Flood Tide dp-14

by Clive Cussler

  “I could never bring myself to shoot a harmless bird,” she said loftily as she expertly ejected an empty clip and pumped a full one inside the handgrip of the Colt.

  Feminine logic again, thought Pitt. Can't shoot an animal or bird, but not hesitating to blow a man's head off. “If he comes at the same speed and altitude, aim a good ten feet ahead of the pilot.”

  The ultralight circled around for another attack while its sister craft hung back in the distance. The droning whir of the engine's exhaust echoed off the rock walls of the canyon. The pilot swooped low over the shoreline, the airflow churned out by the propeller blades whipping the tops of the trees along the banks. The serene and picturesque river and the slopes of the forested canyon seemed the wrong location for a life-and-death struggle. The clear green water flowed past banks that were lined with trees marching up the rocky sides of the mountains until they thinned and stopped at the timberline. The yellow aircraft stood out like a colored gemstone, a Mexican fire opal against a sapphire sky. All things considered, Pitt thought fleetingly, there are worse places to die.

  The ultralight leveled out and came directly toward the Chris-Craft's bow on this run. Now Pitt had an open field of vision and could see the angle of the gunner's trajectory for himself. Unless the pilot is a certified cretin, Pitt thought, he won't fall for the same sidestep again. Pitt had to reach down in his bag of tricks for another dodge. Maintaining his course until the last possible second, he felt like a herring taunting a shark.

  Julia leveled the Colt over the windshield. She almost looked comical, her head slightly tilted to one side as she aimed with the only eye that was partially open. The pilot of the ultralight was sideslipping up the river to give his gunner additional shooting time and a wider range of fire. He knew his stuff and wasn't about to be fooled twice. On this strafing run he hugged the riverbank, cutting off any attempt by Pitt to slip under the plane's narrow belly. The pilot was also playing a more cautious game. Some of Julia's bullets had struck the wing and made him realize his prey had a sting.

  Pitt knew with sickening certainty that they were going to take hits. No tricky maneuvers, no fancy footwork, could save them this time around. Unless Julia scored big-time, they were all dead, literally. He watched the ultralight loom up through the windshield. It was like standing in the middle of a bridge over a thousand-foot ravine with an express train hurtling toward him.

  And then there was the despairing thought that even if they were successful in downing the first ultralight, they weren't even halfway home. The second and third craft were lagging back, staying out of range and clear of stray bullets while awaiting their turn. Take one out of the game and two substitutes were suited up and ready for action. The moment of trepidation ended as bullets struck and gouged the water, the line of splashes moving inexorably toward the boat.

  Pitt jerked the steering wheel, sending the runabout on a skidding turn to his right. The gunner compensated, but too late. Pitt swung the boat in a flat curve to the left, throwing off his aim. He feinted again, but the gunner merely swiveled his weapon and laid down an S pattern. Then, as if he had touched a switch, Julia began blasting away.

  This was the moment. As bullets stitched a groove of holes across the lustrous mahogany bow of the Chris-Craft, Pitt took the gear lever in both hands and yanked it back while the boat was at full speed. There was a horrifying grinding noise as the gearbox howled in protest. The engine revolutions raced past the red line on the tachometer, and the boat came to an abrupt stop. Then it leaped backward in a tight arc. Several bullets shattered the windshield but miraculously missed hitting anyone. And then the hail of fire, like a passing rainstorm, moved behind the boat. Julia tracked her target and fired until the last shell flipped out of the firing chamber.

  Pitt glanced back and saw a beautiful sight. The ultralight was out of control, the racing engine shrieking like a banshee as fragments of the propeller spiraled in the air, spraying in every direction. He could see the pilot fighting the controls in a futile gesture as the craft hung poised in the air as if tied to a string. Then the nose dipped, and it plunged lifeless into the middle of the river, making a crater in the water and causing a huge splash before bobbing back to the surface for a few moments and then sinking rapidly until it vanished.

  “Nice shooting,” Pitt complimented Julia. “Wyatt Earp would be proud of you.”

