Saxon dug a few riales out of his shorts pocket. He handed the coins to the delighted Bedouin and declined the man’s offer to show him another dead queen.
Mohammed dropped the Bedouin off at a cluster of desert tents, then he drove to the old city of Ma’arib. Saxon was staying at the Garden of the Two Paradises Hotel. He asked Mohammed to come by the hotel the next morning and they would decide on his plan.
After a hot shower, Saxon changed into long cotton slacks and shirt and went down to the lounge, his mouth feeling as if he’d swallowed a pound of desert sand. He sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini, and the drink’s astringent sweetness washed the grit out of his throat.
He chatted with a couple of Texas oil company rednecks. A second martini revived his spirits, until one of the oilmen asked him what he was doing in Ma’arib.
Saxon could have responded that it was the last leg of a doomed quest to find the fabled Queen of Sheba among the ruins of old Ma’arib, the city that was said to be her home base.
He said simply, “I’m here to test the waters.”
The oilmen exchanged puzzled glances and then broke into hearty laughter. Before they headed back to their quarters, they bought Saxon a third martini.
Saxon was at that wonderful point where all brain activity was clouded by an alcoholic haze when an elderly bellhop shuffled into the bar and handed him a sheet of hotel stationery with a brief message scrawled on it:
I believe I can introduce you to the man of the sea. If you are still interested in meeting him let me know soonest.
He blinked the blurriness from his eyes and read it again. The sender was a Cairo antiques finder named Hassan, whom he had spoken to by phone before coming to Yemen. He scrawled an answer at the bottom of the note and handed it to the bellhop with a tip and instructions to arrange transportation for a morning departure. Then he ordered the first of several pots of strong black coffee and buckled down to the job of getting sober.
Chapter 6
ZAVALA HAD HIS DUFFEL BAG packed and was ready to go when Austin swung by the former library building in Alexandria, Virginia, that his friend had converted to a bachelor pad with a southwestern flair. The two men caught a morning Air Canada flight, and their plane touched down on the tarmac at St. John’s, Newfoundland, late in the afternoon, after a stop-off in Montreal.
A taxi took them to the busy waterfront, where the two-hundred-seventy-foot-long Leif Eriksson was tied up. The forty-six-hundred-ton vessel was a brawny ship, less than five years old, its hull reinforced for protection against the punishing North Atlantic ice.
The captain, a native Newfoundlander named Alfred Dawe, knew when their flight was coming in and was waiting on deck in anticipation of their arrival. As the men came up the gangway, he introduced himself and said, “Welcome aboard the Eriksson.”
Austin extended his hand in a bone-crushing grip. “Thanks for having us, Captain Dawe. I’m Kurt Austin, and this is my colleague, Joe Zavala. We’re your new iceberg wranglers.”
Dawe was a compact man in his fifties who liked to brag that he’d been born in a place with the forlorn name of Misery Cove, and that his family was so dumb they still lived there. Schoolboy mischief lurked in his clear blue eyes, and he had a dimpled grin that came easily to his ruddy face. Despite his self-deprecating humor, Dawe was an accomplished skipper with years of experience running ships in the cantankerous waters of the Northwest Atlantic. He had often encountered NUMA’s distinctive turquoise-hulled research ships, and knew that the American agency was the most highly respected ocean exploration and study organization on the globe.
When Austin had called and asked to go on an iceberg cruise, the captain had checked with the ship’s owners for permission to have guests aboard. He’d gotten a go-ahead and called Austin back with the date for the ship’s next departure.
Dawe had been eager to meet the two men ever since Austin had faxed him a copy of their résumés. Austin had wanted Dawe to know that he and Zavala were not landlubber dilettantes who’d need constant watching for fear they’d fall overboard.
The captain knew about Austin’s master’s degree from the University of Washington, his training as an expert diver proficient in a variety of underwater specialties, and his expertise in deepwater salvage. Long before former NUMA director James Sandecker had hired Austin away from the CIA, Austin had worked on North Sea oil rigs and with his father’s Seattle-based ocean-salvage company.
Zavala’s curriculum vitae said that he was an honors graduate of New YorkMaritimeCollege, a skilled pilot with hundreds of hours on, above, and under the sea, and a brilliant engineer with expertise in the design and operation of underwater vehicles.
Given his guests’ impressive academic credentials, the captain was intrigued when he met the NUMA engineers in person. Austin and Zavala came across more like gentlemen swashbucklers than the scientific types he’d expected. Their soft-spoken manner couldn’t mask a barnacle-like toughness and
a brass balls brashness that was only partly tempered by their veneer of politeness.
His guests were obviously rugged physically. Austin was over six feet tall and around two hundred pounds, without an ounce of fat on his sturdy frame. With his broad shoulders and powerful build, the brawny man with the mane of prematurely gray, almost-white, hair looked like a one-man wrecking crew. His chiseled face was deeply tanned from constant outdoor exposure, and the ocean winds and sun had given his skin a metallic burnishing. Laugh wrinkles framed intelligent, coral-hued eyes that calmly gazed out at the world with an expression that suggested nothing they saw would surprise them.
Zavala was a few inches shorter. He was flexibly muscular, and he moved with the catlike lightness of a matador, a holdover from his college days when he had boxed professionally as a middleweight. He had earned his tuition with a devastating right cross–left hook combination. With his movie star good looks and athletic build, he looked like the male lead in a pirate saga.
The captain showed his guests to their small but comfortable cabin.
“I hope we haven’t crowded anyone out,” Austin said as he tossed his duffel on a bunk.
Dawe shook his head. “We’ve got a crew of twelve on this cruise—two short of our normal contingent.”
“In that case, we’ll be glad to lend a hand,” Zavala said.
“I’m counting on it, gentlemen.”
Dawe conducted a quick stem-to-stern tour of the ship, and then they went up to the bridge, where he gave the order to get under way. The deckhands cast off the mooring lines, and the ship steamed out of St. John’s harbor. After passing between FortAmherst and Point Spear, the most northeasterly spit of land in North America, the ship headed up along the Newfoundland coast under layers of slag-gray clouds.