Текст книги "Trojan Odyssey"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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21

The mood on board the boat had suddenly changed. For nearly a minute, no one moved. No one spoke as they stared uneasily at the bizarre phenomenon. Finally, Gunn broke the silence.

"The same Hunt the pirate the admiral warned us about?"

"No, Hunt the buccaneer."

"It can't be real." Renee stared in awe, refusing to believe what her eyes relayed to her brain. "Are we really looking at a ghost ship?"

Pitt's lips curled in a vague smile. "Only in the eye of the beholder." Then he paraphrased from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."With never a whisper in the sea, oft darts the Odyssey ship."

"Who was Hunt?" asked Dodge, in a voice close to a quaver.

"A buccaneer who roamed the Caribbean from sixteen sixty-five until sixteen eighty, when he was captured by a British Royal Navy ship and fed to the sharks."

Not wanting to look at the phantom, Dodge turned away, his mind not functioning, and muttered, "What's the difference between a pirate and buccaneer?"

"Very little," answered Pitt. "Pirateis a general term that covers British, Dutch and French seafarers who captured merchant ships for prize money and treasure. The term buccaneercomes from the French for barbecue. The early buccaneers used to grill their meat and dry it. Unlike privateers, who had valid commissions from their government, buccaneers preyed on any ship, mostly Spanish, without papers. They were also known as freebooters."

The ghostly vessel was only a half a mile away now and closing fast. The eerie yellow glow gave the apparition a surrealistic image. As it neared and the details of the ship became more distinct, the sounds of men shouting across the water began to be heard aboard the phantom.

She was a square-rigged barque with three masts and a shallow draft, a favorite vessel of pirates before the seventeen hundreds. The foresails and topsails were billowing in a nonexistent breeze. She mounted ten guns, five run out on the main deck on both sides. Men with bandanas around their head were standing on the quarterdeck, waving swords. High on her mainmast, a huge black flag with a fiendishly grinning skull dripping blood stood straight out as if the ship was sailing against a headwind.

The expressions on the faces of those on the Poco Bonitovaried from growing horror to foreboding to academic contemplation. Giordino looked as if he was staring at cold pizza, while Pitt peered through binoculars at the phantasm with the face of a man enjoying a science fiction movie. Then he lowered the glasses and began to laugh "Are you mad?" Renee demanded.

He handed her the glasses. "Look at the man in the scarlet suit with the gold sash standing on the quarterdeck and tell me what you see."

She stared through the lenses. "A man with a feathered hat."

"What else sets him apart from the others."

"He has a peg leg and a hook on his right hand."

"Don't forget the eye patch."

"Yes. There's that too."

"All that's missing is a parrot on one shoulder."

She lowered the binoculars. "I don't understand."

"A bit stereotyped, don't you think?"

An old Navy man who had served fifteen years on the sea, Gunn read the ghost ship's change of course almost before it turned. "She's going to cross our bow."

"I hope she isn't planning on giving us a broadside," Giordino said half in jest, half seriously.

"Lay on the throttles and ram her amidships," Pitt instructed Gunn.

"No!" Renee gasped, staring at Pitt stupidly, stunned. "That's suicide!"

"I'm with Dirk," Giordino said loyally. "I say stick our bow in the sucker."

A smile began to creep across Gunn's face as he became aware of what Pitt was silently implying. He stood at the helm and punched the engines, laying on full power and lifting the bow three feet out of the water. The Poco Bonitoleaped forward like a racehorse prodded in the rump with a pitchfork. Within a hundred yards, she was flying across the water at fifty knots straight toward the port side of the pirate ship. The cannon muzzles, already poking through the gun ports, opened fire, spouts of flames bursting from their muzzles, accompanied by the sound of a thunderous blast that echoed over the water.

One quick glance at the radar screen and Pitt dashed to his cabin to retrieve his nightscope. He returned to the open deck in less than a minute and motioned for Giordino to follow him up a ladder to the roof of the pilothouse. Without the slightest hesitation, Giordino climbed after him. They lay flat on the roof, elbows braced to steady the nightscope they passed back and forth. Oddly, they did not stare directly at the luminescent phantom, but eyed the darkness ahead and astern of it.

Wondering if the two NUMA men were losing touch with all reality, Dodge and Renee instinctively ducked down on the deck behind the pilothouse. Above them, Pitt and Giordino ignored the approaching disaster.

