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 90

could do far more for the op-pressed 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.

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.

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