Flood Tide dp-14

by Clive Cussler

  Julia tensed as she looked through the steering wheel and saw the needle creep up and waver at seventy miles an hour. “This car doesn't have seat belts.”

  “They didn't believe in them in nineteen twenty-nine.” “You're going awfully fast.”

  “I can't think of a better way to attract attention than by exceeding the speed limit in a seventy-year-old car that weighs almost four tons.”

  “I hope she has good brakes.” Julia resigned herself to the chase, uncertainty still in her mind.

  “They're not as sensitive as modern power brakes, but if I stomp on them they do the job just fine.”

  Julia gripped the Colt automatic but made no effort to remove the safety or aim it. She balked at accepting Pitt's assertion that their lives were in jeopardy. That their bodyguards had turned on them seemed too incredible to believe.

  “Why me?” Pitt moaned as he careened the monster around Mount Vernon Square, the big tires howling in protest, heads turning on the sidewalks, people staring incredulously. “Would you believe this is the second time in a year a pretty girl and I had to escape sharks who chased us over the streets of Washington?”

  She stared at him. “This happened to you before?” “On that occasion I was driving a sports car and had a much easier time of it.”

  Pitt aimed the polished hood ornament on the radiator cap down New Jersey Avenue before hammering a right turn onto First Street and accelerating toward the nation's Capitol and its Mall. Cars that got in his way, he frightened aside with warning blasts from the big twin horns mounted beneath the massive headlights. He spun the thick rim of the steering wheel violently as they raced between the traffic on the crowded street.

  The vans were still on his tail. Because of their faster acceleration, they had closed until their reflections loomed in the rearview mirror atop the center of the windshield. Although the Duesenberg could outpull them if given a long enough straight stretch, it was not a car that would set records at a drag strip. Pitt had yet to shift from second to third, and the gears wailed like a banshee.

  The giant engine with its twin overhead cams turned effortlessly at high rpms. The traffic on the street ahead thinned, and Pitt was able to push the Duesenberg as hard as she could go. He slewed the car into the circle around the Peace Monument behind the Capitol building. Then another quick twist of the steering wheel and the Duesy drifted on all four wheels around the Garfield Monument, skirted the Reflecting Pool and shot down Maryland Avenue toward the Air & Space Museum.

  From behind them, over the exhaust roar of the Duesenberg, they heard a brief staccato of gunfire. The mirror attached to the top of the spare-tire cover mounted in the left front fender abruptly disintegrated. The shooter quickly adjusted and a stream of bullets shredded the top frame of the windshield, shattering the glass, which showered across the hood of the car. Pitt slipped down low behind the wheel, his right hand grabbing Julia by the hair and yanking her horizontal on the leather seat.

  “That concludes the entertainment part of the program,” muttered Pitt. “No more chicken-hearted maneuvers.”

  “Oh, God, you were right!” Julia shouted in his ear. “They are out to kill us.”

  “I'm going to make a straight run so you can return their fire.”

  “Not in traffic, not on these streets,” she retorted. “I couldn't live with myself if I hit an innocent child.”

  Her reply was a frenzied sideways motion as the car rocketed across Third Street. Instead of turning with the traffic, Pitt cut across the pavement and sent the Duesenberg leaping over the curb onto the grass of the Capitol Mall. The big 750-by-17-inch tires took the raised concrete as casually as a minor speed bump. Sod was ripped out of the ground by the spinning rear wheels and sprayed out and under the rear fenders like shrapnel.

  Julia did what any sane woman would do under the same circumstances. She screamed and then cried out, “You can't drive down the middle of the Mall!”

  “I damned well can and will so long as we live to tell about it!” Pitt shot back.

  His seemingly crazy and totally unexpected maneuver had the desired results. The driver of the lead van tenaciously chased the Duesenberg over the curb onto the grassy Mall, and Wew all four tires in the attempt. They struck the concrete barrier with such force that they exploded in a rapid series of loud pops. The much smaller, more modern tires on the vans could not jump over the curb with the ease of the Duesenberg's big doughnuts.

