"We can only do that by following a trail leading to the highest concentrations," said Renee.
Pitt smiled wearily. "That's why we came here—" He broke off suddenly, stiffened and gazed out through the windshield. "That," he continued quietly, "and our fun visit to Disneyland."
"You'd better get some sleep," said Giordino evenly. "You're beginning to babble."
"This is no Disneyland," said Renee, suppressing a yawn.
Pitt turned and nodded his head and pointed toward the sea beyond the bow. "Then why are we about to enter the Pirates of the Caribbean?"
All heads turned in unison, and all eyes stared into the dark water that ended where the stars began. They saw a faint yellow glow that slowly increased in brilliance as Poco Bonito moved steadily toward it. They stood there frozen in silence as the glow slowly materialized into a nebulous shape of an old sailing ship that became more defined with each passing minute.
For a moment, they thought they were losing touch with reality, until Pitt spoke in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone. "I wondered when old Leigh Hunt was going to show up."
21
The mood on board the boat had suddenly changed. For nearly a minute, no one moved. No one spoke as they stared uneasily at the bizarre phenomenon. Finally, Gunn broke the silence.
"The same Hunt the pirate the admiral warned us about?"
"No, Hunt the buccaneer."
"It can't be real." Renee stared in awe, refusing to believe what her eyes relayed to her brain. "Are we really looking at a ghost ship?"
Pitt's lips curled in a vague smile. "Only in the eye of the beholder." Then he paraphrased from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. "With never a whisper in the sea, oft darts the Odyssey ship."
"Who was Hunt?" asked Dodge, in a voice close to a quaver.
"A buccaneer who roamed the Caribbean from sixteen sixty-five until sixteen eighty, when he was captured by a British Royal Navy ship and fed to the sharks."
Not wanting to look at the phantom, Dodge turned away, his mind not functioning, and muttered, "What's the difference between a pirate and buccaneer?"
"Very little," answered Pitt. "Pirate is a general term that covers British, Dutch and French seafarers who captured merchant ships for prize money and treasure. The term buccaneer comes from the French for barbecue. The early buccaneers used to grill their meat and dry it. Unlike privateers, who had valid commissions from their government, buccaneers preyed on any ship, mostly Spanish, without papers. They were also known as freebooters."
The ghostly vessel was only a half a mile away now and closing fast. The eerie yellow glow gave the apparition a surrealistic image. As it neared and the details of the ship became more distinct, the sounds of men shouting across the water began to be heard aboard the phantom.
She was a square-rigged barque with three masts and a shallow draft, a favorite vessel of pirates before the seventeen hundreds. The foresails and topsails were billowing in a nonexistent breeze. She mounted ten guns, five run out on the main deck on both sides. Men with bandanas around their head were standing on the quarterdeck, waving swords. High on her mainmast, a huge black flag with a fiendishly grinning skull dripping blood stood straight out as if the ship was sailing against a headwind.
The expressions on the faces of those on the Poco Bonito varied from growing horror to foreboding to academic contemplation. Giordino looked as if he was staring at cold pizza, while Pitt peered through binoculars at the phantasm with the face of a man enjoying a science fiction movie. Then he lowered the glasses and began to laugh "Are you mad?" Renee demanded.
He handed her the glasses. "Look at the man in the scarlet suit with the gold sash standing on the quarterdeck and tell me what you see."
She stared through the lenses. "A man with a feathered hat."
"What else sets him apart from the others."
"He has a peg leg and a hook on his right hand."
"Don't forget the eye patch."
"Yes. There's that too."
"All that's missing is a parrot on one shoulder."
She lowered the binoculars. "I don't understand."
"A bit stereotyped, don't you think?"
An old Navy man who had served fifteen years on the sea, Gunn read the ghost ship's change of course almost before it turned. "She's going to cross our bow."
"I hope she isn't planning on giving us a broadside," Giordino said half in jest, half seriously.
"Lay on the throttles and ram her amidships," Pitt instructed Gunn.
"No!" Renee gasped, staring at Pitt stupidly, stunned. "That's suicide!"
"I'm with Dirk," Giordino said loyally. "I say stick our bow in the sucker."
A smile began to creep across Gunn's face as he became aware of what Pitt was silently implying. He stood at the helm and punched the engines, laying on full power and lifting the bow three feet out of the water. The Poco Bonito leaped forward like a racehorse prodded in the rump with a pitchfork. Within a hundred yards, she was flying across the water at fifty knots straight toward the port side of the pirate ship. The cannon muzzles, already poking through the gun ports, opened fire, spouts of flames bursting from their muzzles, accompanied by the sound of a thunderous blast that echoed over the water.
One quick glance at the radar screen and Pitt dashed to his cabin to retrieve his nightscope. He returned to the open deck in less than a minute and motioned for Giordino to follow him up a ladder to the roof of the pilothouse. Without the slightest hesitation, Giordino climbed after him. They lay flat on the roof, elbows braced to steady the nightscope they passed back and forth. Oddly, they did not stare directly at the luminescent phantom, but eyed the darkness ahead and astern of it.
Wondering if the two NUMA men were losing touch with all reality, Dodge and Renee instinctively ducked down on the deck behind the pilothouse. Above them, Pitt and Giordino ignored the approaching disaster.
"I've got mine," declare Giordino. "Looks like a small barge to the west about three hundred yards."
"I have my target too," Pitt followed. "A yacht, a big one well over a hundred feet in length, the same distance to the east."
A hundred yards, fifty, on a collision course with the unknown. Then Poco Bonito lunged into and through the opaque shape of the ancient barque. For an instant the yellow glow burst like orange lasers at a rock concert and shrouded the little research boat. Renee and Dodge could see the pirates moving above them on the main deck, firing their guns with a vengeance. Oddly, none of them took the slightest notice of the vessel plunging through their ship.
Then Poco Bonito was speeding alone over a velvet black sea. In her wake, the yellow glow abruptly blinked out and was gone, and the sounds of the guns melted into the night. It was as if the ghostly vision had never been.
"Stay on the throttles," Pitt advised Gunn. "It's not healthy around here."
"Were we hallucinating?" Renee muttered, her face white as a paper towel. "Or did we really run through a ghost ship?"
Pitt put his arm around her. "What you saw, dear heart, was a four-dimensional image — height, depth, width and motion — all recorded and projected in a hologram."
Renee still seemed dazed as she stared into the night. "It looked so real, so convincing."
"About twice as real as its phony captain with his Treasure Island Long John Silver peg leg, Peter Pan hook and Horatio Nelson eye patch. And then there was the flag. Blood was dripping in all the wrong places."
"But why?" asked Renee to no one in particular. "Why such a production in the middle of the sea?"