Rondheim pounded the defenseless battered body until his gi was soaked through with sweat, the front splotched with blood.
Pitt, in those tortured moments between light and darkness, found himself losing his grip of any emotion, of all intelligence; even the pain was beginning to fade into one massive dull throb. Thank God for the brandy, he thought. He'd never have been able to survive up to this point, taking so much brutality from Rondheim's hands without reacting, if it hadn't been for the alcohol's numbing effects. Now he didn't need it. His physical resources were nearly gone, his mind was slipping from control, losing contact with reality, and the most terrible part was that he could do nothing about it.
Rondheim threw a particularly vicious and accurately aimed kick to Pitts stomach. As the light passed from Pitts eyes for the sixth time and the guards released their grip, letting his limp body drop to the mat, the sadistic lust on Rondheim's face slowly faded. He stared vacantly at his bloody and swollen knuckles, his chest heaving as his breath came in quick pants from the exertion. He dropped to his knees, grabbed Pitt by the hair, turning the head so that the throat was exposed, and then he lifted his right hand, palm open, in preparation to deliver the finishing stroke, the coup de grdce, a killing judo chop that would snap Pitts head backward, breaking his neck.
"No!"
Rondheim kept the hand poised, and slowly turned. Kirsti Fyrie stood in the doorway, a look of fear and horror on her face.
"No," she said, "please . . . no! You can't!"
Rondheim kept the hand poised. "What does he mean to you?"
"Nothing; but he is a human being and deserves better. You are cruel and ruthless, Oskar. Not altogether unbecoming qualities in a man. But they should be tempered with courage. Beating a defenseless and half-dead man is little different from torturing a helpless child. There is no courage in that. You disappoint me."
Rondheim's hand slowly dropped. He rose, swaying tiredly, and staggered to Kirsti. Tearing the clothing from the upper part of her body, he slapped her viciously across the breasts. "You warped whore, 9 he grasped. "I warned you never to interfere.
You who have no right to criticize me or anyone else. It's easy for you to sit by on your pretty ass and watch while I do the dirty work."
She lifted a hand to strike him, her beautiful features contorted in hatred and anger. He caught her wrist and held it, twisting until she uttered a cry.
"The basic difference between a man and a woman, my dove, is physical strength." He laughed at her helplessness. "You seem to have forgotten that."
Rondheim roughly pushed her out the door and turned to the guards. "Throw that queer bastard in with the others," he ordered. "if he is fortunate and opens his eyes once more, he can have the satisfaction of knowing he died among friends."
Chapter 16
Somewhere in the black pit of unconsciousness Pitt began to see light. It was vague, dim like the bulb of a flashlight whose batteries were gasping out their last breath of energy. He struggled toward it. Desperately he reached out, once, twice, making several agonizing attempts to touch the yellow glow he knew was his window to the conscious world outside his mind. But each time he thought it was within his grasp, it moved further away and he knew he was slipping backward into the void of nothingness once more. Dead, he thought vaguely, I'm dead.
Then he became aware of another force, a sensation that shouldn't have been there. It was coming through the void, becoming stronger, more intensified with each passing moment. Then he had it, and he knew he was still among the living.
Pain, glorious, tormenting pain. It burst upon him in one crushing, agonizing wave, and he moaned.
"Oh, thank you, God! Thank you for bringing him back!" The voice, it sounded miles away. He pushed his mind into second gear and then it came again.
"Dirk! It's Tidi!" There was a second's silence, a second in which Pitt became increasingly aware of the brightening light and the stinging smell of pure, fresh air and a soft arm tenderly cradled around his head. His vision was blurred and distorted; he could vaguely distinguish a dim form leaning over him. He tried to speak but could do no more than groan, mumble a few incoherent words and stare at the shadowy figure above.
"It seems our Major Pitt is about to be reborn."
Pitt could barely make out the words. The voice wasn't from Tidi's lips, that much he was certain; the tone was too deep, too masculine.
