Текст книги "Flood Tide"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

The next twenty minutes were spent in a strange silence that began to frighten Julia. Not from personal fear of her safety, but a dread that perhaps she had made a mistake. The guard had long since returned to his shack and his television. The barge full of trash lay moored to the dock, dismissed and neglected.

Julia had contacted Captain Lewis aboard the Weehawken soon after her leap onto the towboat and informed him of her reckless enterprise. Lewis was not a happy camper when he realized that die woman whose safety was in his hands had taken a terrible risk. Professional that he was, he brushed aside his frustration and ordered a launch full of armed men under Lieutenant Stowe to follow the towboat and barge as a backup to the helicopter. His only order to Stowe was to keep a respectful distance behind the towboat and not arouse suspicion. Julia could hear the whine of the helicopter's engines and see its navigation lights in the night sky.

She well knew the fate that awaited her if Qin Shang's smuggling enforcers apprehended her, and it gave her a warm feeling to know she was being watched over by men who were willing to lay their lives on the line to save her if worst came to worst.

She had long before removed Lin Wan Chu's cook clothes and crammed them into a plastic trash bag, not so much because they were now incongruous but because the white cloth would have made her visible to anyone on the towboat when she stood up to stare over the side of the barge during the journey from Sungari. Underneath, she wore simple shorts and a blouse.

For the first time in nearly an hour, she spoke into her miniature radio and hailed Lieutenant Stowe. “The towboat has dropped off the barge and moored it alongside a dock near what looks like a large warehouse.”

Lieutenant Jefferson Stowe, in command of the launch, answered quickly over the transmitter and receiver set around his head. “We confirm. The towboat is about to pass us going in the opposite direction. What is your situation?”

“About as exciting as watching a tree become petrified. Except for a security guard on the other side of a tall fence, who's busy watching a TV program in his shack, there isn't another soul in sight.”

“Are you saying your objective is a washout?” asked Stowe.

“I need more time for an investigation,” answered Julia.

“Not too long, I hope. Captain Lewis is hardly a patient man, and the helicopter only has another hour of fuel left. And that's only the half of it.”

“What's the other half?”

“Your decision to jump on the towboat came so fast none of my crew or I got dinner.”

“You're joking.”

“Not about growing coast guardsmen missing a meal,” Stowe said humorously.

“You will stand by, and not desert me.”

“Of course,” replied Stowe, the humor in his voice quickly fading. “I only hope the towboat didn't simply park the barge overnight in expectation of moving it to a trash fill in the morning.”

“I don't think that's the case,” said Julia. “One of the buildings has a railroad siding leading in and out of it. This place would make an ideal layout to transport smuggled immigrants to destinations around the country.”

“I'll request Captain Lewis to check the railroad company for freight-train schedules that call for stops at the mill,” Stowe offered reasonably. “Meanwhile, I'll run the launch into a small inlet across the bayou about a hundred yards south of you. We'll stand by here until I hear otherwise.” There was a slight pause. “Ms. Lee.”

“Yes.”

“Don't get your hopes up,” said Stowe evenly. “I've just spotted a shabby, run-down sign that's sitting at a crazy angle on the bank of the bayou. Would you like to know what it says?”

“Yes, do tell me,” Julia answered, deliberately robbing her words of irritation.

“Felix Bartholomeaux Sugar Processing Plant Number One. Established 1883. You're apparently moored at a long-abandoned sugar mill. From my vantage point, the complex looks deader than a fossilized dinosaur egg.”

“Then why would it be protected by a security guard?”

“I don't know,” Stowe replied honestly.

“Hold on!” Julia snapped unexpectedly. “I heard something.”

She went quietly, listening, and Stowe cooperated by asking no questions. As if far away, she heard the muted clank of metal against metal. At first, she thought it came from somewhere within the deserted sugar mill, but then she realized the sound was muffled by the water beneath the barge. Furiously, she threw the plastic trash bags aside until she could squirm a passage down to the bottom of the barge's hull. Then she pressed her ear against the damp, rusting metal of the bilge keel.

This time she heard muffled voices whose vibrations telegraphed through the steel. She could not distinguish words, but what she heard came through as men shouting harshly. Julia fought her way back to the top of the trash-bag pile, checked to see the guard was still occupied and then leaned over the side of the barge, peering down into the water. There were no telltale lights in the depths, and it was too dark to see more than a few inches past the surface.

