Part 19 (1/2)

As a shadow crept horizontally across the deck and then vertically up the bulkhead, Pitt snapped his body in a half arc and rammed the point of Barf into the stomach of the man standing behind him and pulled the trigger. The black outline against the white paint also betrayed the blurred shape of either a gun or a club in one of the intruder's hands, and, if Pitt had wasted a fraction of a second, he'd have been as dead as March. As it was, he barely had time to see that his a.s.sailant was a tall, hairy man, wearing only a brief green cloth around his loins. The face was intelligent, almost handsome, with blue eyes and a burled ma.s.s of blond hair. The features Pitt soon forgot. It was the next agonized moment in time that he carried to his grave.

The carbon dioxide hissed as it unleashed its immense pressure into pliant, human flesh. The man's body instantly bloated in a distorted monstrosity of ugliness, the stomach protruding together with the small balloonlike pieces of skin that formed between the ribs. The abject look of horror on the face was wiped out in half a second as his grayish-green innards shot from his nose and ears in a fine spray coating the deck for six feet in each direction, and the mouth contorted to twice its size as a great ma.s.s of b.l.o.o.d.y tissue and pieces of internal organs vomited forth in a cascade of red, slimy matter over the inflated torso in unison with the eyeb.a.l.l.s which popped out of both sockets and hung swaying over the puffed cheeks. The arms went straight out to the sides and the hideously deformed figure fell backwards to the deck, slowly deflating to its previous size as the carbon dioxide escaped from the body's orifaces.

Pitt, the bile rising in his throat, turned from the sickening sight, leaned down, and picked up March, carefully laying him on one of the beds. He covered the young lieutenant with a blanket Pitt's eyes were sad and bitter. He knelt beside the still form as if to say: I shouldn't have let you die. Dammit to h.e.l.l, March. I shouldn't have let you die.

Pitt stood up, his legs unsteady. The game had changed drastically now. The Vortex had scored close to home.

He turned again to the deformed body on the deck and realized that he was staring at his first tangible evidence. This was no supernatural being from outer s.p.a.ce. This was a two-armed, two-legged human being that bled like everyone else.

Pitt didn't wait to see more. If there was another one of them lurking nearby, Pitt knew he wouldn't get another chance at killing them from the inside out The gas canister held only one shot Pitt felt helpless, but suddenly it came to him; the weapon he'd seen in the shadow on the wall, the weapon that had killed March. In two steps, he had found it under the surgical table. He hadn't noticed it before because it was shaped more like a small glove with the index finger pointing, than a standard pistol. The grip was the five-finger type in which each finger had its own special rest and support The hand fit the stock as though it had been poured in. Only a short two-inch barrel protruding above the thumb indicated a firing chamber. There was no trigger in the usual sense, but a small b.u.t.ton set so that the tip of the finger rested on its sleeve, ready to fire with only an ounce or two of pressure.

Pitt didn't wait to test it Quickly he reached the radio room, grabbed a protesting Farris by the arm, and raced toward the escape hatch.

They almost made it. Ten more steps across the engine and reactor room and they would have reached the torpedo room door. Pitt braked suddenly, his feet digging in, driving backward against the force of Farris's forward motion behind him as he came face-to-face with a ma.s.sive mountain of a man wearing only brief green shorts and holding the same type of odd weapon that Pitt clutched in his hand.

Dirk Pitt 1 - Pacific Vortex

Pitt lucked out-surprise was on his side. He had expected and feared an untimely confrontation. The other man clearly had not There was no ”who are you?” or ”what are you doing here?” Only the pressure of Pitt's fingers on the b.u.t.ton and an almost inaudible serpentlike hiss as his weapon spoke first.

The projectile from Pitt's gun-he still wasn't sure what it was that spat out of the tiny barrel-hit the man high on the forehead at point-blank range. The stranger jerked back violently against the turbine, then fell forward, head and chest striking heavily on the deck Then, even before the man uttered his last gasp, Pitt had stepped around him and was shoving Farris through the doorway into the torpedo room.

Farris stumbled and fell, sprawling on the deck, taking Pitt down with him, but not before Pitt had smashed his leg just below the knee on the door sill and dropped the weapon. The sharp pain felt as though his leg had been suddenly hacked off. But it was not the pain that paralyzed him as he struggled to rise from the deck, but rather a numbing fear, the realization that he'd blundered by das.h.i.+ng headlong into the forward torpedo room. He groped frantically for the strange gun, knowing it was too late, knowing

that either of the two men standing in the compartment could kill him with ridiculous ease.

”Pitt?” said the smaller of the two men.

Pitt was certain that his ears and his mind were deceiving him. Then he found himself gazing into the face of the Martha Ann's helmsman.

Pitt blurted: ”You followed us?”

”Commander Boland thought you and March must be about out of air,” answered the helmsman. ”So he sent us down with auxiliary tanks. We came in through the escape compartment. We never expected to find it dry.”

Pitt's numbed senses were forging back now. ”We haven't much time. Can you flood this compartment?”

The helmsman stared at him. The other man, Pitt recognized as one of the deckhands, merely looked blank. ”You want to flood .”

”Yes, dammit. I want to fix it so no one will be able to raise this s.h.i.+p for at least a month.”

”I can't do it ...” the helmsman said hesitantly.

”There's no time to waste,” Pitt said softly. ”March is already dead, and we will be too if we don't hurry.”

”Lieutenant March dead? I'don't understand. Why flood ...”

”It doesn't matter,” Pitt said, staring directly into the helmsman's eyes. ”Ill take full responsibility.” Even before the words were out, the same empty, worthless phrase he'd given to March haunted him.

The other seaman pointed at Farris, sitting on the deck, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular. ”Who's her