  The second van's driver elected for discretion, checked his speed in time, braked and slowly drove over the curb without damaging his tires. The men in the first van—there were two —frantically abandoned their vehicle and flung themselves through the open side door of the second one. Then they all stubbornly took up the chase again, pursuing the Duesenberg across the middle of the Mall to the astonishment of hundreds of onlookers who were heading for home after an open-air Marine Corps band conceit at the Navy Memorial. The shocked expression on their faces ranged from frozen incomprehension to stunned astonishment at seeing the huge car with the artistically flowing lines tearing across the Mall between the National Ak & Space Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Groups of people strolling or jogging along the Mall's paths were suddenly galvanized into chasing the speeding vehicles on foot, certain they were about to witness an accident.

  The Duesenberg was still accelerating with Pitt's foot flat on the gas pedal. The long car flared as it tore across Seventh Street, skidding around passing cars, Pitt righting the wheel with grim tenacity. The mammoth car was incredibly responsive. The faster the speed, the more solid the feeling of stability. All he had to do was point the car where he wanted to go, and she went. He breathed a brief sigh of relief at seeing no cross-traffic on Fourteenth Street, the next thoroughfare across the Mall. The sidemount mirror and the rearview mirror on the windshield had both been blown to pieces by the earlier burst of gunfire, and he could not spare a brief glance to see if the pursuing van was closing within accurate firing range again.

  “Take a peek over the seat and see how close they are,” he yelled to Julia.

  She had thumbed off the side safety on the Colt and had it aimed over the backrest of the seat. “They slowed when bouncing over the curbs on the last two cross streets,” she answered, “but they're gaining. I can almost see the whites of the driver's eyes.”

  “Then you can begin shooting back.”

  “This isn't the wilderness around Orion River. There are pedestrians all over the Mall. I can't risk striking anyone with a stray shot.”

  “Then wait until you can't miss.”

  The men firing out the sides of the van were not as considerate. They unleashed another burst at the Duesenberg, drilling the big trunk mounted on the rear of the body, the thuds of the bullets mingling with the pulsing bursts erupting from the guns' muzzles. Pitt wrenched desperately on the wheel, dodging the fusillade that whistled past the right side of the car.

  “Those guys don't have your sensitivity toward others,” he said, thankful that he had managed to swerve around any car that crossed his path without accident.

  Wishing he had a magic wand to stop the traffic, he hurtled across Fifteenth Street, narrowly missing a newspaper truck and throwing the Duesenberg into a four-wheel slide to avoid a black Ford Crown Victoria sedan, which had replaced most of the government limousines. Fleetingly, he wondered what government VIP was riding inside. He felt a small surge of comfort at knowing the van had to drop back to negotiate the curbs.

  The towering Washington Monument rose in front of the car's path. Pitt guided the car around the floodlit obelisk and sped down the slight slope on the opposite side. Julia was still unable to get a clear shot as Pitt concentrated on getting the Duesenberg past the Monument without losing control on the slippery grass. And then they were heading toward the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the Mall.

  Seconds later he came to Seventeenth Street. Thankfully, there was a slot in the middle of the traffic and he shot toward the other side without e
ndangering passing cars. Despite the violent chase through the avenues of Washington and across the Mall, he saw no flashing red lights nor heard sirens from pursuing police cars. If he had attempted the mad ride across the Mall on any other occasion, he'd have been stopped and arrested for reckless driving within the first hundred yards.

  Pitt had a short breathing spell as they roared between the Reflecting Pool and Constitution Gardens. Almost directly ahead loomed the brilliantly illuminated Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac River beyond. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the van, which was corning up fast on the Duesen-berg again. The van's twin headlights were so close he could have read a newspaper under them. The contest was too uneven. Despite the Duesenberg being a magnificent automobile by which all others were measured, it was a case of a big-game hunter in a bush vehicle chasing an elephant. He knew that they knew he was running out of space. If he cut and swung right toward Constitution Avenue, they could easily cut him off. To his left the long Reflecting Pool stretched almost to the great white marble Memorial. The water barrier looked impassable. Or was it?

