"You could safely say it's priceless."

"There was another man who saw the statue?" Pitt asked.

"Colonel Ralph Morehouse Sigler, a real character from the old explorer school. An engineer in the English army, he tramped around the empire, surveying boundaries and building forts throughout Africa and India. He was also a trained geologist and spent his leave time prospecting. He was either damned lucky or damned good, discovering an extensive chromite deposit in South Africa and several precious gemstone veins in Indochina. He became wealthy but didn't have time to enjoy it. The Kaiser marched into France and he was ordered to the Western Front to build fortifications."

"So he didn't enter South America until after the war."

"No, in the summer of 1916, he stepped off the boat at Georgetown, in what was then British Guiana. It seems some hotshot in the British treasury got the bright idea of sending out expeditions around the world to find and open gold mines to finance the war. Sigler was recalled from the front and ordered into the South American interior."

"You think he knew the monk's story?" Pitt asked.

"Nothing in his diaries or papers indicates he ever believed in a lost city. The guy was no wild-eyed treasure hunter. He was after raw minerals. Historic artifacts never interested him. Are you hungry, Dirk?"

"Yes, come to think of it. I was cheated out of dinner."

"We're long past the dinner hour, but if we ask nice I'm sure the kitchen can rustle up some appetizers."

O'Meara gestured for the barmaid and after pleading his case persuaded her to serve them a platter of shrimp with cocktail sauce.

"Hits the spot," said Pitt.

"I could eat these little devils all day long," O'Meara agreed. "Now, where were we?"

"Sigler was about to find La Dorada."

"Oh, yes. After forming a party of twenty men, mostly British soldiers, Sigler plunged into the uncharted wilds. For months, nothing was heard of them. The British began to sense disaster and sent out several search parties, but none found a trace of the missing men. At last, nearly two years later, an American expedition, surveying for a railroad, stumbled upon Sigler five hundred miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro. He was alone, the only survivor."

"Seems like an incredible distance from British Guiana."

"Almost two thousand miles from his jump-off point as the crow flies."

"What kind of shape was he in?"

"More dead than alive, according to the engineers who found him. They carried Sigler to a village that had a small hospital and sent off a message to the nearest American consulate. A few weeks later a relief party arrived from Rio."

"American or British?"

"An odd twist there," answered O'Meara. "The British consulate claimed they were never notified of Sigler's reappearance. Gossip had it that the American consul general himself showed up to question him. Whatever happened, Sigler dropped from sight. The story is he escaped from the hospital and wandered back into the jungle."

"Doesn't figure that he'd turn his back on civilization after two years of hell," said Pitt. O'Meara shrugged. "Who can say?"

"Did Sigler give an account of his expedition before he disappeared?"

"Raved in delirium most of the time. Witnesses said afterward that he babbled about finding a huge city surrounded by steep cliffs and overgrown by jungle. His description pretty much matched the Portuguese monk's. He also drew a rough sketch of the golden woman that was saved by a nurse and now lies in Brazil's national library. I had a look at it while researching another project. The real thing must be an awesome sight."

"So it remains buried in the jungle."

"Ah, there's the rub," sighed O'Meara. "Sigler claimed he and his men stole the statue and dragged it twenty miles to a river, fighting off the Zanona Indians the whole trip. By the time they built a raft, heaved La Dorada on board, and pushed off, there were only three of them left. Later one died of his injuries and the other was lost in a stretch of rapids."

Pitt was fascinated by what O'Meara was telling him, but he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open. "The obvious question is, where did Sigler stash the golden woman?"

"If I only knew," replied O'Meara.

"Didn't he give a clue?"

"The nurse thought he said the raft came apart and the statue dropped into the river a few hundred yards from where the surveyors' party found him. But don't get your hopes up. He was muttering nonsense. Treasure hunters have been dragging metal detectors up and down that river for years without a reading a tick."

Pitt swirled the ice cubes around inside his glass. He knew, he knew what happened to Ralph Morehouse Sigler and La Dorada.

"The American consul general," Pitt said slowly, "he was the last person to see Sigler alive?"

"The puzzle gets cloudy at this point, but as near as anyone can tell, the answer is yes."

"Let me see if I can fill in the pieces. This took place in January and February of 1918. Right?"

O'Meara nodded, and then he gave Pitt a queer stare.

"And the consul general's name was Alfred Gottschalk, who died a few weeks later on the Cyclops. Right?"

"You know this?" said O'Meara, his eyes uncomprehending.

"Gottschalk probably heard of Sigler's mission through his counterpart at the British consulate. When he received the message from the railroad surveyors that Sigler was alive, he kept the news to himself and headed into the interior, hoping to interview the explorer and steal a jump on the British by turning over any valuable information to his own government. What he learned must have shattered any code of ethics he still retained. Gottschalk decided to grab the bonanza for himself.

"He found and raised the golden statue from the river and then transported it, along with Sigler, to Rio de Janeiro. He covered his tracks by buying off anyone who might talk about Sigler, and, if my guess is correct, killing off the men who helped him recover the statue. Then, using his influence with the Navy, he smuggled them both on board the Cyclops. The ship was lost and the secret died with her."

O'Meara's eyes deepened in curious interest. "Now that," he said, "you can't possibly know."

"Why else would LeBaron be looking for what he thought was La Dorada?"

"You make a good case," O'Meara admitted. "But you left the door open to a moot question. Why didn't Gottschalk simply kill Sigler after he found the statue? Why keep the Englishman alive?"

"Elementary. The consul general was consumed by gold fever. He wanted La Dorada and the emerald city too. Sigler was the only person alive who could give him directions or lead him there."

"I like the way you think, Dirk. Your wild-assed theory calls for another drink."

"Too late, the bar's closed. I think they'd like us to leave so the help can get home to bed."

O'Meara mimicked a crestfallen expression. "That's one nice thing about primitive living. No hours, no curfew." He took a final swallow from his glass. "Well, what are your plans?"

"Nothing complicated," said Pitt, smiling. "I'm going to find the Cyclops."

<<11>>

The President was an early riser, awakening at about 6 A.M. and exercising for thirty minutes before showering and eating a light breakfast. In a ritual going back to the days soon after his honeymoon, he gently eased out of bed and quietly dressed while his wife slept on. She was a night person and could not force herself to rise before 7:30. He slipped on a sweatsuit and then removed a small leather briefcase from a closet in the adjoining sitting room. After giving his wife a tender kiss on the cheek, he took the back stairway down to the White House gym beneath the west terrace. The spacious room, containing a variety of exercise equipment, was empty except for a thick-bodied man who lay on his back bench pressing a set of weights. With each lift he grunted like a woman in childbirth. The sweat beaded from a round head that sprouted a thick mat of ivory hair styled in a short crewcut. The stomach was immense and hairy, the arms and legs protruding like heavy tree limbs. He had the look of a carnival wrestler long past his prime.

"Good morning, Ira," said the President. "I'm glad you could make it." The fat man set the weight bar on a pair of hooks above his head, rose from the bench, and squeezed the President's hand. "Good to see you, Vince." The President smiled. No bowing, no scraping, no greeting of "Mr. President." Tough, stoical Ira Hagen, he mused. The gritty old undercover agent never gave an inch to anybody.

"I hope you don't mind meeting like this."

Hagen uttered a coarse laugh that echoed off the gym walls. "I've been briefed in worse places."

"How's the restaurant business?"

"Showing a nice profit since we switched from continental gourmet to downhome American food. Food costs were eating us alive. Twenty entrees with expensive sauces and herbs didn't cut it. So now we specialize in only five menu items the higher-class restaurants don't serve--ham, chicken, fish casserole, stew, and meatloaf."

"You may have something," said the President. "I haven't bitten into a good meatloaf since I was a kid."

"Our customers go for it, especially since we retained the fancy service and intimate atmosphere. My waiters all wear tuxedos, candles on tables, stylish settings, food presented in a continental manner. And the best part is the diners eat faster, so there's a quicker turnover on tables."

"And you're breaking even on the food while taking a profit on the booze and wine, right?"

Hagen laughed again. "Vince, you're okay. I don't care what the news media say about you. When you're an old has-been politician look me up, and we'll open a chain of beaneries together."

"Do you miss criminal investigation, Ira?"

"Sometimes."

"You were the best undercover operative the justice Department ever had," the President said, "until Martha died."

"Gathering evidence on slime for the government didn't seem to matter anymore. Besides, I had three daughters to raise, and the demands of the job kept me away from home for weeks at a time."

"The girls doing all right?"

"Just fine. As you well know, all three of your nieces have happy marriages and presented me with five grandchildren."

"A pity Martha couldn't have seen them. Of my four sisters and two brothers, she was my favorite."

"You didn't fly me here from Denver on an Air Force jet just to talk old times," said Hagen. "What's going down?"

"Have you lost your touch?"

"Have you forgotten how to ride a bicycle?"

It was the President's turn to laugh. "Ask a stupid question. . ."

"The reflexes are a mite slower, but the gray matter still turns at a hundred percent." The President tossed him the briefcase. "Digest this while I hike a couple of miles on the treadmill."

Hagen wiped his sweating brow with a towel and sat on a stationary bicycle, his bulk threatening to bend the frame. He opened the leather case and didn't look up from reading the contents until the President had walked 1.6 miles.

"What do you think?" the President asked finally.

Hagen shrugged, still reading. "Make a great pilot for a TV show. Closet funding, an impenetrable security veil, covert activity on an immense scale, an undetected moon base. The stuff H. G. Wells would have loved."

"Do you figure it's a hoax?"

"Let's say I want to believe it. What flag-waving taxpayer wouldn't? Makes our intelligence community look like deaf and blind mutants. But if it is a hoax, where's the motive?"

"Other than a grand scheme to defraud the government, I can't think of any."

"Let me finish reading. This last file is in longhand."

"My recollection of what was said on the golf course. Sorry about the chicken scratch, but I never learned to type."

Hagen stared at him questioningly. "You've told no one about this, not even your security council?"

"Perhaps I'm paranoid, but this `Joe' character slipped through my Secret Service cordon like a fox through a barnyard. And he claimed members of the ìnner core' were highly placed at NASA and the Pentagon. It stands to reason they've also penetrated the intelligence agencies and my White House staff as well."

Hagen studied the President's report of the golf course meeting intently, going back occasionally to check the Jersey Colony file. Finally he hoisted his body off the bicycle and sat on a bench, looking at the President.

"This photo blowup of a man sitting next to you in a golf cart. Is that Joe?"

"Yes. When returning to the clubhouse, I spotted a reporter from the Washington Post who had been photographing my golf game through a telescopic lens. I asked him to do me a favor and send an enlargement over to the White House so I could autograph it for my caddy."

"Good thinking." Hagen peered closely at the picture and then set it aside. "What do you want me to do, Vince?"

"Dig out the names of the ìnner core.' "

"Nothing else? No information or evidence on the Jersey Colony project?"

"When I know who they are," the President said in a dead voice, "they'll be rounded up and interrogated. Then we'll see how deep their tentacles reach."

"If you want my opinion, I'd pin a medal on every one of those guys."

"I may just do that," the President replied with a cold smile. "But not before I stop them from kicking off a bloody battle for the moon."

"So it adds up to a presidential cutout situation. You can't trust anyone in normal intelligence circles and you're hiring me to be your private field intelligence agent."

"Yes."

"What's my deadline?"

"The Russian spacecraft is set to land on the moon nine days from now. I need every hour I can steal to prevent a fight between their cosmonauts and our moon colonists that might spread into a space conflict that none of us could stop. The ìnner core' must be convinced to back off. I've got to have them under wraps, Ira, at least twenty-four hours before the Russians touch down."

"Eight days isn't much to find nine men."

The President gave a helpless shrug. "Nothing comes easy."

"A certificate saying I'm your brother-in-law won't be enough to pass me through legal and bureaucratic roadblocks. I'll require a concrete cover."

"I leave it to you to create one. An Alpha Two clearance should get you through most doors."

"Not bad," said Hagen. "The Vice President only carries a Three."

"I'll give you the number of a safe phone line. Report to me day or night. Understood?"

"Understood."

"Questions?"

"Raymond LeBaron, dead or alive?"

"Undecided. The wife refused to identify the body found in the blimp as his. She was right. I asked the FBI director, Sam Emmett, to take possession of the remains from Dade County, Florida. They're over at Walter Reed Army Hospital now, undergoing examination."

"Can I see the county coroner's report?"

The President shook his head in wonderment. "You never miss a trick, do you, Ira?"

"Obviously there had to be one."

"I'll see you get a copy."

"And the lab results at Walter Reed."

"That too."

Hagen stuffed the files back into the briefcase, but left out the photo from the golf course. He studied the images for perhaps the fourth time. "You realize, of course, Raymond LeBaron may never be found."

"I've considered that possibility."

"Nine little Indians. And then there were eight. . . make that seven."

"Seven?"

Hagen held up the photo in front of the President's eyes. "Don't you recognize him?"

"Frankly, no. But he did say we knew each other many years ago." "Our high school baseball team. You played first base. I was left field and Leonard Hudson caught."

"Hudson!" The President gasped incredulously. "Joe is Leo Hudson. But Leo was a fat kid. Weighed at least two hundred pounds."

"He became a health nut. Lost sixty pounds and ran marathons. You were never sentimental about the old gang. I still keep track of them. Don't you remember? Leo was the school brain. Won all sorts of awards for his science projects. Later he graduated with honors at Stanford and became director of the Harvey Pattenden National Physics Laboratory in Oregon. Invented and pioneered rocket and space systems before anyone else was working in the field."

"Bring him in, Ira. Hudson is the key to the others."

"I'll need a shovel."

"You saying he's buried?"

"Like in dead and buried."

"When?"

"Back in 1965. A light-plane crash in the Columbia River."

"Then who is Joe?"

"Leonard Hudson."

"But you said--"

"His body was never found. Convenient, huh?"

"He faked his death," the President said as if beholding a revelation. "The son of a bitch faked his death so he could go underground to ramrod the Jersey Colony project."

"A brilliant idea when you think about it. No one to answer to. No way he could be tied to a clandestine program. Disguise himself as any character who could be used to his advantage. A nonperson can accomplish far more than the average taxpayer whose name, birthmarks, and nasty habits are stored in a thousand computers." There was a silence, then the President's grim voice "Find him, Ira. Find and bring Leonard Hudson to me before all hell breaks loose."

Secretary of State Douglas Oates peered through his reading glasses at the last page of a thirty-page letter. He closely examined the structure of each paragraph, trying to read between the lines. At last he looked up at his deputy secretary, Victor Wykoff.

"Looks genuine to me."

"Our experts on the subject think so too," said Wykoff. "The semantics, the rambling flow, the disjointed sentences, all fit the usual pattern."

"No denying it sounds like Fidel all right," Oates said quietly. "However, it's the tone of the letter that bothers me. You almost get the impression he's begging."

"I don't think so. More like he's trying to stress utmost secrecy with a healthy dose of urgency thrown in."

"The consequences of his proposal are staggering."

"My staff has studied it from every angle," said Wykoff. "Castro has nothing to gain from creating a hoax."

"You say he went through devious lengths to get the document into our hands." Wykoff nodded. "Crazy as it sounds, the two couriers, who delivered it to our field office in Miami, claim they sneaked from Cuba to the United States on board a blimp."

<<12>>

The barren mountains and the shadowy ridges on the moon's craters leaped out at Anastas Rykov as he peered through the twin lenses of a stereoscope. Beneath the eyes of the Soviet geophysicist the desolate lunar landscape unreeled in three dimensions and vivid color. Taken from thirty-four miles up, the details were strikingly sharp. Solitary pebbles, measuring less than one inch across, were visually distinct. Rykov lay face downward on a pad, studying the photographic montage that slowly rolled beneath to the stereoscope on two wide reels. The process was similar to a motion picture director editing film, only more comfortable. His hand rested on a small control unit that could stop the reels and magnify whatever area he was scrutinizing. The images had been received from sophisticated devices on a Russian spacecraft that had circumnavigated the moon. Mirrorlike scanners reflected the lunar surface into a prism that broke it down into spectrum wavelengths that were digitized into 263 different shades of gray, black beginning at 263 and fading to white at zero. Next, the spacecraft's computer converted them into a quiltwork of picture elements on high-density tape. After the data was retrieved from the orbiting spacecraft, it was printed in black-and-white on a negative by laser and filtered with blue, red, and green wavelengths. Then it was computer enhanced in color on two continuous sheets of photographic paper that were overlapped for stereoscopic interpretation.

