Part 115 (1/2)

I love him” He would have said more, though he didn't know exactly what.

But then suddenly she was looking past him, over his shoulder. She bolted upright and suddenly screamed,

”Thomas! Jesus!.

She pointed, her soft fatigued expression exploding into a look of wide-eyed terror.

He whirled. He saw it, the submarine, rising near them no less than a hundred yards across the water, streaking straight toward them. His mouth flew open, and like most instants of stark, heart stopping fear, the moment seemed frozen in unreality.

The submarine was going to demolish them. Unmistakably.

They would have jumped, but there was nowhere to jump to.

They would have swum, but swimming was suicidal. The water was too cold, the current brutal, the waves enormous.

The sub steamed in at them. Fifty yards. Thirty.

Then it bore sharply left ward kicking up a gargantuan wake.

Thomas realized, thinking, So that's it! Brilliant to the end! They won't smash us, theyt capsize us instead!

No direct hit on an American s.h.i.+p, merely a deluge of water.

The submarine, slas.h.i.+ng through the surface of the ocean, pa.s.sed within twenty-five yards and then began diving. A ma.s.sive wave, followed by another and another, burst forth from the sub's wake and-rising thirty feet in the water-rolled violently toward the small Chris-craft.

The first wave battered the small boat, the second threw it lopsided up upon its crest. The third wave hit it head-on, propelling it sideways through the water.

Thomas and Leslie clung to the boat with all the strength they had. He remembered yelling

”Hang on! Hang on!” and they did.

But their boat was on its side now, and the frigid water was still rolling over it, rising steadily.

Beneath the waves, Thomas thought. Zenger's words raced back.

Slowly, but inexorably, as the sub dived from sight a final time, their small s.h.i.+p was going down.

Part Nine

Chapter 39 All in all, Aram Sha.s.sad was pleased, as pleased as he could be under the circ.u.mstances. He and Hearn had made an important collar.

The case dated back a while, almost a year in fact. Two holdup men had been working out of town, trying out their show in New Haven, when a ballistics test in a Connecticut liquor store linked them to a holdup slaying in Yorkville a year earlier.

The New Haven police had a lead or two. One gunman's sister, it seemed, lived in New Haven with her three children. She and her kids were scared to death of him and his apparent partner. Some loose talk here and there, and on a warm day in early September 1976 Sha.s.sad, Hearn, and six other detectives and uniformed men closed in on an apartment in Brownsville. Months of detective work ended in a mad scramble for pants.

Then there'd been that other case, the one which Sha.s.sad and Hearn had been rea.s.signed to in the interim per io4 while the Yorkville liquor store trail had gone cold.

The Ryder-Daniels case, as Sha.s.sad termed it generically. Sha.s.sad thought of it that first Monday after Labor Day when he by chance was driving alone across Eighty-ninth Street.

He saw a solitary figure on the southeast corner, standing alone, apparently waiting, while a beehive of construction men and equipment surrounded the old Sandler mansion on the opposite corner.

”Son of a b.i.t.c.h' thought Sha.s.sad, pulling his car to a halt alongside a fire hydrant.