Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

An air search was out of the question until the weather cleared.

Every ship within a hundred miles changed course and steamed full speed in response to the emergency signals. Because of her greater speed, Dover reckoned the Catawba would be the first to reach the stricken vessel. Her big diesels had already pushed her past a coastal freighter and a halibut long-liner gulf boat, leaving them rocking in her wake.

Dover was a great bear of a man who had pain his dues in sea rescue. He'd spent twelve years in northern waters; stubbornly throwing his shoulder against every sadistic whim the Arctic had thrown him. He was tough and wind-worn, slow and shambling in his physical movements, but he possessed a calculator like mind that never failed to awe his crew. In less time than it had taken to program the ship's computers, he had figured the wind factor and current drift, arriving at a position where he knew the ship, wreckage or any survivors should be found-and he'd hit it right on the nose.

The hum of the engines below his feet seemed to take on a feverish pitch. Like an unleashed hound, the Catawba seemed to pick up the scent of her quarry. Anticipation gripped all hands.

Ignoring the rain, they lined the decks and bridge wings.

"Four hundred meters," the radar operator sang out.

Then a seaman clutching the bow staff began pointing vigorously into the rain.

Dover leaned out the wheelhouse door and shouted through a bullhorn. "Is she afloat?"

"Buoyant as a rubber duck in a bathtub," the seaman bellowed back through cupped hands.

Dover nodded to the lieutenant on watch. "Slow engines."

"Engines one third," the watch lieutenant acknowledged as he moved a series of levers on the ship's automated console.

The Arnie Marie slowly emerged through the precipitation.

They expected to find her half awash, in a sinking condition.

But she sat proud in the water, drifting in the light swells without a hint of distress. There was a silence about her that seemed unnatural, almost ghostly. Her decks were deserted, and Dover's hail over the bullhorn went unanswered.

"A crabber by the look of her," Dover muttered to no one in particular. "Steel hull, about a hundred and ten feet. Probably out of a shipyard in New Orleans."

The radio operator leaned out of the communications room and motioned to Dover. "From the Board of Register, sir. The Arnie Marie's owner and skipper is Carl Keating- Home port is Kodiak."

Again Dover hailed the strangely quiet crab boat, this time addressing Keating by name. There was still no response.

The Catawba slowly circled and hove to a hundred meters away, then stopped her engines and drifted alongside.

The steel-cage crab pots were neatly stacked on the deserted deck, and a wisp of exhaust smoke puffed from the funnel, suggesting that her diesel engines were idling in neutral. No human movement could be detected through the ports or the windows of the wheelhouse.

The boarding party consisted of two officers, Ensign Pat Murphy and Lieutenant Marty Lawrence. Without the usual small talk they donned their exposure suits, which would protect them from the frigid waters if they accidentally fell into the sea. They had lost count of the times they had conducted routine examinations of foreign fishing vessels that strayed inside the Alaskan 200-mile fishing limit, yet there was nothing routine about this investigation. No flesh-and-blood crew lined the rails to greet them. They climbed into a small rubber Zodiac propelled by an outboard motor and cast off.

Darkness was only a few hours away. The rain had eased to a drizzle but the wind had increased, and the sea was rising. An eerie quiet gripped the Catawba. No one spoke; it was as though they were afraid to, at least until the spell produced by the unknown was broken.

They watched as Murphy and Lawrence tied their tiny craft to the crab boat, hoisted themselves to the deck and disappeared through a doorway into the main cabin.

Several Minutes dragged by. Occasionally one of the searchers would appear on the deck only to vanish again down a hatchway.

The only sound in the Catawba's wheelhouse came from the static over the ship's open radiophone loudspeaker, turned up to high volume and tuned to an emergency frequency.

Suddenly, with such unexpected abruptness that even Dover twitched in surprise, Murphy's voice loudly reverberated inside the wheelhouse.

"Catawba, this is Arnie Marie."

"Go ahead, Arnie Marie," Dover answered into a microphone.

"They're all dead."

The words were so cold, so terse, nobody absorbed them at first.

"Repeat."