"I've got mine," declare Giordino. "Looks like a small barge to the west about three hundred yards."

"I have my target too," Pitt followed. "A yacht, a big one well over a hundred feet in length, the same distance to the east."

A hundred yards, fifty, on a collision course with the unknown. Then Poco Bonitolunged into and through the opaque shape of the ancient barque. For an instant the yellow glow burst like orange lasers at a rock concert and shrouded the little research boat. Renee and Dodge could see the pirates moving above them on the main deck, firing their guns with a vengeance. Oddly, none of them took the slightest notice of the vessel plunging through their ship.

Then Poco Bonitowas speeding alone over a velvet black sea. In her wake, the yellow glow abruptly blinked out and was gone, and the sounds of the guns melted into the night. It was as if the ghostly vision had never been.

"Stay on the throttles," Pitt advised Gunn. "It's not healthy around here."

"Were we hallucinating?" Renee muttered, her face white as a paper towel. "Or did we really run through a ghost ship?"

Pitt put his arm around her. "What you saw, dear heart, was a four-dimensional image – height, depth, width and motion – all recorded and projected in a hologram."

Renee still seemed dazed as she stared into the night. "It looked so real, so convincing."

"About twice as real as its phony captain with his Treasure IslandLong John Silver peg leg, Peter Panhook and Horatio Nelson eye patch. And then there was the flag. Blood was dripping in all the wrong places."

"But why?" asked Renee to no one in particular. "Why such a production in the middle of the sea?"

Pitt's eyes were staring through the pilothouse doorway at the radar screen. "What we have here is a case of contemporary piracy."

"But who projected the holographic image?"

"I'm in the dark too," added Dodge. "I saw no other vessels."

"Your eyes and mind were focused on the apparition," said Giordino. "Dirk and I observed a large yacht to our port and a barge to the starboard, both three hundred yards away. Neither showing any lights."

A light went on in Renee's mind. "They projected the beam for the hologram?"

Pitt nodded. "They cast the illusion of a phantom ship and crew doomed to sail the sea forever. But their projection was one huge cliché. They must have created Hunt's ship and crew after watching too many old Errol Flynn movies."

"Judging from the radar, the yacht is giving chase," Giordino alerted them.

Standing at the helm, Gunn appraised the two blips on the screen. "One is stationary, which must be the barge. The yacht is following in our wake about half a mile astern, but is losing ground. They must be crazy mad at seeing an old fishing boat leave them in the foam."

Giordino threw a wet blanket over the relief and joy. "We'd better pray that they don't carry mortars or rockets."

"They'd have opened up on us by now—" Gunn's statement was punctuated by a missile that burst out of the early-morning night and whistled past Poco Bonito,grazing its radar dome, striking the water fifty yards ahead with a great thump.

Pitt looked at Giordino. "I wish you hadn't given them ideas."

Gunn didn't answer. He was too busy spinning the helm and heaving the research boat on a sharp bank to port and then to starboard, weaving unpredictably to avoid the rockets that began to come every thirty seconds.

"Douse our running lights!" Pitt shouted to Gunn.

His reply was instant darkness, as the little NUMA director flicked off the main lighting switch. The swells had risen to three feet and Poco Bonito'sbeamy hull was now splashing through the crests at almost forty-five knots.

"How are we fixed for weapons?" Giordino asked Gunn calmly.

"Two M4 carbines with attached forty-millimeter grenade launchers."

"Nothing heavier?"

"Easily hidden small arms is all the admiral would allow on board in case we were stopped and searched by a Nicaraguan patrol boat."

"Do we look like drug smugglers?" demanded Renee.

Dodge stared at her with a crooked smile. "What do drug smugglers look like?"

Pitt said, "I've got my old Colt forty-five. How about you, Al?"

"A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic."

"We may not be able to sink them," said Pitt. "But at least we can repel boarders."

"If they don't blast us to smithereens first," grunted Giordino, as another missile landed in Poco Bonito'swake no more than fifty feet astern.

"So long as their rockets aren't equipped with homing devices, they can't hit what they can't see."

Automatic weapons fire began to wink in the darkness behind them, as the modern pirates aimed by radar in their general direction. Tracers danced over the surface of the sea fifty yards to starboard in a spraying pattern. Gunn, playing the odds, turned the boat to port for a short distance before heading straight again. The tracers ever so slowly spiraled through the night, groping for their prey before falling away into the dark sea where Poco Bonitoshould have been but wasn't.

