White Water td-106 Read online

  To that, Mistress Kali made a reply that Anwar Anwar-Sadat at first dismissed as childish.

  "Why not seek control of the seven seas?"

  Anwar Anwar-Sadat was weighing a judicious reply, calculated not to offend, when Mistress Kali followed up with another thought.

  "The oceans of the world cover three quarters of the face of the globe. It is the source of food, life and is the oldest medium for intercontinental travel. It keeps nations apart, yet connects them by commerce. He who controls the ocean controls the landmasses. Control of landmass equals control of the world."

  "This is an astute observation. But oceans are international. No one political body controls them."

  "The oceans are controlled for two hundred miles out by nations that have encroached on waters that for centuries were free of man's domination."

  "Yes, yes, that last round of treaties expanded them. This was to protect fishing rights. This was twenty years ago. Before my tenure, you understand."

  "From where I view the world, two hundred miles is insufficient for the needs of most nations."

  "This may be true," Anwar Anwar-Sadat admitted. "But to extend it any farther would invite disastrous conflicts."

  "Exactly why the two-hundred-mile limit should be rolled back, and control over coastal waters and deep-sea oceans should fall where it rightfully belongs-under United Nations control."

  "This is an intriguing idea. We already speak to this issue in many respects. There is a UN-sponsored international treaty that will allow signatory nations to board and detain violators of recognized fishing regulations. But it will be years before nations sign in sufficient numbers to give it teeth."

  "Is it not clear that the extension of the two-hundred-mile limit has only worsened the pillage of the oceans?" Mistress Kali continued. "Today there is virtually no coastal fishery that has not been fished out. This could have been avoided had only your forces taken control of the situation."

  "You are unusually well-informed. May I ask where you were educated?"

  "I am a student of human nature."

  "You are the most brilliant woman I have never met," Anwar Anwar-Sadat typed, ending that bit of admiring whimsy with a smiley: :-)

  He only wished there were some way to type out a heart, for he was utterly smitten by this creature who possessed the brain of a shrewd diplomat and the statuesque body of a goddess.

  After that bewitching night, Anwar Anwar-Sadat had studied the situation and decided it was feasible.

  He gave a speech warning of a global water crisis if the world's precious resources were not husbanded quickly. It was carefully calculated not to offend world governments. It said nothing of control of the seas or fishing rights.

  And it sank like a lead balloon. Those newspapers that carried the story buried it on the obituary pages. This infuriated Anwar Anwar-Sadat. These days he found himself buried more and more in the obituaries. It gave him a very ugly feeling. Newscasts reported his remarks as a one-sentence summary just before the car commercials.

  By the next day it was completely forgotten.

  Except by Anwar Anwar-Sadat.

  "There has been no interest expressed in my ideas, Pharaonic One," Anwar Anwar-Sadat informed Mistress Kali that evening.

  "You are not a man to give up easily. All you need is an incident to draw attention to your cause,'' she replied crisply. He could almost hear her dulcet tones, though they had never actually spoken.

  "I am not in the business of manufacturing incidents. Only in taking advantage of them," Anwar Anwar-Sadat replied unhappily, adding a frownie face: :-(

  "Perhaps there is something I can do up here," replied Mistress Kali.

  "What, my sweet?"

  "Be patient, my Anwar. And if you do not hear from me for some time, understand I think of you hourly and work to fulfil all of your brave dreams."

  After she had logged off, Anwar Anwar-Sadat did an impulsive thing. He was not given to impulsive gestures, but this one welled up from deep within him.

  He kissed the cold blue computer-screen glass.

  Chapter 6

  Remo sent the cigarette boat skimming through the oil slick that had now spread an eighth of a mile over the site where the Ingo Pungo went down.

  There was a sonar set on board. Remo had figured out how to turn it on, which was pretty good for him. He sometimes had trouble with the VCR.

  Passing over the Ingo Pungo, he got a big dead blip. That was his first clue that he had it turned on correctly. Mostly it pinged and binged pointlessly.

