Giordino might still be alive.
Pitt stripped away the interior liner and bent over Giordino's face, afraid deep down it would be a lifeless blue. But there was color, and there was breath-- ragged and shallow, but there was breath. The brawny little Italian had incredibly survived on air that was trapped inside the buoyancy chamber.
Pitt felt suddenly drained to his bones. