The ship's generators had started again. The navigation lights blinked on, and the Queen Artemisia suddenly came alive with sound. If there was ever a time when the better part of valor was discretion, it was now. Pitt clamped the mouthpiece of the regulator between his teeth and dove clear of the ship. He kicked his fins with every ounce of power in his legs, seeing nothing under the ink black water, hearing only the strange gurgling sound of his exhaust bubbles. It was times like this that he wished he didn't smoke. After covering nearly fifty-five yards, he surfaced and looked back at the ship.

The Queen Artemisia rode at anchor in tombstone solitude, her silhouette outlined against the graying eastern sky like an old-fashioned shadowgram. Dim shafts of white light came to life here and there about the ship, interrupted only by the green glow of the starboard navigation light. For several minutes nothing more happened. Then without any signal or shouted command, the anchor clattered up from the seafloor and clanged into the hull. The wheelhouse was lit and Pitt could see it clearly; it was still vacant. It just can't be, he repeated to himself over and over again: it just can't be. But the old ship hadn't yet finished the last act of her ghostly performance. As if on cue, the Queen Artemisia's telegraph jangled faintly across the calm pre-dawn sea. The engines responded with their gentle throb, and the ship continued on her voyage, the secret of her evil cargo still locked somewhere within her steel plates.

Pitt didn't have to see the ship move to know it was under way; he could feel the beat of her propellers through the water. Fifty-five yards was more than enough. At that distance he was invisible to any lookout and had little to fear from being sucked through the huge propellers and mangled into fish bait.

A seething flood of frustration swept over Pitt as the great hull slowly slid past his bobbing head. It was as though he was watching a ballistic missile lift from a launching pad and hurtle on its pre-set path toward devastation and death. He was helpless, he could do nothing to stop it. Hidden somewhere on the Queen Artemisia was enough heroin to drown half the population of the Northern Hemisphere in delirium. God alone knew what chaos would erupt in every city and town if it was distributed to all the peddling scum who preyed on its malignant addiction. How many people would become listless dregs and eventually die from the drug's deadly narcosis? One hundred and thirty tons of heroin on the ship. What was that song again, the little ditty that he'd sung all those long years ago in school? "A hundred bottles of beer on the wall." It had nearly the same ring, but it was for light hearts and souls, not drugged minds and lost hopes.