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"Yes, Al and I are back on board after a little excursion into the jungle."
"What can I do for you?"
"Delve into your data bank and see if you can find any record of a tidal wave that struck the shoreline between Lima, Peru, and Panama City sometime in March of 1578."
Yaeger sighed. "Why don't you also ask me to find the temperature and humidity on the day of creation?"
"Just the general area where the wave struck will do, thank you."
"Any record of such an event would likely be in old weather and maritime records I gleaned from Spanish archives in Seville. Another remote possibility would be the local inhabitants, who might have handed down legends of such an event. The Incas were good at recording social and religious occasions on textiles or pottery."
"Not a good lead," Pitt said doubtfully. "The Inca empire was smashed by the Spanish conquest nearly forty years earlier. Whatever records they made in recalling the news of the day were scattered and lost."
"Most tidal waves that come inland are caused by seafloor movement. Maybe I can piece together known geological events of that era."
"Give it your best try."
"How soon do you need it?"
"Unless the admiral has you on a priority project, drop everything else and go."
"All right," said Yaeger, eager for the challenge. "I'll see what I can come up with."
"Thanks, Hiram. I owe you."
"About a hundred times over."
"And don't mention this to Sandecker," said Pitt.
"I thought it sounded like another one of your shady schemes. Mind telling me what this is all about?"
"I'm looking for a lost Spanish galleon in a jungle."
"But of course, what else?" Yaeger said with routine resignation. He had learned long before never to anticipate Pitt.
"I'm hoping you can find me a ballpark to search."
"As a matter of fact, through clean living and moral thinking, I can already narrow your field of search by a wide margin."
"What do you know that I don't?"
Yaeger smiled to himself. "The lowlands between the west flank of the Andes and the coast of Peru have an average temperature of eighteen degrees Celsius or sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit and an annual rainfall that would hardly fill a shot glass, making it one of the world's coldest and driest low altitude deserts. No jungle for a ship to get lost in there."
"So what's your hot spot?" asked Pitt.
"Ecuador. The coastal region is tropical all the way to Panama."
"A precision display of deductive reasoning. You're okay, Hiram. I don't care what your ex-wives say about you."
A mere trifle. I'll have something for you in twenty-four hours."
"I'll be in touch."
As soon as he put down the phone, Yaeger began assembling his thoughts. He never failed to find the novelty of a shipwreck search stimulating. The areas he planned to investigate were neatly filed in the computer of his mind. During his years with NUMA, he had discovered that Dirk Pitt didn't walk through life like other men. Simply working with Pitt and supplying data information had been one long, intrigue-filled, vicarious adventure, and Yaeger took pride in the fact that he had never fumbled the ball that was passed to him.
As Pitt was making plans to search for a landlocked Spanish galleon, Adolphus Rummel, a noted collector of South American antiquities, stepped out of the elevator into his plush penthouse apartment twenty floors above Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. A short, stringy man with a shaven head and an enormous walrus moustache, Rummel was in his midseventies and looked more like a Sherlock Holmes villain than the owner of six huge auto salvage yards.
Like many of his extremely wealthy peers who compulsively amassed priceless collections of antiquities from the black market with no questions asked, Rummel was unmarried and reclusive. No one was ever allowed to view his pre-Columbian artifacts. Only his accountant and attorney were aware of their existence, but they had no idea of how extensive his inventory was.