  He roughly pushed Julia off the seat onto the floor. “Keep down and hold on tight!”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We're going boating.”

  “You're not only deranged, you've gone berserk.”

  “A rare combination,” Pitt said calmly. His features were fixed in concentration, his eyes glistening like those of a hawk circling over a hare. There was a look of unfathomable detachment about him. To Julia, who stared up from her position on the floorboards under the dashboard, he looked as relentlessly determined as a comber surging toward a beach. Then she saw him snap the wheel to the left, sending the Duesenberg sliding sideways in the grass at nearly seventy miles an hour, the big rear wheels spinning crazily, ripping up the turf like giant meat grinders and just missing the large trees spaced twenty-two feet apart along the pool.

  After what seemed like ages, the tires dug in and gripped the soft ground, sending the car beyond the point of no return, her immense bulk lunging forward into the Reflecting Pool.

  The heavy steel chassis and aluminum body, driven by the full force of the powerful engine, smacked into the water with an enormous white explosion that leaped from her front and sides like Niagara Falls turned upside down. The sickening thump jarred the Duesenberg from bumper to bumper as her great weight sank, pushing her balloon tires onto the concrete bottom where their rubber treads bit and hurled the car forward like a bull whale charging through the sea after a female in heat.

  The water gushed over the hood and flooded through the shattered windshield into the front compartment, drenching Pitt and nearly inundating Julia. Unaware exactly of Pitt's intentions, she was petrified at finding herself suddenly submerged under a deluge. To Pitt, taking the full brunt of the torrent, it seemed as if he was driving into raging breakers only a surfer could love.

  There was no growth on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool. It was drained and cleaned by the Park Service on a regular basis. The distance between the surface of the water and the top of the edge along the sides measured only eight inches. The bottom of the pool was not flat but sloped from a depth of one foot around the walls to a maximum depth of two and a half feet in the middle. The distance from the pool floor to the top edge of the wall measured twenty inches.

  Pitt prayed the engine wouldn't flood and die. The distributor, he knew, was a good four feet from the ground. No problem there. Nor with the carburetors, as they sat well over three feet high. But his main concern was the spark plugs. They rested between the twin overhead cam shafts at three feet on the nose.

  The Reflecting Pool was exactly 160 feet in width. It seemed impossible for the Duesenberg to navigate such an obstacle. But she bulldozed a gaping valley through the water, her engine gamely producing torque to the rear wheels and not drowning out. She had pushed her way to within ten yards of the opposite edge of the pool when the water around her suddenly erupted in a cloud of small geysers.

  “Obstinate bastards!” Pitt muttered to himself. He gripped the big steering wheel so hard his knuckles bleached white.

  The chase van had stopped at the edge of the Reflecting Pool, her occupants tumbling out and firing wildly at the big car crashing through the water. Their shock and disbelief had cost them nearly a full minute, giving Pitt time almost to reach the other side. Realizing this was their final chance, they pumped shot after shot at the floundering Duesenberg seemingly deaf and dumb to the sirens and flashing lights that were converging on them from Twenty-Third Street and Constitution Avenue. Too late did they finally sense their predicament. Unless they followed Pitt across the Reflecting Pool, an act about

  as conceivable as producing wings and flying to the moon because of their modern, smaller wheels and tires, they were left with no alternative but to try to evade the rapidly approaching police patrol cars. Without the luxury of a conference, they leaped back in the van and spun a 180-degree turn before tearing back across the Mall toward the Washington Monument.

  The Duesenberg was coming up the slope of the pool toward the edge now. Pitt slowed the car, carefully judging the height of the wall in relation to the size of the front tires. He back-shifted the transmission into first, actually crammed it into gear. The gears inside the three-speed nonsynchromesh crash box shrieked in protest before they finally meshed in place. Then, ten feet before meeting the wall, Pitt stamped the gas pedal into the floorboard as hard as he could, taking advantage of the upward slope of the pool to lift the front end of the car. “Do it!” he implored the Duesenberg. “Go over the wall!”

