His quarry drifted in front of him, blurred, always beyond reach.

He hesitated and tried to focus through the gloom, but the form taunted him, beckoning him closer.

Then a high-pitched ringing sound went off in his ear and he floated out of the dream and groped for the telephone.

"Dirk?",came a cheery voice from a throat he wanted to throttle.

"Yes.

"Got some news for you."

"Huh?"

"You asleep? This is St. Julien."

"Perlmutter?"

"Wake up. I found something."

Then Pitt switched on the bed light and sat up. "Okay, I'm listening."

"I've received a written report from my friends in Korea. They went through Korean shipyard records. Guess what? The Belle Chasse was never scrapped."

Pitt threw back the covers and dropped his feet on the floor.

"Go on."

"Sorry I took so long getting back to you, but this is the most incredible maritime puzzle I've ever seen. For thirty years somebody has been playing musical chairs with ships like you wouldn't believe."

"Try me."

"First, let me ask you a question," said Perlmutter. "The name on the stern of the ship you found in Alaska?"

"The Pilottown?"

"Were the painted letters framed by welded heading?"

Pitt thought back. "As I recall it was faded paint. The raised edges must have been ground away."

Perlmutter uttered a heavy sigh of relief over the phone. "I was hoping you'd say that."

"Why?"

"Your suspicions are confirmed. The San Marino, the Belle Chasse and the Pilottown are indeed one and the same ship."

"Damn!" Pitt said, suddenly excited. "How'd you make the link?"

"By discovering what happened to the genuine Pilottown," said Perlmutter with a dramatic inflection. "My sources found no record of a Belle Chasse being scrapped in the shipyards of Pusan. So I played a hunch and asked them to check out any other yards along the coast.

They turned up a lead in the port of Inchon. Shipyard foremen are ' interesting guys. They never forget a ship, especially one they've junked. They act hard-nosed about it, but deep down they're sad to see a tired old vessel pulled into their dock for the last time. Anyway, one old retired foreman talked for hours about the good old days. A real gold mine of ship lore."

"What did he say?" Pitt asked impatiently.

"He recalled in great detail when he was in charge of the crew who converted the San Marino from a cargo transport into an ore carrier renamed the Belle Chasse."

"But the shipyard records?"

"Obviously falsified by the shipyard owners, who, by the way, happened to be our old friends the Sosan Trading Company. The foreman also remembered breaking up the original Pilottown. it looks like Sosan Trading, or the shady outfit behind it, hijacked the San Marino and its cargo and killed the crew. Then they modified the cargo holds to carry ore, documented it under a different name and sent it tramping around the seas."

"Where does the Pilottown come in?" asked Pitt.