Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt 14)

"Don't get your hopes up," Pitt replied sourly.

Giordino pulled back the throttle two notches above the idle position and flicked the ignition key on and off to simulate misfiring cylinders within the engine. As soon as he saw Pitt in his wet suit stepping over the catwalk on the side of the shantyboat out of sight of the guard, he turned the wheel toward the wharf. A few seconds later, when he glanced downward, Pitt was gone.

He watched Pitt's bubbles approach the barge, and then steadily scatter as he passed under its bottom edge. It looked to Giordino as if Pitt was working deeper and deeper. Then the bubbles rising beside the barge disappeared altogether.

Giordino slowly raised a hand to shield the sun from his eyes and expertly steered the shantyboat around the barge and along the pilings without scratching the paint on the hull. Then he dropped down a ladder to the catwalk, jumped onto the wharf and began looping mooring lines around a pair of rusty bollards.

The guard came out of his shack, unlocked the gate and rushed up to the shantyboat. He cautiously eyed Romberg, who acted happy to see him. The guard looked Asian but he spoke with a West Coast accent. He was a good four inches taller than Giordino but much thinner. He wore a baseball cap and World War II pilot's sunglasses.

"You must leave. This is a private dock. The owners do not allow boats to moor here."

"Ah cain't help it," Giordino moaned. "Mah engine died on me. Just give me twenty minutes, and Ah'll have it fixed."

The guard was not to be refused. He began untying the lines. "You must leave."

Giordino walked over and grasped the guard's wrist in an iron grip. "Qin Shang will not be happy when I report your offensive behavior to one of his inspectors."

The guard looked at Giordino queerly. "Qin Shang? Who the hell is Qin Shang? I was hired by the Butterfield Freight Corporation."

Now it was Giordino's turn to make a queer expression. He unconsciously glanced over the side into the water where he'd last seen Pitt's air bubbles and wondered if they'd made a big mistake. "You were hired to do what? Keep crows off the corn?"

"No," said the guard defensively, unable to shake Giordino's grip and contemplating whether he was dealing with a madman and should draw his bolstered revolver. "Butterfield uses the old buildings to store furniture and equipment from their offices around the country. My job, and the guards who work the other shifts, is to keep vandals off the property."

Giordino released the guard's arm. He was far too wise and cynical to fall for the lie. He was almost thrown off the track in the first moments of the conversation. But now he knew with solid conviction there was more to the abandoned sugar mill at Bartholomeaux than met the eye.

"Tell me, friend. Would it be worth a bottle of Black Label Jack Daniel's whiskey to let me stay here just long enough to fix my engine?"

"I don't think so," the guard said testily as he rubbed his wrist.

Giordino fell back into his back country accent. "Look, Ah'm in a bind. If Ah just drift out in the river while workin' down on the engine, Ah could be busted in two by a towboat."

"That's not my problem."

"Two bottles of Black Label Jack Daniel's whiskey?"

A sly look gleamed in the guard's eyes. "Four bottles."

Giordino stuck out his hand. "Done." Then he motioned through the door leading inside the shantyboat from the veranda. Come on board and Ah'll put 'em in a sack for ya."

The guard looked apprehensively at Romberg. "Does he bite?"

"Only if ya put your hand in his mouth and step on his jaws."

Unwittingly drawn into the web, the guard stepped around Romberg and entered the shantyboat's main cabin. It was the last thing he remembered until he woke up four hours later. Giordino hit him on the nape of the neck. Not a judo chop, but a huge fist swung like a club that sent the guard crashing heavily to the deck, out for the long count.

Ten minutes later, Giordino, wearing the guard's uniform, pants and sleeves too long by inches but the shirt straining at its buttons as his chest and shoulders stretched the seams, stepped out on the shantyboat's veranda. With the guard's baseball cap pulled down over the old, wide-style sunglasses, Giordino leisurely walked to the gate, closed it behind him and pretended to lock it. Then he went inside the guard shack and sat in front of the television set while his eyes roamed the grounds of the sugar mill, picking out the security cameras placed about the property.

Pitt sank to the bottom before swimming up and under the flat bottom of the barge. He was surprised to encounter the bed of the bayou at thirty feet beside the wharf-far deeper than was necessary for barge traffic. The depth must have been dredged to accept a deep-hulled ship.

It was as if a cloud had passed over the sun. The shadow of the barge cut off nearly fifty percent of the light from the surface. The water was an opaque green and filled with plant particles. He swam fast and had hardly passed under the barge when a vague shape appeared in the gloom and stopped his progress.

Hanging from the keel of the barge was an immense cylindrical tube with tapered ends. Pitt instantly recognized what it was, and his heart began to pump faster with excitement. The size and regular shape was similar to the hull of an early submarine. He swam along the hull slightly above it. There were no visible ports, and he could see that it was attached to the barge by a system of rails. These, Pitt immediately determined, were used to move the submerged container from the seagoing ship to the barge and back again.

He estimated the size of the underwater container at ninety feet in length by nearly fifteen feet in diameter by ten feet high. Without being able to peer inside, Pitt quickly realized that it was capable of housing anywhere from two hundred to four hundred people, depending on how tightly they were packed inside.

Quickly, he swam around the vessel to the other side, looking for a hatch connecting with an unde

rwater passage from the vessel to inside the breakwater that anchored the wharf. He found it thirty feet aft of the bow, a small watertight tunnel just large enough for two people to pass through at the same time.