Sahara (Dirk Pitt 11)

Bock breathed deeply. He could feel a cold chill of apprehension down his spine. "Whenever I banked on luck, Madam Secretary, something always went terribly wrong."

St. Julien Perlmutter was sitting in his immense library that housed thousands of books, most neatly arranged on varnished mahogany shelves. At least two hundred, however, were haphazardly stacked and scattered loosely around the Persian carpet or piled on a badly worn rolltop desk. He sat with slippered feet propped on the untidy desktop reading a seventeenth-century manuscript while dressed in his uniform of the day, silk pajamas under a paisley robe.

Perlmutter was a legendary expert on maritime history. His collection of historical records and literature on ships and the sea was considered the finest in the world. Museum curators around the nation would have happily given any limb he requested or a blank check to obtain his massive library. But money mattered little to a man with a fifty-million dollar inheritance, except to purchase additional rare books about the sea he didn't already own.

Love of women didn't come close to his love of research. If any man or woman could passionately give an hour lecture on any shipwreck ever recorded, it was St. Julien Perlmutter. Every salvager and treasure hunter in Europe and America sooner or later showed up on his doorstep for guidance.

A monster of a man, he weighed nearly 181 kilograms, or 400 pounds. He was a product of gourmet food and drink and little or no exercise beyond picking up a book and opening its pages. He had merry sky-blue eyes and a red face buried under a huge gray beard.

His phone rang, and he pushed aside several opened books to reach it. "Perlmutter here."

"Julien, it's Dirk Pitt."

"Dirk, my boy," he fairly shouted. "A long time since I've heard your voice."

"Can't be more than three weeks."

"Who counts the hours when one is on the track of a shipwreck," he laughed.

"Certainly not you or I"

"Why don't you hop over for a bite of my famous Crepes Perlmutter?"

"I'm afraid they'd get cold by the time I arrived," Pitt replied.

"Where are you?"

"Algiers."

Perlmutter snorted. "What are you doing in that dreadful place?"

"Among other things, I'm interested in a shipwreck."

"In the Med off North Africa?"

"No, in the Sahara Desert."

Perlmutter knew Pitt too well to know he was joking. "I'm familiar with the legend of a ship in the California desert above the Sea of Cortez, but I'm not aware of one in the Sahara."

"I've run across three different references to it," Pitt explained. "One source was an old American desert rat who was looking for a Confederate ironclad called the Texas. He swore it steamed up a now dry river and became lost in the sand. Supposedly it was carrying gold from the Confederate treasury."

"Where do you find them?" Perlmutter laughed. "What sort of desert weed was this fellow smoking?"

"He also claimed that Lincoln was on board."

"Now you've gone from the ridiculous to pure humbug.'"

"Strange as it sounds, I believed him. And then. I found two other sources for the legend. One was an old rock painting in a cave that showed what had to be a Confederate design warship. The other was a reference to a sighting in a log book I found in Kitty Mannock's airplane."

"Hold on a minute," Perlmutter said skeptically. "Whose airplane?"

"Kitty Mannock."

"You found her! My God, she vanished over sixty years ago. You really discovered her crash site?"

"Al Giordino and I stumbled on her body and the wreck of the plane in a hidden ravine while we were crossing the desert."

"Congratulations!" Perlmutter boomed. "You've just cleared up one of aviation's most famous mysteries."