Two more rockets arced through the night. The pirates played the odds and fired them almost in parallel at the blip on their radar. They had the right idea, but they fired when Gunn was momentarily heading on a straight course before he feinted port before turning starboard. The rockets landed on opposite sides of the boat within fifty feet, showering the decks with twin cascades of water.

Then the firing stopped and it seemed as though a mantle of stillness had been drawn over the boat. Only the beat of the mighty engines straining in their mounts, the growl of the exhaust and the water sloshing past the bow broke the silence.

"Have they given up?" Renee murmured hopefully.

Staring at the radar, Gunn spoke happily through the pilothouse door, "They're turning away and reversing course."

"But who arethey?"

"Local pirates don't use holograms or fire missiles from yachts," Giordino said flatly.

Pitt stared pensively out the back of the boat. "Our friends from Odyssey are the most likely suspects. No way they could have known our bodies weren't lying on the bottom of the sea. We simply walked into an ambush set for any boat or ship that wandered into this particular area."

"They won't be happy campers," said Dodge, "when they learn we're the ones who got away, not once but twice."

Renee felt even more lost. "But why us? What did we do to be murdered?"

"I suspect we're trespassing on their hunting grounds," Pitt said, taking a logical course. "There has to be somethingin this part of the Caribbean they don't want us or anyone else to see."

"A drug-smuggling operation, perhaps?" offered Dodge. "Could it be Specter is involved with the drug trade?"

"Maybe," said Pitt. "But from what little I know, his empire makes vast profits in excavation and construction projects. Drug running wouldn't be worth their time or effort, even as a side operation. No, what we have here goes far beyond drug smuggling or piracy."

Gunn set the helm on autopilot, stepped from the pilothouse and wearily dropped into the lounge chair. "So what heading do we program into the computer?"

There was a long silence.

Pitt was not happy about further endangering everyone's lives, but they were here and they had a mission. "Sandecker sent us to find the truth behind the brown blob. We'll continue searching for the highest concentration of its contamination in the hope it will lead us to the source."

"And if theychase after us again?" prompted Dodge.

Pitt grinned broadly. "We turn and run, now that we've gotten so good at it."

22

Dawn broke over an empty sea. The radar disclosed no vessels within thirty miles, and except for the lights of a helicopter that passed over an hour earlier, the search for the source of the brown crud went uninterrupted. Just to be on the safe side, they had run without lights the entire night.

Turning south soon after their confrontation with the bogus ghost ship, they were now sailing in Bahia Punta Gorda, where the trail of increasing toxicity in the seawater had led them. So far they had been blessed with good weather, with just the slightest hint of a breeze and low winds.

The Nicaraguan coastline was only two miles distant. The lowlands were a faint line across the horizon, as if some giant hand had drawn it using a T square and a pen with black ink. Mists covered the shore and drifted against the foothills in the low mountains to the west.

"Most strange," said Gunn, peering through binoculars.

Pitt looked up. "What?"

"According to the charts of the bay of Punta Gorda, the only habitation is a small fishing village called Barra del Rio Maiz."

"So?"

Gunn handed the glasses to Pitt. "Take a look and tell me what you see."

Pitt focused the lenses for his eyes and scanned the shoreline. "That's no isolated fishing village, it looks like a major deepwater container port. I count two containerships unloading at a huge dock with cranes, and another two ships anchored and waiting their turn."

"There is also an extensive area devoted to warehouses."

"It's a beehive of activity, all right."

"What's your take on the situation?" asked Gunn.

"My only guess is equipment and supplies are being stored to build the proposed high-speed railroad between the seas."

"They've been damned quiet about it," said Gunn. "I've read no reports that the project was actually funded and under way."

"Two of the ships are flying the Republic of China red flag," said Pitt. "That answers the question on funding."

The great bay of Punta Gorda that they were entering suddenly turned into a sea of ugly brown. Everyone's attention turned to the water. No one spoke. No one moved as the massive brown crud materialized out of the morning haze thick as a bowl of oatmeal.

They stood and watched silently as the bow plowed through water that looked as if it was suffering from a plague, its surface painted the burnt umber on a painter's palette. The effect was of skin invaded by leprosy.

Standing at the helm, chewing on an unlit cigar, Giordino slowed the engines while Dodge furiously recorded and analyzed the chemistry of the water.

