And then the leader of the African Army of Revolution melted into the darkness like a shadow.
At two thousand feet Steiger made a slight adjustment in pitch and the Minerva dipped over the Jefferson Memorial and crossed the Tidal Basin on a course along Independence Avenue.
“It’s crowded up here,” he said, motioning to a bevy of Army helicopters hovering from one end of the Capitol mall to the other like a swarm of mad bees.
Sandecker nodded and said, “Better keep your distance. They’re liable to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“How long since the Iowa’s last shot?”
“Nearly eighteen minutes.”
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“Maybe that’s the end of it, then,” said Steiger.
“We won’t land until we’re sure,” Sandecker replied. “How’s the fuel?”
“Enough for nearly four more hours’ flying time.”
Sandecker twisted in his seat to relieve his aching buttocks. “Stay as close as you dare to the National Archives building. If the Iowa cuts loose again, you can bet that’s the target.”
“I wonder how Pitt made out?”
Sandecker put up an unworried front. “He knows the score. Pitt is the least of our problems.” He turned away and looked out a side window so Steiger couldn’t see the lines of worry that creased his face.
“I should have been the one to go in,” said Steiger. “This is strictly a military show. A civilian has no business risking his life attempting a job he wasn’t trained for.”
“And you were, I suppose.”
“You must admit my credentials outweigh Pitt’s.”
Sandecker found himself smiling. “Care to bet?”
Steiger caught the admiral’s cagey tone. “What are you implying?”
“You’ve been had, Colonel, pure and simple.”
“Had?”
“Pitt carries the rank of major in the Air Force.”
Steiger looked over at Sandecker, his eyes squinting. “Are you going to tell me he can fly?”
“Just about every aircraft built, including this helicopter.”
“But he claimed-“
“I know what he claimed.”
Steiger looked lost. “And you sat back and said nothing?”
“You have a wife and children. Me, I’m too old. Dirk was the logical man to go.”
The tenseness went out of Steiger’s body and he sagged into his seat. “He better make it,” he murmured under his breath. “By God, he better make it.”
Pitt would have gladly given the last penny in his savings account to be anyplace but climbing a pitch-black stairway deep inside a ship that at any second might turn into an inferno. His brow was clammy and cold with sweat, as though he were running a fever. Suddenly Fawkes stopped and Pitt ran into him like a blind man against an oak tree.
“Please remain where you stand, gentlemen.” The voice came from
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the lightless landing several steps above. “You cannot see me, but I can see enough of you both to strike your hearts with a bullet.”
“This is the captain,” Fawkes snapped angrily.
“Ah, Captain Fawkes himself. How convenient. I was beginning to fear I had missed connections. You were not on the bridge, as I supposed.”
“Identify yourself!” Fawkes demanded.
“The name is Emma. Not very masculine, I admit, but it serves the purpose.”
“Stop this foolishness and let us pass.” Fawkes made a move up two steps when the Hocker-Rodine hissed and a bullet zinged past his neck. He froze in midstep. “Good God, man, what is it you want?”
“I admire a no-nonsense approach, Captain.” Emma paused, and then said, “I’ve been ordered to kill you.”
Slowly, unnoticed by Fawkes and, he hoped, by the man on the landing, Pitt slipped down to his stomach on the steps, shielded by the shadowy bulk of the captain. Then, fractionally, he began slithering up the stairs like a snake.
“Ordered, you say,” said Fawkes. “By whom?”
“My employer does not matter.”
“Then why all the prattle, damn you. Why not shoot me in the chest and be done with it?”
“I do not operate without purpose, Captain Fawkes. You have been deceived. I think you should know that.”
“Deceived?” Fawkes thundered. “Your foggy words tell me nothing.”
An alarm began to sound in the back of Emma’s mind, an alarm honed by a dozen years of cat-and-mouse existence. He stood there silently, not answering the captain’s question, his senses probing for a sound or a movement.
“What about the man behind me?” asked Fawkes. “He has no hand in this. No need to murder an innocent bystander.”
“Rest easy, Captain,” said Emma. “My fee is for only one life. Yours.”
With agonizing slowness, Pitt raised his head until he was eye level with the landing. He could see Emma now. Not in detail-the light was too dim for that-but he could make out the pale blur of a face and the outline of a figure.
