Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

"Well, Admiral, I was born and raised in Montana, but I've read enough history books to recognize a Confederate States flag when I see one."

OUT OF A WORLD ALL Bur VANISHED, her brass steam whistle splitting the air, the seawater frothing white beneath her churning pandle wheels, and spewing black smoke from her towering twin stacks, the Stonewall Jackson pitched toward the towboat with the awkward grace of a pregnant Southern belle hoisting her hooped skirts while crossing a mud puddle.

Shrieking gulls rode the wind above a giant stern flag displaying the crossed bars and stars of the Confederacy, while on the roof of the texas deck, a man furiously pounded out the old South's national hymn, "Dixie," on the keyboard of an old-fashioned steam calliope. The sight of the old riverboat charging across the sea stirred the souls of the men flying above. They knew they were witnessing an adventure none would see again.

In the ornate pilothouse, Pitt and Giordino stared at the barge and towboat that loomed closer with every revolution of the thirty-foot pandle wheels.

"The man was right," Giordino shouted above the steam whistle and calliope.

"What man?" Pitt asked loudly.

"The one who said, "Save your Confederate money; the South will rise again.

"Lucky for us it has," Pitt said, smiling"We're gaining." This from a wiry little man who twisted the six-foot helm with both hands.

"They've lost speed," Pitt concurred.

"If the boilers don't blow, and the sweet old darling' holds together in these damned waves . . ." The man at the wheel paused in minsentence, made an imperceptible turn of his big whitebearded head and let fly a spurt of tobacco juice with deadly accuracy into a brass cuspinor before continuing. "We ought to overtake 'em in the next two miles."

Captain Melvin Belcheron had skippered the Stonewall Jackson for thirty of his sixty-two years. He knew every buoy, bend, sandbar and riverbank light from St. Louis to New Orleans by heart.

But this was the first time he'd ever taken his boat into the open sea.

The "sweet old darling"' was built in 1915 at Columbus, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. Her like was the last to stoke the fires of imagination during the golden years of steamboating, and her like would never be seen again. The smell of burning coal, the swish of the steam engine, and the rhythmic splash of the pandle wheels would soon belong only in the history books.

Her shallow wooden hull was long and beamy, measuring 270 feet by forty-four. Her horizontal noncondensing engines ran at about forty revolutions per minute. She was rated at slightly over one thousand tons, yet despite her bulk, she walked the water with a draft of just thirty-two inches.

Down below on the main deck, four men, sweat-streaked and blackened with soot, furiously shoveled coal into the furnaces under four high-pressure boilers. When the pressure began to creep into the red, the chief engineer, a crusty old Scot by the name of McGeen, hung his hat over the steam gauge.

McGeen was the first man to vote for pursuit after Pitt crashlanded the helicopter in shallow water near Fort Jackson, waded ashore with Giordino and Hogan, and described the situation. At first there was undisguised disbelief, but after seeing their wounds, the bullet-riddled aircraft, and th

en hearing a deputy sheriff describe the dead and injured FBi agents a few miles down river, McGeen stoked up his boilers, Belcheron rounded up his deck crew and forty men from the Sixth Louisiana Regiment tramped onboard hooting and hollering and dragging along two ancient field cannons.

"Pour on the coal, boys," McGeen pressed his black gang. He looked like the devil with his trimmed goatee and brushed-up eyebrows in the flickering glare of the open furnace doors. "If we mean to save the Vice President, we've got to have more steam."

The Stonewall Jackson thrashed after the towboat and barge, almost as if sensing the urgency of her mission. When new, her top speed was rated at fifteen miles an hour, but in the past forty years she was never called on to provide more than twelve." She thrust down river with the current at fourteen, then fifteen . . . sixteen . . . eighteen miles an hour. When she burst from the South Pass Channel, she was driving through the water at twenty, smoke and sparks exploding through the flared capitals atop her stacks.

The men of the Sixth Louisiana Regiment-the dentists, plumbers, accountants who marched and refought battles of the Civil War as a hobby-grunted and sweated in the nondescript woolen gray and butternut uniforms that once clothed the Army of the Confederate States of America. Under the command of a major, they heaved huge cotton bales into place as breastworks. The two Napoleon twelve-pounder cannon from Fort Jackson were wheeled into position on the bow, their smoothbore barrels loaded with ball bearings scrounged from McGeen's engine-room supply locker.

Pitt stared down at the growing fortress of wired bales. Cotton against steel, he mused, single-shot muskets against automatic rifles.

It was going to be an interesting fight.

Lieutenant Grant tore his eyes from the incredible sight under his wings and radioed the ship flying the British flag.

"This is Air Force Weather Recon zero-four-zero calling oceanographic research vessel. Do you'read?"

"Righto, Yank. Hear you clearly," came back a cheery voice fresh off a cricket field. "This is Her Majesty's Ship Pathfinder.

What can we do for you, zero-four-zero?"

"A chopper went into the drink about three miles west of you.

Can you effect a rescue of survivors, Pathfinder?"

"We bloody well better. Can't allow the poor chaps to drown, can we?"

"I'll circle the crash sector, Pathfinder. Home in on me."