During the long night, Pitt had become more familiar with Renee and Dodge. She had grown up in Florida and became a master diver at an early age. Falling in love with life underwater, she had achieved her master's degree in ocean biology. A few months before coming aboard Poco Bonito,she came off a divorce that left her with scars. Away from home during long projects at sea, Renee returned after a lengthy research program in the Solomon Islands to find the love of her life had moved out and was living with another woman. Men, she asserted, were no longer a priority.

Pitt launched a campaign to make her laugh at every chance he could think of something funny to say.

His wit fell on deaf ears when it came to Dodge. A taciturn man, somehow happily married for thirty years, he had five children and four grandchildren. He had worked for NUMA since its inception. With a Ph.D. in chemistry, he had specialized in water pollution, working in NUMA's laboratory. But with the death of his wife a year earlier, he had volunteered for fieldwork. He might have cracked a thin smile at Pitt's attempts at humor, but he never laughed.

Around them, the new sun revealed a sea surface thick with the notorious brown crud. It had the consistency of an oil slick, only much denser, and flattened the sea. No swells rolled through it, as Giordino held Poco Bonitoat a reduced speed of ten knots.

After avoiding the explosion outside Bluefields and the narrow escape from the pirate yacht, the uneasy tension that had been building up in the ship all night seemed to become a mist so thick they could reach out and feel it. Pitt and Renee had pulled aboard several buckets of the crud and poured it into glass containers for future analysis in the NUMA labs in Washington. They also collected dead sea life they found floating in the contamination, for Renee to study.

And then, suddenly, Giordino shouted from the pilothouse, his hand motions animated by Italian breeding. "Off the port bow! Something is happening in the water!"

They all saw it then, a movement in the sea as though a giant whale was thrashing in its death throes. Everyone stood as still as a statue as Giordino turned the bow of the boat twelve degrees toward the turbulence.

Pitt stepped into the pilothouse and examined the readings on the depth finder. The bottom was coming up rapidly. It was almost as if they were crossing a steep slope rising from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The naked ugliness of the crud gave the sea the look of a bubbling mud pot.

"Unbelievable," muttered Dodge, as if hypnotized. "According to the depth marked on the chart around our position, we should be recording six hundred feet."

Pitt didn't say anything. He was standing on the bow with the binoculars pressed to his eyes. "It looks as if the sea is boiling," he said to Giordino through the open window beside the helm. "Can't be from a volcanic source. There are no steam or heat waves."

"The bottom is coming up at an incredible rate," Dodge called out. "It's as though it was spewing out of a volcano but without molten lava."

The shore had drawn closer, less than two miles distant. The water was becoming more violent, with waves slashing in every direction. The boat was rocked violently, as if shook by a huge vibrator. The brown crud had thickened until it looked like pure, unadulterated mud.

Giordino stepped to the door of the pilothouse and hailed Pitt. "The water temperature has taken a jump. It returned to a normal eighty-three degrees in the last mile."

"How do you explain that?"

"No more than you can."

Dodge was having trouble accepting any of it. The water temperature's sudden increase, the unmarked rise on the seabed, the incredible amount of brown crud rising from nowhere. It was just inconceivable.

Pitt wasn't buying it either. Everything they'd discovered went against the known laws of the sea. Volcanoes were known to rise from the depths, but not an upheaval of mud and silt. This should have been a liquid, live environment where fish of every variety existed. Here there were no living creatures. They might have swum or crawled across the bottom once. Now they were either dead and buried under a mountain of crud or had migrated to clear water. Nothing grew, nothing lived. It was a world of the dead, covered over with toxic muck that seemed to have materialized from nowhere.

Giordino was having a difficult time keeping the boat on an even keel. The waves were not high, no more than five feet, but unlike waves generated in one direction by the winds of a storm, these whipped and buffeted the boat from every point of the compass. Another two hundred yards and the water went crazy with uncontrolled violence.

"A mass of mad mud," Renee spoke, as if gazing at a mirage. "Pretty soon it will become an island—"

"Sooner than you think," Giordino yelled, hauling the throttles into reverse. "Hang on. The bottom has come up beneath us." The boat yawed, but it was too late. The bow struck the rising muck, throwing everyone forward, and stuck fast. The bow wave died away and the propellers thrashed madly, chopping the mud into an ivory-brown froth as they tried to pull Poco Bonitooff the mysterious rise. With the boat imprisoned in the mud, they felt like unproductive spectators.

