Inca Gold by Clive Cussler
Pitt's spirits soared as he recognized the battered remains of the Wallowing Windbag. Incredibly, the Hovercraft had come through the horrific fall over the cataract and had been cast up here after drifting nearly 40 kilometers. At last a gleam of hope. He stumbled across the gravel beach to the rubber hull and examined it under his light.
The engine and fan had been torn from their mountings and were missing. Two of the air chambers were punctured and deflated, but the remaining six still held firm. Some of the equipment was swept away, but four air tanks, the first-aid kit, Duncan's plastic ball of colored water dye tracer, one of Giordino's paddles, two extra flashlights, and the waterproof container with Admiral Sandecker's thermos of coffee and four bologna sandwiches had miraculously survived.
"It seems my state of affairs has considerably improved," Pitt said happily to nobody but the empty cavern.
He began with the first-aid kit. After liberally soaking the shoulder wound with disinfectant, he awkwardly applied a crude bandage on it inside his tattered wet suit. Knowing it was useless to bind fractured ribs, he gritted his teeth, set his wrist and taped it.
The coffee had retained most of its heat inside the thermos, and he downed half of it before attacking the sandwiches. No medium-rare porterhouse steak, doused and flamed in cognac, tasted better than this bologna, Pitt decided. Then and there he vowed never to complain or make jokes about bologna sandwiches ever again.
After a brief rest, a goodly measure of his strength returned and he felt refreshed enough to resecure the equipment and break open Duncan's plastic dye container. He scattered Fluorescein Yellow with Optical Brightener into the water. Under the beam of his flashlight he watched until the dye stained the river with a vivid yellow luminescence. He stood and watched until the current swept it out of sight.
"That should tell them I'm coming," he thought aloud.
He pushed the remains of the Hovercraft out of the shallows. Favoring his injuries, he awkwardly climbed aboard and paddled one-handed into the mainstream.
As the partially deflated Wallowing Windbag caught the current and drifted downriver, Pitt leaned back comfortably and began humming the tune to "Up a Lazy River in the Noonday Sun."
Informed of up-to-the-minute events from california by Admiral Sandecker and agents Gaskill and Ragsdale in El Paso, the secretary of state decided to sidestep diplomatic protocol and personally call the President of Mexico. He briefed him on the far-reaching theft and smuggling conspiracy engineered by the Zolars.
"An incredible story," said Mexico's President.
"But true," the secretary of state assured him.
"I can only regret the incident occurred, and I promise my government's full cooperation with the investigation."
"If you'll forgive me, Mr. President, I do have a wish list of requests."
"Let's hear them."
Within two hours the border between Mexico and California was reopened. The government officials who were suckered by the Zolars into jeopardizing their positions by false promises of incredible riches were rounded up.
Fernando Matos and Police Comandante Rafael Cortina were among the first to be arrested by Mexican Justice investigators.
At the same time, vessels of the Mexican navy attached to the Sea of Cortez were alerted and ordered to sea.
Lieutenant Carlos Hidalgo peered up at a squawking gull before turning his attention back to the straight line of the sea across the horizon. "Are we searching for anything special, or just searching?" he casually asked his ship's captain.
"Looking for bodies," Commander Miguel Maderas replied. He lowered his binoculars, revealing a round, friendly face under long, thick black hair. His teeth were large and very white and almost always set in a Burt Lancaster smile. He was short and heavy and solid as a rock.
Hidalgo was a sharp contrast to Maderas. Tall and lean with a narrow face, he looked like a well-tanned cadaver. "Victims of a boating accident?"
"No, divers who drowned in an underground river."
Hidalgo's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Not another gringo folktale about fishermen and divers being swept under the desert and disgorged into the Gulf?"
"Who is to say?" Maderas replied with a shrug. "All I know is that orders from our fleet headquarters in Ensenada directed our ship and crew to patrol the waters on the northern end of the Gulf between San Felipe and Puerto Penasco for any sign of bodies."