Rykov raised his glasses and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was 11:57 PM. He'd been analyzing the peaks and valleys of the moon with only a few catnaps for nine days and nights. He readjusted his glasses and ran both hands through a dense carpet of oily black hair, dully realizing he hadn't bathed or changed his clothes since beginning the project.

He shook away the exhaustion and dutifully returned to his work, examining a small area on the far side of the moon that was volcanic in origin. Only two inches of the photo roll remained before it mysteriously ended. He had not been informed by his superiors of the reason for the sudden cutoff, but assumed it was a malfunction of the scanning gear. The surface was pockmarked and wrinkled, like pimpled skin under a strong magnifying glass, and appeared more beechnut brown than gray in color. The steady bombardment of meteorites through the ages had left crater gouged on crater, scar crossing scar.

Rykov almost missed it. His eyes detected an unnatural oddity, but his tired mind nearly ignored the signal. Wearily he backed the image and magnified a grid on the edge of a steep ridge soaring from the floor of a small crater. Three tiny objects came into crisp focus.

What he saw was unbelievable. Rykov pulled back from the stereoscope and took a deep breath, clearing the creeping fog from his brain. Then he looked again. They were still there, but one object was a rock. The other two were human figures. Rykov was transfixed by what he saw. Then the shock set in and his hands began to tremble and his stomach felt as though it had been twisted in a knot. Shaken, he climbed off the pad, walked over to a desk, and opened a small booklet containing private phone numbers of the Soviet Military Space Command. He misdialed twice before he connected with the correct number.

A voice slurred from vodka answered. "What is it?"

"General Maxim Yasenin?"

"Yes, who's this?"

"We've never met. My name is Anastas Rykov. I'm a geophysicist on the Cosmos Lunar Project."

The commander of Soviet military space missions made no attempt to hide his irritation over Rykov's intrusion on his privacy. "Why in hell are you calling me this time of night?"

Rykov fully realized he was overstepping his bounds, but he didn't hesitate. "While analyzing pictures taken by Selenos 4, I've stumbled on something that defies belief. I thought you should be first to be informed."

"Are you drunk, Rykov?"

"No, General. Tired but Siberian sober."

"Unless you are a complete fool, you must know you are in deep trouble for going over the heads of your superiors."

"This is too important to share with anyone beneath your level of authority."

"Sleep on it and you won't be so brash in the morning," said Yasenin. "I'll do you a favor and forget the whole matter. Goodnight."

"Wait!" Rykov demanded, throwing caution aside. "If you dismiss my call, I will have no choice but to turn my discovery over to Vladimir Polevoi." Rykov's statement was greeted by an icy silence. Finally Yasenin said, "What makes you think the chief of state security would listen to a crazy man?"

"When he checked my dossier, he would find I am a respected party member and a scientist who is far from lunacy."

"Oh?" Yasenin asked, his irritation turning to curiosity. He decided to pin Rykov down. "All right. I'll hear you out. What's so vital to the interest of Mother Russia that it can't go through prescribed channels?"

Rykov spoke very calmly. "I have proof that someone is on the moon." Forty-five minutes later, General Yasenin strode into the photo analysis laboratory of the Geophysical Space Center. Big, beefy, and red of face, he wore a rumpled uniform that was ablaze with decorations. The hair was smoke-gray, the eyes steady and hard. He walked quietly, his head thrust out as if stalking a prey.

"You Rykov?" he asked without prelude.

"Yes," Rykov said simply but firmly.

They stared at each other a moment, neither making any attempt at shaking hands. Finally, Rykov cleared his throat and motioned toward the stereoscope.

"This way, General," he said. "Please lie prone on the leather cushion and look through the eyepiece."

As Yasenin positioned himself over the photo montage he asked, "What am I searching for?"

"Focus on the small area I've circled," replied Rykov.

The general adjusted the lenses to his vision and peered downward, his face impassive. After a full minute, he looked up strangely, then bent over the stereoscope again. At last he slowly rose and stared at Rykov, eyes stark in open astonishment.

"This is not a photographic trick?" he asked dumbly.

"No, General. What you see is real. Two human forms, wearing encapsulated suits, are aiming some sort of device at Selenos 4."

Yasenin's mind could not accept what his eyes saw to be true. "It's not impossible. Where do they come from?"

Rykov shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. If they're not United States astronauts, they can only be aliens."

"I do not believe in supernatural fairy tales."

"But how could the Americans launch men to the moon without the event leaking to the world news media or our intelligence people?"

"Suppose they left men behind and stockpiled material during the Apollo program. Such an effort might be possible."

"Their last known lunar landing was by Apollo 17 in 1972," Rykov recalled. "No human could survive the harsh lunar conditions for seventeen years without being resupplied."

"I can think of no one else," Yasenin insisted.

He returned to the stereoscope and intently studied the human forms standing in the crater. The sun's glare was coming from the right, throwing their shadows to the left. Their suits were white, and he could make out the dark green viewports on the helmets. They were of a design unfamiliar to him. Yasenin could clearly distinguish footprints leading into a pitch-black shadow cast by the crater's rim.

"I know what you're looking for, General," said Rykov, "but I've already examined the landscape on the floor of the crater and cannot find any sign of their spacecraft."

"Perhaps they climbed down from the top?"

"That's a sheer drop of over a thousand feet."

"I'm at a loss to explain any of this," Yasenin admitted quietly.

"Please look closely at the device they're both holding and pointing at Selenos 4. It seems to be a large camera with an extremely long telephoto lens."

"No," said Yasenin. "You're treading in my territory now. Not a camera but a weapon."

"A laser?"

"Nothing so advanced. Strikes me as a hand-held surface-to-air missile system of American manufacture. A Lariat type 40, I should say. Homes in with a guidance beam, ten-mile range on earth, probably much more in the moon's rarefied atmosphere. Became operational with NATO forces about six years ago. So much for your alien theory." Rykov was awed. "Every ounce of weight is precious in space flight. Why carry something so heavy and useless as a rocket launcher?"

"The men in the crater found a purpose. They used it against Selenos 4." Rykov thought a moment. "That would explain why the scanners stopped operating a minute later. They were damaged

"By a hit from a rocket," Yasenin finished.

"We were fortunate the scanners finally relayed the digitized data before it crashed."

"A pity the crew were not so lucky."

Rykov stared at the general, not sure he'd heard right. "Selenos 4 was unmanned." Yasenin pulled a slim gold case from his coat, selected a cigarette, and lit it with a lighter embedded in the top. Then he slid the case back into a breast pocket.

"Yes, of course, Selenos 4 was unmanned."

"But you said

Yasenin smiled coldly. "I said nothing."

The message was clear. Rykov valued his position too much to pursue the subject. He simply nodded.

"Do you wish a report on what we've seen here tonight?" Rykov asked.

"The original, no copies, on my desk by ten o'clock tomorrow. And, Rykov, consider this a state secret of the highest priority."

"I will confide in no one but you, General."

"Good man. There may be party honor in this for you."

Rykov wasn't going to hold his breath waiting for the award, yet he could not suppress a glow of pride in his work.

Yasenin returned to the stereoscope, drawn to the image of the intruders on the moon.

"So the fabled star wars have begun," he murmured to himself. "And the Americans have launched the first blow."

<<13>>

Pitt rejected any thought of lunch, and opened one of several granola bars he kept in his desk. Fumbling with the wrapper, held over a wastebasket to catch the crumbs, he kept his concentration locked on a large nautical chart spread across the desk. The chart's tendency to curl was held down by a memo pad and two books on historic shipwrecks that were opened to chapters on the Cyclops. The chart covered a large area of the Old Bahama Channel, flanked on the south by the Archipelago de Camaguey, a group of scattered islands off the coast of Cuba, and the shallow waters of the Great Bahama Bank to the north. The upper left corner of the chart took in the Cay Sal Bank, whose southeastern tip included the Anguilla Cays.

He sat back and took a bite out of the granola bar. Then he bent over the chart again, sharpened a pencil, and picked up a pair of dividers. Setting the needle tips of the dividers on the scale printed on the bottom of the chart, he measured off twenty nautical miles and carefully marked the distance from the tip of the Anguilla Cays with a penciled dot. Next, he described a short arc another fifty miles to the southeast. He labeled the top dot Crogan Castle and the lower arc Cyclops with a question mark.

Somewhere above the arc is where the Cyclops sank, he reasoned. A logical assumption given the fact of the lumber freighter's position at the time of her distress signal and the Cyclops' distance as given in her reply.

The only problem was that Raymond LeBaron's piece of the puzzle didn't fit. From his experience in searching for shipwrecks, Pitt was convinced LeBaron had performed the same exercise a hundred times, only delving deeper into currents, known weather conditions at the time of the loss, and the projected speed of the Navy collier. But one conclusion always came out the same. The Cyclops should have gone down in the middle of the channel under 260 fathoms of water, over 1,500 feet to the bottom. Far too deep to be visible to anything other than a fish.

Pitt relaxed in his chair and stared at the markings on the chart. Unless LeBaron dredged up information nobody else knew about, what was he searching for? Certainly not the Cyclops, and certainly not from a blimp. A side-scan survey from a surface craft or a deepdiving submersible would have been better suited for the job. In addition, the prime search area was only twenty miles off Cuba. Hardly a comfortable place to cruise around in a slow-flying gas bag. Castro's gunboats would have declared open season on such an easy target.

He was sitting lost in contemplation, nibbling on the granola bar, trying to see a probability in Raymond LeBaron's scheme that he had missed, when his desk speaker beeped. He pressed the Talk switch.

"Yes?"

"Sandecker. Can you come up to my office?"

"Five minutes, Admiral."

"Try for two."

Admiral James Sandecker was the director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency. A man in his late fifties, he was of short stature, his body thin and stringy but hard as armor plating. The straight hair and Vandyke beard were blaze red. A fitness freak, he adhered to a strict exercise regimen. His naval career was distinguished more by hard-nosed efficiency than sea combat tactics. And though he wasn't popular in Washington social circles, politicians respected him for his integrity and organizational ability.

The admiral greeted Pitt's entry into his office with nothing more than a curt nod, then gestured to a woman sitting in a leather chair across the room.

"Dirk, I understand you've met Mrs. Jessie LeBaron."

She looked up and smiled, but it was an ingratiating smile. Pitt bowed slightly and pressed her hand.

"Sorry," he said indifferently. "I'd rather forget I know Mrs. LeBaron." Sandecker's eyebrows pinched together. "Am I missing something?"

"My fault," said Jessie, staring into Pitt's eyes but seeing only green ice. "I was very rude to Mr. Pitt last night. I hope he accepts my apology and forgives my bad manners."

"You needn't act so formal, Mrs. LeBaron. Since we're old pals, I won't throw a tantrum if you call me Dirk. As to forgiving you, how much is it going to cost me?"

"My intent was to hire you," she replied, ignoring the gibe. He gave Sandecker a bemused look. "Strange, I had this funny idea I worked for NUMA."

"Admiral Sandecker has kindly consented to release you for a few days, providing, of course, you're agreeable," she added.

"To do what?"

"To look for my husband."

"No deal."

"May I ask why?"

"I have other projects."

"You won't work for me because I'm a woman. Is that it?"

"Sex has no bearing on my decision. Let's just say I don't work for someone I can't respect."

There was an embarrassed silence. Pitt looked at the admiral. The lips were turned down in a grimace, but the eyes fairly twinkled. The old bastard was enjoying this, he thought.

"You've misjudged me, Dirk." Jessie's face was flushed in confusion, but her eyes were hard as crystal.

"Please." Sandecker raised both hands. "Let's call a truce. I suggest you two get together some evening and have it out over dinner."

Pitt and Jessie stared at each other for a long moment. Then Pitt's mouth slowly spread in a wide infectious smile. "I'm willing, providing I pay." Despite herself Jessie had to smile too. "Allow me some self-respect. Let's split the bill?"

"Done."

"Now we can get on with the business at hand," Sandecker said in his no-nonsense way. "Before you arrived, Dirk, we were discussing theories on Mr. LeBaron's disappearance."

Pitt looked at Jessie. "There is no doubt in your mind that the bodies in the blimp were not those of Mr. LeBaron and his crew?"

Jessie shook her head. "None."

"I saw them. There wasn't much left to identify."

"The corpse lying in the morgue was more muscular than Raymond," explained Jessie.

"Also, he'd been wearing an imitation of a Cartier wristwatch. One of those cheap replicas made in Taiwan. I'd given my husband an expensive original on our first anniversary."

"I've made a few calls on my own," added Sandecker. "The Miami coroner backed Jessie's judgment. Physical characteristics of the bodies in the morgue didn't match the three men who took off in the Prosperteer."

Pitt looked from Sandecker to Jessie LeBaron, realizing he was getting involved in something he had wished to avoid--the emotional entanglements complicating any project that depended on solid research, practical engineering, and razor-sharp organization.

"Bodies and clothes switched," said Pitt. "Personal jewelry replaced with fakes. Any thoughts on a motive, Mrs. LeBaron?"

"I don't know what to think."

"Did you know that between the time the blimp vanished and when it reappeared in Key Biscayne the gas bags inside the hull would have had to be reinflated with helium?" She opened her purse, took out a Kleenex, and daintily dabbed at her nose, to give her something to do with her hands. "After the police released the Prosperteer, my husband's crew chief inspected every inch of her. I have his report, if you care to see it. You're very perceptive. He found that the gas bags had been refilled. Not with helium, but with hydrogen."

Pitt looked up in surprise. "Hydrogen? That hasn't been used in airships since the Hindenburg burned."

"Not to worry," said Sandecker. "The Prosperteer's gas bags have been refilled with helium."

"So what's going down?" Pitt asked cautiously.

Sandecker gave him a hard look. "I hear you want to go after the Cyclops."

"It's no secret," answered Pitt.

"You'd have to do it on your own time without NUMA personnel and equipment. Congress would eat me alive if they learned I sanctioned a treasure hunt with government funds."

"I'm aware of that."

"Will you listen to another proposal?"

"I'll listen."

"I'm not going to hand you a lot of double-talk about doing me a great service by keeping this conversation to yourself. If it gets out I go down the drain, but that's my problem. True?"

"If you say so, yes."

"You were scheduled to direct a survey of the sea floor in the Bering Sea off the Aleutians next month. I'll bring in Jack Harris from the deep-ocean mining project to replace you. To head off any questions or later investigations or bureaucratic wrongdoing, we'll sever your connections with NUMA. As of now, you're on leave of absence until you find Raymond LeBaron."

"Find Raymond LeBaron," Pitt repeated sarcastically. "A piece of cake. The trail is two weeks cold and getting colder by the hour. No motive, no leads, not one clue to why he vanished, who did it, and how. Impossible is an understatement."

"Will you at least give it a try?" asked Sandecker.

Pitt stared at the teakwood planking that made up the floor of the admiral's office, his eyes seeing a tropical sea two thousand miles away. He disliked becoming linked with a riddle without being able to calculate at the very least an approximate solution. He knew Sandecker knew that he would accept the challenge. Chasing after an unknown over the next horizon was a lure Pitt could never resist.

"If I take this on, I'd need NUMA's best scientific team to man a first-rate research vessel. The resources and political clout to back me up. Military support in case of trouble."

"Dirk, my hands are tied. I can offer you nothing."

"What?"

"You heard me. The situation requires the search be conducted as quietly as possible. You'll have to make do without any help from NUMA."