"Cut the engines," Pitt ordered Giordino. "High tide is in another hour. Wait and try then. In the meantime, we'll carry all the heavy material and supplies to the stern of the boat."

"Do you really think that by moving a few hundred pounds, you can raise the bow enough to slip off the mud pile?" asked Renee doubtfully.

Pitt was already hauling a large coil of rope toward the transom. "Add another seven hundred pounds of bodies, and who knows? We just might get lucky."

Though every man and one woman worked as though their lives depended on it, it took the better part of the next hour to stack luggage, food supplies, nonessential equipment and furniture as far back on the stern deck as possible. The fishing nets and traps used to disguise the boat were thrown overboard, along with the bow anchors.

Pitt gazed at the hands on his Doxa watch. "High tide in thirteen minutes and then the moment of truth."

"The moment has come sooner than you thought," said Giordino. "We have a vessel approaching from the north on radar. And she's coming fast."

Pitt snatched up the binoculars and peered into the distance. "Appears to be a yacht."

Gunn shaded his eyes from the eastern sun and gazed out over the brown crud. "The same one that attacked us last night?"

"I didn't get a good look at her in the dark through the night glasses. But I think it's safe to say there is little doubt of it being the same vessel. Our friends have tracked us down."

"No time like the present," said Giordino, "to get a head start on the posse."

Pitt herded everyone to the very edge of the Poco Bonito'stransom. Giordino took the helm and looked astern. Making certain they all had a firm grip on the railing, Pitt nodded a signal for reverse full power. The mighty diesels reverberated as Giordino pushed the throttles as far as they could go. The boat slewed and fishtailed, but was stuck fast. The thickness of the brown crud acted as a glue, adhering to the keel of Poco Bonito.Even with the crew and a ton of solid substance crammed against the transom, the forward part of the boat had raised but two inches. Not enough to break loose.

Pitt hoped for a wave to lift the bow, but no waves came. The thick brown substance laid the sea flat as a newspaper. The engines strained and the propellers dug into the muck, but nothing happened. All eyes had turned to the yacht that was approaching at high speed directly toward them.

Now that he saw her clearly in the daylight, Pitt estimated her overall length at one hundred and fifty feet. Unlike the standard white, the mega-yacht was painted lavender, like he'd seen on the Odyssey pickup truck at the dock. A masterpiece of craftsmanship, she was the essence of oceangoing luxury. She carried a twenty-foot powerboat as a tender and a six-passenger helicopter.

She was near enough for him to make out her name in gold letters: EPONA. Below the name, painted across the bulkhead of the second deck, was the same Odyssey logo of a running horse. A flag flying from the communications antenna also flaunted the golden horse on a lavender background.

Pitt observed two crewmen feverishly preparing to lower the tender while several others took up positions on the long forward deck, weapons in hand. None made any attempt at taking cover. They were lulled by the belief that a fishing boat had no bite and took no precautions. The hair on the nape of Pitt's neck rose a fraction as he spotted a pair of the men loading a rocket launcher.

"She's coming straight for us," muttered Dodge uneasily.

"They don't look like any pirates I ever read about," Giordino shouted from inside the pilothouse over the roar of the engines. "They never captured ships from an elegant yacht. Ten will get you twenty, it was stolen."

"Not stolen," Pitt retorted. "It belongs to Odyssey."

"Is it me, or are they everywhere?"

Pitt turned and called out, "Renee!"

She was sitting with her back against the transom. "What is it?"

"Go down in the galley, empty whatever bottles you can find, then fill them with fuel from the tank on the generator motor."

"Why not fuel from the engines?" asked Dodge.

"Because gas ignites more easily than diesel fuel," Pitt explained. "After the bottles are filled, insert a cloth and twist on the top."

"Molotov cocktails?"

"Precisely."

Renee no sooner disappeared below than the Eponaswung in a wide arc toward them. Coming head-on, she was closing fast. From the new view, Pitt could see that she had the twin hulls of a catamaran. "If we don't get off this mud pile," he said irritably, "we'll have a most exasperating complication."

"Exasperating complication," Giordino shot back. "Is that the best you can do?"

Then to everyone's stunned amazement, Giordino suddenly ran from the pilothouse, scrambled up the ladder to the roof, stood poised for a moment like an Olympic diver and leaped onto the stern deck between Pitt and Gunn.

Call it luck, call it foresight or fate. Giordino's weight and momentum striking the stern deck was the extra inducement it took to jar the boat loose. Sluggishly, inch by inch, the boat slowly slithered off the unyielding muck. Finally, the keel slipped free and the boat leaped astern as if yanked on a big spring.

