Flood Tide

“Odd,” muttered Pitt. “All her lifeboats have been removed.”

Giordino looked up at the wisps of light smoke trailing from the fu

“She can't take passengers without carrying boats.” “The plot thickens,” said Giordino, looking up at the silent ship. Pitt nodded in agreement. “Nothing is what we were led to expect.”

Seng came around and opened the rear door. “This is as far as I go. You guys are on your own. Good luck. I'll come back in thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes,” Giordino complained. “You've got to be kidding.”

“A half an hour is not nearly enough time to inspect the interior of an ocean liner the size of a small city,” protested Pitt.

“The best I can do. Chairman Cabrillo's orders. The sooner we abscond, the less chance we all have of being discovered as fakes. Besides, it'll be dark soon.”

Pitt and Giordino stepped from the car and walked up a gangway leading through a pair of open doors and inside the ship. They entered what was once the purser's reception area. It seemed curiously bare of all furnishings and signs of life.

“Did I forget to mention,” said Giordino, “that I can't speak with a German accent?”

Pitt looked at him. “You're Italian, aren't you?”

“My grandparents were, but what has that got to do with anything?”

“If you're confronted, talk with your hands. Nobody will know the difference.”

“And you? How do you intend to pass as a kraut?”

Pitt shrugged. “I'll just say 7a' to anything I'm asked.”

“We don't have much time. More territory can be covered if we split up.”

“Agreed. I'll make a sweep of the cabin decks, you scan the engine room. While you're at it, look in the galley.”

Giordino looked puzzled. “Galley?”

Pitt smiled down at the shorter Giordino. “You can always tell a home by its kitchen.” Then he was walking swiftly up a circular staircase to the upper deck, which had accommodated the first-class dining room, cocktail lounges, gift shops and movie theater.

The etched-glass doors that opened to the first-class dining room had been removed. The walls, with their Spartan fifties decor and high-arched ceiling, stood guard over an empty room. It was the same everywhere he walked, his footsteps echoing on the salon deck, which had been stripped of its carpeting. The 352 seats of the theater had been torn out. The gift shops were bare of display shelving and cases. Each of the two cocktail lounges was little more than a hollow compartment. The ballroom, where the wealthy celebrities of their time danced their way across the Atlantic, was stripped down to the bare walls.

He hurried up a companionway to the crew's quarters and the wheelhouse. The bareness was repeated. The crew's cabins were devoid of any sign of furnishings or human presence. “An empty shell,” Pitt muttered under his breath. “The entire ship is one big empty shell.”

The wheelhouse was a different story. It was crammed from deck to ceiling with a maze of computerized electronic equipment whose multitude of colored lights and switches were mostly positioned in the ON mode. Pitt paused briefly to study the sophisticated ship's automated control system. He found it odd that the brass-spoked helm was the only piece of original equipment.

He checked his watch. Ten minutes was all he had left. Incredibly, he had seen no workers, no crewmen. It was as if the ship had become a graveyard. He dropped down the stairs to the first-class cabin deck and ran down the hallways separating the staterooms. It was the same as the salon deck. Where the passengers once slept in luxury from New York to Southampton and back, there was a ghostly emptiness. Even the doors had been taken from their hinges. What struck Pitt was the lack of trash or debris. The gutted interior appeared surprisingly immaculate, as if the entire interior had been sucked clean by a giant vacuum.

When he reached the entry door in the purser's reception area, Giordino was already waiting. “What did you find?” Pitt asked him.

“Damn little,” Giordino came back. “The cabin class decks and cargo holds are barren voids. The engine room looks like the day the ship left on her maiden voyage. Beautifully maintained with steam up and ready to sail. Every other compartment was stripped clean.”

“Did you get into the baggage and the forward cargo holds that were used to transport the passengers' cars?”

Giordino gave a negative shake of his head. “The cargo doors were welded shut. Same with entrances and exits to the crew's quarters on the lower deck. They must have been cleaned out as well.”

“I got the same picture,” said Pitt. “Did you run into any trouble?”

“That's the weird part. I didn't see a soul. If anyone was working in the engine room, they're either mute or invisible. You meet up with anyone?” “Never encountered a body.”

Suddenly the deck began to tremble beneath their feet. The ships big engines had come to life. Pitt and Giordino quickly headed down the gangway to the waiting Rolls-Royce. Eddie Seng stood beside an open door to the passengers' seat. “Enjoy your tour?” he greeted them.

“You don't know what you missed,” said Giordino. “The food, the floor show, the girls.”

Pitt motioned toward the dockworkers who were casting off the huge hawsers from the iron bollards on the dock. The big rail cranes lifted the gangways and laid them on the dock. “Our timing was right on the money. She's pushing off.” “How is it possible,” Giordino muttered, “with no one on board?”

“We'd better go too while the going is good,” said Seng, herding them inside the car and closing the door. He hurried around the Rolls-Royce's flying-lady ornament on the radiator shell and leaped behind the wheel. This time they were passed through the security gate with the mere nod of the head. Two miles from the shipyard, his eyes darting in the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed, Seng pulled onto a dirt road and drove to an open field behind a school that was empty of children. A purple-and-silver unmarked helicopter was sitting in the middle of a playground, its rotor blades slowly turning. “We're not returning to the Oregon by boat?” inquired Pitt. “Too late,” replied Seng. “Chairman Cabrillo thought it wiser to raise the anchor and put as much water as possible between the ship and Hong Kong before the fireworks start. The Oregon should be passing out of the West Lamma Cha

“Did Cabrillo work a deal on the helicopter too?” said Giordino.

“A friend of a friend runs a charter service.”

“He must not believe in advertising,” observed Pitt, looking vainly for a name on the side of the tail boom.

Seng's mouth stretched in a broad smile. “His clientele prefers to travel in obscurity.”

“If we're any example of his clientele, I'm not at all surprised.”

A young man in a chauffeur's uniform stepped up to the Rolls and opened the door. Seng thanked him and slipped an envelope into his pocket. Then he motioned Pitt and Giordino to follow him into the aircraft. They were in the act of tightening their seat belts when the pilot lifted off the playground and leveled off at only twenty feet before ducking under a network of electrical power lines as if it was an everyday affair. He then set a course to the south and flew out across the waters of the harbor, passing over an oil tanker no more than a hundred feet above its fu

Pitt gazed with longing at the former crown colony in the distance. He would have given a month's pay to walk the winding streets and visit the multitude of small shops selling everything from tea to intricately carved furniture, dine on exotic Chinese cuisine in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel overlooking the lights of the harbor with an elegant and beautiful woman and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin brut champagne ...