“Lieutenant Stowe,” she said softly.

“I'm here.”

“Can you see anything in the water between the dock and the barge?”

“Not from here. But I have you in view.”

Julia instinctively turned and stared across the bayou, but all she saw was darkness. “You can follow my actions?”

“Through a night-vision scope. I didn't want anybody sneaking up on you without you knowing about it.”

Good old faithful Lieutenant Stowe. Another time, another place, she might have felt a growing affection for him. But any thought of love, no matter how fleeting, created an image of Dirk Pitt in her mind. For the first time in her life she was infatuated with a man, and her independent spirit was not sure how to accept the situation. Almost reluctantly, she refocused her concentration on discovering the covert methods of Qin Shang's smuggling operation.

“I believe there must be another vessel or compartment connected to the bottom of the barge,” she reported.

“What are the indications?” asked Stowe.

“I heard voices through the keel. That would explain how the Chinese were able to smuggle the illegal immigrants through Sungari and past immigration, customs and the Coast Guard.”

“I'd like to buy your theory, Ms. Lee, but an underwater compartment that is carried across two oceans from China and then shifted under a barge for a voyage up a Louisiana bayou to a railroad terminal in an abandoned sugar mill may get you an award for literary fiction, but it won't score you any points with pragmatic minds.”

“I'll stake my career on it,” Julia said positively.

“May I ask your intent?” Stowe's tone went from friendly to official.

“I intend to gain entry into the mill and make a search.”

“Not a smart move. Better to wait until morning.”

“That may be too late. The immigrants could be herded into freight cars and transported away by then.”

“Ms. Lee,” said Stowe coldly. “I strongly urge you to think this thing out and back off. I'll swing the launch across the bayou and pick you up off the barge.”

Julia did not feel that she had come this far suddenly to walk away. “No thank you, Lieutenant Stowe. I'm going in. If I find what I hope to find, you and your men can come running.”

“Ms. Lee, I must remind you that although you're under the protection of the Coast Guard, we are not a Justice Department SWAT team. My advice, if you wish to take it, is to wait until daylight, obtain a search warrant from a parish judge and then send in the local sheriff to investigate. You'll score more points with your superiors that way.”

It was as though Julia had not heard Stowe. “Please ask Captain Lewis to notify Peter Harper in Washington and alert the INS office in New Orleans. Good night, Lieutenant Stowe. Let's do lunch tomorrow.”

Stowe tried several times to raise Julia, but she had turned off her little radio. He looked across the bayou through his night-vision scope and saw her jump from the barge and run the length of the dock, disappearing around a moss-covered oak tree outside the chain-link fence.

Julia stopped when she reached the oak and hid for a few minutes under the moss that hung from the branches above. Her eyes slowly panned around the seemingly deserted buildings of the sugar mill. No lights inside the doors and windows leaked through the weathered cracks. She listened but only heard the rhythmic whine and rasp of cicadas, an indication that summer was just around the corner. The balmy air lay heavy and damp with no breeze to cool skin moist with sweat.

The main building in the complex, solid and substantial, stood three stories tall. The founder must have been influenced by medieval architecture. Ramparts traveled around the roof with four turrets that once held the company's offices. The walls showed only enough windows to provide daylight for the interior, but to the men and women who had once labored there, the lack of ventilation must have caused incredibly oppressive working conditions. The red-clay bricks looked as if they had long defied the mugginess, but green moss and climbing vines were slowly invading their mortared seams, loosening their grip. Already, a large number of them had fallen to the damp earth below. To Julia the unearthly scene of a once-thriving business humming with activity, crowded with people but now abandoned, wore the expectant air of a place long overdue for the wrecker's ball.

She worked her way through the shadows of the vegetation growing along the fence until she came to the railroad tracks leading through a heavily padlocked gate, down the culvert and ending at a massive wooden door opening into the basement of the main warehouse. She bent down and studied the rails under a light on a nearby pole. The steel was shiny and free of rust. Her cocksure conviction was now becoming more firmly established.