Creases of mirth crinkled the corner of Pitt's eyes. "Don't ever let me tell you to diet."

Giordino flashed a broad smile. "I won't."

"Now for our well-rehearsed getaway," said Pitt. "Rudi, take the helm and crouch down as far as you can go. Renee, you and Patrick lay low and take cover behind all this junk we've piled on the stern. Al and I will hide under a pile of nets."

The words were barely out of Pitt's mouth when one of the crewmen of the luxury yacht fired a handheld rocket launcher. The missile soared through the port door of the pilothouse and out the starboard window before impacting with the water fifty yards abeam and exploding.

"Good thing I wasn't in there yet," said Gunn, trying to act as if he was on a walk in the park.

"See what I mean about crouching down?"

Gunn jumped in the pilothouse and spun the wheel, sending the hull curling away from the muck rising from below the water. But before he could bring the boat up to speed, another rocket smashed through the side of the hull amidships and struck the starboard engine. Miraculously, it failed to explode, but it caused a fire by igniting oil spilling from the shattered engine. Almost as a reflex, Gunn immediately closed the throttle to prevent any broken lines from spraying fuel on the fire.

Dodge took the initiative, dove down the hatch into the engine room and snatched a fire extinguisher mounted on a bulkhead. Pulling the safety pin and squeezing the trigger, he smothered the flames until only a billow of black smoke spiraled through the open hatch.

"Are we taking on water?" Pitt shouted from under the fishnet.

"It's an ungodly mess down here, but the bilge is dry!" Dodge yelled back between coughing fits.

To those on board the pirate yacht, it looked as though the fishing boat was mortally hit, as they watched the column of smoke billowing from inside her hull. Believing her crew dead and too injured to resist, the yacht's captain backed off on his engines, slowed the vessel and drifted across Poco Bonito's,bow.

"Do we still have power, Rudi?"

"Our port engine is dead, but the starboard is still turning over."

"Then they just made a big mistake," Pitt said with a cold grin.

"And what was that?" Gunn replied.

"Remember the pirate ship?"

"I do indeed." Gunn cut back on the throttle to the good engine for the sucker play, allowing the little research boat to stop dead in the water. The ploy worked. Certain that his victim was about to sink, the yacht's captain swallowed the bait and idled closer.

Seconds crawled by, until the yacht was almost sitting on top of them at point-blank range. Seeing no movement on board and smoke still gushing from the hull, no small-arms fire was poured into the seemingly stricken vessel. Then a bearded man leaned out the window of the yacht's pilothouse, and with an American Deep South accent spoke through a bullhorn.

"Y'all who can hear me. If y'all do not abandon your boat, it will be blasted to kindlin'. Do not attempt to use any communication devices. Ah repeat, do not open communications. We'all have detection equipment on board and will know immediately if y'all transmit. Y'all have exactly sixty seconds to take to the water. Ah promise y'all safe passage to the nearest port."

"Shall we reply?" asked Gunn.

"Maybe we should do as he says," muttered Dodge. "I want to see my children and grandchildren again."

"If you trust a pirate's word," said Pitt coldly, "I've got a gold mine in Newark, New Jersey, I'll sell you cheap."

Seemingly ignoring the yacht, Pitt rose into view and climbed through the gear piled on the stern and approached the jackstaff on the transom that was flying the Nicaraguan flag. He lowered the flag, unclasped the fasteners and removed it. Then he retrieved the bundle he'd been carrying inside his shirt. In a few moments, a silk, three-by-five-foot emblem was raised.

"Now they know where we come from," Pitt said, as everyone stared reverently at the stars and stripes snapping defiantly in the breeze.

Renee returned on deck, carrying two glass jars and a wine bottle topped with gasoline. Quickly sizing up the situation, she suddenly had a revelation. "You're not going to ram him?" she cried.

"Say when," yelled Gunn, in a voice edged with anticipation and the stony face of a poker player bluffing to win a pot.

"No!" Renee moaned. "That isn't a hologram. It's a solid object. Ram that and we'll fold up like Lawrence Welk's accordion."

"I'm counting on it," Pitt snapped back. "You and Patrick light the wicks and get ready to toss the cocktails as soon as we collide."

There was no more hesitation. The yacht was creeping past Poco Bonito'sbow, now less than a hundred feet away.