Valhalla Rising (28 page)

There was a strange kind of greasy feel about it. Instead of being jagged and coarse, like most badly incinerated inorganic material, the object was rounded and smooth and twisted in a spiral. Pitt didn’t have a clue as to its composition. He rewrapped the object in the towel and set it back in the case. He was certain the chemists in the NUMA lab would identify it. Once he delivered the material, his part of the mystery was finished.

Breakfast came, but he begged off, and had only tomato juice and coffee. Hunger eluded him. As he sipped the coffee, he again stared out the window. An island was drifting under the aircraft far below, an emerald speck set on a blue topaz sea. He studied it for a moment and recognized the shape as Tutuila, one of the American Samoan islands. He could make out the harbor of Pago Pago, where he’d visited the naval station many years ago with his father, then a United States congressman on a junket around the Pacific.

He recalled the trip well. He was a boy in his middle teens and he’d taken every opportunity to dive around the island while his father was inspecting the naval facilities, gliding among the coral and the brilliantly colored fish with a spear gun. He’d rarely released the old surgical rubber sling, sending the thin spear shaft at a fish. He’d preferred simply to study or photograph the wonders beneath the surface. After a day spent enjoying the water, he would relax on the sandy beach under a palm tree and contemplate his future.

And then, he remembered another beach, this one on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. He was still in the Air Force then. He saw himself as a young man with the woman whose memory had never left him. Summer Moran was the loveliest woman he’d ever known. He could recall in vivid detail the first time they’d met in the bar at the Ala Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach. Her enchanting gray eyes, the long fiery red hair, the perfectly shaped body in a tight oriental silk green dress slit on the sides. Then came the vision of her death as it had a thousand times. He’d lost her during an earthquake in an underwater city built by her mad father, Frederick Moran. She’d swum down to save him and never returned.

He closed down that part of the memory as he had done so often in the past and stared at his reflection in the window. The eyes still radiated an intensity that had never dimmed, and yet there was a slight hint of age and weariness creeping into them. He wondered what it would be like to meet himself as he was twenty years ago. Suppose the young Dirk Pitt of two decades ago walked up and sat down next to him on a park bench. How would he receive the fresh young buck who had served with distinction as an Air Force pilot? Would he even recognize him? How would the youth see the old Dirk Pitt? Could he remotely foresee the wild adventures, agonizing heartbreaks and bloody encounters and injuries? The old Pitt doubted it. Would the young Pitt be repulsed at what he saw and shy away from what lay ahead, taking a totally different direction in their lives?

Pitt turned back from the window, closed his eyes and put the vision of his youth and what-might-have-been out of his mind. Would he do it all over again if given the chance for a restart? For the most part, the answer was yes. Oh sure, he would have made a few alterations and fine-tuned different episodes of his life. But on the whole, it had been extremely satisfying and filled with achievement. He felt thankful simply to be alive, and let it go at that.

His thoughts were interrupted by the bouncing of the plane as it hit turbulence. He complied when the
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELT
light gonged on. He stayed awake and read magazines until the plane landed at the John Rodgers International Airport in Honolulu. He and Giordino were met by the pilot from NUMA who was to fly them to Washington. He escorted them to the carousels so they could pick up their luggage and then drove them to a turquoise-painted NUMA Gulfstream jet on the far side of the airport. When they took off, the sun was falling in the western sky and the blue was slowly turning black in the east.

For most of the trip, Giordino slept like a zombie, while Pitt fitfully dozed off and on. When he woke, his mind began to work. Was his end of the
Emerald Dolphin
tragedy finished? There was little doubt that Admiral Sandecker would put him to work on a new project. He made up his mind to argue against that possibility. He decided he had to see the mystery through to its conclusion. Those who had caused the terrible fire of the cruise liner must pay. They had to be tracked down, their motives dissected and then punished.