"A large area for only one ship to cover."
"We'll be joined by two Class P patrol boats out of Santa Rosalia, and all fishing boats in the area have been alerted to report any sighting of human remains."
"If the sharks get them," Hildago muttered pessimistically, "there won't be anything left to find."
Maderas leaned back against the railing of the bridge wing, lit a cigarette, and gazed toward the stern of his patrol vessel. It had been modified from a 67-meter (220 foot) U.S. Navy minesweeper and had no official name other than the big G-21 painted on the bow. But the crew unaffectionately called her El Porqueria ("piece of trash") because she once broke down at sea and was towed to port by a fishing boat-- a humiliation the crew never forgave her for.
But she was a sturdy ship, quick to answer the helm, and stable in heavy seas. The crews of more than one fishing boat and private yacht owed their lives to Maderas and El Porqueria.
As executive officer of the ship, Hidalgo had the duty of plotting a search grid. When he was finished poring over a large nautical chart of the northern Gulf, he gave the coordinates to the helmsman. Then the dreary part of the voyage began, plowing down one lane and then reversing course as if mowing a lawn.
The first line was run at eight o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the afternoon a lookout on the bow yelled out.
"Object in the water!"
"Whereaway?" shouted Hildago.
"A hundred and fifty meters off the port bow."
Maderas lifted his binoculars and peered over the blue green water. He easily spotted a body floating face down as it rose on the crest of a wave. "I have it." He stepped to the wheelhouse door and nodded at the helmsman. "Bring us alongside and have a crew stand by to retrieve." Then he turned to Hildago.
"Stop engines when we close to fifty meters."
The foaming bow wave faded to a gentle ripple, the heavy throb of the twin diesels died to a muted rumble as the patrol vessel slipped alongside the body rolling in the waves. From his view on the bridge wing, Maderas could see the bloated and distorted features had been battered to pulp. Small wonder the sharks didn't find it appetizing, he thought.
He stared at Hidalgo and smiled. "We didn't need a week after all."
"We got lucky," Hidalgo mumbled.
With no hint of reverence for the dead, two crewmen jabbed a boat hook into the floating corpse and pulled it toward a stretcher, constructed from wire mesh, that was lowered into the water. The body was guided into the stretcher and raised onto the deck. The ghastly, mangled flesh barely resembled what had once been a human being. Maderas could hear more than one of his crew retching into the sea before the corpse was zipped into a body bag.
"Well, at least whoever he was did us a favor," said Hidalgo.
Maderas looked at him. "Oh, and what was that?"
Hidalgo grinned unfeelingly. "He wasn't in the water long enough to smell."
Three hours later, the patrol vessel entered the breakwater of San Felipe and tied up alongside the Alhambra.
As Pitt had suspected, after reaching shore in the life raft, Gordo Padilla and his crew had gone home to their wives and girlfriends and celebrated their narrow escape by taking a three-day siesta. Then, under the watchful eye of Cortina's police, Padilla rounded everyone up and hitched a ride on a fishing boat back to the ferry. Once on board they raised steam in the engines and pumped out the water taken on when Amaru opened the seacocks. When her keel was unlocked by the silt and her engines were fired to life, Padilla and his crew sailed the Alhambra back to San Felipe and tied her to the dock.
Loren Smith was comfortably dressed in shorts and halter top and exhibited her bruises and a liberal assortment of small bandages over her bare shoulders, midriff, and legs. Giordino sat in a wheelchair with both legs propped ahead of him in plaster casts.
Missing was Rudi Gunn, who was in stable condition in the El Centro Regional Medical Center just north of Calexico, after having survived a badly bruised stomach, six broken fingers, and a hairline fracture of the skull.
Admiral Sandecker and Peter Duncan, the hydrologist, also stood on the deck of the ferryboat, along with Shannon Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and a contingent of local police and the Baja California Norte state coroner. Their faces were grim as the crew of the navy patrol ship lowered the stretcher containing the body onto the Alhambra's deck.
