"Nobody hiding down here. A waste of energy to bother looking. We put enough lead into him to use his corpse for an anchor."
"I won't feel satisfied until I see the body," said Amaru in a businesslike tone.
"You want a body," said the gunman, pulling back through the access door, "then drag a grappling hook h rough the silt. That's the only way you'll ever see him again."
"Back to the forward boarding ramp," Amaru ordered. "The fishing boat is returning."
Pitt could hear the diesel throb and feel the beat of the fishing boat's propellers through the water as it pulled alongside to take off Samson and his mercenary scum. Pitt wondered vaguely what his friends would say to him for running out on them even though it was a desperate measure to save their lives.
Nothing was going according to plan. Sarason was two steps ahead of Pitt.
Already Pitt had allowed Loren and Gunn to suffer at the hands of the art thieves. Already he'd stupidly done nothing while the crew and ferryboat were captured. Already he'd given away the secret to Huascar's treasure. The way he was handling events, Pitt wouldn't have been surprised if Sarason and his cronies elected him chairman of the board of Solpemachaco.
Nearly an hour passed before he sensed the sounds of the fishing boat die in the distance. This was followed by the beating rotor of a helicopter lifting off the ferry, indisputably the NUMA helicopter. Pitt cursed. Another gift to the criminals.
Darkness had fallen and no lights reflected on the water. Pitt wondered why the men on the upper decks had taken so long to evacuate the vessel. His absolute conviction was that one or more would be left behind to take care of him in the event the dead came back to life. Amaru and Samson could not kill the others unless they knew with cold certainty that Pitt was dead and could tell no tales to the authorities, especially the news media.
Pitt could feel apprehension in his chest like a stone tied to his heart. He was at a distinct disadvantage.
If Loren and Rudi had been removed from the Alhambra, he had to get ashore somehow and inform Giordino and the Customs officials in the U.S. border town of Calexico of the situation. And what of the crew? Caution dictated that he must be certain Amaru and his friends were no longer on board. If one of them stayed behind to see if he was only playing dead, they could wait him out. They had all the time in the world. He had practically none.
He pushed away from the float, curled over and dived under the hull. The bottom silt seemed closer to the keel than he remembered from his earlier dive. It didn't seem logical until he passed under a bilge exhaust pipe and felt a strong pull of suction. Pitt didn't have to be told that the seacocks in the bilge had been opened. Amaru was scuttling the Alhambra.
He turned and swam slowly toward the end of the ferryboat where he had left the helicopter. He took the risk of being seen by surfacing briefly alongside the hull beneath the deck overhang to take another breath. After nearly an hour and a half's immersion, he felt waterlogged. His skin looked like that of a shriveled old man of ninety-five. He did not feel overly fatigued, but he sensed his strength was reduced by a good 20 percent. He slipped under the hull again and made for the shallow rudders fitted on the end. They soon loomed out of the murky water. He reached out and gripped one and slowly raised his face out of the water.
No leering face stared back, no guns aimed between his eyes. He hung on to the rudder and floated, relaxing and building back his strength. He listened, but no sound came from the auto deck above.
Finally, he pulled himself up far enough to lift his eyes over the raised edge of the entry/exit ramp. The Alhambra was in complete darkness with neither interior nor exterior lights showing. Her decks appeared still and lifeless. As he suspected, the NUMA helicopter was gone. The tingling fear of the unknown traveled up his spine. Like an old fort on the western frontier before a surprise attack by the Apaches, it was far too quiet.
This wasn't one of his better days, Pitt thought. His friends were captured and held hostage. They might be dead. A thought he refused to dwell on. He'd lost another NUMA aircraft. Stolen by the very criminals he was supposed to entice into a trap. The ferryboat was sinking beneath him and he was dead certain one or more killers were lurking somewhere on board to exact a terrible revenge. All in all he'd rather have been in East St. Louis.
