Flood Tide (Dirk Pitt 14)

Propelled by the Stingray, Pitt burst free of the water just as the black boat was about to run him down. With timing based more on luck than expertise, he cast off the propulsion vehicle, threw up one arm and clamped it over the edge of the forward deck. The shock of the rapidly moving boat as it abruptly jerked his body through the water felt as if his arm was torn from its socket. Fortunately, it remained in place, and Pitt shot the man who was aiming a machine pistol at the people on shore before he could pull the trigger. In three seconds, Pitt had reloaded and fired a barb that punched upward through the man's eye, penetrating his brain.

The catamaran was now on a collision course with the shore, which was less than thirty feet away when Pitt slipped off the forward part of the boat and floated on his back. While the raised cabin advanced over him, he calmly reloaded the air gun. After the propellers thrashed by harmlessly on both sides, he twisted around and stroked powerfully in the wake of the boat. He swam only a short distance before the catamaran smashed into the lake bank, crunching the bows and coming to a stop as abruptly as if it had struck a steel wall. The engines raced for several seconds and then sputtered and died. The momentum and the impact had thrown the enforcer on the aft platform against the cabin with such extraordinary force that he broke his neck.

Unbuckling the straps to the backpack that held his air cylinders and dropping his weight belt, Pitt heaved himself up onto the aft platform. No figure showed inside the wheelhouse. He climbed the ladder and kicked in the door.

A man lay on the deck, his head and shoulders propped against the forward counter, hands clutching his chest. Broke his ribs from the impact, Pitt quickly suspected. Injured or not, the man was a killer. Pitt took no chances. Not with men like this. He raised his air gun in the same instant as Chu Deng thrust out a small, .32-caliber automatic pistol he'd been shielding with the hands across his chest. The deadly crack of the automatic overpowered the hiss of the barb from the air gun, both missiles passing in the same microsecond. The bullet plowed a small hole through the outer flesh of Pitt's hip at the same time the barb plunged into Chu Deng's forehead.

Pitt did not ju

dge his wound as serious. There was minor bleeding and pain to be sure, but it did not slow his physical movements. He ran stiffly from the wheelhouse, down the ladder and jumped off the forward platform onto the shore. He found the frightened immigrants huddled behind a clump of bushes.

"Where is the lady who speaks English?" he asked between pants of breath.

"I'm here," answered Julia. She rose to her feet and approached until she stood in front of him, more imagined than seen.

"How many did I lose?" he asked, fearful of the answer.

"By rough count," she answered, "three are missing."

"Damn!" Pitt muttered in frustration. "I'd hoped I got them all."

"You did," said Julia. "They became lost on the way to shore."

"I'm sorry," Pitt said honestly.

"You needn't be. It was a miracle you saved any of us."

"Can they travel?"

"I believe so."

"Follow the shore to your left as you face the lake," he instructed her. "After about three hundred yards, you'll come to a cabin. Hide everyone in the woods outside but do not enter. I repeat, do not enter. I'll follow as soon as I can."

"Where will you be?" she asked.

"We're not dealing with people who like to be fooled. They'll wonder what happened to their boat and come scouring the lakefront within the next ten minutes. I'm going to create a little diversion. You might call it a little payback for the person responsible for your misery."

It was too dark for him to see the sudden look of caring in her face. "

lease be careful, Mr.... ?"

"Pitt, my name is Dirk Pitt."

"I'm Julia Lee."

He started to say something, but broke off and hurried back to the catamaran, returning to the wheelhouse just as the phone buzzed. He groped for it in the dark, found and picked it up. Someone was conversing in Chinese on the other end. When the voice paused, Pitt muttered unintelligible vowels, clicked the receiver and laid the phone on the bridge counter. Using the dive light on his hood, he soon found the boat's ignition switches and throttles. He engaged the starters and worked the throttles back and forth until both engines coughed into life again.

The catamaran's bows were stuck fast in the mud of the bank. Pitt shifted to full throttle in reverse and spun the helm, swinging the boat's twin sterns back and forth in an effort to loosen the suction of the mud. One agonizing inch at a time, the black boat warped backwards until the suction relaxed its grip and the bows broke free. The boat surged into deeper water, where Pitt swung her around and then pushed the throttles forward, pointing the damaged bows toward the dock and Qin Shang's yacht, its elegant, seemingly deserted salons sparkling with light.

He jammed his dive knife between the spokes of the wheel, sticking the point into the wooden compass box beyond to hold the boat on course. Then he set the throttles on slow and exited the wheelhouse, scrambling down the ladder to the engine compartment in the starboard hull. There was no time to build a fancy incendiary bomb, so he spun off the big refueling cap to the fuel tank, found several oily rags used to clean the engine fittings and quickly knotted them together. Then he stuffed a length of rags inside the tank, soaked them with diesel fuel and trailed the rest onto the engine-compartment deck. Next, he arranged the rags into a small, circlelike dam and poured fuel inside it. Not overly pleased with his handiwork, but satisfied that under the circumstances it was the best he could do, Pitt returned to the wheel-house and rummaged the storage cabinets until he found what he knew had to be there somewhere. Loading the emergency flare gun, he laid it on the counter beside the phone in front of the helm. Only then did he pull his knife from the wheel and grip the spokes.

The yacht and the dock were only two hundred yards distant now.

Water gushing through cracks in the bows, crushed from their collision with the lake bank, rapidly filled the forward section of the twin hulls, dragging them down. Pitt shoved the throttles against their stops. The propellers bit and churned the water to froth, their drive power raising the bows out of the water. Fifteen, eighteen, then twenty knots, the ungainly catamaran skipped over the water. The helm vibrated under Pitt's hands as the yacht loomed ever larger through the windshield. He cut a broad arc until the twin hulls were lined up square in the middle of the yacht's port beam.

When the distance closed to seventy, going on sixty, yards, Pitt dashed through the wheelhouse door, dropped to the aft-deck platform, aimed the flare gun down through the open hatch of the engine compartment at the fuel-soaked rags and pulled the trigger. Trusting his aim was accurate, he leaped into the water, striking it at twenty knots with such force that his buoyancy compensator was torn from his body.

Four seconds later, there was a splintering crash as the catamaran smashed through the hull of the yacht, followed by an explosion that filled the night sky with flame and flying debris. The black catamaran that had acted as an execution chamber disintegrated. All that remained of it was a flaming oil slick. Almost immediately, fire was shooting through every port and varnished door of the yacht. Pitt was stunned at how quickly she became a flaming torch. He backstroked around the yacht's stern toward the floating hut at the end of the dock, watching as the luxurious skylounge and dining salon collapsed into the fire. Slowly, very slowly, the yacht settled into the cold waters of the lake amid a huge cloud of hissing steam, until nothing remained of her except the upper half of a radar antenna.