Vixen 03 Part 71

With agonizing slowness, Pitt raised his head until he was eye level with the landing. He could see Emma now. Not in detail-the light was too dim for that-but he could make out the pale blur of a face and the outline of a figure.

Pitt didn't wait to see more. He could only guess Emma would blast Fawkes in the gut during the middle of a sentence, after lulling him with idle conversation. An old but effective trick. He dug the b.a.l.l.s of his feet

into the steps, took a breath, and lunged, going for a vicious impact with Emma's legs, his hands clawing for the gun.

The silencer flashed in Pitt's face, and a stabbing pain slammed the right side of his head as he grabbed for Emma's arm. After the haze of sudden shock he swam into unconsciousness and began falling, falling. It seemed to take forever before the abysmal void swallowed him and there was nothing.

Goaded on by Pitt's flying tackle, Fawkes charged up the steps like a maddened rhino and threw his great weight against the bodies of both men. Pitt went limp and fell off to one side. Emma struggled to bring the gun to bear, but Fawkes slapped it away as though it were a toy in a child's hands. Then Emma went for Fawkes's crotch, clutched his c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s, and squeezed ruthlessly.

It was the wrong move. The captain roared like thunder and reacted by swinging both his ma.s.sive fists from over his head down upon Emma's upturned face, crus.h.i.+ng cartilage and tearing skin. Astoundingly, Emma maintained the pressure.

Though his groin felt as if it were bursting in white-hot agony, Fawkes was wise enough not to try knocking away the hands that held him like a vise. Calmly, purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do, he gripped Emma's head and began pounding it into the metal deck landing with every ounce of strength in his tree-trunk arms. Mercifully, the pressure eased, but shrouded in his pain-lashed rage, he kept smas.h.i.+ng away until the back of Emma's skull turned to pulp. When his fury was finally spent, he rolled over and gently ma.s.saged his groin, cursing.

After a minute or two he rose stiffly to his feet, took the coat collars of the two inert men, and dragged them up the stairway. One more short flight, a few yards down a pa.s.sageway, and he came to a cargo-loading door in the upper starboard side of iheIowa's hull. He cracked the door enough to let in daylight and examined Pitt's wound.

The bullet had scored Pitt's left temple, causing, at worst, Fawkes figured, a nasty gash and a concussion. Then he checked Emma. What skin that was visible through the mask of blood on the a.s.sa.s.sin's face was

turning blue. Fawkes went through his pockets and found only a spare clip for the Hocker-Rodine pistol. Strapped around a heavy woolen sweater was an inflatable life vest.

"A nonswimmer, hey?" Fawkes said, smiling. "I don't guess you'll be needing this anymore."

He removed the vest from Emma and tied it around Pitt. Reaching into his own coat pocket, Fawkes took out a small notebook and made several notations with the stub of a pencil. Next he took his eelskin tobacco pouch, emptied the contents, inserted the notebook, and tucked the packet snugly under Pitt's s.h.i.+rt. The cord to the CO2 bottle was yanked and the vest hissed as it inflated.

Returning to Emma, Fawkes grabbed the corpse by the front of the sweater and pulled it toward the open hatch. The weight was too much for the angle of Fawkes's grip and the sweater slipped over Emma's head. Something around Emma's upper torso caught Fawkes's eye. It was a nylon binding that tightly circled the chest. Entranced, Fawkes undid a tiny clasp and the nylon fell away, releasing two small rosebud-tipped mounds.

For a moment Fawkes stood petrified.

"Holy Mother of Christ!" he murmured in awe.

Emma had indeed been a woman.

Dale Jarvis pointed at the viewing screen. "There, just below the second gun turret, on the side of the hull."

"What do you make of it?" asked the President.

"Someone has opened the forward loading hatch," answered Kemper. He turned to General Higgins. "Better alert your men to the possibility that the crew may attempt an escape."

"They won't get ten feet past the sh.o.r.eline," said Higgins. They watched as the hatch was thrown back to its stops and a monster of a man stepped to the threshold and threw out what looked like a body. The form hit the water with a splash and disappeared. Soon he returned with another body, but this time he lowered it on a line to the leisurely flowing current-almost tenderly, it seemed to the men in the conference room-until the inert figure bobbed and floated free of the s.h.i.+p. Then the line was cast away and the doors closed.

Kemper motioned to an aide. "Contact the Coast Guard and have them pick up that man drifting in the river."

"What was that little performance all about?" The President's ques-

tion echoed the thoughts of the men at the table.

"The h.e.l.l of it is," Kemper said quietly, "we may never know."

After what seemed like ages, Hiram Lusana found a doorway that exited to the main deck. He stumbled outside, bone chilled in his thin business suit, clutching the sack of bomblets in both hands. His sudden emergence into daylight blinded him and he paused to get his bearings.