How long he hung on the rudder he couldn't be sure. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen. His eyes were accustomed to the dark, but all he could see inside the big auto deck was the dim reflection of the chrome bumpers and radiator grill of the Pierce Arrow. He hung there waiting to see a movement or hear the faint sound of stealth. The deck that stretched into the gaping cavern looked frightening. But he had to enter it if he wanted a weapon, he thought nervously, any weapon to protect himself from men who intended to turn him into sushi.
Unless Amaru's men had made a professional search of the old Travelodge, they wouldn't have found inventor John Browning's dependable Colt .45 automatic where Pitt kept it in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator.
He gripped the deck overhang and heaved himself on board. It took Pitt all of five seconds to run across the deck, sweep the door of the trailer against its stops, and leap inside. In a clockwork motion, he tore open the door to the refrigerator and pulled open the vegetable drawer. The Colt automatic lay where he'd left it. For a brief instant relief washed over him like a waterfall as he gripped the trusty weapon in his hand.
His feeling of deliverance was short-lived. The Colt felt light in his hand, too light. He pulled back the slide and ejected the magazine. It and the firing chamber were empty. With mushrooming despair and desperation he checked the drawer beside the stove that held the kitchen knives. They were gone, along with all the silverware. The only weapon in the trailer was the seemingly useless Colt automatic.
Cat and mouse.
They were out there all right. Pitt now knew Amaru was going to take his time and toy with his prey before dismembering him and throwing the pieces over the side. Pitt treated himself to a few moments for strategy. He sat down in the dark on the trailer's bed and calmly began planning his next moves.
If any of the killers were haunting the auto deck, they could easily have shot, knifed, or bashed Pitt with a club during his dash to the trailer. For that matter, there was nothing stopping them from breaking in and ending it here. Amaru was a sly hombre, Pitt grudgingly admitted to himself. The South American had guessed Pitt was still alive and would head for any available weapon at the first opportunity.
Searching the trailer and finding the gun was shrewd. Removing the bullets but leaving the gun in its place was downright sadistic. That was merely the first step in a game of torment and misery before the final deathblow. Amaru intended to make Pitt twist in the wind before he killed him.
First things first, Pitt decided. Ghouls were lurking in the dark all right, ghouls who wanted to murder him. They thought he was as defenseless as a baby, and he was on a sinking ship with nowhere to go.
And that was precisely what he wanted them to think.
If Amaru was in no rush, neither was he.
Pitt leisurely removed his wet clothes and soggy shoes and toweled himself dry. Next he donned a dark gray pair of pants, a black cotton sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. Then he made and calmly ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank two glasses of Crystal Light. Feeling rejuvenated, he pulled open a small drawer beneath the bed and checked the contents of a leather gun pouch. The spare magazine was gone, just as he knew it would be. But a small flashlight was there, and in one corner of the drawer he found a small plastic bottle with a label advertising its contents as vitamin supplement A, C, and beta carotene. He shook the bottle and grinned like a happy camper when it rattled.
He unscrewed the lid and poured eight .45-caliber bullets into his hand. Things are looking up, he thought. Amaru's cunning fell a notch below perfection. Pitt fed seven bullets into the magazine and one in the firing chamber. Now Pitt could shoot back, and the good old Alhambra was not about to sink above
her lower deck overhang once her keel settled into the shallow bottom.
Just one more manifestation of Pitt's law, he thought "Every villain has a plan with at least one flaw."
Pitt glanced at his watch. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since he entered the trailer. He rummaged through a clothing drawer until he found a dark blue ski mask and slipped it over his head. Next he found his Swiss army knife in the pocket of a pair of pants thrown over a chair.
He pulled a 'small ring in the floor and raised a trapdoor he'd built into the trailer for additional storage space. He lifted out the storage box, set it aside and squirmed through the narrow opening left in the floor. Lying on the deck beneath the trailer, he peered into the darkness and listened. Not a sound. His unseen hunters were patient men.
Coldly and deliberately, like a methodical man with a decisive purpose, who was in no doubt as to the outcome of his intended actions, Pitt rolled from under the trailer and moved like a phantom through a nearby open hatch down a companion ladder into the engine room.
