“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.
He jammed his dive knife between the spokes of the wheel, sticking the point into the wooden compass box beyond to hold the boat on course. Then he set the throttles on slow and exited the wheelhouse, scrambling down the ladder to the engine compartment in the starboard hull. There was no time to build a fancy incendiary bomb, so he spun off the big refueling cap to the fuel tank, found several oily rags used to clean the engine fittings and quickly knotted them together. Then he stuffed a length of rags inside the tank, soaked them with diesel fuel and trailed the rest onto the engine-compartment deck. Next, he arranged the rags into a small, circlelike dam and poured fuel inside it. Not overly pleased with his handiwork, but satisfied that under the circumstances it was the best he could do, Pitt returned to the wheelhouse and rummaged the storage cabinets until he found what he knew had to be there somewhere. Loading the emergency flare gun, he laid it on the counter beside the phone in front of the helm. Only then did he pull his knife from the wheel and grip the spokes.
The yacht and the dock were only two hundred yards distant now.
Water gushing through cracks in the bows, crushed from their collision with the lake bank, rapidly filled the forward section of the twin hulls, dragging them down. Pitt shoved the throttles against their stops. The propellers bit and churned the water to froth, their drive power raising the bows out of the water. Fifteen, eighteen, then twenty knots, the ungainly catamaran skipped over the water. The helm vibrated under Pitt's hands as the yacht loomed ever larger through the windshield. He cut a broad arc until the twin hulls were lined up square in the middle of the yacht's port beam.
When the distance closed to seventy, going on sixty, yards, Pitt dashed through the wheelhouse door, dropped to the aft-deck platform, aimed the flare gun down through the open hatch of the engine compartment at the fuel-soaked rags and pulled the trigger. Trusting his aim was accurate, he leaped into the water, striking it at twenty knots with such force that his buoyancy compensator was torn from his body.
Four seconds later, there was a splintering crash as the catamaran smashed through the hull of the yacht, followed by an explosion that filled the night sky with flame and flying debris. The black catamaran that had acted as an execution chamber disintegrated. All that remained of it was a flaming oil slick. Almost immediately, fire was shooting through every port and varnished door of the yacht. Pitt was stunned at how quickly she became a flaming torch. He backstroked around the yacht's stern toward the floating hut at the end of the dock, watching as the luxurious skylounge and dining salon collapsed into the fire. Slowly, very slowly, the yacht settled into the cold waters of the lake amid a huge cloud of hissing steam, until nothing remained of her except the upper half of a radar antenna.
The reaction time for the security guards, as Pitt had previously estimated, was slow. He had reached the floating hut before they came racing from the retreat on their dirt bikes toward the dock, which had also ignited and was now going up in flames. For the second time in an hour he surfaced inside the hut. Feet could be heard pounding through the passageway. He slammed the door, but finding no lock, wedged his trusty dive knife between the outer edge and the frame, effectively jamming it closed.
An old hand at riding watercraft, he jumped astride the nearest one and pressed the starter button. He squeezed the thumb throttle, and the motor immediately whirred into life. The thrasters dug in the water and threw the craft and Pitt forward. Together, they struck the flimsy door, shattering it into splinters before racing across the lake. Cold, wet, exhausted and bleeding from the bullet wound in his hip, Pitt felt like a man who had just won the lottery, the sweepstakes and broke the bank at Monte Carlo. But only for the time it took to reach the dock beside his cabin.
Then reality set in, and he knew the worst was yet to come.
LO HAN STARED DUMBSTRUCK AT THE MONITORS INSIDE THE mobile security vehicle revealing the black catamaran suddenly making a wide swing around the lake and homing in on the yacht, ramming the beautiful vessel square amidships. The resulting explosion rocked the security vehicle, temporarily knocking out the surveillance systems. Lo Han ran outside and down to the shoreline to witness the disaster firsthand.
There will be a heavy price to pay, he thought, staring at the yacht as it sank under the lake in a cloud of steam. Qin Shang was not a man who easily forgave. He would not be pleased when he learned that one of his four yachts had been destroyed. Already Lo Han was mentally creating ways to blame that stupid Chu Deng.
After he had demanded that Chu Deng investigate the mysterious light, there had been no coherent communication from the black boat and its crew of enforcers. He had to believe that they were drunk and had passed out in a stupor. What other explanation could there be? What reason for purposely committing suicide? The last thing to cross his mind was the specter of an outside source who was responsible for this disaster.
Two of his guards came running up to him. Lo Han recognized them as the men from his water patrol.
“Lo Han,” one of the men panted, out of breath after running nearly four hundred yards out and back through the passageway to the floating log hut.
He stared at them angrily. “Wang Hui, Li San, why aren't you men on the water with your craft?”
“We couldn't reach them,” explained Wang Hui. “The door was locked. Before we could force it open the hut was on fire, and we had to escape back into the tunnel or be burned alive.”
“The door was locked!” Lo Han bellowed. “Impossible. I personally instructed that no lock be installed.”
“I swear to you, Lo Han,” said Li San, “the door was barred from the inside.”
“Perhaps it became blocked from the explosion,” offered Wang Hui.
“Nonsense—” Lo Han broke off as a voice came over his portable radio. “Yes, what is it?” he snapped.
The quiet, competent voice of his second in command, Kung Chong, came through the earpiece. “The two men who were late in relieving the cell-block security guards ...”