Vulcan's Forge (10 page)

“For one thing, he said he was a urologist, which was the same line I used to get past the FBI guards. One of them would have come to recheck my credentials. Also, no doctor making rounds would wear shoes as uncomfortable-looking as his.” Mercer shrugged. “As to why someone is trying to kill you, that is what we have to find out. It’s obvious that it has to do with the last voyage of the
Ocean Seeker
. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Tish was almost at the point of tears and had to slow her breathing before she could speak. “Do you think all those people were killed because of me?” She sobbed once.

Mercer came around the bar and took her into his arms. She sagged into him gratefully. Her hair smelled like hospital soap, and was smooth and slippery against his skin. He let thirty seconds go by before straightening up. Looking deeply into her eyes, he spoke softly. “I don’t think anyone was supposed to survive that trip. Now tell me about the last voyage.”

Tish took a moment to compose herself.

“A few weeks ago, seven gray whales were found beached just west of Hana on Maui. They were all dead. A biologist from the University of Hawaii performed a necropsy.”

“A what?” Mercer interrupted.

“Necropsy—an animal autopsy,” Tish replied as if everyone should know the word. “He found that their digestive tracts were clogged with minerals. About fifty-five percent silica, with some magnesium, calcium, and iron, plus traces of gold.”

“You’re describing lava.”

“That’s what the biologist thought as well. His theory was the whales had been attracted to the huge schools of plankton that would surround a new undersea volcano for its warmth. The whales, while feeding, would also ingest the particles of lava suspended in the water. Eventually, their digestive tracts would fill with the minerals and they could no longer feed.”

“So what happened then?”

“Well, NOAA was called in to investigate. An aerial search of the waters north of Maui showed nothing. No new island, no clouds of ash or even steam. Then some sonar buoys were dropped, and within twelve hours we had found our new volcano, about two hundred miles from the Hawaiian islands.

“The
Ocean Seeker
was sent out late last Thursday night.” Tish stopped speaking for several seconds. “Twenty-four hours later, the ship exploded. When I was first rescued, I just assumed that it had been some sort of accident, but now I don’t know what to think.”

Mercer poured her another glass of wine and opened another beer for himself. The adrenaline rush from a few hours ago was wearing off, leaving him thirsty.

“Why are all those pins in that map?” Tish said, changing the subject and referring to the map of the world hung behind the bar. It was studded with numerous pushpins in several different colors.

Mercer felt that the distraction would let Tish calm down enough to answer the dozens of questions he still had for her. “It’s a map of places I’ve been. The different colors indicate why I was there. Green is for pleasure, like most of the Caribbean islands. Red is for work overseas for the U.S. Geological Survey, mostly meetings in Europe and Africa. And blue is for private consulting work that I’ve done for various mining companies.”

Tish noted that this last category included some pretty exotic places—Thailand, Namibia, South Africa, Alaska, New Guinea and at least fifteen others. “Why is there a clear pin in central Africa? I can’t tell which country.”

Mercer looked pained as he replied. “The pin’s in Rwanda. I was there for six months in 1994 when the world looked on as 800,000 Tutsi tribesmen were slaughtered by the Hutu majority. I was on a consulting job when the violence erupted, and rather than run away, I joined a band of soldiers trying to defend fleeing villagers.”

“My God, why would you do something like that? I heard that the fighting was absolutely savage.”

“I was born in that part of the world. My parents and I lived in Rwanda during the early days of independence. I was too young to remember the massacre of 1964, but I’ve never lost my sense of loyalty to the Tutsi friends I had growing up.”

Tish knew he was keeping something from her, but she didn’t press. “And what about the clear pin in Iraq?”

Mercer smiled. “I was never there—and even if I was, I can’t talk about it.”

She threw him a cheeky grin. “Real James Bond, hush hush.”

“Sort of.” Mercer still carried scars from that mission. The information he had brought back had been the trigger for Operation Desert Storm. “Now tell me about your rescue.”

