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to hear. Martin looked pleadingly at Rogo. “Don’t be that way, Mr. Rogo. We were together before. You might need me now.”
    The crew were talking quickly in French. The warrant officer called for the last time, “We are taking off. Are you coming? Very well.” He shook his head, and the door closed. The pilot threw his big blades into gear and the machine lifted and curved off into the distance.
    Manny and Martin stood like two schoolboys up before their headmaster. Rogo ran through every obscenity in his considerable vocabulary until at last even his flaming anger burned down. They were here. There was nothing else to be done.
    “Okay,” he said, stuffing the gun in his pocket and beckoning them on. “You gotta be outta your minds, the two of you, but if that’s the way you want, okay. Let’s go.”
    He dropped down again inside the hold, and the others hastened after him.
    Other times, other customs. Crime has to be the most modern of industries, and there is no one who takes quicker advantage of the progress of technology than the criminal. So the highwayman has given way to the man with a hand grenade in an airplane, the bank robber has pocketed his gun for the most sophisticated of cutting equipment, and the once furtive cat burglar can now walk in through the front door with his own cut keys.
    So the pirate vessel which lay a mile off the wreck of the Poseidon that bright morning flew no skull and crossbones, and its crew were far more likely to celebrate a triumph with dry martinis than with rum. The Naiad, based at Port Gallice between Cannes and Antibes, was one of the most magnificent private yachts on the Mediterranean. She flew the French flag at her taffrail. She was the property of a handsome playboy by the name of Roland Pascal, in the sense that she was certainly registered in his name. But he, like each of the five young men now so earnestly preparing their scuba-diving equipment on the deck, was helplessly under the sweetly sexual thrall of one silver-haired girl. Heloise, or Hely, as they knew her, was in every sense the captain of that vessel.
    Whether a court would have judged them pirates, it would have been hard to know. They harmed no living thing. But in those waters, where fire, explosion, or a mistral was not uncommon, they had no need to trouble the living. They were simply grave robbers, despoilers of the dead. With depth-sounding equipment, underwater metal detectors, the finest diving gear, a decompression chamber, and the most advanced radio equipment, they could follow up any Mayday call or news of disaster at sea.
    If this troubled some of the young men, it never worried Hely. Morals, ethics, and scruples did not touch her. They were principles she had jettisoned early in life. Indeed, if she had been born in a state of innocence, it was a condition she had shed almost before leaving the cradle. The smile with which she illuminated some of the smartest parties on the Riviera was the one she had assiduously practiced as a child begging on the streets of Paris, and it earned her an audience now as surely as it had won tourists’ pennies twenty years before. The air of innocence had been acquired early too, only now it concealed a past that would make a sailor shudder. As a child she had swiftly digested the cruel lesson that only she could lift herself from the slums to the broad sweet avenues, and that blue eyes and blond hair, properly employed, were potent weapons in that war. By the time she was fifteen she had the skills of the paramour, to which she added the simple but vital insight that has lifted many women to power, that the prince is as easily deceived as his chauffeur, and that all men are equal before a beautiful woman. Via more bedrooms than she could count, Hely had graduated to a luxury yacht on the warm, soft waters of the Mediterranean, and it was here that she held her crew of tough young men so inescapably under her spell that she hardly bothered to conceal the