"She's outlived her usefulness."
"I don't understand," said Pitt. "She looks perfectly sound."
"She's been what is called in the spy trade 'compromised,' explained Cabrillo. "The Chinese are wise to her facade. Within days every intelligence service around the world will be on the lookout for her. No, I'm afraid her days as disguised gatherer of classified information are over."
"Does that mean you're going to dissolve the corporation?"
Cabrillo sat up, his eyes gleaming. "Not in your life. Our grateful government has already offered to refit a new ship with state-of-the-art-technology, bigger, more powerful engines and a heavier weapons system. It may take a few operations to pay off the mortgage, but the stockholders and I are not about to close down operations."
Pitt shook the chairman's hand. "I wish you the best of luck. Perhaps we can do it again sometime." Cabrillo rolled his eyes. "Oh God, I hope not." Giordino took one of his magnificent cigars and slipped it into Cabrillo's shirt pocket. "A little something in case you tire of your smelly old pipe."
They waited as the attendants transferred Cabrillo to the gumey and lifted him inside the ambulance. Then the door was closed and the vehicle moved across the dock. They were standing there watching for a moment until it disappeared onto a street lined with palm trees when a man came up behind them. "Mr. Pitt and Mr. Giordino?" Pitt turned. "That's us."
A man in his middle sixties, with gray hair and beard, held up a leather-encased badge and identification. He was wearing white shorts, a flowered silk shirt and sandals. "I've been sent by my superiors to take you to the airport. An aircraft is waiting to fly you to Washington." "Aren't you a little old to play secret agent?" said Giordino, studying the stranger's identification.
"We oldies but goodies can often pass unnoticed where you younger guys can't."
"Which way to your car?" asked Pitt conversationally. The senior citizen pointed to a small Toyota van painted in the wild colors of a local taxi. "Your carriage awaits."
"I had no idea the CIA cut your budget so drastically," Giordino said sarcastically.
"We make do with what we've got."
They piled into the van, and twenty minutes later they were seated in a military cargo jet. As the plane rolled down the runway of Guam's Air Force base, Pitt looked out the window and saw the senior intelligence agent leaning against his van as if confirming that Pitt and Giordino had departed the island. In another minute they were flying above the often overlooked island paradise of the Pacific with its volcanic mountains, lush jungle waterfalls and miles of white-sand beaches graced with swaying coco palms. The Japanese swarmed into the hotels and onto the beaches of Guam, but not many Americans. He continued staring down as the plane passed over the turquoise waters inside the reef surrounding the island and headed out to sea.
As Giordino dozed off, Pitt turned his thoughts to the United States, sailing somewhere on the ocean below him. Something terrible was in the works, a terrible threat that only one man on earth could prevent. But Pitt knew with crystallized certainty that nothing, except perhaps an untimely death, would deflect Qin Shang from his purpose.
The world may be a place that is scarce of honest politicians, white buffalo, unpolluted rivers, saints and miracles, but there is no shortage of depraved villains. Some, like serial killers, may slay twenty or a hundred innocent victims. But given financial resources they might kill many more. Those like Qin Shang who possessed enormous affluence could hold themselves above the law and hire homicidal cretins to do their dirty work for them. The evil billionaire was not a general who felt remorse over losing a thousand men in battle to achieve an objective. Qin Shang was a cold-blooded sociopathic murderer who could drink a glass of champagne and eat a hearty dinner after condemning hundreds of illegal immigrants, many of them women and children, to a horrible death in the frigid waters of Orion Lake.Pitt was committed to stopping Qin Shang whatever the consequences, whatever the cost, even killing him if the occasion presented itself. He was drawn in too deeply to struggle back over the edge. He fantasized what it would be like if they ever met. What would the circumstances be? What would he say to a mass slaughterer?
For a long time, Pitt sat there staring up at the cabin ceiling of the aircraft. There was no sense in anything. Whatever Qin Shang's plan had to be, if nothing else it was mad. And now Pitt's own mind was running amok. There is nothing to do, he thought finally, but to sleep it off and hope to see things with a sane eye when we reach Washington.