Tish spoke quietly. “The ship exploded late Friday night. I was on the fantail, rigging some acoustical gear. I didn’t hear or even see the explosion. One second, I was standing there, and the next I was in the water. There were a lot of flames. I remember that I couldn’t hear anything. I think I had gone deaf for a moment.”

“The concussion stunned your ears—it’s common. Go on.”

“There was an inflatable raft near me and I swam to it.”

Mercer interrupted again. “It was already inflated?”

“Yes, it was. Come to think of it, that’s awfully strange. They’re usually stowed in big plastic cylinders. Maybe the explosion released the CO
₂
used to inflate it.” That sounded a little far-fetched to Mercer, and he made a mental note to come back to it later. “I was in the raft all of the next day until the
September Laurel
rescued me.”

“That’s the freighter?”

“Yes. A couple hours later, a helicopter from the navy came to pick me up. The doctor on board gave me a shot, and when I came to, I was in D.C.”

“Can you describe the freighter?”

“I don’t know, it was just a ship. I don’t know the length or anything like that. It had a bunch of cranes and booms. There was a black circle with a yellow dot on the funnel, which was near the back of the ship.”

“What else can you tell me?”

Tish paused, her smooth forehead furrowed. There was something she wanted to say, Mercer could tell, but he didn’t think she was sure of the facts herself.

“I heard Russian,” she blurted out.

“Russian? Are you sure?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“When did you hear it?”

“When I was being pulled aboard the freighter. The crew were shouting orders to each other in Russian.”

“How can you be sure it was Russian? Some of the Scandinavian languages sound similar.”

“A year ago I was part of a research team in Mozambique, investigating the ruin that the government there has made of the prawn beds just off the coast. It was a joint venture between NOAA, Woods Hole, the Mozambique government, and a team of Soviets. I, well, I became involved with one of the Soviets. When we were alone together, he would always speak to me in Russian. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sound of that language.”

She looked at Mercer, as if defying him to judge her.

“Okay, so you heard Russian. Could be they had some expatriate Russian crewman or something like that. What happened when you were in the life raft?”

“Nothing. I was unconscious until just before I was rescued.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“I had just been blown off a ship, what the hell am I supposed to remember?” Fatigue was taking its toll on her.

“I’m sorry. You must still be exhausted.” Mercer glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty in the afternoon. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll wake you at seven. I’m sure you’re dying for a nonhospital meal.”

“Yes, that would be wonderful.”

Mercer led her to one of the two guest rooms. He showed her the bath and gave her several towels. He heard the water running even before he returned to the rec room.

Mercer pulled two more beers from the fridge and went to his home office. He switched on the desk lamp and grabbed the phone.

A moment later a female voice chirped, “Berkowitz, Saulman, and Little.”

“David Saulman please. Tell him it’s Philip Mercer.”

Of the dozens of lawyers that Mercer had dealt with in his life, David Saulman was the only one he liked. Saulman had been a ship’s officer during the late 1950s and early sixties, but an engine room accident had scalded his left hand so badly that it had to be amputated. Forced out of the Merchant Marine, he put himself through law school and within just a few years he was the man to talk to about maritime law.

Thirty years later, his office in Miami had over one hundred associate attorneys and his counsel rated five hundred dollars an hour. At seventy-five, Saulman was still sharp and his knowledge of ships and shipping was voluminous.

“Mercer, how are you? I haven’t heard your sorry voice in months. Tell me you’re in Miami and ready to get into trouble.”

“Sorry, Dave, I’m in D.C. and I’m already in trouble.”

“Don’t tell me the cops finally picked you up for flashing the tourists in front of the White House?”

“Hell, no one even notices when I do it. Dave, what do you know about a ship called the
September Laurel
?”

“An official call, is it?”

“Yeah, charge it to NOAA.”

“NOAA, huh? Do they know?”

“Not yet, but if I’m right, they won’t mind.”

“The
September Laurel
was the ship that rescued that woman from the NOAA research vessel last night, right?”

“That’s the one.”

