Atlantis Found (46 page)

“I hope you hurry,” said Sandecker, suppressing an urgent tone in his voice. “There are hungry people here.”

“Traffic is heavy. Will do my best.”

“I’ll leave a light on.” Sandecker set down the phone and stared at Admiral Hozafel with a heavy face. “Forgive the rather silly talk, Admiral.”

“I understand perfectly,” said the courtly old German.

“What is their situation?” asked Little.

“Not good,” replied Sandecker. “They have Dr. O’Connell and her daughter, but must be facing enormous odds in escaping the shipyard. ‘Traffic is heavy’ meant that they were under pursuit by Wolf security forces.”

Little looked directly at Sandecker. “What do you think their odds of making a clean getaway are?”

“Odds?” Sandecker’s expression seemed pained. He looked as though he had aged ten years in the past hour. “They have no odds.”

31

THE TRAM MOVED SLOWLY out of the station, passing another tram going in the opposite direction. Though it picked up speed until it was gliding over the rails at nearly thirty miles an hour, Pitt felt as if the tram were crawling and he wanted to get out and help push it. Stations designated in the letters of the alphabet came and went, each one met with their expectation of security guards flooding on board and seizing them. When the tram exchanged passengers at W Station, Pitt’s hopes began to rise, but at X Station, their luck ran out.

Six black uniformed security guards boarded the end car and began checking the passengers’ identification tags, which Pitt only now observed were carried on bracelets around their wrists. He cursed himself for not knowing earlier so he could have stolen the bracelets from the furniture movers. Too late, it occurred to him that the guards would make a special effort to search for people without them. He also noted that they seemed to be taking extra time to check any workers wearing red or yellow coveralls.

“They’re working their way closer,” Giordino noted without emotion, as the guards entered the second car of the five-car tram.

“One at a time,” said Pitt, “move casually to the first car.”

Without a word passing between them, Giordino went first, followed by Megan and then Pat, with Pitt bringing up the rear.

“We might make the next station before they reach this car,” said Giordino. “But it’s going to be close.”

“I doubt if we’ll get off that easy,” Pitt said grimly. “They’ll probably be waiting there, too.”

He walked forward and peered through the window of the door leading to a small control cab in the front of the car. There was a console with lights, buttons, and switches, but no driver or engineer. The tram was fully automatic. He tried the door latch, but wasn’t surprised to find it locked.

He studied the symbols and markings on the console panel. One in particular struck his eye. Gripping the Colt, he rapped the barrel against the glass window and shattered it. Ignoring the startled looks of the car’s passengers, he reached inside and unlocked the door. Without the slightest pause, he reached out and moved the first of five toggle switches connected to the tram’s electronic couplings. Next he reset the computer that actuated the speed of the tram.

The desired effect gave him a surge of pleasure. The four rear cars detached from the lead car and began to fall back. Though each car had its own power source, their preset speed was now slower than that of the forward car. The security guards could only contact other search teams and watch helplessly as the distances between the cars rapidly widened and their quarry gained a growing lead.

Four minutes later, the car with Pitt and the others swept past Y Station without stopping, to the frustration of a team of security guards and the dumb expressions of the workers who stood on the platform. Pitt felt as if his stomach were being squeezed by a cold hand, and his mouth felt as though it were stuffed with dry leaves. He was playing a desperate gamble, with the dice loaded against him. He glanced behind him into the car and caught sight of Pat, sitting with an arm around Megan’s shoulder, one arm still clutching the attaché case, her face pale and strangely sad and forlorn. He walked back and ran his hand through her streaming red hair.

“We’ll get through this,” he said, with an air of conviction. “Old Dirk will take you over the water and the mountains.”

She looked up and managed a faint smile. “Is that a guarantee?”

“Ironclad,” he said, with a growing conviction inside him.

