As if to bind his commitment, one of the Chinese special forces team fired an SA-7 Russian-made man-portable infrared homing antiaircraft missile at the helicopter hovering over the stern. At less than two hundred yards it was impossible to miss, even without the homing system. The missile struck the helicopter's boom behind the fuselage and blasted it off. Horizontal control was lost and the craft spun crazily in circles before falling into the river and sinking out of sight, but not before the two crewmen and ten troops inside managed to struggle clear.
The men in the second helicopter flying opposite the liner's bridge were not as lucky. The next missile blew it apart in an explosive burst of fire, sending flaming debris and bodies crashing into the dark current of the river, their grave swept clean by the seething wake from the ship's propellers.
During the death and destruction, Hung-chang and the Chinese fighting force were unaware of the low-pitched buzzing sound approaching from upriver. Nor did any of them see the two black parachutes that fleetingly hid the stars in the night sky. Every eye was turned toward the menacing guns of the tanks, every mind concentrating on running the gauntlet of devastating fire they knew was about to ravage them.
Captain Hung-chang spoke quietly into the ship's phone to the engine room. "Full ahead, all engines."
42
TEN MINUTES EARLIER, from a schoolyard a block from the river, Pitt and Giordino lifted into the night sky. After donning helmets and harnesses, they strapped small motors that were mounted on backpacks across their shoulders. Next, they hooked into a thirty-foot-wide canopy with over fifty suspension lines spread on the turf and started their little three-horsepower engines that were about the same size as those used on power mowers and chainsaws. For stealth, the exhaust manifolds were specially muffled, emitting only a soft popping sound. The propellers, looking more like the wide blades on a fan and encased behind a wire cage so as not to entangle their lines, bit the air. After Pitt and Giordino ran a few steps, the thrust of the motors took over, the 230-square-foot canopies inflated and the two men lifted into the sky.
Except for wearing a steel helmet and a body-armor vest, the only weapon Giordino carried was Pitt's 12-gauge Aserma Bulldog, which was slung across his chest. Pitt elected his battle-scarred Colt automatic. Heavier weapons would have made it difficult to keep the para-planes and their tiny engines in the air. There were other considerations as well. Their mission was not to engage in combat but to reach the wheelhouse and gain control of the ship. The Army assault team was relied on to handle any fighting.
Too late, only after they were in the air, did they see the Army helicopters shot out of the sky.
Less than an hour after the United States bypassed New Orleans, Pitt and Giordino met with General Oskar Olson, General Montaigne's old army buddy and commander of the National Guard of Louisiana, at the Guard Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the state capital of Louisiana. He had strictly forbidden Pitt and Giordino to accompany his assault team, brushing aside their argument that they were the only marine engineers on the scene familiar with the deck plan of the United States, and knowledgeable enough to take control of the wheelhouse and stop the ship before it reached Bayou Goula.
"This is an Army show," Olson declared, rapping the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other. For a man in his late fifties, he was youthful-looking, confident and buoyant. He was about the same size as Pitt but with a slight paunch at the waist that comes to most all men as they age. "There may be bloodshed. I can't allow civilians to get hurt, and certainly not you, Mr. Pitt, not the son of a United States senator. I don't need the hassle. If my men can't stop the ship, I'll order them to run it ashore."
"Is that your only plan after the ship is secured?" asked Pitt.
"How else do you stop a vessel the size of the Empire State Building?"
"The length of the United States is more than the width of the river below Baton Rouge. Unless someone stands at the helm who knows how to command the automated systems, the ship could easily go out of control and swing broadside across the channel before ramming both bow and stern into the riverbanks-a barrier that would effectively block all barge traffic for months."
"Sorry, gentlemen, I'm committed," said Olson, smiling, showing even but gapped white teeth. "Only after the ship has been secured will I allow you and Mr. Giordino to be airlifted aboard. Then you can do your thing and bring that monster to a quick halt and anchor her before she becomes a menace to river traffic."
"If it's all the same to you, General," said Pitt without warmth, "Al and I will make our own arrangements to come aboard."
Olson did not immediately absorb Pitt's words; his olive-brown eyes were far away. They were the eyes of an old warhorse whose nose had not sniffed the smells of combat for two decades but sensed one more battle was coming his way. "I warn you, Mr. Pitt, I will not tolerate any foolishness or interference. You will obey my orders."
"A question, General, if you please?" said Giordino.
"Shoot."
"If your team fails to take the ship, what then?"
"As insurance, I have a squadron of six M1A1 tanks, two self-propelled howitzers and a mobile one-hundred-six-millimeter mortar on their way to the levee a few miles downriver. More than enough firepower to blast the United States into scrap."
Pitt gave General Olson a very skeptical look indeed, but made no effort to reply.
"If that's it, gentlemen, I have an attack to carry out." Then, as if he was a school principal dismissing a pair of unruly boys, General Oskar Olson marched back to his office and closed the door.
