Free Deep Six by Clive Cussler Page A

later, when he returned with his tribe to remove whatever they could find of value, it was gone again. Nearly two years passed, and she was reported drifting below the Bering Strait. The Coast Guard was sent out but couldn’t locate her. The Pilottown wasn’t sighted again for eight months. She was boarded by the crew of a fishing trawler. They found her in reasonably good shape. Then she disappeared for the last time.”
    “I seem to recall reading something . . .” Pitt paused. “Ah, yes, the ‘Magic Ship.’ “
    “That’s what the news media dubbed her,” Dover acknowledged. “They described her disappearing act as a ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ routine.”
    “They’ll have a field day when it gets out she was drifting around for years with a cargo of nerve agent.”
    “No way of predicting the horror if the hull had been crushed in an ice pack or shattered on a rocky shore, creating an instant spill,” Dover added.
    “We’ve got to get in her cargo holds,” said Pitt. “Contact Mendoza, give her the position of the wreck and tell her to airlift a team of chemists to the site. We’ll approach from the water.”
    Dover nodded. “I’ll see to the launch.”
    “Throw in acetylene equipment in case we have to cut our way inside.”
    Dover bent over the chart table and stared solemnly at the center of the marked circle. “I never thought for a minute I’d stand on the deck of the Magic Ship.”
    “If you’re right,” said Pitt, staring into his coffee mug, “the Pilottown is about to give her last performance.”

8
    THE SEA HAD BEEN CALM , but by the time the Catawba’s launch was a quarter-mile from the lonely, forbidding coast, a twenty-knot wind kicked up the water. The spray, tainted by the nerve agent, struck the cabin windows with the fury of driven sand. Yet where the derelict lay beached, the water looked reasonably peaceful, protected as it was by jagged pinnacles of rock that rose up a hundred yards offshore like solitary chimneys from burned-out houses.
    Far above the turbulent waters Augustine Volcano seemed calm and serene in the late afternoon sun. It was one of the most beautifully sculptured mountains in the Pacific, rivaling the classic contour of Mount Fuji in Japan.
    The powerful launch surfed for an instant on a whitecapped swell before diving over the crest. Pitt braced his feet, gripped a railing with both hands while his eyes studied the shore.
    The wreck was heeled over at a twenty-degree angle and her stern section blanketed in brown rust. The rudder was canted in the full starboard position and two barnacle-encrusted blades of the propeller protruded from the black sand. The letters of her name and home port were too obscured to read.
    Pitt, Giordino, Dover, the two EPA scientists and one of the Catawba’s junior officers all were garbed in white encapsulating suits to protect them from the plumes of deadly spray. They communicated by tiny transmitters inside their protective headgear. Attached to their waist belts were intricate filter systems designed to refine clean, breathable air.
    The sea around them was carpeted with dead fish of every species. A pair of whales rolled lifelessly back and forth with the tide, united in rotting decay with porpoises, sea lions and spotted seals. Birds by the thousands floated amid the morbid debris. Nothing that had lived in the area had escaped.
    Dover expertly threaded the launch between the threatening offshore barrier of projecting rock, the remnant of an ancient coastline. He slowed, waiting for a momentary lull in the surf, biding his time while carefully eyeing the depth. Then as a wave slammed onto the shore and its backwash spilled against the next one coming in, he aimed the bow at the small spit of sand formed around the base of the wreck and pushed the throttle forward. Like a horse bracing for the next hurdle at the Grand National, the launch rose up on the wave crest and rode it through the swirling foam until