  “I was lucky,” Julia said modestly, not about to admit that she had been aiming at the pilot.

  “You put the fear of God in the pilot of the other two. They're not about to make the same mistakes as his buddy. They'll lay back out of range of your Colt, take their time and pepper away at us at a safer altitude.”

  “How much farther until we're out of the canyon?” “Four, maybe five miles.”

  They exchanged looks, she seeing the fierce determination in his eyes, he seeing her head and shoulders sag from severe fatigue, mental and physical. It didn't take a physician to see Julia was half-dead from lack of sleep. She had run on sheer guts as far as she could go, and had come to the end of the road. She turned slightly and stared at the bullet holes that had splintered the bow of the Chris-Craft.

  “We're not going to make it, are we?” she muttered the words dully.

  “Hell yes, we're going to make it!” he answered as if he truly believed it. “I didn't interrupt my vacation and go to all the work of bringing you and these people this far to let it end now.”

  She gazed at his dark, craggy face for a long moment, then shook her head in defeat. “I can't get off a straight shot if the ultralights stay more than a hundred yards away, not at that distance against a moving target from a boat that's bounding all over the place.”

  “Do the best you can.” Hardly brilliant words of encouragement, Pitt conceded, but his mind was on other matters as he swerved around a series of large boulders protruding from the river. “Another ten minutes and we'll be home free.” “What if they both come at the same time?” “You can bet on it. Take your time and divide your fire, two shots at one then two shots at the other. Maintain a show of resistance, just enough to keep them from getting too cocky and coming in too close. The farther they stay away, the more difficult for the gunners to fire with any accuracy. I'll throw the boat all over the river to spoil their aim.”

  Pitt had read Kung Chong's mind correctly. The Chinaman ordered his pilots to attack from a higher altitude. “I have lost one aircraft and two good men,” he dutifully reported to LoHan.

  “How?” asked Lo Han simply.

  “By gunfire from the boat.”

  “Not inconceivable that professionals would carry automatic weapons.”

  “I am ashamed to say, Lo Han, the defensive fire comes from a woman with one automatic pistol.”

  “A woman!” Lo Han's voice came through Kung Chong's earpiece as angry as he ever heard it. “We have lost face, you and I. Conclude this unfortunate occasion and do it now.”

  “Yes, Lo Han. I will faithfully carry out your orders.”

  “I anxiously await your announcement of victory.”

  “Soon, very soon,” Kung Chong said confidently. “Success or death. I promise you one or the other.”

  During the next three miles, the tactics worked. The two remaining ultralights pressed home their attack, weaving violently from side to side to escape the few pathetic shells sent in their direction, but making it next to impossible for the gunners to train their machine pistols. Two hundred yards away from the Chris-Craft they split apart and closed in on the runabout from two sides. It was a shrewd maneuver that enabled them to converge their fire.

  Julia took her time and fired a round whenever she saw an opportunity for a remote hit while Pitt madly twisted the wheel and sent the speeding runabout zigzagging from one bank to the other in an effort to escape the sporadic spray of bullets that splattered the water around them. He stiffened when he heard the thud of strikes behind him as one burst of gunfire cut across the mahogany hatch over the engine compartme
nt between the dual cockpits. But the big Chrysler marine engine's throaty roar never slackened. On instinct his eyes swept the instrument panel, and he noted ominously that the needle on the oil-pressure gauge was suddenly falling into the red zone.

  Sam Foley will be madder than hell when he gets his boat back, Pitt thought.

  Two miles to go. The stench of scorched oil began to waft from the engine compartment. The engine revolutions were slowly dropping off, and Pitt mentally pictured metal grinding against metal from lack of oil. It was only a matter of minutes before the bearings burned out and the engine froze. All the ultralight pilots have to do now, Pitt savvied, is circle over the boat and blast everyone to bloody bits. He pounded the steering wheel in maddened frustration as they came at him together, wingtip to wingtip.

  They came head-on with no deviation, and much lower this time, knowing time was running out, keenly aware that once the boat and its occupants broke into the open bay, there would be spectators to report the murders.

