He hesitated, making sure they all had leaped from the tram. Then he punched up the numbers until the dial read sixty miles an hour, before running from the cab to the door and jumping as the tram car quickly accelerated toward its fastest speed. He struck soft earth feet first before rolling with the momentum of a cannonball into a bed of ornamental bonsai trees, crushing their distorted branches and mashing them into the soil with his weight. He staggered to his feet, one knee protested in pain, but he was still capable of active movement.
Giordino was beside him, helping him regain his balance. He was relieved to see Pat and Megan, their faces clear of expressions of pain. They seemed more concerned with brushing the soil and pine needles from their hair. The tram had disappeared around the bend, but the stairway leading to the first pier was no more than fifty feet away, and no guards were nearby.
"Where are we going?" Pat asked, regaining a small measure of composure.
"Before we catch our plane," answered Pitt, "we have to take a little boat trip."
He caught her by the arm and dragged her behind him, as Giordino hustled Megan along. They ran along the track until they reached the stairs leading down to Pier Number One. As Pitt suspected, the security guards had encircled the station at Z Section two hundred yards farther up the track in the center of the marina. Confusion reigned, as the tram car shot past the station and around the next bend on its way along the port side of the ship. The guards, completely deluded into thinking their prey was still hiding in the speeding car, hurriedly launched a pursuit, as the security director in command ordered the power circuits for the tram system to be closed down.
Pitt figured it would take them another seven minutes before the guards could reach the stopped car and realize that it was empty. If he and the others weren't off the ship by then, capture was a foregone conclusion.
None of the workers on the pier paid any attention to them as they calmly strolled down the steps and onto the pier. There were three boats moored between the first and second piers, a small twenty-four-foot sailboat, a vessel that Pitt recognized as a forty-two-foot Grand Banks cabin cruiser, and a twenty-four-foot classic runabout. "Climb aboard the big powerboat," said Pitt, walking placidly across the pier.
"I guess we're not going to retrieve our dive gear," said Giordino.
"Pat and Megan could never make it back alive in the water. Better we take our chances on the surface."
"The runabout is faster," Giordino pointed out.
"True," Pitt agreed, "but the security force will be suspicious of a fast boat speeding away from the shipyard. The Grand Banks powerboat, cruising calmly across the water, won't create near the attention."
There was a dockhand hosing down the deck when Pitt walked up and stopped at the gangway.
"Nice boat," he said, smiling.
"Heh?" The dockhand looked at him, unable to understand English.
Pitt moved up the gangway and gestured at the no-nonsense lines of the Grand Banks 42. "She's a nice boat," he repeated, boldly stepping into the bridge cabin.
The dockhand followed him inside, protesting his trespass on the boat, but once they were out of sight of other workers on the pier, Pitt lashed out with his fist and decked him with a solid blow to the jaw.
Then he leaned out the doorway and announced, "Al, cast off the lines. You ladies, all aboard."
Pitt stood for a moment and studied the instruments on the console. He turned the key and hit the twin starter buttons. Down below in the engine compartment, a pair of big marine diesel engines turned over, the fuel inside their firing chambers compressing and igniting to the tune of high-pitched clacking. He slid open the starboard window and peered out. Giordino had untied the fore and aft lines and was climbing on board.
Pitt engaged the reverse drive and very slowly began edging the boat away from the pier and backing it toward the open water twenty yards astern. He passed two dockworkers installing a railing around the pier, and waved. They waved back. It's so much easier to be sneaky, he thought, than to burst out of the corral like a wild bull.
The boat passed the end of the pier into open water. Now the stern of the great ship soared above them. Pitt moved the shift lever into Forward and steered the Grand Banks on a course along the Ulrich Woof. To reach the fjord and escape the shipyard, they had to cruise entirely around the floating titan.
Pitt set the throttles until the speed instruments read eight knots, a pace that he hoped would not arouse suspicions. So far, there had been no shouts, no bells or whistles, no signs of a chase or searchlights pinning them against the dark water.
