Flood Tide

He motioned to the girl, who was rising out of the water a few feet away with the little girl on her shoulders and one arm around an old woman who looked near death. “Take the boy!” he snapped. “Hurry these people into the trees and make them lie down!”

“Where will you ... you be?” she asked haltingly.

He shot another look at the boat. “Horatius at the bridge, Custer standing alone at Little Big Horn, that's me,” Pitt said. Before Julia could reply, the stranger who had saved their lives had vanished back into the water.

Chu Deng was scared down to his boots. In the darkness he had failed to see the deaths of his enforcers. He had been concentrating on keeping the boat from ru

He had no choice but to confront his assailants. It never entered his mind that there was only one. He assumed it had to be a pla

Qin Shang would surely order him sent to the bottom of the lake if he didn't capture the escaped immigrants before they reached American authorities. In the light from across the lake, Chu Deng counted nearly a dozen men and women and two children staggering and crawling from the water's edge toward a forest of trees. Caught up in fear of a short future and without regard to the circumstances, Chu Deng turned the catamaran directly toward a low bank ru

“There they are!” he screamed wildly to the enforcer on the forward deck. “Shoot them, shoot them before they reach the trees!”

He stared mesmerized as his man on the forward platform of the catamaran raised his weapon and stood watching as if a film was ru

There are many advantages to a craft with catamaran twin hulls. Repelling boarders is not one of them. A boat with a single high bow is next to impossible to climb aboard, much less to find a means of hanging on to the hull. But the straight-across platform deck forward of the main cabin and wheel-house sat only fourteen inches above the water, making it relatively simple for a person in the water to grab hold of the leading edge.

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 judge 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. “Please 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.