PART III CANAL TO NOWHERE
22
April 23, 2000 Atchafalaya River, Louisiana
OF THE MAJOR RIVERS of the world, the Nile casts a romantic spell from an ancient past, the Amazon conjures up images of adventure and danger, while the Yangtze entwines the soul with the mysteries of the Orient. Images of pharaohs lounging on royal barges rowed by a hundred men past the pyramids come to mind. . . the Spanish conquistadors struggling and dying in a green hell. . . Chinese junks and sampans crowding water turned yellow-brown with flowing silt. But it is the Mississippi that truly captures the imagination.
Thanks to the stories of Mark Twain of big side-paddle riverboats coming around the bend with whistles blowing as they passed Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on a raft, and of battles up and down the river by Union and Confederate ironclads during the Civil War, the Mississippi's past seems so near that one has but to pierce a thin veil to experience it.
"The Father of Rivers," as the Indians called it, the Mississippi is the only river in North America that ranks in the top ten of the world. Third in length, third in drainage, fifth in volume, it stretches from the headwaters in Montana of its longest tributary, the Missouri, 3,484 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico.
Almost as fluid as mercury, always searching for the path of least resistance, the Mississippi has changed course many times throughout the last five thousand years, especially after the seas finally reached their present levels at the end of the last ice age. Between 1900 B.C. and 700 B.C. it flowed almost forty miles west of its present course. Restlessly, the river shifted back and forth across the state of Louisiana, carving a channel before migrating and carving another. Almost half of Louisiana was formed by the Mississippi depositing tremendous amounts of silt and clay carried from as far north as Minnesota and Montana.
"The water looks quiet today," said a man in an elevated seat who gazed from the pilothouse of the George B. Larson, an Army Corps of Engineers survey boat.
Standing at the control console, the boat's captain, Lucas Giraud, merely nodded as he piloted the craft past the cattle grazing on the levees of the Mississippi River in southern Louisiana.
This was Cajun country, the last outpost of French Acadian culture. Pickup trucks parked under spreading trees next to tar-papered cabins raised on pylons. Nearby, small Baptist churches rose from the damp countryside, their paint-peeled wooden sides overlooking cemeteries with weathered tombs rising above the ground. Soybeans and corn rose from the rich soil between man-made ponds for the farming of catfish. Little hardware and feed stores stood across narrow roads from auto garages surrounded by rusting wrecked cars half-buried in green underbrush that sprouted through their broken windows.
Major General Frank Montaigne studied the passing scene as the big survey boat cruised down the river that was textured by a light morning mist. He was late fiftyish and wore a light gray suit and a striped blue shirt with a burgundy bow tie. A vest, embellished with a large gold watch chain spanning the pockets, was displayed through the open coat. An expensive Panama hat was perched at a jaunty angle over steel-gray hair that flowed back from the temples. The eyebrows had managed to remain black and arched over limpid eyes that were gray-blue. There was a polished look about him, burnished with a hardness that you knew was there but couldn't see. His trademark, a cane carved from a willow tree with a leaping frog for its handle, lay across his lap.
Montaigne was no stranger to the capricious nature of the Mississippi River. To him it was a monster that was condemned to move through a narrow passage for eternity. Mostly it slept, but occasionally it went into a rampage, overflowing its banks and causing disastrous floods. It was the job of General Montaigne and of the Army Corps of Engineers, which he represented, to control the monster and protect the millions of people who lived along its banks and levees.
As president of the Mississippi River Commission, Mo
ntaigne was required to inspect the flood-control projects once a year on an Army Corps towboat that was fitted out almost as ostentatiously as a cruise ship. On those trips he was accompanied by a bevy of high-ranking officers of the Army as well as his civilian staff. Stopping at the many towns and ports along the river, he held conferences with the residents to hear their input and complaints about how the river was affecting their lives.