Before the coroner and his assistant could lift the body bag onto a gurney, Giordino pushed his wheelchair up to the stretcher. "I would like to see the body," he said grimly.
"He is not a pretty sight, senor," Hidalgo warned him from the deck of his ship.
The coroner hesitated, not sure if under the law he could permit foreigners to view a dead body.
Giordino stared coldly at the coroner. "Do you want an identification or not?"
The coroner, a little man with bleary eyes and a great bush of gray hair, barely knew enough English to understand Giordino, but he nodded silently to his assistant who pulled down the zipper.
Loren paled and turned away, but Sandecker moved close beside Giordino.
"Is it. . ."
Giordino shook his head. "No, it's not Dirk. It's that psycho creep, Tupac Amaru."
"Good Lord, he looks as if he was churned through an empty cement mixer."
"Almost as bad," said Duncan, shuddering at the ghastly sight. "The rapids must have beat him against every rock between here and Cerro el Capirote."
"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," Giordino muttered acidly.
"Somewhere between the treasure cavern and the Gulf," said Duncan, "the river must erupt into a rampage."
"No sign of another body?" Sandecker asked Hidalgo.
"Nothing, senor. This is the only one we found, but we have orders to continue the search for the second man."
Sandecker turned away from Amaru. "If Dirk hasn't been cast out into the Gulf by now, he must still be underground."
"Maybe he was washed up on a beach or a sandbank," offered Shannon hopefully. "He might still be alive."
"Can't you launch an expedition down the subterranean river to find him?" Rodgers asked the admiral.
Sandecker shook his head slowly. "I won't send a team of men to certain death."
"The admiral is right," said Giordino. "There could be a dozen cascades like the one Pitt and I went over. Even with a Hovercraft like the Wallowing Windbag, it's extremely doubtful anyone can gain safe passage through a hundred kilometers of water peppered with rapids and rocks."
"If that isn't enough," added Duncan, "there's the submerged caverns to get through before surfacing in the Gulf. Without an ample air supply, drowning would be inescapable."
How far do you think he might drift?" Sandecker asked him.
"From the treasure chamber?"
"Yes."
Duncan thought a moment. "Pitt might have a chance if he managed to reach a dry shore within five hundred meters. We could tie a man on a guideline and safely send him downstream that far, and then pull them back against the current."
"And if no sign of Pitt is found before the guideline runs out?" asked Giordino.
Duncan shrugged solemnly. "Then if his body doesn't surface in the Gulf, we'll never find him."
"Is there any hope for Dirk?" Loren pleaded. "Any hope at all?"
Duncan looked from Giordino to Sandecker before answering. All eyes reflected abject hopelessness and their faces were etched with despair. He turned back to Loren and said gently, "I can't lie to you, Miss Smith." The words appeared to cause him great discomfort. "Dirk's chances are as good as any badly injured man's of reaching Lake Mead outside of Las Vegas after being cast adrift in the Colorado River at the entrance to the Grand Canyon."
The words came like a physical blow to Loren. She began to sway on her feet. Giordino reached out and grabbed her arm. It seemed that her heart stopped, and she whispered, "To me, Dirk Pitt will never die."
"The fish are a little shy today," said Joe Hagen to his wife, Claire.
She was lying on her belly on the roof of the boat's main cabin, barely wearing a purple bikini with the halter untied, reading a magazine. She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and laughed. "You couldn't catch a fish if it jumped up and landed in the boat."
He laughed. "Just wait and see."
"The only fish you'll find this far north in the Gulf is shrimp," she nagged.
The Hagens were in their early sixties and in reasonably good shape. As with most women her age, Claire's bottom had spread and her waist carried a little flab, but her face was fairly free of wrinkles and her breasts were still large and firm. Joe was a big man who fought a losing battle with a paunch that had grown into a well-rounded stomach. Together they ran a family auto dealership in Anaheim specializing in clean, low-mileage used cars.
