Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt 14)

THE EXPLOSION THUNDERED in the ears of the soldiers and sheriff's deputies who had stopped just half a mile from the two semitrucks and trailers. The sky tore apart in a violent, demented convulsion of compressed air as the horrendous detonation tore the heart out of the levee. Seconds later, the eruption of the pressure wave stunned them, followed by a blast of dirt from the levee and concrete from the highway. Then flaming metal from the shattered trucks rained down from a world in chaos. As if given a universal order, everyone ducked behind or under his vehicle to shield himself from the storm of debris.

Sandecker threw up an arm to protect his eyes from the blinding flash and flying fragments. The air felt thick and charged with electricity as a great roar pounded his ears. A huge ball of fire rose and mushroomed, spreading into the sky, transforming into a swirling black cloud that blotted out the stars.

And then all eyes turned back to where a hundred yards of highway, the levee and the two big trucks once stood. All had disintegrated. None of those standing there in shock were prepared for the horrific spectacle that avalanched through the vanished remains of the levee. To a man they stood numbed by the rumbling reverberation in their ears that slowly faded, only to be replaced with a far more ominous sound, an unbelievably loud hissing and sucking sound as a seething wall of water gushed catastrophically into the waiting arms of the Mystic Canal, dredged by Qin Shang for this very event.

For one long, terrible minute they stared bleakly through disbelieving eyes, hypnotically drawn to a cataract so violent that it could not be conceived unless witnessed. They watched impotently as millions of gallons of water poured through the breach in the highway and levee, dragged by the natural laws of gravity and impelled by the force of the river's mass and current. It exploded into a wall of boiling water with nothing to stop its great momentum as it began draining off the main flow of the Mississippi.

The great destroying flood tide was on its way, oblivion in the making.

Unlike ocean tidal waves, there was no trough. Behind the crest, the fluid mass moved without the slightest suggestion of distortion, its texture smooth and rolling, surging with immeasurable energy.

What was left of the abandoned town of Calzas was inundated and swept away. Nearly thirty feet high, the irresistible, seething mass engulfed the marshlands as it hurled toward the waiting arms of the Atchafalaya River. A small cabin cruiser, with its four occupants in the wrong part of the river, at the wrong time, was sucked into the breach, where it plunged dizzily through the wild maelstrom and vanished. No act of man could halt the raging wall of uncontrollable water as it rushed across the valley before advancing toward the Gulf, where its muddy flow would be absorbed by the sea.

Sandecker, Olson and the other men on the highway could do nothing but watch the nightmarish disaster like eyewitnesses at a train derailment, unable to fathom the unrelenting cataclysm that could penetrate and crush concrete, wood, steel and flesh. They watched silently in the face of what appeared to promise inevitable calamity, their faces tightened in expressionless masks. Gunn shivered and looked away toward the Mississippi.

"The ship!" he shouted above the rush of the flood. He pointed excitedly. "The ship!"

In almost the same terror-bred moment in time, the United States came rushing past. Mesmerized by the awesome spectacle of the unleashed flood tide, they had forgotten about her. Their eyes followed Gunn's outstretched hand and finger, seeing an unending black silhouette emerge from the night, a tangible monster from the darkness. Her superstructure, fore and aft, was blasted into a shell-torn, jagged mass of indescribable shambles. Her foremast was gone, her funnels raked and holed, great gaps of twisted steel ripped into the sides of her hull.

But still she came, propelled by her great engines, bent on adding her weight to the devastation. There was no stopping her. She passed them by at a tremendous rate of speed, her bows throwing up a great sheet of water as she drove against the current under full power. Despite the fact she had been used to cause death and destruction, she looked magnificent. No man who saw her that night would ever forget that they were seeing a legend die. No drama was ever played to a more climactic ending.

They stared enthralled, expecting to see her hull turn and slant across the river in preparation of her role of becoming a dam to cast the Mississippi away from her established channel forever. Their convictions seemed verified as waterspouts burst alongside her hull.

"Mother of God!" muttered Olson in shock. "They've blown the charges! She's going down!"

Any shred of misplaced hope any of them had of the Corps stemming the flow was gone now as the glorious superliner began to settle in the water.

But the United States was not headed on a course to bury her bows in the east bank with her stern slanted across the river toward the west. She was running straight up the center of the main channel, ever so slowly curving toward the Niagara-like falls roaring through the breach.

Pitt stood and clutched the wheel, now jammed against its stop. He had turned the rudder as far as it could go. His calculated determination could do no more. He felt the ship shudder as the explosive charges blew great holes in her bottom, and he cursed himself for not being able to control the speed or somehow reverse the port propellers and twist the ship in a tighter turn. But the automated control system had been shut down by damage from the Army's gunfire, making it impossible without a crew down in the engine room to carry out his course change. Then, with torturous slowness, almost miraculously, he watched as the bow began easing toward port.

Pitt felt his heart jump. Imperceptibly at first, but as the angle slowly increased, the river's current began nudging her starboard bow sideways. It was as though the United States refused to give up and was not about to pass from the ages with a black mark against her remarkable history. She had survived forty-eight long years of sailing the seas and being laid

up, and unlike many of her sister ships who went quietly to the scrap yard, she was not going willingly to her death, but with her heart and soul resisting to the end.

Unerringly, as if Pitt had ordained it, the ship's bow stem cut into the steep slope on the edge of the channel and forged through the bottom mud on an oblique angle to the levee two hundred feet beyond the breach. On a sharper angle she might have driven straight through.

The power of the river's flow through the gash blown out by the explosion came into play and helped slew her massive hull laterally against the breach. And then as suddenly as the vast surge had burst into the marshlands, it was dying, falling off to a small torrent that curled around the liner's still-flailing propellers at the stern.

At last she came to a complete stop, her four great bronze screws beating against the riverbed, embedding their blades in the mud until they could turn no more. The United States, the once-grand superliner of America's shipping fleet, had finished her final voyage.

Pitt stood like a man who had run a triathlon, his head dropped over the wheel, his hands still locked on the rim. He was dead-tired, his body, never fully recovered from the injuries received on an island off the coast of Australia only a few weeks before, shrieking for a rest. He was so brain-weary he could not distinguish any separation of the bruises and abrasions suffered from the explosions or the fight with the Chinese defenders of the ship. They all blended into a growing sea of torment.

It took nearly a full minute before he became dimly aware that the ship was no longer moving. His legs could hardly keep him upright as he released the helm and turned to go search for Giordino. But his friend was already standing in the shattered doorway, leaning on the Kalashnikov AKM that he used to shoot down the helicopter, using it as a cane.

"I have to tell you," Giordino said with a slight grin, "your docking technique leaves much to be desired."

"Give me another hour of practice and I'll get the hang of it," Pitt replied in a tone barely above a whisper.

On shore, the sickening moment of panic had passed. They no longer looked out across a broken levee and saw a roaring, unstoppable flood. The flow had fallen off to that of a rushing stream. Every man on the highway cheered and shouted exultantly, all except Sandecker. He gazed at the United States through saddened eyes. His face was weary and haggard. "No seaman likes to see a ship die," he said somberly.

"But what a noble death," said Gunn.

"I suppose there is nothing left for her but to be scrapped."

"It would cost too many millions to restore her."

"Dirk and Al, bless their hides, prevented a major disaster."