A sergeant came rushing out of the command truck, snapped to attention in front of General Olson and saluted. "Sir, the troops and deputies manning the north highway barricade report that a pair of tractor trailers have crashed through at a high rate of speed and are heading this way."
They all spontaneously turned and stared north, seeing two large trucks speeding side by side down the southbound lanes of the highway, the sheriff patrol cars giving chase with sirens and flashing lights. A patrol car cut in front of one of the trucks and slowed in an attempt to pull it to a stop on the road shoulder, but the truck driver deliberately swerved into the patrol car and struck it in the rear, sending it spinning wildly off the highway.
"The idiot!" Marchand snapped. "He's going to jail for that."
Only Sandecker instantly recognized the threat. "Clear the road!" he shouted to Marchand and Olson. "For God's sake clear the road."
Then Gunn knew. "The explosives are in those trucks!" he yelled.
Olson stood shock-still in uncomprehending confusion. His first reaction, his instantaneous conclusion, was that both Sandecker and Gunn had gone mad. Not Marchand. He responded without hesitation and began ordering his deputies to evacuate the area. Finally, Olson came out of his trance and shouted orders to his subordinates to get all men and vehicles a safe distance away.
Crowded as the highway might have been, guardsmen and deputies scattered to their cars and trucks and accelerated away, leaving the stretch of road totally empty within sixty seconds. Their response was as immediate as it was instinctive once they became aware of the danger. The trucks could be seen clearly now as they sped closer. They were semitrucks and trailers, big eighteen-wheelers capable of carrying a load weighing over eighty thousand pounds. No markings or advertising was painted on their sides. They came on seemingly unstoppable, their drivers hunched over the steering wheels, acting as though they were bent on suicide.
Their intentions became unmistakable as they skidded to a stop adjacent to the Mystic Canal, one of them jackknifing across the center strip dividing the highway. Unseen and unnoticed during the bedlam, a helicopter appeared out of the darkness and dropped between the trucks. The drivers leaped from their cabs, ran to the aircraft and scrambled inside. Almost before the last driver's feet had left the ground, the helicopter's pilot lifted the craft into the sky, whipped it on a nearly ninety-degree bank and disappeared into the night toward the Atchafa-laya River to the west.
As they raced south in the backseat of Sheriff Marchand's patrol car, Sandecker and Gunn twisted around and stared back through the rear window. Behind the wheel, Marchand kept darting his eyes from the highway and the vehicles speeding around him into the sideview mirror. "If only the Army's demolition men could have had time to defuse the explosives."
"It would have taken them an hour just to find and figure out the detonating mechanism," said Gunn.
"They won't blow the levee just yet," Sandecker said quietly. "Not before the United States arrives."
"The admiral is right," Gunn agreed. "If the levee is breached before the United States can be angled across the channel to divert the water, enough of the Mississippi's flow will gush into the canal to leave the liner with her keel in the mud."
"There is still a slight chance," said Sandecker. He tapped Marchand on the shoulder. "Can you raise General Olson on your radio?"
"I can if he's listening," replied the sheriff. He reached for the microphone and began asking for Olson to respond. After repeating the request several times, a voice answered. "Corporal Welch in the command truck. I read you, Sheriff. I'll patch in the general for you."
There was a pause punctuated by static, and then Olson answered. "Sheriff, what do you want? I'm busy getting battle reports from my tanks."
"One moment, sir, for Admiral Sandecker."
Sandecker leaned over the front seat and took the microphone. "General, do you have any aircraft in the air?"
"Why do you ask?"
"I believe they intend to set off the explosives by radio from the helicopter that snatched the drivers."
Olson's voice suddenly sounded old and very tired. "Sorry, Admiral, the only aircraft I had at my immediate command were two helicopters. And now they and the men inside are gone."
"You can't call up any jets from the nearest Air Force base?"
"I can try," Olson replied solemnly, "but there is no guarantee they could scramble and get here in time."
