Trojan Odyssey (23 page)

W
HEN ENTERING THE
harbor from seaward, the port buoy marking the sides of the channel is usually painted green with a matching colored light on top, and is given an odd number. The starboard buoy directly opposite is red, mounts a red light and sports an even number. As
Poco Bonito
exited Bluefields Harbor, the channel buoys appeared reversed, red to port, green to starboard.

Except for Giordino, who took the helm, everyone huddled on the stern deck and stared expectantly over the top of the transom as the outer harbor buoys came even with
Poco Bonito
's bow.

Secure in the knowledge that Pitt had discovered the explosives, and having witnessed him placing the cannister in the life raft before allowing it to fall astern, Ford and Dodge still half expected a fiery eruption that would destroy the boat. As they peered warily at the life raft, a small orange shape against the black water a hundred and fifty yards astern, you could have cut the cloud of apprehension with a chain saw until
Poco Bonito
's hull safely passed the buoys without disinte-grating.

Then the tension mounted again, this time even higher as the raft was towed closer and closer to the buoys. Fifty yards, then twenty-five. Renee instinctively ducked and placed her hands over her ears. Dodge crouched and turned his back toward the stern while Pitt and Giordino calmly gazed aft, as if waiting for a shooting star to dart through the stars.

“Soon as she blows,” Pitt said to Dodge, “switch off our running lights so they think we've evaporated.”

He had no sooner finished giving the order than the life raft vaporized.

The sound of the explosion thundered and echoed through the straits between the bluffs as the concussion rolled across the water, slapped their faces and rocked the boat. The darkness became a nightmare of flame and fiery debris as a great boiling upthrust of white water twenty feet wide burst out of a crater in midchannel. The fuel that Pitt had used to fill the life raft burst into a column of flame. The crew of
Poco Bonito
stared as if hypnotized at the atomized wreckage of the raft raining down from the sky like streaking meteors. Tiny bits and pieces splattered down on the boat without injuring anyone or doing damage.

Then, just as suddenly, the night went silent and the water astern the boat closed over the crater and was empty again.

 

T
HE WOMAN SAT
in the pickup truck and checked her watch a dozen times from the time the boat pulled away from the dock, and exhaled a deep breath of satisfaction when at last she heard the distant rumble and saw the brief flash in the blackness nearly two miles away. It had taken longer than she estimated. Eight minutes late, by her calculation. Perhaps the helmsman was cautious and sent the boat slowly through the black waters of the narrow channel. Or, perhaps there was a mechanical problem and the crew stopped the boat for a quick fix. Whatever the reason, it no longer mattered. She could inform her colleagues that the job was accomplished successfully.

Rather than head directly for the airport and a waiting Odyssey corporate jet, she decided to go into the shabby downtown of Bluefields and enjoy a glass of rum. For her work tonight, she felt entitled to a little rest and relaxation.

It had started to rain again, and she switched on the windshield wipers as she drove off the wharf and headed toward town.

 

T
HE CHANNEL WAS
cleared and they were outward bound. A heading was set for Punta Perlas and the Cayos Perlas Islands beyond. The skies were clearing and the stars appeared through the clouds as they picked up a light southerly breeze. Pitt volunteered to take the midnight to three
A.M.
watch. He manned the pilothouse and let his thoughts wander while the computerized automated controls precisely followed the programmed course. For the first hour, it took all his willpower not to fall asleep.

His mind began to create a vision of Loren Smith. Theirs was an on-again, off-again relationship that had lasted almost twenty years. At least twice they had come within a shadow of marrying, but both were already wed to their jobs: Pitt to NUMA, Loren to Congress. But now that Loren expressed a desire not to run for a fifth term, perhaps it was time for him to retire to a less demanding job that didn't take him to the far reaches of the oceans. He had experienced too many brushes with death that had left scars both physical and mental. Chances were, he was now on borrowed time. His luck couldn't last forever. If he hadn't been suspicious of the woman in the Odyssey truck and struck by a sudden revelation about the explosives, he, his friend Giordino and the others would all be dead now. Maybe
it was
time to retire. After all, he was a family man now, with two grown children and responsibilities he'd never imagined two years earlier.

The only problem was that he loved the sea, above and below. There was no way he could simply turn his back and give it up. Somewhere there had to be a compromise.

He refocused on the current problem of the brown crud. Still only minor traces of it were on the chemical detection instruments, whose delicate sensors were mounted under the hull. Despite the fact that no ship's lights showed on the horizons, he picked up a pair of binoculars and idly scanned the darkness ahead.

At a comfortable cruising speed of twenty knots,
Poco Bonito
had left the Cayos Perlas Islands behind over an hour ago. Laying down the glasses and then studying a navigation chart, Pitt estimated that they were about thirty miles off the town of Tasbapauni on the Nicaraguan coast. He glanced at the instruments again. Their needles and digital numbers still stood unwavering on zero, and he began to wonder if they were on a wild-goose chase.

Giordino joined him with a cup of coffee. “Thought you might like a little something to keep you awake.”

“Thank you. You're an hour early for your watch.”

Giordino shrugged. “I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.”

Pitt gratefully sipped at the coffee. “Al, how come you never got married?”

The dark eyes squinted with curiosity. “Why ask me that now?”

“I've had nothing but time on my brain and it wanders to strange subjects.”

“What's the old line?” Giordino said with a shrug. “I never found the right girl.”

“You came close once.”

He nodded. “Pat O'Connell. We both had our reservations at the last minute.”

“What if I told you I'm thinking about retiring from NUMA and marrying Loren?”