"Have you got both oars in the water?" Pitt demanded. "You expect me, one man working alone, to accomplish what half the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard failed to do? Why, hell, they couldn't find a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot airship until it showed up on its own. What am I supposed to use, a dowser and a canoe?"

"The idea," Sandecker explained patiently, "is to fly LeBaron's last known course in the Prosperteer."

Pitt slowly sank into an office sofa. "This is the craziest scheme I've ever heard," he said, unbelieving. He turned to Jessie. "Do you go along with this?"

"I'll do whatever it takes to find my husband," she said evenly.

"A cuckoo's nest," Pitt said gravely. He stood and began to pace the room, clasping and unclasping his hands. "Why the secrecy? Your husband was an important man, a celebrity, a confidant of the rich and famous, closely connected with high government officials, a financial guru to executives of major corporations. Why in God's name am I the only man in the country who can search for him?"

"Dirk," Sandecker said softly. "Raymond LeBaron's financial empire touches hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, it's hanging in limbo because he's still among the missing. It can't be proven whether he's alive or dead. The government has called off any further hunt, because over five million dollars have been spent by military search and rescue teams without a sighting, without a hint of where he might have disappeared. Budget-conscious congressmen will howl for scalps if more government money is spent on another fruitless effort."

"What about the private sector and LeBaron's own business associates?"

"Many business leaders respected LeBaron, but at one time or another most of them were burned by him in his editorials. They won't spend a dime or go out of their way to look for him. As to the men around him, they have more to gain by his death."

"So does Jessie here," said Pitt, gazing at her.

She smiled thinly. "I can't deny it. But the bulk of his estate goes to charities and other family members. I do, however, receive a substantial inheritance."

"You must own a yacht, Mrs. LeBaron. Why don't you assemble your own crew of investigators and look for your husband?"

"There are reasons, Dirk, why I can't conduct a large publicized effort. Reasons you needn't know. The admiral and I think there is a chance, a very slight chance, that three people can quietly retrace the flight of the Prosperteer under the same conditions and discover what happened to Raymond."

"Why bother?" asked Pitt. "All islands and reefs within the blimp's fuel range were covered by the initial search. I'd only be covering the same trail."

"They might have missed something."

"Like maybe Cuba?"

Sandecker shook his head. "Castro would have claimed LeBaron overflew Cuban territory under instructions from the CIA and flaunted the blimp's capture to the world. No, there has to be another answer."

Pitt walked over to the corner windows and gazed longingly down at a fleet of small sailboats that were holding a regatta on the Anacostia River. The white sails gleamed against the dark green water as they raced toward the buoy markers.

"How do we know where to concentrate?" he asked without turning. "We're looking at a search grid as large as a thousand square miles. It would take weeks to cover it properly."

"I have all my husband's records and charts," said Jessie.

"He left them behind?"

"No, they were found in the blimp."

Pitt silently watched the sailboats, his arms crossed in front of him. He tried to probe the motives, penetrate the intrigue, lay out the safeguards. He tried to segregate each into an orderly niche.

"When do we go?" he asked finally.

"Sunrise tomorrow morning," Sandecker replied.

"You both still insist I lead the fishing expedition?"

"We do," Jessie said flatly.

"I want two old hands for my crew. They're both on NUMAs payroll. Either I get them or I'll walk."

Sandecker's face clouded. "I've already explained=

"You've got the moon, Admiral, and you're asking for Mars. We've been friends long enough for you to know I don't operate on a halfassed basis. Put the two men I need on leaves of absence too. I don't care how you do it."

Sandecker wasn't angry, wasn't even annoyed. If there was one man in the country who could pull off the unthinkable, it was Pitt. The admiral had no more cards to play, so he folded.

"All right," he said quietly. "You've got them."

"There's one more thing."

"Which is?" Sandecker demanded.

Pitt turned around with a bleak smile. His gaze went from Jessie to the admiral. Then he shrugged and said, "I've never flown a blimp."

<<14>>

"Appears to me you're making an end run behind my back," said Sam Emmett, the outspoken chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The President looked across his desk in the Oval Office and smiled benignly. "You're absolutely right, Sam. I'm doing exactly that."

"I give you credit for laying it on the line."

"Don't get upset, Sam. This in no way reflects any displeasure with you or the FBI."

"Then why can't you tell me what this is all about?" Emmett asked, holding his indignation in check.

"In the first place, it's primarily a foreign affairs matter."

"Has Martin Brogan at CIA been consulted?"

"Martin has not been called in. You have my word on it."

"And in the second place?"

The President was not about to be pushed. "That's my business." Emmett stiffened. "If the President wishes my resignation--"

"I don't wish anything of the sort," the President cut in. "You're the ablest and bestqualified man to head up the bureau. You've done a magnificent job, and I've always been one of your biggest boosters. However, if you want to pick up your marbles and go home because you think your vanity has been dented, then go right ahead. Prove me wrong about you."

"But if you don't trust=

"Wait just a damned minute, Sam. Let's not say anything we'll be sorry about tomorrow. I'm not questioning your loyalty or integrity. No one is stabbing you in the back. We aren't talking crime or espionage. This matter doesn't directly concern the FBI or any of the intelligence agencies. The bottom line is that it's you who has to trust me, at least for the next week. Will you do that?"

Emmett's ego was temporarily soothed. He shrugged and then relented. "You win, Mr. President. Status quo. I'll follow your lead."

The President sighed heavily. "I promise I won't let you down, Sam."

"I appreciate that."

"Good. Now let's start at the beginning. What have you got on the dead bodies from Florida?"

The tight uneasiness went out of Emmett's expression, and he noticeably relaxed. He opened his attaché case and handed the President a leather-bound folder.

"Here is a detailed report from the Walter Reed pathology lab. Their examination was most helpful in giving us a lead for identification."

The President looked at him in surprise. "You identified them?"

"It was the analysis of the borscht paste that opened the door."

"Borscht what?"

"You recall that the Dade County coroner fixed death by hypothermia, or freezing?"

"Yes."

Yes."

"Well, borscht paste is a god-awful food supplement given to Russian cosmonauts. The stomachs of the three corpses were loaded with the stuff."

"You're telling me that Raymond LeBaron and his crew were exchanged for three dead Soviet cosmonauts?"

Emmett nodded. "We were even able to put a name on them through a defector, a former flight surgeon with the Russian space program. He'd examined each of them on several occasions."

"When did he defect?"

"He came over to our side in August of '87."

"A little over two years ago."

"That's correct," Emmett acknowledged. "The names of the cosmonauts found in LeBaron's blimp are Sergei Zochenko, Alexander Yudenich, and Ivan Ronsky. Yudenich was a rookie, but Zochenko and Ronsky were both veterans with two space flights apiece."

"I'd give my next year's salary to know how they came to be inside that damned blimp."

"Regrettably, we turned up nothing concerning that part of the mystery. At the moment, the only Russians circling the earth are four cosmonauts on board the Salyut 9

space station. But the NASA people, who are monitoring the flight, say they're all in good health."

The President nodded. "So that eliminates any Soviet cosmonaut on a space flight and leaves only those on the ground."

"That's the odd twist," Emmett continued. "According to the forensic pathology people at Walter Reed, the three men they examined probably froze to death while in space." The President's eyebrows raised. "Can they prove it?"

"No, but they say several factors point in that direction, starting with the borscht paste and the analysis of other condensed foods the Soviets are known to consume during space travel. Also evident were physiological signs the men had breathed air of a high oxygen constant and spent considerable time in a weightless environment."

"Wouldn't be the first time the Soviets have launched men into space and failed to retrieve them. They could have been up there for years, and fell to earth only a few weeks ago after their orbit decayed."

"I'm only aware of two instances where the Soviets suffered fatalities," said Emmett.

"The cosmonaut whose craft became tangled in the shrouds of its reentry parachute and slammed into Siberia at five hundred miles an hour. And the three Soyuz crewmen who died after a faulty hatch leaked away their oxygen."

"The disasters they couldn't cover up," said the President. "The CIA has recorded at least thirty cosmonaut deaths since the beginning of their space missions. Nine of them are still up there, drifting around in space. We can't advertise the fact on our end because it would jeopardize our intelligence sources."

"We-know-but-they-don't-know-we-know kind of affair."

"Precisely."

"Which brings us back to the three cosmonauts we've got lying here in Washington," said Emmett, clutching his briefcase on his lap.

"And a hundred questions, beginning with, Where did they come from?"

"I did some checking with the Aerospace Defense Command Center. Their technicians say the only spacecraft the Russians have sent aloft large enough to support a manned crew--besides their orbiting station shuttles--were the Selenos lunar probes." At the word "lunar" something clicked in the President's mind. "What about the Selenos probes?"

"Three went up and none came back. The Defense Command boys thought it highly unusual for the Soviets to screw-up three times in a row on simple moon orbiting flights."

"You think they were manned?"

"I do indeed," said Emmett. "The Soviets wallow in deception. As you suggested, they almost never admit to a space failure. And keeping the buildup for their coming moon landing clouded in secrecy was strictly routine."

"Okay, if we accept the theory the three bodies came from one of the Selenos spacecraft, where did it land? Certainly not through their normal reentry path over the steppes of Kazakhstan."

"My guess is somewhere in or around Cuba."

"Cuba." The President slowly rolled the two syllables from his lips. Then he shook his head. "The Russians would never allow their national heroes, living or dead, to be used for some kind of crazy intelligence scheme."

"Maybe they don't know"

The President looked at Emmett. "Don't know?"

"Let's say for the sake of argument that their spacecraft had a malfunction and fell in or near Cuba during reentry. About the same time, Raymond LeBaron and his blimp show up searching for a treasure ship and are captured. Then, for some unfathomable reason, the Cubans switch the cosmonauts' bodies for LeBaron and his crew and send the blimp back to Florida."

"Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?"

Emmett laughed. "Of course, but considering the known facts, it's the best I can come up with."

The President leaned back and stared at the ornate ceiling. "You know, you just might have struck a vein."

A quizzical look crossed Emmett's face. "How so?"

"Try this on for size. Suppose, just suppose, Fidel Castro is trying to tell us something."

"He picked a strange way to send out a signal."

The President picked up a pen and began doodling on a pad. "Fidel has never been a stickler for diplomatic niceties."

"Do you want me to continue the investigation?" Emmett asked.

"No," the President answered tersely.

"You still insist on keeping the bureau in the dark?"

"This is not a domestic matter for the justice Department, Sam. I'm grateful for your help, but you've taken it about as far as you can go."

Emmett snapped his attaché case shut and rose to his feet. "Can I ask a touchy question?"

"Shoot."

"Now that we've established a link, regardless of how weak, to a possible abduction of Raymond LeBaron by the Cubans, why is the

President of the United States keeping it to himself and forbidding his investigative agencies to follow up?"

"A good question, Sam. Perhaps in a few days we'll both know the answer." Moments after Emmett left the Oval Office, the President turned in his swivel chair and stared out the window. His mouth went dry and sweat soaked his armpits. He was gripped by foreboding that there was a tie between the Jersey Colony and the Soviet lunar probe disasters.

<<15>>

Ira Hagen stopped his rental car at the security gate and displayed a government ID

card. The guard made a phone call to the visitors center of the Harvey Pattenden National Physics Laboratory, then waved Hagen through.

He drove up the drive and found an empty space in a sprawling parking lot crowded by a sea of multicolored cars. The grounds surrounding the laboratory were landscaped with clusters of pine trees and moss rock planted amid rolling mounds of grass. The building was typical of tech centers that had mushroomed around the country. Contemporary architecture with heavy use of bronze glass and brick walls curving at the corners. An attractive receptionist, sitting behind a horseshoe-shaped desk, looked up and smiled as he walked through the lobby. "May I help you?"

"Thomas judge to see Dr. Mooney."

She went through the phone routine again and nodded. "Yes, Mr. Judge. Please enter the security center to my rear. They'll direct you from there."

"Before I go in, can I borrow your men's room?"

"Certainly," she said, pointing. "The door on the right beneath the mural." Hagen thanked her and passed under a massive painting of a futuristic starship soaring between a pair of spectral blue-green planets. He went into a stall, closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. Opening a briefcase, he removed a yellow legal pad and turned to the middle. Then, writing on the upper back of the page, he made a series of tiny cryptic notes and diagrams on the security systems he'd observed since entering the building. A good undercover operative would never put anything down on paper, but Hagen could afford to run fast and loose, knowing the President would bail him out if his cover was blown.

A few minutes later he strolled out of the restroom and entered a glass-enclosed room manned by four uniformed security guards, who eyeballed an array of twenty television monitors mounted against one wall. One of the guards rose from a console and approached the counter.

"Sir?"

"I have an appointment with Dr. Mooney."

The guard scanned a visitor list. "Yes, sir, you must be Thomas Judge. May I see some identification, please?"

Hagen showed him his driver's license and government ID. Then he was politely asked to open the briefcase. After a cursory search the guard silently gestured for Hagen to close it, asked him to sign a "time in and out" sheet, and gave him a plastic badge to clip on his breast pocket.

"Dr. Mooney's office is straight down the corridor through the double doors at the end."

In the corridor, Hagen paused to put on his reading glasses and peer at two bronze plaques on the wall. Each bore the raised profile of a man. One was dedicated to Dr. Harvey Pattenden, founder of the laboratory, and gave a brief description of his accomplishments in the field of physics. But it was the other plaque that intriqued Hagen. It read:

In memory of

Dr. Leonard Hudson

1926-1965

Whose creative genius is an

inspiration for all who follow.

Not very original, Hagen thought. But he had to give Hudson credit for playing the dead-man game down to the last detail.

He entered the anteroom and smiled warmly at the secretary, a demure older woman in a mannish navy-blue suit. "Mr. Judge," she said, "please go right in. Dr. Mooney is expecting you."

"Thank YOU."

Earl J. Mooney was thirty-six, younger than Hagen had expected when he studied a file on the doctor's history. His background was surprisingly similar to Hudson's--same brilliant mind, same high academic record, even the same university. A fat kid who went thin and became director of Pattenden Lab. He stared through pine-green eyes under thunderous eyebrows and above a Pancho Villa moustache. Dressed casually in a white sweater and blue jeans, he seemed remote from intellectual rigor.

He came from behind the desk, scattered with papers, notebooks, and empty Pepsi bottles, and pumped Hagen's hand. "Sit down, Mr. Judge, and tell me what I can do for you."

Hagen lowered his bulk into a straight-back chair and said, "As I mentioned over the phone, I'm with the General Accounting Office, and we've had a legislative request to review your accounting systems and audit research funding expenditures."

"Who was the legislator who made the request?"

"Senator Henry Kaltenbach."

"I hope he doesn't think Pattenden Lab is mixed up in fraud," said Mooney defensively.

"Not at all. You know the senator's reputation for smelling out misuse in government funding. His witch-hunts make good publicity for his election campaign. Just between you and me, there're many of us at GAO who wish he'd fall through an open manhole and stop sending us out chasing moonbeams. However, I must admit in all fairness to the senator, we have turned up discrepancies at other think tanks." Mooney was quick to correct him. "We prefer to think of ourselves as a research facility."

"Of course. Anyway, we're making spot checks."

"You must understand, our work here is highly classified."

"The design of nuclear rocketry and third-generation nuclear weapons whose power is focused into narrow radiation beams that travel at the speed of light and can destroy targets deep in space."

Mooney looked at Hagen queerly. "You're very well informed." Hagen shrugged it off. "A very general description given to me by my superior. I'm an accountant, Doctor, not a physicist. My mind can't function in the abstract. I flunked high school calculus. Your secrets are safe. My job is to help see the taxpayer gets his money's worth out of government-funded programs."

"How can I help you?"

"I'd like to talk to your controller and administration officials. Also, the staff that handles the financial records. My auditing team will arrive from Washington in two weeks. I'd appreciate it if we could set up someplace out of your way, preferably close to where the records are kept."

"You'll have our fullest cooperation. Naturally, I must have security clearances for you and your team."

"Naturally."

"I'll take you around personally and introduce you to our controller and accounting staff."

