passengers' dining pleasure.
Suddenly there was a movement on the fringe of the light beams. 'What in hell is that?' blurted Gunn.
Spellbound, everyone in the control room started at the etheric cloud that floated into camera range.
For long moment it seemed to hover, the outer edges vague and wavering in slow motion. Then, as if encased within a milky translucent shroud, a human form reached out for the RSV, an indistinct, disembodied form like two photographic negatives overlaying one another and producing a double exposure.
Heidi fell silent; her blood turned to ice. Hoker sat like a chunk of granite at the console, his face dazed with disbelief Oddly, Gunn tilted his head to one side and studied the apparition with the clinical look of a surgeon contemplating an X-ray.
'In my wildest dreams,' he said in a hoarse voice, 'I never really thought I'd see a ghost.'
Gunn's apparent composure didn't fool Pitt. He could see the little man was in a near state of shock. 'Reverse Baby,' he said calmly to Hoker.
Fighting a fear he had never experienced before, Hoker gathered his senses and moved his fingers over the controls. At first the undulating shape receded in the background, and then it began to grow larger again.
'Oh, lord, it's following,' whispered Heidi.
A quick glance at the strained, stunned faces showed the same realization on every mind. They stood paralyzed, their attention transfixed on the monitors. 'For God's sake, what is it doing?' rasped Gunn.
No one answered, no, one in the control room possessed the power of speech. No one except Pitt.
'Turn Baby around and get it out of there, fast!' he snapped.
Hoker forced himself to tear his eyes from the unearthly sight and pushed the power setting to FULL.
The little survey craft was not designed for speed. At maximum, its thrusters could only propel it at three knots. It began a tight turn. The cameras in the bow panned away from the undulating menace, past the open portholes glowing weirdly from the filtered light from the surface, past the faces of the mirrors that reflected no more. The 180-degree maneuver seemed to take an endless time.
And it came too late.
A second transparent specter drifted above the threshold of the doorway to the lounge, its shadowy arms outstretched and beckoning.
'Damn!' Pitt cursed. 'Another one!'
'What should I do?' Hoker's voice was pleading, almost desperate.
It would be an understatement to say that Pitt held the undivided attention of everyone in the control room. They were awed by his glacial concentration. It was beginning to seep through to them why he was held in such high esteem by Admiral Sandecker. If ever a man was in the right place at the right time, it was Dirk Pitt standing on the deck of a salvage ship calling the shots against the unnatural.
Given a century, they could never have guessed the thought running through his mind. All they could detect from his expression was that anger had replaced studied contemplation.
If 'Attack and be damned' worked with the phantom train, Pitt reasoned, there was little to lose by repeating the play. He nodded to Hoker.
'Ram the bastard!'
The mood abruptly changed now. Everyone took their strength from Pitt. Their fear gradually altered to growing determination to expose what their imaginations suggested were dead souls haunting the decaying ocean liner.
The RSV zeroed in and struck the spectral barrier in the doorway. There seemed to be no resistance at first. The blurred figure gave way, but then it floated forward and its shroud enveloped the craft. All focus was lost from the cameras and the monitors projected only vague shadows.
'It appears our hosts have substance,' Pitt said conversationally.
'Baby is not responding to command,' Hoker called out. 'The controls react as if it's immersed in cooked oatmeal.'
'Try reversing the thrusters.'
'No go.' Hoker shook his head. 'Whatever those things are, they've immobilized it.'
Pitt walked across to the control console and peered over Hoker's head at the instruments. 'Why is the directional indicator vascillating?'
'It's like they're wrestling with Baby,' answered Hoker. 'Trying to drag it somewhere, I would guess.'
Pitt gripped his shoulder. 'Shut down all systems except the cameras.
'What about the lights?'
'Shut them down too. Let those heavy-handed ghosts think they've damaged Baby's power source.'
The monitors dimmed until their screens showed only blackness. They looked cold and dead, but occasionally a faint, undefined movement showed through. If a stranger had walked into the control room he would have written everyone off as men tally incompetent; finding a group of people standing enraptured by dark TV screens was a psychologist's dream.
Ten minutes became twenty, and twenty became thirty. There was no change. Anticipation hung heavy in the air. Nothing and still nothing. Then very gradually, so gradually nobody noticed it at first, the screens began to lighten. 'What do you make of it?' Pitt asked Hoker.
'No way of telling. Without power, I can't read the systems.'
'Activate the instruments, but only long enough for the computers to record the data.'
'You're talking in microseconds.'
'Then go for it.'
The dexterity in Hoker's index finger ran a poor second to the incomprehensible speed of the data system as he flicked the switch. The demand signals were received by the RSV and returned to the computers, which in turn relayed their readout across the digital dials on the console before the switch clicked to OFF.
'Position, four hundred meters, heading zero-twenty-seven degrees. Depth, thirteen meters.'
'It's coming up,' Gunn said.
'Surfacing about a quarter mile off our starboard stem,' Hoker verified.
'I can make out color now,' said Heidi. 'A dark green becoming a deep blue.'
The haze in front of the camera lenses began to shimmer. Then a bright orange glare burst from the video screens. Human forms could be distinguished now, blurred as though animated through a frosted window.
'We have sun,' declared Hoker. 'Baby is on the surface.'
Without a word, Pitt ran from the room up a companionway to the bridge. He snatched a pair of binoculars hanging by the helm and aimed them across the river.
The sky was free of clouds and the late morning sun reflected off the waters. A light breeze came in from the sea and nudged the short furrows upriver. The only vessels in sight were a tanker steaming from the direction of Quebec and a fleet of five fishing boats to the northeast, fanned out on different headings. Gunn came up behind Pitt. 'See anything?'
'No, I was too late,' Pitt said shortly. 'Baby is gone.'
'Gone?'
'Perhaps kidnapped is a better word. Baby has probably been taken aboard one of those fishing boats out there.' He paused and handed the glasses to Gunn. 'My guess is the old blue trawler, or maybe the red one with the yellow wheelhouse. Their nets are hung so they block off all view of any activity on the far side of their decks.'
Gunn stared silently across the water for a few moments. Then he lowered the binoculars. 'Baby is a two- hundred thousand-dollar piece of equipment,' he said angrily. 'We've got to stop them.'
'I'm afraid the Canadians would not take kindly to a foreign vessel forcibly boarding boats inside their territorial limits. Besides, we've got to keep a low profile on our operation. The last thing the President needs is a messy incident over a piece of gear that can be replaced at the expense of the taxpayers.'
'It doesn't seem right,' grumbled Gunn.
'We'll have to forget righteous indignation,' said Pitt. 'The problem we have to face is who and why. Were they simply thieving sport divers or persons with more relevant motives?'
'The cameras might tell us,' said Gunn.
'They might at that,' Pitt said with a faint smile. 'Providing the kidnappers didn't pull Baby's plug.'
There was a strange atmosphere in the control room when they returned, thick and acrid and almost electrical. Heidi was sitting in a chair shuddering; all color was drained from her face, her eyes were blank. A young
