Flood Tide

Giordino checked the drum on his Aserma shotgun and counted seven 12-gauge rounds left. He leaned to one side, stretched out his hand and retrieved a Kalashnikov AKM rifle dropped by one of the dead ship defenders. He punched out the clip and noted that it was only a quarter empty before shoving it back in the magazine. Wincing from pain, he struggled to one knee and aimed the Aserma at the helicopter, keeping the AKM automatic rifle as a backup.

His eyes did not blink, his face was still. There was no sensation of coldness, no pitiless thoughts ru

“How do I hate you,” he muttered angrily. “Let me count the ways.”

With the last man aboard, the pilot lifted the craft vertically into the air. Buffeted by its own downdraft, it hung for a few moments before slipping sideways and aiming its bow toward the east. At that instant, Giordino opened up, pumping round after round into the turbine engines mounted below the rotor. He could see the twelve-gauge magnum-charged pellets tearing holes in the cowlings but without seeming effect.

He pumped out his last casing, dropped the Aserma and snatched up the AKM. There was a thin wisp of smoke coming from the port turbine now, but the helicopter showed no other signs of vital damage. There was no infrared laser pointer on the rifle, and Giordino disregarded the night scope mounted on the barrel. A large target at this distance was hard to miss. He peered over the iron sights at the great bird about to disappear and pulled the trigger evenly on semiautomatic. After pounding the final shot home, Giordino could do no more that hope that he had at least wounded the bird to a condition where it could not reach its destination. The helicopter seemed to hang before falling backward in a tail-low attitude. It was clearly out of control now as flames shot out of both turbines. Then it was falling like a rock, crashing onto the stern deck before exploding in a solid wall of flame that shot straight up in the air. Within seconds, the stem became a raging inferno, radiating heat and fire with the energy of a blast furnace.

Giordino threw the gun aside as the shooting pain in his broken leg returned with a vengeance. He gazed approvingly at the blazing, twisted tongue of fire shooting into the sky. “Damn,” he murmured softly. “I forgot the marshmallows.”

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 stu

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. Gu

“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 Gu

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 cha

“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 ru