The exposed skin had bloated to grotesque proportions and turned the color of French mustard. Small rivulets of dried blood had pooled around his ears and mouth. A swarm of flies buzzed around the seaman’s face and clustered on his open, bulging eyes. Yet it was the body’s extremities, marked beyond mere decomposition, that was most grisly. The seaman’s ears, nose, and fingertips were charred black, though the skin remained unbroken. Pitt recalled photos of polar explorers who had suffered extreme frostbite, marked by black blisters covering patches of dead skin. Yet the Tasmanian Star had sailed nowhere near any polar region.

Franco slowly backed away from the figure.

“Santa Maria!” he gasped. “He’s been taken by the devil himself.”

8

A SCRATCHED AND BATTERED CRASH HELMET SAT centered on Pitt’s desk when he returned to his office in Washington. A short, typewriten note taped on the visor welcomed him back:

Dad,

Really, you need to be more careful!

Pitt chuckled as he slid the helmet aside, wondering if it came from his son or his daughter. Both children worked for NUMA and had just left for a project off Madagascar involving subsea tectonics.

There was a rap at his office door and in walked a voluptuous woman with perfect hair and makeup. Although Zerri Pochinsky was north of forty, her looks gave no hint of it. Pitt’s trusted secretary for many years, she might have become something more in his life if he hadn’t met Loren first.

“Welcome back to the lion’s den.” She smiled and placed a cup of coffee on his desk. “I honestly don’t know how that helmet got here.”

Pitt returned her smile. “There’s just no sanctity to my inner sanctum.”

“I received a call from the Vice President’s secretary,” Pochinsky said, her hazel eyes turning serious. “You’ve been asked to attend a meeting in his office today at two-thirty.”

“Any mention of the topic?”

“No, they simply indicated it was a security matter.”

“What in Washington isn’t?” He shook his head with annoyance. “Okay, tell them I’ll be there.”

“Also, Hiram is outside. He said you wanted to see him.”

“Send him in.”

Pochinsky slipped out the door and was replaced by a bearded man with shoulder-length hair. Dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a black Allman Brothers Band T-shirt, Hiram Yaeger looked like he was headed to a biker bar. Only the intense blue eyes behind a pair of granny glasses revealed a deeper intellectual pursuit. Far from a roadhouse barfly, Yaeger was in fact a computer genius whose greatest love was writing software code. Managing NUMA’s state-of-the-art computer resource center, he had built a sophisticated network that collected detailed oceanographic data from a thousand points around the globe.

“So, the savior of the mighty Sea Splendour has returned.” He plopped into a chair opposite Pitt. “You mean to tell me they didn’t whisk you off on a free round-the-world cruise for saving the most expensive ship in their fleet?”

“They were more than willing,” Pitt said. “But Loren’s on a diet, so the ship’s buffet would have been wasted. And my shuffleboard game’s a bit rusty, so there was really no point.”

“I’d be happy to take the trip for you.”

“And risk the whole agency falling apart without your presence?”

“True, I am rather indispensable around here.” Yaeger lofted his nose in the air. “Remind me to mention that at my next performance review.”

“Done,” Pitt said with a grin. “So I take it you found something on the Tasmanian Star?”

“The basics. She was built in Korea in 2005. At a length of five hundred and ten feet and a capacity of fifty-four thousand deadweight tons, she’s classified as a Handymax dry bulk carrier. She was fitted with five holds, two cranes, and a self-dispensing conveyor system.”

“Which can make for a nice stairwell,” Pitt noted.

“She’s owned by a Japanese shipping company named Sendai, and has seen steady service in the Pacific, primarily as an ore carrier. On her last voyage she was under contract with an American petrochemical company. She departed Perth three and a half weeks ago, with a recorded cargo of bauxite, bound for Los Angeles.”

“Bauxite.” Pitt pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket. He retrieved the silver rock he had picked up from the deck of the Tasmanian Star and laid it on his desk. “Any idea of the value of the bauxite she was carrying?”

“I couldn’t locate the ship’s insured value, but depending on the grade, the stuff sells for around thirty to sixty bucks a ton on the open market.”

“Doesn’t make sense someone would hijack a ship over it.”

“Personally, I’d go for a freighter full of iPads.”

“Any theories on where our thieves may have run to?”

“Not really. I took the coordinates you gave me where the ship changed course, but I came up dry. NRO satellite images were a week old. That’s a dead part of the Pacific. It doesn’t garner much attention from the spies in the sky.”

“Tapping the National Reconnaissance Office? I hope you didn’t leave any footprints.”

An accomplished hacker when circumstances dictated, Yaeger feigned insult. “Footprints, me? Should anyone even notice the intrusion, I’m afraid the trail leads to my favorite Hollywood celebrity gossip website.”

“A true shame if the government were to shut that down.”

“My sentiments precisely. I do have a theory, though, about the Tasmanian Star’s appearance in Valparaiso.”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“The ship made an abrupt southerly turn nine days ago, some seventeen hundred miles west of Costa Rica. One of our free-floating weather buoys bit the dust in that area of the Pacific about the same time. Turns out, a pretty significant tropical storm blew through that area, although it petered out by the time it hit Mexico. We recorded force 9 winds before we lost the buoy.”

“So our pirates may have had to abandon their heist in a hurry.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Maybe that’s why they left most of the cargo, and left the engine running.”

Pitt thought for a moment. “Are there are any islands in the area?”

Yaeger pulled out a tablet computer and called up a map of the area where the ship’s course changed.

“There’s a small atoll called Clipperton Island. It’s only about twenty miles from the position you gave me . . . and dead-on along that same heading.” He looked at Pitt and shook his head. “Nice deduction.”

“They didn’t have time to flood her, so they probably set her on a course toward Clipperton, assuming she’d founder on the reef and disappear.”

“Only the storm blew her clear of the island,” Yaeger said, “and she kept on sailing for another four thousand miles until arriving in Valparaiso.”

Pitt took a sip of coffee. “That still doesn’t put us any closer to who attacked the ship and disposed of the crew.”

“I’ve searched for port documents showing recent shipments of bauxite, but nothing’s surfaced.”

“And it probably won’t. Hiram, see if you can find mention of any other pirate attacks—or lost ships, for that matter—that have occurred recently in the Pacific. And one more favor.” Pitt picked up the silver rock and tossed it to Yaeger. “I picked this up on the Tasmanian Star. On your way back to the computer center, drop this off with the boys in subsea geology and have them tell us what it is.”

“Will do.” Yaeger studied the rock as he headed for the door. “Not our bauxite?”

Pitt shook his head. “A pang in my stomach and a large, grounded ghost ship says not.”

9

PITT JOGGED UP THE ENTRY STEPS TO THE EISENHOWER Executive Office Building, trying to shake his creeping jet lag. Adjacent to the White House, the imposing stone structure was Pitt’s favorite federal building. Built in 1888 in the French Second Empire style of architecture, it featured a steep-pitched mansard roof and towering windows, making it look like a transplant from a Victor Hugo story. A monument to the use of granite and slate, almost no wood had been used in its construction, to reduce the risk of fire. Ironically, a fire on the second floor had nearly destroyed Vice President Cheney’s office in 2007.