Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

Young wolfed the first quarter of his sandwich and drained his second martini. "How is your Monte Cristo, Mr. Donner?"

Donner forced a few bites. "Excellent, and yours?"

"Grandly delicious. Would you like my private theory? Don't bother to be polite; you can laugh without embarrassment. Everyone else does when they hear it."

"I promise you I won't laugh," Donner said, his tone dead serious.

"Be sure to dip your Monte Cristo in the grape jam, Mr. Donner. It heightens the pleasure. Now then, as I've mentioned, my uncle was a man of great detail, a keen observer of his work, his surroundings and accomplishments. I've collected most of his diaries and notebooks; they fill a goodly portion of my study's bookshelves. His remarks concerning the Sour Rock and the Buffalo mines, for example, take up five hundred and twenty-seven pages of exacting sketches and neatly legible handwriting. The pages in the notebook that come under the heading of the 'Little Angel Mine', however, are totally blank."

"He left nothing behind regarding the Little Angel, not even a letter, perhaps?"

Young shrugged and shook his head. "It was as though there was nothing to

record. It was as though Joshua Hays Brewster and his eight-man crew went down into the bowels of the earth never intending to return."

"What are you suggesting?"

"Ridiculous as it seems," Young admitted, "the thought of mass suicide once darted through my mind. Extensive research showed me that all nine men were either bachelors or widowers. Most were itinerant loners who drifted from digging to digging, looking for any excuse to move on when they became bored or disenchanted with the foreman or mine management. They had little to live for once they became too old to work the mines."

"But Jason Hobart had a wife," Donner said.

"What? What's that?" Young's eyes widened. "I found no record of a wife for any of them."

"Take my word for it."

"God in heaven! If my uncle had known that, he'd never have recruited Hobart."

"Why is that?"

"Don't you see he needed men he could trust implicitly, men who had no close friends or relatives to ask questions should they vanish."

"You're not making sense," Donner said flatly.

"Simply put, the reopening of the Little Angel Mine and the subsequent tragedy was a sham, a pretext, a hoax. I'm convinced my uncle was going mad. How or what caused his mental illness will never be known. His character altered drastically, even to the point of producing a different man."

"A split personality?"

"Exactly. His moral values changed; his warmth and love for friends disappeared. When I was younger, I talked to people who remembered him. They all agreed on one thing, the Joshua Hays Brewster they all knew and loved died months before the Little Angel disaster."

"How does this lead to a hoax?"

"Insanity aside, my uncle was still a mining engineer. Sometimes he could tell within minutes whether a mine would pay or not. The Little Angel was a bust, he knew that. He never had any intention of finding a high-grade lode. I don't have the vaguest idea of what his game was, Mr. Donner, but one thing I'm certain of, whoever pumps the water from the lower levels of that old shaft will find no bones."

Donner finished off his Manhattan and looked quizzically at Young. "So you think the nine men who went into the mine escaped?"

Young smiled. "Nobody actually saw them enter, Mr. Donner. It was assumed, and reasonably so, that they died down there in the black waters because they were never heard from again."

"Not enough evidence," Donner said.

"Oh, I have more, lots more," Young replied enthusiastically.

"I'm listening."

"Item One. The Little Angel's lowest working chamber was a good hundred feet above the mean water level. At worst, the walls leaked only moderately from surface accumulations. The lower shaft levels were already flooded because the water had gradually built up during the years the mine was originally shut down. Therefore, there was no way a dynamite blast could have unleashed a tidal wave of water over my uncle and his crew.

"Item Two. The equipment supposedly found in the mine after the accident was old, used junk. Those men were professionals, Mr. Donner. They'd never have gone below the surface with second-rate machinery.

"Item Three. Though he made it known to everyone that he was reopening the mine, my uncle never once consulted or discussed the project with Ernest Bloeser, the man who owned the Little Angel. In short, my uncle was claim jumping. An unthinkable act to a man of his moral reputation.