"They worked him over pretty thoroughly," said the unidentified voice. "Better he'd died without rezonaining consciousness.
Judging from the looks of things, none of us will live to see-"
"He'll make it." It was Tidi again. "He's got to he's just got to. Dirk is our only hope."
74
"Hope . . . Hope?" Pitt whispered. "Dated a girl named Hope once."
The agony in his side stabbed and twisted like white-hot iron, but strangely his face felt nothing; the tortured flesh was numb. Then he knew why, knew why he saw only shadows. His sight, or at least thirty percent of it, returned as Tidi lifted a piece of thin damp fabric, the nylon of her pantyhose, from his face. Pitts torn and swollen features felt nothing because Tidi had been constantly soaking the cuts and bruises in ice water from a nearby mud puddle to relieve the intense swelling.
The mere fact that Pitt could see anything at all through the tiny slits around his bloated eyes attested to her successful efforts.
Pitt focused his eyes with difficulty. Tidi was gazing down at him, her long fawn-colored hair framing a pale and anxious face. Then the other voice spoke and the tone was no longer strange.
"Did you get the license number of the truck, Major: Or was it a bulldozer that mashed your already ugly profile?"
Pitt turned his head and looked into the smiling, but tight-muscled face of Jerome P. Lillie. "Would you believe a giant with muscles like tree trunks?"
"I suppose," Lillie said expectantly, "your next words will be-if you think I look bad, you should see the other guy."
"You'd be disappointed. I didn't lay so much as a fingertip on him."
"You didn't fight back?"
"I didn't fight back."
Lillie showed pure astonishment. "You stood there and took . . . took this terrible beating and did nothing?"
"Oh, will you two shut up!" Tidi's voice held a mixture of irritation and distress. "If any of us are to survive, we must get Dirk on his feet. We can't just sit here and gossip."
Pitt pulled himself to a sitting position and gazed in agony through a red haze of pain as his broken rib cried in protest. The unthinking sudden movement made his side feel as if someone had squeezed his chest between a giant pair of pliers and twisted. Carefully, gently, he eased himself forward until he could see around him.
The sight that met his eyes looked like something out of a nightmare. For a long moment he stared at the unreal scene and then at Tidi and Lillie, his face a study of bewildered incomprehension. Then a shred of understanding crept into his head and with it some certainty of where he was. He reached out a hand to steady himself and muttered to no one in particular.
"My God, it's not possible."
For maybe ten seconds, maybe twenty, in one of those silences they refer to as pregnant, Pitt sat there, as still and unmoving as a dead man, staring at the broken helicopter a scant ten yards away. The jagged remains of the hulk lay half sunk in mud at the bottom of a deep ravine whose walls rose in sharp sloping angles to seemingly come together and meet a hundred feet toward the Iceland sky. He noted that the shattered craft was large, probably one of the Titan class, capable of carrying thirty passengers. Whatever colors or markings the copter may have been painted originally, it was impossible to recognize them now. Most of the fuselage back of the cockpit was crumpled like a bellows, the remaining framework a myriad of twisted metal.
Pitts first frightful impression, the one that ruled his confused mind, was that no one from the crash could have survived. But there they were: Pitt, Tidi, Lillie, and scattered about the steep slopes of the ravi
ne in unnatural pain-contorted positions, the same group of men who had stood beside Pitt in Rondheim's trophy room, the same group who had opposed F. James Kelly and Hermit Limited.
They all appeared to be alive, but most were badly injured; the grotesque angles of their arms and legs revealed a terrible array of smashed and broken bones.
"Sorry to ask the inescapable question," Pitt mumbled, his voice hoarse, though now under control, "but what in hell happened?"
"Not what you think," Lillie replied.
"What then? It's obvious . . . Rondheim was abducting all of us somewhere when the aircraft crashed."
"We didn't crash," Lillie said. "the wreck has been here for days, maybe even weeks."