Half a minute passed. Pitt walked back into the control cabin and saw that they were approaching the marina at the stern of the ship. Up ahead, he could see the tracks begin their curve toward the marina, where the tram, he was certain, was supposed to stop at Z Station before continuing around the ship. He didn’t need mystical powers to know security guards had reached the station platform first and were waiting to blast them with an arsenal of weapons.

“I’m going to slow the car to about ten miles an hour,” Pitt said. “When I give the word, we jump. The edge of the tracks is planted with vegetation, so our landing should be fairly soft. Try to roll forward when you hit. At this point we can’t afford to have anybody suffer a fractured ankle or leg.”

Giordino put his arm around Megan. “We’ll go together. That way you’ll have lots of fat to cushion your fall.” It was a broad misstatement. Giordino didn’t have an ounce of fat on his muscular body.

Pitt reset the controls and the car slowed abruptly. The instant the red numbers on the speed scale dropped to ten miles an hour, he yelled, “All right, everyone out!”

He hesitated, making sure they all had leaped from the tram. Then he punched up the numbers until the dial read sixty miles an hour, before running from the cab to the door and jumping as the tram car quickly accelerated toward its fastest speed. He struck soft earth feet first before rolling with the momentum of a cannonball into a bed of ornamental bonsai trees, crushing their distorted branches and mashing them into the soil with his weight. He staggered to his feet; one knee protested in pain, but he was still capable of active movement.

Giordino was beside him, helping him regain his balance. He was relieved to see Pat and Megan, their faces clear of expressions of pain. They seemed more concerned with brushing the soil and pine needles from their hair. The tram had disappeared around the bend, but the stairway leading to the first pier was no more than fifty feet away, and no guards were nearby.

“Where are we going?” Pat asked, regaining a small measure of composure.

“Before we catch our plane,” answered Pitt, “we have to take a little boat trip.”

He caught her by the arm and dragged her behind him, as Giordino hustled Megan along. They ran along the track until they reached the stairs leading down to Pier Number One. As Pitt suspected, the security guards had encircled the station at Z Section two hundred yards farther up the track in the center of the marina. Confusion reigned, as the tram car shot past the station and around the next bend on its way along the port side of the ship. The guards, completely deluded into thinking their prey was still hiding in the speeding car, hurriedly launched a pursuit, as the security director in command ordered the power circuits for the tram system to be closed down.

Pitt figured it would take them another seven minutes before the guards could reach the stopped car and realize that it was empty. If he and the others weren’t off the ship by then, capture was a foregone conclusion.

None of the workers on the pier paid any attention to them as they calmly strolled down the steps and onto the pier. There were three boats moored between the first and second piers, a small twenty-four-foot sailboat, a vessel that Pitt recognized as a forty-two-foot Grand Banks cabin cruiser, and a twenty-four-foot classic runabout. “Climb aboard the big powerboat,” said Pitt, walking placidly across the pier.

“I guess we’re not going to retrieve our dive gear,” said Giordino.

“Pat and Megan could never make it back alive in the water. Better we take our chances on the surface.”

“The runabout is faster,” Giordino pointed out.

“True,” Pitt agreed, “but the security force will be suspicious of a fast boat speeding away from the shipyard. The Grand Banks powerboat, cruising calmly across the water, won’t create near the attention.”

There was a dockhand hosing down the deck when Pitt walked up and stopped at the gangway. “Nice boat,” he said, smiling.

“Heh?” The dockhand looked at him, unable to understand English.

Pitt moved up the gangway and gestured at the no-nonsense lines of the Grand Banks 42. “She’s a nice boat,” he repeated, boldly stepping into the bridge cabin.

The dockhand followed him inside, protesting his trespass on the boat, but once they were out of sight of other workers on the pier, Pitt lashed out with his fist and decked him with a solid blow to the jaw. Then he leaned out the doorway and announced, “Al, cast off the lines. You ladies, all aboard.”

Pitt stood for a moment and studied the instruments on the console. He turned the key and hit the twin starter buttons. Down below in the engine compartment, a pair of big marine diesel engines turned over, the fuel inside their firing chambers compressing and igniting to the tune of high-pitched clacking. He slid open the starboard window and peered out. Giordino had untied the fore and aft lines and was climbing on board.

