Pitt did not judge his wound as serious. There was minor bleeding and pain to be sure, but it did not slow his physical movements. He ran stiffly from the wheelhouse, down the ladder and jumped off the forward platform onto the shore. He found the frightened immigrants huddled behind a clump of bushes.
“Where is the lady who speaks English?” he asked between pants of breath.
“I'm here,” answered Julia. She rose to her feet and approached until she stood in front of him, more imagined than seen.
“How many did I lose?” he asked, fearful of the answer.
“By rough count,” she answered, “three are missing.”
“Damn!” Pitt muttered in frustration. “I'd hoped I got them all.”
“You did,” said Julia. “They became lost on the way to shore.”
“I'm sorry,” Pitt said honestly.
“You needn't be. It was a miracle you saved any of us.”
“Can they travel?”
“I believe so.”
“Follow the shore to your left as you face the lake,” he instructed her. “After about three hundred yards, you'll come to a cabin. Hide everyone in the woods outside but do not enter. I repeat, do not enter. I'll follow as soon as I can.”
“Where will you be?” she asked.
“We're not dealing with people who like to be fooled. They'll wonder what happened to their boat and come scouring the lakefront within the next ten minutes. I'm going to create a little diversion. You might call it a little payback for the person responsible for your misery.”
It was too dark for him to see the sudden look of caring in her face. “Please be careful, Mr.... ?” “Pitt, my name is Dirk Pitt.” “I'm Julia Lee.”
He started to say something, but broke off and hurried back to the catamaran, returning to the wheelhouse just as the phone buzzed. He groped for it in the dark, found and picked it up. Someone was conversing in Chinese on the other end. When the voice paused, Pitt muttered unintelligible vowels, clicked the receiver and laid the phone on the bridge counter. Using the dive light on his hood, he soon found the boat's ignition switches and throttles. He engaged the starters and worked the throttles back and forth until both engines coughed into life again.
The catamaran's bows were stuck fast in the mud of the bank. Pitt shifted to full throttle in reverse and spun the helm, swinging the boat's twin sterns back and forth in an effort to loosen the suction of the mud. One agonizing inch at a time, the black boat warped backwards until the suction relaxed its grip and the bows broke free. The boat surged into deeper water, where Pitt swung her around and then pushed the throttles forward, pointing the damaged bows toward the dock and Qin Shang's yacht, its elegant, seemingly deserted salons sparkling with light.
He jammed his dive knife between the spokes of the wheel, sticking the point into the wooden compass box beyond to hold the boat on course. Then he set the throttles on slow and exited the wheelhouse, scrambling down the ladder to the engine compartment in the starboard hull. There was no time to build a fancy incendiary bomb, so he spun off the big refueling cap to the fuel tank, found several oily rags used to clean the engine fittings and quickly knotted them together. Then he stuffed a length of rags inside the tank, soaked them with diesel fuel and trailed the rest onto the engine-compartment deck. Next, he arranged the rags into a small, circlelike dam and poured fuel inside it. Not overly pleased with his handiwork, but satisfied that under the circumstances it was the best he could do, Pitt returned to the wheelhouse and rummaged the storage cabinets until he found what he knew had to be there somewhere. Loading the emergency flare gun, he laid it on the counter beside the phone in front of the helm. Only then did he pull his knife from the wheel and grip the spokes.
The yacht and the dock were only two hundred yards distant now.
Water gushing through cracks in the bows, crushed from their collision with the lake bank, rapidly filled the forward section of the twin hulls, dragging them down. Pitt shoved the throttles against their stops. The propellers bit and churned the water to froth, their drive power raising the bows out of the water. Fifteen, eighteen, then twenty knots, the ungainly catamaran skipped over the water. The helm vibrated under Pitt's hands as the yacht loomed ever larger through the windshield. He cut a broad arc until the twin hulls were lined up square in the middle of the yacht's port beam.
When the distance closed to seventy, going on sixty, yards, Pitt dashed through the wheelhouse door, dropped to the aft-deck platform, aimed the flare gun down through the open hatch of the engine compartment at the fuel-soaked rags and pulled the trigger. Trusting his aim was accurate, he leaped into the water, striking it at twenty knots with such force that his buoyancy compensator was torn from his body.