The original plan of landing on the ship after it was seized by the Army assault team went down the toilet in less time than it takes to tell, Giordino mused ironically, as he flew less than fifty feet behind Pitt and slightly above. He didn't need a diagram on a blackboard to know their odds of being riddled with bullets or blasted into tiny molecules by heavy firearms were somewhere between ordained and a sure thing. And if those options weren't bad enough, there was still the onslaught from the Army to live through.
Dropping onto a rapidly moving ship in the dead of night without breaking several bones will not be a routine affair, thought Pitt. Faced with an inconceivable landing, their biggest difficulty would be the forty-mile-an-hour speed of the ship versus the barely twenty-five-mile crawl of the paraplanes. Only by coming in downwind of the ship could they increase their airspeed.
They could lower the odds slightly, he reasoned, by flying downriver, meeting the ship and circling in as it slowed while turning through the sharp bend at the old Evan Hall plantation.
Pitt wore yellow-lensed glasses to soften the darkness, and relied on the ambient illumination from the houses and cars traveling on the highways and roads on both sides of the river to guide his descent. Though he was in full control, he felt as if he was falling into a deep crevasse with some unspeakable minotaur rushing toward him out of the depths. He could see the giant ship now, more imagined than real, but materializing out of the night, the colossal funnels looming ominous and threatening.
There could be no error in judgment. He fought off an urge to pull a toggle and veer off to avoid crashing into the unyielding superstructure and smashing his body to pulp. Al, he knew with dead certainty, would follow him without an instant's hesitation whatever the consequence. He spoke into the radio attached inside his helmet.
"Al?"
"Here."
"Do you see the ship?"
"Like standing on railroad tracks inside a tunnel watching an express train come at you."
"She's slowing down through the bend. We'll get one chance and one chance only before she picks up speed again."
"Just in time for the buffet, I hope," he said, still hungry after not eating since breakfast.
"I'm going to make a left turn and land on the open deck behind the aft funnel."
"Right behind you," Giordino said laconically. "Mind the ventilators and don't forget to step aside for me."
Giordino's
resolution conveyed the loyalty he felt toward his best friend. That he would have accompanied Pitt into the deepest reaches of hell went without saying. They acted as one, almost as if each read the other's mind. From now until they came down on the deck of the United States, no more conversation would pass between them. It wasn't necessary.
Not requiring power to land, Pitt and Giordino hit the kill switches to their little motors to cut off all sound of their final approach. Pitt set up for his circular course and firmly pulled on the left toggle in preparation for a sweeping hook turn. Under their canopies, like a pair of black flying reptiles out of the Mesozoic era about to attack a galloping Sphinx, they swung over the east levee and then made a tight corkscrew turn toward the approaching ship, timing their descent to come from astern for their landing, much like a hobo running from a field onto a railroad track to catch the last freight car of a train.
No gunfire erupted from the ship. No shells reached up and shredded their canopies. They were coming in unseen, undetected and unheard by the armed men defending the ship. With the helicopters down, the Chinese fighting force was no longer focusing on what it thought was an empty sky.
As the deck with its two rows of low ventilators came into view behind the huge funnel, Pitt expertly adjusted and buried both toggles, causing his canopy to stall as he gradually flared down in the clear space between the ventilators. His landing gear-his legs and feet- lightly touched down on the surface of the deck as his lifeless canopy collapsed with the barest of whispers behind him. Not waiting to congratulate himself for landing uninjured, he quickly pulled the canopy and caged motor off to one side. Three seconds later, Giordino dropped out of the sky and made a picture-perfect landing less than six feet away.
"Is this where one of us is supposed to say, 'So far, so good'?" said Giordino softly as he released his harness and engine pack.
"No gunshot holes and no broken bones," Pitt whispered. "Who could ask for anything more?"
They moved into the shadow of the funnel and, while Giordino searched the darkness for signs of life, Pitt set a new frequency on his helmet radio and hailed Rudi Gunn, who was with the sheriff's deputies and a team of Army demolition experts on the highway above the Mystic Canal.
"Rudi, this is Pitt. Do you read me?"
Before a reply came back, he stiffened as a blast from the Aserma Bulldog intermingled with the staccato fire of an automatic rifle. He spun around and saw Giordino crouched on one knee, aiming the shotgun at an unseen target on the aft end of the deck.
"The natives aren't at all friendly," Giordino said with glacial calm. "One of them must have heard our motors, and came to investigate."
"Rudi, please answer," Pitt said, an urgent tone in his voice. "Dammit, Rudi, talk to me."
"I hear you, Dirk." Gunn's voice came resonant and precise through the earphones inside Pitt's helmet. "Are you on the ship?"
Gunn's words ended just as Giordino unleashed another two rounds from his shotgun. "It's getting a bit warm," he said. "I don't think we should hang around."
"On board, safe and sound for the moment," Pitt answered Gunn.
