Valhalla Rising (26 page)

As they dropped down to the engine and generating room, Pitt was beginning to believe his worst fears were realized by the total lack of security guards. They should have been standing watch over their prisoners, if indeed there was still anyone on board to imprison. And then there was the absence of lights. Guards would not sit around in darkness. His despondency deepened until they passed the engineering-deck staterooms and found lights on in the chief engineer’s office.

“At last,” muttered Giordino, “someone wants light to see by.”

At the end of the passageway was the door to the engine and generating room. They took up positions opposite each other along the bulkheads and approached the door. From ten feet away they could hear the faint murmur of voices. Their eyes met for a brief instant. For a few moments, Pitt put his ear to the steel door and listened. The voices seemed to be taunting and heavy with scorn. Occasionally came the sound of laughter.

Pitt pushed the long metal door handle a fraction of an inch. It moved noiselessly. He made a mental note to thank Chief Engineer House for having the hatch door latches oiled periodically. He eased the handle downward with infinite slowness so it wouldn’t be noticed on the other side. When the handle reached the end of its stop, he gently cracked open the door the way he’d have done it if he knew that inside were a dozen alien monsters who digested humans for nourishment.

They clearly heard the voices now. There were four of them. Two came from strangers, but the other two were as familiar as his own. Pitt’s heart leaped within his chest. The voices were not indulging in idle conversation. The two unknowns seemed to be taunting the others.

“Won’t be long now and the whole lot of you will see what it’s like to drown.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing like falling asleep in the Arctic,” said his partner nastily. “Your head feels like it’s being filled with exploding firecrackers. Your eyes pop from your head. Your ears burst like they were punctured with icepicks. Your throat feels like it’s being torn out and your lungs feel like they’re being swabbed with nitric acid. You’ll have a blast.”

“You sick scum,” spat Captain Burch.

“Talking like that in front of women, it only proves that you’re nothing but a bunch of degenerate animals,” came the voice of Chief Engineer House.

“Hey, Sam, did you know you were a degenerate?”

“Not since last week.”

The last remark was followed by deep laughter.

“You kill us,” said Burch angrily, “and every investigative force in the world will surely track you down and hang your butts higher than a kite.”

“Not without evidence of the crime,” the hijacker called Sam said with a sneer.

“You’ll just be another one of the thousands of ships that sailed off and were lost with all hands.”

“Please?” came the voice of one of the female scientists. “We all have loved ones at home. You can’t do this terrible thing.”

“Sorry, lady,” said Sam coldly. “To the people who pay our wages, your lives aren’t worth two cents.”

Sam’s partner said, “Our crew should be coming aboard in another half hour.” Then he paused and looked beyond Pitt’s vision. “Two hours after that, you NUMA people will get to study all them denizens of the deep first hand.”

From his limited view through the crack in the hatch, Pitt could see that the hijackers were holding automatic weapons in the ready position. Pitt nodded at Giordino. Both men crouched forward and prepared for a fight, as they opened the door and walked in the engine room shoulder to shoulder.

The two hijackers sensed the movement behind them, but they didn’t bother to turn, thinking it was their friends showing up early for the execution. Sam said, “You guys are early. What’s the rush?”

“We’ve been ordered to set a course for Guam,” said Giordino, in a reasonably good imitation of the hijacker with the gravelly voice.

“That’s it,” said Sam, laughing. “You people better start praying. It’s almost time to meet your maker —”

That was as far as he got. Giordino picked him up off the deck by his head and smashed it against a bulkhead, as Pitt whipped his .45 in a sidearm swing against the other guard’s jaw, sending him crumpling in a heap on the deck.

Then it was fiesta time. Saturday night all over again. All that was missing were the balloons and champagne.

They were all there. Sitting on the floor around the ship’s generators with their legs chained together like galley slaves was the entire company of
Deep Encounter.
Their ankles were encased in steel bands attached to a long chain that was locked to the mounting of the main generator. Pitt made a quick count, while everyone sat there in shock at seeing the two men they’d thought were lost and gone forever. Burch, House, the crew and scientific team looked like they were in a dream. Then they began coming to their feet and were within a twinkling of launching into wild cheering when Pitt threw up his hands and hissed, “Quiet! For God’s sake, remain silent or we’ll have an army of armed guards rushing in here.”

“Where in Hades did you come from?” asked Burch.

“From a very luxurious yacht,” answered Giordino. “But that’s another story.” He looked at Chief Engineer House. “What have you got to cut the chain?”

House pointed to a side compartment. “In the toolroom. You’ll find a pair of cable cutters hanging on the bulkhead.”

“Release the crew first,” Pitt said to Giordino. “We’ve got to get the ship under way before the hijackers come on board.”

Giordino returned in thirty seconds and began feverishly cutting the chain. In the meantime, Pitt had rushed up to the outer deck and made sure the rescue had gone undiscovered. The decks of the pirate ship were still empty. As far as he could determine, they were all still in the mess room licking their chops like hungry hyenas, he thought, in happy anticipation of sending the
Deep Encounter
and its people to a watery grave.

When he returned, Chief House and his engine room crew were already manning the main control station in preparation for getting the survey ship under way. “This is where I leave you,” he said to Burch.

The captain looked blank. Even Giordino turned and stared at Pitt queerly.

“There is a guard in a house on the cliffs above the entrance to the channel. I’m guessing that besides keeping a lookout for intruders, he has enough firepower to stop any ship leaving the lagoon.”

“What brought you to that conclusion?” asked Giordino.