She continued her reconnaissance, flitting silently with the grace of a cat through the underbrush until she came to a small drainage pipe two feet in diameter that ran under the fence before emptying in a ditch parallel to the old mill. She made a quick survey of the immediate area to check that she was still unobserved and began crawling into the pipe, pushing herself feet first so she could scramble forward if it proved to be a dead end.

Julia was by no means lulled into a false sense of security. It puzzled her that only one guard appeared to be working for a security service other than Qin Shang Maritime. The lack of extra guards and brighter floodlighting suggested that this was a facility holding little of value—perhaps the very image that was meant to be projected. She was too much the professional not to consider the likely possibility that her movements were recorded by concealed infrared video cameras from the time she jumped from the barge until now. But she had come too far to quit. If this was a staging area for illegal immigrants, then Qin Shang wasn't operating under his usual formula of fanatical secrecy and tight security.

A broad-shouldered man might never have squirmed through the drainage pipe, but Julia had inches to spare. At first, all she saw when she looked between her feet was blackness. But after negotiating a slight bend in the pipe, she saw a circle of moonlight playing in a reflection of water. At last she emerged into a concrete ditch filled with several inches of muck that ran around the main warehouse building to catch the rainwater that dropped from drain spouts on the roof.

She went immobile as she gazed to her left and right. No sirens, no mad attack dogs, no searchlights greeted her entry into the sugar-mill compound. Content that her presence wasn't detected, she stealthily moved along the building, searching for a way to enter. She pressed her back against the moss-covered brick walls, deciding on which direction to take around the sugar mill. The side where the railroad tracks sloped off into a basement was open and washed from the light on the pole, so she chose the opposite course, which offered dark shadows from a grove of cypress trees. She stepped as noiselessly as possible, careful not to fall over any old rubbish that lay scattered about the ground.

A small thicket of brush blocked her way, and Julia crawled under it. Her outstretched, probing fingers touched a stone step, and then a second one leading downward. Squinting her eyes, she peered into the shadows and discovered a stairway dropping to the basement of the mill. The steps were covered with debris, and she carefully had to step around and over it. The door at the bottom of the stairs had seen better days. Stout and made of oak, at one time it could have stopped a battering ram. But a century of damp climate had rusted out the hinges, and Julia found that all she had to do was give it a hearty kick for the door to creak open just far enough to allow her to squeeze past.

Julia hesitated only long enough to see that she was in a concrete-walled passage. There was a faint glow of light at the other end a good fifty feet away, she guessed. The dank smell from the long-unused passage lay heavy. The floor was dripping-damp and puddled in places where rainwater had seeped in from the outer door. Debris and old furniture cast into the passageway when the sugar mill closed down made it difficult to pass through without undue sounds. She became extra cautious when she reached the dim light that shone through the dirty glass window of a heavy oak door blocking the way. She carefully turned a rusting door handle. Unexpectedly, the bolt slid whisper-silent from its slot. Then she painstakingly eased the door open a crack. It swung on its hinges as smoothly as if it had been oiled only the day before.

She softly stepped inside with the expectation of a woman anticipating trouble. She found herself inside an office furnished in the heavy oak furniture so popular in the early part of the twentieth century. Julia froze. The room was immaculately clean. There wasn't a speck of dust or a cobweb to be seen. It was like entering a time capsule. She had also stepped into a trap.

She felt as if she had been punched in the stomach when the oak door clunked shut behind her and three men stepped from behind a screen that shielded a sitting room at the other end of the office. All of the men were dressed in business suits, two carrying briefcases as though they had just come from a board-of-directors meeting.

Before she could transmit over her hidden radio, her arms were pinned and her mouth taped shut.

“You are a most obstinate young lady, Ling T'ai, or should I call you Julia Lee?” said Ki Wong, Qin Shang's chief enforcer, as he gave a curt bow and grinned satanically. “You don't know how happy I am to meet you again.”

Stowe stared across the bayou as he pressed the receiver against his ear with one hand and held the microphone of the transmitter until it nearly touched his lips. “Ms. Lee. If you read me, please answer.”

He heard what seemed to be stifled voices for a moment before all communications with Julia went dead. His first instinct was to rush across the bayou and charge the gate on the wharf. But he could not be certain Julia had encountered a life-threatening situation. Surely not certain enough to risk the lives of his men in a combat engagement. Another factor that preyed on his mind was the possibility of ambush on territory that was unknown. Stowe took the route used by astute officers since the first military force was formed: He laid the responsibility on his superior officer.