"One more thing," said Hagen. "Do you permit after-hours work?" Mooney smiled. "Unlike nine-to-five office people, physicists and engineers have no set hours. Many of us work around the clock. I've often put in thirty hours at a stretch. It also helps to stagger the time on our computers."

"Would it be possible for me to do a little preliminary checking from now until, say, about ten o'clock this evening?"

"I don't see why not," Mooney said agreeably. "We have an all night cafeteria on the lower level if you want to grab a bite. And a security guard is always nearby to point out directions."

"And keep me out of the secret areas." Hagen laughed.

"I'm sure you're familiar with facility security."

"True," Hagen admitted. "I'd be a rich man if I had a dime for every hour I put in auditing different departments of the Pentagon."

"If you'll come this way," said Mooney, heading for the door.

"Just out of curiosity," Hagen said, remaining in his chair. "I've heard of Harvey Pattenden. He worked with Robert Goddard, I believe."

"Yes, Dr. Pattenden invented several of our early rocket engines."

"But Leonard Hudson is unfamiliar to me."

"A pretty bright guy," said Mooney. "He paved the way by design engineering most of our spacecraft years before they were actually built and sent aloft. If he hadn't died in his prime, there's no telling what he might have achieved."

"How did he die?"

"Light-plane crash. He was flying to a seminar in Seattle with Dr. Gunnar Eriksen when their plane exploded in midair and dropped into the Columbia River."

"Who was Eriksen?"

"A heavy thinker. Perhaps the most brilliant astrophysicist the country ever produced." A tiny alarm went off in Hagen's mind. "Did he have any particular pursuit?"

"Yes, it was geolunar synoptic morphology for industrialized peoplement."

"Could you translate?"

"Of course." Mooney laughed. "Eriksen was obsessed with the idea of building a colony on the moon."

<<16>>

Ten hours ahead in time, 2 A.M. in Moscow, four men were grouped around a fireplace that warmed a small sitting room inside the Kremlin. The room was poorly lit and had a morbid feel about it. Cigarette smoke mingled with that of a single cigar. Soviet President Georgi Antonov stared thoughtfully at the undulating flames. He had removed his coat after a light dinner and replaced it with an old fisherman's sweater. His shoes were off and his stocking feet casually propped on an embroidered ottoman. Vladimir Polevoi, head of the Committee for State Security, and Sergei Kornilov, chief of the Soviet space program, wore dark wool suits, custom-tailored in London, while General Yasenin sat in full bemedaled uniform.

Polevoi threw the report and photographs on a low table and shook his head in amazement. "I don't see how they accomplished it without a breach of secrecy"

"Such an extraordinary advance seems inconceivable," Kornilov agreed. "I won't believe it until I see more proof"

"The proof is evident in the photographs," said Yasenin. "Rykov's report leaves no room for doubt. Study the detail. The two figures standing on the moon are real. They're not an illusion cast by shadows or created by a flaw in the scanning system. They exist."

"The space suits do not match those of American astronauts," Kornilov retorted. "The helmets are also designed differently."

"I won't argue over trivials," said Yasenin. "But there is no mistaking the weapon in their hands. I can positively identify it as a surface-to-air missile launcher of American manufacture."

"Then where is their spacecraft?" Kornilov persisted. "Where is their lunar rover? They couldn't just materialize out of nowhere."

"I share your doubts," said Polevoi. "An absolute impossibility for the Americans to put men and supplies on the moon without our intelligence network monitoring the progress. Our tracking stations would have detected any strange movement entering or coming from space."

"Even stranger yet," said Antonov, "is why the Americans have never announced such a momentous achievement. What do they gain by keeping it a secret?" Kornilov gave a slight nod. "All the more reason to challenge Rykov's report."

"You're all overlooking one important fact," said Yasenin in a level tone. "Selenos 4

went missing immediately after its scanners recorded the figures in the photographs. I say our space probe was damaged by rocket fire which penetrated the hull, drained away the capsule's pressure, and killed our cosmonauts."

Polevoi looked at him, startled. "What cosmonauts?"

Yasenin and Kornilov exchanged bemused looks. "There are some things even the KGB doesn't know," said the general.

Polevoi looked squarely at Kornilov, "Selenos 4 was a manned probe?"

"As were Selenos 5 and 6. Each craft carried three men." He turned to Antonov, who was calmly puffing on a Havana cigar. "You knew about this?"

Antonov nodded. "Yes, I was briefed. But you must remember, Vladimir, not all matters concerning space fall under state security."

"None of you wasted any time running to me when your precious moon probe fell and vanished in the West Indies," Polevoi said angrily.

"An unforeseen circumstance," Yasenin patiently explained. "After its return from the moon, control could not be established for Selenos 4's earth reentry. The engineers at our space command wrote it off as a dead lunar probe. After orbiting for nearly a year and a half, another attempt was made to establish command. This time the guidance systems responded, but the reentry maneuver was only partially successful. Selenos 4 fell ten thousand miles short of its touchdown area. It was imperative we keep the deaths of our cosmonaut heroes secret. Naturally the services of the KGB were required."

"How many lost cosmonauts does that make?" asked Polevoi.

"Sacrifices must be made to ensure Soviet destiny," Antonov murmured philosophically.

"And to cover up blunders in our space program," Polevoi said bitterly.

"Let's not argue," cautioned Antonov. "Selenos 4 made a great contribution before it impacted in the Caribbean Sea."

"Where it has yet to be found," Polevoi added.

"True," said Yasenin. "But we retrieved the lunar surface data. That was the main purpose of the mission."

"Don't you think American space surveillance systems tracked its descent and pinpointed the landing position? If they had set their minds on salvaging Selenos 4, they'd already have it sitting hidden away inside a secure facility"

"Of course they tracked the descent trajectory," said Yasenin. "But their intelligence analysts had no reason to believe Selenos 4 was anything but a scientific deep-space probe that was programmed to land in Cuban waters."

"There is a crack in your carefully laid plot," Polevoi argued. "The United States rescue forces made an exhaustive air and sea search for the missing capitalist Raymond LeBaron in the same general area only a few days after Selenos 4 dropped from orbit. I have strong suspicions their search was a decoy to find and retrieve our spacecraft."

"I read your report and analysis of the LeBaron disappearance," said Kornilov. "I disagree with your conclusion. Nowhere did I see that they conducted an underwater search. The rescue mission was soon called off. LeBaron and his crew are still listed as missing in the American press and presumed dead. That event was merely a coincidence, nothing more."

"Then we all agree that Selenos 4 and her cosmonauts lie somewhere on the bottom of the sea." Antonov paused to blow a smoke ring. "The questions we still face are, do we concede the probability the Americans may have a base on the moon, and if so, what do we do about it?"

"I believe it exists," Yasenin said with conviction.

"We cannot ignore the possibility," Polevoi granted.

Antonov stared narrowly at Kornilov. "And you, Sergei?"

"Selenos 8, our first manned lunar landing mission, is scheduled for launch in seven days," he answered slowly. "We cannot scrap the mission as we did when the Americans upstaged us with their Apollo program. Because our leaders saw no glory in being the second nation to set men on the moon we tucked our tail between our legs and quit. It was a great mistake to place political ideology above scientific achievement. Now we have a proven heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of placing an entire space station with a crew of eight men on lunar soil. The benefits in terms of propaganda and military rewards are immeasurable. If our ultimate goal is to obtain permanent preeminence in space and beat the Americans to Mars, we must follow through. I vote we program the guidance systems of Selenos 8 to land the crew within walking distance of where the astronauts stood in the crater and eliminate them."

"I am in complete agreement with Kornilov," said Yasenin. "The facts speak for themselves. The Americans are actively engaged in imperialistic aggression in space. The photographs we've studied prove they've already destroyed one of our spacecraft and murdered the crew. And I believe the cosmonauts in Selenos 5 and 6 met the same fate. They have taken their colonialistic designs to the moon and claimed it for their own. The evidence is unequivocal. Our cosmonauts will be attacked and murdered when they attempt to plant the red star on lunar soil."

There was a prolonged hush. No one spoke his thoughts.

Polevoi was the first to break the pensive silence. "So you and Kornilov propose we attack them first."

"Yes," said Yasenin, warming to the subject. "Think of the windfall. By capturing the American moon base and its scientific technology intact, we'd be advancing our own space program by ten years."

"The White House would surely mount a propaganda campaign and condemn us before the world as they did with the KAL Flight 007 incident," protested Polevoi.

"They will remain quiet," Yasenin assured him. "How can they announce the seizure of something that isn't known to exist?"

"The general has a point," said Antonov.

"You realize we could be guilty of launching a war in space," cautioned Polevoi.

"The United States struck first. It is our sacred duty to retaliate." Yasenin turned to Antonov. "The decision must be yours."

The President of the Soviet Union again turned his gaze to the fire. Then he laid the Havana in an ashtray and looked down in wonder at his trembling hands. His face, ordinarily ruddy, was gray. The omen was plain. The demons outnumbered the forces of good. Once the course was set in motion, it would hurtle forward outside his control. Yet he could not allow the country to be slapped in the face by the imperialists. At last he turned back to the other men in the room and wearily nodded.

"For Mother Russia and the party," he said solemnly. "Arm the cosmonauts and order them to strike the Americans."

<<17>>

Eight introductions and three tiresome conversations after his introduction to Dr. Mooney, Hagen was seated in a small office feverishly pounding an adding machine. Scientists dote on computers and engineers fondle digital calculators, but accountants are a Victorian lot. They still prefer traditional adding machines with thumb size buttons and paper tapes that spit out printed totals.

The controller was a CPA, a graduate of the University of Texas School of Business, and an ex-Navy man. And he had the engraved degrees and photographs of the ships he'd served on displayed on the oak-paneled wall of his office to prove it. Hagen had detected an uneasiness in the man's eyes, but no more than he'd expect from any corporate finance director who had a government auditor snooping around his private territory. There had been no suspicious look, no hesitation, when he asked to spot-check the telephone records for the last three years. Though his accounting experience with the justice Department was limited to photographing ledgers in the dead of night, he knew enough of the jargon to talk a good line. Anyone who happened to glance in his office and saw him scribbling notes and intently examining the tape on the adding machine would have thought he was an old pro.

The numbers on the tape were exactly that, numbers. But the note scribbling consisted of a methodical diagram of the placement and view angles of the security TV cameras between his office and Mooney's. He also wrote out two names and added several notations beside each one. The first was Raymond LeBaron and the second was Leonard Hudson. But now he had a third, Gunnar Eriksen.

He was certain that Eriksen had faked his death along with Hudson and dropped from the living to work on the Jersey Colony project. He also knew Hudson and Eriksen would never completely cut their ties with Pattenden Laboratory. The facility and its highpowered crop of young scientists were too great an asset to ignore. There had to be an underground channel to the "inner core."

The telephone records for a facility with three thousand employees filled several cardboard cartons. Control had been tight. Everyone who used a phone for any purpose, business or personal, had to keep a diary of the calls. Hagen wasn't about to attempt an examination of each one. That chore would take weeks. He was concerned only with the entries in Mooney's monthly diaries, especially those involving long distance. Hagen was not psychic, nor was he as exact as some men he knew who had a talent for detecting an irregularity, but he had an eye and a gut instinct for the hidden that seldom failed him.

He copied down six numbers that Mooney had phoned more than once in the past ninety days. Two were itemized as personal calls, four as company calls. Long shots all. Still, it was the only way he might trace a lead to another member of the "inner core." Playing by the rules, he picked up the phone and punched the Pattenden Lab operator, requesting an open line and promising to record all his calls. The hour was late, and most of the list showed area codes of numbers in the Middle West or in the East Coast. Their time zones were two or three hours ahead and they had likely shut down for the day, but he doggedly began calling anyway.

"Centennial Supply," announced a male in a bored tone.

"Yes, hello, is anyone in this evening?"

"The office is closed. This is the twenty-four-hour order desk."

"My name is judge, and I'm with the federal government," said Hagen, using his cover in case the phone was tapped. "We're doing an audit of the Pattenden Physics Laboratory in Bend, Oregon."

"You'll have to call back tomorrow morning after the office opens."

"Yes, I'll do that. But can you tell me exactly what kind of business Centennial Supply conducts?"

"We supply specialized parts and electronics for recording systems."

"For what applications?"

"Mostly business. Video for recording executive meetings, laboratory experiments, security systems. And executive audio for secretaries. Stuff like that, you know."

"How many employees do you have?"

"Around twelve."

"Thank you very much," said Hagen. "You've been most helpful. Oh, one more thing. Do you get many orders from Pattenden?"

"Not really. Every couple of months they'll order a part to update or modify their video systems."

"Thanks again. Goodbye."

Hagen scratched that one and tried again. His next two calls reached answering machines. One was a chemical lab at Brandeis University in Waltham and the other an unidentified office at the National Science Foundation in Washington. He checked the latter for a follow-up in the morning and tried an individual's number.

"Hello?"

Hagen looked at the name in Mooney's diary. "Dr. Donald Fremont?"

"Yes."

Hagen went through his routine.

"What do you wish to know, Mr. Judge?" Fremont's voice sounded elderly.

"I'm making a spot check of long-distance telephone calls. Has anyone from Pattenden called you in the last ninety days?" Hagen asked, looking at the dates of the calls and playing dumb.

"Why, yes, Dr. Earl Mooney. He was a student of mine at Stanford. I retired five years ago, but we still keep in touch."

"Did you by chance also have a student by the name of Leonard Hudson?"

"Leonard Hudson," he repeated as if trying to recall. "I met him on two occasions. He wasn't in my class, though. Before my time, or I should say before my tenure at Stanford. I was teaching at USC when he was a student."

"Thank you, Doctor. I won't trouble you further."

"Not at all. Glad to help."

Scratch four. The next name from the diary was an Anson Jones. He tried again, well aware it never came easy and that making a gold strike was 99 percent luck.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Jones, my name is judge."

"Who?"

"Thomas Judge. I'm with the federal government, and we're running an audit on Pattenden Physics Laboratory."

"I don't know any Pattenden. You must have the wrong number."

"Does the name Dr. Earl Mooney ring a bell?"

"Never heard of him."

"He's called your number three times in the last sixty days.

"Must be a phone company foulup."

"You are Anson Jones, area code three-zero-three, number five-four-seven

"Wrong name, wrong number."

"Before you hang up, I have a message."

"What message?"

Hagen paused, and then leaped. "Tell Leo that Gunnar wants him to pay for the airplane. You got that?"

There was silence on the other end for several moments. Then finally, "Is this a crank call?"

"Goodbye, Mr. Jones."

Pay dirt.

He called the sixth listing just to be on the safe side. An answering service for a stock brokerage firm answered. A dry hole.

Elation, that was what he felt. He became even more elated as he added to his notes. Mooney was not one of the "inner core," but he was connected--one of the subordinate officers under the high command.

Hagen tapped out a number in Chicago and waited. After four rings, a woman answered sweetly. "Drake Hotel."

''My name is Thomas Judge and I'd like to confirm a room reservation for tomorrow night."

"One moment and I'll connect you with reservations."

Hagen repeated the request for confirmation with the desk clerk. When asked for a credit card number to hold the room for late arrival, he gave Anson Jones's phone number in reverse

"Your room is confirmed, sir."

"Thank you."

What time was it? A glance at his watch told him it was eight minutes to midnight. He closed the briefcase and wiggled into his coat. Taking a cigarette lighter from one pocket, he slid the interior workings from its case. Next, he removed a thin metal shaft with a dental mirror on one end from a slit in his rear coat flap.

Hagen moved to the doorway. Clutching the briefcase between his knees, he stopped short of the threshold and tilted the tiny mirror up and down the corridor. It was empty. He turned the mirror until it reflected the television monitor above the far end of the corridor. Then he positioned the lighter until it barely protruded around the doorframe and pressed the flint lever.

Inside the security booth behind the main lobby, a screen on one of the TV monitors suddenly turned to snow. The guard at the console quickly began checking the circuit lights.

