Valhalla Rising (Dirk Pitt 16)

used the largest library on the sea ever amassed by one individual.

Pitt parked the Jeep, walked to the door and rapped the big bronze knocker that was cast in the shape of a sailing ship. The door was swept open almost before the knocker struck its bolt. A huge man who weighed 400 pounds, wearing burgundy paisley silk pajamas under a matching robe, filled the doorway. He was not what you'd call soft or flabby fat. His girth was solid and he moved with an unexpected grace. His flowing hair was gray, as was his long beard beneath a rosy red tulip nose and deep sky blue eyes.

"Dirk!" he cried out. He crushed Pitt in a tight hug and stepped back. "Come in, come in. It seems I don't see enough of you anymore."

"I have to admit I do miss your fantastic cooking."

Pitt followed St. Julien Perlmutter through rooms and hallways stacked floor to high ceilings with books on ships and the sea. It was an immense library eagerly sought by universities and museums, but Perlmutter meant to keep every volume until the day he died. And only then would his last will and testament reveal the recipient of his collection. He led Pitt into a spacious kitchen with enough jars, cooking utensils and dinnerware to fill ten restaurants. He motioned Pitt to a chair beside a round hatch table with a compass binnacle standing in the center of it.

"Sit down while I uncork my rare port. I've been saving it for a special occasion."

"My presence hardly ranks as a special occasion," Pitt said, smiling.

"Any occasion is special when I don't have to drink alone," Perlmutter chortled. He was a good-natured man who laughed easily and was rarely seen without a happy grin. He removed the cork and poured the deep red liquid into port glasses. He handed one to Pitt. "What do you think?"

Pitt savored the port and swished it gently around his tongue before swallowing and voicing his approval. "Nectar fit for the gods."

"One of life's finer joys." Perlmutter sipped his glass dry and poured another. "You said you had a research project for me."

"Have you heard of Dr. Elmore Egan?"

Perlmutter stared at Pitt intently for a moment. "I most certainly have. The man was a genius. His efficient and cost-practical magne-tohydrodynamic engines are a marvel of the technical age. A pity he had to be one of the many victims of the Emerald Dolphin on the eve of his triumph. Why do you ask?"

Pitt relaxed in the chair, enjoyed a second glass of port and related the story as he knew it, beginning with the fire on board the Emerald Dolphin and ending with the fight in Egan's home above the Hudson River.

"So where do I fit in?" asked Perlmutter.

"Dr. Egan was a devotee of Jules Verne, especially his book Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I thought that if anybody knew about Captain Nemo's submarine, the Nautilus, it had to be you."

Perlmutter leaned back and stared at the ornate ceiling above his kitchen. "Because it's a work of fiction, I have not put it on the list of my research projects. It's been a few years since I reread the story. Verne was either way ahead of his time or he could see into the future, because the Nautilus was extremely technically advanced for 1866."

"Could someone or some country have built a submarine that might have been half as efficient as the Nautilus?" asked Pitt.

"The only one that I recall that was proven practical before the eighteen-nineties was the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley."

"I remember," said Pitt. "She sank a Union sloop-of-war called the Housatonic outside of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1864, and became the first submarine in history to sink a warship."

Perlmutter nodded. "Yes, the feat didn't happen again until fifty years later, in August of 1914, when the U-21 sank the HMS Pathfinder in the North Sea. The Hunley sat on the bottom buried in silt for a hundred and thirty-six years before she was discovered, raised and placed in a conservation laboratory tank to preserve her for public display. When she was inspected at first hand and the silt and remains of her crew removed from inside, she was found to be far more modern in concept than was supposed. She was quite streamlined, and she had a rudimentary snorkel system with bellows to pump air, ballast tanks with pumps, diving planes and flush rivets to reduce water drag. That last thing, by the way, was a concept that nobody thought had been used before Howard Hughes flushed the rivets on an aircraft he designed in the mid-nineteen-thirties. The Hunley even experimented with electromagnetic engines, but that technology was not ready, so eight men sat inside the submarine and turned a crank that spun the propeller for propulsion. After that, submarine science lagged until John Holland and Simon Lake began experimenting with and building submarines that were accepted by several countries, including us and the Germans. Those early efforts would have looked crude beside Captain Nemo's Nautilus."

Perlmutter ran out of steam and was about to reach for the port bottle again when a look of revelation swept over his face. "I just thought of something," he said, raising his great bulk out of his chair with ease. He disappeared down the hall for several minutes before reappearing with a book in one hand. "A copy of the board of inquiry minutes concerning the sinking of the U.S. Navy frigate Kearsarge."

"The ship that sank the famous Confederate raider Alabama?"

"The same," Perlmutter answered Pitt. "I'd forgotten the strange circumstances behind her grounding on Roncador Reef off Venezuela in 1894."

"Strange?" asked Pitt.

"Yes, according to her commander, Captain Leigh Hunt, he was attacked by a man-made underwater vessel that resembled a whale. The vessel was chased, then sank into the water before surfacing again and ramming the Kearsarge, putting a large hole in her hull. She barely made it to Roncador Reef before she grounded. The crew then made camp on the reef until they were rescued."

"Sounds like the good captain was heavily into the rum locker," Pitt said, jokingly.

"No, he was dead serious," replied Perlmutter, "and what's important is that his entire crew backed him up. Not one of them who witnessed the spectacle varied his story. Their testimony described a large steel monster that was impenetrable to a series of cannon shots the Kearsarge poured into it-they simply bounced off. They also mentioned some sort of pyramid-shaped tower on its back that appeared to have viewing ports. Captain Hunt swore that he saw a face staring back at him through one of the ports, a man with a beard."

"Did they comment on the monster's size?"

"The crew agreed that it was cigar shaped, cylindrical with conical ends. As would be expected, they estimated the size anywhere from one to three hundred feet, with a beam of twenty to forty feet."

"Probably somewhere in between," Pitt said thoughtfully. "Somewhere slightly more than two hundred feet in length with a twenty-five-foot beam. Not exactly an underwater craft to be taken lightly in 1894."