  Then, magically, the pilot of the ultralight that rolled off to the left of the Chris-Craft suddenly slumped in his seat and his arms fell to his sides. One of Julia's bullets had taken the pilot in the chest and torn through his heart. The aircraft sheered off violently, its wingtip brushed the water and then it cartwheeled crazily across the wake of the boat before disappearing into the uncaring river.

  There was no time to celebrate Julia's phenomenal shot. Their situation went from bad to worse as she fired her last shell. The pilot on the last ultralight, seeing the return fire slacken and finally die, and the Chris-Craft slow considerably with smoke beginning to curl from the engine compartment, threw caution to the winds and came at them no more than five feet above the water.

  The Chris-Craft was limping along at less than ten miles an hour. The race for survival was almost over. Pitt looked up and saw the Chinese gunner in the inner ultralight. The eyes were covered by stylish sunglasses, and his lips stretched in a tight grin. He waved a salute and lifted his weapon, finger tightening on the trigger.

  In a final act of defiance, Pitt shook his fist in the air and raised the third digit. Then he threw his body over Julia and the two children in what he knew was a futile effort to use his body as a shield. He tensed, waiting for the bullets to tear into his back.

  THE OLD MAN WITH THE SCYTHE, TO PlTT'S GREAT RELIEF, either decided he had urgent business at a catastrophe elsewhere, or Pitt wasn't worth taking and threw him back. The bullets Pitt expected to feel plowing through his flesh never came because they were never fired.

  He firmly believed the last sound he was about to hear in this life was the soft report of a suppressed machine pistol. Instead, the rapid beat of rotor blades reverberated in the air, rotor blades whirling at top speed, drowning out the exhaust and unpleasant noises from inside the big Chrysler. With a thundering roar accompanied by a great gust of wind that flattened every hair on every head, a huge shadow flashed over the Chris-Craft. Before anyone comprehended what was happening, a big t irquoise helicopter with the letters NUMA painted on its tail boom, swept down the river straight at the yellow ultralight like an avenging hawk swooping on a canary.

  “Oh God no!” Julia moaned.

  “Never fear!” Pitt shouted jubilantly. “This one's on our side.”

  He recognized the McDonnell Douglas Explorer, a fast, no-tail rotor helicopter with twin engines and a top speed in excess of 170 miles an hour, as a craft he'd often flown. The forward fuselage looked like those on most rotorcraft, but the tail boom, with its dual vertical stabilizers, extended to the rear like a thin corona cigar.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “My ride showed up early,” Pitt said, swearing to put the pilot in his will.

  Every pair of eyes in the runabout and on the remaining ultralight were trained on the intruder as it charged through the air. Two figures could be seen through the transparent bow of the helicopter. The copilot was wearing a baseball cap turned backward and peered through horn-rim glasses. The pilot wore a reed hat like those woven on tropical beaches and a brightly flowered Hawaiian aloha shirt. A gargantuan cigar was clenched between his teeth.

  Kung Chong was no longer grinning. His expression was one of abject shock and fear. It flashed through his mind that the new bully on the playground wasn't about to back off. He took stock and saw that the runabout, though barely making headway, would soon reach the mouth of the river leading into Grapevine Bay. From his height he could already see a small fleet of fishing boats heading out to sea around the final bend in the river. Houses on the outskirts of a town perched along the shoreline. People walked along the beaches. His chance for terminating the escaped immigrants and the devil responsible for the chaos at Orion Lake had evaporated. Kung Chong had no choice but to order his pilot to break off the attack. In an attempt to dodge its attacker, the ultralight pulled up sharply and curled a turn so tight its wing tipped on a vertical angle.

  The pilot of the NUMA helicopter had been there before. He easily second-guessed his opponent. There was never a flicker of pity or indecision. The face was expressionless as he easily matched the ultralight's steep turn and closed the distance between them. Then came a crunching sound as the landing skids of the helicopter ripped through the ultralight's flimsy wing.

