Inca Gold (Dirk Pitt 12)

The Hagens were in their early sixties and in reasonably good shape. As with most women her age, Claire's bottom had spread and her waist carried a little flab, but her face was fairly free of wrinkles and her breasts were still large and firm. Joe was a big man who fought a losing battle with a paunch that had grown into a well-rounded stomach. Together they ran a family auto dealership in Anaheim specializing in clean, low-mileage used cars.

After Joe bought a 15-meter (50-foot) oceangoing ketch, and named it The First Attempt, out of Newport Beach, California, they began leaving the management of their business to their two sons. They liked to sail down the coast and around Cabo San Lucas into the Sea of Cortez, spending the fall months cruising back and forth between picturesque ports nestled on the shores.

This was the first time they had sailed this far north. As he lazily trolled for whatever fish took a fancy to his bait, Joe kept half an eye on the fathometer as he idled along on the engine with the sails furled. The tides at this end of the Gulf could vary as much as 7 meters (23 feet) and he didn't want to run on an uncharted sandbar.

He relaxed as the stylus showed a depression under the keel to be over 50 meters (164 feet) deep. A puzzling feature, he thought. The seafloor on the north end of the Gulf was uniformly shallow, seldom going below 10 meters at high tide. The bottom was usually a mixture of silt and sand. The fathometer read the underwater depression as uneven hard rock.

"Aha, they laughed at all the great geniuses," said Joe as he felt a tug on his trolling line. He reeled it in and discovered a California corbina about the length of his arm on the hook.

Claire shaded her eyes with one hand. "He's too pretty to keep. Throw the poor thing back."

"That's odd."

"What's odd?"

"All the other corbinas I've ever caught had dark spots on a white body. This sucker is colored like a fluorescent canary."

She adjusted her halter and came astern to have a closer look at his catch.

"Now this is really weird," said Joe, holding up one hand and displaying palm and fingers that were stained a bright yellow. "If I weren't a sane man, I'd say somebody dyed this fish."

"He sparkles under the sun as if his scales were spangles," said Claire.

Joe peered over the side of the boat. "The water in this one particular area looks like it was squeezed out of a lemon."

"Could be a good fishing hole."

"You may be right, old girl." Joe moved past her to the bow and threw out the anchor. "This looks as good a place as any to spend the afternoon angling for a big one."

There was no rest for the weary. Pitt went over four more cataracts. Providentially, none had a steep, yawning drop like the one that almost killed him and Giordino. The steepest drop he encountered was 2

meters (6.5 feet). The partially deflated Wallowing Windbag bravely plunged over the sharp ledge and successfully ran an obstacle course through rocks hiding under roaring sheets of froth and spray before continuing her voyage to oblivion.

It was the boiling stretches of rapids that proved brutal. Only after they ext

racted their toll in battering torment could Pitt relax for a short time in the forgiving, unobstructed stretches of calm water that followed. The bruising punishment made his wounds feel as if they were being stabbed by little men with pitchforks. But the pain served a worthy purpose by sharpening his senses. He cursed the river, certain it was saving the worst for last before smashing his desperate gamble to escape.

The paddle was torn from his hand, but it proved a small loss. With 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of equipment in a collapsing boat in addition to him, it was useless to attempt a sharp course change to dodge rocks that loomed up in the dark, especially while trying to paddle with one arm. He was too weak to do little more than feebly grasp the support straps attached to the interior of the hull and let the current take him where it might.

Two more float cells were ruptured after colliding with sharp rocks that sliced through the thin skin of the hull, and Pitt found himself lying half-covered with water in what had become little more than a collapsed air bag. Surprisingly, he kept a death grip on the flashlight with his right hand. But he had completely drained three of the air tanks and most of the fourth while dragging the sagging little vessel through several fully submerged galleries before reaching open caverns on the other side and reinflating the remaining float cells.

Pitt never suffered from claustrophobia but it would have come easy for most people in the black never-ending void. He avoided any thoughts of panic by singing and talking to himself during his wild ride through the unfriendly water. He shone the light on his hands and feet. They were shriveled like prunes after the long hours of immersion.

"With all this water, dehydration is the least of my problems," he muttered to the dank, uncaring rock.

He floated over transparent pools that dropped down shafts of solid rock so deep the beam of his lamp could not touch bottom. He toyed with the thought of tourists coming through this place. A pity people can't take the tour and view these crystallized Gothic caverns, he thought. Perhaps now that the river was known to exist, a tunnel might be excavated to bring in visitors to study the geological marvels.

He had tried to conserve his three flashlights, but one by one their batteries gave out and he dropped them over the side. He estimated that only twenty minutes of light remained in his last lamp before the Stygian gloom returned for good.

Running rapids in a raft under the sun and blue sky is called white-water rafting, his exhausted mind deliberated. Down here they could call it black-water rafting. The idea sounded very funny and for some reason he laughed. His laughter carried into a vast side chamber, echoing in a hundred eerie sounds. If he hadn't known it came from him, it would have curdled his blood.

It no longer seemed possible that there could be any place but this nightmare maze of caverns creeping tortuously end on end through such an alien environment. He had lost all sense of direction. "Bearings"

was only a word from a dictionary. His compass was made useless by an abundance of iron ore in the rock. He felt so disoriented and removed from the surface world above that he wondered if he had finally crossed the threshold into lunacy. The only breath of sanity was fueled by the stupendous sights revealed by the light from his lamp.

He forced himself to regain control by playing mind games. He tried to memorize details of each new cavern and gallery, of each bend and turn of the river, so he could describe them to others after he escaped to sunlight. But there were so many of them his numbed mind found it impossible to retain more than a few vivid images. Not only that, he found he had to concentrate on keeping the Windbag afloat.

Another float cell was hissing its buoyancy away through a puncture.