Night Probe! by Clive Cussler

  "We couldn't sit on the sidelines and not become militarily involved."

  "Oh, we'd rattle our sabers and make fiery speeches in the United Nations denouncing another example of Communist aggression. Send a few aircraft carriers into the Indian Ocean. Launch another trade embargo."

  Mercier picked at his salad. "In other words, the same reaction as we've always given. Stand by and watch-"

  "-the Soviets dig their own grave," interrupted the President. "Marching on seven hundred million people who live in poverty would be like General Motors buying a vast welfare department. Believe me, the Russians would lose by winning."

  Mercier did not agree with the President, but deep down he knew the nation's leader was probably right. He dropped the subject and turned to a problem closer to home.

  "The Quebec referendum for total independence comes up next week. After going down to defeat in '80

  and '86, it looks like the third time may be the lucky charm."

  The President appeared unconcerned as he scooped up a forkful of peas. "If the French think full sovereignty leads to utopia, they're in for a rude awakening."

  Mercier put out a feeler. "We could stop it with a show of force."

  "You never give up, do you, Alan?"

  "The honeymoon is over, Mr. President. It's only a question of time before congressional opposition and the news media begin labeling you an indecisive leader. The very opposite of what you promised during the campaign."

  "All because I won't go to war over the Middle East or send troops into Canada?"

  "There are other measures, less drastic, to show a determined front."

  "There is no reason to lose one American life over a dwindling oil field in the desert. As for Canada, things will work themselves out."

  Mercier came straight out with it. "Why do you want to see a divided Canada, Mr. President?"

  The chief executive looked across the table at him coolly. "Is that what you think? That I want to see a neighboring country torn apart and turned into chaos?"

  "What else am I to believe?"

  "Believe in me, Alan." The President's expression turned cordial. "Believe in what I am about to do."

  "How can I?" asked a confused Mercier, "when I don't know what it is?"

  "The answer is simple," replied the President with a trace of sadness in his voice. "I'm making a desperate play to save a critically ill United States."

  It had to be bad news. From the sour look on Harrison Moon's face, the President knew it couldn't be anything else. He laid aside the speech he was editing and sat back in his chair. "You look like a man with a problem, Harrison."

  Moon laid a folder on the desk. "I'm afraid the British have tagged the game."

  The President opened the file and found himself staring at an eight-by-ten glossy of a man who gazed back at the camera.

  "This was just flown in from the Ocean Venturer," explained Moon. "An underwater survey vehicle was probing the wreck when it was ripped off by a pair of unknown divers. Before communications were broken, this face appeared on the monitors."

  "Who is he?"

  "For the last twenty-five years he's been living under the name of Brian Shaw. As you can see in the report, he's a former British secret agent. His record makes interesting reading. Achieved quite a bit of notoriety back in the fifties and early sixties. He became too well known to operate; couldn't step on the sidewalk without a Soviet agent from their SMERSH assassination unit waiting to cut him down. His cover, as they say in the intelligence circles, was blown. Forced his secluded retirement. Their secret service buried his old identity by listing him as killed on duty in the West Indies."

  "How did you put a make on him so fast?"

  "Commander Milligan is on board the Ocean Venturer. She recognized him from the monitors. The CIA tracked down his true identity in their files."

  "She knew Shaw?" the President asked incredulously.

  Moon nodded. "Met him at a party in Los Angeles a month ago."

  "I thought she was shipped out to sea."

  "A foul-up. It never occurred to anyone to check out the fact that her ship was ordered to lay over three days in Long Beach for modifications. Also, nothing was said about not allowing her on shore."

  "Their meeting? Could it have been a setup?"

  "Seems so. The FBI spotted Shaw when he arrived from Britain. A usual procedure when embassy staff members greet overseas visitors. Shaw was escorted to a plane bound for LA. There the party was thrown by Graham Humberly, a well known jet setter on the payroll of British intelligence."

  "So Commander Milligan spilled her knowledge of the treaty.

  Moon shrugged. "She had no instructions to keep her mouth shut."

  "But how did they get wind of our knowledge of the treaty in the first place?"

  "We don't know," Moon admitted.

  The President read through the report on Shaw. "Odd that the British would trust an assignment of such magnitude to a man crowding seventy."

  "At first glance it seems MI6 has given our treaty search low priority. But when you think about it, Shaw might well be the perfect choice to operate undercover. If Commander Milligan hadn't recognized his face, I doubt if we'd have tied him to British intelligence."

  "Times have changed since Shaw was on the active list. He may be out of his element on this one."

  "I wouldn't bet on it," Moon said. "The guy is no slouch. He's pegged us every step of the way."

  The President sat very still for a moment. "It would appear that our neatly hatched concept has been penetrated."

  "Yes, sir," Moon nodded somberly. "It's only a question of days, maybe hours, before the Ocean Venturer is ordered off the St. Lawrence. The stakes are too high for the British to gamble on us not finding the treaty."

  "Then we write off the Empress of Ireland as a lost cause.

  "Unless . . ." Moon said as if thinking out loud. "Unless Dirk Pitt can find the treaty in what precious time he has left."