"I've got a problem with number twelve," he announced.

His supervisor came over from a desk and stared at the monitor. "Interference. The eggheads in the electrophysics lab must be at it again."

Suddenly the interference stopped, only to begin again on another monitor.

"That's funny," said the supervisor. "I've never seen it happen in sequence before." After a few seconds, the screen cleared, showing nothing but an empty corridor. The two security guards simply looked at each other and shrugged.

Hagen turned off the miniature electrical impulse jammer as soon as he stepped inside and closed the door to Mooney's office. He walked softly over to the window and closed the drapes. He slipped on a pair of thin plastic gloves and turned on the overhead lights. Hagen was a master at the technique of tossing a room. He didn't bother with the obvious, the drawers, files, address and telephone lists. He went directly to a bookshelf and found what he had hoped to find in less than seven minutes.

Mooney might have been one of the leading physicists in the nation, but Hagen had read him like a pictorial magazine. The small notebook was hidden inside a book entitled Celestial Mechanics in True Perspective by Horace DeLiso. The contents were in a code employing equations. It was Greek to Hagen but he wasn't fooled by the significance. Normally he would have photographed the pages and put them back, but this time he simply pocketed them, fully realizing he could never have them deciphered in time. The guards were still struggling with the monitors when he stepped up to the counter.

"Would you like me to sign out?" he said with a smile.

The head security guard came over, a quizzical expression on his face. "Did you just come from finance?"

"Yes."

"We didn't see you on the security TV"

"I can't help that," said Hagen innocently. "I walked out the door and through the hallways until I came here. I don't know what else to tell you."

"Did you see anyone? Anything unusual?"

"No one. But the lights flickered and dimmed a couple of times.'

The guard nodded. "Electrical interference from the electro physics lab. That's what I thought it was."

Hagen signed out and walked into a cloudless night, humming softly to himself.

<2>THE CYCLOPS

October 25, 1989

Key West, Florida

<<18>>

Pitt lay with his back pressed against the cool concrete of the airstrip, looking up at the Prosperteer. The sun pushed over the horizon and slowly covered her worn hull in a shroud of pastel orange. The blimp had an eerie quality about it, or so it seemed in Pitt's imagination, an aluminum ghost unsure of where it was supposed to haunt. He'd been awake most of the time during the flight from Washington to Key West, poring over Buck Caesar's charts of the Old Bahama Channel and retracing Raymond LeBaron's carefully marked flight path. He closed his eyes, trying to get a clear picture of the Prosperteer's spectral wanderings. Unless the gas bags inside the blimp were reinflated from a ship, an extremely unlikely event, the only answer to Raymond LeBaron's whereabouts lay in Cuba.

Something nagged at his mind, a thought that kept returning after he unconsciously brushed it aside, a piece of the picture that became increasingly lucid as he began dwelling on it. And then suddenly it crystallized.

The flight to trace LeBaron's trail was a setup.

A rational and logical conclusion remained a dim outline in a thick mist. The trick was to try to fit it into a pattern. His mind was casting about for directions to explore when he sensed a shadow fall over him.

"Well, well," said a familiar voice, "looks as though Snow White fell for the old apple routine again."

"Either that or he's hibernating," came another voice Pitt recognized. He opened his eyes, shielded them from the sun with one hand, and looked up at a pair of grinning individuals who stared down. The shorter of the two, a barrel-chested, muscled character with black curly hair and the ironbound look of a man who enjoyed eating bricks for breakfast, was Pitt's old friend and assistant projects director at NUMA, Al Giordino.

AI reached down, grabbed an outstretched hand, and pulled Pitt to his feet as effortlessly as a sanitation worker picking up an empty beer can from park grass.

"Departure time in twelve minutes."

"Our unnamed pilot arrive yet?" Pitt asked.

The other man, slightly taller and much thinner than Giordino, shook his head. "No sign of one."

Rudi Gunn peered through a pair of blue eyes that were magnified by thick-lensed glasses. He had the appearance of an undernourished assistant bookkeeper toiling for a gold watch. The impression was deceptive. Gunn was the overseer of NUMAs oceanographic projects. While Admiral Sandecker waged pitched battles with Congress and the federal bureaucracy, Gunn watched over the agency's day-to-day operation. For Pitt, prying Gunn and Giordino from under Sandecker had been a major victory.

"If we want to match LeBaron's departure time, we'll have to wrestle it aloft ourselves," said Giordino, unconcerned.

"I guess we can manage," said Pitt. "You study the flight manuals?" Giordino nodded. "Requires fifty hours of instruction and flying time to qualify for a license. The basic control isn't difficult, but the art of keeping that pneumatic scrotum stable in a stiff breeze takes practice."

Pitt couldn't help grinning at Giordino's colorful description. "The equipment loaded on board?"

"Loaded and secured," Gunn assured him.

"Then I guess we might as well shove off."

As they approached the Prosperteer, LeBaron's crew chief climbed down the ladder from the control car. He spoke a few words to one of the ground crew and then waved a friendly greeting.

"She's all ready to go, gentlemen."

"How close are we to the actual weather conditions of the previous flight?" asked Pitt.

"Mr. LeBaron was flying against a five-mile-an-hour head wind out of the southeast. You'll buck eight, so figure on compensating. There's a late-season hurricane moving in over the Turks and Caicos Islands. The meteorological guys christened her Little Eva because she's a small blow with a diameter no more than sixty miles wide. The forecasters think she'll swing north toward the Carolinas. If you turn back no later than 1400 hours, Little Eva's outer breeze should provide you with a nice fat tail wind to nudge you home."

"And if we don't?"

"Don't what?"

"Swing back by 1400 hours."

The crew chief smiled thinly. "I don't recommend getting caught in a tropical storm with fifty-mile-an-hour winds, at least not in an airship that's sixty years old."

"You make a strong case," Pitt admitted.

"Allowing for the head wind," said Gunn, "we won't reach the search area until 1030

hours. That doesn't leave us much time to look around."

"Yes," Giordino said, "but LeBaron's known flight path should put us right in the ballpark."

"A tidy package," Pitt mused to no one in particular. "Too tidy." The three NUMA men were about to climb on board when the LeBaron limousine pulled up beside the blimp. Angelo got out and smartly opened the passenger door. Jessie stepped into the sun and walked over, looking outdoorsy in a designer safari suit with her hair tied in a bright scarf, nineteen-thirties style. She was carrying a suede flight bag.

"Are we ready?" she said brightly, slipping past them and nimbly hustling up the ladder to the control car.

Gunn gave Pitt a grim look. "You didn't tell us we were going on a picnic."

"Nobody told me either," Pitt said, gazing up at Jessie, who had turned and was framed in the doorway.

"My fault," said Jessie. "I forgot to mention that I'm your pilot." Giordino and Gunn looked as if they had swallowed live squid. Pitt's face wore an amused expression.

He said, "No kidding."

"Raymond taught me to fly the Prosperteer," she said. "I've logged over eighty hours at the controls and have a license."

"No kidding," Pitt repeated, becoming intrigued.

Giordino failed to see the humor. "Do you also know how to dive, Mrs. LeBaron?"

"Sky or scuba? I'm certified for both."

"We can't take a woman," said Gunn resolutely.

"Please, Mrs. LeBaron," pleaded the crew chief. "We don't know what happened to your husband. The flight might be dangerous."

"We'll use the same communication plan as Raymond's flight," she said, ignoring him.

"If we find anything interesting we'll transmit in normal voice. No code this time."

"This is ridiculous," snapped Gunn.

Pitt shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. I'll vote for her."

"You don't really mean it!"

"Why not?" replied Pitt with a sardonic grin. "I firmly believe in equal rights. She has just as much right to get herself killed as we do."

The ground crew stood as silent as pallbearers, their eyes following the old blimp as she lifted into the sunrise. Suddenly she began dropping. They held their breath as the landing wheel touched the crest of a wave. Then she slowly bounced back into the air and struggled to rise.

Someone muttered anxiously, "Lift, baby, lift!"

The Prosperteer agonizingly rose a few feet at a time until she finally leveled out at a safe altitude. The ground crew watched motionless, staring until the blimp became a tiny dark speck above the silent horizon. They stood there when she was no longer in view, instinctively quiet, a sense of dread in their hearts. There would be no volleyball game this day. They all herded inside the maintenance truck, overburdening the air conditioning system, clustering around the radio.

The first message came in at 0700 hours. Pitt explained away the shaky liftoff. Jessie had under compensated for the lack of buoyancy caused by the extra payload Giordino and Gunn had placed on board.

From then on until 1400 hours, Pitt kept the frequency open and maintained a running dialogue, matching his observations with the transcribed report that was recorded during LeBaron's flight.

The crew chief picked up the microphone. "Prosperteer, this is Grandma's house. Over."

"Go ahead, Grandma."

"Can you give me your latest VIKOR satellite position?"

"Roger. VIKOR reading H3608 by T8090."

The crew chief quickly plotted the position on a chart. "Prosperteer, you're looking good. I have you five miles due south of Guinchos Cay on the Bahama Bank. Over."

"I read the same, Grandma."

"How are the winds?"

"Judging from the wave crests, I'd say the breeze has picked up to about Force 6 on the Beaufort scale."

"Listen to me, Prosperteer. The Coast Guard has issued a new update on Little Eva. She has doubled her speed and swung east. Hurricane warnings are up throughout the southern Bahamas. If she sticks to her present course, she'll strike the east coast of Cuba sometime this evening. I repeat, Little Eva has swung east and is heading in your direction. Call it a day, Prosperteer, and beat a course for home."

"Will do, Grandma. Turning onto new course for the Keys." Pitt was silent for the next half hour. At 1435 hours, the crew chief hailed again.

"Prosperteer, come in, please. Over."

No reply.

"Come in, Prosperteer. This is Grandma's house. Do you read?" Still nothing.

The stifling air inside the truck seemed suddenly to turn cold as fear and apprehension gripped the crew. The seconds crawled past and took forever to become minutes as the crew chief tried desperately to raise the blimp.

But the Prosperteer did not respond.

The crew chief slammed down the microphone and pushed his way outside the truck through the stunned ground crew. He ran over to the parked limousine and feverishly jerked open a rear door.

"They're gone! We've lost them, the same as the last time!" The man sitting alone in the rear seat simply nodded. "Keep trying to raise them," he said quietly.

As the crew chief hurried back to the radio, Admiral James Sandecker lifted a telephone receiver from a varnished cabinet and placed a call.

"Mr. President."

"Yes, Admiral."

"They're missing."

"Understood. I've briefed Admiral Clyde Monfort of the Caribbean Joint Task Force. He's already put ships and planes on alert around the Bahamas. As soon as we hang up I'll order him to launch a search and rescue operation."

"Please impress upon Monfort the need for speed. I've also been informed the Prosperteer disappeared in the predicted path of a hurricane."

"Return to Washington, Admiral, and do not worry. Your people and Mrs. LeBaron should be sighted and picked up within a few hours."

"I'll try to share your optimism, Mr. President. Thank you." If there was one doctrine Sandecker believed in with all his heart, it was "Never trust a politician's word." He placed another call on the limousine's phone.

"Admiral James Sandecker. I'd like to speak with Admiral Monfort."

"Right away, sir."

"Jim, is that really you?"

"Hello, Clyde. Good to hear your voice."

"Damn, it's been nearly two years. What's on your mind?"

"Tell me, Clyde, have you been alerted for a rescue mission in the Bahamas?"

"Where did you hear that?"

"The rumor mill."

"News to me. Most of our Caribbean forces are conducting an amphibious landing exercise on Jamaica."

"Jamaica?"

"A little muscle-flexing display of military capability to shake up the Soviets and Cubans. Keeps Castro off balance, thinking we're going to invade one of these days."

"Are we?"

"What in hell for? Cuba is the best advertising campaign we've got running that promotes communism as a big economic bust. Besides, better the Soviet Union throws twelve million dollars a day down Castro's toilet than us."

"You've received no orders to keep an eye on a blimp that left on a flight from the Keys this morning?"

There was an ominous silence on the other end of the line.

"I probably shouldn't be telling you this, Jim, but I did receive a verbal order concerning the blimp. I was told to keep our ships and aircraft out of the Bahama Banks and to put a blackout on all communications coming from the area."

"The order come direct from the White House?"

"Don't press your luck, Jim."

"Thanks for setting me straight, Clyde."

"Any time. Let's get together next time I'm in Washington."

"I'll look forward to it."

Sandecker hung up, his face red with anger, his eyes fired with fury.

"God help them," he muttered through clenched teeth. "We've all been had."

<<19>>

Jessie's smooth, high cheekboned face was tense from the strain of fighting the wind gusts and rain squalls that pounded against the skin of the blimp. Her arms and wrists were turning numb as she orchestrated the throttles and the big elevator pitch control. With the added weight from the rain it was becoming nearly impossible to keep the wallowing airship level and steady. She began to feel the icy caress of fear.

"We'll have to head for the nearest land," she said, her voice uneven. "I can't keep her aloft much longer in this turbulence."

Pitt looked at her. "The nearest land is Cuba."

"Better arrested than dead."

"Not yet," Pitt replied from his seat to the right and slightly behind her. "Hang on a little longer. The storm will sweep us back to Key West."

"With the radio out, they won't know where to look if we're forced to ditch in the sea."

"You should have thought of that before you spilled coffee on the transmitter and shorted its circuitry."

She stole a glance at him. God, she thought, it was maddening. He was leaning out the starboard window, nonchalantly peering through a pair of binoculars at the sea below. Giordino was observing out the port side, while Gunn was taking readings off the VIKOR navigating computer and laying out their course on a chart. Every so often, Gunn calmly examined the stylus markings on the recorder of a Schonstedt gradiometer, an instrument for detecting iron by measuring magnetic intensity. All three men looked at though they didn't have a care in the world.

"Didn't you hear what I said?" she asked in exasperation.

"We heard," Pitt replied.

"I can't control her in this wind. She's too heavy. We've got to drop ballast or touch down."

"The last of the ballast was dumped an hour ago."

"Then get rid of that junk you brought on board," she ordered, gesturing to a small mountain of aluminum boxes strapped to the deck.

"Sorry. That junk, as you call it, may come in handy."

"But we're losing lift."

"Do the best you can."

Jessie pointed through the windshield. "The island off to our starboard is Cayo Santa Maria. The landmass beyond is Cuba. I'm going to bring the blimp around on a southerly course and take our chances with the Cubans."

Pitt swung from the window, his green eyes set and purposeful. "You volunteered for this mission," he said roughly. "You wanted to be one of the boys. Now hang in there."

"Use your head, Pitt," she snapped. "If we wait another half hour the hurricane will tear us to pieces."

"I think I have something," Giordino called.

Pitt moved from his seat over to the port side. "What direction?" Giordino pointed. "We just passed over it. About two hundred yards off our stern."

"A big one," Gunn said excitedly. "The markings are going off the scale."

"Come about to port," Pitt ordered Jessie. "Take us back over the same course. Jessie didn't argue. Suddenly caught up in the fervor of the discovery, she felt her exhaustion fall away. She slammed the throttles forward and rolled the blimp to port, using the wind to crab around on a reverse course. A gust slammed into the aluminum envelope, causing a shudder to run through the ship and rocking the control car. Then the buffeting eased and the flight smoothed as the eight tail fins came around and the wind beat from astern.

The interior of the control car was as hushed as the crypt of a cathedral. Gunn unreeled the line from the gradiometer's sensing unit until it dangled four hundred feet below the belly of the blimp and skimmed the rolling swells. Then he turned his attention back to the recorder and waited for the stylus to make a horizontal swing across the graph paper. Soon it began to waver and scratch back and forth.

"Coming up on target," Gunn announced.

Giordino and Pitt ignored the wind stream and leaned farther out the windows. The sea was building and foam was spraying from the wave crests, making it difficult to see into the transparent depths. Jessie was having a tougher time of it now, struggling with the controls, trying to reduce the violent shaking and swaying of the blimp, which behaved like a whale fighting its way up the Colorado River rapids.