Pitt engaged the reverse drive and very slowly began edging the boat away from the pier and backing it toward the open water twenty yards astern. He passed two dockworkers installing a railing around the pier, and waved. They waved back. It’s so much easier to be sneaky, he thought, than to burst out of the corral like a wild bull.

The boat passed the end of the pier into open water. Now the stern of the great ship soared above them. Pitt moved the shift lever into Forward and steered the Grand Banks on a course along the
Ulrich Wolf.
To reach the fjord and escape the shipyard, they had to cruise entirely around the floating titan. Pitt set the throttles until the speed instruments read eight knots, a pace that he hoped would not arouse suspicions. So far, there had been no shouts, no bells or whistles, no signs of a chase or searchlights pinning them against the dark water.

At this speed, it would take fifteen minutes to pass the entire length of the supership and turn the bow until they could move a safe distance away and out from under the glare of the lights from the shipyard. Fifteen agonizing minutes that would seem like fifteen years. That was only the first hurdle. They still had the patrol boats to contend with, and by then there was every possibility their crews would have been alerted to the fugitives’ escape in the Grand Banks cabin cruiser.

There was nothing they could do except remain inside the main cabin out of sight and stare up at the immense monster as they crept alongside. From bow to stern, the great mass of glass was a blaze of light inside and out, giving it the effect of a baseball stadium during a night game. The famous classic liners of their time,
Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth,
and
Normandy,
if anchored in a row, would still have come up short next to the
Ulrich Wolf.

“I could use a hamburger about now,” said Giordino, trying to relieve the tension.

“Me, too,” said Megan. “All they fed us was yucky nutritional stuff.”

Pat smiled, though her face looked strained. “It won’t be long, honey, and you’ll get your hamburger.”

Pitt turned from the helm. “Were you treated badly?”

“No abuse,” answered Pat, “but I’ve never been ordered around by so many nasty and arrogant people. They worked me twenty hours a day.”

“Deciphering Amenes inscriptions from another chamber?”

“They weren’t from another chamber. They were photos taken of inscriptions they found at a lost city in the Antarctic.”

Pitt looked at her curiously. “The Antarctic?”

She nodded solemnly. “Frozen in the ice. The Nazis discovered it before the war.”

“Elsie Wolf told me they’d found evidence the Amenes built six chambers.”

“I can’t say,” admitted Pat. “All I can tell you is that I got the impression they’re using the ice city for some purpose. What, I didn’t find out.”

“Did you learn anything new from the inscriptions they forced you to decipher?”

As she talked, Pat no longer looked sad and forlorn. “I was barely into the project when you burst through the door. They were extremely interested in what
we
deciphered in the Colorado and St. Paul chambers. It appeared that the Wolfs were desperate to study the accounts passed down by the Amenes describing the effects of the cataclysm.”

“That’s because any inscriptions they found inside the lost city came before the cataclysm.” He paused and nodded toward her briefcase.

“Is that what’s in there?”

She held it up. “The photos from the Antarctic chamber. I couldn’t bring myself to leave them behind.”

He looked at her steadily. “They don’t make women like you anymore.”

Pitt might have said more, but a boat was crossing his bow about a hundred yards ahead. It looked to be a workboat, and its course remained steady as it turned and passed on the Grand Bank’s port side. The crew seemed intent on their labors and didn’t pay the slightest attention to the cabin cruiser.

Relaxing a bit as they neared the forward section of the
Ulrich Wolf
without any sign of pursuit, Pitt asked, “You said they’re studying what conditions will be like in the aftermath of the cataclysm?”

“In a big way. I assume they want every bit of data they can glean for their survival.”

“I’m still at a loss as to why the Wolfs are so positive a comet is going to return and collide with Earth within days of the prediction made by the Amenes nine thousand years ago,” Pitt said.

Pat shook her head slowly. “I have no answers to that.”