Clive Cussler - Shock Wave

“They’re almost on us,” Giordino announced calmly.

Pitt slipped on a leather coat, zipped it to his collar, turned and gripped the wheel. “Okay, let’s see if we can get high marks from the judges.”

He revved up the engine and shifted the automatic transmission into sow. The battered bus jerked forward, right front tire flapping, steam billowing so thick he could hardly see ahead, gathering speed for the plunge. There was no railing along the pier, only a low, wooden horizontal beam that acted as a curb for vehicles. The front wheels took the brunt of the impact. The already weakened front suspension tore away as the wheelless chassis ground over it, the rear tires tearing rubber as they spun, pushing what was left of the Toyota bus over the side of the pier.

The bus seemed to fall in slow motion before the heavier front end dropped and struck the water with a great splash. The last thing Pitt remembered before the windshield fell inward and the seawater surged through the open passenger door was the loud hiss of the overheated engine as it was inundated.

The bus bobbed once, hung for an instant and they sank into the green water of the bay. All Dorsett’s security people saw when they ran to the edge of the dock and looked down, was a cloud of steam, a mass of gurgling bubbles and a spreading oil slick. The waves created by the impact spread and rippled into the pilings beneath the pier. They waited expectantly for heads to appear, but no indication of life emerged from the green depths.

Pitt guessed that if the docks could accommodate large cargo ships the water depth had to be at least fifteen meters. The bus sank, wheels down, into the muck on the bottom of the harbor, disturbing the silt, which burst into a rolling cloud. Pushing away from the wheel, he stroked toward the rear of the bus to make sure Maeve and Giordino were not injured and had exited through a window. Satisfied they had escaped, he snaked through the opening and kicked into the blinding silt. When he burst into the clear, visibility was better than he had expected, the water temperature a degree or two colder. The incoming tide brought in fairly clean water, and he could easily distinguish the individual pilings under the pier. He estimated visibility at twenty meters.

He recognized the indistinct shapes of Maeve and Giordino about four meters in front, swimming strongly into the void ahead. He looked up, but the surface was only a vague pattern of broken light from a cloudy sky. And then suddenly the water darkened considerably as he swam under the pier and between the pilings. He temporarily lost the others in the shadowy murk, and his lungs began to tighten in complaint from the growing lack of air. He swam on an angle toward the surface, allowing the buoyancy of his body to carry him upward, one hand raised above his head to ward off imbedding something hard and sharp in his scalp. He finally surfaced in the midst of a small sea of floating litter. He sucked in several breaths of salty air and swung around to find Maeve and Giordino bobbing in the water a short distance behind him.

They swam over, and his regard for Maeve heightened when he saw her smiling. “Show-off,” she whispered, aware that voices could be heard by the Dorsett men above. “I bet you almost drowned trying to outdistance me.”

“There’s life in the old man yet,” Pitt murmured.

“I don’t think anyone saw us,” muttered Giordino. “I was almost under the dock before I broke free of the silt cloud.”

Pitt motioned in the general direction of the main dock area. “Our best hope is to swim under the pier until we can find a safe place to climb clear.”

“What about boarding the nearest ship we can find?” asked Giordino.

Maeve looked doubtful. Her long blond hair floated in the water behind her like golden reeds on a pond. “If my father’s people picked up our trail, he’d find a way to force the crew to turn us over to him.”

Giordino looked at her, “You don’t think the crew would hold us until we were under the protection of local authorities?”

Pitt shook his head, flinging drops of water in a spiral. “If you were the captain of a ship or the commander in charge of dock police, would you believe a trio of half drowned rats or the word of someone representing Arthur Dorsett?”

“Probably not us,” Giordino admitted.

“If only we could reach the Ocean Angler.”

“That would be the first place they’d expect us to go,” said Maeve.

“Once we were on board, Dorsett’s men would have a fight on their hands if they tried to drag us off,” Pitt assured her.

“A moot point,” Giordino said under his breath. “We haven’t the foggiest idea where the Ocean Angler is berthed.”

Pitt stared at his friend reproachfully. “I hate it when you’re sober minded.”

“Has she a turquoise hull and white on the cabins above like the Ice Hunter?” asked Maeve.

“All NUMA ships have the same color scheme,” Giordino answered.

“Then I saw her. She’s tied to Pier 16.”

“I give up. Where’s Pier 16 from here?”

“The fourth one north of here,” replied hid.

“How would you know that?”

“The signs on the warehouses. I noticed number 19 before I drove off of Pier 20.”

“Now that we’ve fixed our location and have a direction, we’d best get a move on,” Giordino suggested. “If they have half a brain they’ll be sending down divers to look for bodies in the bus.”

“Stay clear of the pilings,” cautioned Pitt. “Beneath the surface, they’re packed with colonies of mussels. Their shells can cut through flesh like a razor blade.”

“Is that why you’re swimming in a leather jacket?” asked Maeve.

“You never know who you’ll meet,” Pitt said dryly.

Without a visual sighting, there was no calculating how far they had to go before reaching the research ship. Conserving their strength, they breaststroked slowly and steadily through the maze of pilings, out of sight of Dorsett’s men on the dock above. They reached the based Pier 20, then passed beneath the main dockyard thoroughfare, which connected to all the loading docks, be, fore turning north toward Pier 16. The better part of as hour crept by before Maeve spotted the turquoise hull reflected in the water beneath the pier.

“We made it,” she cried out happily.

“Don’t count your prize money,” Pitt warned her. “The dock might be crawling with your father’s muscle patrol.”

The ship’s hull was only two meters from the pilings. Pitt swam until he was directly beneath the ship’s boarding ramp. He reached up, locked his hands around across member that reinforced the pilings and pulled himself out of the water. Climbing the slanting beams until he reached the upper edge of the dock, he slowly raised his; head and scanned the immediate vicinity. .

The area around the boarding ramp was deserted, but a Dorsett security van was parked across the nearest entry onto the pier. He counted four men lined across an open stretch between stacks of cargo containers and several parked cars alongside the ship moored in front of the Ocean Angler.

He ducked below the edge of the dock and spoke to Maeve and Giordino. “Our friends are guarding the entrance to the pier about eighty meters away, too far to stop us from making it on board.”

No more conversation was necessary. Pitt pulled both of them onto the beam he was standing on. Then, at his signal, they all climbed over the beam that acted as a curb, dodged around a huge bollard that held the mooring lines of the ship, and with Maeve in the lead, dashed up the boarding ramp to the open deck above.

When he reached the safety of the ship, Pitt’s instincts began working overtime. He had erred badly, and the mistake couldn’t be undone. He knew when he saw the men guarding the dock begin walking slowly and methodically toward the Ocean Angler as if they were out for stroll through the park. There was no shouting or confusion. They acted as though they had expected them quarry to suddenly appear and reach the sanctuary of the ship. He knew when he looked over decks devoid of human activity that something was very, very wrong. Someone on the crew should have been in evidence on a working ship. The robotic submersibles, the sonar equipment, the great winch for lowering survey systems into the depths were neatly secured. Rare was the occasion when an engineer or scientist wasn’t fussing with hi prized apparatus. And he knew when a door opened from a companionway leading to the bridge and a familiar figure stepped out onto the deck that the unthinkable had happened.