"I've got her!" Pitt suddenly shouted. "She's lying north and south, about a hundred yards to starboard."

Giordino moved to the opposite side of the control car and gazed down. "Okay, I have her in sight too."

"Can you detect any sign of derricks?" Gunn asked.

"Her outline is distinct, but I can't make out any detail. I'd say she's about eighty feet under the surface."

"More like ninety," said Pitt.

"Is it the Cyclops?" Jessie asked anxiously.

"Too early to tell." He turned to Gunn. "Mark the position from the VIKOR."

"Position marked," Gunn acknowledged.

Pitt nodded at Jessie. "All right, pilot, let's make another pass. And this time, as we come about into the wind, try to hover over the target."

"Why don't you ask me to turn lead into gold," she snapped back. Pitt came over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. "You're doing great. Stick in a little longer and I'll spell you at the controls."

"Don't patronize me," she said testily, but her eyes took on a warm glow and the tension lines around her lips softened. "Just tell me when to stop the bus." Very self-willed she was, thought Pitt. For the first time he felt himself envying Raymond LeBaron. He returned aft and put a hand on Gunn's shoulder.

"Use the clinometer and see if you can get a rough measurement of her dimensions." Gunn nodded. "Will do."

"If that's the Cyclops," said Giordino happily, "you made a damned good guess."

"A lot of luck mixed with a small amount of hindsight," Pitt admitted. "That, and the fact Raymond LeBaron and Buck Caesar aimed us toward the ballpark. The puzzle is why the Cyclops lies outside the main shipping lane."

Giordino gave a helpless tilt to his head. "We'll probably never know."

"Coming back on target," Jessie reported.

Gunn set the distance on the clinometer and then sighted through the eyepiece, measuring the length of the shadowy object under the water. He managed to hold the instrument steady as Jessie fought a masterful battle against the wind.

"No way of accurately measuring her beam because it's impossible to see if she lies straight up or on her side," he said, studying the calibrations.

"And the overall length?" asked Pitt.

"Between five hundred thirty and five hundred fifty feet."

"Looking good," Pitt said, visibly relieved. "The Cyclops was five hundred and fortytwo feet."

"If we drop down closer, I might be able to get a more precise reading," said Gunn.

"One more time, Jessie," Pitt called out.

"I don't think so." She lifted a hand from the controls and pointed out the forward window. "A welcoming committee."

Her expression appeared calm, almost too calm, while the men watched in mild fascination as a helicopter materialized out of the clouds a thousand feet above the blimp. For several seconds it seemed to hang there, fastened in the sky like a hawk eyeing a pigeon. Then it swelled in size as it approached and banked around on a parallel course with the Prosperteer. Through the binoculars they could clearly see the grim faces of the pilots and the two pairs of hands grasping the automatic guns that poked through the open side door.

"They brought friends," Gunn said succinctly. He was aiming his binoculars at a Cuban gunboat about four miles away that was planing through the swells, throwing up great wings of sea spray.

Giordino said nothing. He tore the holding straps from the boxes and began throwing the contents on the deck as fast as his hands could move. Gunn joined him as Pitt began assembling a strange looking screen.

"They're holding up a sign in English," Jessie announced.

"What does it say?" Pitt asked without looking up.

" `Follow us and do not use your radio,' " she read aloud. "What should I do?"

"Obviously we can't use the radio, so smile and wave to them. Let's hope they won't shoot if they see you're a woman."

"I wouldn't count on it," grunted Giordino.

"And keep hovering over the shipwreck," Pitt added.

Jessie didn't like what was going on inside the control car. Her face noticeably paled. She said, "We'd better do what they want."

"Screw them," Pitt said coldly. He unbuckled her seat belt and lifted her away from the controls. Giordino held up a pair of air tanks and Pitt quickly adjusted the straps over her shoulders. Gunn handed her a face mask, swim fins, and a buoyancy compensator vest.

"Quickly," he ordered. "Put these on."

She stood there baffled. "What are you doing?"

"I thought you knew," said Pitt. "We're going for a swim."

"We're what?" The dark gypsy eyes were wide, not so much from alarm as astonishment.

"No time for the defense to make a closing argument," Pitt said calmly. "Call it a wild plan for staying alive and let it go at that. Now do as you're told and lie down on the deck behind the screen."

Giordino stared dubiously at the inch-thick screen. "Let's hope it does the job. I'd hate to be around if a bullet finds an air tank."

"Fear not," Pitt replied, as the three men hurriedly strapped on their diving gear. "High

tensile plastic. Guaranteed to stop anything up to a twenty-millimeter shell." With no hands at the controls, the blimp lurched sideways under the onslaught of a fresh gust and pitched downward. Everyone instinctively dropped to the deck and snatched at the nearest handgrip. The boxes that held the equipment skidded madly across the deck and crashed into the pilots' seats.

There was no hesitation, no further attempt at communication. The Cuban commander of the helicopter, thinking the sudden erratic movement of the blimp meant it was trying to escape, ordered his crew to open fire. A storm of bullets struck the starboard side of the Prosperteer from no more than thirty yards away. The control car was immediately turned into a shambles. The old yellowed windows melted away in a shower of fragments that splashed cross the deck. The controls and the instrument panel were blasted into twisted junk, filling the shattered cabin with smoke from shorted circuitry. Pitt lay prone on top of Jessie, Gunn and Giordino blanketing him, listening to the steel-nosed shells thump against the bulletproof screen. Then the gunmen in the helicopter altered their aim and concentrated on the engines. The aluminum cowlings were torn and mangled by the devastating fire until they shredded and blew away in the air stream. The engines coughed and sputtered into silence, their cylinder heads shot away, oil spewing out amid torrents of black smoke.

"The fuel tanks!" Jessie heard herself shouting above the mad din. "They'll explode!"

"The least of our worries," Pitt yelled back in her ear. "The Cubans aren't using incendiary bullets, and the tanks are made out of selfsealing neoprene rubber." Giordino crawled over to the ripped and jumbled pile of equipment boxes and retrieved what looked to Jessie like some kind of tubular container. He pushed it ahead of him up the steeply tilted deck.

"Need any help?" Pitt yelled.

"If Rudi can brace my legs. . ." His voice trailed off.

Gunn didn't require a lecture on instructions. He jammed his feet against a bulkhead for support and clutched Giordino around the knees in a vise grip. The blimp was totally out of control, dead in the sky, the nose pointing at a fortydegree angle toward the sea. All lift was gone and it began to sink from the sky as the Cubans sprayed the plump, exposed envelope. The stabilizer fins still reached for the clouds, but the old Prosperteer was in her death throes.

She would not die alone.

Giordino wrestled the tube open, pulled out an M-72 missile launcher, and loaded the 66-millimeter rocket. Slowly, moving with great caution, he eased the snout of the bazookalike weapon over the jagged glass left in the frame of the window and took aim. To the astonished men in the patrol boat, less than one mile away, the helicopter appeared to disintegrate in a huge mushroom of fire. The sound of the explosion burst through the air like thunder, followed by a flaming rain of twisted metal that hissed and steamed when it hit the water.

The blimp still hung there, pivoting slowly on its axis. Helium surged through gaping rents in the hull. The circular supports inside began snapping like dried sticks. As if heaving out her final breath the Prosperteer caved in on herself, collapsing like an eggshell, and fell into the seething whitecaps.

The raging devastation all happened so quickly. In less than twenty seconds both engines were torn from their mounts, and the support beams holding the control car twisted apart, accompanied by a banshee screeching sound. Like a fragile toy thrown on the sidewalk by a destructive child, the rivets burst and the internal structure shrieked in agony as it disintegrated.

The control car kept sinking into the deep, the water flooding through the shattered windows. It was as if a giant hand was pressing the blimp downward until at last she slipped into the depths and disappeared. Then the control car broke free and dropped like a falling leaf, trailed by a confused maze of wire and cable. The remains of the duraluminum envelope followed, flapping wildly like a drunken bat in flight. A school of yellowtail snappers darted from under the plunging mass an instant before it struck the sea floor, the impact throwing up billowing clouds of fine sand. Then all was as quiet as a grave, the deathly stillness broken only by the gentle gurgle of escaping air.

On the turbulent surface the stunned crew of the gunboat began sweeping back and forth over the crash sites, searching for any sign of survivors. They only found spreading pools of fuel and oil.

The winds from the approaching hurricane increased to Force 8. The waves reached a height of eighteen feet, making any further search impossible. The boat's captain had no choice but to turn about on a course toward a safe harbor in Cuba, leaving behind a swirling and malignant sea.

<<20>>

The opaque cloud of silt that hid the shredded remains of the Prosperteer was slowly carried away by a weak bottom current. Pitt rose to his hands and knees and looked around the shambles that had been the control car. Gunn was sitting upright on the deck, his back pressed against a buckled bulkhead. His left ankle was swelling into the shape of a coconut, but he sucked on his mouthpiece and raised one hand with the fingers formed in a V

Giordino doggedly pulled himself upright and tenderly pressed the right side of his chest. One broken ankle and probably a few ribs between them, thought Pitt. It could be worse. He bent over Jessie and lifted her head. Her eyes appeared blank through the lens of the face mask. The hollow hiss of her regulator and the rise and fall of her chest indicated her breathing was normal, if a bit on the rapid side. He ran his fingers over her arms and legs but found no sign of a fracture. Except for a rash of black-and-blue marks that would bloom in the next twenty-four hours, she seemed whole. As if to assure him, she reached out for his arm and gave it a firm squeeze.

Satisfied, Pitt turned his attention to himself. All the joints swiveled properly, the muscles functioned, nothing seemed distorted. Yet he didn't escape unscathed. A purplish lump was rising on his forehead, and he noticed a strange stiffening sensation in his neck. Pitt canceled out the discomfort with the consolation that no one appeared to be bleeding. One hairline brush with death was enough for one day, he mused. The last thing they needed now was a shark attack.

Pitt focused on the next problem, getting out of the control car. The door was jammed, small wonder after the beating it had taken. He sat on his buttocks, grasped both hands on the bent frame, and lashed out with his feet. Lashed out was an exaggeration. The water pressure impeded the thrust of his legs. He felt as though he was trying to kick out the bottom of a huge jar of glue. On the sixth attempt, when the balls and heels of his feet could take no more, the metal seal gave and the door swung outward in slow motion. Giordino emerged first, his head swathed by a surge of bubbles from his breathing regulator. He reached back inside, dug his feet into the sand, braced himself for the chest pain that was sure to come, and gave a mighty heave. With Pitt and Gunn shoving from the inside, a large, unwieldy bundle slowly squeezed through the door and dropped to the sand. Then eight steel tanks containing 104 cubic feet of air were passed out to the waiting hands of Giordino.

Inside the mangled control car Jessie fought to equalize her ears with the water pressure. The blood roared and a stabbing pain burst in her head, blanking out the trauma of the crash. She pinched her nose and snorted furiously. On the fifth try her ears finally popped, and the relief was so marvelous that tears came to her eyes. She clamped her teeth on the regulator's mouthpiece and sucked in a lungful of air. How beautiful it would be to wake up in her own bed, she thought. Something touched her hand. It was another hand, firm and rough-skinned. She looked up to see Pitt's eyes staring at her through his mask, they seemed crinkled in a smile. He nodded for her to follow him. He led her outside into the vast liquid void. She gazed up, watching her air bubbles hiss and swirl toward the restless surface. Despite the turbulence above, visibility on the bottom was nearly two hundred feet and she could clearly see the entire length of the airship's main carcass lying a short distance from the control car. Gunn and Giordino were nowhere in sight.

Pitt gestured for her to wait by the air tanks and the strange bundle. He checked the compass on his left wrist and swam off into the blue haze. Jessie drifted, weightless, her head feeling light from a touch of nitrogen narcosis. An overwhelming sense of loneliness closed over her, but quickly evaporated when she saw Pitt retuning. He made a sign for her to follow, and then he turned and slowly paddled away. Pounding her feet against the water resistance, she quickly caught up with him.

The white sandy bottom gave way to clumps of coral inhabited by a variety of oddly shaped fish. Their natural bright colors were deadened to a soft gray by the scattering and absorption of the water particles that filtered out the reds, oranges, and yellows, leaving only dull greens and blues. They pedaled their fins, moving only an arm's length above the weird and exotically molded underwater jungle, observed queerly by a crowd of small angelfish, pufferfish, and trumpetfish. The amusing scene reminded Pitt of children watching the huge ballooned cartoon characters that float down Broadway in Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Suddenly Jessie dug her fingers into Pitt's leg and pointed above and behind. There, swimming in lazy apathy, only twenty feet away, was a school of barracuda. There must have been two hundred of them, none measuring less than four feet in length. They turned as one and began circling the divers while displaying a beady-eyed curiosity. Then, deciding that Pitt and Jessie were not worth lingering over, they flashed away in the wink of an eye and were lost to view.

When Pitt turned back he saw Rudi Gunn materializing out of the smoky blue curtain. Gunn came to a stop and beckoned for them to hurry in his direction. Then he made the V

sign of success.

The meaning was clear. Gunn vigorously kicked with one fin, rapidly rising at an angle until he was about thirty feet above the coral landscape, Pitt and Jessie trailing immediately in his wake.

They had traveled nearly a hundred yards when Gunn abruptly slowed and curved his body into a vertical position, one whitened hand held out, slightly bent finger pointing like the grim reaper.

Like a haunted castle looming from the mists of a Yorkshire moor, the phantom shape of the Cyclops rose up through the watery gloom, evil and sinister, as though some unspeakable force lurked within her bowels.

<<21>>

Pitt had dived on many shipwrecks and he was the first man to view the Titanic, but staring at the lost ghost ship of legend left him numb with an almost superstitious awe. The knowledge that she was the tomb for over three hundred men only deepened her malignant aura.

The sunken ship was lying on her port side with a list of about twenty-five degrees, her bow set toward the north. She did not have the look of anything that was supposed to rest on the sea floor, and mother nature had gone to work laying a veil of sediment and marine organisms over the steel intruder.

The entire hull and superstructure were encrusted with sea growth of every imaginable description--sponges, barnacles, flowery anemones, feathery sea ferns, and slender weeds that gracefully swayed with the current like the arms of dancers. Except for the distorted bow and three fallen derricks, the ship was suprisingly intact. They found Giordino busily scraping the growth from a small section below the stern railing. He turned at their approach and showed off his handiwork. He had exposed the raised letters that spelled out Cyclops.

Pitt glanced at his orange-faced Doxa diver's watch. It seemed an eternity since the blimp crashed, but only nine minutes had passed from the moment they swam out of the control car. It was imperative that they conserve their air. They still had to search the wreck and have enough left in the spare tanks for decompression. The safety margin would be cut dangerously thin.

He checked Jessie's air gauge and studied her eyes. They looked clear and bright. She was breathing slowly in a comfortable rhythm. She gave him a thumbs-up sign and then threw him a coquettish wink. Her brush with death in the Prosperteer was forgotten for the moment.

Pitt winked back. She's actually enjoying this, he thought.

Using hand signals for communication, the four of them fanned out in a line above the fantail and began prowling her length. The doors of the aft deckhouse had rotted away and the teak deck was heavily worm-eaten. Any flat surface was coated by sediment that gave the appearance of a dusty shroud.

The jackstaff stood bare, the United States ensign having rotted away long ago. The two stern guns pointed aft, mute and deserted. The twin smokestacks stood like sentries over the decaying wreckage of ventilators, bollards and railings, rotting coils of wire and cable still hugging rusting winches. Like a shantytown, each piece of debris offered a nesting place for spiny urchins, arrow crabs, and other creatures of the sea. Pitt knew from studying a diagram of the Cyclops' interior that searching the stern section was a waste of time. The smokestacks stood over the engine room and its crew quarters. If they were to find the La Dorada statue it would most likely be in the general cargo compartment beneath the bridge and forecastle. He motioned the others to continue their probe toward the bow.

