Flood Tide

by Clive Cussler

  There were two of them, no doubt a change of a shift for the men monitoring the video surveillance around the outer grounds and inside the prison cells. Neither had call to be apprehensive or suspicious of intruders. They casually moved up the stairs chatting to each other, and due to the human habit of watching one's feet when climbing a staircase, neither looked up and spied Pitt. Their only weapons were automatic pistols firmly clipped in their holsters.

  Pitt had to move fast if he wanted the advantage of surprise, and he used it to the hilt. Foolhardy or not, he rushed down the stairs and leaped, crashing into the lead guard before he literally knew what hit him and throwing him backward into his friend.

  Accustomed to cowering and frightened captives, the two Chinese guards were petrified with shock at being attacked by a reckless crazy man in a rubber suit whose body was considerably larger than either of theirs. Both men, caught off balance, stumbled and fell backward, arms and legs flailing, locked together back to chest. Pitt piled on the man on the top and rode them down the steps to the second landing before they all crumpled against a railing. The bottom man struck his head on a step and was immediately knocked unconscious. His friend, less injured but stunned with surprise, snatched feverishly at his holstered automatic.

  Pitt could have killed him, could have killed them both, by shooting a pair of barbs through their heads. But he settled for gripping the air gun by the barrel and clubbing the guard on the side of the head with the butt. He didn't doubt for an instant that if their positions were reversed, they'd have had no misgivings whatsoever about blowing his brains out.

  He dragged them into the vacant second level and propped them against the far wall in the shadows. He tore off their uniforms and ripped them into strips. Then he bound their hands and legs, and gagged them. If, as he suspected, they were on their way to work, they'd be missed in less than five or ten minutes at the most. Once they were found knocked unconscious and bound with shreds of their uniforms, all hell would erupt when an intrusion was reported to Shang or his murder advisory board. Once they became aware their security had been penetrated by an unknown force, there was no second-guessing the consequences. He didn't want to think about what might happen to the unfortunates still locked in the cells if it was decided all evidence to whatever was going on had to be destroyed and all eyewitnesses killed. If the bodies on the bottom of the lake were any indication, whatever this bunch of slime lacked, it certainly wasn't a willingness to murder by the numbers.

  Pitt crept back through the corridor of the guards' living quarters with the finesse of Don Juan flitting out of a lady's bedroom. The luck he had of not being seen going in carried with him going out. He reached the passageway to the boathouse and hurried through as best he could without scraping the shoulders of his dry suit to shreds. Not in the mood for an exciting pursuit by incensed Chinese with lethal weapons, he briefly considered working over the motors of the water-craft, but thought better of wasting the time. If they couldn't find the AUV in broad daylight, they would never find him thirty feet underwater in the dark.

  After hurriedly putting on his dive gear, he dropped into the water, swam around the dock and retrieved the Stingray. Pitt hadn't traveled a hundred yards along the lake bed when he heard the throb of an engine exhaust and the beat of propellers from a boat coming out of the darkness in the distance. The sound carried through the water faster than the air, making it seem as if the boat was almost on top of him when in fact it was just coming off the river outlet onto the lake. Inclining the Stingray, he let its thrust pull him to the surface. He spotted the boat as it moved out of the shadows and became illuminated under the lights from shore. He identified the approaching vessel as the black catamaran he'd observed the day before.

  He figured that unless one of the boat's crew ate a bushel of carrots every day and took large doses of vitamin A for acute night vision, their chances of picking out a nearly invisible head on dark waters were unlikely. Then suddenly, the boat's motor died to an idle and it drifted to a stop not fifty feet away.

  Pitt should have ignored the boat and moved on. There was still plenty of juice left in the Stingray's batteries to take him back to the cabin. He should have moved on, having seen more than he was ever meant to see. Law-enforcement authorities had to be notified quickly before any further harm came to the unknown human beings imprisoned inside the retreat. He was cold and exhausted and looked forward to a shot of tequila and a chair in front of a warm fire. He should have listened to an inner voice telling him to get the hell away from Orion Lake while the getting was still good. His inner voice might as well have pleaded with his sinus passages for all the good it did.

  Some unfathomable fascination attracted him to the eerie-looking catamaran. There was something sinister about its appearance in the night. No one walked the decks, no lights showed anywhere.

  Downright diabolic, he thought. A strange, indescribable malignance seem to vent from its decks. Then it began to dawn on Pitt that this just might be the ferry that transported dead souls across the River Styx. He rolled beneath the surface and aimed the Stingray in a downward and then upward arc that would bring him beneath the twin hulls of the mysterious vessel.

  8

  THE FORTY-EIGHT MEN, women and children were crammed so tightly inside the square cabin of the black boat that there was no room for anyone to sit. They all stood pressed together, breathing the stale air. The night outside the cabin was cool, but inside the body heat made it hot and stifling. The only ventilation came from a small grate in the cabin roof. A few were already unconscious, having collapsed from the terror induced by claustrophobia, but their bodies were unable to fall. Instead their heads sagged and rolled with the rocking of the boat. Everyone was strangely silent. Perhaps defeated and powerless to dictate their fate, the prisoners lapsed into a strange lethargy like those sent by the Nazis to the concentration camps in World War II.

