Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

Then Pitt switched on the bed light and sat up. "Okay, I'm listening."

"I've received a written report from my friends in Korea. They went through Korean shipyard records. Guess what? The Belle Chasse was never scrapped."

Pitt threw back the covers and dropped his feet on the floor.

"Go on."

"Sorry I took so long getting back to you, but this is the most incredible maritime puzzle I've ever seen. For thirty years somebody has been playing musical chairs with ships like you wouldn't believe."

"Try me."

"First, let me ask you a question," said Perlmutter. "The name on the stern of the ship you found in Alaska?"

"The Pilottown?"

"Were the painted letters framed by welded heading?"

Pitt thought back. "As I recall it was faded paint. The raised edges must have been ground away."

Perlmutter uttered a heavy sigh of relief over the phone. "I was hoping you'd say that."

"Why?"

"Your suspicions are confirmed. The San Marino, the Belle Chasse and the Pilottown are indeed one and the same ship."

"Damn!" Pitt said, suddenly excited. "How'd you make the link?"

"By discovering what happened to the genuine Pilottown," said Perlmutter with a dramatic inflection. "My sources found no record of a Belle Chasse being scrapped in the shipyards of Pusan. So I played a hunch and asked them to check out any other yards along the coast.

They turned up a lead in the port of Inchon. Shipyard foremen are ' interesting guys. They never forget a ship, especially one they've junked. They act hard-nosed about it, but deep down they're sad to see a tired old vessel pulled into their dock for the last time. Anyway, one old retired foreman talked for hours about the good old days. A real gold mine of ship lore."

"What did he say?" Pitt asked impatiently.

"He recalled in great detail when he was in charge of the crew who converted the San Marino from a cargo transport into an ore carrier renamed the Belle Chasse."

"But the shipyard records?"

"Obviously falsified by the shipyard owners, who, by the way, happened to be our old friends the Sosan Trading Company. The foreman also remembered breaking up the original Pilottown. it looks like Sosan Trading, or the shady outfit behind it, hijacked the San Marino and its cargo and killed the crew. Then they modified the cargo holds to carry ore, documented it under a different name and sent it tramping around the seas."

"Where does the Pilottown come in?" asked Pitt.

"She was a legitimate purchase by Sosan Trading. You may be interested to know the International Maritime Crime Center has her listed with ten suspected customs violations. A hell of a high number.

It's thought she smuggled everything from plutonium to Libya, rebel arms to Argentina, secret American technology to Russia, you name it.

She sailed under a smart bunch of operators.

The violations were never proven. On five occasions she was known to have left port with clandestine cargo but was never caught unloading it. When her hull and engines finally wore out, she was conveniently scrapped and all records destroyed."

"But why claim her as sunk if it was really the San Marino, alias the Belle Chasse, they scuttled?"

"Because questions might be raised regarding the Belle Chasse's pedigree. The Pilottown had Solid documentation, so they claimed it was she that sank in 1979, along with a nonexistent cargo, and demanded a fat settlement from the insurance companies."

Pitt glanced down at his toes and wiggled them, "did the old foreman talk about other ship conversions for Sosan Trading?"

"He mentioned two, a tanker and a container ship," Perlmutter answered. "But they were both refits and not conversions. Their new names were the Boothville and the Venice."

"What were their former names?"