"Is that gunfire?" the unmistakable voice of Admiral Sandecker came over the radio.
" Al is celebrating the Fourth of July early. Did you find and cut the detonators on the explosives?"
"Bad news on this end," replied Sandecker soberly. "The army used a small charge to blow the doors to the tunnel at the end of the canal. We gained entrance and found an empty chamber."
"You've lost me, Admiral."
"I hate to be the bearer of sad tidings, but there are no explosives. If Qin Shang means to blast a hole in the levee, it's not anywhere around here."
43
THERE WAS FAR MORE LIGHT on the highway levee above the Mystic Canal. Portable floodlights and flashing red and blue lights lit up the river and surrounding countryside. Eight Army vehicles in their camouflage paint schemes mingled with a dozen sheriff's cars from Iberville Parish. Highway barricades had north and southbound traffic backed up for nearly a mile.
The group of men standing beside an Army command vehicle wore expressions of grave concern. Admiral Sandecker, Rudi Gunn, Sheriff Louis Marchand of Iberville Parish and General Olson looked like men who had wandered into a maze with no exit. General Olson was especially exasperated.
"A fool's errand," he snarled angrily. After being informed his helicopters were shot down and a dozen of his men feared dead, he no longer put up a cocky front. "We were sent on a fool's errand. All this talk about blowing up the levee is a myth. We're dealing with a gang of international terrorists. That's our real problem."
"I'm forced to agree with the general," said Sheriff Marchand. No redneck, this man. He was trim and smartly dressed in a tailored uniform. He was polished, urbane and extremely street-smart. "The plan to blow up the levee to divert the river seems most implausible. The terrorists who stole the United States have a different goal in mind."
"They are not terrorists in the usual sense," said Sandecker. "We know for a fact who is behind the operation, and they did not steal the ship. This is an incredibly complex and well-financed operation to divert the flow of the Mississippi past the port of Sungari."
"Sounds like some kind of fantastic dream," retorted the sheriff.
"A nightmare," Sandecker said flatly. He looked at Marchand. "What's been done about evacuating residents from the Atchafalaya Valley?"
"Every sheriff's department and all military personnel are alerting the farms, towns and neighborhoods to the possible flood and ordering them to go to higher ground," replied the sheriff. "If there is a threat to lives, we hope to keep casualties to a minimum."
"Most residents will never get the word in time," Sandecker said seriously. "When that levee splits apart, every morgue between here and the Texas border will be working overtime."
"If your conclusion is correct," said Marchand, "and I pray to God you and Commander Gunn are wrong, we're already too late to conduct a search for explosives up and down the river before the ship arrives some time in the next hour-"
"Make that fifteen minutes," interrupted Sandecker.
"The United States will never reach here," Olson said emphatically. He paused to glance at his watch. "My battle group of national guardsmen under the able command of Colonel Bob Turner, a decorated veteran of the Gulf War, should be in place and ready to fire from the levee at point-blank range any minute."
"You might as well send bees after a grizzly bear," snorted Sandecker. "From the time she passes in front of your firepower until she passes out of sight around the next bend your men will have no more than eight or ten minutes. As a Navy man, I can tell you that fifty guns won't stop a ship the size of the United States in that length of time."
"Our high-velocity, armor-piercing rounds will make short work of her," persisted Olson.
"The liner is no battleship and carries no armor, sir. The superstructure is not steel but aluminum. Your armor-penetrating shells will dart through one side and out the other without detonating, unless a lucky shot strikes a support beam. You'd be far better off firing fragmentation shells."
"Should the ship survive the Army's blitz," said Marchand, "matters little. The bridge at Baton Rouge was designed and built low specifically to prevent oceangoing ships from continuing any farther up the Mississippi. The United States will have to stop or destroy herself."
"You people still don't get it," Sandecker said in frustration. "That ship is rated at over forty thousand tons. It will go through your bridge like an enraged elephant through a greenhouse."
"The United States will never reach Baton Rouge," Gunn maintained. "Where we stand is exactly where Qin Shang intends to blow the levee and scuttle the ship as a diversionary dam."
"Then where are the explosives?" asked Olson sarcastically.
"If what you say is true, gentlemen," said Marchand slowly, "why not simply ram the liner through the levee. Wouldn't it produce an opening with the same result as explosives?"
/>
Sandecker shook his head. "It may breach the levee, Sheriff, but it would also plug its own hole."
The admiral had no sooner finished speaking than the sound of cannonfire began thundering a few short miles to the south. The highway quaked as the tank's guns roared out in unison, their flashes lighting up the horizon. Every man on the highway stopped and stared wordlessly downriver. The younger ones, not having served during a war, had never heard a cannon barrage before and stood enthralled. General Oskar Olson's eyes gleamed like a man looking at a beautiful woman.
"My men have opened up on her," he exclaimed excitedly. "Now we'll see what concentrated firepower at point-blank range can do."