“You have a contact?” asked Morton.
Kaiser didn’t answer immediately but went on listening for a few more moments. At last he pulled up the phone over his left ear and muttered, “This is crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“I’m getting a signal that shouldn’t be.”
Fazio shook his head as if agreeing. “Beats me.”
“Care to let me in on your secret?” Morton asked impatiently.
“I’ll put it on the speaker,” said Kaiser.
Morton and several officers and men who had received the news of a strange contact by osmosis gathered around the sonar enclosure, staring up at the speaker expectantly. The sounds were not perfect but they were clear enough to be understood. No high-pitched squeak of whales, no whirring crick of propeller cavitation, but rather voices singing.
“Not unless they’re building them ten times tougher than ours,” said Fazio.
“What range and bearing?” Morton demanded.
Kaiser was hesitant. He had the look of a little boy who was in trouble and afraid to tell the truth.
“No horizontal compass bearing, sir. The singing is coming from the bottom of the sea, five thousand meters straight down.”
The bottom of the gorge where the NUMA mining station once stood had been filled by silt and rock slides into a broken, irregular plain littered with half-buried boulders and scattered wreckage. There should have been a deathly silence after the final rumblings of the earthquake died away, but a warped chorus of “Minnie the Mermaid” rose from under the desolated wasteland and rippled out into the liquid void.
If one could have walked over the debris field to the sound source, they’d have found a single antenna shaft, bent and twisted, poking up through the mud. A grayish-pink ratfish briefly inspected the antenna but, finding it unsavory, flicked its pointed tail and lazily swam into the dark.
Almost before the ratfish disappeared, the silt a few meters from the antenna began to stir, swirling in an ever widening vortex that was weirdly illuminated from below. Suddenly a shaft of light burst through the ooze, joined by a mechanical hand shaped like a scoop and articulated at the wrist. The steel apparition paused and straightened like a prairie dog standing on its haunches and sniffing the horizon for a coyote.
Then the scoop arched downward, gouging through the seabed, excavating a deep trench that began to ascend at one end like a ramp. When it struck a boulder too large to fit in the scoop, a great metal claw appeared magically alongside. The claw’s talonlike pincers bit around the boulder, yanked it free from the sediment, and dropped it clear of the trench in a billowing mud cloud. The claw then swung clear, and the scoop continued digging.
“Nice work, Mr. Pitt,” said Plunkett, grinning with relief. “You’ll have us out and driving through the countryside by teatime.”
Pitt lay back in a reclining seat, staring up at a TV monitor with the same attentive concern he usually reserved for a football game. “We’re not on the road yet.”
“Boarding one of your Deep Sea Mining Vehicles and running it into the air pressure lock before the major quake hit was a stroke of genius.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Pitt muttered while programming the vehicle’s computer to slightly alter the angle of the scoop. “Call it theft of Mr. Spock’s logic.”
“The air-lock walls held,” Plunkett argued. “But for fickle providence, we’d have been crushed like bugs.”
“The chamber was built to withstand four times the pressure of the other project structures,” Pitt said with a quiet unarguable assertion. “Fickle providence, as you call it, gave us time to pressurize the lock, open the outer door, and move forward enough for the scoop and claw to operate before the avalanche struck. Otherwise we’d be trapped for longer than I care to think about.”
“Oh, bloody hell.” Plunkett laughed. There was little that fazed him. “What does it matter so long as we cheat the grave?”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘grave.’ “
“Sorry.” Plunkett sat in a seat beside and slightly to the rear of Pitt. He stared around the interior of the DSMV. “A damned fine machine. What’s its power source?”
“A small nuclear reactor.”
“Nuclear, heh? You Yanks never cease to amaze me. I’ll wager we can drive this monster right across the bottom and onto Waikiki Beach.”
“You’d win your bet,” said Pitt with a faint grin. “Big John’s reactor and life-support systems could get us there. The only problem being a flat-out speed of five kilometers per hour. We’d die of starvation a good week before we arrived.”
