Flood Tide

by Clive Cussler

  "Launch an immediate search of the grounds," demanded Lo Han.

  "I have already given the order."

  Lo Han slipped the radio into his pocket and gazed at the dock that was still blazing from end to end. There has to be a connection between the men who were assaulted in the prison building and the insane collision of the yacht by the catamaran, he thought. Still ignorant of Pitt's rescue of the doomed immigrants, Han could not bring himself to believe that American law-enforcement agents had sent an undercover team to destroy Qin Shang's operation. He eliminated that thought as unrealistic, considering the situation. That would make them responsible for the murders of Chu Deng and his crew of enforcers, an act not generally conceived by FBI or INS agents. No, if American investigators had the slightest clue of the covert activities taking place on Orion Lake, a tactical assault team would already be swarming over the grounds. It was painfully obvious to Lo Han that this was no professionally planned intrusion by an army of trained agents. It was an operation conducted by one, surely no more than two, men.

  But whom were they working for? Who was paying them? Certainly not a competing smuggling operation or one of the established criminal syndicates. They wouldn't be so stupid as to start a territory fight, not while Qin Shang had the backing of the People's Republic of China.

  Han's gaze traveled from the burning pier and the sunken ships to the cabin across the lake. He stood there transfixed and recalled the arrogant fisherman who flaunted his catch the day before. He may not be what he seemed. Probably no fisherman or a simple businessman on vacation, Lo Han deduced, and yet he did not act like an agent of the Immigration Service or the FBI. Whatever his motive, the fisherman was Lo Han's only suspect within a hundred miles.

  Content that he had eliminated the worst-case scenario, Lo Han began to breathe a little easier. He took his radio and called a name. The voice of Kung Chong answered.

  "Are there suspicious sightings of vehicles?" Lo Han asked.

  "The roads and skies are empty," Kung Chong assured him.

  "Any unusual activity across the lake?"

  "Our cameras reveal some movement among the trees behind the cabin but no signs of the occupant inside."

  "I want a raid on that cabin. I must know who we're dealing with."

  "A raid will take time to organize," said Kung Chong.

  "Buy time by sending in a man to sabotage his automobile so he can't escape."

  "Should something go wrong, won't we be risking a confrontation with the local law authorities?"

  "The last of my worries. If my instincts are correct, the man is dangerous and a threat to our employer who pays us and pays us well."

  "Do you wish to terminate him?"

  "I believe that to be the safest alternative," Lo Han said, nodding to himself. "Be warned. There must be no mistakes. It is not wise to incur the wrath of Qin Shang."

  "Mr. Pitt?" Julia Lee's whisper was barely audible in the darkness.

  "Yes." Pitt had parked the watercraft in a small inlet that opened onto the lake beside the cabin, approaching through the woods until he found Julia and her brood. He sat down heavily on a fallen tree and began pulling off his dry suit. "Is everyone all right?"

  "They're alive," she answered in a soft voice with just a trace of huskiness. "But they're not all right. They're soaked to the skin and freezing. Everyone needs dry clothes and medical attention."

  Pitt gently touched the bullet wound in his hip. "I'll second that."

  "Why can't they go inside your cabin where they can be warm and find something to eat?"

  He shook his head. "Not a good idea. I haven't been to town for almost two days and my cupboard is bare. Better we herd them into the boathouse. I'll bring them whatever food I have left and every blanket I can find."

  "You're not making sense," she said flatly. "They'd be more comfortable in the cabin than some smelly old boathouse."

  A stubborn woman, this one, Pitt thought, and self-sufficient too. "Did I forget to mention the surveillance cameras and listening bugs that grow like mushrooms in nearly every room? I think it best if your friends across the lake observe no one but me. If they suddenly see the ghosts of the people they believe they drowned watching television and drinking my tequila, they'll come charging in here with every gun blazing before our side's posse arrives. No sense in getting them all riled up before their time."

  "They've been monitoring you from across the lake?" she asked, puzzled.

  "Someone over there thinks I have beady eyes and can't be trusted."

  She looked at his face, trying to distinguish his features, but saw no details in the dark. "Who are you, Mr. Pitt?"

  "Me?" he said, pulling his feet out of the dry suit. "I'm just an ordinary guy who came to the lake to unwind and fish."

  "You are far from ordinary," she said softly, turning and gazing at the dying flames and smoldering embers of the dock. "No ordinary man could have accomplished what you did tonight."

  "And you, Ms. Lee? Why is a highly intelligent lady who speaks flawless English and associates with a bunch of illegal immigrants thrown into a lake with weights tied around her ankles?"

  "You know they're illegals?"

  "If they're not, they don't hide it very well."

  She shrugged. "I guess it's useless to pretend I'm somebody I'm not. I can't flash my badge, but I'm a special undercover agent with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And I would be most grateful if you could get me to a telephone."

