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"No, drowning victims."
"A pity. With a 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 Mongoloin."
"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."
"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 vineotape 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 bands 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 coincinence," Lee Tong suggested. "There is no direct link between the freighters and the yacht."
"Better an informer." Her voice cut like a whip. "We've been sold out."
"Not a valid conclusion, aunumi," said Lee Tong, amused at her sudden outburst. "Only you and I knew the facts. Everyone else IS dead."
"Nothing is ever immune to failure. Only fools think they're perfect."