“You didn’t pack a lunch?” Plunkett asked humorously.
“Not even an apple.”
Plunkett gave Pitta dry look. “Even death would be a treat if I didn’t have to hear that blasted tune again.”
“You don’t care for ‘Minnie’?” Pitt asked in mock surprise.
“After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no.”
“With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it’s all we’ve got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“I don’t think much of your musical inventory,” Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. “What’s wrong with Strauss?”
“Instrumental,” Pitt answered. “Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they’ll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there’s no mistaking good old human babble.”
“For all the good that will do,” said Plunkett. “If a rescue mission is launched, there’s no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise.”
“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘demise.’ “
Plunkett reached into a pocket of his big woolen sweater and produced a flask. “Only about four swigs left, but it ought to keep our spirits up for a while.”
Pitt took the offered flask as a muffled rumble shook the big tracked vehicle. The scoop had screeched into a mass of stone and attempted to lift it clear. Far beyond its load safety level, it struggled and groaned to hoist the debris. Like an Olympic weight lifter straining for the gold, the scoop heaved its massive burden above the seafloor and dumped it in a growing mound along the trench.
The outside lights failed to penetrate the mud clouds, and the monitors inside the control cabin showed only constantly merging colors of yellow and gray. But the computer monitor gave a three-dimensional sonar image that displayed the extent of the excavation.
Fully five hours had elapsed since Pitt began the digging operation. At last he could see an enhanced display showing a narrow but reasonably clear corridor slanting toward the surface of the seabed.
“We’ll scrape some paint off the fenders, but I think we can squeeze through,” Pitt said confidently.
Plunkett’s face lit up. “Kick her in the butt, Mr. Pitt. I’m sick to death of staring at this filthy muck.”
Pitt’s head tilted slightly and he gave a wink of one green eye. “As you wish, Mr. Plunkett.” He took over manual control from the computer and rubbed his hands like a pianist about to play. “Cross your fingers the tracks get a firm grip on the sediment or we’ll have to take up permanent residence.”
He gently eased the throttle control forward. The wide track crawlers on the sides of Big John slowly began to move, churning through the soft ooze, turning faster as Pitt increased the power. Gradually they inched forward. Then one track caught and gripped on a layer of small stones, stewing the giant mining machine into the opposite side of the trench. Pitt fought to correct, but the wall gave way and the mudflow spread over one side of the vehicle.
He rammed the throttle against its stop, then pulled back as he shifted into reverse, then full forward again as he rocked Big John back and forth. The compact nuclear reactor had the power, but the tracks could not find the traction. Rock and silt flew from the pivoted cleats as they ripped through the slimy gumbo.
Still the DSMV remained stuck in its narrow prison.
“Maybe we should call a halt and scoop the mud off,” said Plunkett, dead serious. “Or better yet, sit back and review the situation.”
Pitt spared a few moments to give the big Britisher a hard, icy stare. Plunkett swore Pitt’s eyes burned out a goodly number of his brain cells.
“A lot of my people and I worked hard and long to build the first deep-water community,” he said in a voice that bordered on satanic. “And someone, somewhere, is responsible for its destruction. They’re also the cause behind the loss of your submersible, your support ship, and its crew. That’s the situation. Now, speaking for myself, I’m going to bust through this crap if I have to tear the guts out of this thing, get to the surface in one piece, find the scum behind the disaster, and punch their teeth down their lungs.”
Then he turned and sent the tracks thrashing through the encasement of silt and rock. With an awkward wobble, the great machine dug in and lurched a meter forward, then two meters.
Plunkett sat like a tree, thoroughly intimidated yet quite convinced. By God, he thought, I think the man might damn well do it!
The floodlights illuminating the narrow shaft cast eerie distorted shadows in what appeared to be a large tunnel beyond the one-meter-thick concrete. Inside, an old rusty truck could be distinguished, surrounded by what looked to be a vast bed of graybrown scrubwood.
