Serpent (NUMA Files 1)

"I think I see them near the bow."

They moved higher, then leveled out and glided toward the bow in fighter plane formation. Zavala saw a movement and called Austin's attention to it. The slab was being pushed along, floating on the pontoons. Two divers, one on either side. A tow line stretched off into the gloom ahead, probably being pulled by an unseen diver.

"We'll try to bluff them. Give them a light show. I'll take a shot."

The beams washed the slab and the divers on either side.

The divers accelerated, as if they thought they could outrun their pursuers. Austin loosed a bolt, trying not to puncture a pontoon. He thought he saw the projectile bounce off the slab. The attackers shot off into the murk. The tow line went loose. The slab came to a slow stop above the old bridge wing of the Doria.

"Let them go, Joe. We've got to tend to this thing."

They swooped down and started to swim the stone back toward the hull opening where McGinty could find them with the bell. It was slow going because they were pushing against the current flowing over the ship.

A voice crackled in Austin's earphones. "It's McGinty. Are you okay?"

"We're both fine. Got the stone. We're moving it back to the work area. You can drop the bell anytime."

There was a pause followed by a faint snort. "That might be a problem," the captain said, his voice burred with irritation. "We've lost the bow anchors. From the looks of the lines, they've been cut. Surface current's pushing us around. If we drop the bell, it'll swing like a big pendulum. Could knock us over."

"Looks like our pals covered their escape, Joe."

"I heard. Any chance of reattaching the anchor lines?"

Austin and Zavala were dangerously tired. The Hard Suits were not designed for hand-to-hand combat, and the metal skins w

ith all their paraphernalia had become personal prisons.

"It's doable, but not by us. It'll be easier just to wrassle this thing up on our own. And that's not going to be easy." He asked the captain if he could get the boat roughly into the same position and hold it there.

"Not exactly, but close enough," McGinty said.

They were approaching the hull opening. The Monkfish should be right above them.

McGinty did a skillful job. The line they had used to lift the hull section dangled a short distance above the wreck. They attached the line to the slab, not easy without the fingers of the saturation divers to do the detailed work, then gave the captain the go-a-head.

"Okay, Cap," Austin said. "We're coming up."

45 AUSTIN HAD A GOOD VIEW OF THE impenetrable wall of fog bearing down on the Monkfish as he dangled like a hooked flounder over the ocean. The crane pivoted and lowered him onto the deck, where crewmen helped him out of the dripping gym suit like pages attending to an armored knight.

Hauled aboard a few minutes earlier, Zavala looked strangely shrunken without the benefit of his form-fitting hull. Like those of an astronaut coming out of free fall, Austin's first steps were wobbly. Zavala handed him a mug of hot coffee. A few sips of the strong brew got his blood circulating. Then they dealt with their top priority, a stiff-legged race for the nearest head. They came out smiling, After changing into warm dry clothes they went back on deck.

The trip up from the Andrea Doria wreck had been uneventful but tense, especially during the first few moments as the winch eased the strain with slow stop-and-go pulls and at the surface where the load lost its buoyancy. The skilled Monkfish crew attached more floats to make sure they didn't lose the stone, got it into a sling, then winched it aboard using the stern A-frame.

Austin gazed at the innocuous-looking block, now lying on a wooden pallet, and found it hard to believe it had caused so much trouble and cost so many lives. The slab was shaped vaguely like an oversized headstone, which was appropriate given all the people who'd been killed for its sake. The object was a little longer than a tall man, almost as wide and as thick. Austin knelt on the deck and ran his hand over the surface, which was going from black to dark gray as it dried. He traced the hieroglyphics, but they made no sense to him. Nothing about this case made sense.

Crew members covered the slab with a quilted protective material, then wrapped it in a plastic tarp. A small forklift transported the slab to a storage space at deck level. It didn't seem fragile, having weathered nearly half a century in a submerged armored truck and a ride to the surface, but he didn't want to take the chance that it would break into a thousand brittle pieces.

With sad eyes, Donatelli watched the stone being taken away. "So that's what all those men died for."

"The killing still hasn't stopped," Austin answered grimly as he squinted at the fog, which now encased the salvage ship in a yellowgray tomb that muffled sound and light. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. He shivered as he remembered Angelo's description of a similar fog bank that hid the Andrea Doria from eyes on the Stockholm.

"Let's check in with the captain," he suggested, and they climbed to the bridge.

Inside the wheelhouse McGinty motioned for them to come over to the radar screen and pointed to a white, blip against the green backdrop. Austin blinked. Maybe he'd been underwater too long. The blip's rapid progress across the screen was more like that of an aircraft than a boat.

"Is that vessel moving as fast as I think it is?" Zavala said.

"Goin' like a banshee," McGinty growled.