Iceberg dp-3

by Clive Cussler

  Lazard grasped the managing attendant by the arm. "Quickly. you must stop the boats."

  The attendant, a blond, lanky boy no more than twenty years of age, simply stood there in mute uncomprehension.

  Lazard, obviously a man who disliked wasted conversation, moved hurriedly across the landing to the controls, disengaged the underwater traction chain that pulled the excursion boats, set the handbrake and turned to face the stunned boy again.

  "Two men, two men together, have they taken the ride?"

  "Don't know for sure, sir. There… there's been so many. I can't recall them all-" Kippmann stepped in front of Lazard and showed the boy the photographs of Castile and De Croix. "Do you recognize these men?"

  The boy's eyes widened. "Yes, sir, now I remember." Then a frown spread across his youthful face.

  "But they weren't alone. There were two other men with them."

  "Four!" Kippmann shouted, turning about thirty heads. "Are you sure?"

  "Yes, sir." The boy nodded his head violently.

  "I'm positive. The boat holds eight people. The first four seats held a man and woman with two kids. The men in the photographs took the rear seats with two other men."

  Pitt arrived just then, his breath coming in short pants, his hand clutching the handrail as he fought off the pain and exhaustion. "Was one of them a big guy with a bald head, hairy hands? A-nd the other, red-faced with a huge mustache and shgulders like an ape?"

  The boy stared dumbly for a moment at Pitts disguise. Then his expression took on a half smile "You hit them exactly. A real pair. Like tough-looking Mutt and Jeff characters."

  Pitt turned to Kippmann and Lazard. "Gentlemen," he said, his voice slightly muffled under the rubber wolf's head, "I think we've just missed our boat."

  "For God's sake!" Kippmann murmured in exasperation. "We can't just stand here."

  "No." Lazard shook his head. "We can't do that."

  He nodded at the boy. "Call extension 309. Tell whoever answers that Lazard has relocated the missing party in The Pirates of the Caribbean. Tell them it's a red situation-the hunters are in there too." He turned back to Kippmann and Pitt. "The three of us can work along the catwalks and the backdrops until we reach them, and only hope we're not too late."

  "How many boats ago did they board?" Pitt asked the boy.

  The dazed boy could only stammer. "I… "Ten, maybe twelve. They should be sitting about between the building and — "

  "This way!" Lazard almost snapped the words.

  He disappeared through a doorway at the end of the landing marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  As they moved into the blackness that cloaked the mechanical workings of the pirates, the sound of voices from the passengers of the stalled boats could be beard murmuring throughout the cavernous amusement ride.

  Castile and De Croix, as well as their assassins, Pitt reflected, could have little suspicion as to the delay, but even so, it didn't seem to matter: there was every possibility that Kelly's and Rondheim's scheme had already been carried out. He fought off the ache in his chest and followed the squat, dim form of Kippmann past a storyland setting of five pirates burying a treasure chest. The figures seemed so lifelike it was difficult for Pitt to believe they were only electronically controlled mannequins. He was so engrossed in the simulated reality of the scene that he rammed into Kippmann, who had stopped abruptly.

  "Easy, easy," Kippmann protested.

  Lazard motioned to them to stay where they were as he moved catlike along a narrow corridor and leaned over the railing of a workman's gallery running over the canal that supported the boats. Then he waved Pitt and Kippmann forward.

  "We got lucky for a change," he said. "Take a look." Pitt, his eyes not yet accustomed to the dark, stared below at a sight that never was-a wild fantasy night scene containing a band of at least thirty pirates burning and looting what seemed to be a replica of a miniature Port Royal or Panama City. Flames were shooting out of several buildings. while silhouettes of laughing buccaneers chased screaming make-believe girls around and around the back-lighted windows.

  Boisterous singing was reverberating out of hidden speakers, giving the illusion that rape and pillage were merely good clean fun.

