Pitt turned slowly. “Maeve is already dead,” he lied.
Deirdre leaned sideways and tried to examine her sister around Pitt’s body. “Then you can watch as I shoot her precious twins.”
“No!” Maeve cried out from behind Pitt... “Not my babies!”
Deirdre was beyond all reason as she lifted the gun and stepped around Pitt for a clear shot at Maeve and her sons.
White rage overcame any shred of common sense as Pitt leaped, hurling himself toward Deirdre. He came out fast, saw the muzzle of the automatic pointing at his chest. He did not fool himself into thinking he could make it. The distance separating them was too far to bridge in time. At two meters, Deirdre couldn’t miss.
Pitt hardly felt the impact from the two bullets as they struck and penetrated into his flesh. There was enough loathing and malice inside him to deaden any pain, forestall any abrupt shock. He pounded Deirdre off her feet with a crushing impact that distorted her delicate features into an expression of abhorrent agony. It was like running into a sapling tree. Her back bowed as she toppled backward over a coffee table, pressed downward by Pitt’s crushing weight. There was a horrible sound like a dried branch snapping as her spine fractured in three places.
Her strange, wild cry brought no compassion from Pitt. Her head was thrown back, and she stared up at Pitt through dazed brown eyes that still retained a look of deep hatred.
“You’ll pay...” she moaned wrathfully, staring up at the growing circles of blood on Pitt’s side and upper chest. “You’re going to die.” The gun was still locked in her grip, and she tried to aim it at Pitt again, but her body refused to react to her mind’s commands. All feeling had suddenly gone out of her.
“Maybe,” he said slowly, looking down and smiling a smile as hard as the handle on a coffin, certain her spine was irreparably fractured. “But it’s better than being paralyzed for the rest of my life.”
He dragged himself off Deirdre and stumbled over to Maeve. Bravely, she ignored her wound and was consoling the little boys, who were still crying and trembling in terror.
“Its all right, my darlings,” she said softly. “Everything will be all right now.”
Pitt knelt in front of her and examined her wound. There was little blood, just a neat hole that looked like nothing more than a slight stab wound from a small object. He could not see where the plunging bullet had expanded inside her body and torn through her intestines and a labyrinth of blood vessels before penetrating the duodenum and lodging in a disc between two vertebrae. She was bleeding internally, and unless she received immediate medical treatment, death was only minutes away.
Pitt’s heart felt as if it had fallen into a chasm filled with ice. He instinctively wanted to cry in bitter grief, but no sound came from his throat, only a moan of sorrow that rose from deep inside him.
Giordino couldn’t stand the delay any longer. Dawn had arrived, and the eastern sky above the island was already glowing orange from the sun. He jumped from the helicopter to the deck, ducking under the rotating blades as the van carrying the security guards raced onto the dock. What the devil had happened to Pitt and Maeve? he wondered anxiously. Pitt wouldn’t have wasted an unnecessary second. The mooring lines were hanging slack in the water, and the yacht had already caught the outgoing tide and had drifted nearly thirty meters away from the dock.
Haste was vital. The only reason the guards had not fired on the helicopter or yacht was because they were afraid to damage Dorsett property. Now the guards were only a hundred meters away and closing in.
Giordino was so engrossed in keeping his eyes on their pursuers and his mind on what was delaying his friends that he failed to notice the sound of dogs barking from all parts of the island or the sudden flight of birds ascending and flying in confused circles in the sky. Nor did he sense an odd humming sound or feel the quivering on land and see the sudden agitation of the lagoon’s waters as the sound waves of staggering intensity, driven by an immense velocity, slammed into the subterranean rock of Gladiator Island.
Only when he was within a few steps of the door to the main salon did he glance over his shoulder at the guards. They were standing transfixed on the dock whose planking was curling like waves across a sea. They had forgotten their quarry and were pointing to a small cloud of gray smoke that had begun to rise and spread above Mount Scaggs. Giordino could see men pouring like ants from the tunnel entrance in the volcano’s slope. There seemed to be some activity inside Mount Winkleman as well. Pitt’s warning about the island going up in smoke and cinders came back to him.
He burst through the doorway of the salon, stopped dead and expelled a low moan of emotional agony at seeing the blood oozing from the wounds in Pitt’s chest and waist, the puncture in Maeve’s midriff and the body of Deirdre Dorsett bent back almost double over the coffee table.
“God, what happened?”
Pitt looked up at him without answering. “The eruption, has it started?”
“There’s smoke coming from the mountains, and the ground is moving.”
“Then we’re too late.”
Giordino immediately knelt beside Pitt and stared at Maeve’s wound. “This looks bad.”
She looked up at him, her eyes imploring. “Please take my boys and leave me.”
Giordino shook his head heavily. “I can’t do that. We’ll all go together or not at all.”
Pitt reached over and clutched Giordino’s arm. “No time. The whole island will blow any second. I can’t make it either. Take the boys and get out of here, get out now.”
As if he had been struck by a bombshell, Giordino went numb with disbelief. The lethargic nonchalance, the wisecracking sarcasm, fled from him. His thick shoulders seemed to shrink. Nothing in his entire life had primed him to desert his best friend of thirty years to a certain death. His expression was one of agonized indecision. “I can’t leave either of you.” Giordino leaned over and slipped his arms under Maeve as if to carry her. He nodded at Pitt. “I’ll come back for you.”
Maeve brushed his hands away. “Don’t you see Dirk is right?” she murmured weakly.
Pitt handed Giordino Rodney York’s logbook and letters. “See that York’s story reaches his family,” he said, his voice hard with glacial calmness. “Now for God’s sake, take the kids and go!”
Giordino shook his head in torment. “You never quit, do you?”
Outside, the sky had suddenly vanished, replaced by a cloud of ash that burst from the center of Mount Winkleman with a great rumbling sound that was truly terrifying. Everything went dark as the evil black mass spread like a giant umbrella. Then came a more thunderous explosion that hurled thousands of tons of molten lava into the air.
Giordino felt as if his soul was being torn away. Finally, he nodded and turned his head, a curious understanding in his grieved eyes. “All right.” And then one last jest. “Since nobody around here wants me, I’ll go.”
Pitt gripped him by the hand. “Good-bye, old friend. Thank you for all you’ve done for me.”
“Be seeing you,” Giordino muttered brokenly, tears forming in his eyes. He looked like a very old man who was shrouded in solemn and heart-wrenching shock. He started to say something, choked on the words and then he snatched up Maeve’s children, one boy under each arm, and was gone.
Charles Bakewell and the experts at the volcanic observatory in Auckland could not look into the interior of the earth as they could the atmosphere and to a lesser degree, the sea. It was impossible for them to predict the exact events in sequence and magnitude once the acoustic wave traveling from Hawaii struck Gladiator Island. Unlike most eruptions and earthquakes, these gave no time to study precursory phenomena such as foreshocks, groundwater fluctuations and changes in the behavior of domestic and wild animals. The dynamics were chaotic. All the scientists were certain of was that a major disturbance was in the making, and the smoldering furnaces deep within the island were about to burst into life.