Machita caught his breath and tensed. The colonel had overstepped his rank. And yet Lusana kept his back to the shore and nonchalantly went about his fishing. 'I'll remind you,' he said over his shoulder with quiet authority, 'the lion's share of our treasury came from me. What is mine I can take back or I can use as I please.'
Jumana clenched his hands in tight knots and the cords in his neck stood out. He made a move toward the water's edge, his lips drawn back over his teeth. Then, suddenly, as if a circuit breaker somewhere in his gray matter had overloaded and clicked off, all expression of rage vanished, and he smiled. His words came casually, but with an undercurrent of bitterness.
'I apologize for my remarks. I am overtired.'
Machita decided then and there that the colonel was a danger that bore watching. He could see that jumana would never fully accept the position of number-two man.
'Forget it,' said Lusana. 'The important thing now is to lay our hands on Wild Rose.'
'I will make arrangements for the exchange,' said Machita.
'You will do more than that,' Lusana said, facing the shore again. 'You will create a plan to make the payoff. Then you will kill Einma.'
Jumana's mouth hung open. 'You never intended to give away the two million dollars?' he sputtered.
Lusana grinned. 'Of course not. If you had been patient, you could have spared us your juvenile outburst.'
Jumana made no reply. There was nothing he could say. He widened his smile and shrugged. It was then Machita caught the imperceptible shift of the eyes. jumana was not looking directly at Lusana; his vision was aimed at a spot in the river ten feet upstream from the general.
'Guards!' Machita screamed, pointing frantically. 'The river! Fire! For God's sake, fire!'
The security men's reaction time measured less than two seconds. Their shots exploded in Machita's ears and the water erupted a few feet from Lusana in a hundred shattered geysers.
Twenty feet of hideous brown scale burst through the surface and rolled over and over, its tail thrashing crazily as the bullets thudded into the thick hide like hail. Then the firing ceased and the great reptile made one more convulsive revolution and sank beneath the surface.
Lusana stood in his wading boots, his eyes wide, his body stunned into immobility. He stared dazedly into the clear water at the hulk of the crocodile, now gracefully tumbling along the riverbed in the current.
On the bank, Machita trembled, not so much at Lusana's narrow escape as at the satanic expression on Jumana's Neanderthal-shaped face.
The bastard had known, Machita thought. He had known the instant the crocodile slithered off the far bank and homed in on the general, and yet he had said nothing.
25
It was two hours before dawn when Patrick Fawkes paid the cabdriver and walked up to the floodlit gate of the Forbes Marine Scrap & Salvage Company. A uniformed guard turned from a portable TV set and yawned as Fawkes passed a small folder through the arched window of the gatehouse. The guard scrutinized the signatures and compared the photograph with the man before him. Then he passed it back.
'Welcome to America, Captain. My employers have been expecting you.'
'Is she here?' Fawkes asked impatiently.
'Tied up to the east dock,' replied the guard, shoving a Xerox copy of a map of the salvage area through the window. 'Mind your step. Since the energy rationing, the yard's night lights have been shut off. It's darker than Hades out there.' As Fawkes passed under the giant derricks toward the dock, a wind swept in off the bay and carried a heavy odor to his nostrils: the pungent perfume of the waterfront. He inhaled the mingled aromas of diesel oil, tar and salt water. It never failed to revive his spirits.
He came to the dock and glanced about for signs of human activity. The night crew had long since gone home. Only a seagull, perched on a wooden piling, returned Fawkes's gaze out of one beady eye.
After another hundred yards Fawkes stopped at a huge spectral shape that loomed in the darkness beside the pier. Then he took the gangplank, stepped onto the seemingly endless deck, and unerringly made his way through the steel labyrinth to the bridge.
Later, as the sun crept over the eastern side of the bay, the mutilated shabbiness of the ship became manifest. But the peeling paint, the acres of rust, and the jagged torch marks of the salvage crew stood unseen in Fawkes's eyes. Like a father with a hideously disfigured daughter, he saw only her beauty.
'Aye, you're a bonny ship,' he shouted across the silent decks. 'You're gonna do Just fine.'
26
Steiger's superiors at the Pentagon sat on his report of the discovery of Vixen 03 for nearly two months before summoning him to Washington. To Steiger it was like sitting in the audience of a staged nightmare. He felt more like a hostile witness than a key investigator.
Even with the evidence before their eyes, in the form of videotape, General Ernest Burgdorf, chief of Air Force Safety, and General John O'Keefe, aid to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed doubts over the sunken aircraft's importance, and argued that nothing was to be gained by bringing it to light except sensationalistic play from the news media. Steiger sat stunned.
'But their families,' he protested. 'It would be criminal not to notify the crew's families that the bodies have been found.'
'Come to your senses, Colonel. What good would dredging up old memories do them? The crew's parents are probably long since dead. Wives have remarried. Children raised by new fathers. Let all concerned go about their present lives in peace.'
'There's still the cargo,' Steiger said. 'The possibility exists that Vixen 03's cargo included nuclear warheads.'
'We've been all through that,' snapped O'Keefe. 'A thorough computer search through military- s torehou se records confirmed that there are no missing warheads. Every piece of atomic hardware beginning with the bomb dropped on Hiroshima can be accounted for.'
'Are you also aware, sir, that nuclear material was, and is still, shipped in stainlesssteel canisters?'
'And did it also occur to you, Colonel,' said Burgdorf, 'that the canisters you say you found might be empty?'
Steiger sagged in his chair, beaten. He might as well have been debating with the wind. They were treating him like an overimaginative child who claimed he'd seen an elephant in a Minnesota cornfield.
'And if that actually is the same aircraft that was supposed to have vanished over the Pacific,' added Burgdorf, 'I think it best to let sleeping dogs lie.'
'Sir?'
'The grim reasons behind the aircraft's tremendous course differential may not be something the Air Force wishes to publicize. Consider the probabilities. To fly a thousand miles in the opposite direction takes either the total malfunction of at least five different instrument systems aided by the blind stupidity of the crew, a navigator who lost his marbles, or a plot by the entire crew to steal the airplane, for what purpose God only knows.'
'But somebody must have authorized the flight orders,' said Steiger, puzzled.
'Somebody did, ' said O'Keefe. 'The original orders were issued at Travis Air Force Base, in California, by a Colonel Michael Irwin.'
Steiger looke at the general skeptically, 'Flight orders are seldom kept on file more than a few months. How