“The
Laurel
’s owned by Ocean Freight and Cargo, head office in New York, but all of their ships are registered in Panama and have Italian crews. She’s just a tramp freighter, usually runs the north Pacific. Let me think, about four hundred feet, thirty thousand gross tons. Only notable thing about her is this rescue.”

“Dave, I want you to check her out—normal cargoes, big contracts—also I want the lowdown on her parent company. Dig deep. Also, could you get me any information on all the ships that have sunk in the same waters as the
Ocean Seeker
?”

“What’s going on in that paranoid mind of yours?”

“I’m not sure yet, and I can’t really talk about what I suspect. Do you happen to know the design on her stack?”

“Yeah, a bunch of laurels.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, it’s OF&C’s trademark. Their ship
August Rose
has a bunch of roses on the stack and the
December Iris
has irises on hers.”

“So there’s no way that her stack could be painted with a black circle surrounding a yellow dot?”

“Not unless the company has changed a forty-year tradition.”

“Thanks, Dave, I owe you. Just fax the info to my home and I’ll take it from there.”

“Are you up for a trivia challenge?” Saulman asked. This had been a tradition since they’d first met in 1983, at a reception honoring the few remaining Titanic survivors.

“Fire away.”

“Who was the last person to own the
Queen Elizabeth
and what did he change her name to?”

“C. Y. Tung, and he called her
Seawise University
.”

Mercer just barely heard Saulman call him a bastard before he hung up.

Mercer flipped through his Rolodex for a second, searching for a number at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

“Time to call in another favor,” he muttered as the phone began ringing.

“Yo,” answered a familiar deep baritone.

Mercer instantly recognized the easy negligence of the greeting. The voice was pure Harlem. “Spook, whatever happened to hello?”

“Only one man dare call me that. Is that you, Mercer?”

“No, this is the Massachusetts chapter of the KKK soliciting donations.”

“So it is the Rock Jock, how the hell are you?”

Three years earlier, Mercer had been contacted by a Pennsylvania mining firm about a piece of property they had just purchased in upstate New York. The company was hoping to reopen a hard-rock anthracite mine first excavated in the 1890s. While doing the first exploratory trips into the half-submerged mine, Mercer and a small team from the mining company had come across a school of swift but blind fish. Not recognizing them as a normal subterranean species, Mercer had called in Woods Hole to investigate the mutated specimens. They sent over two marine biologists and several assistants. The mine was never reopened, but the research had given a young grad student named Charles Washington his Ph.D. thesis and a guaranteed tenure at Woods Hole. Mercer had given Washington the nickname Spook, not because of his black skin and inner-city manner, but because of his love of Stephen King novels and the frightening stories he’d tell to keep the crew entertained while working in the dark mine tunnels.

“Another day older and deeper in debt.”

“Shit, man, you ain’t seen debt until you see the payments on my new BMW.”

“Whatever happened to scientists with leather-elbowed jackets, untrimmed beards, and beat-up Saabs?”

“That’s for old white farts, not us lean and mean black brothers. ’Sides which, last I knew you was drivin’ a Jag.”

“Just to prove I’m not an old white fart, that’s all.”

“Bullshit, but I love ya anyway. This ain’t no social call, what up?”

“A year ago, Woods Hole sent a team to Mozambique to look at shrimp beds. You know anything about it?”

“No, but hold on, I know someone who does.”

Mercer could hear him shout to someone else in the room. A few minutes later a frail female voice came on the line. “Hello, this is Dr. Baker.”

“Good afternoon, Doctor, my name is Philip Mercer. I’m a geologist with the USGS.” Mercer thought it best to sound formal. “I’m trying to get some information about an expedition to Mozambique that Woods Hole was involved with last year.”

“That’s what Charley said. I was on that expedition as lab director.”

“Do you happen to remember any of the Russian scientists? A youngish man in particular. I’m sorry, I don’t have his name.”

“Probably you’re referring to Valery Borodin. Supposedly he was a biologist, but he knew more about geology than anything else. He spent most of his time with one of the women from NOAA, lucky girl.”