Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

Without a second of lost motion, he quickly removed his dive knife from its leg sheath and pried out the pins in the hinges.

The hatch cover, released from its mountings and thrust upward by its buoyancy, sailed past him.

And so did a bloated corpse that burst through the open hatch like a jack-in-the-box.

PITT REELED BACKWAIRD into a bulkhead and watched numbly as an unearthly parade of floating debris and bodies erupted from the engine room. They drifted up to the ceiling, where they hung in grotesque postures like trapped balloons. Though the internal gases had begun to expand, the flesh had not yet started to decompose.

Sightless eyes bulged beneath strands of hair that wavered from the disturbance in the water.

Pitt struggled to fight off the grip of shock and revulsion, hardening his mind for the repugnant job he could not leave undone.

With creeping nausea merged with cold fear he snaked through the hatch into the engine room.

His eyes were met with a charnel house of death. Bedding, clothing from half-open suitcases, pillows and cushions, anything buoyant enough to float, mingled between a crush of bodies. The scene was a nightmare that could never be imagined or remotely duplicated by a Hollywood horror film.

Most of the corpses wore white Coast Guard uniforms that anded to their ghostly appearance. Several had on ordinary work clothes.

None showed signs of injury or wounds.

He spent two minutes, no more, in there, cringing when a lifeless hand brushed across his arm or a white expressionless face drifted inches in front of his face mask. He could have sworn they were all staring at him, begging for something that was not his to give. One was dressed differently from the others, in a knit sweater covered by a stylish raincoat. Pitt swiftly rifled through the dead man's pockets.

Pitt had seen enough to be permanently etched in his mind for a lifetime. He hurriedly kicked up the lander and out of the engine room. Once free of the morbin scene below, he hesitated to read his air gauge. The needle indicated a hundred pounds, an ample supply to reach the sun again if he didn't linger. He found Giordino rummaging through a cavernous food locker and made an upward gesture with his thumb. Giordino nodded and led the way through a passageway to the outside deck.

A great wave of relief swept over Pitt as the yacht receded into the murk. There wasn't time to search for the buoy line so they ascended with the bubbles that flowed from their air regulators' exhaust valves. The water slowly transformed from an almost brown-black to a leaden green. At last they broke the surface and found themselves fifty yards downstream from the Hoki lamoki.

Sandecker and the boat's crew of engineers spotted them immediately and quickly began hauling on the lifeline. Sandecker cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Hang on, we'll pull you in."

Pitt waved, thankful he could lie back and relax. He felt too drained to do anything but lazily float against the current and watch the trees lining the banks slip past. A few minutes later he and Giordino were lifted onto the deck of the old clamming boat.

"Is it the Eagle?" Sandecker asked, unable to mask his curiosity.

Pitt hesitated in answering until he'd removed his air tank.

"Yes," he said finally, "it's the Eagle." Sandecker could not bring himself to ask the question that was gripping his mind. He sidestepped it. "Find anything you want to talk about?"

"The outside is undamaged. She's sitting upright, her keel resting in about two feet of silt."

"No sign of life?"

"Not from the exterior."

It was obvious that Pitt wasn't going to volunteer any information unless asked. His healthy tan seemed strangely paled.

"Could you see inside?" Sandecker demanded.

"Too dark to make out anything."

"All right, dammit, let's have it straight .

"Now that you've asked so pleasantly," Pitt said stonily, "there's more dead bodies in the yacht than a cemetery. They were stacked in the engine room from deck to overhead. I counted twenty-one of them."

"Christ!" Sandecker rasped, suddenly taken aback. "Could you'recognize any of them?"

"Thirteen were crewmen. The rest looked to be civilians."

"Eight civilians?" Sandecker seemed stunned.

"As near as I could judge by their clothing. They weren't in any condition to interrogate."