Clive Cussler - Flood Tide

Sandecker nodded. “Do we have a research ship operating in the Gulf?”

“The Marine Denizen. Her scientific team is conducting a study on the diminishing coral reefs off Yucatan.”

“She's served NUMA for a long time,” Sandecker said, visualizing the ship.

“The oldest in our fleet,” Gunn acknowledged. “This is her final voyage. After she returns to port in Norfolk, we're donating her to the Lampack University of Oceanography.”

“The university will have to wait a while longer. An old marine-research ship with a crew of biologists should prove an ideal cover to investigate Shang's port facility.”

“Who have you in mind to lead the investigation?”

Sandecker turned to Gunn. “Our special projects director, who do you think?”

Gunn hesitated. “Asking a bit much from Dirk, aren't we?”

“Can you think of a better man?”

“No, but he took quite a beating on the last project. When I saw him a few days ago, he looked like death warmed over. He needs more time to mend.”

“Pitt is a fast healer,” Sandecker said confidently. “A challenge is just what he needs to get back into the swim of things. Track him down and tell him it's essential he contact me immediately.”

“I don't know where to reach him,” Gunn said vaguely. “After you gave him a month's leave, he just took off without saying where he was going.”

“He's in Washington State, up to his old tricks at a place called Orion Lake.”

Gunn looked at the admiral suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

“Hiram Yaeger sent him a truckload of underwater gear,” said Sandecker, his eyes glinting like a fox's. “Hiram thought he did it on the sly, but word has a funny way of filtering up to my office.”

“Not much goes on around NUMA that you don't know about.”

“The only mystery I haven't solved is how Al Giordino smokes my expensive Nicaraguan cigars when I never find any missing.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you both might have the same source?”

“Impossible,” snorted Sandecker. “My cigars are rolled by a family who are close friends of mine in Managua. Giordino couldn't possibly know them. And while we're on the subject, where is Giordino?”

“Lying on a beach in Hawaii,” answered Gunn. “He decided it was as good a time as any to take a vacation until Dirk got back in the saddle again.”

“Those two are usually as thick as thieves. It's a rare moment when they're not causing mischief together.”

“You want me to brief Al on the situation and then send him out to Orion Lake to bring Dirk back to Washington?”

Sandecker nodded. “A good idea. Pitt will listen to Giordino. You go along as backup. Knowing Dirk, if I called and ordered him to report back to work, he'd hang up the phone.”

“You're absolutely right, Admiral,” Gunn said, smiling. “That's exactly what he would do.”

JULIA LEE'S THOUGHTS, CERTAIN BELIEFS RATHER, CENTERED around an overwhelming sense of defeat. Deep down, she knew she had botched her mission. She had made the wrong moves, said the wrong things. There was a feeling of emptiness, shrouded by despair in her mind. She had learned much about the smugglers' operation. There were ashes in her mouth as she realized that it was all for nothing. The vital information she had obtained might never be passed on to the Immigration and Naturalization Service so they could apprehend the smugglers.

She felt a sea of pain from her sadistically inflicted injuries, sick and empty and debased. She was also deathly tired and hungry. Her self-assurance had gotten the better of her. She failed by not acting meek and subjugated. By using the skills taught her during her training as a special INS agent and given enough time, she could have easily escaped her captors before being submitted to a life of rape. Now it was too late. Julia was too badly hurt to make an all-out physical effort. It was all she could do to stand upright without getting dizzy and losing her balance before falling to her knees.

Because of dedication to her work, Julia had few close friends. The men in her life had passed through as if they were part of a reception line, little more than acquaintances. Sadness settled over her at the thought of never seeing her mother and father again. Strangely, she was conscious of no fear or revulsion. Whatever was to happen to her in the next few hours, nothing could change it.

Through the steel deck she sensed the engines coming to a stop. Without headway the ship began rolling in the swells. A minute later the anchor chain clattered through the hawsehole. The Indigo Star had anchored just outside the territorial limits of the United States to evade law enforcement action.

Julia's watch had been taken from her during the interrogation, and all she could be certain about the time was that it was sometime in the middle of the night. She looked around at the other forty or more pathetic individuals huddled hi the cargo hold, thrown in there after the interrogations. They all began chattering excitedly, thinking they had at last reached America and were going ashore to begin a new life. Julia might have felt the same, but she knew better. The truth would strike savagely and with cold indifference. Any expectation of happiness was short-lived. They had all been deceived. These were the intelligent ones, those of wealth and substance. They had been defrauded and robbed by the smugglers, and yet they still had the look of hope about them.

Julia was certain their immediate future would be one of terror and extortion. She looked with great sadness at two families with young children and prayed they would live to escape the smugglers and the domination by the criminal cartels waiting on shore.

Two hours was all the time the crew of smugglers needed to transfer the illegal Chinese aliens onto trawlers belonging to a fishing fleet owned by Qin Shang Maritime. Manned by documented Chinese who had taken out their citizenship papers, the fleet carried out legitimate fishing operations when not transporting illegal immigrants from the mother ship to transit points in small harbors and coves along the Olympic Peninsula coast. There, buses and cargo trucks waited to carry them to destinations throughout the country.

Julia, the last one to be taken from the cargo hold, was led roughly by an enforcer to the outer deck. She could barely walk, and he half dragged her. Ki Wong was standing by the disembarkation ramp. He held up a hand and stopped the enforcer before he could escort her down the ramp to a strange-looking black boat, bobbing in the waves beside the ship.

“One final word, Ling T'ai,” he said in a low, cold voice. “Now that you've had a chance to think over my offer, perhaps you've had a change of mind.”

“If I agree to become your slave,” she murmured through her swollen lips. “What then?”

He gave her his best jackal grin. “Why nothing. I don't expect you to become a slave. That opportunity has long since passed.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

“Your cooperation. I'd like you to tell me who else was working with you on board the Indigo Star.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she muttered contemptuously.

He stared at her and shrugged smugly. Then he reached in his coat pocket, drew out a piece of paper and pushed it at her. “Read this, and see that I was right about you.”

“You read it,” she said with her last shred of defiance.

He held the paper under a deck light and squinted his eyes. “ ”The fingerprint and description you sent via satellite were analyzed and identified. The woman Ling T'ai is an INS agent by the name of Julia Marie Lee. Suggest you deal with her in an expeditious manner.' "

If Julia had a tiny thread of hope, it was abruptly swept away. They must have taken her prints after she was battered unconscious. But how was it possible for a band of Chinese smugglers to make her ID within a few hours from any source but the FBI in Washington, D.C.? The organization had to be far more complex and sophisticated than she and the field investigators at the INS suspected. She was not about to give Wong the slightest degree of satisfaction.