  Julia stood listening to the sound of the waves lapping against the hull of the boat and the soft beat of the twin diesel engines, wondering where she was being taken. The water was smooth now. The swells of the ocean had been left behind twenty minutes ago. She assumed they were inside a quiet bay or traveling on a river. She knew with reasonable clarity that she was back somewhere in the United States. This was her home ground. She refused to let herself become pliant, and though she was still weak and dizzy, she was determined to fight her way out of this insane predicament and survive. Too much depended on her survival. By escaping and reporting the information she had gathered on the smuggling syndicate to her superiors at INS, she could stop the ghastly suffering and killing of thousands of illegal immigrants.

  In the wheelhouse above the cabinlike prison, two of the smuggling crew's four enforcers began cutting rope into short lengths while the captain, who stood at the helm, threaded his way up the Orion River in the dark. The only light came from the stars, and his eyes never strayed from the radar screen. After another ten minutes, he alerted the others to the fact that they were passing from the river into the lake. Just as the black boat was about to come under the bright lights positioned at Qin Shang's retreat, the helmsman picked up the boat's phone and spoke a few words in Chinese. Almost before he set the phone back in its cradle, the lights inside the main building and those placed around the shore blinked out, throwing the entire lake into a cloak of blackness. Guided by a small red light on a buoy, the helmsman expertly slipped the catamaran around the broad transom of Shang's magnificent yacht and came alongside the pilings on the opposite side of the dock. Two enforcers jumped clear and slipped the mooring lines over their cleats as the helmsman set the twin diesel engines on idle.

  For the next three or four minutes there was no sound outside the crowded cabin. A flurry of questions, a swarm of anxieties, framed themselves in the thoughts of Julia and the illegal immigrants. But they didn't know in what order to assess them, and the continuing nightmare of their voyage still overshadowed any attempt at clear thinking. And then the door wa
s opened on the rear wall of the cabin. The fresh air that came from a breeze drifting down from the mountains seemed like a miracle. At first, all they could see outside was darkness; then an enforcer moved into the doorway.

  "When you hear your name, step out onto the dock," he instructed them.

  At first it was difficult for those in the middle or the back to squeeze through the overcrowded cabin, but as each body exited through the door those who remained gave a collective sigh of relief. Most of those who left the boat were poorer immigrants, the ones who could not pay the exorbitant fare to reach land, any land, so long as it didn't belong to the People's Republic of China. Unknowingly, they had signed away their souls to a life of servitude to the smugglers, who in turn sold them to criminal syndicates already established in the U.S.

  Soon, only Julia, a mother and father weak from lack of food, along with their two small children, who looked like they might be suffering from rickets, and eight elderly men and women were left standing in the cabin. These were the castoffs, thought Julia, those who had been bled dry of their possessions, who had no more money to give and were too helpless and frail for any type of heavy work. These were the ones, including herself, who were not going ashore.

  As if to confirm her worst fears, the door was slammed shut, the lines were cast off and the diesels were shifted into reverse, increasing their throb. It seemed as though the boat had only traveled a short distance when the engines slowed and idled again. The door was thrown open and four enforcers entered. Without a word they began binding everyone's hands and feet. Mouths were sealed with duct tape and heavy iron weights tied to their ankles. The mother and father made a feeble defense of their children but were easily subdued.

  This was it then, death by drowning. Julia's whole mind, her every nerve became instantly concentrated on escaping. She sprinted toward the door, intent on reaching the outside deck and throwing herself into the water, making a swim for the nearest shore. The attempt was doomed before she hit the door. Debilitated from her beating the day before, she stumbled rather than ran, and was easily swept off her feet by one of the enforcers and knocked to the deck. She tried to fight them, pounding, scratching, biting as they bound her feet and ankles. Then the tape was adhered across her lips and the weight tied to her ankles.

  She watched in icy horror as a hatch in the middle of the deck was lifted open and the first body dropped through into the water.

  Pitt removed his thumb from the speed switch on the Stingray and hovered in the water ten feet below the center cabin of the catamaran. He had planned to surface between the two hulls and inspect the bottom of the boat when suddenly a light showed above him and a heavy splash broke the water followed in succession by several more.

  What in God's name is happening? Pitt wondered as bodies came raining down around him. Though disbelieving at what he saw and shocked at the abhorrent sight, his reaction time was nothing short of incredible. In a series of lightning movements he released his grip on the Stingray, switched on the dive light and snatched his dive knife out of its sheath. In movements blurred in time, he began grabbing bodies, slicing the ropes binding the hands and ankles and slashing away the iron weights. Once the ropes were cut free, he pushed the body toward the surface and swam to the next one. He worked frantically, hoping against hope that none slipped past him into the black depths of the lake, never knowing at first whether the victims were already dead, but fighting to save them all regardless of his fears. Then he found they were alive when he gripped a young girl no more than ten, who stared back at him through terror-stricken eyes. She looked like she was Chinese. He prayed she could swim as he thrust her toward the night air.

