Trojan Odyssey (Dirk Pitt 17)

Dirk shook Perlmutter's hand. "Goodbye and thank you."

"Give your dad my best and tell him to drop by."

"We will."

After the kids had left, Perlmutter sat for a long time lost in his thoughts, until the phone rang. It was Pitt.

"Dirk, your son and daughter just left."

"Did you steer them in the right direction?" asked Pitt.

"I whetted their appetite a bit. Not a great deal I could offer them. There is little recorded history of the seafaring Celts."

"I have a question for you."

"I'm here."

"Ever hear of a pirate named Hunt?"

"Yes, a buccaneer who achieved minor fame in the late sixteen hundreds. Why do you ask?"

"I'm told he's a restless ghost known as the Wandering Buccaneer."

Perlmutter sighed. "I've read the reports. Another Flying Dutchman fable. Although, several of the ships and boats that radioed that they'd seen his ship disappeared without a trace."

"So there is cause to be concerned when sailing in Nicaraguan waters?"

"I suppose so. What's your interest?"

"Curiosity."

"Would you like whatever history I have on Hunt?"

"I'd be grateful if you could send it to my hangar by courier," said Pitt. "I've a plane to catch first thing in the morning."

"It's on its way."

"Thank you, St. Julien."

"I'm having a little soiree in two weeks. Can you make it?"

"I never miss one of your fabulous parties."

After he rang off, Perlmutter assembled his papers on Hunt, called a courier service and went to his bedroom, where he stood before a case tightly packed with books. Unerringly, he pulled one from the shelf and walked heavily to his study, where he reclined his bulk on a leather Recamier doctor's couch made in Philadelphia in 1840. Fritz jumped up and lay on Perlmutter's stomach, staring at him through doleful brown eyes.

He opened the book by Iman Wilkens titled Where Troy Once Stood and began reading. After an hour, he closed the cover and gazed at Fritz. "Could it be?" he murmured to the dog. "Could it be?"

Then he allowed the lingering effects of the vintage Chardonnay to put him to sleep.

18

Pitt and Giordino left for Nicaragua the next day on a NUMA Citation jet to Managua. There, they switched to a commercial Spanish-built Cassa 212 turboprop for the hour-and-ten-minute flight over the mountains and across the lowlands to the Caribbean sea and over an area known as the Mosquito Coast. They could have made the short flight in the NUMA jet, but Sandecker thought it best they arrive like ordinary tourists, in order to blend in.

The setting sun in the west bathed the mountain peaks gold before the rays were lost in shadows on the eastern slopes. It was hard for Pitt to imagine a canal crossing such difficult terrain, and yet throughout history Nicaragua was always considered the better route for an inter-oceanic channel than Panama. It had a healthier climate, the surveyed route was easier to excavate, and the canal would have been three hundred miles closer to the United States; six hundred miles, if you consider the mileage down and up from the Panama passage.

Before the turn of the century, as with too many far-reaching and historic turning points, politics crawled out of its lair and came to a bad verdict. Panama had a powerful lobby and worked hard to push their cause and disrupt relations between Nicaragua and the U.S. government. For a while, it was a toss-up, but with Teddy Roosevelt working behind the scenes to hammer out a sweet deal with the Panamanians, the pendulum swung the extra mile away from Nicaragua when Mount Pelee, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Martinique, erupted, killing more than thirty thousand people. In a case of incredibly bad timing, the Nicaraguans issued a series of stamps advertising the country as the land of volcanos, one of them depicting an eruption behind an illustration of a wharf and a railroad. That clinched it. The Senate voted for Panama as the site of the U.S.-built canal.

Pitt began studying a report on the Mosquito Coast soon after takeoff from Washington. Nicaragua's Caribbean lowlands were isolated from the more populated western side of the country by the rugged mountains unfolding below and dense tropical rain forests. The people and the region were never a part of the Spanish empire but came under British influence until 1905, when the entire coast fell under the jurisdiction of the Nicaraguan government.