Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt 14)

"Well, don't stand there. Open it up."

"It really should be opened in a laboratory," O'Connell protested. "

roper methodology, you know."

"No!" Pitt said flatly. "

roper methodology be damned. These people worked long and hard. And by God they deserve to see the fruits of their labor. Open the footlocker."

Seeing that Pitt was not to be denied, and glancing at the sea of faces around her reflecting expressions of hostility, O'Connell knelt down and began working open the latch on the front of the footlocker with a small crowbar. The wall around the latch quickly fell away as if it were made of clay, and she lifted the lid open very, very slowly.

Inside the footlocker the upper tray held several objects neatly wrapped in sodden gauze and exactingly placed in little individual compartments. As if she was unwrapping the Holy Grail, O'Connell delicately removed the covering from the largest object. When the last piece of gauze fell away, she held up what looked like a yellow-brown circular bowl.

"A skullcap," she said in a hushed voice, "from Peking man."

53

THE CAPTAIN of the Jade Adventurer, Chen Jiang, had served Qin Shang Maritime Limited for twenty of his thirty years at sea. Tall and thin with straight white hair, he was quiet and efficient in the operation of his ship. He forced back a smile and spoke to his employer.

"There is your ship, Qin Shang."

"I can't believe after all these years I'm seeing her at last," said Qin Shang, his eyes locked on the video monitor receiving images from an ROV that was moving over the sunken wreck."We are very lucky the depth is only four hundred and thirty feet. If the ship had, indeed, foundered off the coast of Chile, we'd have found ourselves working in ten thousand feet."

"It appears the hull is separated in two parts."

"Not unusual for ships caught in storms on the Great Lakes to break up," explained Chen Jiang. "The Edmund Fitzgerald, a legendary ore carrier, was twisted apart when she sank."

During the search, Qin Shang had paced the deck of the wheelhouse restlessly. He appeared impassive to the captain and officers of the ship, but beneath the cold exterior, his adrenaline was pumping madly. Qin Shang was not a patient man. He hated doing nothing but waiting while the ship swept back and forth before finally striking the wreck he hoped was the Princess Dou Wan. The tedious search was a torment he could have happily done without.

The Jade Adventurer did not look like the usual businesslike survey-and-salvage ship. Her sleek superstructure and twin catamaran hulls gave her more the look of an expensive yacht. Only the stylized, contemporary A-frame crane on her stern suggested that she was anything but a pleasure cruiser. Her hulls were painted blue with a red stripe running around the leading edges. The upperworks gleamed white.

A big ship with a length of 325 feet, elegant and brutishly powered, she was a marvel of engineering, loaded from the keel with the latest and most sophisticated equipment and instrumentation. She was Qin Shang's pride and joy, expressly designed and constructed to his specifications for this moment, the salvage of the Princess Dou Wan.

The ship had arrived on site early in the morning, relying on the approximate position Zhu Kwan had received from St. Julien Perlmutter. Qin Shang was relieved to see only two ships within twenty miles. One was an ore carrier heading toward Chicago, the other Chen Jiang identified as a research vessel only three miles away, showing her starboard broadside as she moved on an opposite course with uncommon lethargy.

Using the same basic techniques and equipment as Pitt and the crew of the Divercity, the Jade Adventurer was only in the third hour of the search when the sonar operator announced a target. After four more passes to improve the quality of the recording, the sonar operator could safely say they had a ship on the bottom that, although broken up, matched the dimensions of the Princess Dou Wan. Then a Chinese-manufactured ROV was lowered over the side and descended to the wreck.

After another

hour of passionately staring at the monitor, Qin Shang snapped angrily. "This cannot be the Princess Dou Wan! Where is her cargo? I see nothing that confirms the report of wooden crates protecting the art treasures."

"Odd," murmured Chen Jiang. "The steel plates of the hull and superstructure look scattered around the wreck. It looks as if the ship was burst apart."

Qin Shang's face went pale. "This wreck cannot be the Princess Dou Wan," he repeated.

"Move the ROV around the stern," Chen Jiang ordered the operator.

In a few minutes the little underwater prowler stopped and the operator zoomed the camera in on the lettering across the stern of the hulk. There was no mistaking the name, PRINCESS YUNG T'AI, SHANGHAI.

"It is my ship!" Qin Shang's eyes were stricken as he stared into the monitor.

"Could it have been salvaged without your knowledge?" asked Chen Jiang.

"Not possible. No treasure that immense could have remained hidden all these years. Pieces of it would have most certainly surfaced."

"Shall I order the crew to prepare the submersible?"

"Yes, yes," Qin Shang said anxiously. "I must have a closer look."