“Weehawken, this is Lieutenant Stowe.”

“We read you,” came the voice of Captain Lewis.

“Sir, I believe we have a situation.”

“Please explain.”

“Contact has been lost with Ms. Lee.”

There was a few moments' pause. Then Lewis replied slowly. “Remain in your position and keep the sugar mill under surveillance. Report any new information. I'll get back to you.”

Stowe stood in the launch and gazed across the bayou at the silent and dark buildings. “God help you if you've run into trouble,” Stowe muttered softly, “because I can't.”

THERE WAS NO FEVERISH HURRY AFTER PITT AND GIORDINO left the burning hovercraft and command post. It seemed reasonable to assume that all communications between the security force and Qin Shang's headquarters were cut off when the plantation burned to the ground. They continued their project of photographing the bed of the canal with the AUV as if no interruption ever occurred. Neither man was of a mind to do a rushed, botched job.

They reached the Atchafalaya River and returned up Hooker's Bayou to the shantyboat just as the eastern sky was beginning to lighten from black to blue-gray. Romberg greeted their arrival by opening his eyes only long enough to recognize them before instantly dropping off into dog dreamland again.

Without delay, they unloaded the dive equipment and the AUV. Once the skiff was stowed on the roof, Giordino started the big Ford 427 engine as Pitt pulled the mooring stakes from the mud under the boat. The sun had still to put in an appearance when the shantyboat swung onto the Atchafalaya and headed downriver.

“Where to?” Giordino shouted down into the main cabin from the pilothouse.

“Bartholomeaux,” Pitt yelled back over the roar of the engine.

Giordino said no more. Boat traffic was not as light as he expected this early in the morning. The oyster and crawfish boats were already on the river heading toward their favored fishing grounds. Towboats with their trains of barges came south after passing through the Old River Canal Lock from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya north of Baton Rouge. He skirted the other vessels respectfully, but once past he took the big 427 up to half throttle, sending it barreling down the river at twenty-five miles an hour.

Inside the little house, Pitt sat on a small sofa and played the videotape shot by the cameras of the AUV of the canal bed beginning at the highway bordering the Mississippi and ending at the entrance to the Atchafalaya. From start to finish the totally dull and boring show ran nearly six hours. Except for a few fish, a passing turtle and a runty baby gator no more than a foot in length, the bottom of the canal was nothing but barren muck. Pitt was relieved to find no bodies, nor was he surprised. Qin Shang's incredibly complicated plan had a small crack in it. The canal was the key, and Pitt was onto its purpose now. But he still found himself on the short side of tangibility. He had no proof. Only a vague theory that even he found almost impossible to accept.

He turned off the TV monitor and sat back in the sofa. He didn't dare close his eyes. He could have easily slipped off to sleep, but it wouldn't be fair to Giordino. There was still much to do. He fixed breakfast and called Giordino down to a table laid with a plate of scrambled eggs and ham. He'd brewed coffee in an old-fashioned pot and set out a carton of orange juice. To save time, he spelled Giordino at the helm while his friend ate.

He turned the shantyboat into Berwick Bay several miles above Morgan City and traveled south through the Wax Lake Canal, entering Bayou Teche just above Patterson, only two miles from the old sugar mill at Bartholomeaux. He gave the wheel back to Giordino and sat in his lawn chair on the veranda with Romberg curled up beside him.

They had made good time, and it was still shy of twelve noon when Giordino slowed the shantyboat as the abandoned sugar mill came into view around a bend just under a mile ahead. Pitt stared through a pair of binoculars, scanning the

buildings and the long wharf that trailed along a stone breakwater. A tight smile curled his lips at seeing the barge still loaded with trash. He stood, leaned over the veranda railing, called up to Giordino and pointed down the bayou. “That must be the place. The barge moored to the wharf looks like the same one we saw at Sungari.”

Giordino picked up a brass telescope he'd found in a drawer next to the helm. His right eye squinted through the lenses, scanning the wharf and buildings. “The barge is still full. Looks like they haven't gotten around to dumping the trash.”

“Unlike the ramshackle condition of the buildings, the wharf looks no more than a year or two old. Can you make out anyone inside the guard shack by the gate?”

