Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt 14)

Julia instinctively turned and stared across the bayou, but all she saw was darkness. "You can follow my actions?"

"Through a night-vision scope. I didn't want anybody sneaking up on you without you knowing about it."

Good old faithful Lieutenant Stowe. Another time, another place, she might have felt a growing affection for him. But any thought of love, no matter how fleeting, created an image of Dirk Pitt in her mind. For the first time in her life she was infatuated with a man, and her independent spirit was not sure how to accept the situation. Almost reluctantly, she refocused her concentration on discovering the covert methods of Qin Shang's smuggling operation.

"I believe there must be another vessel or compartment connected to the bottom of the barge," she reported.

"What are the indications?" asked Stowe.

"I heard voices through the keel. That would explain how the Chinese were able to smuggle the illegal immigrants through Sungari and past immigration, customs and the Coast Guard."

"I'd like to buy your theory, Ms. Lee, but an underwater compartment that is carried across two oceans from China and then shifted under a barge for a voyage up a Louisiana bayou to a railroad terminal in an abandoned sugar mill may get you an award for literary fiction, but it won't score you any points with pragmatic minds."

"I'll stake my career on it," Julia said positively.

"May I ask your intent?" Stowe's tone went from friendly to official.

"I intend to gain entry into the mill and make a search."

"Not a smart move. Better to wait until morning."

"That may be too late. The immigrants could be herded into freight cars and transported away by then."

"Ms. Lee," said Stowe coldly. "I strongly urge you to think this thing out and back off. I'll swing the launch across the bayou and pick you up off the barge."

Julia did not feel that she had come this far suddenly to walk away. "No thank you, Lieutenant Stowe. I'm going in. If I find what I hope to find, you and your men can come running."

"Ms. Lee, I must remind you that although you're under the protection of the Coast Guard, we are not a Justice Department SWAT team. My advice, if you wish to take it, is to wait until daylight, obtain a search warrant from a parish judge and then send in the local sheriff to investigate. You'll score more points with your superiors that way."

It was as though Julia had not heard Stowe. "

lease ask Captain Lewis to notify Peter Harper in Washington and alert the INS office in New Orleans. Good night, Lieutenant Stowe. Let's do lunch tomorrow."

Stowe tried several times to raise Julia, but she had turned off her little radio. He looked across the bayou through his night-vision scope and saw her jump from the barge and run the length of the dock, disappearing around a moss-covered oak tree outside the chain-link fence.

Julia stopped when she reached the oak and hid for a few minutes under the moss that hung from the branches above. Her eyes slowly panned around the seemingly deserted buildings of the sugar mill. No lights inside the doors and windows leaked through the weathered cracks. She listened but only heard the rhythmic whine and rasp of cicadas, an indication that summer was just around the corner. The balmy air lay heavy and damp with no breeze to cool skin moist with sweat.

The main building in the complex, solid and substantial, stood three stories tall. The founder must have been influenced by medieval architecture. Ramparts traveled around the roof with four turrets that once held the company's offices. The walls showed only enough windows to provide daylight for the interior, but to the men and women who had once labored there, the lack of ventilation must have caused incredibly oppressive working conditions. The red-clay bricks looked as if they had long defied the mugginess, but green moss and climbing vines were slowly invading their mortared seams, loosening their grip. Already, a large number of them had fallen to the damp earth below. To Julia the unearthly scene of a once-thriving business humming with activity, crowded with people but now abandoned, wore the expectant air of a place long overdue for the wrecker's ball.

She worked her way through the shadows of the vegetation growing along the fence until she came to the railroad tracks leading through a heavily padlocked gate, down the culvert and ending at a massive wooden door o

pening into the basement of the main warehouse. She bent down and studied the rails under a light on a nearby pole. The steel was shiny and free of rust. Her cocksure conviction was now becoming more firmly established.

She continued her reconnaissance, flitting silently with the grace of a cat through the underbrush until she came to a small drainage pipe two feet in diameter that ran under the fence before emptying in a ditch parallel to the old mill. She made a quick survey of the immediate area to check that she was still unobserved and began crawling into the pipe, pushing herself feet first so she could scramble forward if it proved to be a dead end.

Julia was by no means lulled into a false sense of security. It puzzled her that only one guard appeared to be working for a security service other than Qin Shang Maritime. The lack of extra guards and brighter floodlighting suggested that this was a facility holding little of value- perhaps the very image that was meant to be projected. She was too much the professional not to consider the likely possibility that her movements were recorded by concealed infrared video cameras from the time she jumped from the barge until now. But she had come too far to quit. If this was a staging area for illegal immigrants, then Qin Shang wasn't operating under his usual formula of fanatical secrecy and tight security.

A broad-shouldered man might never have squirmed through the drainage pipe, but Julia had inches to spare. At first, all she saw when she looked between her feet was blackness. But after negotiating a slight bend in the pipe, she saw a circle of moonlight playing in a reflection of water. At last she emerged into a concrete ditch filled with several inches of muck that ran around the main warehouse building to catch the rainwater that dropped from drain spouts on the roof.

She went immobile as she gazed to her left and right. No sirens, no mad attack dogs, no searchlights greeted her entry into the sugar-mill compound. Content that her presence wasn't detected, she stealthily moved along the building, searching for a way to enter. She pressed her back against the moss-covered brick walls, deciding on which direction to take around the sugar mill. The side where the railroad tracks sloped off into a basement was open and washed from the light on the pole, so she chose the opposite course, which offered dark shadows from a grove of cypress trees. She stepped as noiselessly as possible, careful not to fall over any old rubbish that lay scattered about the ground.

A small thicket of brush blocked her way, and Julia crawled under it. Her outstretched, probing fingers touched a stone step, and then a second one leading downward. Squinting her eyes, she peered into the shadows and discovered a stairway dropping to the basement of the mill. The steps were covered with debris, and she carefully had to step around and over it. The door at the bottom of the stairs had seen better days. Stout and made of oak, at one time it could have stopped a battering ram. But a century of damp climate had rusted out the hinges, and Julia found that all she had to do was give it a hearty kick for the door to creak open just far enough to allow her to squeeze past.

Julia hesitated only long enough to see that she was in a concrete-walled passage. There was a faint glow of light at the other end a good fifty feet away, she guessed. The dank smell from the long-unused passage lay heavy. The floor was dripping-damp and puddled in places where rainwater had seeped in from the outer door. Debris and old furniture cast into the passageway when the sugar mill closed down made it difficult to pass through without undue sounds. She became extra cautious when she reached the dim light that shone through the dirty glass window of a heavy oak door blocking the way. She carefully turned a rusting door handle. Unexpectedly, the bolt slid whisper-silent from its slot. Then she painstakingly eased the door open a crack. It swung on its hinges as smoothly as if it had been oiled only the day before.

She softly stepped inside with the expectation of a woman anticipating trouble. She found herself inside an office furnished in the heavy oak furniture so popular in the early part of the twentieth century. Julia froze. The room was immaculately clean. There wasn't a speck of dust or a cobweb to be seen. It was like entering a time capsule. She had also stepped into a trap.

She felt as if she had been punched in the stomach when the oak door clunked shut behind her and three men stepped from behind a screen that shielded a sitting room at the other end of the office. All of the men were dressed in business suits, two carrying briefcases as though they had just come from a board-of-directors meeting.