Clive Cussler - Cyclops

Sand coated Pitt's wet body as he stood there catching his breath, becoming conscious of the pain from his rope-burned hands. Staring up at the Prosperteer, he had his first solid look at the airship and was fascinated by the antiquated design. It was obvious she predated the modern Goodyear blimps.

He made his way around the scattered tables and chairs on the patio and climbed into the gondola. The crew were still strapped in their seats, unmoving, unspeaking. Pitt leaned over the pilot, found the ignition switches, and turned them off. The engines popped softly once or twice and went silent as their propellers gave a final twitch and came to rest.

The quiet was tomblike.

Pitt grimaced and scanned the interior of the gondola. There was no sign of damage, the instruments and controls appeared to be in operating order. But it was the extensive electronics that amazed him. Gradiometers for detecting iron, side-scan sonar and sub-bottom profiler to sweep the sea floor, everything for an underwater search expedition.

He wasn't aware of the sea of faces peering up into the open door of the gondola, nor did he hear the pulsating scream of approaching sirens. He felt detached and momentarily disoriented. The hot, humid atmosphere was heavy with a morbid eeriness and the sickening stench of human decay.

One of the crewmen was slouched over a small table, head resting on arms as if he were asleep. His clothes were damp and stained. Pitt placed his hand on a shoulder and gave a slight shake. There was no firmness to the flesh. It felt soft and pulpy. An icy shroud fell over him that lifted goose bumps on every inch of his skin, yet the sweat was trickling down his body in streams.

He turned his attention to the ghastly apparitions seated at the controls. Their faces were covered by a blanket of flies, and decomposition was eating away all traces of life. The skin was slipping from the flesh like broken blisters on burns. Jaws hung slack with mouths agape, the lips and tongues swollen and parched. Eyes were open and staring into nothingness, eyeballs opaque and clouded over. Hands still hung on the controls, their fingernails turned blue. Unchecked by enzymes, bacteria had formed gases that grotesquely bloated the stomachs. The damp air and the high temperatures of the tropics were greatly speeding the process of putrefaction.

The rotting corpses inside the Prosperteer had flown from some unknown grave, a macabre crew in a charnel airship on a ghostly mission.

<<5>>

The naked corpse of an adult black woman lay stretched on an examining table under the glaring lights of the autopsy room. Preservation was excellent, no visible injuries due to violence. To the trained eye the state of rigor mortis indicated she had been dead less than seven hours. Her age appeared to be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. The body might have drawn male stares once, but now it lay undernourished, wasted, and ravaged by a decade of drug intake.

The Dade County coroner, Dr. Calvin Rooney, wasn't too pleased about doing the autopsy. There were enough deaths in Miami to keep his staff working around the clock, and he preferred to spend his time on the more dramatic and puzzling postmortem examinations. A garden-variety drug overdose held little interest for him. But this one was found dumped on a county commissioner's front lawn, and it wouldn't do to send in a third-string quarterback.

Wearing a blue lab coat because he detested the standard white issue, Rooney, a home-grown Floridian, U.S. Army veteran, and Harvard Medical School graduate, slipped a new cassette in a portable tape recorder and dryly commented on the general condition of the body.

He picked up a scalpel and bent over for the dissection, starting a few inches under the chin and slicing downward toward the pubic bone. Suddenly Rooney halted the incision over the chest cavity and leaned closer, squinting through a pair of wide-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses. In the next fifteen minutes, he removed and examined the heart while delivering a running monologue into the tape recorder.

Rooney was in the midst of making a last-minute observation when Sheriff Tyler Sweat entered the autopsy room. He was a medium-built, brooding man, slightly round-shouldered, his face a blend of melancholy and brutish determination. Methodical and shrewdly earnest, he enjoyed great respect from the men and women under him.

He threw an expressionless glance at the opened cadaver and then nodded a greeting to Rooney. "New piece of meat?"

"The woman from the commissioner's yard," answered Rooney.

"Another OD?"

"No such luck. More work for homicide. She was murdered. I found three punctures in the heart."

"Ice pick?"

"From all indications."

Sweat peered at the balding little chief medical examiner, whose benign appearance seemed better suited to a parish priest. "They can't fool you, Doc."

"What brings the master scourge of evildoers to the forensic palace?" Rooney asked amiably. "You slumming?"

"No, an identification by VIPs. I'd like you in on it."

"The bodies from the blimp," Rooney deduced.

Sweat nodded. "Mrs. LeBaron is here to view the remains."

"I don't recommend it. What's left of her husband isn't a pretty sight to someone who doesn't see death every day."

"I tried to tell her that identification of his effects would satisfy legal requirements, but she persisted. Even brought along an aide from the governor's office to grease the way"

"Where are they?"

"Waiting in the morgue office."

"News media?"

"An entire regiment of TV and press reporters running around like crazy people. I've ordered my deputies to keep them confined to the lobby."

"Strange how the world works," said Rooney in one of his philosophical moods. "The renowned Raymond LeBaron gets front-page headlines while this poor baggage gets a column inch next to classified advertising." Then he sighed, removed his lab coat, and threw it over a chair. "Let's get it over with. I've got two more postmortems to conduct this afternoon."

As he spoke a tropical storm passed over and the sound of thunder rumbled through the walls. Rooney slipped on a sports jacket and straightened his tie. They fell into step, Sweat staring down pensively at the design in the hallway carpet.

"Any idea on the cause of LeBaron's death?" asked the sheriff.

"Too soon to tell. The lab results were inconclusive. I want to run some more tests. Too many things don't add up. I don't mind admitting, this one is a puzzler."

"No guesses?"

"Nothing I'd put on paper. Problem is the incredibly rapid rate of decomposition. I've seldom seen tissue disintegrate so fast, except maybe once back in 1974."

Before Sweat could prod Rooney's recollection, they reached the morgue office and entered. The governor's aide, a slippery type in a three-piece suit, jumped up. Even before he opened his mouth, Rooney classified him as a jerk.

"Can we please get the show on the road, Sheriff. Mrs. LeBaron is most uncomfortable and would like to return to her hotel as soon as possible."

"I sympathize with her," the sheriff drawled. "But I shouldn't have to remind a public servant that there are certain laws we must follow."

"And I needn't remind you, the governor expects your department to extend every courtesy to ease her grief."

Rooney marveled at Sweat's stony patience. The sheriff simply brushed by the aide as though he were walking past trash on a sidewalk.

"This is our chief medical examiner, Dr. Rooney. He will assist with the identification."

Jessie LeBaron didn't look the least bit uncomfortable. She sat in an orange plastic contour chair, poised, cool, head held high. And yet Rooney sensed a fragility that was held together by discipline and nerve. He was an old hand at presiding over corpse identification by relatives. He'd suffered through the ordeal hundreds of times in his career and instinctively spoke softly and in a gentle manner.