Giordino swung the telescope and refocused. “I have a single security guard sitting on his ass inside, watching a TV set.”

“Any sign we might be sailing into an ambush?”

“I've seen cemeteries with more life than this place,” Giordino said mildly. “Word must not have come down about our party on the canal.”

“I'm going over the side and check out the bottom of the barge,” said Pitt. “I lost my dive gear at the plantation so I'll borrow yours. Take it slow, as if you're having engine problems. As soon as I'm in the water, tie up to the wharf and give the guard another of your sterling performances.”

“After mastering the manipulation of unsympathetic audiences,” Giordino pontificated, “Romberg and I may form an act and go to Hollywood.”

“Don't get your hopes up,” Pitt replied sourly.

Giordino pulled back the throttle two notches above the idle position and flicked the ignition key on and off to simulate misfiring cylinders within the engine. As soon as he saw Pitt in his wet suit stepping over the catwalk on the side of the shantyboat out of sight of the guard, he turned the wheel toward the wharf. A few seconds later, when he glanced downward, Pitt was gone.

He watched Pitt's bubbles approach the barge, and then steadily scatter as he passed under its bottom edge. It looked to Giordino as if Pitt was working deeper and deeper. Then the bubbles rising beside the barge disappeared altogether.

Giordino slowly raised a hand to shield the sun from his eyes and expertly steered the shantyboat around the barge and along the pilings without scratching the paint on the hull. Then he dropped down a ladder to the catwalk, jumped onto the wharf and began looping mooring lines around a pair of rusty bollards.

The guard came out of his shack, unlocked the gate and rushed up to the shantyboat. He cautiously eyed Romberg, who acted happy to see him. The guard looked Asian but he spoke with a West Coast accent. He was a good four inches taller than Giordino but much thinner. He wore a baseball cap and World War II pilot's sunglasses.

“You must leave. This is a private dock. The owners do not allow boats to moor here.”

“Ah cain't help it,” Giordino moaned. “Man engine died on me. Just give me twenty minutes, and Ah'll have it fixed.”

The guard was not to be refused. He began untying the lines. “You must leave.”

Giordino walked over and grasped the guard's wrist in an iron grip. “Qin Shang will not be happy when I report your offensive behavior to one of his inspectors.”

The guard looked at Giordino queerly. “Qin Shang? Who the hell is Qin Shang? I was hired by the Butterfield Freight Corporation.”

Now it was Giordino's turn to make a queer expression. He unconsciously glanced over the side into the water where he'd last seen Pitt's air bubbles and wondered if they'd made a big mistake. “You were hired to do what? Keep crows off the corn?”

“No,” said the guard defensively, unable to shake Giordino's grip and contemplating whether he was dealing with a madman and should draw his bolstered revolver. “Butterfield uses the old buildings to store furniture and equipment from their offices around the country. My job, and the guards who work the other shifts, is to keep vandals off the property.”

Giordino released the guard's arm. He was far too wise and cynical to fall for the lie. He was almost thrown off the track in the first moments of the conversation. But now he knew with solid conviction there was more to the abandoned sugar mill at Bartholomeaux than met the eye.

“Tell me, friend. Would it be worth a bottle of Black Label Jack Daniel's whiskey to let me stay here just long enough to fix my engine?”

“I don't think so,” the guard said testily as he rubbed his wrist.

Giordino fell back into his back country accent. “Look, Ah'm in a bind. If Ah just drift out in the river while workin' down on the engine, Ah could be busted in two by a towboat.”

“That's not my problem.”

“Two bottles of Black Label Jack Daniel's whiskey?”

A sly look gleamed in the guard's eyes. “Four bottles.”

Giordino stuck out his hand. “Done.” Then he motioned through the door leading inside the shantyboat from the veranda. Come on board and Ah'll put 'em in a sack for ya."

The guard looked apprehensively at Romberg. “Does he bite?”

“Only if ya put your hand in his mouth and step on his jaws.”

Unwittingly drawn into the web, the guard stepped around Romberg and entered the shantyboat's main cabin. It was the last thing he remembered until he woke up four hours later. Giordino hit him on the nape of the neck. Not a judo chop, but a huge fist swung like a club that sent the guard crashing heavily to the deck, out for the long count.

