Clive Cussler - The Mediterranean Caper

Pitt’s mouth was dry — a dusty cavern in which his tongue lay like a rubber sponge. A hammer pounded in his head, blurring his thinking, He left the wheelhouse, softly closing the door behind him, and found an alleyway leading to the captain’s cabin. The door was ajar. He gently eased it full open and stepped soundlessly and sideways into the steel cubicle.

A movie set, it looked like a movie set That was the only way Pitt could describe it. Everything was neat and tidy, and exactly where it should have been. Across the far bulkhead, the Queen Artemisia loomed in tranquil splendor from an amateurish oil painting, Pitt shuddered at the choice of colors; the ship sailed on a purple sea. The signature in the lower right corner was signed by a Sophia Remick. There was the usual photograph on the desk with a matronly, round-faced woman staring out of a cheap metal frame. The inscription read: To the Captain of my heart from his loving wife.

It was unsigned, but obviously written by the same hand that had autographed the painting, And next to the photograph, on an otherwise barren desk top, a carefully laid pipe reposed in an empty ashtray. Pitt picked it up and smelled the blackened bowl; it hadn’t been smoked in months. Nothing looked used or handled. It was a museum without dust, a house without odor. And, like the ship herself, quiet as a graveyard.

He returned to the alleyway, closing the door behind him, almost wishing some strange voice, any voice, would shout, “Who goes there?” or “What are you doing here?" The stillness made his sweat run cold.

Pitt began to imagine vague shapes in shadowy corners. His heartbeat thumped at an accelerating pace.

It couldn’t have been more than ten seconds that he stood there not moving a muscle, forcing his mind back into rational control.

It’ll be dawn soon, he thought. Hurry, must hurry. He ran down the port alleyway, ignoring any attempt at stealth and secrecy, and threw open the other cabin doors. Each small compartment was like the black Hole of Calcutta. One quick sweep of the hooded light told the same story as the captain’s cabin He also searched the radio cabin. The transmitter was warm and pre-set on a VHF frequency, but the radio operator was conspicuous by his absence. Pitt slipped the door shut and headed aft.

Companionways, port and starboard alleyways, they all seemed to merge into one long black, underground tunnel. It was an effort not to lose his sense of direction in the maze. A naked man, except for the flotation vest, in a dark nightmare of gray paint and steel walls. He tripped over a bulkhead step and fell, banging a shin and dropping the flashlight; all in harmony with an uttered, “Goddamn!”

The flashlight had fallen on the hard deck, shattering the lens and blinking out. He knelt on his hands and knees, muttering additional curses and searching frantically. After agonizing seconds his hands grasped the aluminum-plated case. The glass of the lens tinkled with grim foreboding inside the cloth cover. He picked it up and pushed the switch forward. The bulb blinked on as dull as ever. Pitt uttered a gasp of relief and shined the subdued beam down the passage. It dimly illuminated a door that was titled Fire Passage — Number Three Hold.

The great chambers of Carlsbad Caverns couldn’t have looked much less formidable than Number Three Hold. All that Pitt’s light showed was a vast steel cave crammed with countless sacks and stacked from deck to hatch cover on wooden tiers. The air was permeated with a sweet Incense kind of odor.

The cocoa from Ceylon, Pitt surmised. He took the diver's knife and cut a small half inch hole in the coarse cloth of one of the sacks. A flow of stony hard beans fell to the deck, bouncing and rattling like a hail on a quonset hut. A quick examination under the flashlight proved the parchment skinned beans to be the genuine article.

Suddenly he heard a noise. It was faint and indistinct, but it was there. He froze, listening. Then it stopped as abruptly as it had come, and silence once more gripped the haunted ship; a deserted ship with all its dark and hidden secrets. Maybe it’s a ghost ship after all, Pitt mused. Another Mary Celeste or Flying Dutchman. All that was missing was a stormy sea with rain lashing the top decks and lightning flashing in the night and a gale shrieking through the derricks.

There was nothing more to see in the hold. Pitt left and headed for the engine room. He lost a precious eight minutes finding the right companionway. The heart of the ship was warm from the heat of the engines and smelled of hot oil. He stood on the catwalk above the huge and lifeless machinery and searched for a sign that would indicate bona fide human activity. The flashlight caught the gleam of burnished pipes that snaked across the bulkheads in geometric parallel line., ending in a mass fusion of valves and gauges. Then the faint beam fell on a carelessly wadded oily rag. Above the rag was a shelf containing several coffee-stained cups, and to the left of those, a tray of scattered tools with greasy finger marks. At least someone was working this part of the ship, he thought, quite relieved. He knew that most engine rooms were kept as clean as a hospital ward, but this one was messy. But where was the chief engineer and his oilmen? They couldn’t have evaporated into the Aegean atmosphere.

Pitt started to leave, then he stopped. There it was again; the same mysterious sound, echoing through the ship’s hull. He stood stock-still, holding his breath for what seemed a lifetime. It was an odd, uncanny sound, like the scraping of a ship’s keel over a submerged rock or coral reef. Pitt involuntarily shivered.

It also reminded him of the way chalk squeaked across a blackboard. The sound lasted for perhaps ten seconds, then it was punctuated with the dull clank of metal against metal.

Pitt had never sat bathed with cold sweat in a cell on San Quentin’s death row, waiting for the warden and the prison guards to escort him to the gas chamber. Nor. did he have to be there to describe the experience for he knew exactly what it felt like. To be alone in a claustrophobic atmosphere, expecting the footsteps of death to come treading from the black unknown, was a blood chilling business. When in doubt, he thought, run like a son of a bitch. And run like a son of a bitch he did. Back through the alleyways, back up the companion-stairs, until at last his lungs were greeted by the pure, wholesome air on deck.

The early morning was still dark and the derricks reached toward the velvet ceiling of a sky that was alive. with a dazzling array of stars. There was scarcely a stir of wind. Over the bridge, the radio mast swayed back and forth across the milky way, and below Pitts's feet, the hull creaked from the rolls of the gentle swells. He hesitated a moment, gazing at the dark line of the Thasos coast, yet a bare mile away.

Then he looked down at the smooth black surface of the water. It looked so inviting. so peaceful.

The flashlight still glowed. Pitt cursed his stupidity for not switching it off when he reached the open deck. Might as well have advertised my presence with a neon sign, he thought. He quickly doused the light. Then carefully, so as not to cut himself on the broken glass, he unwrapped his swim trunks and removed the remains of the lens. He hurled the tiny slivers over the railing and listened till the faint splash, like rain on a pond, reached his ears. He was tempted to deep six the flashlight too, but his mind shifted into gear and rejected the impulse. Leaving the rack in the wheelhouse void of the flashlight would be about as clever as sending the captain, if there was a captain, a telegram and saying, “Just before dawn, there was a prowler on board your ship who ransacked it from stem to stern.” It very definitely wasn’t a smart move, not with people like these who had outfoxed nearly every law enforcement agency in the world. The fact that the lens was missing would be a gamble that Pitt would have to take.