Deep Six (33 page)

“Keep a lookout for any information relating to a ship called the
Eagle.”

“The presidential yacht?”

“Just a ship called the
Eagle.”

“Anything else?”

Pitt nodded grimly. “I’ll see that security is increased around your computer processing center.”

“Mind if I stay here and use your couch. I’ve developed this sudden aversion to sleeping alone irt my apartment.”

“My office is yours.”

Yaeger stood up and stretched. Then he nodded at the data sheets again. “What are you going to do with it?”

Pitt stared down at the first breach ever in the Bougainville criminal structure. The pace of his personal investigation was gaining momentum, pieces falling into his hands to be fitted in the overall picture, jagged edges meshing together. The scope was far beyond anything he’d imagined in the beginning.

“You know,” he said pensively, “I don’t have the vaguest idea.”

43

WHEN SENATOR LARIMER AWOKE
in the tear seat of the limousine, the eastern sky was beginning to turn orange. He slapped at the mosquito whose buzzing had interrupted his sleep. Moran stirred in his corner of the seat, his squinting eyes unfocused, his mind still unaware of his surroundings. Suddenly a door was opened and a bundle of clothes was thrown in Larimer’s lap.

“Put these on,” Suvorov ordered brusquely.

“You never told me who you are,” Larimer said, his tongue moving in slow motion.

“My name is Paul.”

“No surname?”

“Just Paul.”

“You FBI?”

“No.”

“CIA?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Suvorov said. “Get dressed.”

“When will we arrive in Washington?”

“Soon,” Suvorov lied.

“Where did you get these clothes? How do you know they’ll fit?”

Suvorov was losing his patience with the inquisitive American. He shrugged off an impulse to crack the senator in the jaw with the gun.

“I stole them off a clothesline,” he said. “Beggars can’t be particular. At least they’re washed.”

“I can’t wear a stranger’s shirt and pants,” Larimer protested indignantly.

“If you wish to return to Washington in the nude, it is no concern of mine.”

Suvorov slammed the door, moved to the driver’s side of the car and edged behind the wheel. He drove out of a picturesque residential community called Plantation Estates and cut onto Highway 7. The early-morning traffic was starting to thicken as they crossed over the Ashley River bridge to Highway 26, where he turned north.

He was grateful that Larimer went silent. Moran was climbing from his semi-conscious state and mumbling incoherently. The headlights reflected off a green sign with white letters:
AIRPORT NEXT RIGHT
. He took the off ramp and came to the gate of the Charleston Municipal Airport. Across the main landing strip the brightening sky revealed a row of jet fighters belonging to the Air National Guard.

Following the directions given over the phone, he skirted the airport searching for a narrow cutoff. He found it and drove over a dirt road until he came to a pole holding a wind sock that hung limp in the dank atmosphere.

He stopped and got out, checked his watch and waited. Less than two minutes later the steady beat of a helicopter’s rotor could be heard approaching from behind a row of trees. The blinking navigation lights popped into view and a teardrop blue-and-white shape hovered for a few moments and then sat down beside the limousine.

The door behind the pilot’s seat swung outward and a man in white coveralls stepped to the ground and walked up to the limousine.

“You Suvorov?” he asked.

“I’m Paul Suvorov.”

“Okay, let’s get the baggage inside before we attract unwanted attention.”

Together they led Larimer and Moran into the passenger compartment of the copter and belted them in. Suvorov noted that the letters on the side of the fuselage read
SUMTER AIRBORNE AMBULANCE.

“This thing going to the capital?” asked Larimer with a spark of his old haughtiness.

“Sir, it’ll take you anyplace you want,” said the pilot agreeably.

Suvorov eased into the empty co-pilot’s seat and buckled the harness. “I wasn’t told our destination,” he said.

“Russia, eventually,” the pilot said with a smile that was anything but humorous. “First thing is to find where you came from.”

“Came from?”

“My orders are to fly you around the back country until you identify the facility in which you and those two windbags in the back have spent the last eight days. When we accomplish that mission, I’m to fly you to another departure area.”

“All right,” said Suvorov. “I’ll do my best.”

The pilot didn’t offer his name and Suvorov knew better than to ask. The man was undoubtedly one of the estimated five thousand Soviet-paid “charges” stationed around the United States, experts in specialized occupations, all waiting for a call instructing them to surface, a call that might never come.

The helicopter rose fifty feet in the air and then banked off toward Charleston Bay. “Okay, which way?” asked the pilot.

“I can’t be sure. It was dark and I was lost.”

“Can you give me a landmark?”

“About five miles from Charleston; I crossed a river.”

“From what direction?”

“West, yes, the dawn was breaking ahead of me.”

“Must be Stono River.”

“Stono, that’s it.”

“Then you were traveling on State Highway 700.”

“I turned onto it about half an hour before the bridge.”

The sun had heaved itself above the horizon and was filtering through the blue summer haze that hung over Charleston. The helicopter climbed to nine hundred feet and flew southwestward until the highway unreeled beyond the cockpit windows. The pilot pointed downward and Suvorov nodded. They followed the outbound traffic as the South Carolina coastal plain spread beneath them. Here and there a few cultivated fields lay enclosed on all sides by forests of long-leafed pines. They passed over a farmer standing in a tobacco field who waved his hat at them.

“See anything familiar?” the pilot asked.

Suvorov shook his head helplessly. “The road I turned off of might be anywhere.”

