Poseidon's Arrow

at this.”

One glance at the stains told Pitt they were dried blood. When he rubbed a finger across the wall, the dry residue flaked off.

“Doesn’t look recent. Can we backtrack the ship’s navigation system to see where they came from?”

Franco stepped to the helm, glad to distance himself from the gore. He located a navigation monitor, which showed a tiny representation of the Tasmanian Star overlaid on a digital map of Valparaiso Harbor. He tapped on an embedded keyboard and reduced the scale. A yellow line traced the ship’s path off the top of the screen as Valparaiso receded into the coastline of Chile, which gradually receded into the continent of South America. The slightly angular line continued north before cutting sharply left off the west coast of Central America. Franco tracked the line across the Pacific, locating its origin in Australia.

“She came from Perth.” Then he zeroed back in on the point where the ship changed heading. He looked up at Pitt and nodded.

“Your assumption of piracy makes sense. She wouldn’t be crossing the Pacific with one of her holds empty.”

“Let’s see where that course change occurred,” Pitt said.

Franco adjusted the image. “Looks to be about seventeen hundred miles due west of Costa Rica.”

“A lonely spot in the ocean to stage a holdup.”

Franco shook his head. “If that’s where the crew left the ship, then the Tasmanian Star sailed herself over thirty-five hundred miles to Valparaiso.”

“Which means she was hijacked more than a week ago. That leaves a pretty cold trail to follow.”

Franco’s crewman suddenly burst through the bridge wing door. His face was flush, and he panted from sprinting up the companionway. Pitt noticed his hand trembled on the doorframe.

“The crew quarters are empty, sir. There doesn’t seem to be anyone aboard.” He hesitated. “I did find one man.”

“Dead?” the captain asked.

The sailor nodded. “I wouldn’t have found him but for the odor. He’s on the main deck, near the forward hatch.”

“Take me to him.”

Slowly the seaman turned and led Franco and Pitt down the companionway. They crossed the deck to the port side and marched past the rows of hatch covers. The seaman slowed as they approached the forward hatch, then stopped and pointed.

“He’s beneath one of the supporting braces,” the man said, not moving any closer. “He must have rolled or fallen there.”

Pitt and Franco stepped forward. Then they noticed a blue object wedged in the hatch cover’s hydraulics, next to a supporting brace. Inching closer, they could see it was the body of a man dressed in blue coveralls. The odor of decomposing flesh was overpowering, but the sight before them was even worse.

The clothes were unmarked and perfectly clean. Judging by the heavy work boots and a pair of gloves cinched to his waist, Pitt guessed he was an ordinary seaman. But that was the only thing he could determine.

The exposed skin had bloated to grotesque proportions and turned the color of French mustard. Small rivulets of dried blood had pooled around his ears and mouth. A swarm of flies buzzed around the seaman’s face and clustered on his open, bulging eyes. Yet it was the body’s extremities, marked beyond mere decomposition, that was most grisly. The seaman’s ears, nose, and fingertips were charred black, though the skin remained unbroken. Pitt recalled photos of polar explorers who had suffered extreme frostbite, marked by black blisters covering patches of dead skin. Yet the Tasmanian Star had sailed nowhere near any polar region.

Franco slowly backed away from the figure.

“Santa Maria!” he gasped. “He’s been taken by the devil himself.”

8

A SCRATCHED AND BATTERED CRASH HELMET SAT centered on Pitt’s desk when he returned to his office in Washington. A short, typewriten note taped on the visor welcomed him back:

Dad,

Really, you need to be more careful!

Pitt chuckled as he slid the helmet aside, wondering if it came from his son or his daughter. Both children worked for NUMA and had just left for a project off Madagascar involving subsea tectonics.

There was a rap at his office door and in walked a voluptuous woman with perfect hair and makeup. Although Zerri Pochinsky was north of forty, her looks gave no hint of it. Pitt’s trusted secretary for many years, she might have become something more in his life if he hadn’t met Loren first.

“Welcome back to the lion’s den.” She smiled and placed a cup of coffee on his desk. “I honestly don’t know how that helmet got here.”

Pitt returned her smile. “There’s just no sanctity to my inner sanctum.”

“I received a call from the Vice President’s secretary,” Pochinsky said, her hazel eyes turning serious. “You’ve been asked to attend a meeting in his office today at two-thirty.”

“Any mention of the topic?”

“No, they simply indicated it was a security matter.”

“What in Washington isn’t?” He shook his head with annoyance. “Okay, tell them I’ll be there.”

“Also, Hiram is outside. He said you wanted to see him.”

“Send him in.”

Pochinsky slipped out the door and was replaced by a bearded man with shoulder-length hair. Dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Allman Brothers Band T-shirt, Hiram Yaeger looked like he was headed to a biker bar. Only the intense blue eyes behind a pair of granny glasses revealed a deeper intellectual pursuit. Far from a roadhouse barfly, Yaeger was in fact a computer genius whose greatest love was writing software code. Managing NUMA’s state-of-the-art computer resource center, he had built a sophisticated network that collected detailed oceanographic data from a thousand points around the globe.

“So, the savior of the mighty Sea Splendour has returned.” He plopped into a chair opposite Pitt. “You mean to tell me they didn’t whisk you off on a free round-the-world cruise for saving the most expensive ship in their fleet?”

“They were more than willing,” Pitt said. “But Loren’s on a diet, so the ship’s buffet would have been wasted. And my shuffleboard game’s a bit rusty, so there was really no point.”

“I’d be happy to take the trip for you.”

“And risk the whole agency falling apart without your presence?”

“True, I am rather indispensable around here.” Yaeger lofted his nose in the air. “Remind me to mention that at my next performance review.”

“Done,” Pitt said with a grin. “So I take it you found something on the Tasmanian Star?”

“The basics. She was built in Korea in 2005. At a length of five hundred and ten feet and a capacity of fifty- four thousand deadweight tons, she’s classified as a Handymax dry bulk carrier. She was fitted with five holds, two cranes, and a self-dispensing conveyor system.”

“Which can make for a nice stairwell,” Pitt noted.

“She’s owned by a Japanese shipping company named Sendai, and has seen steady service in the Pacific, primarily as an ore carrier. On her last voyage she was under contract with an American petrochemical company. She departed Perth three and a half weeks ago, with a recorded cargo of bauxite, bound for Los Angeles.”

“Bauxite.” Pitt pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. He retrieved the silver rock he had picked up from the deck of the Tasmanian Star and laid it on his desk. “Any idea of the value of the bauxite she was carrying?”

“I couldn’t locate the ship’s insured value, but depending on the grade, the stuff sells for around thirty to sixty bucks a ton on the open market.”