Pitt's eyes were staring through the pilothouse doorway at the radar screen. "What we have here is a case of contemporary piracy."
"But who projected the holographic image?"
"I'm in the dark too," added Dodge. "I saw no other vessels."
"Your eyes and mind were focused on the apparition," said Giordino. "Dirk and I observed a large yacht to our port and a barge to the starboard, both three hundred yards away. Neither showing any lights."
A light went on in Renee's mind. "They projected the beam for the hologram?"
Pitt nodded. "They cast the illusion of a phantom ship and crew doomed to sail the sea forever. But their projection was one huge cliché. They must have created Hunt's ship and crew after watching too many old Errol Flynn movies."
"Judging from the radar, the yacht is giving chase," Giordino alerted them.
Standing at the helm, Gunn appraised the two blips on the screen. "One is stationary, which must be the barge. The yacht is following in our wake about half a mile astern, but is losing ground. They must be crazy mad at seeing an old fishing boat leave them in the foam."
Giordino threw a wet blanket over the relief and joy. "We'd better pray that they don't carry mortars or rockets."
"They'd have opened up on us by now—" Gunn's statement was punctuated by a missile that burst out of the early-morning night and whistled past Poco Bonito, grazing its radar dome, striking the water fifty yards ahead with a great thump.
Pitt looked at Giordino. "I wish you hadn't given them ideas."
Gunn didn't answer. He was too busy spinning the helm and heaving the research boat on a sharp bank to port and then to starboard, weaving unpredictably to avoid the rockets that began to come every thirty seconds.
"Douse our running lights!" Pitt shouted to Gunn.
His reply was instant darkness, as the little NUMA director flicked off the main lighting switch. The swells had risen to three feet and Poco Bonito's beamy hull was now splashing through the crests at almost forty-five knots.
"How are we fixed for weapons?" Giordino asked Gunn calmly.
"Two M4 carbines with attached forty-millimeter grenade launchers."
"Nothing heavier?"
"Easily hidden small arms is all the admiral would allow on board in case we were stopped and searched by a Nicaraguan patrol boat."
"Do we look like drug smugglers?" demanded Renee.
Dodge stared at her with a crooked smile. "What do drug smugglers look like?"
Pitt said, "I've got my old Colt forty-five. How about you, Al?"
"A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic."
"We may not be able to sink them," said Pitt. "But at least we can repel boarders."
"If they don't blast us to smithereens first," grunted Giordino, as another missile landed in Poco Bonito's wake no more than fifty feet astern.
"So long as their rockets aren't equipped with homing devices, they can't hit what they can't see."
Automatic weapons fire began to wink in the darkness behind them, as the modern pirates aimed by radar in their general direction. Tracers danced over the surface of the sea fifty yards to starboard in a spraying pattern. Gunn, playing the odds, turned the boat to port for a short distance before heading straight again. The tracers ever so slowly spiraled through the night, groping for their prey before falling away into the dark sea where Poco Bonito should have been but wasn't.
Two more rockets arced through the night. The pirates played the odds and fired them almost in parallel at the blip on their radar. They had the right idea, but they fired when Gunn was momentarily heading on a straight course before he feinted port before turning starboard. The rockets landed on opposite sides of the boat within fifty feet, showering the decks with twin cascades of water.
Then the firing stopped and it seemed as though a mantle of stillness had been drawn over the boat. Only the beat of the mighty engines straining in their mounts, the growl of the exhaust and the water sloshing past the bow broke the silence.
"Have they given up?" Renee murmured hopefully.
Staring at the radar, Gunn spoke happily through the pilothouse door, "They're turning away and reversing course."
"But who are they?"
"Local pirates don't use holograms or fire missiles from yachts," Giordino said flatly.
Pitt stared pensively out the back of the boat. "Our friends from Odyssey are the most likely suspects. No way they could have known our bodies weren't lying on the bottom of the sea. We simply walked into an ambush set for any boat or ship that wandered into this particular area."
"They won't be happy campers," said Dodge, "when they learn we're the ones who got away, not once but twice."
Renee felt even more lost. "But why us? What did we do to be murdered?"
"I suspect we're trespassing on their hunting grounds," Pitt said, taking a logical course. "There has to be something in this part of the Caribbean they don't want us or anyone else to see."
"A drug-smuggling operation, perhaps?" offered Dodge. "Could it be Specter is involved with the drug trade?"
"Maybe," said Pitt. "But from what little I know, his empire makes vast profits in excavation and construction projects. Drug running wouldn't be worth their time or effort, even as a side operation. No, what we have here goes far beyond drug smuggling or piracy."
Gunn set the helm on autopilot, stepped from the pilothouse and wearily dropped into the lounge chair. "So what heading do we program into the computer?"
There was a long silence.
Pitt was not happy about further endangering everyone's lives, but they were here and they had a mission. "Sandecker sent us to find the truth behind the brown blob. We'll continue searching for the highest concentration of its contamination in the hope it will lead us to the source."
"And if they chase after us again?" prompted Dodge.
Pitt grinned broadly. "We turn and run, now that we've gotten so good at it."
22
Dawn broke over an empty sea. The radar disclosed no vessels within thirty miles, and except for the lights of a helicopter that passed over an hour earlier, the search for the source of the brown crud went uninterrupted. Just to be on the safe side, they had run without lights the entire night.
Turning south soon after their confrontation with the bogus ghost ship, they were now sailing in Bahia Punta Gorda, where the trail of increasing toxicity in the seawater had led them. So far they had been blessed with good weather, with just the slightest hint of a breeze and low winds.
The Nicaraguan coastline was only two miles distant. The lowlands were a faint line across the horizon, as if some giant hand had drawn it using a T square and a pen with black ink. Mists covered the shore and drifted against the foothills in the low mountains to the west.
"Most strange," said Gunn, peering through binoculars.
Pitt looked up. "What?"
"According to the charts of the bay of Punta Gorda, the only habitation is a small fishing village called Barra del Rio Maiz."
"So?"
Gunn handed the glasses to Pitt. "Take a look and tell me what you see."
Pitt focused the lenses for his eyes and scanned the shoreline. "That's no isolated fishing village, it looks like a major deepwater container port. I count two containerships unloading at a huge dock with cranes, and another two ships anchored and waiting their turn."
"There is also an extensive area devoted to warehouses."
"It's a beehive of activity, all right."
"What's your take on the situation?" asked Gunn.
"My only guess is equipment and supplies are being stored to build the proposed high-speed railroad between the seas."