“What direction were you facing when you met the highway?”

“I made a left turn so I must have been heading south.”

“This area is called Wadmalaw Island. I’ll start a circular search pattern. Let me know if you spot something.”

An hour slipped by, and then two. The scene below transformed into a maze of creeks and small rivers snaking through bottomland and swamps. One road looked the same as another from the air. Thin ribbons of reddish-brown dirt or potholed asphalt slicing through dense overgrowth like lines on the palm of a hand. Suvorov became more confused as time wore on, and the pilot lost his patience.

“We’ll have to knock off the search,” he said, “or I won’t have enough fuel to make Savannah.”

“Savannah is in the state of Georgia,” Suvorov said, as though reciting in a school class.

The pilot smiled. “Yeah, you got it.”

“Our departure point for the Soviet Union?”

“Only a fuel stop.” Then the pilot clammed up.

Suvorov saw it was impossible to draw any information out of the man, so he turned his attention back to the ground.

Suddenly he pointed excitedly over the instrument panel. “There!” he shouted above the engine’s roar. “The small intersection to the left.”

“Recognize it?”

“I think so. Drop lower. I want to read the sign on that shabby building sitting on the corner.”

The pilot obliged and lowered the helicopter until it hovered thirty feet over the bisecting roadways. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “ ‘Glover Culpepper— gas and groceries’?”

“We’re close,” said Suvorov. “Fly up the road that leads toward that river to the north.”

“The Intracoastal Waterway.”

“A canal?”

“A shallow canal that provides an almost continuous inshore water passage from the North Atlantic States to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Used mostly by small pleasure boats and tugs.”

The helicopter beat over the tops of trees, whipping leaves and bending branches with the wash from its rotor blades. Suddenly, at the edge of a wide marshy creek, the road ended. Suvorov stared through the windshield.

“The laboratory, it must be around here.”

“I don’t see anything,” the pilot said, banking the craft and studying the ground.

“Set us down!” Suvorov demanded nervously. “Over there, a hundred meters from the road in that glade.”

The pilot nodded and gently eased the helicopter’s landing skids into the soft grassy earth, sending up a swirl of dead and moldy leaves. He set the engine on idle with the blades slowly turning and opened the door. Suvorov leaped out and ran stumbling through the underbrush back to the road. After a few minutes of frantic searching he stopped at the bank of the creek and looked around in exasperation.

“What’s the problem?” asked the pilot as he approached.

“Not here,” Suvorov said dazedly. “A warehouse with an elevator that dropped down to a laboratory. It’s gone.”

“Buildings can’t vanish in six hours,” said the pilot. He was beginning to look bored. “You must be on the wrong road.”

“No, no, this has to be the right one.”

“I only see trees and swamp”—he hesitated and pointed—”and that decrepit old houseboat on the other side of the creek.”

“A boat!” Suvorov said as though having a revelation. “It must have been a boat.”

The pilot gazed down into the muddy water of the creek. “The bottom here is only three or four feet deep. Impossible to bring a vessel the size of a warehouse, requiring an elevator, in here from the waterway.”

Suvorov threw up his hands in bewilderment. “We must keep searching.”

“Sorry,” the pilot said firmly. “We haven’t the time or the fuel to continue. To keep our appointment we’ve got to leave now.”

He turned without waiting for a reply and walked back to the helicopter. Slowly Suvorov followed him, looking for all the world like a man deep in a trance.

* * *

As the helicopter lifted above the trees and swung toward Savannah, a gunnysack curtain in the window of the houseboat was pulled aside to reveal an old Chinaman peering through an expensive pair of Celestron 11 x 80 binoculars.

Satisfied he had read the aircraft’s identification number on the fuselage correctly, he laid down the glasses and dialed a number on a portable telephone scrambling unit and spoke in rapid Chinese.

44

“GOT A MINUTE, DAN
?” Curtis Mayo asked as Dan Fawcett got out of his car in the private street beside the White House.

“You’ll have to catch me on the run,” Fawcett replied without looking in Mayo’s direction. “I’m late for a meeting.”

“Another heavy situation in the Situation Room?”

Fawcett sucked in his breath. Then, as calmly as his trembling fingers would permit, he locked the car door and picked up his attache case.

“Care to comment?” Mayo asked.

Fawcett marched off toward the security gate. “I shot an arrow in the air . . .”

“It fell to earth, I know not where,” Mayo finished, keeping step. “Longfellow. Want to see my arrow?”

“Not particularly.”

“This one is going to land on the six o’clock news.”

Fawcett slowed his pace. “Just what are you after?”

Mayo took a large tape cassette from his pocket and handed it to Fawcett. “You might like to view this before air time.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Call it professional courtesy.”

“Now
that’s
news.”

Mayo smiled. “Like I said, view the tape.”

“Save me the trouble. What’s on it?”

“A folksy scene of the President playing farmer. Only it isn’t the President.”

Fawcett drew up and stared at Mayo. “You’re full of crap.”

“Can I quote you?”

“Don’t get cute,” Fawcett snapped. “I’m in no mood for a slanted interview.”

“Okay, straight question,” said Mayo. “Who is impersonating the President and Vice President in New Mexico?”

“Nobody.”

“I’ve got proof that says otherwise. Enough to use it as a news item. I release this and every muckraker between here and Seattle will crawl over the White House like an army of killer ants.”