Pitt didn’t wait to see more. He could only guess Emma would blast Fawkes in the gut during the middle of a sentence, after lulling him with idle conversation. An old but effective trick. He dug the balls of his feet
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into the steps, took a breath, and lunged, going for a vicious impact with Emma’s legs, his hands clawing for the gun.
The silencer flashed in Pitt’s face, and a stabbing pain slammed the right side of his head as he grabbed for Emma’s arm. After the haze of sudden shock he swam into unconsciousness and began falling, falling. It seemed to take forever before the abysmal void swallowed him and there was nothing.
Goaded on by Pitt’s flying tackle, Fawkes charged up the steps like a maddened rhino and threw his great weight against the bodies of both men. Pitt went limp and fell off to one side. Emma struggled to bring the gun to bear, but Fawkes slapped it away as though it were a toy in a child’s hands. Then Emma went for Fawkes’s crotch, clutched his cock and balls, and squeezed ruthlessly.
It was the wrong move. The captain roared like thunder and reacted by swinging both his massive fists from over his head down upon Emma’s upturned face, crushing cartilage and tearing skin. Astoundingly, Emma maintained the pressure.
Though his groin felt as if it were bursting in white-hot agony, Fawkes was wise enough not to try knocking away the hands that held him like a vise. Calmly, purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do, he gripped Emma’s head and began pounding it into the metal deck landing with every ounce of strength in his tree-trunk arms. Mercifully, the pressure eased, but shrouded in his pain-lashed rage, he kept smashing away until the back of Emma’s skull turned to pulp. When his fury was finally spent, he rolled over and gently massaged his groin, cursing.
After a minute or two he rose stiffly to his feet, took the coat collars of the two inert men, and dragged them up the stairway. One more short flight, a few yards down a passageway, and he came to a cargo-loading door in the upper starboard side of iheIowa’s hull. He cracked the door enough to let in daylight and examined Pitt’s wound.
The bullet had scored Pitt’s left temple, causing, at worst, Fawkes figured, a nasty gash and a concussion. Then he checked Emma. What skin that was visible through the mask of blood on the assassin’s face was
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The Iowa
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turning blue. Fawkes went through his pockets and found only a spare clip for the Hocker-Rodine pistol. Strapped around a heavy woolen sweater was an inflatable life vest.
“A nonswimmer, hey?” Fawkes said, smiling. “I don’t guess you’ll be needing this anymore.”
He removed the vest from Emma and tied it around Pitt. Reaching into his own coat pocket, Fawkes took out a small notebook and made several notations with the stub of a pencil. Next he took his eelskin tobacco pouch, emptied the contents, inserted the notebook, and tucked the packet snugly under Pitt’s shirt. The cord to the CO2 bottle was yanked and the vest hissed as it inflated.
Returning to Emma, Fawkes grabbed the corpse by the front of the sweater and pulled it toward the open hatch. The weight was too much for the angle of Fawkes’s grip and the sweater slipped over Emma’s head. Something around Emma’s upper torso caught Fawkes’s eye. It was a nylon binding that tightly circled the chest. Entranced, Fawkes undid a tiny clasp and the nylon fell away, releasing two small rosebud-tipped mounds.
For a moment Fawkes stood petrified.
“Holy Mother of Christ!” he murmured in awe.
Emma had indeed been a woman.
Dale Jarvis pointed at the viewing screen. “There, just below the second gun turret, on the side of the hull.”
“What do you make of it?” asked the President.
“Someone has opened the forward loading hatch,” answered Kemper. He turned to General Higgins. “Better alert your men to the possibility that the crew may attempt an escape.”
“They won’t get ten feet past the shoreline,” said Higgins. They watched as the hatch was thrown back to its stops and a monster of a man stepped to the threshold and threw out what looked like a body. The form hit the water with a splash and disappeared. Soon he returned with another body, but this time he lowered it on a line to the leisurely flowing current-almost tenderly, it seemed to the men in the conference room-until the inert figure bobbed and floated free of the ship. Then the line was cast away and the doors closed.
Kemper motioned to an aide. “Contact the Coast Guard and have them pick up that man drifting in the river.”