“If one didn’t know better, you’d think the hijackers were guarding a flower garden against marauding deer. Two men guarding fifty, the rest sitting around like they were on vacation? Not likely. They have to be confident that this ship could never get through to the open sea if the crew somehow managed to regain control. The channel is a good four hundred feet deep in its center.
Deep Encounter
could easily be sent to the bottom and never be found, while the pirate ship would still have plenty of water under her keel to sail out of the lagoon.”

“It’s a black night,” said Burch. “We might be able to sneak out to sea without the guard spotting us.”

“No good,” said Pitt. “The minute you get under way, the hijackers on board their ship will know about it and give chase. They’re bound to get wise when the anchor comes up and the engines begin pounding. The first thing they’d do is alert the channel entrance guard. I’ve got to get there first and remove the threat.”

“I’ll come with you,” Giordino said firmly.

Pitt shook his head. “You’re the best man to repel boarders before the ship slips away.”

“Horatio at the bridge—that’s me.”

“You’ll never get there in time,” said House. “It’s a good half mile uphill through the jungle.”

Pitt held up his small penlight. “This will light my way. Besides, the hijackers have to have a well-beaten path between here and the guardhouse.”

Giordino shook Pitt’s hand. “Good luck, pal.”

“Same to you.”

And then Pitt was gone.

I
t was odd the way the crew hurried about their duties as calmly as if they were leaving the dock in San Francisco. There were no wasted words. It was equally odd that there was no discussion about the danger they were in. There was no apprehension, no foreboding. The scientists, bent on keeping out from underfoot, went to their staterooms and stayed there.

Captain Burch crouched low on the bridge wing, staring through the darkness at the hijackers’ work boat. He held the ship’s portable phone to his mouth and said softly, “Ready when you are, Chief.”

“Then bring up the anchor,” replied House. “Soon as it’s off the bottom, call me and I’ll give her every pound of torque these engines got in them.”

“Stay tuned,” said Burch. There was a time when anchors were brought up by crewmen operating switches and levers. All Burch had to do with the modern systems on board the
Deep Encounter
was punch a code into the computer. Then it was all automatic. But there was nothing he could do, there was nothing anybody could do, to muffle the rattle and clank as the chain scraped through the hawse hole into the chain locker.

His years of experience told Burch the instant that the anchor broke free of the bottom. “Okay, Chief. Full speed. Take us the hell out of here.”

Down below in his kingdom, House’s hands played over the control panel. He felt a measure of pleased satisfaction as he felt the propellers bite the water and drag down the stern as the ship lurched forward.

G
iordino took the automatic rifles gathered from the two hijackers he and Pitt had overpowered and stationed himself behind the gunnel a few feet away from the gangplank leading to the pirate ship. He lay on the deck, one rifle held in the crook of his arm. The other rifle he laid on the deck beside him next to the revolver. He didn’t fool himself into thinking he could win a heavy firefight. But his line of fire could easily keep boarders off the survey vessel once it got under way. He could have pushed the gangplank between the two ships into the water, but thought better of making any unnecessary sound. It would fall of its own accord after the
Deep Encounter
began to move away.

He felt the vibrations through the deck as Chief Engineer House switched on the big generators and set the diesel electric engines at full speed. Two of the survey ship’s crewmen crawled along the deck under the steel gunnel shields and cast off the mooring lines to the work boat from the starboard bollards, before scrambling back inside the undercover of the superstructure.

Now comes the fun part, Giordino thought to himself, as he heard the clatter from the anchor chain. To the people on board
Deep Encounter,
the sound came like twenty hammers striking an anvil. True to expectations, three of the hijackers rushed out of the mess room to see what the noise was about.

Confused at seeing the anchor of the
Deep Encounter
being raised and unaware that their partners in crime had been subdued, one started yelling at the top of his voice. “Stop, stop! You can’t leave ahead of schedule. Not without a crew!”

It was not in Giordino’s nature to lie quiet. “Don’t need no crew,” he said, in a grating voice, still mimicking the frog-throated hijacker. “I’m gonna do the job myself.”

There was growing confusion as more of the hijackers burst out onto the deck. Then a familiar rasping voice shouted out, “Who are you?”

“Sam!”

“You’re not Sam. Where is he?”

Giordino could feel the beat of the engines increase as the ship began to make headway. Another few seconds and the gangplank would be pulled off the ship. “Sam sez you’re a drooling imbecile who can’t be trusted to raise a toilet seat.”

Curses and shouts erupted as a crowd of hijackers made a run for the gangplank. Two of them made it and were halfway across when Giordino took careful aim and shot them in the knees. One hijacker fell backward on the work boat, the other sagged, clutching the railing on the gangplank, crying out in pain. At that moment, the end of the gangplank fell away as the survey ship got under way and began her dash through the channel.

The hijackers rallied in the blink of an eye. Before the
Deep Encounter
had covered a hundred yards, the anchor was hoisted on the work boat and her stern dug in the water as she leaped to the pursuit. A volley of shots rang out and echoed off the lava rock hills, answered by Giordino, who unleashed several shots through the bridge windshield of the work boat.

Rounding the bend into the channel, the survey ship was temporarily out of sight of the hijackers’ guns. Giordino took the lull in the firing to run up the stairs to the pilothouse.

“They’re not happy campers,” he said to Burch, who was manning the helm.

“All they can do is bounce bullets off us,” Burch said through teeth clenched on a pipe that was turned upside down. “They won’t be boarding us as easily as they did the first time.”

They were pounding through the channel now. House was running the big electric diesels as fast as they could turn. The channel looked like a black pit. Only the vague shapes of the cliffs soaring above them, silhouetted against the stars, offered any visual sense of direction, but Delgado was bent over the radar screen quietly giving course changes. Everyone else in the pilothouse was casting anxious glances through the rear ports as the lights of the work boat came into view as she entered the channel.