  Running past the site, he kept the boat on an easterly course. He figured he was looking for a submarine. Maybe the sonar would find it, maybe it wouldn't. Couldn't hurt to try, he figured. Perhaps he'd get lucky.

  An hour passed and he watched his gas gauge. He wasn't much of a boater. Fortunately boats were simple. You just had to point the bow where you wanted to go and follow it. The hard part was making landfall. Remo preferred to just run them up on shore and hop out while the hull and propeller chewed themselves up on sand and rocks. Someday they'd build a boat with brakes.

  In the end Remo didn't find the submarine so much as the submarine found him.

  He got a string of noisy pings. The boat took him past the point of contact before he could check out the screen. Before the pinging stopped abruptly, the last ping sounded like a very big ping, so Remo brought the power boat around for another sweep.

  The gleaming black submarine surfaced directly in his path.

  It came up with the sail showing first. It lifted out of the water, a slab of blackness with a square of white on its side. Seawater cascaded and drooled from various places on the hull.

  Then the long flat deck broke the surface.

  Remo cut the power and let the boat glide toward the sub.

  The sail loomed closer and closer. It dwarfed the power boat into insignificance.

  At the last moment before collision, Remo turned the wheel, and the side of the boat bumped against the hull. He flung out a looped line, snagged a steel cleat and pulled the boat snug to the submarine.

  Stepping off casually, Remo walked up to the imposing black sail. He knocked on it once, hard with his knuckles.

  The sail rang like a bell. It was a very satisfactory sound. So Remo knocked again.

  "Submarine inspector. Anybody home?"

  A hatch popped atop the sail. Remo looked up. At his back another hatch popped. It fell down with a clang.

  One eye on the sail, Remo glanced over his shoulder.

  Two men in white sailor suits were climbing up from the hatch. They carried Uzis. With their faces painted white, they looked like mimes. The white blankness of their expressions was broken by a dark, flowery tattoo in the middle.

  Remo recognized the symbol instantly. It was the Boy Scout crest. No, that was gold. This was blue. It still looked familiar.

  "You clowns have caused me a lot of trouble," Remo said casually.

  The two creeping closer failed to answer. Remo couldn't read their faces, but their weapons were pointed at him with professional intent.

  "I surrender. Don't shoot me," he said, hoping they stepped right up to him. But they approached carefully. They weren't fools.

  Remo raised his hands to encourage them. That worked. They moved up on quick sneakered feet.

  A man appeared up on the sail and pointed a rifle down at Remo, complicating things. But only a little.

  Remo offered a weak smile as the two seamen took positions on either side of him. They looked up. Remo looked up, too.

  The man on the sail had a white face, too. He gave a hand signal while keeping the rifle trained on Remo.

  The two on the deck took comfort in that, and one holstered his Uzi while the other stood back and trained his weapon on Remo with businesslike intent. His eyes were two dark squints.

  Remo realized he was about to be frisked for weapons and decided he really didn't want to be frisked.

  When one sailor put his hands
to Remo's sides, Remo broke both forearms with his elbows. He dug them into his sides. Crunch. Bones splintered. The seaman let out a high, frightened howl.

  Pivoting, Remo spun the screaming sailor in a half circle and let go. The flying body slammed into the other sailor, and they went tumbling down the steep side of the sub.

  Remo backpedaled in place ahead of the rifle bullet that punched a hole in the deck where he had stood a second before.

  Arcing into the water, he made almost no sound, his lean body cleaving the water like an eel. Feet kicking, he used the slimy, cold skin of the hull to guide him to the bow and over to the other side.

  Through the water Remo should have been able to hear the sailors shouting at one another. But they weren't shouting. Even the howling sailor had gotten a grip on himself.

  Surfacing on the other side of the sub, Remo reached up and found the ankles of the two still struggling to hold on to the deck. They came into the water screaming.

  "Fun's over," said Remo, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks. "Time to confess to Father Remo."