"I understand, thank you."
"Not to worry, Admiral," Olson said, his self-assurance all but gone. "She won't get past my tanks." But this time around he didn't sound entirely as if he meant it.
The gunfire downriver came like a death knell as the United States presented her broadside to the gunners inside the tanks. What General Olson did not yet know was that it wasn't a one-sided battle.
Sandecker passed the microphone back to Marchand and sagged into the rear seat, anxiety and defeat etched in his eyes. "That bastard Qin Shang has outsmarted us all, and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it except stand by helplessly and watch a lot of people die."
"And let us not forget Dirk and Al," he said grimly. "They must be taking it from the Chinese as well as Olson's tanks and howitzers."
"God help them," Sandecker murmured. "God help everybody who lives on or near the Atchafalaya River if the United States comes through the chaos."
44
THE UNITED STATES did not reel, she barely quivered as the guns on the turrets of the six tanks opened up on her, their flashes lighting up the sky. At less than two hundred yards it was impossible to miss. As if by witchcraft, black, jagged holes appeared in the funnels and upper decks that once housed the cocktail lounges, cinemas and libraries. As Admiral Sandecker had predicted, every round in the first salvo from the tanks' 120-millimeter guns was ineffective. The armor-penetrating rounds passed through the ship's aluminum bulkheads as if they were made of cardboard, buried themselves in the marshlands on the other side of the west-bank levee and exploded harmlessly. The 106-millimeter mortar rounds fired from the launchers of the M125 carriers arched high into the sky and rained down on the exposed decks, gouging craters in the decks below but causing little serious damage. The tried-and-true 155-millimeter high-explosive fragmentation shells that spat from the Paladin self-propelled howitzers were a different story. Their fire battered the superliner unmercifully, causing significant destruction but none that affected her vital machinery deep within the bowels of her hull.
One shell plowed into what had been the main dining room in the center of the hull and burst, shattering the bulkheads and the old stairway. The second exploded against the base of the foremast and toppled it over the side. The great ship shook off the onslaught. And then it was the turn of the Chinese weapons team of professional fighters who were geared to put up a tactical confrontation despite the odds. The battle was not about to be one-sided. There would be no turning the cheek after the first slap.
Their missile launchers, though armed for surface-to-air and not antitank, lashed out. One struck the lead tank without penetrating its armor but burst against the barrel of the 120-millimeter gun, effectively putting it out of action. It also killed the tank commander, who was standing in the hatch observing the results of the barrage and who never expected return fire. Another projectile struck the circular opening in the roof of the mortar carrier, killing two men, wounding three and setting the vehicle on fire.
Colonel Robert Turner, directing the fire from within his XM4 command-and-control vehicle, was slow to comprehend the magnitude of his mission. The last thing he would have predicted was for the old passenger liner to shoot back. It's downright outrageous, he thought. He immediately called Olson and said in a voice vague with shock, "We're taking hits, General. I just lost my mortar unit."
"What are they using?" Olson demanded.
"They're firing portable missiles at us from the ship! Fortunately, they don't appear to be armor-piercing. But I've taken casualties." As he s
poke another missile blew the treads off a third tank, but its crew gamely kept up their rate of fire, hammering the rapidly passing liner.
"What is the effect of your fire?"
"Severe damage to the superstructure but no vital hits. It's like trying to stop a charging rhino with air-pellet guns."
"Don't let up!" Olson ordered. "I want that ship stopped."
Then, almost as suddenly as the hail of missiles from the ship was launched, their fire slackened off. Not until later was the reason known. Pitt and Giordino, risking their lives to halt the counterfire, had shot down the two Chinese missile-launching teams.
Scuttling across the deck on their stomachs to avoid the hurricane of shrapnel and to make aim difficult for the Chinese riflemen who had discovered their presence, they moved around the giant aft funnel and lay prone, peering cautiously down onto the lifeboat deck, whose davits were now empty. Almost directly below, four Chinese soldiers crouched behind a steel bulwark, busily loading and firing their portable missiles, completely disregarding the hail of explosions erupting around them.
