Clive Cussler - Trojan Odyssey

The woman who bore the image of a high priestess chanted: "Here lies one who should not have been born."

Then she plunged her dagger into the chest of the horrified man bound on the altar. Lifting the dagger with blood streaming from the blade, she stepped aside as the other women came one after the other and drove their daggers into the helpless man.

The circle of women moved down the steps and stood beneath the columns, holding the bloody daggers as if presenting them as gifts. There was an eerie silence for several moments until they all chanted: "Under the gaze of our gods, we triumph."

Then the laser beams and the swirling rays blinked out, leaving the pagan temple of murder in the black of the night.

The following day, the business world was stunned by the news that publishing mogul Westmoreland Hall was presumed dead after swimming off the reef of his luxurious beach house estate in Jamaica and vanishing. Hall went for his usual morning swim alone. He was known to swim beyond the reef into deeper water and allow the surf to return him to shore though a narrow channel. It is not known whether Hall drowned, was attacked by a shark or died of natural causes, since his body went undiscovered after an extensive search by Jamaican officials. His obituary read:

Founder of a mining empire that owned the world's major reserves of platinum and the other five metals in its group in New Zealand, Hall was a hard-driving executive who established his success by taking over the mines when they were on the verge of bankruptcy and turning them into profit makers before borrowing against them for new acquisitions in Canada and Indonesia. A widower who lost his wife in a car accident three years previously, Hall leaves a son, Myron, who is a successful artist, and a daughter, Rowena, who, as executive vice president, will become board chairman and take over the day-to-day management of the conglomerate.

Amazingly, according to most Wall Street economists, stock in Hall Enterprises rose ten points after word spread of his presumed death. In most circumstances when the head of a large corporation dies, the stock falls, but brokers reported heavy buying by several unknown speculators. Most mining experts predict that Rowena Westmoreland will sell her father's holdings to the Odyssey Corporation, since it is known that Odyssey's founder, Mr. Specter, has made an offer above and beyond any other mining conglomerate's bid.

A memorial service will be held for friends and family at Christ-church Cathedral on Wednesday next at 2:00 P.M.

Ten days later an item appeared in the business sections of the world's leading newspapers:

Mr. Specter of the Odyssey Corporation has purchased the Hall Mining Company for an undisclosed sum from the late Westmoreland Hall's family. Chairman and major stockholder Rowena Westmoreland will continue to run day-to-day operations as chief executive officer.

There was no mention that all the processed platinum ore was now being purchased by Ling Ho Limited in Beijing and shipped in Chinese cargo ships to an industrial center on the coast of Fukien Province.

The wind off the Pacific bumped the water on the lake into a mild chop. Though the lake was large, the tide was minimal and the temperature was a mild eighty degrees. The silence over the dark waters was fractured by the harsh whirr of a jet ski's motor. Unseen by human eyes, it raced through the night at a speed of over fifty knots, invisible to radar because of a soft rubber mantle that absorbed the radio wave pulse and stopped the echo from returning to the radar's transmitter.

Pitt steered the Polaris Virage TX with Giordino on the rear seat and a bag full of equipment in the bow storage. Along with their dive gear, they also carried their stolen Odyssey employee jumpsuits, except this time the photos on the IDs matched their faces, with Giordino's features retouched to at least resemble a husky woman. While waiting for their dive gear to be flown in from Washington, they had gone to a photo shop and arranged for their pictures to be taken and reinserted inside the laminated plastic ID holders. The shop's owner charged them a pretty price, but asked no questions.

As they rounded the shoreline below the Madera volcano side of the island, they skirted the isthmus, staying a mile off a sandy beach that stretched between the two mountains. The lights of the complex shone brightly against the black of Mount Concepcion. No blackout here. The Odyssey management felt safe and snug guarded by their army of security agents and array of detection equipment.

Pitt slowed the jet ski as they approached the dock area, where a large COSCO containership was brightly lit under a sea of floodlights. Pitt noted that the cranes were off-loading the cargo containers onto trucks parked beneath the hull. No cargo was going on. He began to think the complex was more than a research and development center. It had to have a connection with the tunnels that ran under it.

Sandecker had finally agreed on the mission in principle. Yaeger and Gunn had filled Pitt and Giordino in on the purpose of the tunnels. It then became imperative in everyone's mind that whatever information they gained inside the complex might be vital for the discovery of Specter's motives for covering Europe in ice.

The Virage TX was painted a charcoal gray that blended into the black water. Contrary to what is shown in the movies where agents sneak around in black skintight suits, dark gray has less visibility under the stars at night. The three-cylinder engine was massaged by NUMA engineers to put out one hundred and seventy horsepower. Noise reduction was also modified to reduce exhaust noise by ninety percent.

Speeding across the black water, the only sounds came from the slap of the bow and the muted hum of the tuned pipe exhaust. They had reached the outer edge of the Isle de Ometepe in half an hour after leaving a deserted wharf south of Granada.

Pitt eased back on the throttle as Giordino studied a basic, handheld radar detector. "How's it look?" Pitt asked.

"Their beam sweeps past us without pausing, so they must not be reading us."

"We were wise to take the precaution of finishing the trip underwater," Pitt said, tipping his head toward a pair of searchlights that were sweeping the water for five hundred yards off the shore.

"I make it about a quarter of a mile."

"Our depth sounder reads the bottom at only twenty-two feet. We must be out of the main channel."

"Time to abandon ship and get wet," Giordino said, motioning toward a patrol boat that appeared around the end of a long dock.

Already in their light wet suits, they quickly pulled their dive gear and packs from the jet ski's storage areas. The Virage was a stable craft and they could stand while helping each other slip into their oxygen closed-circuit rebreathers, of a type used by the military for shallow-water operations. After quickly going through the predive checking procedures, Giordino slid into the water while Pitt tied the hand grips in a straight position. Then he aimed the jet ski on a course toward the west shore of the lake and set the throttle as he slid off. Neither man took a backward glance at the speeding craft before diving beneath the surface. Though they were using communication equipment, they took no chances of losing each other in the ink-black water. They clipped the ends of a ten-foot line to their weight belts.

Pitt preferred the oxygen closed-circuit rebreather. The semi — closed circuit rebreathers were more efficient for deepwater work, but they left telltale signs of bubbles on the surface. Breathing one hundred percent oxygen, the rebreather was the only true bubble-free diving system, the reason they were used by military divers on covert missions. There could be no detection on the surface because the system eliminated all indications of bubble exhaust. It took specialized training to use the system efficiently without problems, but Pitt and Giordino were no strangers to rebreathers, having used them for twenty years.