  "I've always been putty in the hands of women." He walked over to a tree, reached up under the branches and returned. He handed her his Iridium satellite phone. "Call your superiors and tell them what's going on here," he advised. "Tell them the building on the lake is a prison for illegal immigrants. For what purpose, I can't say. Tell them the lake bed is littered with hundreds, maybe thousands of dead bodies. Why, I can't say. Tell them the security is first-rate and the guards are heavily armed, and tell them to get here fast before the evidence is either shot, drowned or burned to death. Then tell them to call Admiral James Sandecker at the National Underwater and Marine Agency and say his special projects director wants to come home and to send a taxi."

  Julia looked at Pitt's face in the dim starlight, trying to read something, her eyes wide and questioning, her lips slowly forming the words. "You are an amazing man, Dirk Pitt. A director of NUMA. I'd have never guessed in a thousand years. Since when do they train marine scientists to be assassins and arsonists?"

  "Since midnight," he said briefly as he turned and set off for the cabin. "And I'm not a scientist, I'm an engineer. Now make your call, and hurry. As sure as the sun sets in the west, we're going to have company very soon."

  Ten minutes later Pitt returned from the house loaded down with a small box of food and ten blankets. He had also hurriedly changed into more practical clothes. He failed to hear the silenced pair of bullets that smashed into the radiator of his rental car. He only caught the antifreeze flooding the ground under the front bumper when it reflected off the night-lights he'd left burning on the porch of the cabin.

  "So much for driving out of here," he said quietly to Julia as she distributed what little food he had, and he passed out the blankets to the shivering Chinese.

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

  "Your friends just punctured my radiator. We wouldn't make the main highway before the engine heated up and the bearings froze."

  "I wish you'd stop calling them my friends," she said flippantly.

  "Merely a form of speech."

  "I fail to see a problem. The lake will be crawling with INS and FBI agents in another hour."

  "Too late," said Pitt seriously. "Shang's men will be all over us long before they arrive. By disabling my car, they bought time to organize a raiding party. They're probably closing off the road and forming a net around the cabin while we stand here."

  "You can't expect these people to hike miles through the woods in the dark," said Julia firmly. "They can endure no m
ore. There must be another way to get them to safety. You have to think of something."

  "Why does it always have to be me?"

  "Because you're all we've got."

  Feminine logic, Pitt mused. How do they come by it? "Are you in the mood for romance?"

  "Romance?" She was completely taken aback. "At a time like this? Are you crazy?"

  "Not really," said Pitt casually. "But you must admit, it's a lovely night for a boat ride under the stars."

  They came to kill Pitt shortly before dawn. They came quietly and deliberately, surrounding and approaching the cabin in a well-timed and organized operation. Kung Chong spoke softly into his portable radio, coordinating his men's movements. Kung Chong was an old hand at conducting raids on houses of dissidents when he was an agent with the People's Republic intelligence service. He did not like what he saw of the cabin from the woods. The outside floodlights were on around the porch, playing havoc with the raiders' night vision. The lights of every room were also turned on, and country-western music blasted from a radio.

  His team of twenty men had converged on the cabin along the road and through the forest after his advance scout radioed that he had shot holes in the radiator of the occupant's car. Kung Chong was certain that all paths of escape were cut off and that no one had passed through his cordon. Whoever was living in the cabin had to be there. And yet Kung Chong sensed all was not going according to plan.

  Throwing light around a darkened building usually indicated an ambush by people waiting to open fire inside. The brightly lit yard canceled the use of night glasses. But this situation was different. The illuminated interior rooms and the loud music puzzled Kung Chong. Total surprise seemed out of the question. Until his men could gain the relative safety of the cabin walls and break through the doors, they were sitting ducks to anyone with automatic weapons as they rushed across the yard. He moved from position to position around the cabin, peering through the windows with a pair of binoculars, observing a solitary man who sat at a table in the kitchen, the only room unrecorded by interior surveillance cameras. He wore a baseball cap and reading glasses and was bent over the table seemingly reading a book. A cabin ablaze with lights. The radio turned up at full volume. A man fully dressed and reading a book at five-thirty in the morning? Kung Chong sniffed the air and smelled a setup.

  He sent for one of his men who carried a sniper rifle with a scope and a long suppressor on the muzzle. "You see the man sitting in the kitchen?" he asked quietly.

  The sniper nodded silently.

  "Shoot him."

  Anything less than a hundred yards was child's play. A good shot with a handgun could have hit the target. The sniper ignored the scope and sighted in on the man seated at the table with the gun's iron sights. The shot sounded like the quick clap of hands followed by a tinkle of glass. Kung Chong peered through his binoculars. The bullet had made a small hole in the windowpane, but the figure remained upright at the table as if nothing had happened.

  "You fool," he growled. "You failed to hit him."

  The sniper shook his head. "At this distance it is impossible to miss."

  "Shoot again."

  The sniper shrugged, lined up the shot and pulled the trigger. The man at the table remained immobile. "Either the target is already dead or he is in a coma. I struck him above the bridge of the nose. See the hole for yourself."