Giordino turned and looked at Pitt as if he'd taken an arrow through one lung. “Say again?”

“I think you get the drift.”

“I'll believe that when the morning sun rises in the west.”

“Haven't you ever wondered about packing it in and taking it easy?”

“Not really,” said Giordino thoughtfully. “I've never entertained any great ambitions. I'm happy at what I do. The husband and father routine never turned me on. Besides, I'm away from home eight months out of the year. What woman would put up with that? No, I guess I'll keep things just as they are until they wheel me into a nursing home.”

“I can't picture you expiring in a nursing home.”

“The gunslinger Doc Holliday did. His last words were ‘I'll be damned' when he looked at his bare feet and realized he wasn't dying with his boots on.”

“What do you want on your tombstone?” Pitt asked, not without humor.

“‘It was a great party while it lasted. I trust it will continue elsewhere.'”

“I'll remember when your time comes—”

Suddenly, Pitt went silent as the instrument displays came to life and began detecting traces of chemical pollution in the water.

“Looks like we're picking up something.”

Giordino turned for the stairway leading to the crew's cabins. “I'll wake Dodge.”

A few minutes later, a yawning Dodge climbed to the pilothouse and began scanning the computer monitors and recordings. Finally, he stood back, seemingly perplexed. “This doesn't look like any man-made pollution I've ever seen.”

“What do you make of it?” asked Pitt.

“I'm not sure yet till I run some tests, but it appears to be a veritable cocktail of minerals flowing from the chemical element chart.”

Excitement began to mount as Gunn and Renee, aroused by the sudden activity in the pilothouse, joined them and offered to make breakfast. There was an underlying current of expectation and optimism as Dodge quietly began assembling the incoming data and analyzing the numbers.

The eastern sun was still three hours from sliding over the horizon when Pitt went out on deck and studied the black sea flowing past the hull. He lay on the deck, leaned through the railing and trailed his hand in the water. When he pulled it back and raised it before his eyes, the palm and fingers were covered with a brown slime. He reentered the pilothouse, held up his hand and announced, “We're in the crud now. The water has turned a dull brownish muck almost as if the bottom silt was stirred up.”

“You're closer to the mark than you think,” said Dodge, speaking for the first time in half an hour. “This is the wildest concoction I've ever seen.”

“Any clues to its recipe?” asked Giordino, waiting patiently as Renee filled his plate with bacon and scrambled eggs.

“The ingredients are not what you might think.”

Renee looked puzzled. “What type of chemical pollutants are we talking about?”

Dodge looked at her solemnly. “The crud is not derived from manufactured toxic chemicals.”

“Are you saying man is not the culprit?” inquired Gunn, pushing the chemist into a corner.

“No,” Dodge answered slowly. “The culprit in this case is Mother Nature.”

“If not from chemicals, then what?” Renee insisted.

“A cocktail,” replied Dodge, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “A cocktail containing some of the most toxic minerals found in the earth. Elements that include barium, antimony, cobalt, molybdenum and vanadium that are obtained from toxic minerals such as stibnite, barytine, patronite and mispickel.”

Renee's finely defined eyebrows lifted. “Mispickel?”

“The mineral arsenic is obtained from.”

Pitt looked at Dodge, soberly, speculatively. “How is it possible that such a heavily concentrated toxic mineral cocktail, as you call it, can multiply, since it's impossible for it to reproduce itself?”

“The accumulation comes from constantly being replenished,” replied Dodge. “I might add that there are heavy traces of magnesium, an indication of dolomitic lime that has dissolved in unheard-of concentrations.”

“What does that suggest?” queried Rudi Gunn.

“The presence of limestone, for one thing.” Dodge answered directly. He paused a few moments to study a readout from a printer. “Another factor is the gravitational force that pulls minerals or chemicals in alkaline water toward true magnetic north. Minerals attract other minerals to form rust or oxidation. Chemicals in alkaline water pull other chemicals toward their surface to form toxic waste or gas. That is why most of the brown blob has moved north toward Key West.”

Gunn shook his head. “That doesn't explain why Dirk and Summer were able to study sections of the blob on Navidad Bank on the other side of the Dominican Republic out in the Atlantic.”

Dodge shrugged. “A portion must have been carried by wind and currents through the Mona Passage between Dominica and Puerto Rico before drifting onto Navidad Bank.”

“Whatever the cocktail,” said Renee, waving her environmentalist flag, “it's turned the water harmful and dangerous to all life that uses it—humans, animals, reptiles, fish, even the birds that land in it, not to mention the microbial world.”

“What puzzles me,” muttered Dodge, continuing as if he hadn't heard Renee, “is how something with the consistency of silt can bind together in a cohesive mass that floats over a great distance in a cloud no deeper than a hundred and twenty feet from the surface.” As he spoke, he made notations in a notebook. “I suspect sea salinity plays a part in the spread, which might explain why the crud doesn't sink to the bottom.”

“That's not the only odd part of the puzzle,” said Giordino.

“Make your point?” Pitt softly probed.

“The water temperature is seventy-eight, a good five degrees below normal for this part of the Caribbean.”

“Another problem to solve,” muttered Dodge wearily. “A drop that low is a phenomenon that doesn't go by the book.”

“You've accomplished a lot,” Gunn complimented the chemist. “Rome wasn't built in a day. We'll collect specimens and let the NUMA lab in Washington find answers to the rest of the enigma. Our job now is to track down the source somehow.”

“We can only do that by following a trail leading to the highest concentrations,” said Renee.