After Joe bought a 15-meter (50-foot) oceangoing ketch, and named it The First Attempt, out of Newport Beach, California, they began leaving the management of their business to their two sons. They liked to sail down the coast and around Cabo San Lucas into the Sea of Cortez, spending the fall months cruising back and forth between picturesque ports nestled on the shores.
This was the first time they had sailed this far north. As he lazily trolled for whatever fish took a fancy to his bait, Joe kept half an eye on the fathometer as he idled along on the engine with the sails furled. The tides at this end of the Gulf could vary as much as 7 meters (23 feet) and he didn't want to run on an uncharted sandbar.
He relaxed as the stylus showed a depression under the keel to be over 50 meters (164 feet) deep. A puzzling feature, he thought. The seafloor on the north end of the Gulf was uniformly shallow, seldom going below 10 meters at high tide. The bottom was usually a mixture of silt and sand. The fathometer read the underwater depression as uneven hard rock.
"Aha, they laughed at all the great geniuses," said Joe as he felt a tug on his trolling line. He reeled it in and discovered a California corbina about the length of his arm on the hook.
Claire shaded her eyes with one hand. "He's too pretty to keep. Throw the poor thing back."
"That's odd."
"What's odd?"
"All the other corbinas I've ever caught had dark spots on a white body. This sucker is colored like a fluorescent canary."
She adjusted her halter and came astern to have a closer look at his catch.
"Now this is really weird," said Joe, holding up one hand and displaying palm and fingers that were stained a bright yellow. "If I weren't a sane man, I'd say somebody dyed this fish."
"He sparkles under the sun as if his scales were spangles," said Claire.
Joe peered over the side of the boat. "The water in this one particular area looks like it was squeezed out of a lemon."
"Could be a good fishing hole."
"You may be right, old girl." Joe moved past her to the bow and threw out the anchor. "This looks as good a place as any to spend the afternoon angling for a big one."
There was no rest for the weary. Pitt went over four more cataracts. Providentially, none had a steep, yawning drop like the one that almost killed him and Giordino. The steepest drop he encountered was 2
meters (6.5 feet). The partially deflated Wallowing Windbag bravely plunged over the sharp ledge and successfully ran an obstacle course through rocks hiding under roaring sheets of froth and spray before continuing her voyage to oblivion.
It was the boiling stretches of rapids that proved brutal. Only after they ext
The paddle was torn from his hand, but it proved a small loss. With 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of equipment in a collapsing boat in addition to him, it was useless to attempt a sharp course change to dodge rocks that loomed up in the dark, especially while trying to paddle with one arm. He was too weak to do little more than feebly grasp the support straps attached to the interior of the hull and let the current take him where it might.
Two more float cells were ruptured after colliding with sharp rocks that sliced through the thin skin of the hull, and Pitt found himself lying half-covered with water in what had become little more than a collapsed air bag. Surprisingly, he kept a death grip on the flashlight with his right hand. But he had completely drained three of the air tanks and most of the fourth while dragging the sagging little vessel through several fully submerged galleries before reaching open caverns on the other side and reinflating the remaining float cells.
Pitt never suffered from claustrophobia but it would have come easy for most people in the black never-ending void. He avoided any thoughts of panic by singing and talking to himself during his wild ride through the unfriendly water. He shone the light on his hands and feet. They were shriveled like prunes after the long hours of immersion.
"With all this water, dehydration is the least of my problems," he muttered to the dank, uncaring rock.
He floated over transparent pools that dropped down shafts of solid rock so deep the beam of his lamp could not touch bottom. He toyed with the thought of tourists coming through this place. A pity people can't take the tour and view these crystallized Gothic caverns, he thought. Perhaps now that the river was known to exist, a tunnel might be excavated to bring in visitors to study the geological marvels.