"They're murdering our guys on the levee," Giordino shouted in Pitt's ear, his words barely heard over the bedlam.
"Take the two on the left," Pitt yelled back. "The others are mine."
Giordino took careful aim with the shotgun and fired two shots. The two men beneath him never knew what hit them. They fell to the deck like stuffed dolls in almost the same moment as Pitt's Colt dropped their comrades a few feet away. Now, but for a curtain of small-arms fire that was directed at any soldier who showed himself through a hatch in the armored vehicles, no missiles came from the ship.
Pitt grabbed Giordino's arm to get his attention. "We've got to get to the bridge-"
His voice was cut off in a painful gasp, his arms and legs suddenly thrust into the air as his body was catapulted against a ventilator, driving the air from his lungs. A tremendous blast rang in his ears as the deck beneath him was heaved up in an enormous explosion. A shell from a howitzer had smashed into the crew's cabins below and burst, leaving a jagged hole filled with tangled wreckage and shattered metal. Almost before the debris had settled, Pitt was fighting off the blackness that seeped into his vision. With agonizing slowness he forced himself to sit up. His first words muttered through a cut and bleeding lip were, "Damn the Army, damn their hides." But he knew they were just doing their job, fighting for their own lives, and doing it well.
The mist slowly cleared from his mind, but there were still blinding flashes of white and orange colors before his eyes. He looked down and saw that Giordino was lying across his legs. He reached out and shook his shoulder. "Al, are you hurt?"
Giordino blinked one of his dark brooding eyes open and stared up. "Hurt? I feel like I've had root canals all over my body."
As they lay recovering, another wave of shells pounded into the ship. The tanks had lowered their guns now and were firing into the steel hull. Now their high-explosive antitank armor began to score, burning through the steel hull plates before smashing into one of the thousands of the ship's bulkheads and exploding. One howitzer zeroed in on the bridge and soon the structure became a mass of jagged wreckage that looked as if a giant had chopped it with a cleaver. The great ship stubbornly bored through the exploding hell, looming huge in front of the gunners as they loaded and fired with incredible calm. The national guardsmen, often called weekend warriors, fought like seasoned veterans. But like a wounded whale that shook off a cloud of harpoons and swam on, the United States absorbed the punishment they dished out without so much as a fractional drop in speed.
The ship was almost past the gauntlet now. Desperately, the forces on the levee loosed one final wall of devastating fire that tore the night air apart. A crescendo of explosions rocked the battered, once-proud superliner. There was no fire, no mushrooming balls of flame or billowing clouds of smoke. Her designer William Francis Gibbs, would have been saddened by her mauling but pleased that his fetish for fireproofing had resisted any attempt to turn his achievement into a fiery shambles. In his command vehicle, Colonel Turner watched in utter frustration as the juggernaut showed her stern and disappeared into the night.
Without warning, three figures rushed out of the blackness toward Pitt and Giordino. A burst of gunfire cut across the deck. Giordino stumbled but regained his feet, firing off a blast from the 12-gauge Aserma that dropped the Chinese who had managed to squeeze the trigger of his Chinese-copied Kalashnikov AKM automatic rifle. Then the remaining four men fell on each other in a thrashing melee of bodies. Pitt felt the muzzle of a gun jam into his ribs, but he knocked it aside a millisecond before a stream of bullets whipped past his hip. He brought the Colt's barrel down on his opponent's head once, twice, three times and clubbed him to the deck. In icy disregard for his injury, Giordino thrust his shotgun against his assailant's chest at the same time he pulled the trigger. The Aserma's muzzle erupted with a muffled roar that knocked the Chinese fighter backward as if he had been jerked off his feet by a horse galloping in the opposite direction. Only then did the feisty little Italian crumple to the deck.
