Night Probe! (Dirk Pitt 6)

Weeks waited until he heard the bridge speaker come on and emit a low crackle of static. Then he began transmitting.

"To the ship-on an upriver course, bearing zero-one-seven degrees off Pointe-au-Pere. This is the H.M.C.S. Huron . Please respond. Over." His only reply was the muted static. He called two more times, but there was still no reply.

"Down to three knots and still closing. Range tw

elve hundred yards.

Weeks ordered a seaman to sound the inland waterway fog signal for a ship at anchor. Four blasts of the Huron's horn whooped over the black water: one short, two long, one short.

The answer was a prolonged shriek that cut through the fog.

Weeks stepped to the doorway, his eyes straining into the night. The approaching intruder remained invisible.

"He appears to be slipping between us and the Ocean Venturer," the first officer reported.

"Why in hell don't they answer? Why don't the fools stay clear?"

"Maybe we'd better throw a scare into them."

A devious gleam came into Weeks' eyes. "Yes, I think that might do the trick." He pressed the mike's transmit button and said, "To the ship off my port stem. This is the H.M.C.S. destroyer Huron . If you do not identify yourself immediately, we shall open fire and blow you out of the water."

Perhaps five seconds passed. Then a voice rasped out of the bridge speaker in a pronounced Texas drawl.

"This is the U.S.S. guided missile cruiser Phoenix . Draw when you're ready, pardner."

Local farmers may have welcomed the rain that poured onto the Hudson River valley, but it only further depressed the crew of the De Soto. Their search for the Manhattan Limited had turned up nothing but the twisted, rusting remains of the Hudson-Deauville bridge, which lay on the river bottom like the scattered bones of an extinct dinosaur.

Hour followed hour, the crew keyed to the instruments, the helmsman steering over the same grids five and six times, everyone trying to spot something they might have overlooked. Three times the probes that trailed behind the boat's stern hung up on underwater obstructions, creating delays of several hours before divers could work them free again.

The line of Giordino's mouth tightened as he pored over the grid charts, sketching in the debris shown by the side-scan so nor Finally he turned to Glen Chase.

"Well, we may not know where it is, but we sure as hell know where it ain't. I'm hoping the diving team will get lucky." He looked up at the large brass chronograph on the wheelhouse wall. "They should be surfacing about now."

Chase idly thumbed through the historical report on the Manhattan Limited wreck that Heidi Milligan had compiled and sent from Canada. He stopped at the last two pages and read them in silence.

"Is it possible the train was salvaged years later when it was old news," and no one bothered notifying the newspapers?"

"I don't think so," replied Giordino. "The disaster was too big an event in these parts for a successful recovery to go unnoticed and unrecorded."

"Any truth to the claims by individual divers that they discovered the locomotive?"

"None that can be verified. One guy even swears he sat in the cab and rang the engine's bell. Another says he swam through a Pullman car filled with skeletons. Show me an unsolved mystery, and I'll show you a certified weirdo with all the answers."

A figure in a dripping exposure suit materialized in the doorway and stepped into the wheelhouse.

Nicholas Riley, chief diver for the project, sank to the deck, his back pressed against a bulkhead, and exhaled a great sigh. "That three-knot current is murder," he said tiredly.

"Did you find anything?" Giordino asked impatiently.

"A veritable junkyard," Riley answered. "Sections of the bridge are strewn all over the riverbed. Some of the girders look shredded, as if they were blown apart."

"That's explained in here," said Chase, holding aloft the report. "The Army Corps of Engineers blasted off the top of the wreckage in nineteen seventeen because it was a menace to navigation."

"Any sign of the train?" Giordino persisted.

"Not even a wheel." Riley paused to blow his nose. "Bottom geology is fine sand, very soft. You could sink a thin dime in it."

"How deep is bedrock?"