Pitt stared incredulously at Lillie, who seemed to be lying comfortably on the damp ground, oblivious of the wetness soaking through his clothing. "You'd better fill me in. What happened to these people? How did you come to be here? Everything."
"Not too much to my story," Lillie said quietly.
"Rondheim's men caught me snooping around the Albatross docks. Before I had a chance to uncover anything, they hustled me off to Rondheim's house and threw me in with these other gentlemen."
Pitt made a move toward Lillie. "You're in pretty rough shape. Let's have a look."
Impatiently Lillie waved him back.
"Hear me out. Then get the hell away from here and get help. No one is in immediate danger of dying from their injuries-Rondheim saw to that. Our primary peril is exposure. The temperature is under forty degrees now. in another few hours it Will 75
be freezing.
After that, the cold and the shock will take the first of us. By morning there will be nothing in this goddamn ravine but frozen bodies."
"Rondheim saw to that? I'm afraid-"
"You don't get it" You're slow on the trigger, Major Pitt. It's obvious, the carnage you see here was never caused by accident.
Immediately after our sadistic friend Rondheim beat you to a pulp, we were each given a heavy dose of Nembutal and then, very coldly and methodically, he and his men took us one at a time and fractured whatever bones they thought were necessary to make it appear as though we were all injured in the crash of the helicopter."
Pitt stared at Lillie but said nothing. Totally off balance, his mind was in a whirlpool of disbelief, his thought desperately seeking to sort out a set of circumstances that defied comprehension. The way he felt, he would have been prepared to believe anything, but Lillie's words were too macabre, too monstrous to consider.
"My God, it's not possible." Pitt screwed his eyes shut and shook his head in slow frustration. "It has to be some kind of insane nightmare."
"Nothing insane about the reason," Lillie assured him. "There is a method to Kelly's and Rondheim's madness."
"How can you be sure?"
"I'm sure-I was the last one they put under the drug-I overheard Kelly explaining to Sir Eric Marks how this whole unreal tragedy was conceived by Hermit Limited's computers."
"But for what purpose? Why the savagery? Kelly could have simply put us on another aircraft and dropped it over the ocean without a trace, with no chance for survivors."
"Computers are a hard lot they only deal in cold facts," Lillie murmured wearily. "To their respective governments, the men suffering around us are important figures. You were at Rondheim's little party. You heard Kelly explain why they had to die-their deaths are meant to be a diversion, to buy time and to grab headlines and the attention of world leaders while Hermit Limited pulls off its coup without international interference."
Pitts eyes narrowed. "That doesn't explain away the sadistic cruelty."
"No, it doesn't," Lillie admitted. "However, in Kelly's eyes the end justifies the means. A disappearance at sea was probably fed into the computer's banks but undoubtedly rejected in favor of a sounder plan."
"Like producing the bodies at an opportune time."
"In a sense, yes," Lillie said slowly. "World focus on a disappearance at sea would have faded in a week or ten days-the search would have obviously been called off since no one could live long floating in the frigid North Atlantic."
"Of course," Pitt nodded. "The vanishing act of the Lax was an ideal example."
"Exactly. Kelly and his rich friends need all the time they can buy to become entrenched in whatever country it is they intend to take over. The longer our State Department is diverted by the loss of high-ranking diplomats, the harder it will be when they get around to PUtting the screws on Hermit Limited's operations."
"This way, Kelly can have the advantage of an extended search." Pitts voice was quiet but positive. "And when hope begins to grow dim, he can arrange for an Icelander to stumble accidentally on the crash site and the bodies. And Kelly can reap the advantage of an extra two weeks while the world mourns and government leaders are concentrating on speeches at the funeral processions."
"Every alternative was neatly considered. We were all supposedly on a flight to Rondheim's northern estate for a day of salmon fishing. His group, the Hermit Limited bunch, were going to come on the next flight. At least, that's the story that will be handed out."
