The food lockers were bare. No dishes or cups lined the shelves of the crew mess. Even the toilets lacked paper. Fire extinguishers, door latches, furnishings, anything that could be unbolted or was of the slightest value was gone.
“Mighty peculiar,” muttered Dover.
“My thought too,” Pitt said. “She’s been systematically stripped.”
“Scavengers must have boarded and carried away everything during the years she was adrift.”
“Scavengers leave a mess,” Pitt disagreed. “Whoever was behind this job had a fetish for neatness.”
It was an eerie trip. Their shadows flitted on the dark walls of the alleyways and followed alongside the silent and abandoned machinery. Pitt felt a longing to see the sky again.
“Incredible,” mumbled Dover, still awed by what they’d found, or rather not found. “They even removed all the valves and gauges.”
“If I was a gambling man,” said Pitt thoughtfully, “I’d bet we’ve stumbled on an insurance scam.”
“Wouldn’t be the first ship that was posted missing for a Lloyd’s of London payday,” Dover said.
“You told me the crew claimed they abandoned the Pilottown in a storm. They abandoned her all right, but they left nothing but a barren, worthless shell.”
“Easy enough to check out,” said Dover. “Two ways to scuttle a ship at sea. Open the sea cocks and let her flood, or blow out the bottom with explosive charges.”
“How would you do it?”
“Flooding through the sea cocks could take twenty-four hours or more. Time enough for a passing ship to investigate. I opt for the charges. Quick and dirty; put her on the seafloor in a matter of minutes.”
“Something must have prevented the explosives from detonating.”
“It’s only a theory.”
“Next question,” Pitt persisted. “Where would you lay them?”
“Cargo holds, engine room, most any place against the hull plates so long as it was below the waterline.”
“No sign of charges in the after holds,” said Pitt. “That leaves the engine room and the forward cargo holds.”
“We’ve come this far,” Dover said. “We might as well finish the job.”
“Faster if we split up. I’ll search the engine room. You know your way around the ship better than I do—”
“The forward cargo holds it is,” Dover said, anticipating him.
The big Coast Guardsman started up a companion-way, whistling the Notre Dame fight song under his breath. His bearlike gait and hulking build, silhouetted by the wavering flashlight in his hand, grew smaller and finally faded.
Pitt began probing around the maze of steam pipes leading from the obsolete old steam reciprocating engines and boilers. The walkway gratings over the machinery were nearly eaten through by rust, and he treaded lightly. The engine room seemed to come alive in his imagination — creaks and moans, murmurings drifting out of the ventilators, whispering sounds.
He found a pair of sea cocks. Their handwheels were frozen in the closed position.
So much for the sea-cock theory, he thought.
An icy chill crept up the back of Pitt’s neck and spread throughout his body, and he realized the batteries operating the heater in his suit were nearly drained. He switched off the light for a moment. The pure blackness nearly smothered him. He flicked it on again and quickly swept the beam around as if he expected to see a specter of the crew reaching out for him. Only there were no specters. Nothing except the dank metal walls and the worn machinery. He could have sworn he felt the grating shudder as if the engines looming above him were starting up.
Pitt shook his head to purge the phantoms in his mind and methodically began searching the sides of the hull, crawling between pumps and asbestos-covered pipes that led into the darkness and nowhere. He fell down a ladder into six feet of greasy water. He struggled back up, out of the seeming clutches of the dead and evil and ugly bilge, his suit now black with oil. Out of breath, he hung there a minute, making a conscious effort to relax.
It was then he noticed an object dimly outlined in the farthest reach of the light beam. A corroded aluminum canister about the size of a five-gallon gas can was wired to a beam welded on the inner hull plates. Pitt had set explosives on marine salvage projects and he quickly recognized the detonator unit attached to the bottom of the canister. An electrical wire trailed upward through the grating to the deck above.
Sweat was pouring from his body but he was shivering from the cold. He left the explosive charge where he found it and climbed back up the ladder. Then he began inspecting the engines and boilers.
There were no markings anywhere, no manufacturer’s name, no inspector’s stamped date. Wherever there had been a metal ID tag it was removed. Wherever there had been letters or numbers stamped into the metal, they were filed away. After probing endless nooks and crannies around the machinery, he got lucky when he felt a small protrusion through his gloved hand. It was a small metal plate partially hidden by grease under one of the boilers. He rubbed away the grime and aimed the light on the indented surface. It read:
PRESSURE 220 PSI.
TEMPERATURE 450° F.
HEATING SURFACE
5,017 SQ. FT.
MANUFACTURED BY THE
ALHAMBRA IRON AND BOILER COMPANY
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
SER. #38874
Pitt memorized the serial number and then made his way back to where he started. He wearily sank to the deck and tried to rest while suffering from the cold.
Dover returned in a little under an hour, carrying an explosive canister under one arm, as indifferently as if it were a jumbo can of peaches. Cursing fluently and often as he slipped on the oily deck, he stopped and sat down heavily next to Pitt.
“There’s four more between here and the forepeak,” Dover said tiredly.
“I found another one about forty feet aft,” Pitt replied.
“Wonder why they didn’t go off.”
“The timer must have screwed up.”
“Timer?”
“The crew had to jump ship before the bottom was blown out. Trace the wires leading from the canisters and you’ll find they all meet at a timing device hidden somewhere on the deck above. When the crew realized something was wrong, it must have been too late to re-board the ship.”
“Or they were too scared it would go up in their faces.”
“There’s that,” Pitt agreed.
“So the old Pilottown began her legendary drift. A deserted ship in an empty sea.”
“How is a ship officially identified?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Just curious.”
Dover accepted that and stared up at the shadows of the engines. “Well, ID can be found most anywhere. Life jackets, lifeboats, on the bow and stern the name is often bead welded, outlining the painted letters. Then you have the builder’s plates, one on the exterior of the superstructure, one in the engine room. And, oh, yeah, the ship’s official number is burned into a beam around the outer base of the hatch covers.”
“I’ll wager a month’s pay that if you could dig the ship from under the mountain you’d find the hatch number burned off and the builder’s plate gone.”
“That leaves one in the engine room.”
“Missing too. I checked, along with all the manufacturer’s markings.”
“Sounds devious,” said Dover quietly.
“You’re damn right,” Pitt replied abruptly. “There’s more to the Pilottown than a marine insurance rip-off.”