“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Pitt indifferently. “You never met her.”
Lee Tong swung up the barrel of his carbine and pulled the trigger.
Pitt was faster, but Giordino had used up the last cartridge and the revolver’s hammer fell on an empty cylinder. He stiffened, expecting the impact of a bullet.
It never came.
Lee Tong had forgotten to insert a new clip after firing his final round at Pitt on the towboat. He lowered the carbine, his lips stretched into an inscrutable smile. “It seems we have a standoff, Mr. Pitt.”
“Only temporary,” said Pitt, recocking the hammer and keeping the revolver raised and aimed. “My people will be coming aboard any minute now.”
Lee Tong sighed and relaxed. “Then I can do little else but surrender and wait for arrest.”
“You’ll never stand trial.”
The smile turned into a sneer. “That’s not for you to decide. Besides, you’re hardly in a position to—”
Suddenly he flipped the carbine around, gripping the barrel and raising it as a club. The rifle butt was on a vicious downswing when Pitt squeezed the trigger and blasted Lee Tong in the throat with the barrel loaded with buckshot. The carbine poised in midair and then fell from his hand as he stumbled backward until striking the wall and dropping heavily to the deck.
Pitt left him where he lay and threw off the cover over Loren’s cocoon. He gently lifted her out and carried her to the open elevator. He checked the circuit breakers and found them on, but there was still no response from the lift motors when he pressed the “up” button.
He had no way of knowing the generators that provided electricity to the barge had run out of fuel and shut down, leaving only the emergency battery power to illuminate the overhead lighting. Scrounging through a supply locker, he found a rope, which he tied under Loren’s arms. Then he pulled himself through the elevator roof’s trapdoor and scaled the shaft ladder to the top deck of the barge.
Slowly, gently, he eased Loren’s body upward until she lay on the rusting deck. Winded, he took a minute to catch his breath and look around. The
Taking a short length of the rope, Pitt tied Loren loosely to a cleat so she wouldn’t roll into the sea, then he returned below. When he entered the isolation chamber again, Lee Tong was gone. A trail of blood led up the corridor and ended at an open hatch to a storage deck below. He saw no reason to waste time on a dying murderer and turned to rescue the Vice President.
Before he took two steps, a tremendous blast lifted him off his feet and hurled him face downward twenty feet away. The impact from the concussion drove the breath from his lungs and the ringing in his ears prevented him from hearing the sea rush in through a gaping hole torn in the hull of the barge.
Pitt awkwardly raised himself to his hands and knees and tried to orient himself. Then slowly, as the haze before his eyes melted away, he realized what had happened and what was coming. Lee Tong had detonated an explosive charge before he died and already the water was flowing across a corridor deck.
Pitt pushed himself to his feet and reeled drunkenly into the isolation chamber again. The Vice President looked up at him and tried to say something, but before he could utter a sound, Pitt had hoisted him over a shoulder and was lurching toward the elevator.
The water was surging around Pitt’s knees now, splashing up the walls. He knew only seconds were left before the barge began its dive to the seabed. By the time he reached the open elevator, the sea was up to his chest and he half walked, half swam inside. It was too late to repeat the rope lift procedure. Furiously he manhandled Margolin through the ceiling trapdoor, clasped him under the chest and began climbing the iron ladder to the tiny square patch of blue sky that seemed miles away.
He remembered then that he had tied Loren to the upper deck to keep her from rolling into the sea. The sickening thought coursed through him that she would be pulled to her death when the barge sank.
Beyond fear lies desperation, and beyond that a raging drive to survive that cuts across the boundaries of suffering and exhaustion. Some men yield to hopelessness, some try to sidestep its existence, while a very few accept and face it head-on.
Watching the froth tenaciously dog his rise up the elevator shaft, Pitt fought with every shred of his will to save the lives of Margolin and Loren. His arms felt as if they were tearing from their sockets. White spots burst before his eyes and the strain on his cracked ribs passed from mere pain to grinding agony.
His grip loosened on flakes of rust and he almost fell backward into the water boiling at his heels. It would have been so easy to surrender, to let go and drop into oblivion and release the torture that racked his body. But he hung on. Rung by rung, he struggled upward, Margolin’s dead weight becoming heavier with each step.
His ears regained a partial sense of hearing and picked up a strange thumping sound, which Pitt wrote off as blood pounding in his head. The sea rose above his feet now, and the barge shuddered; it was about to go under.
A nightmare world closed in on him. A black shape loomed above, and then his hand reached out and clasped another hand.
Accounting
The
75
House Speaker Alan Moran, his face wreathed in a confident smile, circulated around the East Room of the White House conversing with his aides and inner circle of advisers while awaiting final word of the trial taking place on the floor of the Senate.
He greeted a small group of party leaders and then turned and excused himself as Secretary of State Douglas Oates and Defense Secretary Jesse Simmons entered the room. Moran came over and held out his hand, which Oates ignored.
Moran shrugged off the snub. He could well afford to. “Well, it seems you’re not of a mind to praise Caesar, but you haven’t a prayer of burying him either.”
“You’ve just reminded me of an old gangster movie I saw when I was a boy,” Oates said icily. “The title fits you perfectly.”
“Oh, really? What movie was that?”
Moran’s smile turned into a sinister glare. “Have you come with your resignation?”
Oates pulled an envelope partway out of his inside breast pocket. “I have it right here.”
“Keep it!” Moran snarled. “I won’t give you the satisfaction of bowing out gracefully. Ten minutes after I take the oath I’m holding a press conference. Besides assuring the nation of a smooth succession, I intend to announce that you and the rest of the President’s Cabinet planned a conspiracy to set up a dictatorship, and my first order as chief executive is to fire the whole rotten lot of you.”
“We expected no less. Integrity was never one of your character traits.”
“There was no conspiracy and you know it,” Simmons said angrily. “The President was the victim of a Soviet plot to control the White House.”
“No matter,” Moran replied nastily. “By the time the truth comes out, the damage to your precious reputations will have been done. You’ll never work in Washington again.”
Before Oates and Simmons could retort, an aide rushed up and spoke softly in Moran’s ear. He dismissed his enemies with a snide look and turned away. Then he stepped to the center of the room and raised his hands for
