of a speargun, Woodson carried a 35 mm Nykonos with flash, swinging the expensive underwater unit over the railing, negligently, as if it were an old used box camera.

Pitt pulled the mask down over his eyes, whistling softly to himself, and gazed once more at the water. It was passing beneath the platform at a much more leisurely rate now—Gunn had cut the
First Attempt
's speed to a crawling three knots—slow enough, Pitt decided, for a feet-first entry. His eyes turned past the bow, looking forward with trance-like fixity at the approximate point in the sea where at any moment now he must dive.

At almost the same instant, Gunn scrutinized the fathometer and the jagged cliffs for the last time. His hand slowly raised, groped for the bell line, found it, paused, then gave one hard pull. The metallic clang burst into the hot afternoon air and carried across the surf to the step coastal wall, echoing in a muted undertone back toward the ship.

Pitt, poised on the platform, didn't wait for the echo. Holding the mask firmly in place against his face with one hand and clutching the pole spear in the other, he leaped.

The impact shattered the sun-danced water into a blazing diffused pattern of blue brilliance. Immediately after the surface closed over his head, Pitt rolled frontward and kicked his fins as fast, it seemed to him, as a Mississippi River paddlewheeler at full throttle. Five seconds and fifteen feet later, he glanced over his shoulder and watched the dark shape of the ship's hull slide slowly overhead. The whirling twin propellers seemed frighteningly closer than they really were: their thrashing sound traveled at forty-nine hundred feet per second underwater as compared to less than eleven hundred feet through air, and the light refraction magnified their flashing blades by nearly twenty-five percent.

Teeth clenched on the regulator's mouthpiece, Pitt swung around and stared in the direction of the shrinking ship to see how the others had fared. His sigh of relief was answered by the hiss of his exhaust bubbles from the regulator. Thank God, they were all there, and in one piece. Knight, Thomas, Spencer, and Hersong, all in a group within touching distance. Only Woodson had dragged his feet; he hung in the water about twenty feet beyond the rest.

The visibility was startling. The long, purplish tentacles of a jelly-like Portuguese man-o'-war were clearly discernible nearly eighty feet away. A pair of ugly looking Dragonet fish swam idly across the bottom, their vivid blue and yellow scaleless bodies topped by high slender gill spines. It was a hidden world, a soundless world, owned by weirdly shaped creatures and decorated by graceful fantasies of form and vibrant hues that defied any attempt at human description. It was also a world of mystery and danger, guarded by a sinister array of weapons, varying from the slaughterous teeth of the shark to the deadly venom of the innocent looking Zebra fish; an intriguing combination of eternal beauty and constant peril.

Without waiting for signs of discomfort, Pitt began snorting into the mask to equalize the air pressure of his inner ears to that of the water pressure. When his ears popped, he slowly dove toward the majestic seascape under him and became a part of it.

At thirty feet, the reds were left behind, and the depths became a soft blending of blues and greens. Pitt leveled off at fifty and studied the bottom. No sea growth or rocks here, just a patch of submerged desert where miniature sand dunes meandered in unbroken snake-like ripples. Except for an occasional bottom-dwelling Star Gazer fish, buried with only a pair of stony eyes and a portion of its grotesque, fringed lips protruding above the sand, the sea floor was deserted.

Exactly eight minutes after they had left the
First Attempt,
the bottom began to slope upward, and the water became slightly murky from the surface wave action. A rock formation, covered with swaying seaweed, appeared in the gloom ahead. And then suddenly they were at the base of a vertically sheer cliff that rose at an unbroken ninety-degree angle until it disappeared into the mirrored surface above. Like Captain Nemo and his companions exploring an undersea garden, Pitt began directing his team of marine scientists to spread out and search for the submarine cave.

The hunt took no more than five minutes. Woodson, who had angled a hundred feet out on the right perimeter, found it first. Signaling Pitt and the others by rapping his knife against his airtank, he motioned for them to come and went swimming off along the northern face of the cliff to a point beyond a weed-encrusted crevasse. There he paused and held up a leveled arm. And then Pitt saw it: a black and ominous opening just twelve feet below the surface. The size was perfect; big enough for a submarine or, for that matter, a locomotive to have been driven in. They all hung suspended in the clear crystal water, their eyes fixed on the cave entrance, hesitating, exchanging glances.