  The canal the boats circuited through cut between the town buildings, lifting the viewers' eyes from a pair of pirates trying vainly to get a mule to pull a wagonload of their loot on the left to a trio of their shipmates drinking on a pile of wildly swaying wine barrels on the right. But it was the center of the canal that drew Pitts attention. There in a boat almost directly under a bridge that ran over the water were Castile and De C-roix, happily pointing out details of the wondrous scene like two schoolboys playing hookey at a Friday matinee. And, sitting ominously like disinterested statues on the seat directly in back of the South American Presidents, Pitt could make out the two men who had held his arms while Rondheim bad battered him to a pulp only two days before in Reykjavik.

  Pitt glanced at the luminous dial of the orange faced Doxa watch on his wrist. Stan an hour and twenty minutes before Kelly's countdown. Too early, far too early, yet there were two of Rondheim's killers sitting not three feet from their intended victims. A very large Piece was missing from the puzzle. He had no doubt that Kelly told the truth about his timetable and that Rondheim would stick to it. But would he?

  If Rondheim meant to take over Hermit Limited, it stood to reason that he just might make a change in plans.

  This is your show, Dan." Kippmann spoke softly to the security director. "How do we take them?"

  "No guns," Lazard said. "The last thing we want is a stray shot killing a child."

  "Maybe we'd better wait for reinforcements," Kippmann said.

  "No time," Lazard said. "We've kept the boats stopped too long already. Everyone is starting to get edgy, including those two characters in back of Castile and De Croix."

  "Then we'll have to take a risk." Kippmann wiped a handkerchief across his damp brow. "Get the boats moving again. Then as soon as the one with our friends begins to cross under the bridge, we'll take them."

  "Okay," Lazard agreed. "The bridge will give us cover to close within fifteen feet. I'll work around and come out of that doorway under the gunshop sign.

  Kippmann. you hide behind the mule and wagon."

  "Need an extra hand?" Pitt asked.

  "Sorry, Major." Lazard gave Pitt a cool stare.

  "You're hardly in shape for hand-to-hand combat." He paused and gripped Pitts shoulder. "You could play a vital role though."

  "Say the word."

  "By standing on the bridge in your wolf costume and miming with the pirates, you could distract those two in the boat long enough to give Kippmann and myself a few more seconds of insurance."

  "I guess it beats hell out of matching wits with the three little pigs," Pitt said.

  As soon as Lazard found a call phone and ordered the attendant to start the canal boats moving in two minutes, he and Kippmann dropped into the burning village behind the realistic-looking burning fronts and took their positions.

  After he stumbled over the stuffed body of a pirate who supposedly had passed out from too much wine, Pitt reached down and relieved the mannequin of its cutlass and was surprised to find that it was a steel replica of the real thing. Even at close range he could only marvel at the true-to-life appearance of the mechanical pirates. The glass eyes set in brown wax faces stared unerringly in whatever direction the head was set, and the eyebrows raised up and down in unison with the lips as the strains of "Sixteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest" boomed from speakers concealed within their aluminum-frame bodies.

  Pitt moved to the center of the arched bridge over the canal and joined in the singing amid three merry buccaneers who sat with their legs dangling over the fake stone parapet, swirling their cutlasses around in circles in time with the songfest. Pitt in his Big Bad Wolf suit and the frolicking pirates presented a strange sight to the people in the boat as they waved and sang the famous old seafaring ditty. The
children, a girl about ten and a boy, Pitt guessed, no more than seven,oon recognized him as the three-dimensional cartoon character and began waving back.

  Castile and De Croix also laughed and then saluted him in Spanish, pointing and joking to themselves while the tall, bald assassin and his accomplice, the broad-shouldered brute, sat stony-faced, unmoved by the performance. It occurred to Pitt that he was on thin ice, on which not merely a false move, but the tiniest miscalculation of any detail could spell death to the men, woman and children who sat innocently enjoying his antics.

  Then he saw the boat move.

  The bow was just passing under his feet when the shadowy figures of Kippmann and Lazard leaped from their cover, sprinted through the mass of animated figures and dropped into the rear of the boat. The surprise was complete. But Pitt hadn't noticed. No fuss, no elaborate flourish. no token words of warning, he coldly and efficiently shoved the blade of his cutlass under the armpit and into the chest cavity of the pirate sitting nearest him.

