“The chamber was built to withstand four times the pressure of the other project structures,” Pitt said with a quiet unarguable assertion. “Fickle providence, as you call it, gave us time to pressurize the lock, open the outer door, and move forward enough for the scoop and claw to operate before the avalanche struck. Otherwise we’d be trapped for longer than I care to think about.”
“Oh, bloody hell.” Plunkett laughed. There was little that fazed him. “What does it matter so long as we cheat the grave?”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘grave.’ “
“Sorry.” Plunkett sat in a seat beside and slightly to the rear of Pitt. He stared around the interior of the DSMV. “A damned fine machine. What’s its power source?”
“A small nuclear reactor.”
“Nuclear, heh? You Yanks never cease to amaze me. I’ll wager we can drive this monster right across the bottom and onto Waikiki Beach.”
“You’d win your bet,” said Pitt with a faint grin. “Big John’s reactor and life-support systems could get us there. The only problem being a flat-out speed of five kilometers per hour. We’d die of starvation a good week before we arrived.”
“You didn’t pack a lunch?” Plunkett asked humorously.
“Not even an apple.”
Plunkett gave Pitta dry look. “Even death would be a treat if I didn’t have to hear that blasted tune again.”
“You don’t care for ‘Minnie’?” Pitt asked in mock surprise.
“After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no.”
“With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it’s all we’ve got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“I don’t think much of your musical inventory,” Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. “What’s wrong with Strauss?”
“Instrumental,” Pitt answered. “Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they’ll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there’s no mistaking good old human babble.”
“For all the good that will do,” said Plunkett. “If a rescue mission is launched, there’s no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘demise.’ “
Plunkett reached into a pocket of his big woolen sweater and produced a flask. “Only about four swigs left, but it ought to keep our spirits up for a while.”
Pitt took the offered flask as a muffled rumble shook the big tracked vehicle. The scoop had screeched into a mass of stone and attempted to lift it clear. Far beyond its load safety level, it struggled and groaned to hoist the debris. Like an Olympic weight lifter straining for the gold, the scoop heaved its massive burden above the seafloor and dumped it in a growing mound along the trench.
The outside lights failed to penetrate the mud clouds, and the monitors inside the control cabin showed only constantly merging colors of yellow and gray. But the computer monitor gave a three-dimensional sonar image that displayed the extent of the excavation.
Fully five hours had elapsed since Pitt began the digging operation. At last he could see an enhanced display showing a narrow but reasonably clear corridor slanting toward the surface of the seabed.
“We’ll scrape some paint off the fenders, but I think we can squeeze through,” Pitt said confidently.
Plunkett’s face lit up. “Kick her in the butt, Mr. Pitt. I’m sick to death of staring at this filthy muck.”
Pitt’s head tilted slightly and he gave a wink of one green eye. “As you wish, Mr. Plunkett.” He took over manual control from the computer and rubbed his hands like a pianist about to play. “Cross your fingers the tracks get a firm grip on the sediment or we’ll have to take up permanent residence.”
He gently eased the throttle control forward. The wide track crawlers on the sides of Big John slowly began to move, churning through the soft ooze, turning faster as Pitt increased the power. Gradually they inched forward. Then one track caught and gripped on a layer of small stones, stewing the giant mining machine into the opposite side of the trench. Pitt fought to correct, but the wall gave way and the mudflow spread over one side of the vehicle.
He rammed the throttle against its stop, then pulled back as he shifted into reverse, then full forward again as he rocked Big John back and forth. The compact nuclear reactor had the power, but the tracks could not find the traction. Rock and silt flew from the pivoted cleats as they ripped through the slimy gumbo.
Still the DSMV remained stuck in its narrow prison.
“Maybe we should call a halt and scoop the mud off,” said Plunkett, dead serious. “Or better yet, sit back and review the situation.”
Pitt spared a few moments to give the big Britisher a hard, icy stare. Plunkett swore Pitt’s eyes burned out a goodly number of his brain cells.
“A lot of my people and I worked hard and long to build the first deep-water community,” he said in a voice that bordered on satanic. “And someone, somewhere, is responsible for its destruction. They’re also the cause behind the loss of your submersible, your support ship, and its crew. That’s the situation. Now, speaking for myself, I’m going to bust through this crap if I have to tear the guts out of this thing, get to the surface in one piece, find the scum behind the disaster, and punch their teeth down their lungs.”
Then he turned and sent the tracks thrashing through the encasement of silt and rock. With an awkward wobble, the great machine dug in and lurched a meter forward, then two meters.
Plunkett sat like a tree, thoroughly intimidated yet quite convinced. By God, he thought, I think the man might damn well do it!
13
EIGHT THOUSAND KILOMETERS distant, deep in a shaft carved out of volcanic rock, a crew of diggers stepped aside as two men moved forward and peered through an excavated break in a concrete wall. A sickening stench drifted from the opening, filling the twenty-man mining crew with a dread of the unknown.
The floodlights illuminating the narrow shaft cast eerie distorted shadows in what appeared to be a large tunnel beyond the one-meter-thick concrete. Inside, an old rusty truck could be distinguished, surrounded by what looked to be a vast bed of graybrown scrubwood.
Despite the cool damp air deep under the battle-scarred slopes of Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay, the two men who peered through the hole were sweating heavily. After years of research, they knew they were on the brink of discovering part of the huge World War II cache of war loot known as “Yamashita’s Gold,” named after General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines after October of 1944.
The immense hoard that was seized by the Japanese during the war—from China, the Southeast Asian countries, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—consisted of thousands of metric tons of exotic gems and jewelry, silver and gold bullion, and Buddhas and Catholic altarpieces encrusted with priceless gems and cast in solid gold.
Manila had been the collection point for future transshipment to Japan, but because of heavy shipping losses in the later stages of the war from American submarines, less than twenty percent of the loot actually arrived in Tokyo. With nowhere to go and faced with certain invasion by the avenging Americans, the Japanese guardians of the treasure were in a dilemma. They weren’t about to give it back to the nations and people they had pillaged. Their only option was to hide the immense hoard in over a hundred different sites on and around the island of Luzon, hoping to return after the war and smuggle it home.
Conservative estimates of the stolen treasure on the current money markets were put at between 450 and
