Deep Six

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“My name is Pitt.”

“He’s with a client. Can you call back?”

“No!” Pitt growled menacingly. “I’m calling from Washington and it’s urgent.”

Suitably intimidated, the receptionist replied, “One moment.”

Casio came on the line almost immediately. “Mr. Pitt. Good to hear from you.”

“Sorry to interrupt your meeting,” said Pitt, “but I need a few answers.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“What do you know about the crew of the San Marino?”

“Not much. I ran a make on the officers, but nothing unusual turned up. They were all professional merchant mariners. The captain, as I recall, had a very respectable record.”

“No ties to any kind of organized crime?”

“Nothing that came to light in the computers of the National Crime Information Center.”

“How about the rest of the crew?”

“Not much there. Only a few had maritime union records.”

“Nationality?” Pitt asked.

“Nationality?” Casio repeated, thought a moment, then said, “A mixture. A few Greek, a few Americans, several Koreans.”

“Koreans?” Pitt came back, suddenly alert. “There were Koreans on board?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Now that you mention it, as I remember, a group of about ten signed on just before the San Marino sailed.”

“Would it be possible to trace the ships and companies they served prior to the San Marino?”

“You’re going back a long time, but the files should be available.”

“Could you throw in the history of the Pilottown’s crew as well?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“What are you after exactly?” Casio asked.

“Should be obvious to you.”

“A link between the crew and our unknown parent company, is that it?”

“Close enough.”

“You’re going back before the ship disappeared,” said Casio thoughtfully.

“The most practical way to take over a ship is by the crew.”

“I thought mutiny went out with the Bounty.”

“The modern term is hijacking.”

“You’ve got a good hunch going,” said Casio. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Mr. Casio.”

“We’ve danced enough to know each other. Call me Sal.”

“Okay, Sal, and make it Dirk.”

“I’ll do that,” Casio said seriously. “Goodbye.”

After he hung up, Pitt leaned back and put his feet on the desk. He felt good, optimistic that a vague instinct was about to pay off. Now he was about to try another long shot, one that was so crazy he almost felt foolish for pursuing it. He copied a number out of the National University Directory and called it.

“University of Pe

“May I speak to Dr. Grace Perth?”

“Just a sec.”

“Thank you.”

Pitt waited for nearly two minutes before a motherly voice said, “Hello.”

“Dr. Perth?”

“Speaking.”

“My name is Dirk Pitt and I’m with the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Have you got a moment to answer a couple of academic questions for me?”

“What do you wish to know, Mr. Pitt?” Dr. Perth asked sweetly.

Pitt tried to picture her in his mind. His initial image was that of a prim, white-haired lady in a tweed suit. He erased it as a stereotype.

“If we take a male between the ages of thirty and forty, of medium height and weight, who was a native of Peking, China, and another male of the same description from Seoul, South Korea, how could we tell them apart?”

“You’re not doing a number on me, are you, Mr. Pitt?”

Pitt laughed. “No, Doctor, I’m quite serious,” he assured her.

“Hmmm, Chinese versus Korean,” she muttered while thinking. “By and large, people of Korean ancestry tend to be more classic, or extreme, Mongoloid. Chinese features, on the other hand, lean more generally to Asian. But I wouldn’t want to make my living guessing which was which, because the overlap is so great. It would be far simpler to judge them by their clothes or behavior, or the way they cut their hair — in short, their cultural characteristics.”

“I thought they might have certain racial features that could separate them, such as you find between Chinese and Japanese.”

“Well now, here the genetic spread is more obvious. If your Oriental male has a fairly dense beard growth, you’d have a rather strong indication that he’s Japanese. But in the case of China and Korea, you’re dealing with two racial groups that have intermixed for centuries, so much so that the individual variations would tend to blur out any distinction.”

“You make it sound hopeless.”

“Awfully difficult, maybe, but not hopeless,” Dr. Perth said. “A series of laboratory tests could raise your probability factor.”

“My interest is strictly from a visual view.”

“Are your subjects living?”

“No, drowning victims.”

“A pity. With the living individual there are little traits of facial expressions that are culturally acquired and can be detected by someone who has had a lot of experience with both races. A pretty good guess may be made on that basis alone.”

“No such luck.”

“Perhaps if you could define their facial characteristics to me.”

Pitt dreaded the thought, but he closed his eyes and began describing the lifeless heads he’d seen on the Eagle. At first the vision was vague, but soon it focused with clarity and he found himself dissecting each detail with the callous objectivity of a surgeon narrating a heart transplant into a tape recorder. At one point he suddenly broke off.

“Yes, Mr. Pitt, please go on,” said Dr. Perth.

“I just remembered something that escaped me,” Pitt said. “Two of the bodies did in fact have thick facial hair. One had a mustache while another sprouted a goatee.”

“Interesting.”

“So they weren’t Korean or Chinese?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What else could they be but Japanese?”

“You’re leaping before you look, Mr. Pitt,” she said, as if lecturing a student. “The features you’ve described to me suggest a heavy tendency toward the classic Mongoloid.”

“But the facial hair?”

“You must consider history. The Japanese have been invading and marauding Korea since the sixteenth century. And for thirty-five years, from 1910 until 1945, Korea was a colony of Japan, so there was a great blending of their particular genetic variations.”

Pitt hesitated before he put the next question to Dr. Perth. Then he chose his words carefully. “If you were to stick your neck out and give an opinion on the race of the men I’ve described, what would you say?”

Grace Perth came back with all flags flying. “Looking at it from a percentage factor, I’d say your test group’s ancestry was ten percent Japanese, thirty percent Chinese and sixty percent Korean.”

“Sounds like you’ve constructed the genetic makeup of your average Korean.”

“You read it anyway you wish to see it, Mr. Pitt. I’ve gone as far as I can go.”

“Thank you, Dr. Perth,” Pitt said, suddenly exultant. “Thank you very much.”

33

“So that’s Dirk Pitt,” Min Koryo said. She sat in her wheelchair peering over a breakfast tray at a large TV screen in her office wall.

Lee Tong sat beside her watching the videotape of the Hoki Jamoki anchored over the presidential yacht. “What puzzles me,” he said quietly, “is how he discovered the wreck so quickly. It’s as though he knew exactly where to search.”

Min Koryo set her chin in frail hands and bowed her graying head, eyes locked on the screen, the thin blue veins in her temples pulsing in concentration. Her face slowly tightened in anger. She looked like an Egyptian mummy whose skin had somehow bleached white and remained smooth.

“Pitt and NUMA.” She hissed in exasperation. “What are those wily bastards up to? First the San Marino and Pilottown publicity hoax, and now this.”

“It can only be coincidence,” Lee Tong suggested. “There is no direct link between the freighters and the yacht.”