His mind slowly turned from the inhuman unpleasantness to the lure of sleeping in his own down-filled bed in his aircraft hangar apartment. He wondered if Congresswoman Loren Smith, his current lady love, would meet him after the plane landed, as she did so often. Loren, with her cinnamon hair and violet eyes. They had come so close to marriage on several occasions, but never quite got over the hump. Maybe now was the time. God only knows, thought Pitt, I can’t be bounding all over the oceans and falling in a pit of devilment for many more years. Age, he knew, was creeping over his body like a layer of molasses, slowing it down infinitesimally, until one day he would wake up and say, My God, I’m eligible for Social Security and Medicare.

“No!” he said aloud.

Giordino awoke and looked at him. “Did you call?”

Pitt smiled. “Talking in my sleep.”

Giordino shrugged, rolled to his side and reentered dreamland.

No, Pitt thought silently this time. I’m not going out to pasture, not for a long while yet. There would always be another undersea project, another maritime investigation. There was no way he would quit until they closed the lid on his casket.

When he woke up for the final time, the aircraft was touching down at Andrews Air Force Base. The day was dark and rainy, the water streaking across the windows. The pilot taxied to the NUMA terminal and stopped just short of an open hangar. When Pitt stepped to the asphalt, he paused and looked toward the nearby parking lot. His hopes were in vain.

Loren Smith was not there to greet him.

G
iordino went to his condo in Alexandria to clean up and call a bevy of his girlfriends to let them know he was back in circulation. Pitt postponed the comforts of home and took a NUMA jeep to the NUMA headquarters on the east hill overlooking the Potomac River. He parked the jeep in the underground parking lot and took the elevator up to the tenth floor, the domain of Hiram Yaeger, the agency’s computer genius, who headed up a vast network. Yaeger’s library contained every known scientific fact or historical event about the oceans since recorded history, and then some.

Yaeger came out of Silicon Valley and had been with NUMA almost fifteen years. He looked like an old hippie, with his graying hair tied in a ponytail. His standard uniform for the day was a pair of Levi’s, a Levi jacket and cowboy boots. Nobody knew it to look at him, but he lived in an elegantly designed house in a fashionable residential section of Maryland. He drove a BMW 740i, and his daughters were honor students and equestrian trophy-winners. He’d also created and designed a technically advanced computer named Max that was nearly human. He’d programmed photos of his wife into the holographic image that appeared when he talked to it.

Yaeger was studying the latest results sent from a NUMA expedition off Japan that was drilling into the sea floor in a search of life under the silt in the fractured rock, when Pitt walked into his sanctum sanctorum.

He looked up, then stood and smiled as he extended his hand. “Well, well, the scourge of the dismal deep is home again.” He was taken aback at Pitt’s appearance. The NUMA special projects director looked like a lost soul off the street. His shorts and flowered shirt were ratty, and he was wearing slippers over heavily bandaged feet. Despite several hours of sleep on the airplanes, his eyes looked tired and washed out. His face had over a week’s growth of scraggly beard. This was clearly a man who had seen hard times. “For the man of the hour, you look like second-class roadkill.”

Pitt shook Yaeger’s hand. “I came directly from the airport just to harass you.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment.” He looked into Pitt’s eyes with pure admiration. “I read the report about the incredible rescue performed by you and the
Deep Encounter’s
crew, followed up by your fight with the pirates. How do you become involved in so much havoc?”

“It
finds
me,” said Pitt, throwing up his hands in a modest gesture. “Seriously, the lion’s share of the credit goes to the entire complement of the research ship, who worked like fiends in saving the passengers. And Giordino did most of the work in rescuing the crew of the survey ship.”

Yaeger well knew Pitt’s aversion to words of praise and compliments. The guy was too self-conscious for his own good, Yaeger thought. He skipped over any more talk of the recent events and motioned for Pitt to sit down.

“Have you seen the admiral yet? He has about fifty media interviews lined up for you.”

“I’m not ready to face the world just yet. I’ll see him in the morning.”

“What brings you to my world of electronic manipulation?”

Pitt laid Egan’s leather case on Yaeger’s desk and opened it. He unwrapped the object taken from the cruise liner and handed it to him. “I’d like to have this analyzed and identified.”

Yaeger examined the odd-shaped thing for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll have the chemistry lab do a number on it. Unless it has a complicated molecular structure, I should have an answer for you in two days. Anything else?”