  One threw a punch that Remo avoided with a quick bob of his head. The sailor tried twice more, with the same frustrating result.

  "Give up?" Remo asked.

  They said nothing. If clown faces could look sullen, these two managed a respectable impersonation.

  "Last chance to talk freely," Remo warned.

  They offered frowns, and their shoulders slumped dejectedly.

  So Remo dunked their heads under the surface. Their hands groped and splashed wildly. When he lifted them, they gasped like frightened flounders.

  "Okay, who are you guys?"

  They gasped some more, so Remo dunked them again. Longer this time.

  When he finally brought them up, they were jabbering some doggerel Remo didn't understand at all.

  "You two just flunked Usefulness 101," he said, and brought their faces together so fast and hard they fused.

  Like Siamese twins joined at the nose, they sank as one. They didn't even struggle. For them the light had gone out forever.

  Remo stepped back onto the deck and found the ladder that led up the side of the great black sail. He started climbing.

  The seaman on the sail was sweeping the seas with a small gimbal-mounted searchlight now. He missed Remo entirely every time. That was Remo's doing, not the seaman's fault.

  Remo pointed out his error by slipping up to the top of the sail and tapping on his shoulder.

  Startled, the seaman spun around.

  The expression on his pale face was not so much surprise as it was a cartoon. The blue symbol spread outward like a flower coming to life. A black hole formed in the bottom of the gleaming white face. The black hole had blue lips and white teeth, with prominent incisors. Remo flicked the front teeth with a finger, and they flew back into the sailor's mouth.

  The seaman grabbed his throat, eyes bugging out in shock.

  "That's only a sample of what I can do if I don't get some answers from you," Remo warned.

  The seaman doubled over, coughing.

  "Uh-oh," said Remo, who then spun the man around and, jamming his fists into his stomach, Heimliched him.

  With a grunt the seaman expelled the teeth lodged in his throat, then collapsed on the sail, gasping.

  "Speak English?" asked Remo.

  The sailor started to gurgle. Then he vomited up his last meal. It looked like potatoes, except they were bluish.

  Reaching down, Remo picked him up by the collar and belt and deposited him down the sail's hatch.

  He went down, limbs and other bodily projections banging off the spiral staircase. When he reached bottom, Remo started down after him.

  It was a big sub. There had to be plenty more sailors to interrogate. And that one had unforgivably splashed vomit on Remo's shoes.

  The stink of the interior of the sub was a mixture of oil, cooking odors and stale human sweat. Remo absorbed all these scents as he slipped down the spiral stairs. Fear-sweat was predominant. The air reeked of it.

  That meant an ambush down below.

  Remo processed the assorted scents. He got a whiff of inert, unburned gunpowder. Sailors with guns. He wasn't in a great position to dodge wild shooting. On the other hand, only idiots would shoot inside a sub on the high seas.

  On the other other hand, Remo remembered, these guys were wearing clown faces. No telling what they would do.

  He decided to smoke them out. He was coming down on silent feet, and deliberately he stumbled. The stairs rang like a tuning fork.

  And up from the shadows they poured, silent except for their drumming boots. No shouting. No war cries.

  "Are these guys all mute?" Remo wondered aloud.

  The steps vibrated with their mad rushing as they circled up and around.

  Remo reached out and took hold of the spiral rail corkscrewing around the stairs. Stepping out, he let his legs dangle and slid down on both hands.

  The sailors saw him going past as they were going up. They collided, bunched up, and started to reverse course.

  By the time they got themselves organized, Remo had reached bottom and ducked through a hatch. He dogged it shut. That let him in and kept them out.

  Moving down the cramped corridor, Remo came upon a sailor with a white-and-blue face.

  "Speak English?" he asked casually.

  The sailor was unarmed. He ran. Remo grabbed him by the shoulder and began to squeeze his hard rotator cup.

  "Habla espanol?" he asked.

  The man screamed. No words. Just high, mindless screaming.

  "Parlez-vous Francais?''

  More screaming.