Ten minutes later, Giordino, wearing the guard's uniform, pants and sleeves too long by inches but the shirt straining at its buttons as his chest and shoulders stretched the seams, stepped out on the shantyboat's veranda. With the guard's baseball cap pulled down over the old, wide-style sunglasses, Giordino leisurely walked to the gate, closed it behind him and pretended to lock it. Then he went inside the guard shack and sat in front of the television set while his eyes roamed the grounds of the sugar mill, picking out the security cameras placed about the property.

Pitt sank to the bottom before swimming up and under the flat bottom of the barge. He was surprised to encounter the bed of the bayou at thirty feet beside the wharf—far deeper than was necessary for barge traffic. The depth must have been dredged to accept a deep-hulled ship.

It was as if a cloud had passed over the sun. The shadow of the barge cut off nearly fifty percent of the light from the surface. The water was an opaque green and filled with plant particles. He swam fast and had hardly passed under the barge when a vague shape appeared in the gloom and stopped his progress.

Hanging from the keel of the barge was an immense cylindrical tube with tapered ends. Pitt instantly recognized what it was, and his heart began to pump faster with excitement. The size and regular shape was similar to the hull of an early submarine. He swam along the hull slightly above it. There were no visible ports, and he could see that it was attached to the barge by a system of rails. These, Pitt immediately determined, were used to move the submerged container from the seagoing ship to the barge and back again.

He estimated the size of the underwater container at ninety feet in length by nearly fifteen feet in diameter by ten feet high. Without being able to peer inside, Pitt quickly realized that it was capable of housing anywhere from two hundred to four hundred people, depending on how tightly they were packed inside.

Quickly, he swam around the vessel to the other side, looking for a hatch connecting with an underwater passage from the vessel to inside the breakwater that anchored the wharf. He found it thirty feet aft of the bow, a small watertight tunnel just large enough for two people to pass through at the same time.

Pitt could find no way to enter, certainly not from the water. He was about to give up and swim back to the shantyboat when he spotted a small round portal embedded in the stone breakwater. The portal was above the surface of the water but just below the planking on the wharf. It was covered by an iron door that was secured by three dog levers. Its purpose eluded him. A sewer outlet? A drainage pipe? A maintenance tunnel? A closer inspection of the lettering stamped by the manufacturer on the iron door cleared up the mystery.

MANUFACTURED BY THE ACADIA CHUTE COMPANY NEW ORLEANS. LOUISIANA

It was a chute that was used when the mill was in operation to load the raw sugar onto barges. The old wharf had been demolished and a new one constructed that was five feet higher to accommodate the passage of illegal immigrants under the water without being visible on the surface. The newer, raised wharf now sat a good foot over the early loading chute.

The dog levers were badly rusted and probably hadn't been opened in eighty years. But the bayou water did not have the salt content of the sea. The corrosion was not deep. Pitt gripped a dog lever with both hands, positioned his feet against the upper planks of the wharf and pulled downward.

To his delight, the lever gave and moved an inch on the first try. The next heave took it three inches; then it turned more easily. Finally, he twisted it out against its stop. The second dog lever came slightly easier, but the third fought him every inch of the way. Gasping and panting, Pitt rested for a minute before pulling the door open. It fought too. He had to put both feet against the breakwater and pull with every ounce of strength he had left.

At last the iron door grudgingly squeaked open on its rusting hinges. Pitt peered inside, but all he could see was darkness. He turned and swam under the wharf, stopping just before he reached the shantyboat's hull. He called up softly. “Al, are you there?”

His only response came from Romberg. Curious, the hound strolled onto the wharf and sniffed through the cracks in the planking just above Pitt's head. “Not you. I want Giordino.”

Romberg began wagging his tail. He stretched out his front paws, and lay down on the wharf and playfully tried to dig through the wooden planking.

Inside the guard shack, Giordino turned every minute or two and stared at the shantyboat for an indication of Pitt's return. Seeing Romberg pawing and scratching on the wharf for something underneath made him curious. He slowly walked through the gate and stopped by the dog. “What are you sniffing at?” he asked.

“Me!” Pitt whispered through the planking.

“Jeez!” muttered Giordino. “For a second I thought Romberg could talk.”

Pitt stared up between the cracks in the planks. “Where did you get the uniform?”