  Pitt scanned the screens, which showed the salvage team going about their business on the hulk below.

  Like two moon creatures cavorting in slow motion, the JIM suits and their human occupants carefully placed the Pyroxpne on the upper superstructure. The men worked comfortably under the surface equal atmosphere within their articulated enclosures. While outside, the bodies of the scuba divers were squeezed by seventy-five pounds of pressure per square inch. Pitt turned to Doug Hoker, who was fine-tuning a monitor.

  "Where's the submersible?"

  Hoker turned and studied a chart unreeling from a sonar recorder. "The Sappho I is cruising twenty meters off the port bow of the Empress. Until we're ready to begin removing debris, I've ordered its crew to patrol a quarter-mile perimeter around the wreck."

  "Good thinking," said Pitt. "Any sign of trespassers?"

  "Negative."

  "At least we'll be ready for them this time."

  Hoker made a dubious gesture. "I can't give you a perfect detection system. Visibility is too lousy for the cameras to see very far."

  "What about side-scan sonar?"

  "Its transducers cover a three-hundred-sixty-degree spread for three hundred meters, but again, no guarantees. A man makes an awfully small target."

  "Any surface ships prowling about?"

  "An oil tanker passed by ten minutes ago," answered Hoker. "And what looks to be a tug with a trash barge under tow is approaching from upriver."

  "Probably going to dump its load further out in the gulf," Pitt surmised. "Won't hurt to keep a sharp eye on it."

  "Ready to burn," announced Rudi Gunn, who stood looking up at the monitors, a pair of earphones with an attached microphone clamped on his head.

  "Okay, clear the divers off the site," ordered Pitt.

  Heidi entered the control room wearing a tan corduroy jump suit, a tray with ten steaming coffee cups held carefully in front of her. She passed them around to the engineering crew, offering the last one to Pitt.

  "Have I mis
sed anything?" she asked.

  "Perfect timing. We're going for the first burn. Keep your fingers crossed that we laid the right amount of Pyroxone in the right place."

  "What will happen if you didn't?"

  "Not enough, and We accomplish nothing. Too much in the wrong place, and half the side of the ship caves in, costing us days we can't afford. You might compare us with a wrecking crew which is demolishing a building floor by floor. Explosives have to be set in exact positions for the interior structure to collapse within a prescribed area."

  "Flasher is set and counting," reported Gunn.

  Pitt anticipated the question in Heidi's mind. "A flasher is an electronically timed incendiary device that ignites the Pyroxone."

  "Divers are free of the ship and we are counting," said Gunn. "Ten seconds."

  Everyone in the control room focused their eyes on the monitors. The countdown dragged by while they tensely awaited the results. Then Gunn's voice broke the heavy atmosphere.

  "We are burning."

  A bright glare engulfed the Empress of Ireland's starboard topside, and two ribbons of white incandescence curled out from the same source and raced around the deck and bulkheads, joining together and forming a huge circle of superheat. A curtain of steam burst above the fiery arc and swirled toward the surface.

  Soon the framework in the center began to sag. It hung there for nearly a minute, refusing to give way.

  Then the Pyroxone melted the last tenacious bond and the aging steel fell silently inward and vanished onto the deck below, leaving an opening twenty feet in diameter. The molten rim of the ring turned red and then gray, hardening again under the relentless cold of the water.

  "Looking good!" said Gunn excitedly.

  Hoker threw his clipboard in the air and whooped. Then they all began laughing and applauding. The first burn, the crucial burn, was a critical success.

  "Lower the grappling claw," Pitt said sharply. "Let's not waste a minute clearing that rubble out of there."

  "I have a contact."

  Not everyone's focus had been on the monitors. The shaggy haired man at the side-scan sonar recorder had kept his eyes on the readout chart. In three steps Pitt was behind him. "Can you identify?"

  "No, sir. Distance is too great to enhance with any detail. Looked like something dropped off that barge passing to port."

  "Did the target glide out on an angle?"

  The sonar operator shook his head. "Dropped straight down."

  "Doesn't read like a diver," said Pitt. "The crew probably heaved a bundle of scrap or weighted trash overboard."

  "Shall I stay on it?"

  "Yes, see if you can detect any movement." Pitt turned to Gunn. "Who's manning the submersible?"

  Gunn had to think a moment. "Sid Klinger and Marv Powers."

  "Sonar has a strange contact. I'd like them to make a pass over it." Gunn looked at him. "Think our callers might be back?"

  "The reading is doubtful," Pitt shrugged. "But then, you never know."

  As soon as he dropped over the side of the barge, Foss Gly swam straight to the bottom. Dragging an extra set of air tanks with him wasn't the easiest of chores, but he would need them for the return trip and the necessary decompression stops before he could resurface. He leveled off and hugged the riverbed, kicking his flippers with a lazy rhythm. He had a long way to go and much to do.

  He had traveled only fifty meters when he heard a sustained droning coming from somewhere in the black void. He froze, listening.

  The acoustics of the water scattered the sound and there was no way his ears could accurately detect the direction of the source. Then his eyes distinguished a dim yellow glow that grew and expanded above and to his right. There was no uncertainty in his mind. The Ocean Venturer's manned submersible was homing in on him.