Despite the cool damp air deep under the battle-scarred slopes of Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay, the two men who peered through the hole were sweating heavily. After years of research, they knew they were on the brink of discovering part of the huge World War II cache of war loot known as “Yamashita’s Gold,” named after General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines after October of 1944.
The immense hoard that was seized by the Japanese during the war—from China, the Southeast Asian countries, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—consisted of thousands of metric tons of exotic gems and jewelry, silver and gold bullion, and Buddhas and Catholic altarpieces encrusted with priceless gems and cast in solid gold.
Manila had been the collection point for future transshipment to Japan, but because of heavy shipping losses in the later stages of the war from American submarines, less than twenty percent of the loot actually arrived in Tokyo. With nowhere to go and faced with certain invasion by the avenging Americans, the Japanese guardians of the treasure were in a dilemma. They weren’t about to give it back to the nations and people they had pillaged. Their only option was to hide the immense hoard in over a hundred different sites on and around the island of Luzon, hoping to return after the war and smuggle it home.
Conservative estimates of the stolen treasure on the current money markets were put at between 450 and 500 billion dollars.
The digging in this particular location on Corregidor, a few hundred meters west and a good kilometer deeper than the lateral tunnel that served as General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters before he was evacuated to Australia, had gone on for four months. Using copies of old OSS maps recently found buried in CIA archives at Langley, American and Philippine intelligence agents worked as a team directing the excavation. It was exhausting and very slow going.
The map instructions were deciphered from an ancient Japanese dialect unused for a thousand years. The shaft to the treasure location had to be approached from a side angle because the original access tunnel was booby-trapped with several one and two-thousand-pound bombs and designed to collapse from a direct entry. The penetration through the twenty-mile labyrinth burrowed by the Japanese during their occupation of Luzon had to be precisely calculated or the miners might have wasted months by excavating on the wrong level and missing the treasure tunnel by centimeters.
The taller of the two men, Frank Mancuso, gestured for a large flashlight. One was passed, and he thrust it through the breach in the wall. His face turned pale in the yellow half-light. With numbed horror he realized what the scrubwood really was.
Rico Acosta, a mining engineer attached to the Philippine security forces, moved in closer to Mancuso. “What do you see, Frank?”
“Bones,” Mancuso said, his voice just above a whisper. “Skeletons. God, there must be hundreds of them in there.” He stepped back and nodded at Acosta.
The short little man motioned the diggers toward the opening. “Widen it up,” he ordered.
It took less than an hour for the crew of Philippine miners to smash a hole with sledgehammers large enough for a man to pass through. The cement forming the tunnel walls was of poor quality, crusty and crumbling, and easy to break away. It was looked upon as a piece of luck, since none of them wished to run the risk of a cave-in by using explosives.
Mancuso sat off to one side and lit a stubby curved pipe while he waited. At forty-two, he still kept the long-limbed, thin body of a basketball player. His long brown hair draped around the nape of his neck in oily strands badly in need of washing, and his soft, round Germanic face seemed better suited to an accountant than a get-dirty engineer. His blue eyes had a dreamy quality that never seemed to focus, and yet they took in everything in view and then some.
A graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, he’d spent his early years wandering the world prospecting and working mines in search of precious gems. Opals in Australia, emeralds in Colombia, and rubies in Tanzania, with varying degrees of success. There was also a fruitless three-year hunt on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido for the rarest of the rare, red painite.
Shortly before he reached thirty, he was courted and recruited by an obscure intelligence agency in Washington and appointed a special agent under contract. His first assignment was to search for Yamashita’s gold as part of a Philippine security force team.
The excavation was carried out in the strictest secrecy. None of the gold or gems were to be turned over to their former owners. All treasure found was to be kept by the Philippine government to decrease the debt burden and pump up the sagging economy devastated by the incalculable financial rape of the Marcos reign.