  Kung Chong focused his glasses on the face of the man in the kitchen. There was a neat round hole above the bridge of the nose above the reading glasses, and it wasn't bleeding.

  "Curse that devil!" Kung Chong snarled. No stealth. No orders quietly issued over his radio. He shouted wildly across the clearing in front of the cabin, "Move in! Move in!"

  Men dressed in black materialized from the shadows cast by the trees and ran across the yard, past the car and burst through the front door of the cabin. They spread through the rooms like a flood, weapons at the ready, poised to shoot at the first hint of resistance. Kung Chong was the fifth man into the living room. He rushed past his men and burst into the kitchen.

  "What manner of devil is he?" Kung Chong muttered as he picked up the dummy sitting in the chair and threw it on the floor. The baseball hat fell away and the reading glasses shattered, revealing a crude face hurriedly molded out of wet newspaper and painted sloppily with vegetable dyes.

  Kung Chong's second in command came up to him. "The cabin is empty. No sign of our quarry."

  His lips pressed together in a thin line as he nodded, not surprised by the report. He touched the transmit button on his radio and spoke a name. Lo Han's voice responded immediately.

  "Report."

  "He has escaped," said Kung Chong simply.

  There was a moment's pause, then Lo Han said irritably, "How is it possible he sidestepped your men?"

  "No one larger than a rat could have slipped through the cordon. He cannot be far away."

  "Most odd. Not in the cabin, not in the forest, where could he have gone?"

  Kung Chong stared out the window at the boathouse that was being searched by his men. "The lake," he answered. "He can only be on the lake."

  He skirted the dummy lying on the floor and ran out the back door across the porch and onto the dock. He shoved aside his men and stepped inside the boathouse. The sailboat was hanging in its cradle, the kayaks and canoe still in their wall racks. He stood numb, aware of the enormity of his blunder, the incredible ease with which he had been deceived. He should have known, at least guessed, how the man in the cabin had slipped through his fingers.

  The old boat, the Chris-Craft runabout that Kung Chong had observed earlier after a personal search of the cabin and boathouse, was missing.

  Nearly two miles away, it was a sight to stir the blood of those fortunate people who lived in the past. The beautifully designed mahogany hull, contoured in what old-timers called a tumble-home stern, curved gracefully from the transom forward to the engine compartment, which sat between the forward and aft cockpits. Weighted down with twelve adults and two children packed into its dual cockpits, the sixty-seven-year-old 125-horsepower Chrysler marine engine lifted the bow and thrust the boat over the water at nearly thirty miles an hour, casting twin sheets of water to the sides and leaving a rooster tail in her wake. Pitt sat behind the wheel of the Foleys' 1933 Chris-Craft runabout with the little Chinese boy on his lap as the boat planed over the waters of the Orion River toward Grapevine Bay.

  After explaining his latest plot to Julia, Pitt had quickly put two of the elderly Chinese men to work siphoning gas out of the car's tank and transferring it into the tank of the runabout. Because the big Chrysler marine engine had not turned over for several months, Pitt also replaced the battery with the one from his car. With Julia Lee translating, he instructed the senior citizens to take the paddles from the kayaks and canoe, and demonstrated the proper method of propelling the runabout without undue splashing noises. Considering the fatigue of the elderly immigrants and drawback of working in the dark, the enterprise went surprisingly smoothly.

  Suddenly Pitt turned and rushed out of the boathouse.

  "Where are you going?" shouted Julia.

  "I almost forgot my best pal," he yelled back, running across the dock to the cabin. He was back in two minutes with a small bundle under one arm wrapped in a towel.

  "That's your best pal?" asked Julia.

  "I never leave home without him," he said.

  Without further explanation he began helping everyone in the boat. When the drawn and hollow-eyed immigrants were stuffed into the confined dual cockpits, Pitt opened the boathouse door and whispered the order for everyone to paddle. They had hardly traveled little more than a quarter of a mile, staying along the shoreline in the shadows, when the weary Chinese began giving up from the effects of exposure and exhaustion. Pitt continued stroking until the runabout was at last caught in the current of the river. Only then did he lay his paddle aside and catch his breath for a few moments. Luck was with them; they had yet to be discover
ed. He waited until they had drifted down the river out of earshot of the lake before he tried to start up the engine. He primed the twin carburetors Foley had installed to update the intake manifold. Then he made a wish on every star in sight and pushed the starter button on the dashboard.

  The big, straight-eight Chrysler turned over slowly until the oil circulated, and then increased its revolutions. After grinding away for several seconds, Pitt disengaged the starter. As he primed the carburetors again he could have sworn that everyone in the boat was holding his breath. On the next attempt a pair of cylinders popped to life, then another pair until the engine was hitting on all eight. Pitt pushed the floor lever into forward and let the boat move only on the engine's idle speed. He steered with the little Chinese boy sitting in his lap. Still no shouts from the shore, no searchlight stabbing across the lake. He looked back at the cabin. He could see tiny figures appearing out of the forest and running into the lights he'd left on.