"What's to stop someone from accidentally discovering us at any moment?" Tidi asked, gently dabbing a trickle of blood from Pitts swollen mouth.
"It's fairly obvious," Pitt said, thoughtfully surveying the immediate surroundings. "We can't be Seen unless that someone is standing practically on top of us.
Add to that the fact we're probably in the most uninhabited area of Iceland, and the odds of being found begin to stretch to infinity."
"Now you can clearly see the picture," Lillie said.
"The helicopter had to be placed in the narrow confines of the ravine and then destroyed because it could not have been purposely crashed with any degree of accuracy-a perfect undetectable location. A search plane directly overhead could have no more than a second to spot the debris, a million-to-one chance at best. The next step was to scatter our bodies around the area.
Then, after two or three weeks of decomposition, the most a competent coroner could determine is that some of us died from injuries sustained from the phony crash and the rest from exposure and shock."
"Am I the only one who can walk?" Pitt asked harshly. His broken ribs ached like a thousand sores, but the hopeful stares, the miserable bit of optimism in the eyes of the men who knew death was only a few hours away, forced him to ignore the pain.
"A few can walk," Lillie answered. "But with broken arms, they'll never make it to the top of the ravine.
"Then I guess I'm elected."
"You're elected." Lillie smiled faintly. "If it's any consolation, you have the satisfaction of knowing Rondheim is up against a tougher man than his computers projected."
The encouragement in Lillie's eyes became the extra impetus Pitt needed. He rose unsteadily to his feet and looked down at 76
the figure lying stiffly on the ground.
"Where did Rondheim bust you?"
"Both shoulders and-I'm guessing-my pelvis."
Lillie's tone was as calm as if he were describing the fractured surface of the moon.
"Kind of makes you wish you were back in St. Louis running the brewery, doesn't it?"
"Not really. Dear old Dad never had much confidence in his only son. If I . . . if I'm not alive and kicking when you come back, tell him-"
"Read him the riot act yourself. Besides, my heart wouldn't be in it." Pitt had to fight to keep his voice from faltering. 'I never liked Lillie beer anyway."
He turned away and knelt over Tidi.
"Where did they hurt you, dearheart?"
"My ankles are a little off center." She smiled gamely. "Nothing serious. I'm just lucky, I guess."
"I'm sorry," Pitt said. "You wouldn't be lying here if it wasn't for my bungling."
She took his hand and squeezed it. "It's more exciting than taking dictation and typing the admiral's letters."
Pitt bent over and lifted her in his arms and carried her
tenderly a few feet and laid her beside Lillie.
"Here's your big chance, you little gold digger. A real live millionaire. And for the next few hours he's a captive audience.
Mr. Jerome P. Lillie, may I present Miss Tidi Royal, the darling of the National Underwater Marine Agency. May you both live happily ever after."
Pitt kissed her lightly on the forehead, stumbled awkwardly once more to his feet and walked unsteadily over the water-soaked ground to the old man he knew simply as Sam. He thought of the distinguished manner, the warm, piercing eyes he had seen in the trophy room as he stared down and saw the legs, twisted outwards like the crooked branches of an oak tree, the blue eyes dulled by pain, and he forced himself to smile a confident, hopeful smile.
"Hang in there, Sam." Pitt leaned over and gently grasped the old man's shoulder. "I'll be back with the prettiest nurse in Iceland before, lunchtime."
Sam's lips gave the barest hint of a grin. "To a man my age, a cigar would prove much more practical."
"A cigar it is."
Pitt leaned over and shook Sam's hand. The blue eyes suddenly came to life and the old man raised up, griPPing Pitts outstretched hand with an intensity that Pitt didn't think was possible, and the lines of the tired, drawn face lightened into determined hardness.
"He must be stopped, Major Pitt." The voice was low, almost an insistent whisper. "James must not be allowed to go through with this terrible thing. His purpose glories in goodness, but the people he has surrounded himself with, glory only in greed and power."