Pitt passed over the videocassettes from the
Abyss Navigator.
“Computer-enhance and digitize these into three-dimensional images.”

“Can do.”

“One final thing before I head home.” He laid a drawing on the desk. “Have you ever seen a company logo like this?”

Yaeger examined Pitt’s crude drawing of the three-headed dog with a snake for a tail and the word
Cerberus
beneath. He stared at Pitt queerly. “You don’t know what outfit this is?”

“No.”

“Where did you see it?”

“It was covered up on the side of the pirates’ work boat.”

“An oil rig work boat.”

“Yes, the same type,” Pitt replied. “You’re familiar with it?”

“I am,” replied Yaeger sagely. “You’re opening a real can of worms if you connect the Cerberus Corporation with the hijacking of the
Deep Encounter.
”

“The Cerberus Corporation,” Pitt said, uttering each syllable slowly. “How stupid of me. I should have known. The conglomerate owns most of the U.S. domestic oil fields, copper and iron mines, and its chemical division makes a thousand different products. It was the three-headed dog that threw me. I failed to make the connection.”

“All very relevant when you think about it.”

“Why a three-headed dog as a corporate logo?”

“Each head stands for a division of the company,” answered Yaeger. “One for oil, one for mining and the other for the chemistry division.”

“And the serpent’s tail?” asked Pitt half facetiously. “Does that represent something dark and sinister?”

Yaeger shrugged. “Who can say?”

“What’s the source for the dog?”

“Cerberus … sounds Greek.”

Yaeger sat at his computer and typed on the keyboard. In a chamber just opposite his console, the face and figure of an attractive woman appeared in three dimensions. She was dressed in a one-piece bathing suit.

“You called,” she said.

“Hello, Max. You know Dirk Pitt.” The hazy brown eyes flicked from Pitt’s feet to his face. “Yes, I am familiar with him. How are you, Mr. Pitt?”

“Fair to middlin’, as they say in Oklahoma. And you, Max, how are you?”

The face changed to an angry pout. “This stupid bathing suit Hiram put on me. It doesn’t flatter me at all.”

“Would you prefer something else?” asked Yaeger.

“An elegant Armani suit, Andra Gabrielle lingerie, and high-heel, ankle-strap sandals by Tods would be nice.”

Yaeger smiled a cocky smile. “What color?”

“Red,” Max replied without hesitation.

Yaeger’s fingers flew in a blur over the computer keyboard. Then he sat back to admire his handiwork.

Max faded for a few moments and then reappeared in an elegant red suit with blouse, jacket and skirt. “Much better,” she said happily. “I hate to look mundane when I’m on the job.”

“Now that you’re in a good mood, I would like you to produce data on a subject.”

Max ran her hands over her new outfit. “Just name it.”

“What can you tell me about Cerberus the three-headed dog?”

“From Greek mythology,” Max came back instantly. “Hercules—Latin for Herakles, as the Greeks called him—in a fit of temporary insanity murdered his own wife and children. The god Apollo ordered him to serve King Eurystheus of Mycenae for twelve years as punishment for his terrible act. As part of his sentence, Hercules had to perform twelve labors, feats so challenging they looked impossible. He had to overcome all sorts of hideous monsters, the most difficult being the submission of Cerberus, again Latin for the Greek Kerberos. This was the three-headed grotesque dog who guarded the gates of Hades and prevented the dead souls from escaping from the underworld. The three heads represented the past, present and future. What the serpent tail signified is not known to me.”

“Did Hercules destroy the dog?” asked Pitt.

Max shook her head. “Near the gates of the Acheron River, one of five running into the underworld, he wrestled the monstrosity into submission after being bitten, not by the dog’s jaws, but by the serpent on the tail. Hercules then took Cerberus to Mycenae and showed him off before returning him to Hades. That’s about it in a nutshell, except that Cerberus’s sister was Medusa, the hussy with snakes for hair.”

“What can you tell me about the Cerberus Corporation?”

“Which one? There must be a dozen businesses around the world that go under the name Cerberus.”

“A widely diversified corporation that does business in oil, mining and chemistry.”

“Oh, that one,” said Max, enlightened. “Have you got about ten hours?”