He found himself standing beneath the aft fire-control bridge, forward of the number-three gun turret. Small-arms fire whistled about the s.h.i.+p, but his mind was intent on disposing of the Quick Death bomblets, and he was oblivious of it. The river beckoned and he began sprinting toward the bulwarks edging the outer limits of the deck. He still had twenty feet to go when a man in a black rubber wet suit rose from the shadows of the turret and aimed a gun at him.

Lieutenant Alan Fergus no longer felt the burning pain from the hole in his leg, no longer felt the agony from seeing his combat teams cut to pieces. His whole body was quivering with hatred for the men responsible. It did not matter that the man in his sights wore a business suit j instead of a uniform, or that he appeared to be unarmed. Fergus saw only I a man who in his mind was murdering his friends.

Lusana halted abruptly and stared at Fergus. He had never before seen such cold malignity on a man's face. They looked into each other's eyes from no more than twelve feet, trying to exchange thoughts in that brief instant. No word pa.s.sed between them, only a strange kind of understanding. Time seemed to pause and all sounds diminished into a blurred background.

Hiram Lusana knew his fight to rise above the filth of his childhood had culminated in this time and place. He had come to realize he could not be the leader of a people who would never fully accept him as one of their own. His path became clear. He could do far more for the oppressed of Africa by becoming a martyr to their cause.

Lusana accepted the invitation of death. He threw Fergus a silent smile of forgiveness and then leaped toward the bulwarks.

Fergus pulled the trigger and sprayed a pattern of automatic fire. The sudden impact of three bullets in his side pitched Lusana forward in a shuddered dance that pounded the breath from his lungs. Miraculously, he stayed on his feet and staggered drunkenly on.

Fergus fired again.

Lusana fell to his knees, still struggling toward the edge of the deck.

Fergus watched in detached admiration, vaguely wondering what drove the incongruously dressed black man to ignore at least a dozen bullets in his body.

With brown eyes glazed with shock, and with a determination known only to a man who could never quit, Lusana crawled across the deck, holding the canvas sack against his stomach, leaving an ever-widening trail of crimson behind him.

The bulwarks were only three feet away. He fought closer despite the blackness beginning to cloud his vision and the blood streaming from the corners of his mouth. Summoning an inner strength born of final desperation, he threw the sack.

It hung on the bulwark for an instant that seemed frozen in time, teetered, and then fell into the river. Lusana's face sank to the deck and he pa.s.sed the gate into oblivion.

The interior of the ma.s.sive gun housing reeked of sweat and blood and the pungent odors of powder and heated oil. Most of the crew were still in shock, their eyes glazed, unknowing, dulled with confusion and fear; the rest were lying amid the machinery in unnatural poses, blood trickling from their ears and mouths. A charnel house, Fawkes thought, a d.a.m.n charnel house. G.o.d, I'm no better than the butchers who slaughtered my family.

He peered down the center elevator tube to the magazines and saw Charles Shaba hammering away with a sledge on a sh.e.l.l cradle that had become wedged ten feet below the turret deck. The interlock doors, designed to prevent accidental breech failure from communicating explosive flash to the magazines, were jammed open, and to Fawkes it was like looking into a bottomless pit. Then the black void seemed to fuzz and he suddenly realized the problem. The air was too foul to breathe. Those who survived the concussion caused by the Satan missile were dropping from lack of oxygen.

"Open the outside hatch!" he roared. "Get some fresh air in here!"

"She's buckled, Captain," a voice rasped on the other side of the turret. "Jammed tight."

"The ventilators! Why aren't they operating?"

"Blown circuits," another man said, coughing. "The only air we've got is what's coming up through the magazine tubes."

In the choking haze and gloom Fawkes could barely make out the form of the man who spoke. "Find me something to pry the hatch open. We've got to make a path for crossventilation."

He made his way around the bodies and over the huge gun mechanism to the hatch that opened to the main deck. Looking at its seven-inch-thick wall of hard steel, Fawkes could well appreciate what he was up against. The only points in his favor were the shattered locking p.r.o.ngs and the inch of daylight showing at the top where the hatch had been blown inward.

Someone tapped his shoulder and he turned. It was Shaba.

"I heard you down in the magazine tube, Captain. I thought you might need this." He handed Fawkes a heavy steel bar four feet long and two inches thick.

Fawkes wasted no words of appreciation. He wedged the bar into the opening to the outside and pulled. His face flushed with the effort and his great arms trembled, but the hatch would not budge.

The obstinacy of the hatch came as no surprise to Fawkes. It was an age-old Scottish adage that nothing fell to a man's lot on the first try. He closed his eyes and sucked in great breaths, hyperventilating. Every cell in his body focused on kindling the strength locked within his immense body. Shaba watched, fascinated. He had never seen such a demonstration of sheer concentration. Fawkes reinserted the bar, paused a few seconds more, and finally began to heave. It looked to Shaba as though the captain had turned to stone; there was no obvious hint of effort, no tenseness of the muscles. The sweat began to pop from Fawkes's forehead and the tendons of his neck bulged and tautened, every muscle turned rock hard with strain; then, slowly, incredibly, the hatch shrieked as steel sc.r.a.ped against steel.