“What was that little performance all about?” The President’s question echoed the thoughts of the men at the table.
“The hell of it is,” Kemper said quietly, “we may never know.”
After what seemed like ages, Hiram Lusana found a doorway that exited to the main deck. He stumbled outside, bone chilled in his thin business suit, clutching the sack of bomblets in both hands. His sudden emergence into daylight blinded him and he paused to get his bearings.
He found himself standing beneath the aft fire-control bridge, forward of the number-three gun turret. Small-arms fire whistled about the ship, but his mind was intent on disposing of the Quick Death bomblets, and he was oblivious of it. The river beckoned and he began sprinting toward the bulwarks edging the outer limits of the deck. He still had twenty feet to go when a man in a black rubber wet suit rose from the shadows of the turret and aimed a gun at him.
Lieutenant Alan Fergus no longer felt the burning pain from the hole in his leg, no longer felt the agony from seeing his combat teams cut to pieces. His whole body was quivering with hatred for the men responsible. It did not matter that the man in his sights wore a business suit j instead of a uniform, or that he appeared to be unarmed. Fergus saw only I a man who in his mind was murdering his friends.
Lusana halted abruptly and stared at Fergus. He had never before seen such cold malignity on a man’s face. They looked into each other’s eyes from no more than twelve feet, trying to exchange thoughts in that brief instant. No word passed between them, only a strange kind of understanding. Time seemed to pause and all sounds diminished into a blurred background.
Hiram Lusana knew his fight to rise above the filth of his childhood had culminated in this time and place. He had come to realize he could not be the leader of a people who would never fully accept him as one of their own. His path became clear. He could do far more for the oppressed of Africa by becoming a martyr to their cause.
Lusana accepted the invitation of death. He threw Fergus a silent smile of forgiveness and then leaped toward the bulwarks.
Fergus pulled the trigger and sprayed a pattern of automatic fire. The sudden impact of three bullets in his side pitched Lusana forward in a shuddered dance that pounded the breath from his lungs. Miraculously, he stayed on his feet and staggered drunkenly on.
Fergus fired again.
Lusana fell to his knees, still struggling toward the edge of the deck.
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Fergus watched in detached admiration, vaguely wondering what drove the incongruously dressed black man to ignore at least a dozen bullets in his body.
With brown eyes glazed with shock, and with a determination known only to a man who could never quit, Lusana crawled across the deck, holding the canvas sack against his stomach, leaving an ever-widening trail of crimson behind him.
The bulwarks were only three feet away. He fought closer despite the blackness beginning to cloud his vision and the blood streaming from the corners of his mouth. Summoning an inner strength born of final desperation, he threw the sack.
It hung on the bulwark for an instant that seemed frozen in time, teetered, and then fell into the river. Lusana’s face sank to the deck and he passed the gate into oblivion.
The interior of the massive gun housing reeked of sweat and blood and the pungent odors of powder and heated oil. Most of the crew were still in shock, their eyes glazed, unknowing, dulled with confusion and fear; the rest were lying amid the machinery in unnatural poses, blood trickling from their ears and mouths. A charnel house, Fawkes thought, a damn charnel house. God, I’m no better than the butchers who slaughtered my family.
He peered down the center elevator tube to the magazines and saw Charles Shaba hammering away with a sledge on a shell cradle that had become wedged ten feet below the turret deck. The interlock doors, designed to prevent accidental breech failure from communicating explosive flash to the magazines, were jammed open, and to Fawkes it was like looking into a bottomless pit. Then the black void seemed to fuzz and he suddenly realized the problem. The air was too foul to breathe. Those who survived the concussion caused by the Satan missile were dropping from lack of oxygen.
“Open the outside hatch!” he roared. “Get some fresh air in here!”
“She’s buckled, Captain,” a voice rasped on the other side of the turret. “Jammed tight.”
“The ventilators! Why aren’t they operating?”
“Blown circuits,” another man said, coughing. “The only air we’ve got is what’s coming up through the magazine tubes.”
In the choking haze and gloom Fawkes could barely make out the form of the man who spoke. “Find me something to pry the hatch open. We’ve got to make a path for crossventilation.”