Inca Gold (Dirk Pitt 12)

Hidalgo's eyes narrowed skeptically. "Not another gringo folktale about fishermen and divers being swept under the desert and disgorged into the Gulf?"

"Who is to say?" Maderas replied with a shrug. "All I know is that orders from our fleet headquarters in Ensenada directed our ship and crew to patrol the waters on the northern end of the Gulf between San Felipe and Puerto Penasco for any sign of bodies."

"A large area for only one ship to cover."

"We'll be joined by two Class P patrol boats out of Santa Rosalia, and all fishing boats in the area have been alerted to report any sighting of human remains."

"If the sharks get them," Hildago muttered pessimistically, "there won't be anything left to find."

Maderas leaned back against the railing of the bridge wing, lit a cigarette, and gazed toward the stern of his patrol vessel. It had been modified from a 67-meter (220 foot) U.S. Navy minesweeper and had no official name other than the big G-21 painted on the bow. But the crew unaffectionately called her El Porqueria ("piece of trash") because she once broke down at sea and was towed to port by a fishing boat-- a humiliation the crew never forgave her for.

But she was a sturdy ship, quick to answer the helm, and stable in heavy seas. The crews of more than one fishing boat and private yacht owed their lives to Maderas and El Porqueria.

As executive officer of the ship, Hidalgo had the duty of plotting a search grid. When he was finished poring over a large nautical chart of the northern Gulf, he gave the coordinates to the helmsman. Then the dreary part of the voyage began, plowing down one lane and then reversing course as if mowing a lawn.

The first line was run at eight o'clock in the morning. At two o'clock in the afternoon a lookout on the bow yelled out.

"Object in the water!"

"Whereaway?" shouted Hildago.

"A hundred and fifty meters off the port bow."

Maderas lifted his binoculars and peered over the blue green water. He easily spotted a body floating face down as it rose on the crest of a wave. "I have it." He stepped to the wheelhouse door and nodded at the helmsman. "Bring us alongside and have a crew stand by to retrieve." Then he turned to Hildago.

"Stop engines when we close to fifty meters."

The foaming bow wave faded to a gentle ripple, the heavy throb of the twin diesels died to a muted rumble as the patrol vessel slipped alongside the body rolling in the waves. From his view on the bridge wing, Maderas could see the bloated and distorted features had been battered to pulp. Small wonder the sharks didn't find it appetizing, he thought.

He stared at Hidalgo and smiled. "We didn't need a week after all."

"We got lucky," Hidalgo mumbled.

With no hint of reverence for the dead, two crewmen jabbed a boat hook into the floating corpse and pulled it toward a stretcher, constructed from wire mesh, that was lowered into the water. The body was guided into the stretcher and raised onto the deck. The ghastly, mangled flesh barely resembled what had once been a human being. Maderas could hear more than one of his crew retching into the sea before the corpse was zipped into a body bag.

"Well, at least whoever he was did us a favor," said Hidalgo.

Maderas looked at him. "Oh, and what was that?"

Hidalgo grinned unfeelingly. "He wasn't in the water long enough to smell."

Three hours later, the patrol vessel entered the breakwater of San Felipe and tied up alongside the Alhambra.

As Pitt had suspected, after reaching shore in the life raft, Gordo Padilla and his crew had gone home to their wives and girlfriends and celebrated their narrow escape by taking a three-day siesta. Then, under the watchful eye of Cortina's police, Padilla rounded everyone up and hitched a ride on a fishing boat back to the ferry. Once on board they raised steam in the engines and pumped out the water taken on when Amaru opened the seacocks. When her keel was unlocked by the silt and her engines were fired to life, Padilla and his crew sailed the Alhambra back to San Felipe and tied her to the dock.

/> To Maderas and Hidalgo, looking down from their bridge, the forward car deck of the ferry looked like the accident ward of a hospital.

Loren Smith was comfortably dressed in shorts and halter top and exhibited her bruises and a liberal assortment of small bandages over her bare shoulders, midriff, and legs. Giordino sat in a wheelchair with both legs propped ahead of him in plaster casts.

Missing was Rudi Gunn, who was in stable condition in the El Centro Regional Medical Center just north of Calexico, after having survived a badly bruised stomach, six broken fingers, and a hairline fracture of the skull.

Admiral Sandecker and Peter Duncan, the hydrologist, also stood on the deck of the ferryboat, along with Shannon Kelsey, Miles Rodgers, and a contingent of local police and the Baja California Norte state coroner. Their faces were grim as the crew of the navy patrol ship lowered the stretcher containing the body onto the Alhambra's deck.

Before the coroner and his assistant could lift the body bag onto a gurney, Giordino pushed his wheelchair up to the stretcher. "I would like to see the body," he said grimly.

"He is not a pretty sight, senor," Hidalgo warned him from the deck of his ship.

The coroner hesitated, not sure if under the law he could permit foreigners to view a dead body.