“Sorry to trouble you, sir, but Admiral Hunter ordered strict security all around the ship.” A black shadow passed the ID back to Pitt. “If you take the first stairway to your right, you’ll find Commander Denver in the chart room.”
“Thanks,” Pitt grunted. He retrieved the gun and straggled up the stairway toward the bridge. At the top he found the darkened wheelhouse empty so he walked through the deserted enclosure and cautiously cracked open a door. Here at last he was greeted by a flood of bright light.
“Hello, Dirk,” Denver said wa
rmly. He had a cigarette between his fingers and as he waved a greeting to Pitt, the ash fell in a tiny heap on the chart table. He was wearing a black pullover sweater and a pair of soiled denims. “Welcome aboard the U.S. Navy’s only floating fossil.”
Pitt tossed him an offhand salute. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Burdette. I thought you were remaining in Operations with the admiral.”
Denver smiled. “I’ll get there. But I couldn’t resist coming down and wishing you and Paul good hunting.”
“We’ll need it. If the choice was up to me, I’d take the old-fashioned needle in a haystack any day.”
“Do you think this is a strange phenomenon?” Denver asked him.
“Like your boss said, our job is to find and raise the Starbuck. Any ghost-catching is strictly a side benefit. Besides, our NUMA scientists and engineers do not make a habit of researching Bermuda triangles or Pacific vortices. We leave that up to imaginative writers with a knack for exaggeration. Any unexplainable discoveries are purely accidental, and afterward, they’re quietly filed away.”
“Could you give me an example?” Denver asked softly.
Pitt stared vacantly at a half-opened chart on the table.
“There was one instance about nine months ago that smacked of Jules Verne. Two of our oceanographic ships were conducting subbottom profiling and underwater acoustical tests in the Kurile Trench off Japan when their instruments detected the sound of a vessel traveling at a high rate of speed in very deep water. Both ships immediately heaved to, closing down all engines and turning all instruments to whatever it was that was down there.”
“Could an instrument or one of the operators have been mistaken?” Denver murmured.
“Not likely,” Pitt answered. “Those researchers were the tops in their respective fields. And, when you consider that two different ships with two sets of precision instruments traced and recorded identical readings, you pretty much eliminate any percentage of error. No mistake about it, the thing, the submarine, the sea monster, whatever you wish to call it, was there. And it was moving at one hundred ten miles an hour in a depth of nineteen thousand feet.”
Denver slowly shook his head. “Incredible. It’s beyond understanding.”
“That’s only the half of it,” Pitt said. “Another ship working over the Cayment Trench off Cuba came up with an identical contact. I’ve seen both the Cayment and Kurile data. The sonar graphs agree to the millimeter.”
“Was the Navy notified?”
“No way. The Navy doesn’t want to hear about weird undersea sightings any more than the Air Force wants to hear about Unidentified Flying Objects. But then, what real proof was there other than a mass of scraggly lines on a few sheets of graph paper?” Pitt leaned back in a chair, propping his feet on the table and bracing the back of his head in his hands. “There was one instance, though, when we came within a whisker of getting one of the sea’s unknown residents on videotape. A NUMA zoologist was studying and recording fish sounds off the Continental slope near Iceland where he’d dropped a microphone in ten thousand feet of water to pick up noises made by the rarely seen benthos. For several days he recorded the usual clicks and creaking sounds with pretty much the same tones as surface-dwelling fish. He also noted the continuous cracking noise made by shrimps.
“Suddenly, one afternoon, the cracking stopped and he began receiving a tapping sound, as if something was rapping a pencil on the underwater microphone. At first he figured he’d only run onto a fish with a previously unrecorded sound. But it slowly dawned on him that the tapping was in some kind of code. The ship’s radio operator was hastily called and he deciphered it as a mathematical formula. Then the noise stopped and a shrieking laughter, eerily distorted by the density of the water, burst from the listening room speakers. Shaking off disbelief, the crew quickly lowered a TV camera. They were about ten seconds too late. The fine bottom silt had been stirred up by a rapid movement, leaving an impenetrable cloud of muck. It took an hour before the bottom cleared. And there, in front of the cameras, was a set of odd-looking indentations in the silt going off into the black void.”
“Were they able to make anything out of the formula?” asked Denver.
“Yes, it was a simple equation for finding the water pressure at the depth the microphone was located.”
“And the answer?”
“Nearly two and a half tons per square inch.”
Silence fell on the chart room, a long, chilling silence. Pitt could hear the water below the ports gently lapping the hull.
“Any coffee around?” Pitt asked.
Denver’s mind still roamed the mysterious abyss of the sea. Then with a marked degree of effort, he shrugged it away. “Be assured,” he said with a grim smile, “when you take an ocean cruise on the Martha Ann, you travel under the finest service in the Pacific.” He picked up an old blackened pot and poured the coffee into a battered tin cup. “There you are, sir, and enjoy your trip.”
They were sitting at the chart table just beginning to savor the coffee when the door swung open and Boland entered. He wore a soiled T-shirt, faded Levi’s, and a pair of brogans in worse condition than Pitt’s. The thin shirt showed off Boland’s muscular shoulders, and for the first time, Pitt noticed a tattoo on one of his arms. The picture of a knife piercing the skin and oozing blood, adorned his right forearm, and underneath the gruesome illustration in blue lettering, read the words: DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.
“You two look like you just received Dear John letters,” Boland’s voice was mocking, yet firm. “What goes?”
“We were just solving the mysteries of the universe,” Denver answered. “Here, Paul, have a shot of my world-renowned brew.” He pushed a steaming cup toward Boland, spilling a few brown drops on the deck.
Boland took the dripping mug from Denver’s hand and looked thoughtfully at Pitt, and when Pitt stared back at him, he slowly cracked a smile, lifted the cup, and sipped at the hot contents.