At this speed, it would take fifteen minutes to pass the entire length of the supership and turn the bow until they could move a safe distance away and out from under the glare of the lights from the shipyard.
Fifteen agonizing minutes that would seem like fifteen years. That was only the first hurdle. They still had the patrol boats to contend with, and by then there was every possibility their crews would have been alerted to the fugitives' escape in the Grand Banks cabin cruiser.
There was nothing they could do except remain inside the main cabin out of sight and stare up at the immense monster as they crept alongside. From bow to stern, the great mass of glass was a blaze of light inside and out, giving it the effect of a baseball stadium during a night game. The famous classic liners of their time, Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elisabeth, and Normandy, if anchored in a row, would still have come up short next to the Ulrich Wolf.
"I could use a hamburger about now," said Giordino, trying to relieve the tension.
"Me, too," said Megan. "All they fed us was yucky nutritional stuff."
Pat smiled, though her face looked strained. "It won't be long, honey, and you'll get your hamburger."
Pitt turned from the helm. "Were you treated badly?"
"No abuse," answered Pat, "but I've never been ordered around by so many nasty and arrogant people. They worked me twenty hours a day."
"Deciphering Amenes inscriptions from another chamber?"
"They weren't from another chamber. They were photos taken of inscriptions they found at a lost city in the Antarctic."
Pitt looked at her curiously. "The Antarctic?"
She nodded solemnly. "Frozen in the ice. The Nazis discovered it before the wax."
"Elsie Wolf told me they'd found evidence the Amenes built six chambers."
"I can't say," admitted Pat. "All I can tell you is that I got the impression they're using the ice city for some purpose. What, I didn't find out.
"Did you learn anything new from the inscriptions they forced you to decipher?"
As she talked, Pat no longer looked sad and forlorn. "I was barely into the project when you burst through the door. They were extremely interested in what me deciphered in the Colorado and St. Paul chambers. It appeared that the Wolfs were desperate to study the accounts passed down by the Amenes describing the effects of the cataclysm."
"That's because any inscriptions they found inside the lost city came before the cataclysm." He paused and nodded toward her briefcase.
"Is that what's in there?"
She held it up. "The photos from the Antarctic chamber. I couldn't bring myself to leave them behind."
He looked at her steadily. "They don't make women like you anymore."
Pitt might have said more, but a boat was crossing his bow about a hundred yards ahead. It looked to be a workboat, and its course remained steady as it turned and passed on the Grand Bank's port side.
The crew seemed intent on their labors and didn't pay the slightest attention to the cabin cruiser.
Relaxing a bit as they neared the forward section of the Ulrich Wolf without any sign of pursuit, Pitt asked, "You said they're studying what conditions will be like in the aftermath of the cataclysm?"
"In a big way. I assume they want every bit of data they can glean for their survival."
"I'm still at a loss as to why the Wolfs are so positive a comet is going to retur
n and collide with Earth within days of the prediction made by the Amenes nine thousand years ago," Pitt said.
Pat shook her head slowly. "I have no answers to that."
Still crawling along at eight knots, Pitt gently turned the wheel, sending the Grand Banks on a wide arc around the bow of the Ulrich Wolf and passing the end of the dock, now swarming with shipyard workers and security guards checking the identification of every man and woman in red coveralls. He passed a small powerboat running with no lights that ominously swung around in a 180-degree turn and began following in their wake. He set his directional computer on the frame of the windshield and studied the readings that would lead him through the darkness to the ravine that held the Skycar.
Three miles to the ravine, three miles over water in a boat that offered no protection from probing lights or automatic weapons and heavy machine guns. All they carried were a pair of handguns. And there were the patrol boats that surely must have been alerted by now of a stolen powerboat carrying intruders attempting to escape the shipyard. His only consolation was that the patrol boats were at the far end of the fjord, giving them an extra few minutes of time. A slim consolation at best. With their superior speed, the patrol boats could easily intercept the Grand Banks before they could reach the mouth of the ravine.
