Clive Cussler - Inca Gold

"How did you compare the modern terrain with the old?"

"With three-dimensional overlays," replied Yaeger. "By either reducing or increasing the scale of the old charts to match the latest satellite maps, and then overlaying one upon the other, any variations of the coastal jungles since the galleon vanished became readily apparent. I found that much of the heavily forested coastal jungles had been cut down over the centuries for farmland."

"Not enough," Sandecker said irritably, "not nearly enough. You'll have to whittle the grid down to no more than twenty kilometers if you want to give Pitt a fighting chance of finding the wreck."

"Bear with me, Admiral," said Yaeger patiently. "The next step was to conduct a search through historical archives for recorded tidal waves that struck the Pacific coastline of South America in the sixteenth century. Fortunately, the occasions were well documented by the Spanish during the conquest. I found four. Two in Chile in 1562 and 1575. Peru suffered them in 1570 and again in 1578, the year Drake captured the galleon."

"Where did the latter strike?" Sandecker asked.

"The only account comes from the log of a Spanish supply ship on its way to Callao. It passed over a `crazy sea' that swept inland toward Bahia de Caraquez in Ecuador. Bahia, of course, means bay."

" `Crazy sea' is a good description of water turmoil above an earthquake on the seafloor. No doubt a seismic wave generated by a movement of the fault that parallels the west coast of the entire South American continent."

"The captain also noted that on the return voyage, a village that sat at the mouth of a river running into the bay had vanished."

"There is no question of the date?"

"Right on the money. The tropical rain forest to the east appears to be impenetrable."

"Okay, we have a ballpark. The next question is, what was the wave length?"

"A tidal wave, or tsunami, can have a length of two hundred kilometers or more," said Yaeger.

Sandecker considered this. "How wide is the Bay of Caraquez?"

Yaeger called up a map on his monitor. "The entrance is narrow, no more than four or five kilometers."

"And you say the captain of the supply ship logged a missing village by a river?"

"Yes, sir, that was his description."

"How does the contour of the bay today differ from that period?"

"The outer bay has changed very little," answered Yaeger, after bringing up a program that depicted the old Spanish charts and the satellite map in different colors as he overlaid them on the screen. "The inner bay has moved about a kilometer toward the sea due to silt buildup from the Chone River."

Sandecker stared at the screen for a long moment, then said slowly, "Can your electronic contraption do a simulation of the tidal wave sweeping the galleon onto shore?"

Yaeger nodded. "Yes, but there are a number of factors to consider."

"Such as?"

"What was the height of the wave and how fast was it traveling."

"It would have to be at least thirty meters high and traveling at better than a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour to carry a five-hundred-and-seventy-ton ship so far into the jungle that she has never been found."

"Okay, let's see what I can do with digital imagery."

Yaeger typed a series of commands on his keyboard and sat back, staring at the monitor for several seconds, examining the image he produced on the screen. Then he used a special function control to fine-tune the graphics until he could generate a realistic and dramatic simulation of a tidal wave crossing an imaginary shoreline. "There you have it," he announced. "Virtual reality configuration."

"Now generate a ship," ordered Sandecker.

Yaeger was not an expert on the construction of sixteenth-century galleons, but he produced a respectable image of one rolling slowly on the waves that was equal to a projector displaying moving graphics at sixty frames per second. The galleon appeared so realistic any unsuspecting soul who walked into the room would have thought they were watching a movie.

"How does it look, Admiral?"

"Hard to believe a machine can create something so lifelike," said Sandecker, visibly impressed.

"You should see the latest computer-generated movies featuring the long-gone old stars with the new. I've watched the video of Arizona Sunset at least a dozen times."

"Who plays the leads?"

"Humphrey Bogart, Lionel Barrymore, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise. It's so real, you'd swear they all acted together on the set."

Sandecker laid his hand on Yaeger's shoulder. "Let's see if you can make a reasonably accurate documentary."

Yaeger did his magic on the computer, and the two men watched, fascinated, as the monitor displayed a sea so blue and distinct it was like looking through a window at the real thing. Then slowly, the water began convulsing into a wave that rolled away from the land, stranding the galleon on the seabed, as dry as if it were a toy boat on the blanket of a boy's bed. Then the computer visualized the wave rushing back toward shore, rising higher and higher, then cresting and engulfing the ship under a rolling mass of froth, sand, and water, hurling it toward land at an incredible speed, until finally the ship stopped and settled as the wave smoothed out and died.

"Five kilometers," murmured Yaeger. "She looks to be approximately five kilometers from the coast."

"No wonder she was lost and forgotten," said Sandecker. "I suggest you contact Pitt and make arrangements to fax your computer's grid coordinates."

Yaeger gave Sandecker a queer look indeed. "Are you authorizing the search, Admiral?"

Sandecker feigned a look of surprise as he rose and walked toward the door. Just before exiting, he turned and grinned impishly. "I can't very well authorize what could turn out to be a wild goose chase, now can I?"

"You think that's what we're looking at, a wild goose chase?"

Sandecker shrugged. "You've done your magic. If the ship truly rests in a jungle and not on the bottom of the sea, then the burden falls on Pitt and Giordino to go in that hell on earth and find her."

Giordino contemplated the dried red stain on the stone floor of the temple. "No sign of Amaru in the rubble," he said with an utter lack of emotion.

"I wonder how far he got?" Miles Rodgers asked no one in particular. He and Shannon had arrived from the sacred well an hour before noon on a helicopter piloted by Giordino.

"His mercenary buddies must have carried him off," Pitt surmised.

"Knowing a sadist like Amaru might still be alive," said Rodgers, "is enough to cause nightmares."

Giordino gave a mechanical shrug. "Even if he survived the rocket attack, he'd have died from loss of blood."

Pitt turned and stared at Shannon, who was directing a team of archaeologists and a small army of workers. They were numbering the shattered blocks of stone from the temple in preparation for a restoration project. She seemed to have discovered something in the debris and was bending down for a closer examination. "A man like Amaru doesn't die easily. I don't think we've heard the last of him."

"A grim prospect," said Rodgers, "made worse by the latest news from Lima."

Pitt raised an eyebrow. "I didn't know we received CNN this deep in the Andes."

"We do now. The helicopter that landed about an hour ago belonged to the Peruvian News Bureau. It brought in a team of television reporters and a mountain of equipment. The City of the Dead has become international news."

"So what did they have to report?" pressed Giordino.

"The military and police have admitted their failure to capture the army renegade mercenaries who flew into the valley to slit our throats and remove the artifacts. Nor have investigators tracked down any of Amaru's grave looters."