Clive Cussler - Deep Six

“You can’t be faulted for nature’s whims,” Min Koryo said impassively. “The true blame lies with the Russians. If they hadn’t backed out of their bargain to buy Nerve Agent S, there would have been no need to scuttle the ship.”

“They were afraid the agent was too unstable to transport across Siberia to their chemical warfare arsenal in the Urals.”

“What’s puzzling is how did NUMA tie the two ships together?”

“I can’t say, aunumi. We were careful to strip every piece of identification.”

“No matter,” Min Koryo said. “The fact remains, the article in the newspaper is a ploy. We must remain silent and do nothing to jeopardize our anonymity.”

“What about the man who made the announcement?” Lee Tong asked. “This Dirk Pitt?”

A long, cold, brooding look came over Min Koryo’s narrow face. “Investigate his motives and observe his movements. See where he fits in the picture. If he appears to be a danger to us, arrange his funeral.”

The gray of evening softened the harsh outlines of Los Angeles, and the lights came on, pimpling the sides of the buildings. The noise of the street traffic rose and seeped through the old-fashioned sash window. The tracks were warped and jammed under a dozen coats of paint. It hadn’t been opened in thirty years. Outside, an air conditioner rattled in its brackets.

The man sat in an aging wooden swivel chair and stared unseeing through the grime filming the glass. He stared through eyes that had seen the worst the city had to give. They were hard, stark eyes, still clear and undimmed after sixty years. He sat in shirtsleeves, the well-worn leather of a holster slung over his left shoulder. The butt of a.45 automatic protruded from it. He was large-boned and stocky. The muscles had softened over the years, but he could still lift a two-hundred-pound man off the sidewalk and imbed him in a brick wall.

The chair creaked as he swung around and leaned over a desk that was battle-scarred with uncountable cigarette burns. He picked up a folded newspaper and read the article on the ship discoveries for perhaps the tenth time. Pulling open a drawer, he searched out a dog-eared folder and stared at the cover for a long while. Long ago he had memorized every word on the papers inside. Along with the newspaper he slipped it inside a worn leather briefcase.

He rose and stepped over to a washbowl hung in one corner of the room and rinsed his face with cold water. Then he donned a coat and a battered fedora, turned off the light and left the office.

As he stood in the hallway waiting for the elevator, he was surrounded by the smells of the aging building. The mold and rot seemed stronger with each passing day. Thirty-five years at the same stand was a long time, he mused, too long.

His thoughts were interrupted by the clatter of the elevator door. An operator who looked to be in his seventies gave him a yellow-toothed grin. “Callin’ it quits for the night?” he asked.

“No, I’m taking the red-eye flight to Washington.”

“New case?”

“An old one.”

There were no more questions and they rode the rest of the way in silence. As he stepped into the lobby he nodded at the operator. “See you in a couple of days, Joe.”

Then he passed through the main door and melted into the night.

To most, his name was Hiram Yaeger. To a Select few he was known as Pinocchio because he could stick his nose into a vast number of computer networks and sift over their software. His playground was the tenth-floor communications and information network of NUMA.

Sandecker hired him to collect and store every scrap of data ever written on the oceans, scientific or historical, fact or theory. Yaeger tackled the job with a fierce dedication, and within five years had accumulated a huge computer library of knowledge about the sea.

Yaeger worked erratic hours, sometimes coming in with the morning sun and working straight through until the following dawn. He seldom showed up for departmental meetings, but Sandecker left him alone because there was none better, and because Yaeger had an uncanny ability to pry out secret access codes to a great number of worldwide computer networks.

Always dressed in Levi’s jacket and pants, he wore his long blond hair in a bun. A scraggly beard combined with his probing eyes gave him the appearance of a desert prospector peering over the next hill for Eldorado.

He sat at a computer terminal stuck away in a far corner of NUMA’s electronic maze. Pitt stood off to one side watching with interest the green block letters on a display screen.

“That’s all we’re going to comb from the Maritime Administration’s mass storage system.”

“Nothing new there,” Pitt agreed.

“What now?”

“Can you tap the Coast Guard headquarters documents?”

Yaeger gave a wolfish grin. “Can Aunt Jemima make pancakes?”

He consulted a thick black notebook for a minute, found the insertion he was looking for and punched the number into a pushbutton telephone connected to a modem link. The Coast Guard computer system answered and accepted Yaeger’s access code, and the green block letters swept across the display: “PLEASE STATE YOUR REQUEST.”

Yaeger gave Pitt a questioning look.

“Ask for an abstract of title on the Pilottown,” Pitt ordered.

Yaeger nodded and sent the request into the terminal. The answer flashed back and Pitt studied it closely, noting all the transactions of the vessel from the time she was built, who owned it as long as it was a documented vessel flying the United States flag, and the mortgages against it. The probe was redundant. The Pilottown had been removed from documentation when it was sold to an alien, in this case the Kassandra Phosphate Company of Athens, Greece.

“Anything promising?” Yaeger inquired.

“Another dry hole,” Pitt grunted.

“How about Lloyd’s of London? They’ll have it in their register.”

“Okay, give it a shot.”

Yaeger logged out of the Coast Guard system, checked his book again and routed the terminal to the computer bank of the great maritime insurance company. The data printed out at 400 characters a second. This time the history of the Pilottown was revealed in greater detail. And yet little of it appeared useful. Then an item at the bottom of the display screen caught Pitt’s attention.

“I think we might have something.”

“Looks pretty much like the same stuff to me,” said Yaeger.

“The line after Sosan Trading Company.”

“Where they’re listed as operators? So what? That showed up before.”

“As owners, not operators. There’s a difference.”

“What does it prove?”

Pitt straightened, and his eyes took on a reflective look. “The reason owners register their vessel with what is called a ‘country of convenience’ is to save costly licenses, taxes and restrictive operating regulations. Another reason is they become lost to any kind of investigation. So they set up a dummy front and carry the company headquarters address as a post office box, in this case, Inchon, Korea. Now, if they contract with an operator to arrange cargoes and crews for the ship, the transfer of money from one to the other must take place. Banking facilities must be used. And banks keep records.”

“All right, but say I’m a parent outfit. Why let my shady shipping line be run by some sleazy second party if we leave traceable banking links? I fail to see the advantage.”

“An insurance scam,” Pitt answered. “The operator does the duty work while the owners collect. For example, take the case of a Greek tanker several years ago. A tramp called the Trikeri. It departed Surabaja, Indonesia, with its oil tanks filled to the brim. After reaching Capetown, South Africa, it slipped onto an offshore pipeline and removed all but a few thousand gallons. A week later it mysteriously sank off West Africa. An insurance claim was filed on the ship and a full cargo of oil. Investigators were dead certain the sinking was intentional, but they couldn’t prove it. The Trikeri’ s operator took the heat and quietly went out of business. The registered owners collected the insurance payoff and then siphoned it off through a corporate maze to the power at the top.”