Iceberg (Dirk Pitt 3)

Rondheim's teeth showed. "I don't need anyone to break you, Pitt.

My only regret is that I don't have the time to stretch out your next lesson in pain."

"Okay, Oskar, so much for the psychological bullshit," Pitt said calmly. He knew exactly what he was going to do. True, he was still weak and dead tired, but that was more than canceled out by the selfdetermination, the invisible figures of Lillie, Tidi, Sam Kelly, Hunnewell and the rest who stood at his side giving him strength he could have never possessed alone.

An uncertain smile came to Rondheim's mouth as he crouched in a karate stance. The smile didn't last.

Pitt hit him. He hit Rondheim with a right cross, a perfectly timed punch that jerked Rondheim's head sideways and staggered him into the ship's main mast.

Deep down Pitt had known that he had little chance of taking Rondheim in a prolonged fight, that he couldn't hold the other man off for more than a few minutes, but he had schemed and timed for the element of surprise, the one advantage that played on his side before the karate blows could lash his face again. As it turned out, the advantage was a small one.

Rondheim was incredibly tough; he had taken a hard blow, yet he was already recovering. He sprang from the mast and threw a kick to Pitts head, missing by a scant inch as Pitt ducked easily away. The ill timing cost him. Pitt caught Rondheim with a series of left jabs and another short, hard right that sent him to his knees on the deck, holding a hand to a broken, bleeding nose.

"You've improved," Rondheim whispered through the streaming blood.

"I said I misled you." Pitt was hanging back tensed in a half boxing, half judo position, waiting for Rondheim's next move.

"In reality, I'm about as queer as Carzo Butera."

With the sound of his true name, Rondheim could see death's fingers reaching out to touch him, but he kept his voice under iron control, his bleeding face an expressionless mask. "It seems I underestimated you, Major."

"You were an easy man to lead astray, Oskar, or should I call you by the name on your birth certificate?

No matter, your run has played out."

Mouthing a string of curses through blood-speck lips, his face now frozen in insane hate, Rondheim flung himself at Pitt. He hadn't taken a second step when Pitt brought an uppercut from the deck and rammed it as solidly as a sledgehammer into Rondheim's teeth. Pitt had given it everything he had, thrown his shoulder and body into it with such force that his ribs screamed in agony and he knew even as he did it that he could never marshal the strength to do it again.

There came a dull squish sound, mingled with a muffled cracking noise. Rondheim's teeth were jerked from their sockets and imbedded in torn lips as Pitts wrist snapped. For two or three seconds Rondheim seemed to straighten and stand there poised like a frame frozen in a movie projector, then, with the unbelievably slow, irrevocable finality of a falling tree, he crumbled to the deck and lay still.

Pitt stood and panted through clenched teeth, his right wrist hanging -limply at his side. He stared up at the little lights flashing from the make-believe cannon on the fortress and then he noticed that the next excursion boat was passing through the chamber. He blinked his eyes to focus more clearly and the sweat ran into them and stung. There was something he had to do.

At first the thought repulsed him, but he shook it aside, determined that there could be no other way.

He stepped over the sprawling legs of the unconscious man and bent down, propping one of Rondheim's arms against the deck and the bottom base of the railing. Then, riisin,g one of his feet, he stomped on it, shuddering inwardly as the bone broke a few inches below the elbow.

Rondheim stirred sluggishly and moaned.

"That's for Jerome Lillie," Pitt said, his voice bitter.

He repeated the process with Rondheim's other arm, noting with grim satisfaction that his victim's eyes had opened and were staring vacantly, pupils enlarged, in a glassy state of physical shock.

"Score that one ior Tidi Royal."

Pitt moved automatically as he turned Rondheim's body so that the legs were pointing in the opposite direction, propped as 99

the arms had been on the deck and trained The thinking, emotional part of Pitts mind was C, no longer part of his brain. It floated outside its cranial vault, keeping enouph contact to pull the strings that made the hands and feet work. Inside the bruised, cut, and in some places. deserted shelter, the machine was quietly, smoothly ticking over. The deadly exhaustion and pain were pushed into the background, forgotten for the moment until his mind regained full control.

There. he jumped on Rondheim's left leg.

"Mark that up for Sam Kelly."

Rondheim screamed a scream that died in his throat. The glazed blue-gray eyes stared upward intg Pitts. "Kill me," he whispered. "why don't you kill me?"

"If you lived for a thousand years," Pitt said grimly, "you could never make up for all the pain and misery you've caused. I want you to know what it's like, feel the agony as your bones part, the helplessness of lying there and watching it happen. I should break your spine like you did Lillie's; watch you rot your life away in a wheelchair. But that would be wishful Thinking, Oskar. Your trial might last a few weeks, even months, but there isn't a jury in the world that won't hand you a death sentence without leaving the box. No, I'd be doing you a favor by killing you, and that would never do. This one is for Willie Hunnewell."

There was no grin on Pitts face, no gleam of anticipation in the deep green eyes. He leaped for the fourth and final time and the hoarse, horrible scream of pain rolled over the ship's decks, echoed through the chamber, then slowly faded and died.

With a feeling of emptiness, almost sadness, Pitt sat there on a hatch cover and stared down at the broken figure of Rondheim. It wasn't a pretty sight. The fury within him had found its outlet and now he felt totally drained as he waited for his lungs and heart to slow back to normal.