Trojan Odyssey

Poco Bonito leaped forward like a racehorse prodded in the rump with a pitchfork. Within a hundred yards, she was flying across the water at fifty knots straight toward the port side of the pirate ship. The cannon muzzles, already poking through the gun ports, opened fire, spouts of flames bursting from their muzzles, accompanied by the sound of a thunderous blast that echoed over the water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'But who projected the holographic image?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Nothing heavier?'

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

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

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

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

'A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Have they given up?' Renee murmured hopefully.

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

'But who are they?'

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

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

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

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

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

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