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19
Gunn guided Poco Bonito through the black water separating the high-bluffed straits. The water was deserted of all shipping as he kept the bow aimed straight down the middle of the channel. The lights on the top of the buoys that marked the entrance to the harbor swayed with the waves in the distance, one with a blinking green light, the opposite showing red.
As Pitt was sitting in the lounge chair enjoying the tropical evening at sea and watching the yellow glow of Bluefields fade into the darkness astern, the memory of the spy on the dock stayed in his mind and spread, like a plant with roots. There was an indefinite thought that seemed distant and unfocused. He was not concerned that they had been observed as they cast off their moorings. That part of the intrigue seemed inconsequential. The pickup truck with odyssey painted on the door measured no more than two points on his trepidation scale. It was the haste of the driver when she shot off the dock that puzzled him. There had been no need for a quick getaway. So she was made by the NUMA crew? So what? They'd made no move to approach her. The answer had to lie somewhere else.
And then it all crystallized when he recalled the driver's wet hair.
Gunn's right hand was poised above the twin throttles leading to the big fuel-injected engines in readiness to ease them forward and send the boat whipping over the low swells rolling in from the Caribbean. Abruptly, Pitt sat up in his lounge chair and shouted.
"Rudi, stop the boat!"
Gunn half turned. "What?"
"Stop the boat! Stop it now!"
Pitt's voice was as sharp as a fencing saber, and Gunn quickly complied, pulling the throttles back to their stops. Then Pitt yelled at Giordino, who was down below in the galley with Ford and Dodge, savoring pie and coffee. "Al, bring up my dive gear!"
"What's this all about?" asked Gunn in confusion as he stepped from the side door of the pilothouse. Looking bewildered, Renee and Dodge also appeared on deck to see what all the fuss was about.
"I can't be certain," explained Pitt, "but I suspect we might have a bomb on board."
"What brought you to that conclusion?" asked Dodge skeptically.
"The driver of the truck couldn't wait to get away. Why the hurry? There must be a reason."
"If you're right," spoke up Dodge, seeing the light, "we'd better find it."
Pitt nodded decisively. "My thoughts exactly. Rudi, you, Renee and Patrick search every inch of the cabins. Al, you take the engine room. I'm going over the side on the possibility it was attached under the hull."
"Let's get a move on," said Al. "The explosives could be on a timer set to detonate as soon as we cleared the harbor and moved into deep water."
Pitt shook his head. "I don't think so. There was always the chance we might have hung around the dock until morning. Impossible for anyone to predict the precise time we'd cast off and reach the open sea. My guess is that when we pass the entrance, a transmitter attached to one of the channel buoys will activate a receiver connected to the explosives."
"I believe you have an overactive gray matter," Renee said dubiously. "I can't for the life of me imagine who has a motive to kill all of us and destroy the boat."
"Somebody is afraid of what we might find," Pitt continued. "And for now the Odyssey mob is our prime suspect. Their intelligence-gathering must be good if they saw through the admiral's scheme to smuggle the five of us and the boat into Bluefields."
Giordino appeared from below with Pitt's dive gear. He didn't require intuition to accept Pitt's theory. From their many years together since elementary school, he knew Pitt rarely if ever misinterpreted events. Their trust in each other's vision was more than a simple bond. Many times in the past their minds had acted as one.
"We better move quickly," Pitt advised strongly. "The longer we hang around, the sooner our friends know we're onto them. They'll be expecting to see a fireworks display in the next ten minutes."
The message came through. No one needed any urging. They quickly coordinated their efforts and assigned themselves sections of the boat to search while Pitt stripped to his shorts and strapped on his air tanks and regulator. He didn't bother, nor did he take the time, to slip into a wet suit. Without its buoyancy he felt no necessity to be hindered by a weight belt. Inserting the regulator's mouthpiece between his teeth, he strapped a small tool kit around his left leg, gripped a dive light in his right hand and stepped over the stern.
The water felt warmer than the air above. Visibility was almost diamond clear. Shining the light downward, he could make out a flat, sandy, nondescript bottom eighty feet below. Pitt felt remarkably comfortable as the tepid water pressed against his body. The hull below the waterline was free of growth, having been dry-docked and scraped clean before Sandecker ordered Poco Bonito south.
He moved from the rudder and propellers toward the bow, swinging the light from port to starboard and back. There was always the danger of a curious shark, nosing its way toward the light, but in all his years of diving Pitt had seldom crossed paths with the murder machines of the deep. He concentrated instead on the object caught in the beam of his dive light, protruding like a tumor from the keel amidships. His suspicions confirmed, he stroked his fins slowly until he was staring at what he knew without the slightest doubt was an explosive device no more than ten inches in front of his face mask.
Pitt was no bomb expert. All he could determine was that some kind of oval-shaped cannister about three feet in length and eight inches wide had been attached to the aluminum hull where it met the keel. Whoever had placed the cannister had anchored it with an adhesive tape impervious to liquid and strong enough to maintain a grip against the drag from the water as the boat cruised through the channel.
There was no way he could tell what type of explosive was being used, but it looked to him like a classic case of overkill. It seemed far more than enough to blast Poco Bonito into a thousand fragments and her crew into tiny shreds of flesh and bone. It was hardly a pretty thought.
He clamped the dive light under an armpit and gently placed both hands on the cannister. One deep breath and he attempted to pull the cannister away from the hull. Nothing happened. He increased his effort, but it was fruitless. Without a firm base to stand on, Pitt could exert too little force to overcome the adhesive. He backed off, reached into the tool kit strapped to his leg and pulled out a small fisherman's knife with a curved blade.
Under the light, he took a quick glance at the orange dial on his ancient Doxa dive watch. He had been down four minutes. He had to hurry before Specter's agent onshore got wise that something was up. Very cautiously slipping the edge of the knife under the cannister as far as he dared, Pitt sliced the blade through the tape as if he was sawing a piece of wood. Whoever had attached the bomb used enough tape to choke a whale. Though he had split the tape in four different areas, the cannister still remained stuck to the hull.
Putting the knife back in the kit, Pitt gripped both ends, curled his body until his finned feet were planted firmly against the keel and heaved, praying that only an electronic signal would set it off. The cannister abruptly came off the hull with such momentum that Pitt was hurled through the water nearly six feet before drifting to a stop. It was then, as he held the explosives in his hands, that he realized he was gasping air from his tank like a pump, while his heart felt like it was trying to beat through his rib cage.
Without waiting for his heart to slow and his breathing to return to normal, Pitt swam along the keel and surfaced beside the rudder at the stern. No one was visible. They were all busily searching the interior of the boat. He spit out his mouthpiece and shouted.