  At first, he kept slightly ahead of the flow of victims, but he soon struggled furiously to keep pace. Desperation was replaced with sheer anger as he saved a little boy no more than four years old. He mentally cursed the monsters who were capable of such inhumanity. Not taking any chances, he kicked his fins upward, quickly found the floating Stingray and placed the boy's arms around it. He switched off the dive light and took a quick glance at the boat to see if the crew had observed their victims popping to the surface. All on board appeared quiet. There was no hint of alarm. He dove under again, turning on the dive light. Its beam picked out what seemed to be the last body dumped from the boat. It was already falling past twenty feet when he caught up with it. This one was a young woman.

  Before her turn came, Julia had breathed deeply in and out, hyperventilating her lungs, then holding her breath as the enforcers kicked her through the hatch into the water. She fought desperately to free herself from the ropes. Deeper and deeper she fell in the black void, furiously snorting through her nose to relieve the pressure building in the eustachian tubes of her ears. One minute, maybe two, and her oxygen would be gone and she'd die an agonizing death.

  Suddenly, a pair of arms wrapped around her waist, and she could feel the iron weight dropping away from her feet. Then her hands came free and a hand snatched her arm in a grip and began towing her upward. As her head broke the surface she winced as the tape was ripped from her mouth. The first thing she saw was an apparition in a hood with a face mask and light protruding from its head.

  "Can you understand me?" a voice asked in English.

  "I can understand you," she gasped.

  "Are you a good swimmer?"

  She only nodded her reply.

  "Good. Help save as many people as you can, try and gather them into a group. Tell them to follow my light. I'll lead you all into shallow water along the shore."

  Pitt left her and swam off toward the boy clutching the Stingray in a death grip. He swung the boy behind him, clasping the small hands around his neck. Then he engaged the speed switch and searched for the little girl, finding her and circling his arm around her only seconds before she was about to slip out of sight.

  On board the boat two of the enforcers climbed to the wheelhouse and stepped inside. "All are drowned," one said to the helmsman. "Our job is done."

  The captain at the helm nodded and gently pushed the twin throttles forward. The propellers bit the water, and the black catamaran began to move back toward the dock. Before it had traveled a hundred feet, a call came over the boat's phone.

  "Chu Deng?"

  "This is Chu Deng," the captain responded.

  "Lo Han, chief of compound security. Why are you ignoring your instructions?"

  "I have followed the plan. All immigrants are disposed of. What is your problem?"

  "You are showing a light."

  Chu Deng stepped from the wheel and glanced over the boat. "You ate too much spicy Szechuan chicken for dinner, Lo Han. Your stomach is telling lies to your eyes. There are no lights showing on this boat."

  "Then what am I seeing toward the eastern shoreline?"

  As supervisor for transporting the illegal immigrants from the mother ships, Chu Deng was also responsible for the execution of those unfit for slave labor. He did not work under the chief of security for the imprisoned immigrants. Both merciless men, both on equal footing, neither got along with the other.

  Lo Han was a big bull of a man built like a beer keg with a massive, square-jawed head and eyes that were always bloodshot. Deng considered him little better than an untrained dog. He turned and stared to the east. Only then did he spot a dim light low in the water. "I see it, about two hundred yards off the starboard beam. Must be a local fisherman," he said to Lo Han.

  "Take no chances. You must investigate."

  "I shall make a search."

  "If you see anything suspicious," said Lo Han, "contact me immediately and I will switch the lights on again."

  Chu Deng acknowledged and hung up the phone. Then he twisted the wheel, swinging the catamaran to starboard. As he set the twin bows on a course toward the dim light bobbing on the surface of the lake, he called to the pair of enforcers still below on the main deck. "Go forward and closely observe that light on the water dead ahead."

  "What do you think i
t is?" asked a small man with expressionless eyes as he unslung his machine pistol.

  Chu Deng shrugged. "

  robably fishermen. It's not the first time we've seen them troll for salmon at night."

  "And if they aren't fishermen?"

  Chu Deng turned from the wheel and grinned with every tooth. "In that case, see that they join the others."

  Pitt saw the boat coming toward the small group of people struggling through the water and was certain they'd been seen. He could hear voices on the bow, actually more of a platform extending across the forward section between the hulls, shouting in Chinese, no doubt telling their skipper there were people swimming in the lake. He didn't mentally have to do an equation to know they had been attracted by his dive light. He was guilty of being damned if it was on and damned if it was off. With no light the people he'd rescued from a watery death would have floundered off in all directions, become lost and eventually drowned.