He moved cautiously, careful not to make sudden movements or undue sound.
Amaru would not cut him any slack.
With no one to tend them, the boilers that created heat to make the steam that powered the walking beam engines had cooled to such a degree that Pitt could lay the palm of his bare hand against their thick riveted sides without blistering his skin. He leveled the gun with his right hand and held the flashlight as far to his left as his outstretched arm could allow. Only the unwary aim a beam in front of them. If a cornered man is going to shoot at the person shining a light into his eyes, he unerringly points his weapon where the body is expected to be, directly behind the light.
The engine room looked deserted, but then he tensed. There was a soft mumbling sound like somebody trying to talk through a gag. Pitt swung the beam of the flashlight up into the giant A-frames that supported the walking beam. Someone was up there. Four of them were up there.
Gordo Padilla, his assistant engineer, a man whose name Pitt had not learned, and the two deckhands, Jesus and Gato, all hung upside down, tightly bound and gagged with duct tape, their eyes pleading. Pitt pried open the largest blade of the Swiss army knife and quickly cut them down, freeing their hands and allowing them to pull the tape from their mouths.
"Muchas gracias, amigo," Padilla gasped as the tape tore out a dozen hairs of his moustache. "Blessed be the Virgin Mary you came when you did. They were going to cut our throats like sheep."
"When did you see them last?" asked Pitt softly.
"No more than ten minutes ago. They could return at any second."
"You've got to get away from the boat."
"I can't remember when we dropped the lifeboats." Padilla shrugged with a manana display of indifference. "The davits and motors are probably rusted solid and the boats are rotted."
"Can't you swim?" Pitt asked desperately.
Padilla shook his head. "Not very well. Jesus can't swim at all. Sailors do not like to go in the water,"
Then his face lit up under the beam of the flashlight. "There is a small six-man raft tied to the railing near the galley."
"You'd better hope it still floats." He handed Padilla his knife. "Take this to cut away the raft."
"What about you? Aren't you coming with us?"
"Give me ten minutes to conduct a quick search of the ship for the others. If I've found no sign of them by then, you and your crew get free in the raft while I create a diversion."
Padilla embraced Pitt. "Luck be with you."
It was time to move on.
Before he traveled to the upper decks, Pitt dropped into the water that was rapidly filling the bilges and turned off the valves of the seacocks. He decided against climbing back up the companion ladder or using a stairway. He had the uneasy feeling that somehow Amaru was following his every move. He climbed up the engine to the top of the steam cylinder and then took a Jacob's ladder to the top of the A-frame before stepping off onto the top deck of the ferry just aft of its twin smokestacks.
Pitt felt no fear of Amaru. Pitt had won the first round in Peru because Amaru wrote him off as a dead man after dropping the safety line into the sacred pool. The South American killer was not infallible. He would err again because his mind was clouded with hate and revenge.
Pitt worked his way down after searching both pilothouses. He found no sign of Loren or Rudi in the vast passenger seating section, the galley, or the crew's quarters. The search went quickly.
Never knowing who or what he might encounter in the dark, or when, Pitt investigated most of the ship on his hands and knees, scurrying from nook to cranny like a crab, using whatever cover was available. The ship seemed as deserted as a cemetery, but by no stretch of his imagination did he believe for a moment the killers had abandoned the ship.
The rules had not changed. Loren and Rudi Gunn had been removed from the ferry alive because Sarason had a reasonably good hunch Pitt was still alive. The mistake was trusting the murder to a man fired with vengeance. Amaru was too sick with hate to take Pitt out cleanly. There was too much satisfaction in making the man who took away his manhood suffer the tortures of the damned. Loren and Rudi Gunn had a sword hanging over their heads, but it wouldn't fall until the word went out that Pitt was absolutely and convincingly terminated.
The ten minutes were up. There was nothing left for him but to cause a distraction so Padilla and his crew could paddle the raft into the darkness. Once he was certain they were away Pitt would try to swim to shore.
