Deep Six (Dirk Pitt 7)

"I thought mutiny went out with the Bounty."

"The modern term is hijacking."

"You've got a good hunch going," said Casio. "I'll see what I can do."

"Thank you, Mr. Casio."

"We've danced enough to know each other. Call me Sal."

"Okay, Sal, and make it Dirk."

"I'll do that," Casio said seriously. "Goodbye."

After he hung up, Pitt leaned back and put his feet on the desk.

He felt good, optimistic that a vague instinct was about to pay off.

Now he was about to try another long shot, one that was so crazy he almost felt foolish for pursuing it. He copied a number out of the National University Directory and called it.

"University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology."

"May I speak to Dr. Grace Perth?"

"Just a sec."

"Thank you."

Pitt waited for nearly two minutes before a motherly voice said, "Hello."

"Dr. Perth?"

"Speaking."

"My name is Dirk Pitt and I'm with the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Have you got a moment to answer a couple of academic questions for me?"

"What do you wish to know, Mr. Pitt?" Dr. Perth asked sweetly. Pitt tried to picture her in his mind. His initial image was that of a prim, white-haired lady in a tweed suit. He erased it as a stereotype.

"If we take a male between the ages of thirty and forty, of medium height and weight, who was a native of Peking, China, and another male of the same description from Seoul, South Korea, how could we tell them apart?"

"You're not doing a number on me, are you, Mr. Pitt?"

Pitt laughed. "No, Doctor, I'm quite serious," he assured her.

"Hmmm, Chinese versus Korean," she muttered while thinking.

"By and large, people of Korean ancestry tend to be more classic, or extreme, Mongoloin. Chinese features, on the other hand, lean more generally to Asian. But I wouldn't want to make my living guessing which was which, because the overlap is so great. It would be far simpler to judge them by their clothes or behavior, or the way they cut their hair-in short, their cultural characteristics."

"i thought they might have certain facial features that could separate them, such as you find between Chinese and Japanese."

"Well now, here the genetic spread is more obvious. If your Oriental male has a fairly dense heard growth, you'd have a rather strong indication that he's Japanese. But in the case of China and Korea, you're dealing with two racial groups that have intermixed for centuries, so much so that the individual variations would tend to blur out any distinction."

"You make it sound hopeless."

"Awfully difficult, maybe, but not hopeless," Dr. Perth said. "A series of laboratory tests could raise your probability factor."

"My interest is strictly from a visual view."

"Are your subjects living?"