"Al!"
Giordino was at his side immediately. "Aye, aye."
"Find some bottles. There must be some on board. Empty, then fill them with whatever you can find that's highly inflammable. Diesel fuel is too slow-burning. Look for gas or solvent."
"Molotov cocktails," said Giordino, grinning like a demon. "I haven't thrown one of those since kindergarten." Two steps, and he was dropping down a ladder to the engine compartment.
Pitt brushed aside an urge to shove the throttles to their stops, judging that it was more productive to play out a passive role. He stared over one shoulder at the twenty-five-foot runabout behind them, its big, powerful outboard motor clamped to its transom-- it had increased speed and was drawing alongside. The lights from the shipyard revealed only two men in black uniforms, one steering the boat, the other standing in the stern gripping an automatic rifle. The one at the helm was motioning at his ear.
Pitt understood the message and turned on the radio, leaving it on the frequency it was set.
A voice crackled over the speaker in Spanish, with an indisputable inflection that Pitt knew was a command to lay to. He picked up the microphone and answered "No habla espanol."
"Alto, alto!" the voice shouted.
"Get down below and lay flat on the deck," he ordered Pat and Megan. They silently complied and hurried down the ladder to the main cabin.
Pitt slowed the boat and stood in the doorway, his Colt cocked and stuffed under his belt. The guard in the stern of the runabout crouched in readiness to jump on board the Grand Banks.
Pitt then pulled back the throttles but kept a slight headway, measuring the distance between the two boats and moving at just enough parallel speed so that the boarder would come over the railing almost in line with the doorway to the bridge. His timing would have to be exactly on the mark. He waited patiently, like a hunter in a blind watching the skies for a passing duck.
At the precise moment the security guard crouched to leap between the two boats, he shoved the twin throttles forward in a brief burst of speed, before abruptly pulling them back again. The sudden movement threw off the balance of the guard, and he landed sprawling on the narrow port deck of the Grand Banks.
Pitt smoothly stepped through the cabin door, jammed the heel of his right foot into the guard's neck, bent down and snatched up his automatic rifle, a Bushmaster M17S, and clubbed him behind the neck with the butt end. He leveled it at the guard at the helm of the outboard and fired. He missed, as the guard dropped to his knees, cramped the wheel over, hit the throttle, and turned the outboard on a sharp angle away from the Grand Banks. With a loud roar from the motor, the boat leaped away in a cloud of spray and churning water. Without waiting to see more, Pitt stepped back into the cabin and pushed the throttles as far as they would go. The stern of the Grand Banks dug down in the water, the bow lifted, and soon it was rushing across the black waters at nearly twenty knots.
Now Pitt focused on the patrol boats that had swung around on a course back up the fjord, coming at full speed, the searchlights playing the water in ever-closer sweeps toward the Grand Banks. It was a given that the guard driving the outboard had radioed a report. The lead boat was a good half mile ahead of its escort. From Pitt's view through the windshield, it was impossible to predict when the nearest patrol boat would meet the Grand Banks on a converging course. The only certainty was that it would cross his bows before they reached the mouth of the ravine. Another six or seven minutes would spell the difference between survival and death.
They were well clear of the shipyard now, with less than two miles to go.
The outboard cruiser was less than a hundred yards off and slightly behind. The only reason the remaining security guard had not opened up with his own Bushmaster rifle was that he was afraid of hitting his partner.
Giordino returned to the cabin, carrying an armload of four bottles filled with solvent from a can used to clean oil and grease within the engine compartment. Thin strips of rags were stuffed in the bottle necks.
He carefully set the bottles on the cushions of a bench. The beefy Italian was nursing a large bruise on his forehead.
"What happened to you?" Pitt asked.
