Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

Suvorov saw it was impossible to draw any information out of the man, so he turned his attention back to the ground.

Suddenly he pointed excitedly over the instrument panel.

"There!" he shouted above the engine's roar. "The small intersection to the left."

"Recognize it?"

"I think so. Drop lower. I want to read the sign on that shabby building sitting on the corner."

The pilot obliged and lowered the helicopter until it hovered thirty feet over the bisecting roadways. "Is that what you want?"

he asked. "'Glover Culpepper-gas and groceries "We're close," said Suvorov. "Fly up the road that leads toward that river to the north."

"The Intracoastal Waterway."

"A canal?"

"A shallow canal that provines an almost continuous inshore water passage from the North Atlantic States to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Used mostly by small pleasure boats and tugs."

The helicopter beat over the tops of trees, whipping leaves and bending branches with the wash from its rotor blades. Suddenly, at the edge of a wine marshy cre

ek, the road ended. Suvorov stared through the windshield.

"The laboratory, it must be around here."

"I don't see anything," the pilot said, banking the craft and studying the ground.

"Set us down!" Suvorov demanded nervously. "Over there, a hundred meters from the road in that glade."

The pilot nodded and gently eased the helicopter's landing skids into the soft grassy earth, sending up a swirl of dead and moldy leaves. He set the engine on inle with the blades 'Slowly turning and opened the door, Suvorov leaped out and ran stumbling through the underbrush back to the road. After a few minutes of frantic searchin he stared at the bank of the creek and looked around in exasperation.

"What's the problem?" asked the pilot as he approached.

"Not here," Suvorov said dazedly. "A warehouse with an elevator that dropped down to a laboratory. It's gone."

"Buildings can't vanish in six hours," said the pilot. He was beginning to look bored. "You must be on the wrong road."

"No, no, this has to be the right one."

"I only see trees and swamp"-he hesitated and pointed-"and that decrepit old houseboat on the other side of the creek."

"A boat!" Suvorov said as though having a revelation. "It must have been a boat."

The pilot gazed down into the muddy water of the creek. "The bottom here is only three or four feet deep. Impossible to bring a vessel the size of a warehouse, requiring an elevator, in here from the waterway."

Suvorov threw up his hands in bewilderment. "We must keep searching."

"Sorry," the pilot said firmly. "We haven't the time or the fuel to continue. To keep our appointment we've got to leave now."

He turned without waiting for a reply and walked back to the helicopter. Slowly Suvorov followed him, looking for all the world like a man deep in a trance.

As the helicopter lifted above the trees and swung toward Savannah, a gunnysack curtain in the window of the houseboat was pulled aside to reveal an old Chinaman peering through an expensive pair of Celestron 11 x 80 binoculars.

Satisfied he had read the aircraft's identification number on the fuselage correctly, he lain down the glasses and dialed a number on a portable telephone scrambling unit and spoke in rapid Chinese.

"GOT A MINUTE, DAN?" Curtis Mayo asked as Dan Fawcett got out of his car in the private street beside the White House.

"You'll have to catch me on the run," Fawcett replied without looking in Mayo's direction. "I'm late for a meeting."