Cyclops (Dirk Pitt 8)

The children stopped in midchorus and huddled around the man, frightened at the sudden appearance of three people shouting and running toward them. They clung to him as life itself. The dogs closed ranks around his legs and began barking louder than ever.

Giordino halted and stood there only two feet away, not sure of what to say that was meaningful. He smiled and smiled in immense delight and relief. At last he found his tongue.

"Welcome back, Lazarus."

Pitt grinned impishly. "Hello, pal. You wouldn't happen to have a dry martini in your pocket?"

Six hours later Pitt was sleeping like a stone in an empty alcove of the cathedral. He had refused to go down until the children were cared for and the dogs fed. Then he insisted that Jessie get some rest too.

They lay a few feet apart on double blankets that served as pads against the hard tile floor. Faithful Giordino sat in a wicker chair at the entrance of the alcove, guarding against invasion of their sleep, shushing an occasional band of children who played too close and too loud.

He stiffened at the sight of Sandecker approaching with a group of uniformed Cubans at his heels. Ira Hagen was among them, looking older and far more tired than when Giordino had last seen him, hardly twenty hours previously. The man next to Hagen and directly behind the admiral, Giordino recognized immediately. He rose to his feet as Sandecker nodded toward the sleeping figures.

"Wake them up," he said quietly.

Jessie struggled up from the depths and moaned. Giordino had to shake her by the shoulder several times to keep her from slipping back again. Still bone-tired and drugged from sleep, she sat up and shook her head to clear the blurriness.

Pitt came awake almost instantly, his mind triggered like an alarm clock. He twisted around and elbowed himself to a sitting position, eyes alert and sweeping the men standing around him in a half circle.

"Dirk," said Sandecker. "This is President Fidel Castro. He was making an inspection tour of the hospitals and was told you and Jessie were here. He'd like to talk to you."

Before Pitt could make a remark, Castro stepped forward, took his hand, and pulled him to his feet with surprising strength. The magnetic brown eyes met with piercing opaline green. Castro wore neat, starched olive fatigues with a commander in chief's shoulder insignia, in contrast to Pitt, who still had on the same ragged and dirty clothes as when he arrived at the cathedral.

"So this is the man who made idiots out of my security police and saved the city," said Castro in Spanish.

Jessie translated, and Pitt made a negative gesture. "I was only one of the luckier men who survived.

At least two dozen others died trying to prevent the tragedy."

"If the ships had exploded while still tied to the docks, most of Havana would now be a leveled wasteland. A tomb for myself as well as half a million people. Cuba is grateful and wishes to make you a Hero of the Revolution."

"There goes my standing in the neighborhood," muttered Pitt.

Jessie threw him a distasteful look and didn't translate.

"What did he say?" asked Castro.

Jessie cleared her throat. "Ah. . . he said he is honored to accept."

Castro then asked Pitt to describe the seizing of the ships. "Tell me what you saw," he said politely.

"Everything you know that happened. From the beginning."

"Starting with the time we left the Swiss Embassy?" Pitt asked, his eyes narrowed in furtive but shrewd reflection.

"If you wish," answered Castro, comprehending the look.

As Pitt narrated the desperate fight on the docks and the struggle to move the Amy Bigalow and the Ozero Zuysun from the harbor, Castro interrupted with a barrage of questions. The Cuban leader's curiosity was insatiable. The report took almost as long as the actu

al event.

Pitt related the facts as straight and unemotionally as he could, knowing he could never do justice to the incredible courage of men who selflessly gave their lives for people of another country. He told of Clark's magnificent holding action against overwhelming odds-- how Manny and Moe and their crews struggled in the dark bowels of the ships to get them under way, knowing they could be blown into atoms at any moment. He told how Jack and his crew stayed with the tugboat, towing the death ships out to sea until it was too late to escape. He wished they could all be there to tell their own stories, and he wondered what they might have said. He smiled to himself, knowing how Manny would have turned the air blue with pungent language.

At last Pitt told of being swept into the city by the tidal wave and blacking out, and how he regained consciousness hanging upside down from an overhead jewelry-shop sign. He related how staggering through the debris he heard a little girl crying, and pulled her and a brother from under the wreckage of a collapsed apartment building. After that he seemed to attract lost children like a magnet. Rescue workers added to his collection during the night. When no more could be found alive, a policeman directed Pitt to the children's hospital and relief center, where he was discovered by his friends.

Suddenly Pitt's voice trailed off and he dropped his hands limply to his sides. "That's all there is to tell."