  The men in the open seats froze as their craft twisted in maddened torment, seeking desperately, hopelessly to cling to the sky. Then the shredded wing folded in the middle, and the little craft dove and crashed into a shoreline filled with large rocks. There was no explosion, as only a small cloud of dust and debris sprayed the air. All that remained was a distorted mass of wreckage with two bodies fused amid the shattered struts and tubing.

  The helicopter hovered over the crippled Chris-Craft as the pilot and the man sitting in the copilot's seat both leaned out the cockpit windows and waved.

  Julia waved back and threw them kisses. “Whoever those wonderful men are, they saved our lives.”

  “Their names are Al Giordino and Rudi Gunn.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “For many, many years,” Pitt said, beaming like a lighthouse.

  The struggling old Chrysler marine engine almost carried them to the end of their harrowing voyage, but not quite. Its bearings and pistons finally froze from lack of oil, and it gave up the ghost only two hundred yards from the dock that extended from the main street of the seaside village of Grapevine. A young teenager with an outboard boat towed the battered Chris-Craft and its weary passengers to the dock, where two men and one woman waited. None of the tourists strolling the wooden pier nor any of the local residents fishing over the railings would have guessed by the casual clothing that the three people standing at the end of the dock were INS agents about to collect a group of illegal immigrants.

  “Your people?” Pitt asked Julia.

  She nodded. “I've never met him but I assume one of them is the district director of investigations.”

  Pitt held up the little boy, made a funny face and was rewarded with a smile and a laugh. “What will happen to these people now?”

  “They're illegal aliens. Under the law they must be sent back to China.”

  He looked at her and scowled. “After what they've endured, it would be a crime to send them back.”

  “I agree,” said Julia. “But my hands are tied. I can fill out the required paperwork and recommend they be allowed to stay. But their final disposition is beyond my control.”

  “Paperwork!” Pitt nearly spat the word. “You can do better than that. The minute they step foot in their homeland, Shang's people will have them killed, and you damned well know it. They wouldn't be alive if you hadn't shot down the ultralights. You know the rule, save someone's life and you're forever responsible for them. You can't wash your hands of them and not care about their fate.”

  “I do care,” Julia said firmly. She looked at Pitt the way women usually look at men when they feel as if they're talking to the village idiot. “And I'm not about to wash my
hands of them. And because it is entirely possible, as you suggest, that they might be murdered if they returned to the Chinese mainland, it goes without saying that they'll be given every opportunity to apply for political asylum. There are laws, Mr. Pitt, whether you or I like them or not. But they're for a purpose and must be followed. I promise you that if it is humanly possible for these people to become United States citizens, it shall be.”

  “I'll hold you to that promise,” Pitt said quietly. “Believe me,” she said earnestly, “I'll do everything in my power to help them.”

  “Should you run into problems, please contact me through NUMA. I have a bit of political influence and might arrange for the Senate to back their cause.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “How could a marine engineer with NUMA possibly have political influence in the Senate?”

  “Would it help if I told you my father is Senator George Pitt of California?”

  “Yes,” she murmured, properly awed. “I can see you might prove useful.”

  The boy in the outboard cast off the towline, and the Chris-Craft bumped against the dock pilings. The Chinese immigrants were all smiles. They were happy at not being shot at any longer, and elated to have at last reached safety in America. Any apprehension about their fate was set aside for the moment. Pitt passed up the little boy and girl to the waiting hands of the INS agents and then turned to help the mother and father step up to the dock.

  A tall, jovial-looking man with twinkling eyes stepped up to Julia and put his arm around her. The look on his face was one of compassion at seeing the bruised and swollen face with blood caked around the split lips. “Ms. Lee, I'm George Sim-mons.”

  “Yes, the assistant district director. I spoke to you over the phone from the cabin.”

  “You don't know how happy we are to see you alive, how grateful for your information.”

  “Not as happy as I am,” she said, wincing with pain as she tried to crack a smile.

  “Jack Farrar, the district director, would have greeted you himself, but he's directing the cleanup operation on Orion Lake.”