  There was no place to hide on the flat and barren riverbed, no rock formations, no forest of kelp to shield him. Once the submersible high-intensity beam picked him out, he would become as conspicuous as an escaping convict flattened against a prison wall under the harsh glare of a spotlight.

  He dropped the spare air tanks and pressed his body into the silt, imagining the crew's faces pressed against the viewing ports, eyes trying to pierce the unending darkness. He held his breath so no telltale air bubbles would issue from his regulator.

  The craft passed behind him and moved on. Gly inhaled a great breath, but didn't congratulate himself.

  He knew the crew would double back and keep looking.

  Then he realized why he'd been missed. The silt had billowed up and clouded his figure. He lashed out with his fins and watched with relief as the submersible's light became lost in a great swirl of sediment. He grabbed up handfuls and waved the ooze about him. Within seconds he was totally cloaked. He switched on his diving light, but the floating muck reflected its ray. If he was blind, so were the men inside the submersible.

  He groped around until his hands touched the spare air tanks. He checked his luminous wrist compass for the direction of the Empress and started to swim, stirring up the bottom in his wake.

  "Klinger reporting in from the Sappho," said Gunn.

  Pitt stepped back from the monitors. "Let me talk to him."

  Gunn pulled off the headset and held it out. Pitt adjusted it to his head and spoke into the tiny microphone.

  "Klinger, this is Pitt. What did you find?"

  "Some sort of disturbance on the riverbed," Klinger's voice came back.

  "Could you make out the cause?"

  "Negative," Klinger repeated. "Whatever it was must have sunk in the silt."

  Pitt looked over at the side-scan sonar. "Any contacts?"

  The operator shook his head. "Except for a cloudlike smudge this side of the sub, the chart reads clear."

  "Shall we return and give a hand with the salvage?" asked Klinger.

  Pitt subsided into momentary silence. Oddly, Klinger's query annoyed him. Deep down inside he felt that an indefinable something was being overlooked.

  Cold logic dictated that the human mind was far less infallible than machines. If the instruments detected nothing, then chances were, nothing was there to detect. Against his own nagging doubts, Pitt acknowledged Klinger's request.

  "Klinger."

  "Go ahead."

  "Come on back, but take it slow and run a zigzag course."

  "Understood. We'll keep a sharp eye. Sappho out."

  Pitt handed the communications link back to Gunn. "How's it going?"

  "Beautifully," replied Gunn. "See for yourself."

  The clearing of the gallery was proceeding at a furious rate, or as furiously as was possible under the glue like hindrance of deepwater pressure. The team of divers from the saturation chamber sliced away at the smaller pieces of scrap, working with acetylene torches and hydraulic cutters. Two of them propped up the teetering bulkheads with aluminum support pillars to prevent a cave-in.

  The men in the JIM suits were guiding the grappling claw, dangling from the Ocean Venturer's derrick above, to the heaviest sections of twisted debris. While one manhandled the lift cable, twisting it to the best angle, the other man held a small box in his hand-operated manipulator clamps that controlled the huge claw. When they were satisfied that they had a good, healthy bite, the pincers were closed, and the winch operator on the derrick took over, gently easing the load out of what had come to be known.

  affectionately as the pit.

  "At the rate they're going," said Gunn, "we'll be ready to make the final burn over the area of Shields'

  stateroom in four days."

  "Four days," Pitt said turning over the words slowly. "God only knows if we'll still be here-" Suddenly he stiffened and stared at the screens.

  Gunn looked at him. "Is something wrong?"

  "How many divers are supposed to be out of the chamber this shift?"

  "Four at a time," replied Gunn. "Why do you ask?"

  "Because I count five."

  Gly cursed himself for taking s
uch a foolish risk, but lying under one of the rusting lifeboats he could not observe in any detail the activity taking place down in the hole where the salvage team was laboring. The idea of mingling with them seemed absurdly simple, though dangerous.

  He noted there was only a slight difference in the style of his thermal exposure suit and theirs. The air tanks strapped to his back were of an earlier model, but the color was the same. Who would notice a near-lookalike interloper in the murk?

  He swam down and approached from one side until his fins scraped against something solid: a steel hatch cover torn loose and resting on the deck. Before he could figure out his next move, one of the salvage crew drifted over and pointed down at the hatch. Gly gave an exaggerated nod of his head in understanding, and together the two of them wrestled the heavy steci plate to the bulwarks and heaved it over the side.

  There were no invisible perils here. Gly recognized the threat and kept a wary eye. He pitched in with the others as though he had been doing it from the start. It was to his way of thinking a classic case of the most obvious being the least obvious.

  They were much farther along than he had imagined. The NUMA people were like miners who seemed to know exactly where the mother lode was located, and they dug their shaft accordingly. By his calculation they were removing a ton of scrap every three hours.

  He kicked across the cavity, taking an approximate measurement of its width. The next two questions were, how deep were they going and how long would it take them to get there: Then he sensed that something was out of place, an impression more fancied than evident. Nothing looked to be out of the ordinary. The salvage men seemed too involved with their work to notice Gly. Yet there was a subtle change.