  A curious thing happened. The pirate dropped his cutlass, his lips contorted into a soundless oval, eyes registering astonishment and shock, a shock almost immediately replaced by a final awareness. Then the eyes turned up in the head and he fell forward splashing into the now empty canal beneath the bridge.

  The second pirate failed to react in the split second when he might have parried Pitts swing. He started to say something. Then, with cutlass still dripping red, Pitt put all his strength into a backhand slash that bit into the base of the pirate's neck at the left shoulder blade.

  The man grunted and flung up the opposite arm, made as if to roll clear, but his feet slipped on the uneven flooring of the bridge and he came down on both knees, falling over sideways in a rubbery heap, blood pulsing from his half-opened mouth.

  Pitt had one fleeting glimpse of a flashing metallic glint in the fiery light, and the instinctive slight inclination of his head saved his life as the third pirate's cutlass sliced through the crooked top hat that was perched on the wolf mask. Too fir; Pitt had pushed his luck too far. He had caught two of Rondheim's men before they knew what was happening, but the third had gained sufficient time to counter Pitts attack and catch him off balance.

  Blindly fending off the lunging thrusts, staggering backward under the fury of the other man's assault, Pitt hurled himself convulsively sideways and over the parapet, and plunged into the cool water of the canal. Even as he dived, Pitt had heard the swish of the pirate's blade as it hissed through the empty air where his body had stood only an instant before. And then there was the sudden shock as his shoulder collided with vicious force against the shallow bottom of the canal. The pain exploded in him and everything seemed to dissolve and stop. 3t "Yo ho ho, sixteen men on a dead man's chest.

  God, Pitt thought through the haze, why don't those mechanical bastards sing something else? Like a diagnostic specialist, he carefully explored his bruised body-the areas of pain, the position of his arms and legs in the flame-sparkled water. His ribs felt as if they were burning inside his chest, the fire spreading into his back and shoulders. Pulling himself onto the landing, Pitt stood up unsteadily, swayed and only kept erect by using the cutlass as a cane, somewhat bewildered to find the hilt still imbedded tightly in his right hand.

  He crouched on one knee, fighting to catch his breath, waiting for his heart to slow down to a reasonably nominal rate and scanned the make-believe set, his eyes trying desperately to pierce the darkness beyond the flaming half light. The bridge was empty, the third pirate was gone, and the boat was just disappearing around a curve into the next gallery. He turned in the opposite direction just in time to see another sightseeing boat approaching up the canal.

  All these things he noted mechanically, without consciously classifying their significance. All he could think of was that a killer was somewhere close by, disguised as one of the pirates. He felt helpless, the mannequins all began to look alike, and the action on the bridge had happened with such speed that he hadn't been able to perceive any details of the man's costume.

  Almost frantically, he tried to plan the next step.

  There was no more chance in the world for surprise on his part-the human pirate knew what Pitt looked like, while he was helpless to detect the real from the fake and had now lost the opportunity to move first. Even as these thoughts flashed through Pitts mind, he knew he must act.

  A second later, he was half running, half stumbling along the quay, gasping at every step as waves of pain shot through every tendon of his body. He burst through a black curtain and into the next stage set. It had a huge domed chamber dimly lit for a nighttime scene.

  Built into the far wall, a scaled-down version of a pirate's corsair ship, complete with dummy crew and Jolly Roger rippling in a breeze urged on by a hidden electric fan, fired stimulated broadsides from replica cannon across fifty feet of water and over the heads of the people in the excursion boat at a miniature fortress sitting high atop a jagged cliff on the opposite side of the cavernous chamber.

  It was too dark to make out any details on the excursion boat. Pitt could detect no movement at the stern and he felt certain that Kippmann and Lazard had everything under their command. Everything, that is, that was within their reach. As his eye, began to penetrate the heavy darkness, of the simulated nighttime harbor between the ship and the fortress, he saw that the bodies in the boat were all huddled below the sides of the hull.

