Flood Tide dp-14

by Clive Cussler

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 was 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 inced as the tape was ripped from her mouth. The first thing she saw was an apparition hi 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, rinding 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 wheel-house 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 LoHan.

  “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 it is?” asked a small man with expressionless eyes as he unslung his machine pistol.

  Chu Deng shrugged. “Probably 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.

  Keeping the frightened boy on his shoulders, he stopped the Stingray and passed off the little girl to the young woman, who'd been helping an elderly man and woman paddle through the water. Now both his hands were free and he flicked off his dive light, twisted around to face the boat that was looming above him and blocking off the stars. He noted that it was passing less than three feet from him, and he could see two shadowy figures move down a ladder from the cabin to the bow platform deck. One of them leaned over, spotted Pitt in the water and gestured at him.

  Before the other enforcer could fix Pitt in his flashlight's beam, a barb from Pitt's air gun hissed through the darkness and buried itself in the man's temple above the ear. Before his partner knew what happened, he fell dead with a barb protruding from his throat. There was no hesitation or grain of misgiving in Pitt's mind. These men had murdered countless innocent people. They did not deserve a warning or a chance to defend themselves. They deserved no more chance than those they killed.

  Both had fallen silently backward, crumpled on the catamaran's forward deck. Pitt reloaded another barb and slowly swam on his back, waving his dive fins behind. The young boy buried his head in Pitt's shoulder and held on to his savior's neck with every ounce of strength in his little arms.

  Pitt watched in amazement as the boat passed on, circled and continued on toward the dock as if nothing had occurred, seemingly unaware of the dead bodies on the forward deck. He barely discerned the shadow of a man at the helm through the wheelhouse windows. Strangely, the helmsman didn't act as if he knew his men were terminated. Pitt could only speculate that the helmsman's attention was focused elsewhere when he'd killed his partners in crime.

  Pitt didn't have the slightest doubt that the boat would return, and return quickly once the two bodies were found. He had bought four, maybe five, minutes, certainly no more. He kept his eyes on the catamaran as its phantom outline glided away in the darkness. The craft was halfway back to the dock when her shape gradually began to alter, and he reckoned that she was turning broadside and circling back.

  He thought it odd that no light blinked on and swept the lake. He thought it odd for all of about ten seconds, when the lights at the prison retreat burst on again and danced on the waves created by the wake of the catamaran.

  Caught like floating decoy ducks in the water was as bad as it could get. Caught after reaching the shore but before finding cover was only slightly less bad. Then suddenly the Stingray pulled him into the shallows, and he found he could stand up in water to his lower hips. He waded ashore and set the boy on the lake's bank, which rose about eighteen inches out of the water. Then he returned for the others, towing them in until they could wade onto dry land. These people were either too old or too young and too played out to do more than crawl into the trees.

  He motioned to the girl, who was rising out of the water a few feet away with the little girl on her shoulders and one arm around an old woman who looked near death. “Take the boy!” he snapped. “Hurry these people into the trees and make them lie down!”

  “Where will you ... you be?” she asked haltingly.

  He shot another look at the boat. “Horatius at the bridge, Custer standing alone at Little Big Horn, that's me,” Pitt said. Before Julia could reply, the stranger who had saved their lives had vanished back into the water.

  Chu Deng was scared down to his boots. In the darkness he had failed to see the deaths of his enforcers. He had been concentrating on keeping the boat from running aground when they were murdered. After discovering the dead bodies, Chu Deng had panicked. There was no going to the dock and reporting two of his enforcers murdered by unknown assassins without his witnessing the act. His employer would never accept vague and inexplicable excuses. He would be punished for inefficient actions—he knew that with total certainty.

  He had no choice but to confront his assailants. It never entered his mind that there was only one. He assumed it had to be a planned operation by professionals. He stationed his remaining two men—one aft on the stern deck between the hulls, the other on the forward deck. After requesting Lo Han to turn on the lights, he spotted several people stumbling out of the water onto the lake bank. Then to add disaster to catastrophe, he recognized them as the immigrants who were supposed to be drowned. He went rigid in astonishment. How could they have escaped? Impossible unless they had help. It had to be a special force of trained agents, he thought wildly.

  Qin Shang would surely order him sent to the bottom of the lake if he didn't capture the escaped immigrants before they reached American authorities. In the light from across the lake, Chu Deng counted nearly a dozen men and women and two children staggering and crawling from the water's edge toward a forest of trees. Caught up in fear of a short future and without regard to the circumstances, Chu Deng turned the catamaran directly toward a low bank running along the shoreline.

  “There they are!” he screamed wildly to the enforcer on the forward deck. “Shoot them, shoot them before they reach the trees!”

  He stared mesmerized as his man on the forward platform of the catamaran raised his weapon and stood watching as if a film was running in slow motion when a dark form rose out of the water in front of the boat like some abominable creature out of a nightmare. The enforcer suddenly stiffened, dropping the machine pistol and clutching his shoulder. Seconds later an ugly barb suddenly protruded from the enforcer's left eye. Chu Deng froze in bewildered shock as his enforcer tumbled into the cold waters of the lake.

  There are many advantages to a craft with catamaran twin hulls. Repelling boarders is not one of them. A boat with a single high bow is next to impossible to climb aboard, much less to find a means of hanging on to the hull. But the straight-across platform deck fo
rward of the main cabin and wheel-house sat only fourteen inches above the water, making it relatively simple for a person in the water to grab hold of the leading edge.

  Propelled by the Stingray, Pitt burst free of the water just as the black boat was about to run him down. With timing based more on luck than expertise, he cast off the propulsion vehicle, threw up one arm and clamped it over the edge of the forward deck. The shock of the rapidly moving boat as it abruptly jerked his body through the water felt as if his arm was torn from its socket. Fortunately, it remained in place, and Pitt shot the man who was aiming a machine pistol at the people on shore before he could pull the trigger. In three seconds, Pitt had reloaded and fired a barb that punched upward through the man's eye, penetrating his brain.

  The catamaran was now on a collision course with the shore, which was less than thirty feet away when Pitt slipped off the forward part of the boat and floated on his back. While the raised cabin advanced over him, he calmly reloaded the air gun. After the propellers thrashed by harmlessly on both sides, he twisted around and stroked powerfully in the wake of the boat. He swam only a short distance before the catamaran smashed into the lake bank, crunching the bows and coming to a stop as abruptly as if it had struck a steel wall. The engines raced for several seconds and then sputtered and died. The momentum and the impact had thrown the enforcer on the aft platform against the cabin with such extraordinary force that he broke his neck.

  Unbuckling the straps to the backpack that held his air cylinders and dropping his weight belt, Pitt heaved himself up onto the aft platform. No figure showed inside the wheelhouse. He climbed the ladder and kicked in the door.

  A man lay on the deck, his head and shoulders propped against the forward counter, hands clutching his chest. Broke his ribs from the impact, Pitt quickly suspected. Injured or not, the man was a killer. Pitt took no chances. Not with men like this. He raised his air gun in the same instant as Chu Deng thrust out a small, .32-caliber automatic pistol he'd been shielding with the hands across his chest. The deadly crack of the automatic overpowered the hiss of the barb from the air gun, both missiles passing in the same microsecond. The bullet plowed a small hole through the outer flesh of Pitt's hip at the same time the barb plunged into Chu Deng's forehead.