Four seconds later, there was a splintering crash as the catamaran smashed through the hull of the yacht, followed by an explosion that filled the night sky with flame and flying debris. The black catamaran that had acted as an execution chamber disintegrated. All that remained of it was a flaming oil slick. Almost immediately, fire was shooting through every port and varnished door of the yacht. Pitt was stunned at how quickly she became a flaming torch. He backstroked around the yacht's stern toward the floating hut at the end of the dock, watching as the luxurious skylounge and dining salon collapsed into the fire. Slowly, very slowly, the yacht settled into the cold waters of the lake amid a huge cloud of hissing steam, until nothing remained of her except the upper half of a radar antenna.
The reaction time for the security guards, as Pitt had previously estimated, was slow. He had reached the floating hut before they came racing from the retreat on their dirt bikes toward the dock, which had also ignited and was now going up in flames. For the second time in an hour he surfaced inside the hut. Feet could be heard pounding through the passageway. He slammed the door, but finding no lock, wedged his trusty dive knife between the outer edge and the frame, effectively jamming it closed.
An old hand at riding watercraft, he jumped astride the nearest one and pressed the starter button. He squeezed the thumb throttle, and the motor immediately whirred into life. The thrasters dug in the water and threw the craft and Pitt forward. Together, they struck the flimsy door, shattering it into splinters before racing across the lake. Cold, wet, exhausted and bleeding from the bullet wound in his hip, Pitt felt like a man who had just won the lottery, the sweepstakes and broke the bank at Monte Carlo. But only for the time it took to reach the dock beside his cabin.
Then reality set in, and he knew the worst was yet to come.
LO HAN STARED DUMBSTRUCK AT THE MONITORS INSIDE THE mobile security vehicle revealing the black catamaran suddenly making a wide swing around the lake and homing in on the yacht, ramming the beautiful vessel square amidships. The resulting explosion rocked the security vehicle, temporarily knocking out the surveillance systems. Lo Han ran outside and down to the shoreline to witness the disaster firsthand.
There will be a heavy price to pay, he thought, staring at the yacht as it sank under the lake in a cloud of steam. Qin Shang was not a man who easily forgave. He would not be pleased when he learned that one of his four yachts had been destroyed. Already Lo Han was mentally creating ways to blame that stupid Chu Deng.
After he had demanded that Chu Deng investigate the mysterious light, there had been no coherent communication from the black boat and its crew of enforcers. He had to believe that they were drunk and had passed out in a stupor. What other explanation could there be? What reason for purposely committing suicide? The last thing to cross his mind was the specter of an outside source who was responsible for this disaster.
Two of his guards came running up to him. Lo Han recognized them as the men from his water patrol.
“Lo Han,” one of the men panted, out of breath after running nearly four hundred yards out and back through the passageway to the floating log hut.
He stared at them angrily. “Wang Hui, Li San, why aren't you men on the water with your craft?”
“We co
uldn't reach them,” explained Wang Hui. “The door was locked. Before we could force it open the hut was on fire, and we had to escape back into the tunnel or be burned alive.”
“The door was locked!” Lo Han bellowed. “Impossible. I personally instructed that no lock be installed.”
“I swear to you, Lo Han,” said Li San, “the door was barred from the inside.”
“Perhaps it became blocked from the explosion,” offered Wang Hui.
“Nonsense—” Lo Han broke off as a voice came over his portable radio. “Yes, what is it?” he snapped.
The quiet, competent voice of his second in command, Kung Chong, came through the earpiece. “The two men who were late in relieving the cell-block security guards ...”
“Yes, what about them?”
“They have been found bound and beaten on the vacant second level of the building.”
“Bound and beaten,” blurted Lo Han. “There is no mistake?”
“It looks like the work of a professional,” stated Kung
Chong flatly.
“Are you saying our security has been infiltrated?”
“It would seem so.”
“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 Indium 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 more. 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.” I 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 j 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.
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