  As though she had a mechanical brain and heart, the old Duesenberg responded with a burst of acceleration that lifted the front end, barely clearing the bumper over the edge of the pool, the tires rolling up the wall until they shot over the edge onto flat ground.

  The Duesenberg's ground clearance was almost a foot, but not high enough for the bottom of her chassis to run clear. She canted steeply, followed by a rendering crash. Then an ungodly scraping, tearing sound ripped the air. For a moment she seemed to hang, then her momentum propelled her forward and she leaped ahead, as if grinding her guts out over the concrete wall until all four wheels were on the grass of the Mall again.

  Only at that instant did the engine begin to miss. Almost like a golden retriever exiting a river with a bird in its mouth, the Duesenberg shuddered, shook herself free of the water that filled her body, and limped ahead. After only a hundred yards the fan behind the radiator and the heat from the engine worked in unison to blow-dry the water that had splashed and shorted four of her spark plugs. Soon, she began hitting on all eight cylinders again.

  Julia came up off the floor sputtering and peered over the back of the car at the van speeding away under pursuit by four police cars. She wrung the water from the hem of her dress and ran her fingers through her hair in a vain attempt to look presentable. “I'm a mess. My dress and coat are ruined.” She looked at Pitt with a look of pure anger. Then her expression softened. “If you hadn't saved my life for the second time hi as many weeks, I'd make you buy me a new outfit.”

  He turned to her and smiled as he set the Duesenberg on a course down Independence Avenue and across the Memorial Bridge toward the Washington National Airport and his hangar. “Tell you what. If you're a good girl, I'll take you to my place, dry your clothes and warm you up with a cup of coffee.”

  Her gray eyes were soft and unblinking. She laid a hand on his arm and murmured. “And if I'm a naughty girl?”

  Pitt laughed, partly from the relief of escaping another death trap, partly from seeing Julia's bedraggled appearance and partly because she was trying without success to cover the parts of her body that were revealed through the wet dress. “Keep talking like that and I'll skip the coffee.”

  SUNLIGHT WAS SLIDING OVER THE SILLS OF THE SKYLIGHTS when Julia slowly pushed aside the mist of sleep. She felt as if she was floating, her body totally weightless. It was a pleasurable s
ensation left over from the ardor of the night. She opened her eyes, shifted her mind into gear and began studying her surroundings. She found herself lying alone. The bed was king-size and sat in the middle of a room that looked like the captain's cabin from an old sailing ship, complete with mahogany-paneled walls and a small fireplace. The furnishings, including the dressers and cabinets, were nautical antiques.

  Like most women, Julia was curious and intrigued about male bachelor apartments. She felt that the opposite gender could be read by their surroundings. Some men, ladies observed, lived like pack rats and never cleaned up after themselves, creating and preserving strange alien life-forms in their bathrooms and inside their refrigerators. Making beds was as foreign as processing goat cheese. Their laundry was piled beside and over washers and dryers that still had the instruction booklets attached to the knobs.

  And then there were the neatness freaks who lived in an environment only a decontamination scientist could love. Dust, food scraps and toothpaste droppings were all furiously attacked and energetically eliminated. Every piece of furniture, every object of decor, was positioned with precision, never to migrate. The kitchen would have passed a white-glove inspection by the most diligent of sanitation inspectors.

  Pitt's apartment was somewhere in between. Tidy and uncluttered, it had a masculine casualness about it that appealed to the women who visited occasionally rather than frequently. Julia could see that Pitt was a man who preferred to live in the past. There was nothing modern in the entire apartment. Even the brass plumbing fixtures in the bathroom and kitchen seemed to have come out of some old passenger liner that once traveled the seas.

  She rolled over on her side and stared through the doorway into the living room, where shelves on two walls were filled with delicately built ship models of wrecks that Pitt and his NUMA crew had discovered and surveyed. The remaining walls held dockyard builders' half models and four seascape paintings by Richard DeRosset, a contemporary American artist, of nineteenth-century steamships. There was a feeling of comfort about the apartment, not the formal and grandiose atmosphere produced by an interior decorator.