  He was about halfway up the maintenance ramp to the deck of the corsair ship when he knew why, when he heard a strange sound, the almost silent thump of a gun with a silencer. And then suddenly he was standing in back of a form in a pirate costume who was holding something in his hand and pointing it at the little boat in the water.

  Pitt looked at him curiously, with only a detached sort of interest. He raised the cutlass and brought the flat side of the blade down on the pirate's wrist.

  The gun dropped from the man's wristover the railing and into the water below. The pirate swung around, the white hair falling from under a scarlet bandanna that was knotted around his head, the cold blue-gray eyes flashing with anger and frustration, the lines about the mouth deeply etched. He searched the comical figure that had so coolly killed two of his comrades. His voice was hard and metallic.

  "It seems I am your prisoner."

  Pitt wasn't fooled for an instant. The words were only a stall, a curtain to shield the lighg move that would surely come. The man behind the voice was dangerous and he was playing for high stakes. But Pitt had more than an edged weapon-he had a newly found strength that was suddenly coursing through his body like a gathering tidal wave. He began to smile.

  "Ah-so it is you, Oskar."

  Pitt paused significantly, watching Rondheim like a cat. Holding Hermit Limited's chief executioner on the end of the cutlass. Pitt pulled off the rubber wolf's head. Rondheim's face was still set and hard, but the eyes betrayed total incomprehension. Pitt dropped the mask, bracing himself for the moment he had planned for but never really believed would happen. Slowly, he unwrapped the bandages with one hand, letting the gauze fall to the deck in little unraveled piles, building the suspense. When he finished, he gazed steadily at Rondheim and stood back. Rondheim's lips began to work in a half-formed question and dazed expression spread across his features.

  "Sorry you can't recall the face, Oskar," Pitt said quietly. "But you didn't leave a great deal to recognize.

  Rondheim stared at the swollen eyes, the bruised and puffed lips, the sutures that laced the cheekbones and eyebrows, and then his mouth fell open and in a whisper he breathed, "Pitt!"

  Pitt nodded.

  "It's not possible," Rondheim gasped.

  Pitt laughed. "I apologize for ruining your day, but it just goes to prove that you can't always trust a computer."

  Rondheim looked at Pitt long and searchingly.

  "And the others?"

  "With one exception, they're all alive and mending the broken bones you so generously dispensed." Pitt focused h
is gaze beyond Rondheim's shoulder and saw that the excursion boat was safely entering the next gallery.

  "Then it's back to you and me again, Major. Under conditions more favorable to you than those I enjoyed in the gym. But don't get your hopes up." A sort of smile twisted the tight lips. "fairies are no match for men."

  "I agree," Pitt returned. He hurled the cutlass over Rondheim's head into the water and stood back. He looked down and examined his hands. They would have to do the job. He took several slow deep breaths, ran his hands through his wet hair, rubbed them roughly on the sides of his costume and then gave a final flex to his fingers. He was ready.

  "I misled you, Oskar. Round one was an unequal contest. You had the numbers, the planning and the initiative from the beginning. How are you alone, Oskar, without your paid help to prop your victims? How are you when you're on strange ground? You still have time to escape. Nothing stands between you and a chance for freedom except me.

  But there's the rub, Oskar. You have to get by me."

  Rondheim's teeth showed. "I don't need anyone to break you, Pitt.

  My only regret is that I don't have the time to stretch out your next lesson in pain."

  "Okay, Oskar, so much for the psychological bullshit," Pitt said calmly. He knew exactly what he was going to do. True, he was still weak and dead tired, but that was more than canceled out by the selfdetermination, the invisible figures of Lillie, Tidi, Sam Kelly, Hunnewell and the rest who stood at his side giving him strength he could have never possessed alone.

  An uncertain smile came to Rondheim's mouth as he crouched in a karate stance. The smile didn't last.

  Pitt hit him. He hit Rondheim with a right cross, a perfectly timed punch that jerked Rondheim's head sideways and staggered him into the ship's main mast.