"Some guy I know can't drive a boat. I was thrown all over the engine compartment and bounced my head off a water pipe during a series of wild gyrations." Then Giordino spotted the unconscious body of the security guard lying partially in the door. "My sincerest apologies. You had a social caller."
"He failed to produce an invitation."
Giordino moved beside Pitt and stared through the windshield at the rapidly approaching patrol boat.
"No warning shot across the bow with this crew. They're armed to the teeth and looking for any excuse to blow us out of the water."
"Maybe not," said Pitt. "They still need the expertise of Pat to decipher their inscriptions. They might rough her up and slap Megan around, but they won't kill them. You and I will be history. I plan on giving them a bit of a surprise. If we can suck them in close enough, we might give them a bonfire to enjoy."
Giordino stared Pitt in the eyes. Most men would have reflected inevitable defeat, but Giordino saw no such reflection. What he saw was calculated determination and a faint gleam of anticipation. "I wonder how John Paul Jones would see it."
Pitt nodded. "You'll be busy with your toys. Lend me your piece. Then lay low on the far side of the bridge until you hear shooting."
"You or them?"
Pitt gave Giordino a dour look. "It doesn't matter who."
Giordino handed over his Para-Ordnance automatic without question, as Pitt pushed against the throttles in a fruitless attempt to goad a few more revolutions out of the engines. The Grand Banks was giving everything it had, but it was a boat built for comfortable cruising, not speed.
The commander of the patrol boat had no reservations about closing in on the Grand Banks. He had no reason to believe that anyone on board was crazy enough to take on a boat armed with twin machine guns plus the weapons held by men who were trained to kill at the slightest provocation. He studied the Grand Banks through night glasses, saw only one man standing at the helm on the bridge, and made the ultimate mistake of an aggressor-- he profoundly underestimated his adversary. The searchlights were trained on the Grand Banks, illuminating the boat in a blinding glare.
The bone of foam cut by the bow fell away as the thirty-eight-foot patrol boat edged closer to the Grand Banks and gradually pulled alongside, until it was less than twenty feet away. From his position on the bridge, Pitt squinted his eyes against the bright light and made out a man behind each machine gun, pointing the barrels directly at him in the bridge cabin. Three other men stood shoulder to shoulder on the ope
n deck aft of the cabin, armed with Bushmaster automatic rifles. Pitt was unable to see Giordino crouched on the opposite side of the cabin, but he knew that his friend was poised with either a match or a lighter to ignite the wicks on the bottles filled with the solvent. It was a nerve-prickling moment, but not one of total hopelessness, certainly not in Pitt's mind.
He had no burning desire to execute anyone, not even the species of hardened killers whom he was looking at across the water, and whose mercenary comrades he'd met in Colorado. It was no mystery that his life and that of Giordino weren't worth two cents if they were captured. He watched as the commander of the patrol boat raised a loudspeaker to his mouth.
Pitt recognized that the word alto meant "stop," and he could only assume the words that followed were a threat that if he didn't do what he was ordered, the security guards would open fire. He waved that he understood, took one more look at the distance separating him from the ravine, now down to less than half a mile, and a quick glance at the second patrol boat to estimate when it would arrive to back up its escort five to six minutes. Next he checked to make sure the two automatics were snug under the belt behind his back. Only then did he pull back the throttles to the idle position, but he kept the boat in gear so that it still maintained very slow headway.
He moved to the doorway of the cabin, no farther, raised his hands, and stood properly subdued in the dazzling beam of the light. He didn't bother using his limited Spanish vocabulary. He shouted back in English. "What do you want?"
"Do not resist," ordered the commander, now close enough to dispense with the loudspeaker. "I am sending men to board you."
"How can I possibly resist?" Pitt offered helplessly. "I have no machine guns like you."
"Tell the others to come on deck!"
Pitt kept his hands in the air, turned, and made as if he were relaying the commander's orders. "They are afraid you will shoot them."
"We're not going to shoot anyone," the commander answered, in a tone that was about as slimy as an eel.