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"Speed zero," the watch officer notified them from the bridge.
"Anchor away."
Dover acknowledged, then sat on a stool, cupped his hands around the coffee mug and looked directly at Pitt.
"Okay, what do you see?"
"I have the ship we're looking for," Pitt said, speaking slowly and distinctly. "There are no other possibilities. You were mistaken in one respect, Dover, but correct in another. Mother Nature seldom makes rock formations that run in a perfectly straight line for several hundred feet. Consequently, the outline of a ship can be detected against an irregular background. You were right, though, in saying our chances were nil of finding it on the seafloor."
"Get to the point," Dover said impatiently.
"The target is on shore."
"You mean grounded in the shallows?"
"I mean on shore, as in high and dry."
"You can't be serious?"
Pitt ignored the question and handed Dover the magnifying glass.
"See for yourself." He took a pencil and circled a section of cliffs above the tineline.
Dover bent over and put his eye to the glass. "All I see is rock."
"Look closer. The projection from the lower part of the slope into the sea."
Dover's expression turned incredulous. "Oh, Jesus, it's the stern of a ship!"
"You can make out the fantail and the top half of the rudder."
"Yes, yes, and a piece of the after deckhouse." Dover's frustration was suddenly washed away by the mounting excitement of the discovery. "Incredible. She's buried bow-on into the shore, as though an avalanche covered her. Judging from the cruiser stern and the balanced rudder, I'd say she's an old Liberty ship." He looked up, a deepening interest in his eyes. "I wonder if she might be the Pilottown?"
"Sounds vaguely familiar."
"One of the most stubborn mysteries of the northern seas. The Pilottown tramped back and forth between Tokyo and the West Coast until ten years ago, when her crew reported her sinking in Ashton. A search was launched and no trace of the ship was found.
Two years later an Eskimo stumbled on the Pilottown caught in the ice about ninety miles above Nome. He went aboard but found the ship deserted, no sign of the crew or cargo. A month later, when he returned with his tribe to remove whatever they could find of value, it was gone again. Nearly two years passed, and she was reported drifting below the Bering Strait. The Coast Guard was sent out but couldn't locate her. The Pilottown wasn't sighted again for eight months. The crew of a fishing trawler boarded her. They found her in reasonably good shape. Then she disappeared for the last time."
"I seem to recall reading something Pitt paused. "Ah, yes, the Magic Ship."' "That's what the news media dubbed her," Dover acknowledged.
"They described her disappearing act as a 'now you see it, now you don't routine."
"They'll have a field day when it gets out she was drifting around for years with a cargo of nerve agent S."
"No way of predicting the horror if the hull had been crushed in an ice pack or shattered on a rocky shore, creating an instant spill," Dover added.
"We've got to get in her cargo holds," said Pitt. "Contact Mendoza, give her the position of the wreck and tell her to airlift a team of chemists to the site. We'll approach from the water."
Dover nodded. "I'll see to the launch."
"Throw in acetylene equipment in case we have to cut our way inside."
Dover bent over the chart table and stared solemnly at the center of the marked circle. "I never thought for a minute I'd stand on the deck of the Magic Ship."
"You're right," said Pitt, staring into his coffee mug, "the Pilottown is about to give her last performance."
THE SEA HAD BEEN CALM, but by the time the Catawba's launch was a quarter-mile from the lonely, forbidding coast, a twenty-knot wind kicked up the water. The spray, tainted by the nerve agent, struck the cabin windows with the fury of driven sand. Yet where the derelict lay beached, the water looked reasonably peaceful, protected as it was by jagged pinnacles of rock that rose up a hundred yards offshore like solitary chimneys from burned-out houses.
