Goaded on by Pitt's flying tackle, Fawkes charged up the steps like a maddened rhino and threw his great weight against the bodies of both men. Pitt went limp and fell off to one side. Emma struggled to bring the gun to bear, but Fawkes slapped it away as though it were a toy in a child's hands. Then Emma went for Fawkes's crotch, clutched his cock and balls, and squeezed ruthlessly.
It was the wrong move. The captain roared like thunder and reacted by swinging both his massive fists from over his head down upon Emma's upturned face, crushing cartilage and tearing skin. Astoundingly, Emma maintained the pressure.
Though his groin felt as if it were bursting in white-hot agony, Fawkes was wise enough not to try knocking away the hands that held him like a vise. Calmly, purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do, he gripped Emma's head an began pounding it into the metal deck landing with every ounce of strength in his tree- trunk arms. Mercifully, the pressure eased, but shrouded in his pain-lashed rage, he kept smashing away until the back of Emma's skull turned to pulp. When his fury was finally spent, he rolled over and gently massaged his groin, cursing.
After a minute or two he rose stiffly to his feet, took the coat collars of the two inert men, and dragged them up the stairway. One more short flight, a few yards down a passageway, and he came to a cargo-loading door in the upper starboard side of the Iowa's hull. He cracked the door enough to let in daylight and examined Pitt's wound.
The bullet had scored Pitt's left temple, causing, at worst, Fawkes figured, a nasty gash and a concussion. Then he checked Emma. What skin that was visible through the mask of blood on the assassin's face was turning blue. Fawkes went through his pockets and found only a spare clip for the Hockey-Rodine pistol. Strapped around a heavy woolen sweater was an inflatable life vest.
'A nonswimmer, hey?' Fawkes said, smiling. 'I don't guess you'll be needing this anymore.'
He removed the vest from Emma and tied it around Pitt. Reaching into his own coat pocket, Fawkes took out a small notebook and made several notations with the stub of a pencil. Next he took his eelskin tobacco pouch, emptied the contents, inserted the notebook, and tucked the packet snugly under Pitt's shirt. The cord to the C02 bottle was yanked and the vest hissed as it inflated.
Returning to Emma, Fawkes grabbed the corpse by the front of the sweater and pulled it toward the open hatch. The weight was too much for the angle of Fawkes's grip and the sweater slipped over Emma's head. Something around Emma's upper torso caught Fawkes's eye. It was a nylon binding that tightly circled the chest. Entranced, Fawkes undid a tiny clasp and the nylon fell away, releasing two small rosebud-tipped mounds.
For a moment Fawkes stood petrified.
'Holy Mother of Christ!' he murmured in awe.
Emma had indeed been a woman.
Dale Jarvis pointed at the viewing screen. 'There, just below the second gun turret, on the side of the hull.'
'What do you make of it?' asked the President.
'Someone has opened the forward loading hatch,' answered Kemper. He turned to General Higgins. 'Better alert your men to the possibility that the crew may attempt an escape.'
'They won't get ten feet past the shoreline,' said Higgins. They watched as the hatch was thrown back to its stops and a monster of a man stepped to the threshold and threw out what looked like a body. The form hit the water with a splash and disappeared. Soon he returned with another body, but this time he lowered it on a line to the leisurely flowing current — almost tenderly, it seemed to the men in the conference room — until the inert figure bobbed and floated free of the ship. Then the line was cast away and the doors closed.
Kemper motioned to an aide. 'Contact the Coast Guard and have them pick up that man drifting in the river.'
'What was that little performance all about?' The President's question echoed the thoughts of the men at the table.
'The hell of it is,' Kemper said quietly, 'we may never know.'
After what seemed like ages, Hiram Lusana found a doorway that exited to the main deck. He stumbled outside, bone chilled in his thin business suit, clutching the sack of bomblets in both hands. His sudden emergence into daylight blinded him and he paused to get his bearings.
He found himself standing beneath the aft fire-control bridge, forward of the numberthree gun turret. Small- arms fire whistled about the ship, but his mind was intent on disposing of the Quick Death bomblets, and he was oblivious of it. The river beckoned and he began sprinting toward the bulwarks edging the outer limits of the deck. He still had twenty feet to go when a man in a black rubber wet suit rose from the shadows of the turret and aimed a gun at him.
Lieutenant Alan Fergus no longer felt the burning pain from the hole in his leg, no longer felt the agony from seeing his combat teams cut to pieces. His whole body was quivering with hatred for the men responsible. It did not matter that the man in his sights wore a business suit instead of a uniform, or that he appeared to be unarmed. Fergus saw only a man who in his mind was murdering his friends.
Lusana halted abruptly and stared at Fergus. He had never before seen such cold malignity on a man's face. They looked into each other's eyes from no more than twelve feet, trying to exchange thoughts in that brief instant. No word passed between them, only a strange kind of understanding. Time seemed to pause and all sounds diminished into a blurred background.
Hiram Lusana knew his fight to rise above the filth of his childhood had culminated in this time and place. He had come to realize he could not be the leader of a people who would never fully accept him as one of their own. His path became clear. He could do far more for the oppressed of Africa by becoming a martyr to their cause.
Lusana accepted the invitation of death. He threw Fergus a silent smile of forgiveness and then leaped toward the bulwarks.
Fergus pulled the trigger and sprayed a pattern of automatic fire. The sudden impact of three bullets in his side pitched Lusana forward in a shuddered dance that pounded the breath from his lungs. Miraculously, he stayed on his feet and staggered drunkenly on.
Fergus fired again.
Lusana fell to his knees, still struggling toward the edge of the deck. Fergus watched in detached admiration, vaguely wondering what drove the incongruously dressed black man to ignore at least a dozen bullets in his body.
With brown eyes glazed with shock, and with a determination known only to a man who could never quit, Lusana crawled across the deck, holding the canvas sack against his stomach, leaving an everwidening trail of crimson behind him.
The bulwarks were only three feet away. He fought closer despite the blackness beginning to cloud his vision and the blood streaming from the corners of his mouth. Summoning an inner strength born of final desperation, he threw the sack.
It hung on the bulwark for an instant that seemed frozen in time, teetered, and then fell into the river. Lusana's face sank to the deck and he passed the gate into oblivion.
The interior of the massive gun housing reeked of sweat and blood and the pungent odors of powder and heated oil. Most of the crew were still in shock, their eyes glazed, unknowing, dulled with confusion and fear; the rest were lying amid the machinery in unnatural poses, blood trickling from their ears and mouths. A charnel house, Fawkes thought, a damn charnel house. God, I'm no better than the butchers who slaughtered my family.
He peered down the center elevator tube to the magazines and saw Charles Shaba hammering away with a sledge on a shell cradle that had become wedged ten feet below the turret deck. The interlock doors, designed to prevent accidental breech failure from communicating explosive flash to the magazines, were jammed open, and to Fawkes it was like looking into a bottomless pit. Then the black void seemed to fuzz and he suddenly realized the problem. The air was too foul to breathe. Those who survived the concussion caused by the Satan missile were dropping from lack of oxygen.
'Open the outside hatch!' he roared. 'Get some fresh air in here!'
'She's buckled, Captain,' a voice rasped on the other side of the turret. 'Jammed tight.'
'The ventilators! Why aren't they operating?'
'Blown circuits,' another man said, coughing. 'The only air we've got is what's coming up through the magazine tubes.'
