"All that's left after Lizzie got through with it," answered Gunn.
Four hundred yards later the Escort rolled onto an old wooden wharf crowded with darkened and forlorn fishing boats. Gunn braked to a stop at the only one whose lights illuminated its decks. The boat appeared to have seen better days. Under the yellow glow, her black paint looked faded. Rust streaks ran from the deck and hull hardware. Fishing gear lay carelessly cluttered around the work deck. To a passerby on the dock, she looked uncompromisingly utilitarian, another fishing boat in a world full of fishing boats, with the same character as the vessels anchored and moored around her.
As Pitt's eyes swept the beamy vessel from stem to stern, where the Nicaraguan flag hung limp with its twin horizontal blue stripes bordering one of white, he reached inside his shirt and felt the small folded silk bundle, reassuring himself it was still there.
He turned slightly and glanced briefly sideways at a lavender-colored pickup truck that was parked in the shadows of a nearby warehouse. It was not empty. He could see a dark shape behind the wheel and the red glow of a cigarette through the rain-streaked windshield.
Finally, he turned back to the boat. "So this is Poco Bonito."
"Not much to look at, is she?" Gunn said, as he opened the trunk and helped retrieve the bags. "But she's powered by twin thousand-horsepower diesels and carries scientific gear most chemical labs would die for."
"There's a switch," said Pitt.
Gunn looked at him. "How so?"
"This has to be the only vessel in the NUMA fleet that isn't painted turquoise."
"I'm familiar with the smaller Neptune class of NUMA survey ships," said Giordino. "She's also built like an armored car and comfortably stable in heavy seas." He hesitated and looked up and down the wharf at the other fishing boats. "Nice job of disguise. Except for her larger deckhouse, which you can't reduce with a stage set, she fits right in."
"How old is she?" Pitt asked.
"Six months," answered Gunn.
"How did our engineers make her look so… so used?"
"Special effects," Gunn replied, laughing. "The shabby paint and rust are specially formulated to give that appearance."
Pitt leaped from the dock onto the deck and turned as Giordino passed over their luggage and duffel bag. The sound of feet thumping on the deck alerted a man and a woman, who appeared from the rear door of the deckhouse. The man, in his early fifties with a neatly trimmed gray beard and bushy eyebrows, stepped under the deck light. His head was shaven and gleamed with sweat. He wasn't much taller than Giordino and he stood with slightly hunched shoulders.
The other crew member was nearly six feet tall and willowy, with the anorexic figure of a fashion model. The blond hair, radiant and thick, splashed around her shoulders. Her face was tanned with high cheekbones and when she smiled a greeting she displayed a fine set of white teeth. Like most women who worked in the outdoors, she wore her hair tied back and little makeup, which did not distract from her overall attractiveness. At least not in Pitt's mind. He noted that she did adhere to certain feminine traits of beauty. She painted her toenails.
Both man and woman were dressed in native cotton shirts with vertical stripes over khaki shorts. The man wore sneakers that looked like they had been shot full of holes, while the woman's feet were slipped into wide-strapped sandals.
Gunn made the introductions. "Dr. Renee Ford, our resident fishery's biologist, and Dr. Patrick Dodge, NUMA's leading marine geochemist. I believe you know Dirk Pitt, special projects director, and Al Giordino, marine engineer."
"We've never worked on the same project together," said Renee in a husky voice only a few decibels above a whisper. "But we've sat together in conferences on several occasions."
"Likewise," said Dodge, as he shook hands.
Pitt was tempted to ask if Ford and Dodge shared a garage, but held back from making a bad joke. "Good to see you again."
"I trust we'll have a happy ship." Giordino flashed one of his congenial grins.
"Why wouldn't we?" Renee asked sweetly.
Giordino did not reply. It was another of the rare times he was at a loss for a comeback.
Pitt stood for several moments, listening to the water slapping against the wharf pilings. Not a soul could be seen. The wharf looked deserted. Almost, but not quite.
He dropped down to his cabin in the stern, removed a small black case from his suitcase and eased back up the stairway onto the side of the deck opposite the wharf. Using the deckhouse as a cover, he opened the case and removed what looked like a video camera. He switched on its transformer and it gave off a muted high-pitched whine. Next, he draped a blanket over his head and slowly rose until his eyes could peer over a pile of rope coiled on the deckhouse roof. He pressed his face against the eyepiece of the night-vision monocular as the scope automatically adjusted the amplification, brightness control and infrared illuminator. Then he peered into the darkness across the wharf that was now illuminated in a greenish image that gave him the night vision of an owl.
The Chevrolet pickup truck he'd noticed when arriving at the Poco Bonito was still sitting in the dark. The ambient light from the stars and two dim lights a hundred yards down the wharf were now enhanced twenty thousand times, revealing the driver of the truck as if he were in a well-lit room. But as Pitt studied the driver, he saw that he was a she. Pitt could tell by the way the observer swept her scope back and forth across the lit portholes of the hull that she did not suspect that she had been detected. He could even tell that her hair was wet.
Pitt lowered the scope slightly until it was focused on the pickup truck's driver's door. The snoop was no professional, Pitt thought. Nor was she cautious. Probably a construction worker doing double duty as a spy, since the name of her employer was painted on the side of the door in gold letters:
ODYSSEY
The name stood alone, no "Limited," no "Corporation," no "Company," after it.
Below the name was the stylized image of a horse running with its legs outstretched. It looked vaguely familiar to Pitt, but he couldn't recall where he'd seen it.
Why was Odyssey interested in a NUMA research expedition?
Pitt wondered. What possible threat was a team of ocean scientists? He saw no sense to the stakeout by a giant organization with nothing to gain.
He could not refrain from standing up and walking to the wharf side of the boat and waving to the woman in the pickup, who immediately trained her nightscope on him. Pitt held up his scope to his eyes and stared back. Definitely not a professional snoop, the woman became so shaken that she dropped her scope on the seat, hurriedly kicked over the engine and roared across the wharf into the darkness, spinning her rear tires in a screech of protest.
Renee looked up in unison with Giordino and Dodge. "What was that all about?" asked Renee.
"Someone in a hurry," Pitt said in amusement.
Renee cast off the bow and stern lines while the men looked on. With Gunn manning the pilothouse, the powerful engines sputtered and rumbled into life with a mellow hum, as they gently shivered the deck. Then Poco Bonito slipped away from the wharf and churned into the channel that ran through the Straits of Bluffs to the sea. The course, programed into the computerized navigation equipment, set the bow on a heading toward the northeast. But Gunn — like most airline pilots, who would rather take off and land a commercial airliner than allow a computer to do it — took the wheel and steered the vessel seaward.
Pitt descended a ladder to his cabin, replaced the nightscope in his bag and retrieved a Globalstar tri-mode satellite phone. Then he returned to the deck and relaxed in a tattered lounge chair. He turned and smiled as Renee extended her hand through a porthole of the galley with a cup in her hand.