Her analytical mind went to work, stewing over the thefts. Acquiring the Sea Arrow’s plans and motor had been all too easy for Pablo. He must have had inside help. The involvement of the two men who had abducted her, and then were killed, indicated as much. And what about her? Why had she been abducted?
She could draw only one conclusion, that she must have been getting close to identifying the source. She racked her brains, reviewing the contractors and persons of interest. She kept returning to Tom Cerny. Could the White House aide have been alerted to her inquiry?
She paced the small cabin, noticing several cigarette burns on the corner desk. The marks made her think of the crewman and his odd greeting.
“Don’t get cooked,” she repeated. The words nagged at her until suddenly their meaning struck like a bolt of lightning.
“Of course!” she said, disgusted that it hadn’t come to her sooner. “Don’t get cooked indeed.”
52
A LATE-NIGHT COMMERCIAL FLIGHT FROM DURBAN via Johannesburg proved the quickest way back to Washington for Dirk and Summer. They were bleary-eyed when they staggered off the plane early the next morning at Reagan National Airport. Remarkably, Summer walked freely through the terminal, showing stiffness from the flight but no lingering paralysis from her decompression sickness.
Timely immersion in the Alexandria’s deco chamber had proved her salvation. While the NUMA ship rushed from the tip of Madagascar to Durban, Summer and Dirk had been pressurized to an equivalent depth of four hundred feet. The paralysis in Summer’s leg promptly disappeared. The ship’s medical team slowly relieved the pressure in the chamber, allowing the nitrogen bubbles in their tissues to dissipate. When they were released from the chamber almost two days later, Summer found she could walk with only a faint lingering ache.
Since flying could aggravate the symptoms, the ship’s doctor insisted they not board an airplane for twenty-four hours. Fortunately, their steaming time to Durban occupied the full duration. Free of the chamber, they had time to brief the others on their work in the submersible, inspect its damage, and book their flight home, before racing to Durban’s King Shaka International Airport the moment the Alexandriatouched the dock.
After collecting their bags at Reagan, they took a cab across the tarmac to their father’s hangar. Letting themselves in, they stored their bags and cleaned themselves up in the loft apartment.
“You think Dad would mind if we borrowed one of his cars to run to the office?” Summer asked.
“He’s always given us a standing offer to drive what we like,” Dirk said. He pointed to a silver-and-burgundy roadster parked near a workbench. “He said in an e-mail before he left for the Pacific that he just got that Packard running strong. Why don’t we take it?”
He checked to see that it had plenty of gas while Summer opened a garage door. Sliding into the driver’s seat, he pulled the choke and adjusted the throttle lever mounted on the steering wheel and hit the starter button. The big straight-eight engine murmured to life. Letting it warm up for a moment, he pulled the car outside and waited for Summer to lock the hangar.
She jumped into the passenger seat with a travel bag in tow, not noticing a white van parked across an adjacent field. “What’s with the funky seats?” she asked.
The Packard roadster’s tight cockpit held two rigid seats. Summer’s passenger seat was permanently offset a few inches farther from the dash than Dirk’s driver’s seat.
“More room for the driver to turn and shift at high speed,” Dirk explained, pointing to the floor-mounted gear lever.
“I’ll gladly take the extra legroom.”
Built in 1930, the Model 734 Packard chassis carried one of the factory’s rarest bodies, a sleek boattail speedster. The trunk line tapered to an angular point, giving the car a highly streamlined appearance. Sporting dual side-mounted spare tires, the body gleamed with metallic pewter paint, contrasted by burgundy fenders and a matching body-length stripe. Narrow Woodlite headlights on the prow, combined with an angled windshield, added to the sensation that the car was in motion even while parked.
Dirk drove north onto the George Washington Parkway, finding that the Packard loped along easily with the highway traffic. It was only a ten-minute drive to the NUMA headquarters, a tall glass structure that bordered the Potomac. Dirk parked in the underground garage, and they took an employee elevator to the top floor and Rudi Gunn’s office. His secretary directed them to the computer resource center, so they dropped down three flights to the high-tech lair of Hiram Yaeger.
They found Gunn and Yaeger parked in front of a wall-sized video screen, examining satellite photos of an empty sea. With bedraggled hair and circles under their eyes, both looked as if they hadn’t slept in days. But the men perked up at the sight of Pitt’s children. “Glad to have you back,” Gunn said. “You gave us quite a scare when your submersible went missing.”
Summer smiled. “Us, too.”
“I thought we were going to have to sedate Rudi,” Yaeger said. “Your leg okay, Summer?”
“Just fine. I think the coach seat from Johannesburg was more painful than the bends.” She eyed a collection of dirty coffee cups on the table before breaking the mood. “What’s the latest on Dad and Al?”
Both men turned grim. “Unfortunately, there’s not much to report,” Gunn said. He described Pitt’s mission of protecting the ore carrier, while Yaeger dialed up a map of the eastern Pacific.
“They boarded the Adelaideabout a thousand miles southeast of Hawaii,” Yaeger said. “A Navy frigate on exercise out of San Diego was scheduled to meet them when they neared the coast and escort them to Long Beach. The Adelaidenever appeared.”
“Any sign of debris?” Dirk asked.
“No,” Gunn said. “We’ve had search-and-rescue craft from Hawaii and the mainland overflying the area for days. The Navy has dispatched two vessels to the scene, and the Air Force has even sent in some long-range reconnaissance drones. They’ve all come up empty.”
Dirk noted a white horizontal line beginning at the left edge of the screen that ended when it intersected a red line from Hawaii. “Is that the Adelaide’s track?”
“Her AIS beacon provided her track to that point shortly after your dad and the SWAT team went aboard,” Yaeger said. “After that, the AIS signal went dead.”
“So she sank?” Summer asked, her voice breaking.
“Not necessarily,” Gunn said. “She could have simply disengaged the tracking system, which would be an obvious move after a hijacking.”
“We’ve drawn a couple of big circles around her last reported position to see where she could have gone.” Yaeger replaced the ocean map with a split screen of two satellite ocean photos. At the bottom was overlaid a stock photo of a large green bulk carrier labeled Adelaide. “We’re looking at coastal satellite photos to see if she might have popped up somewhere.”
“Hiram has accessed every public and not-so-public source of satellite reconnaissance. Unfortunately, the point of disappearance is smack in the middle of a large dead zone in satellite coverage, so we’re jumping to the coastlines.”
“North, South, and Central America, for starters.” Yaeger stifled a yawn. “Should keep us busy till Christmas.”
“How can we help?” Summer asked.
“We’ve got satellite images for most of the major West Coast ports from the past four days. I’ll divvy them up and see if anyone can spot a ship resembling the Adelaide.”