They swam slowly, carefully along the catwalk that stretched over the sprawling coal hatches, skirting around the great clamshell loading buckets and under the corroded derricks that reached forlornly toward the refracted rays from above. It became apparent to them that the Cyclops had died a quick and violent death. The rotting remains of the lifeboats were forever frozen in their davits and much of the superstructure looked as if it had been crushed by a monstrous fist.

The odd boxlike form of the bridge slowly took form out of the blue-green dusk. The two support legs on the starboard side had buckled, but the hull's tilt to port had compensated for the angle. Peculiarly out of kilter with the rest of the ship, the bridge stood on a perfect horizontal plane.

The dark on the other side of the wheelhouse door looked ominous. Pitt switched on his dive light and drifted slowly inside, taking care not to stir up the silt on the deck with his fins. Dim light filtered through the slime-coated portholes on the forward bulkhead. He brushed away the muck from the glass covering the ship's clock. The tarnished hands were frozen at 12:21. He also examined the big upright compass stand. The interior was still watertight and the needle floated free in kerosene, pointing faithfully toward magnetic north. Pitt noted that the ship's heading was 340 degrees. On opposite sides of the compass, covered over by a colony of sponges that turned vivid red under Pitt's light, were two postlike objects that rose from the deck and fanned out at the top. Curious, Pitt wiped the growth from the port one, revealing a glass face, through which he could barely make out the words AHEAD FULL, HALF, SLOW, DEAD SLOW, STOP, and FINISHED WITH ENGINES. It was the bridge telegraph to the engine room. He noted that the brass arrow was pointing to FULL. He floated over and cleaned the glass on the starboard telegraph. The pointer was locked on FINISHED

WITH ENGINES.

Jessie was about eight feet behind Pitt when she let out a garbled scream that lifted the hair on the nape of his neck. He spun around, half thinking she was being dragged away by a shark, but she was gesturing frantically at a pair of objects protruding from the silt. Two human skulls, muck up to their nose openings, stared through empty eye sockets. They give Pitt the disconcerting feeling he was being watched. The bones of another crewman rested against the base of the helm, one skeletal arm still wedged between the spokes of the wheel. Pitt wondered if one of them might be the pitiful remains of Captain Worley.

There was nothing else to see, so Pitt led Jessie outside the wheelhouse and down a companionway to the crew and passenger quarters. At almost the same time, Gunn and Giordino disappeared down a hatch leading to a small cargo hold.

The layer of silt was shallow in this section of the ship, no more than an inch deep. The companionway led to a long passageway with small compartments off to the sides. Each one contained bunks, porcelain sinks, scattered personal effects, and the skeletal relics of their occupants. Pitt soon lost count of the dead. He paused and added air to his buoyancy compensator to keep his body balanced in a freefloating, horizontal position. The slightest touch from his fins would stir up large clouds of blinding silt. Pitt tapped Jessie on the shoulder and shone his light into a small head with a bathtub and two toilets. He made a questioning gesture. She grinned around her mouthpiece and made a comical but negative reply.

He accidentally struck his dive light against a steampipe running along the ceiling and momentarily knocked the switch into the Off position. The sudden realm of utter darkness was as total and stifling as if they were dropped into a coffin and the lid slammed shut. Pitt had no wish to remain surrounded by eternal black within the grave of the Cyclops, and he quickly flicked on the light again, exposing a brilliant yellow and red sponge colony that clung to the bulkheads of the passageway.

It soon became obvious they would find no evidence of the La Dorada statue here. They made their way back through the passageway of death and resurfaced on the forecastle deck. Giordino was waiting and motioned toward a hatch that was frozen half open. Pitt squeezed through, clanging his air tanks on the frame, and dropped down a badly eroded ladder.

He swam through what looked like a baggage cargo hold, twisting around the jumbled and decayed rubbish, heading toward the unearthly glow of Gunn's dive light. A pile of unhinged bones passed under him, the jaw of the skull gaping in what seemed in Pitt's imagination a ghastly scream of terror.

He found Gunn intently examining the rotting interior of a large shipping crate. The grisly skeletal remains of two men were wedged between the crate and a bulkhead. For a brief instant Pitt's heart pounded with excitement and anticipation, his mind certain they had found the most priceless treasure of the sea. Then Gunn looked up, and Pitt saw the bitter disappointment reflected in his eyes.

The crate was empty.

A frustrating search of the cargo hold turned up a startling revelation. Lying in the dark shadows like a collapsed rubber doll was a deep-sea diving suit. The arms were outstretched, the feet encased in Frankenstein-style weighted boots. A tarnished brass diving helmet and breastplate covered the head and neck. Curled off to the side like a dead gray snake was the umbilical line that contained the air hose and lifeline cable. They were severed about six feet from the helmet couplings.

The layer of silt and slime on the diving outfit indicated it had lain there for many years. Pitt removed a knife strapped to his right calf and used it to pry loose the wing nut clamping the helmet's faceplate. It gave slowly at first and then loosened enough to be removed by his fingers. He pulled the faceplate open and aimed the beam of the dive light inside. Protected from the ravages of destructive sea life by the rubber suit and the helmet's safety valves, the head still retained hair and remnants of flesh. Pitt and his party were not the first to have probed the gruesome secrets of the Cyclops. Someone else had already come and gone with the La Dorada treasure.

<<22>>

Pitt checked his old Doxa watch and calculated their decompression stops. He added an extra minute to each stop as a safety margin to eliminate the gas bubbles from their blood and tissues and prevent the agony of diver's bends.

After leaving the Cyclops, they had exchanged the nearly empty air cylinders for their reserve supply stashed beside the control car and began their slow rise to the surface. A few feet away, Gunn and Giordino added air to their buoyancy compensators to maintain the required depth while handling the cumbersome bundle.

Below them in the watery gloom, the Cyclops lay desolate and cursed to oblivion. Before another decade passed, her rusting walls would begin to collapse inward, and a century later the restless sea floor would cover her pitiful remains under a shroud of silt, leaving only a few pieces of coral-encrusted debris to mark her grave. Above them, the surface was a turmoil of quicksilver. At the next decompression stop, they began to feel the crushing momentum from the mountainous swells and fought to hang in the void together. There was no thought of a stop at the twenty-foot level. Their air supply was almost exhausted and only death by drowning waited in the depths. They had no alternative but to surface and take their chances in the tempest above. Jessie seemed composed and unshaken. Pitt realized that she didn't suspect the danger on the surface. Her only thoughts were of seeing the sky again.

Pitt made one final check of the time and motioned upward with his thumb. They began to ascend as one, Jessie hanging on to Pitt's leg, Gunn and Giordino dragging the bundle. The light increased and when Pitt looked up he was surprised to see a whorl of foam only a few feet above his head.

He surfaced in a trough and was lifted by a vast sloping wall of green that carried him up and over the crest of a high wave as lightly as a bathtub toy. The wind shrieked in his ears and sea spray lashed his cheeks. He pulled up his mask and blinked his eyes. The sky to the east was filled with dark swirling clouds, dark as charcoal as they soared over the gray-green sea. The speed of the approaching storm was uncanny. It seemed to be leaping from one horizon to the next.

Jessie popped up beside him and stared through wide stricken eyes at the blackening overcast bearing down on them. She spit out her mouthpiece."What is it?"

"The hurricane," Pitt shouted over the wind. "It's coming faster than anyone thought."

"Oh, God!" she gasped.

"Release your weight belt and unstrap your air tanks," he said. Nothing needed to be said to the others. They had already dropped their gear and were tearing open the bundle. The clouds swept overhead and they were hurled into a twilight world drained of all color. They were stunned at the violent display of atmospheric power. The wind suddenly doubled in strength, filling the air with foam and driving spray and shattering the wave crests into froth.

Abruptly, the bundle that they had so doggedly hauled with them from the Prosperteer burst open into an inflatable boat, complete with a compact twenty-horsepower outboard motor encased in a waterproof plastic cover. Giordino rolled over the side, followed by Gunn, and they frantically tore at the motor covering. The savage winds quickly drove the boat away from Pitt and Jessie. The gap began widening at an alarming rate.

"The sea anchor!" Pitt bellowed. "Throw out the sea anchor!" Gunn barely heard Pitt over the wail of the wind. He heaved a canvas cone-shaped sack over the side that was held open by an iron hoop at the mouth. He then paid it out on a line which he made fast to the bitt on the bow. As the drag on the anchor took hold, the boat's head came around into the wind and slowed its drift.

While Giordino labored over the motor, Gunn threw out a line to Pitt, who tied it under Jessie's arms. As she was towed toward the boat Pitt swam after her, the waves breaking over his head. The mask was torn from his head and the salt spray whipped his eyes. He doubled his effort when he saw that the running sea was carrying away the boat faster than he could swim.

Giordino's muscled arms thrust into the water, closed on Jessie's wrists, and yanked her into the boat as effortlessly as if she were a ten-pound sea bass. Pitt squinted his eyes until they were almost slits. He felt rather than saw the line fall over his shoulder. He could just make out Giordino's grinning face leaning over the side, his great hands winding in the line. Then Pitt was lying in the bottom of the wildly rocking boat, panting and blinking the salt from his eyes.

"Another minute and you'd have been beyond reach of the line," Giordino yelled.

"Time sure flies when you're having fun," Pitt yelled back. Giordino rolled his eyes at Pitt's cocky reply and went back to laboring over the motor. The immediate danger facing them now was overturning. Until the motor could be started to provide a small degree of stability, a thrashing wave could flip them upside down. Pitt and Gunn threw over trailing ballast bags, which temporarily reduced the threat.

The strength of the wind was ungodly. It tore at their hair and bodies, the spray felt as abrasive to their skin as if it came from a sand blaster. The little inflatable boat flexed under the stress of the mad sea and reeled in the grip of the gale, but she somehow refused to be tipped over.

Pitt knelt on the hard rubber floorboards, clasping the lifeline with his right hand, and turned his back to the wind. Then he extended his left arm. It was an old seaman's trick that always worked in the Northern Hemisphere. His left hand would be pointing to the center of the storm.

They were slightly outside the center, he judged. There would be no breathing spell from the relative calm of the hurricane's eye. Its main path lay a good forty miles to the northwest. The worst was yet to come.

A wave crashed over them, and then another--two in quick succession that would have broken the back of a larger, more rigid vessel. But the tough, runty inflatable shook off the water and struggled back to the surface like a playful seal. Everyone managed to keep a firm grip and no one was washed overboard.

At last Giordino signaled that he had the motor running. No one could hear it over the howl of the wind. Quickly Pitt and Gunn pulled in the sea anchor and the ballast bags. Pitt cupped one hand and yelled in Giordino's ear, "Run with the storm!" To sheer on a sideways course was impossible. The combined force of wind and water would have flung them over. To head into the thrust of the storm bows-on meant a sure battering they could never survive. Their only hope was to ride in the path of the least resistance. Giordino grimly nodded and pushed the throttle lever. The boat banked around sharply in a trough and surged forward across a sea that had turned completely white from the driving spray. They all flattened themselves against the floorboards except Giordino. He sat with one arm wrapped around a lifeline and gripped the outboard motor's steering lever with his free hand.

The daylight was fading slowly away and night would fall in another hour. The air was hot and stifling, making it difficult to breathe. The almost solid wall of wind-stripped water decreased visibility to less than three hundred yards. Pitt borrowed Gunn's diver's mask and raised his head over the bow. It was like standing under Niagara Falls and staring upward.

Giordino felt icy despair as the hurricane unleashed its full wrath around them. That they had survived this long was just short of a miracle. He was fighting the tumbling sea in a kind of restrained frenzy, struggling desperately to keep their puny oasis from being overwhelmed by a wave. He constantly changed throttle settings, trying to ride just behind the towering crests, warily glancing over his shoulder every few seconds at the gaping trough chasing their stern thirty feet below and behind.

Giordino knew the end was only minutes away, certainly no more than an hour with enormous luck. It would be so easy to swing the boat abeam of the sea and finish it now. He allowed himself a quick look down at the others and saw a broad smile of encouragement on Pitt's lips. If his friend of nearly thirty years felt close to death, he gave no hint of it. Pitt threw a jaunty wave and returned to peering over the bow. Giordino couldn't help wondering what he was looking at.

Pitt was studying the waves. They were piling up higher and more steeply, the wind hurling the foaming white horse at the peaks into the next trough. He estimated the distance between crests and judged that they were packing together like the forward lines of a marching column that was slowing its pace.

The bottom was coming up. The surge was flinging them into shallower water. Pitt's eyes strained to penetrate the chaotic wall of water. Slowly, as if a black-andwhite photograph were being developed, shadowy images began taking shape. The first image that flashed through his mind was that of stained teeth, blackened molars being scrubbed by white toothpaste. The image sharpened into dark rocks with the waves smashing against them in great unending explosions of white. He watched the water shoot skyward as the backwash struck an incoming surge. Then, as the surf momentarily settled, he spotted a low reef extending parallel to the rocks that formed a natural wall in front of a wide, sweeping beach. It had to be the Cuban island of Cayo Santa Maria, he reckoned.

Pitt had no problem visualizing the probabilities of the new nightmare, bodies torn to shreds on the coral reef or crushed on the jagged rocks. He wiped the salt from the mask lens and stared again. Then he saw it, a thousand-in-one chance to survive the vortex. Giordino had seen it too--a small inlet between the rocks. He steered for it, knowing he stood a better chance of threading a needle in a thrashing washing machine. In the next thirty seconds the churning outboard and the storm had carried them a hundred yards. The sea over the reef boiled in a dirty foam and the wind velocity increased to where the driving spray and the darkness made vision almost impossible. Jessie's face went white, her body rigid. Her eyes met Pitt's for an instant, fearful yet trusting. His arm circled her waist and squeezed tight.

A breaker caught and struck them like an avalanche down a mountain. The screw of the outboard raced as it lifted clear of the crest, but its protesting whirr was drowned by the deafening noise of the surf. Gunn opened his mouth to shout a warning, but no sound came. The plunging breaker curled over the boat and smashed down on them with fantastic force. It tore Gunn's hold on the lifeline, and Pitt saw him gyrate through the air like a kite with a broken string.

The boat was driven over the reef, buried in foam. The coral sliced through the rubberized fabric into the air chambers. A field of razor blades couldn't have done it more efficiently. The thickly encrusted bottom swirled past. For several moments they were completely submerged. Then at last the faithful little inflatable wallowed to the surface and they were clear of the reef with only fifty yards of open water separating them from the craggy ramparts, looming dark and wet.

Gunn bobbed up only a few feet away, gasping for breath. Pitt reached way out, grabbed him by the shoulder strap of his buoyancy compensator, and hauled him on board. The rescue didn't come a second too soon. The next breaker came roaring over the reef like a herd of crazed animals running before a forest fire.

Giordino grimly hung on to the motor, which was unfalteringly purring away with every bit of horsepower her pistons could punch out. It didn't take a psychic to know the frail craft was being torn to bits. She was only buoyed up by air still trapped in her chambers.

They were almost within reach of the gap between the rocks when they were caught by the wave. The preceding trough slipped under the base of the breaker, causing it to steepen to twice its height. Its speed increased as it rushed toward the rocky shoreline. Pitt glanced up. The menacing pinnacles towered above them, water boiling around their foundations like a seething caldron. The boat was thrust up the front of the breaker, and for a brief instant Pitt thought they might be carried over the peak before it broke. But it curled suddenly and toppled forward, striking the rocks opposite the inlet with the shattering crash of thunder, throwing the shredded boat and its occupants into the air, spilling them into the maelstrom.

Pitt heard Jessie scream from far in the distance. It barely pierced his numbed mind, and he struggled to reply, but then everything blurred. The boat fell with such jarring force the motor was ripped from the transom and slung onto the beach. Pitt remembered nothing after that. A black whirlpool opened up and he was sucked into it.

<<23>>

The man who was the driving force behind the Jersey Colony lay on an office couch inside the concealed headquarters of the project. He rested his eyes and concentrated on his meeting with the President on the golf course.

