Medusa

“It’s on its way.”

Austin clicked off and was about to call the Trouts. But Lee was coming his way, and he put his cell away to hail a taxi.

Austin was only slightly worried about Zavala. The charming young Mexican-American had an amazing talent for survival, and there was little Austin could do at this point anyhow. He was more worried about the fact that Chang had known that Austin was on the island. Someone had tailed him to the harbor, and that meant his comings and goings from the airport had been under surveillance from the time the Citation landed.

He couldn’t figure it. Only a few trusted people knew that they were in Pohnpei. He cursed himself for underestimating the Triad.

The taxi dropped them off at the airport, and they went out to the tarmac to await the return of the Seahawk. Austin started to tell Lee about Zavala’s disappearance, but she couldn’t contain her excitement.

“Do you know what we discovered in that place?” she said. “It was a hospital or clinic, where the medusa toxin was administered to cure people! This is the immunology discovery of the century. It proves that ancient men knew the value of inoculation and used it to cure disease. I can’t wait to tell Dr. Huang about this. He’ll be thrilled.”

“Who is Dr. Huang?” Austin asked.

“He’s my friend and mentor,” Lee said. “He’s with the Ministry of Health, and was the one who brought me into the medusa project.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“He asked me to keep him informed on a daily basis about what I was doing. I climbed the water tower every night at Bonefish Key to get a phone signal.”

“Every detail?” Austin asked.

“Yes,” Lee said. “I even called him when we stopped at Los Angeles and told him that we were coming to Pohnpei.”

“That explains how Chang and his buddies knew we were here.”

“Oh, no, you don’t think . . .”

Austin shrugged.

“Our mission is top secret,” he said. “Only a few trusted people knew we were coming here. But Chang must have had someone on our tail from the second we landed. How well do you know Dr. Huang?” he asked. “Could he be an informant?”

“I met him at Harvard, and he was quite helpful finding me employment.” She thought about Huang’s failure to fight her exile and his deceptive manner in bringing her into the medusa research. “Dr. Huang is a brilliant but fearful man. It would take only a little threat to bend him to someone’s will.”

“Someone or something like the Triad.”

Her mood darkened.

“Yes,” she said. “But it is my fault for letting him deceive me.”

“You did a favor for someone you thought was an old friend,” he said. “I’d suggest that you keep Dr. Huang in the dark from now on.”

The distant whup-whup of rotor blades from over the lagoon announced the imminent arrival of the helicopter from the Concord. The Seahawk set down moments later. Austin and Lee climbed in, and the chopper lifted off. It was less than an hour, but it seemed like days to Austin, before the helicopter was setting down for a landing on the aft deck of the Concord.

Captain Dixon helped Lee off the helicopter, and said, “Welcome to the Concord, Dr. Lee. Your government has been trying to get in touch with you.”

“We were somewhat delayed in Pohnpei,” she said.

“Quite all right,” he said. “I told your people that you were on the way. We’ve got a teleconferencing setup you can use. I’ll have my communications officer take you there.”

While Dixon stepped off to the side to use his hand radio, Lee turned to Austin.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Kurt. Thank you for an interesting day.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Perhaps on our next tour of Nan Madol, we can spend more time above water.”

“That would certainly be different,” she said with a smile.

The communications officer arrived minutes later and led Lee to her teleconference. Dixon welcomed Austin back to the Navy cruiser, and said he would show him on a chart where Zavala had disappeared. On the way to the bridge, the captain said aircraft in the vicinity had made several sweeps around the atoll, but there was no sign of Zavala or the helicopter.

“No debris or oil slick?” Austin asked.

“Nothing,” Dixon said. “But we’ll keep looking.”

“Thanks, Captain, but you can’t spend any more time looking for Joe. The lab is our top priority.” Noting the frustrated look on the captain’s face, he added, “Don’t worry about Joe. He pops up when you least expect him.”

Austin studied the atoll’s location, wondering what had attracted Zavala to the tiny speck of land, and then punched in the Trouts’ number on his cell phone. Gamay answered.

“Kurt! Thank goodness you called. We’ve been worried. What’s going on?”

“We had a run-in with one of the Triad leaders in Nan Madol. Guy named Chang. The Triad had an informant. We’re back on the Concord, but now Joe is missing. Captain Dixon said Joe borrowed a helicopter and went off to check out an atoll.”

“We gave him the atoll’s coordinates,” Gamay said. “It’s located approximately where Trouble Island was, the place Captain Dobbs stopped at with his whale ship a hundred fifty years ago.”

“You found the logbook?” Austin asked.

“No,” she said. “You’re not the only one who’s discovered that the Triad has a long reach. We contacted a book dealer who said he had a lead on the log, but someone killed him and tried to jump us. We got away by the skin of our teeth.”

“Glad to hear that,” Austin said with relief. “I’m puzzled, though. If you didn’t find the log, where did you dig up the information about the atoll?”

Gamay told Austin about Perlmutter’s lead to Caleb Nye, the visits to the Dobbs mansion and Brimmer’s store, and finding Brimmer’s body in the old mill. Austin fumed as he listened to the details of Brimmer’s murder and the attempt to ambush the Trouts. Even without Dr. Huang, the vast criminal organization seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. He asked for the longitude and latitude coordinates from Nye’s diorama and said he would check them out immediately.

“What do you want us to do in the meantime?” Gamay asked.

“Call Sandecker and bring him up to speed,” Austin said. “I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

Austin signed off with a quick thank-you, then sat down in front of a computer and called up a satellite image on the monitor using Nye’s coordinates. Nineteenth-century navigation was not exactly precise, and the atoll Austin saw on the screen didn’t match the position on the map.

But a radar reading of Joe’s trajectory showed that he seemed to be heading directly for the atoll. Austin zoomed in on the tiny speck. The monitor showed a palm-studded, handkerchief-sized patch of sand encircled by a coral reef. Nothing unusual, except for a dark streak near one side of the lagoon. He ran through the possibilities: school of fish, coral, undersea vegetation, shadows . . . Nothing seemed to fit. He looked up earlier images of the island: the streak was larger then. He kept going back in time, hour by hour.

As he dug back into the satellite photos, he saw that the streak had disappeared. He went further back, and he stopped in his tracks. A cigar-shaped object had taken the place of the streak. The conning tower protruding from the object identified it as a submarine. He enlarged the image, and did a quick Internet search for an Akula-class submarine. He found a series of pictures, extracted one that had the conning tower in roughly the same position, and placed the two images side by side. The subs were identical.

With growing excitement, Austin backed up in the photo file even further. There was no submarine in the lagoon now, not even a black streak. But he saw a dark spot which, upon enlargement, showed the unmistakable outline of a helicopter. Starting with that shot, he rapidly played the pictures forward like images in a nickelodeon: empty lagoon, helicopter, submarine, no helicopter, black streak shrinking in length.