Pitt dropped to his friend's side. "Where are you hit?"
"The bastard got me in the leg above the knee," Giordino answered in a hoarse grunt. "I think it's broken."
"Let me take a look."
Giordino pushed Pitt away. "Never mind me. Get to the bridge and stop this tub before the levee blows." Then he forced a grin through the pain. "That's what we came for."
There were only two more miles left to go and five minutes to get there. And then Pitt was charging like a demon struggling through the shattered wreckage toward the remains of the wheelhouse. He fought his way through the maze of fallen wires left by the broken foremast and came to a shocked halt. The bridge structure hardly existed anymore. Nothing could be recognized of it. The walls of the wheelhouse looked to have collapsed outward. Miraculously, the interior console had survived with minor damage. The body of Captain Li Hung-chang lay on the floor covered with glass and debris. His fixed expression, his open, staring eyes and few spots of blood on his uniform almost made him seem as though he was looking up through the vanished roof, staring at the stars. Pitt instantly recognized that he had been killed by concussion.
The master helmsman still stood, his lifeless hands gripping the wheel. It seemed that a curse from the devil had refused to let him fall beside his captain. Pitt saw with blood-chilling horror that his head was gone, taken off cleanly at the shoulders.
Pitt glanced through the shattered remains of the bridge window. Mystic Canal was less than a mile away. Far below, the crew had abandoned the engine room and were rushing onto the outer decks in expectation of being evacuated by helicopter.
All gunfire had stopped now and the thunderous tumult became a hushed and unimaginable silence. Pitt's hands played over the levers and switches of the console, trying frantically to cut all power throughout the ship. But without a chief engineer to carry out the commands, the enormous turbines ignored any attempt to stop them. No power on earth could stop the United States now. Her massive bulk and incredible impetus drove her on. In his final moment of life Ming Lin had begun to turn the wheel and send the ship on an oblique angle, lining her up to be scuttled, as dictated by Qin Shang's master plan. Her bow was already coming around toward the east bank of the river.
Pitt knew the explosive charges far below in the ship's bilge were set and timed to go off and sink the ship at any second. He wasted no time in staring helplessly at the obscene apparition at the helm. He pushed the mutilated body off to one side and took the wheel at the exact instant the trucks on the highway, now only a few hundred yards away, exploded with a thunderous roar that shook the ground and churned the river. He felt the icy needles of disaster in his spine. Hopelessness swamped him in a fleeting rage. But his resolve, his infinite endurance, would never allow him to fail. He had developed a sixth sense after having survived death over the years. The fear of hopelessness came and went. He was oblivious to any
thing and everything, except for what he must do.
With unwavering concentration, he gripped the wheel and desperately spun it, turning the rudder to head the ship on a new course before her bottom was blown out.
Back on the deck beneath the colossal funnels where Pitt had left him, Al Giordino pulled himself up against the base of a ventilator. The pain in his leg had receded to little more than a dull ache. Running figures suddenly appeared, dressed head to toe in black night-fighting attire. Believing him to be among the dead scattered about the deck, they rushed past and ignored him. As he lay there a black helicopter abruptly shot out of the dark and darted over the east levee. The pilot did not waste moments hovering but dove right in, barely clearing the aft railing by less than two feet and dropping onto the same deck behind the rear funnel where Giordino and Pitt had landed their paraplanes. Almost before the helicopter's wheels slammed onto the deck, Qin Shang's men were diving inside through the open door in the fuselage.
Giordino checked the drum on his Aserma shotgun and counted seven 12-gauge rounds left. He leaned to one side, stretched out his hand and retrieved a Kalashnikov AKM rifle dropped by one of the dead ship defenders. He punched out the clip and noted that it was only a quarter empty before shoving it back in the magazine. Wincing from pain, he struggled to one knee and aimed the Aserma at the helicopter, keeping the AKM automatic rifle as a backup.