  "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

  He apparently didn't speak German. So Remo tried Korean. "Hanguk-mal hae?"

  The man's rolling eyes turned white. They matched his face. It created an interesting effect. While his mouth was open, Remo checked to see if he had a tongue. He did. A pink one.

  Having exhausted his stock of languages, Remo put the screaming sailor out his misery with a hard tap to the temple. The man collapsed in the corridor, and Remo stepped over him.

  Back the way Remo came, the trapped sailors began pounding on the dogged hatch. That was all they did. Pound. They said nothing. They might have been completely mute. Or what they seemed to bemimes.

  "What would mimes be doing with a sub?" Remo muttered to himself, wishing Chiun were here. The Master of Sinanju would have an answer. It was even money it would be wrong, but at least it would be something to argue about. This slipping around a submarine wasn't exactly Remo's idea of a productive evening.

  Remo knocked on each closed hatch as he passed by, hoping to draw someone out. He got no takers. A white-faced sailor dogged a hatch after himself when he saw Remo coming.

  That meant they were afraid of him-always a good way to start an interrogation. All Remo needed was someone to interrogate.

  Behind him another hatch clanged shut. It was far behind. Then, not twenty yards down the passage way, a hatch opened and a hand tossed out a grenade.

  Remo shot into reverse, knowing the blast radius would be small.

  When the grenade let go, it did so with a pop, releasing a spurt of yellowish white gas cloud. The cloud had nowhere to go but Remo's way.

  Remo smelled the first wisp of gas and understood he was not at risk. It was pepper gas. Nonlethal.

  Pausing, Remo picked a hatch and tried to undog it. The wheel wouldn't turn. Someone had locked it on the other side. The same was true for the next hatch. He took hold of it with both hands and forced it to turn. It did give a bit, then it cracked and Remo found himself holding a broken section of useless wheel.

  A hatch at the end of the corridor was locked, too.

  And the white exhalation kept spreading Remo's way.

  He pinched his eyelids shut, making them tear. That was to protect his eyes.

  Closing his mouth, Remo sucked in a long breath of air. It stung a little, but was mostly good. Then he b
egan to exhale in a long, slow release of carbon dioxide.

  As long as he kept air flowing out through his nostrils, no gas could get in.

  That left him practically blind and with limited oxygen. Remo just hoped the gas didn't work through the pores, too.

  Turning to face the hatch, Remo found the exposed hinges. They were massive. Laying the side of his hand against the top one, he brought it back and chopped hard at the place his sensitive fingertips told him the metal was weakest. The hinge shattered. Remo chopped the other one. It broke, and a chunk of cold steel fell with a clang.

  Grabbing the wheel, he exerted pull. The wheel remained locked, but without functioning hinges, it was useless. Remo wrestled the hatch off its shattered hinges, and the locking mechanism twisted out of its groove.

  Dropping it on the floor, Remo moved on.

  He found another hatch that was open. It led to a corridor. He moved down its length by feel, ears alert for the pounding of excited hearts. Every sense was alert.

  After a while it felt safe to open his eyes. Remo squeezed out the last protecting tears as he tried to figure out his next line of attack.

  Before, he had been headed toward the control compartment amidships. Now he was angling back toward the tail.

  Remo could feel eyes on him. From time to time, he spotted ceiling video cameras. Remo waved at them where he could.

  No one waved back. No one tried to stop him, either.

  But a lot of hatches were hastily shut as he approached them. After he passed them, too.

  Just to see what happened, Remo knocked on one hatch.

  "All clear!" he shouted through the steel. He repeated the call, knocking loudly.

  He heard a gunshot. A smooth spot on the hatch abruptly bulged out, followed by two closely spaced ricochet sounds.

  Remo decided to leave well enough alone. These guys were so nervous they were capable of sinking the sub with everyone aboard, including Remo.

  He moved on. It was weird. The crew seemed pretty scared of him-which they should be. But this was a different scared. Usually Remo had to pile the bodies to the rafters to get this kind of reaction.