waved. They waved back. It's so much easier to be sneaky, he thought, than to burst out of the corral like a wild bull.
The boat passed the end of the pier into open water. Now the stern of the great ship soared above them. Pitt moved the shift lever into Forward and steered the Grand Banks on a course along the Ulrich Woof. To reach the fjord and escape the shipyard, they had to cruise entirely around the floating titan. Pitt set the throttles until the speed instruments read eight knots, a pace that he hoped would not arouse suspicions. So far, there had been no shouts, no bells or whistles, no signs of a chase or searchlights pinning them against the dark water.
At this speed, it would take fifteen minutes to pass the entire length of the supership and turn the bow until they could move a safe distance away and out from under the glare of the lights from the shipyard. Fifteen agonizing minutes that would seem like fifteen years. That was only the first hurdle. They still had the patrol boats to contend with, and by then there was every possibility their crews would have been alerted to the fugitives' escape in the Grand Banks cabin cruiser.
There was nothing they could do except remain inside the main cabin out of sight and stare up at the immense monster as they crept alongside. From bow to stern, the great mass of glass was a blaze of light inside and out, giving it the effect of a baseball stadium during a night game. The famous classic liners of their time, Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Queen Elisabeth, and Normandy, if anchored in a row, would still have come up short next to the Ulrich Wolf.
'I could use a hamburger about now,' said Giordino, trying to relieve the tension.
'Me, too,' said Megan. 'All they fed us was yucky nutritional stuff.'
Pat smiled, though her face looked strained. 'It won't be long, honey, and you'll get your hamburger.'
Pitt turned from the helm. 'Were you treated badly?'
'No abuse,' answered Pat, 'but I've never been ordered around by so many nasty and arrogant people. They worked me twenty hours a day.'
'Deciphering Amenes inscriptions from another chamber?'
'They weren't from another chamber. They were photos taken of inscriptions they found at a lost city in the Antarctic.'
Pitt looked at her curiously. 'The Antarctic?'
She nodded solemnly. 'Frozen in the ice. The Nazis discovered it before the wax.'
'Elsie Wolf told me they'd found evidence the Amenes built six chambers.'
'I can't say,' admitted Pat. 'All I can tell you is that I got the impression they're using the ice city for some purpose. What, I didn't find out.
'Did you learn anything new from the inscriptions they forced you to decipher?'
As she talked, Pat no longer looked sad and forlorn. 'I was barely into the project when you burst through the door. They were extremely interested in what me deciphered in the Colorado and St. Paul chambers. It appeared that the Wolfs were desperate to study the accounts passed down by the Amenes describing the effects of the cataclysm.'
'That's because any inscriptions they found inside the lost city came before the cataclysm.' He paused and nodded toward her briefcase.
'Is that what's in there?'
She held it up. 'The photos from the Antarctic chamber. I couldn't bring myself to leave them behind.'
He looked at her steadily. 'They don't make women like you anymore.'
Pitt might have said more, but a boat was crossing his bow about a hundred yards ahead. It looked to be a workboat, and its course remained steady as it turned and passed on the Grand Bank's port side. The crew seemed intent on their labors and didn't pay the slightest attention to the cabin cruiser.
Relaxing a bit as they neared the forward section of the Ulrich Wolf without any sign of pursuit, Pitt asked, 'You said they're studying what conditions will be like in the aftermath of the cataclysm?'
'In a big way. I assume they want every bit of data they can glean for their survival.'
'I'm still at a loss as to why the Wolfs are so positive a comet is going to return and collide with Earth within days of the prediction made by the Amenes nine thousand years ago,' Pitt said.
Pat shook her head slowly. 'I have no answers to that.'
Still crawling along at eight knots, Pitt gently turned the wheel, sending the Grand Banks on a wide arc around the bow of the Ulrich Wolf and passing the end of the dock, now swarming with shipyard workers and security guards checking the identification of every man and woman in red coveralls. He passed a small powerboat running with no lights that ominously swung around in a 180-degree turn and began following in their wake. He set his directional computer on the frame of the windshield and studied the readings that would lead him through the darkness to the ravine that held the Skycar.
Three miles to the ravine, three miles over water in a boat that offered no protection from probing lights or automatic weapons and heavy machine guns. All they carried were a pair of handguns. And there were the patrol boats that surely must have been alerted by now of a stolen powerboat carrying intruders attempting to escape the shipyard. His only consolation was that the patrol boats were at the far end of the fjord, giving them an extra few minutes of time. A slim consolation at best. With their superior speed, the patrol boats could easily intercept the Grand Banks before they could reach the mouth of the ravine.
'Al!'
Giordino was at his side immediately. 'Aye, aye.'
'Find some bottles. There must be some on board. Empty, then fill them with whatever you can find that's highly inflammable. Diesel fuel is too slow-burning. Look for gas or solvent.'
'Molotov cocktails,' said Giordino, grinning like a demon. 'I haven't thrown one of those since kindergarten.' Two steps, and he was dropping down a ladder to the engine compartment.
Pitt brushed aside an urge to shove the throttles to their stops, judging that it was more productive to play out a passive role. He stared over one shoulder at the twenty-five-foot runabout behind them, its big, powerful outboard motor clamped to its transom- it had increased speed and was drawing alongside. The lights from the shipyard revealed only two men in black uniforms, one steering the boat, the other standing in the stern gripping an automatic rifle. The one at the helm was motioning at his ear. Pitt understood the message and turned on the radio, leaving it on the frequency it was set.
A voice crackled over the speaker in Spanish, with an indisputable inflection that Pitt knew was a command to lay to. He picked up the microphone and answered 'No habla espanol.'
'Alto, alto!' the voice shouted.
'Get down below and lay flat on the deck,' he ordered Pat and Megan. They silently complied and hurried down the ladder to the main cabin.
Pitt slowed the boat and stood in the doorway, his Colt cocked and stuffed under his belt. The guard in the stern of the runabout crouched in readiness to jump on board the Grand Banks.
Pitt then pulled back the throttles but kept a slight headway, measuring the distance between the two boats and moving at just enough parallel speed so that the boarder would come over the railing almost in line with the doorway to the bridge. His timing would have to be exactly on the mark. He waited patiently, like a hunter in a blind watching the skies for a passing duck.
At the precise moment the security guard crouched to leap between the two boats, he shoved the twin throttles forward in a brief burst of speed, before abruptly pulling them back again. The sudden movement threw off the balance of the guard, and he landed sprawling on the narrow port deck of the Grand Banks.
Pitt smoothly stepped through the cabin door, jammed the heel of his right foot into the guard's neck, bent down and snatched up his automatic rifle, a Bushmaster M17S, and clubbed him behind the neck with the butt end. He leveled it at the guard at the helm of the outboard and fired. He missed, as the guard dropped to his knees, cramped the wheel over, hit the throttle, and turned the outboard on a sharp angle away from the Grand Banks. With a loud roar from the motor, the boat leaped away in a cloud of spray and churning water. Without waiting to see more, Pitt stepped back into the cabin and pushed the throttles as far as they would go. The stern of the Grand Banks dug down in the water, the bow lifted, and soon it was rushing across the black waters at nearly twenty knots.
Now Pitt focused on the patrol boats that had swung around on a course back up the fjord, coming at full speed, the searchlights playing the water in ever-closer sweeps toward the Grand Banks. It was a given that the guard driving the outboard had radioed a report. The lead boat was a good half mile ahead of its escort. From
