Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

Prevlov leaned forward, his eyes half-closed in wary speculation. "My name?" his voice was barely above a murmur. "You know my name?"

"Fair is fair," Pitt answered. "I know as much about you as you know about me."

"You're even cleverer than I was led to believe," Prevlov said. "You've discovered my identity-an astute piece of perception. On that I commend you. But you needn't bluff with knowledge you do not possess. Beyond my name, you know nothing."

"I wonder. Perhaps I can enlighten you further with a bit of local folklore."

"I have no patience for fairy tales," Prevlov said. He motioned to the guard with the knife. "Now if we can get on about the business of persuading Admiral Sandecker to inspire your pumping crew to greater efforts, I would be most grateful."

The guard, a tall. man, his face still hidden under the muffler, began advancing toward Dana once more. He extended the knife. Its blade gleamed in the light no more than three inches from Dana's left breast. She hugged Pitt's jacket tightly around her shoulders and stared at the knife, numbed beyond fear.

"Too bad you're not big on fairy tales," Pitt said conversationally. "This is one you'd have enjoyed. It's all about a pair of bumbling characters called Silver and Gold."

Prevlov glanced at him, hesitated, and then nodded the guard back. "You have my attention, Mr. Pitt. I will give you five minutes to prove your point."

"It won't take long," Pitt said. He paused to rub the eye that had caked closed from the hardening blood. "Now then, once upon a time there were two Canadian engineers who discovered that spying could be a lucrative sideline. So they shed all qualms of guilt and became professional espionage agents in every sense of the word, concentrating their talents on obtaining classified data about American oceanographic programs and sending it through hidden channels to Moscow. Silver and Gold earned their money, make no mistake. Over the past two years, there wasn't a NUMA project the Russians didn't have knowledge of down to the tiniest detail. Then, when the Titanic's salvage came up, the Soviet Navy's Department of Foreign Intelligence-- your department, Prevlov-- smelled, a windfall. Without the slightest degree of chicanery, you found yourself with not one, but two men in your employ who were in a perfect situation to obtain and pass along America's most advanced deep-water-salvage techniques. There was, of course, another vital consideration, but even you weren't aware of it at the time.

"Silver and Gold," Pitt went on, "sent regular reports concerning the raising of the wreck through an ingenious method. They used a battery-powered pinger, a device that can transmit underwater sound waves similar to sonar. I should have caught on to it when the Capricorn's sonar man detected the transmissions, but instead I dismissed it as loose debris caused by a deep water current knocking about the Titanic. The fact that someone was sending out coded messages never entered our heads. Nobody bothered to decipher the random noises. Nobody, that is, except the man sitting under a set of hydrophones on board the Mikhail Kurkov."

Pitt paused and glanced about the dining saloon. He had everyone's attention. "We didn't begin to smell either rat until Henry Munk felt the need for a poorly timed call of nature. On his way back to the head at the aft end of the Sappho II, he heard the pinging device in operation and investigated; he caught one of the agents in the act. Your man probably tried to lie his way out of it, but Henry Munk was an instrument specialist. He recognized a communications pinger when he saw one and quickly figured the game. It was a case of the cat killing curiosity. Munk had to be silenced, and he was, from a blow to the base of the skull by one of Woodson's camera tripods. This created an awkward situation for the murderer, so he bashed Munk's head against the alternator housing to make it look like an accident. However, the fish didn't take the bait. Woodson was suspicious; I was suspicious; and to top it off, Doc Bailey found the bruise on Munk's neck. But since there was no way of proving who the killer was, I decided to string along with the accident story until I could scratch up enough evidence to point an accusing finger. Later, I went back and searched the submersible and discovered one slightly used and very bent camera tripod along with the pinging device where our friendly neighborhood spy had, ironically, hidden them in Munk's own storage locker. Certain that it was a waste of time to have them checked on shore for fingerprints-I didn't need a bolt from the blue to tell me I was dealing with a professional-I left the tripod and the pinger exactly as I found them. I took the chance that it would only be a matter of time before your agent got complacent and began contacting the Mikhail Kurkov again. So I waited."

"A fascinating story," Prevlov said. "But very circumstantial. Absolute proof would have been impossible to come by."

Pitt smiled enigmatically and continued. "The proof came through a process of elimination. I was relatively sure the killer had to be one of the three men on board the submersible who were supposedly asleep during their rest period. I then alternated the Sappho II's crew schedule every few days so that two of them had duties on the surface while the third was diving below on the wreck. When our sonar man picked up the next transmission from the pinger, I had Munk's murderer."

"Who is it, Pitt?" Spencer asked grimly. "There are ten of us here. Was it one of us?"

Pitt locked eyes for an instant with Prevlov and then turned suddenly and nodded at one of the weary men huddled under the lamps.

"I regret that the only introductory fanfare I can offer is the pounding of the waves against the hull, but bear with me and take a bow anyway, Drummer. It may well be your final encore before you toast in the electric chair."

"Ben Drummer!" Gunn gasped. "I can't believe it. Not with him sitting there all battered and bloody after attacking Woodson's killer."

"Local color," Pitt said. "It was too early to raise the curtain on his identity, not at least until we had all walked the plank. Until then, Prevlov n

eeded an informer to blow the whistle on any ideas we might have dreamed up for retaking the ship."

"He fooled me," said Giordino. "He's worked harder than any two men on the crew to keep the Titanic floating."

"Has he?" Pitt came back. "Sure, he's looked busy, even managed to work up a sweat and get dirty, but what have you actually seen him accomplish since we came on board?"

Gunn shook his head. "But he's . . . rather I thought that he'd been working day and night surveying the ship."

"Surveying the ship, hell. Drummer has been running around with a portable acetylene torch and cutting holes in her bottom."

"I can't buy that," said Spencer. "Why work at scuttling the ship if his Russian chums want to lay their claws on her, too?"

"A desperate gamble to delay the tow," Pitt answered.

"Timing was critical. The only chance the Russians had to board the Titanic with any degree of success was during the eye of the hurricane. It was clever thinking. The possibility never occurred to us. If the tugs could have towed the hulk without any complications, we'd have missed the eye by thirty miles. But thanks to Drummer, the instability of the listing hull made the tow job a shambles. Before the cable parted, she sheered all over the ocean, forcing the tugs to reduce their speed to minimum steerage way. And, as you can see, the mere presence of Prevlov and his band of cutthroats attests to the success of Drummer's efforts."

The truth began to register then. None of the salvage crew had actually witnessed Drummer slaving over a pump or offering to carry his share of the load. It registered that he'd always been off on his own, showing up only to complain of his frustration at not overcoming the obstacles that supposedly prevented his survey tour of the ship. They stared at Drummer as though he was some alien from another world, waiting for, expecting the indignant words of denial.

There was to be no denial, no shocked plea of innocence, only a flicker of annoyance that vanished as quickly as it had come. Drummer's transformation was nothing short of astounding. The sad droop to the eyes had disappeared; they suddenly took on a glinting sharpness. Gone too was the lazy curl from the corners of his lips and the slouched, indifferent posture of his body. The indolent facade was gone and, in its place, was a straight-shouldered, almost aristocratic-looking man.

"Permit me to say, Pitt," Drummer said in a precise tone, "your powers of observation would do a first-class espionage agent proud. However, you haven't uncovered anything that really changes the situation."

"Fancy that," Pitt said. "Our former colleague has suddenly lost his Jubilation T Cornpone accent."