Leonard Hudson knew damn well the President wasn't about to sit still and wait patiently for another surprise contact. The Chief Executive was a pusher who never left anything to luck. Although Hudson's sources inside the White House and the intelligence agencies reported no indication of an investigation, he was certain the President was figuring a way to penetrate the curtain around the inner core.'

He could almost feel the net being thrown.

His secretary rapped softly on the door and then opened it. "Excuse me for intruding, but Mr. Steinmetz is on the viewer and wishes to talk to you."

"I'll be there in a minute."

Hudson rearranged his thoughts as he laced his shoes. Like a computer, he logged out of one problem and called up another. He didn't look forward to battling with Steinmetz even if the man was a quarter of a million miles away.

Eli Steinmetz was the kind of engineer who overcame an obstacle by designing a mechanical solution and then building it with his own hands. His talent for improvisation was the reason Hudson had chosen him as the leader of the Jersey Colony. A graduate of Caltech with a master's degree from MIT, he had supervised construction projects in half the countries of the world, even Russia.

When approached by the "inner core" to build the first human habitat on lunar soil, Steinmetz had taken nearly a week to make a decision while his mind wrestled with the awesome concept and staggering logistics of such a project. Finally, he accepted, but only on his own terms.

He and only he would select the crew to live on the moon. There would be no pilots or prima donna astronauts in residence. All space flight would be directed by ground control or computers. Only men whose special qualifications were vital in the construction of the base would be included. Besides Steinmetz, the first three to launch the colony were solar and structural engineers. Months later a biologist-doctor, a geochemical engineer, and a horticulturist arrived. Other scientists and technicians followed as their special skills and knowledge were required.

At first Steinmetz had been considered too old. He was fifty-three when he set foot on the moon, and he was fifty-nine now. But Hudson and the other "inner core" members weighed experience over age and never once regretted their selection. Now Hudson stared into the video monitor at Steinmetz, who was holding up a bottle with a hand-drawn label. Unlike the other colonists', Steinmetz's face sprouted no beard and his head was clean-shaven. His skin had a dusky tint that complemented his slateblack eyes. Steinmetz was a fifth-generation American Jew, but he could have walked unnoticed in a Moslem mosque.

"How's that for self-sufficiency?" said Steinmetz. "Chateau Lunar Chardonnay, 1989. Not exactly a premier vintage. Only had enough grapes to make four bottles. Should have allowed the vines in the greenhouses to mature another year, but we got impatient."

"I see you even made your own bottle," observed Hudson.

"Yes, our pilot chemical plant is in full operation now. We've increased our output to where we can process almost two tons of lunar soil materials into two hundred pounds of a bastard metal or five hundred pounds of glass in fifteen days." Steinmetz appeared to be sitting at a long flat table in the center of a small cave. He was wearing a thin cotton shirt and a pair of jogger's shorts.

"You look cool and comfortable," said Hudson.

"Our first priority when we landed," Steinmetz said, smiling. "Remember?"

"Seal the entrance to the cavern and pressurize its interior so you could work in a comfortable atmosphere without the handicap of encapsulated suits."

"After living in those damned things for eight months, you can't imagine what a relief it was to get back into normal clothing."

"Murphy has been closely monitoring your temperatures and he says the walls of the cavern are increasing their rate of heat absorption. He suggests that you send a man out and lower the angle on the solar collectors by half a degree."

"I'll see to it."

Hudson paused. "It won't be long now, Eli."

"Much changed on earth since I left?"

"About the same, only more smog, more traffic, more people." Steinmetz laughed. "You trying to talk me into another tour of duty, Leo?"

"Wouldn't dream of it. You're going to be the biggest-man-on-campus since Lindbergh when you drop out of the blue."

"I'll have all our records packed and secured in the lunar transfer vehicle twenty-four hours before liftoff."

"I hope you don't have a mind to uncork your lunar vino on the trip home."

"No, we'll hold our farewell party in plenty of time to purge all alcoholic residue." Hudson had been trying to approach his point sideways, but decided it was better to come right out with it. "You'll have to deal with the Russians shortly before you leave," he said in a monotone.

"We've been through this," Steinmetz replied firmly. "There is no reason to believe they'll land within two thousand miles of the Jersey Colony."

"Then seek them out and destroy them. You have the weapons and equipment for such a hunting expedition. Their scientists won't be armed. The last thing they'd expect is an attack from men already on the moon."

"The boys and I will gladly defend the homestead, but we're nest about to go out and shoot down unarmed men who are innocent of any threat."

"Listen to me, Eli," Hudson implored. "There is a threat, a very real one. If the Soviets somehow discover the existence of Jersey Colony, they can move right in. With you and your people returning to earth less than twenty-four hours after the cosmonauts land, the colony will be deserted and everything in it fair game."

"I realize that as well as you," said Steinmetz roughly, "and hate it even worse. But the sad fact is we can't postpone our departure. We've pushed ourselves to the limit and beyond up here. I can't order these men to hang on another six months or a year, or until your friends can whistle up another craft to take us from space to a soft landing on earth. Cross it off to bad luck and the Russians, who leaked their lunar landing schedule after it was too late for us to alter our return flight."

"The moon belongs to us by right of possession," Hudson argued angrily. "Men of the United States were the first to walk on its soil, and we were the first to colonize it. For God's sake, Eli, don't turn it over to a bunch of thieving Communists."

"Dammit, Leo, there's enough moon for everybody. Besides, this isn't exactly a Garden of Eden. Outside this cavern, day and night temperatures can vary as much as two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. I doubt if even casino gambling could make a go of it here. Look, even if the cosmonauts fall into our colony, they won't strike a gold vein of information. The accumulation of all our data will go back to earth with us. What we leave behind we can destroy"

"Don't be a fool. Why destroy what can be used by the next colonists, permanent colonists, who will need every advantage they can get?"

Viewing the monitor in front of him, Steinmetz could see the flush on Hudson's face 240,000 miles away. "I've made my position clear, Leo. We'll defend Jersey Colony if need be, but don't expect us to form a posse to kill innocent cosmonauts. It's one thing to shoot at an unmanned space probe, but quite another to murder a fellow human being for trespassing on land he has every right to walk on."

There was an uneasy silence after this statement, but it was no less than what Hudson expected from Steinmetz. The man was no coward. Far from it. Hudson had heard reports of many fights and brawls. Steinmetz could be pushed and clubbed to the floor, but when he came to his feet and his rage seethed to a boil, he could fight like ten devils incarnate. Purveyors of his legend had lost count of the backcountry saloon patrons he had mauled. Hudson broke the spell. "Suppose the Soviet cosmonauts land within fifty miles? Will that prove to you they intend to occupy Jersey Colony?"

Steinmetz shifted in his stone-carved chair, reluctant to make a concession. "We'll have to wait and see."

"Nobody ever won a battle by going on the defensive," Hudson lectured him. "If their landing site is within striking distance and they show every indication of advancing on the colony, will you accept a compromise and attack?"

Steinmetz bowed his shaven head in assent. "Since you insist on putting my back to the wall, you don't leave me much choice."

"The stakes are too high," said Hudson. "You have no choice at all."

<<24>>

The fog in Pitt's brain lifted, and one by one his senses flickered back to life like lights across a circuit board. He struggled to raise his eyelids and focus on the nearest object. For a good half minute he stared at the water-wrinkled skin of his left hand, then at the orange face of his diver's watch as if it were the first time he had ever laid eyes on it. In the dim twilight the luminescent hands read 6:34. Only two hours since they had escaped from the wrecked control car. It seemed more like a lifetime, and none of it real. The wind was still roaring off the sea with the speed of an express train and the sea spray combined with rain to beat against his back. He tried to lift himself to his hands and knees, but his legs felt trapped in concrete. He turned and looked down. They were half buried under the sand by the burrowing action of the ebbing surf line. Pitt lay there for a few more moments, recharging his strength, an exhausted and battered piece of flotsam thrown on the beach. Boulders rose up on either side of him like tenements overlooking an alley. His first really conscious thought was that Giordino had done it, he had steered them through the needle's eye of the rock barrier. Then somewhere through the howling wind, he could hear Jessie calling faintly. He dug out his legs and forced himself to his knees, staggering under the gale, retching out the saltwater that had been forced into his nose, mouth, and down his throat. Half crawling, half stumbling across the stinging sand, he found Jessie sitting dazed, her hair limp and stringy on her shoulders, Gunn's head resting in her lap. She looked up at him through lost eyes that suddenly widened in vast relief.

"Oh, thank God," she murmured, her words drowned out by the storm. Pitt put his arms around her shoulders and gave her a reassuring hug. Then he turned his attention to Gunn.

He was semiconscious. The broken ankle had swelled like a soccer ball. There was an ugly gash above the hairline, and his body was cut in a dozen places from the coral, but he was alive and his breathing was deep and steady.

Pitt shielded his eyes and scanned the beach. Giordino was nowhere in sight. At first Pitt refused to believe it. The seconds passed and he stood rooted, his body leaning into the offshore gale, eyes peering desperately through the torrential dark. He caught a glimpse of orange in the swirl of a dying breaker, and immediately recognized it as the shredded carcass of the inflatable boat. It was caught in the grip of the backwash, drifting out and then swept in again by the next wave.

Pitt lurched into the water up to his hips, oblivious to the spent breakers that rolled around him. He dove under the tattered boat and extended his hands, feeling around like a blind man. His groping fingers found only torn fabric. Moved by some deep urgency to make absolutely sure, he pulled the boat toward the beach.

A large wave caught him unawares and smashed into his back. Somehow he managed to keep his feet under him and drag the boat into shallow water. As the blanket of foam dissolved and was blown away, he saw a pair of legs protruding from under the collapsed boat. Shock, disbelief, and a fanatical refusal to accept Giordino's death flooded through his mind. Frantically, oblivious to the battering of the hurricane, he tore away the sliced remains of the inflatable, revealing Giordino's body floating upright, his head buried inside a buoyancy chamber. Hope came first to Pitt, then optimism that struck him like a punch in the stomach.

Giordino might still be alive.

Pitt stripped away the interior liner and bent over Giordino's face, afraid deep down it would be a lifeless blue. But there was color, and there was breath--ragged and shallow, but there was breath. The brawny little Italian had incredibly survived on air that was trapped inside the buoyancy chamber.

Pitt felt suddenly drained to his bones. Physically and emotionally he was spent. He swayed wearily, the wind trying to beat him flat. Only a firm resolve to save everyone drove him on. Slowly, stiffly from a myriad of cuts and bruises, he slid his arms under Giordino and picked him up. The dead weight of Giordino's solid hundred and seventyfive pounds felt like a ton. Gunn had come around and was huddled with Jessie. He looked up questioningly at Pitt, who was struggling across the windswept beach under Giordino's inert body.

"We've got to find shelter from the wind," Pitt yelled, his voice rasped by the intake of saltwater. "Can you walk?"

"I'll help him," Jessie yelled in reply. She circled both arms around Gunn's waist, braced her feet in the sand, and shoved him upright.

Panting under his load, Pitt made for a line of palm trees bordering the beach. Every twenty feet he glanced back. Jessie had somehow retained her dive mask, so she was the only one who could keep her eyes open and see straight ahead. She was supporting nearly half of Gunn's weight while he gamely hobbled beside her, eyes shut against the stinging sand, dragging his badly swollen foot.

They made it into the trees but received no mercy from the hurricane. The gale bent the tops of the palms almost to the ground, their fronds splitting like paper in a shredding machine. Coconuts were ripped from their clusters, striking the ground with the velocity of cannonballs and just as deadly. One grazed Pitt's shoulder, its husk tearing his exposed skin. It was as though they were running through the no-man's-land of a battlefield. Pitt kept his head bent down and squinted sideways, watching the ground directly in front of him. Before he knew it he had walked into a chain link fence. Jessie and Gunn drew up beside him and stopped. He stared to the right and then the left, but found no sign of a break. Trying to climb it was out of the question. The fence was at least ten feet high with a thick angle of barbed wire at the top. Pitt also spotted a small porcelain insulator and realized the chain links were wired for electricity.

"Which way?" Jessie cried.

"You lead," Pitt shouted in her ear. "I can hardly see." She nodded to the left and set off with Gunn limping along at her side. They staggered onward, beaten every step by the unrelenting force of the wind.

Ten minutes later they had covered only fifty yards. Pitt couldn't push on much longer. His arms were going numb and he was losing his grip on Giordino. He closed his eyes and blindly began to count the steps, staying in a straight line by brushing his right shoulder against the fence, certain the hurricane must have cut off the power source. He heard Jessie shouting something, and he opened one eye in a narrow slit. She was pointing vigorously ahead. Pitt sank to his knees, gently lowered Giordino to the ground, and looked past Jessie. A palm tree had been uprooted by the insane wind and hurled through tire air like some monstrous javelin, landing on the fence and crushing it against the sand.

With appalling abruptness, night closed in and the sky went pitch black. Blindly, they stepped over the flattened fence like sightless drones, reeling and falling, driven on by instinct and some inner discipline that wouldn't allow them to lie down and give up. Jessie gamely kept the lead. Pitt had slung Giordino over a shoulder and held on to the waistband of Gunn's swim trunks, not so much for support as to prevent them from becoming separated.

A hundred yards, then another hundred yards, and suddenly Gunn and Jessie seemed to drop into the ground as if they were swallowed up. Pitt released his grip on Gunn and fell backward, grunting as Giordino's full weight fell across his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. He scrambled from under Giordino and stretched his hand gropingly forward into the dark until he felt nothing there.

Jessie and Gunn had fallen down a steep, eight-foot slope into a sunken road. He could just make out their vague outlines huddled in a heap below.

"Are you injured?" he called.

"We already hurt so much we can't tell." Gunn's voice was muffled by the gale, but not so muffled Pitt couldn't tell it came through clenched teeth.

"Jessie?"

"I'm all right. . . I think."

"Can you give me a hand with Giordino?"

"I'll try."

"Send him down," said Gunn. "We can manage it." Pitt eased Giordino's limp figure over the edge of the slope and lowered him gently by the arms. The others held him by the legs until Pitt could scramble down beside them and take up the heavy bulk. Once Giordino was stretched comfortably on the ground, Pitt looked around and took stock.

The sunken road provided a shelter from the gale-force wind. The blowing sand had dropped off and Pitt could finally open his eyes. The road's surface was made up of crushed seashells and appeared hard packed and little used. No sign of light was visible in either direction, which wasn't too surprising when Pitt considered that any local inhabitants would have evacuated the shoreline before the full energy of the hurricane struck.

Both Jessie and Gunn were very nearly played out, their breath coming in short, tortured rasps. Pitt was aware his own breathing was fast and labored, and his heart pounding like a steam engine under full load. Exhausted and battered as they were, Pitt reflected, it still felt like paradise to lie behind a barrier that reduced by half the main drive of the gale.

Two minutes later Giordino began to groan. Then he slowly sat up and looked around, seeing nothing.

"Jesus, it's dark," he muttered to himself, his mind crawling from a woolly mist. Pitt knelt beside him and said, "Welcome back to the land of the walking dead." Giordino raised his hand and touched Pitt's face in the darkness. "Dirk?"

"In the flesh."

"Jessie and Rudi?"

"Both right here."

"Where is here?"

"About a mile from the beach." Pitt didn't bother to explain how they survived the landing or how they arrived at the road. That could come later. "Where are you hurt?"

"All over. My rib cage feels like it's on fire. I think my left shoulder is dislocated, one leg feels like it was twisted off at the knee, and the base of my skull where it meets the neck throbs like hell." He swore disgustedly. "Damn, I blew it. I thought I could bring us through the rocks. Forgive me for screwing up."

"Would you believe me if I told you we'd all be fish food if it wasn't for you?" Pitt smiled and then gently probed Giordino's knee, guessing that the injury was a torn tendon. Then he turned his attention to the shoulder. "I can't do anything about your ribs, knee, or thick skull, but your shoulder is out of place, and if you're in the mood I think I can manipulate it back where it belongs."