What saved him in the two seconds after he detected the soft sounds of bare feet padding across the deck was a lightning fall to his hands and knees. It was an obsolete football tackle that no longer worked with more sophisticated training techniques. The movement was pure reflex. If he had swung around, flicked on the flashlight and squeezed the trigger at the dark mass that burst out of the night, he would have lost both hands and his head under the blade of a machete that sliced the air like an aircraft propeller.
The man that tore out of the dark could not halt his forward momentum. His knees struck Pitt's crouching body and he flew forward out of control as if launched by a huge spring and crashed heavily onto the deck, the machete spinning over the side. Rolling to one side, Pitt beamed the light on his assailant and pulled the trigger of the Colt. The report was deafening, the bullet entering the killer's chest just under the armpit. It was a killing shot. A short gasp and the body on the deck shriveled and went still.
"A nice piece of work, gringo," Amaru's voice boomed through a loudspeaker. "Manuel was one of my best men."
Pitt did not waste his breath on a reply. His mind rapidly turned over the situation. It suddenly became clear to him that Amaru had followed his movements once he reached the open decks. The need for stealth was finished. They knew where he was, but he couldn't see them. The game was over. He could only hope Padilla and his men were going over the side unnoticed.
For effect, he fired three more shots in the general direction Amaru's voice came from.
"You missed." Amaru laughed. "Not even close."
Pitt stalled by firing one shot every few seconds until the gun was empty. He had run out of delaying tactics and could do no more. His situation was made even more desperate when Amaru, or one of his men, turned on the ferryboat's navigation and deck lights, leaving him as exposed as an actor on an empty stage under a spotlight. He pressed his back against a bulkhead and stared at the railing outside the galley. The raft was gone-- the lines were cut and dangling. Padilla and the rest had slipped into the darkness before the lights came on.
"I'll make you a deal you don't deserve," said Amaru in a congenial tone. "Give up now and you can die quickly. Resist and your death will come very slowly."
Pitt didn't require the services of a mediator to explain the depth of Amaru's intent. His options were somewhat limited. Amaru's tone reminded him of the Mexican bandit who tried to coax Walter Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and Tim Holt from their gold diggings
in the motion picture Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
"Do not waste our time making up your mind. We have other--"
Pitt wasn't in the mood to hear more. He was as certain as he could ever be that Amaru was trying to hold his attention while another of the murderers crept close enough to stick a knife somewhere it would hurt. He did not have the slightest intention of waiting to be made sport of by a gang of sadists. He sprinted across the deck and leaped over the side of the ferry for the second time that evening.
A gold-medal diver would have gracefully soared into the air and performed any number of jackknifes, twists, and somersaults before cleanly entering the water 15 meters (50 feet) below. He'd have also broken his neck and several vertebrae after crashing into the bottom silt only two meters below the surface. Pitt had no aspirations of ever trying out for the U.S. diving team. He went over the side feet first before doubling up and striking the water like a cannonball.
Amaru and his remaining two men ran to the edge of the top deck and looked down.
"Can you see him?" asked Amaru, peering into the dark water.
"No, Tupac, he must have gone under the hull."
"The water is turning dirty," exclaimed another voice. "He must have buried himself in the bottom mud."
"This time we're not taking any chances. Juan, the case of concussion grenades we brought from Guaymas. We'll crush him to pulp. Throw them about five meters from the hull, especially in the water around the paddlewheels."
Pitt made a crater in the seafloor. He didn't impact hard enough to cause any physical damage, but enough to stir up a huge cloud of silt. He uncoiled and swam away from the Alhambra, unseen from above.
He was afraid that once he cleared the cover of murk he might still be seen by the killers. This was not to be. A freshening breeze from the south turned the water surface into a light chop that caused a refraction the lights from the ferryboat could not penetrate.
He swam underwater as far as he could until his lungs began to burn. When he came to the surface, he broke it lightly, trusting in the ski mask to keep his head invisible in the black water. A hundred meters (328 feet) and he was beyond the reach of the lights illuminating the ferry. He could barely distinguish the dark figures moving about on the upper deck. He wondered why they weren't shooting into the water.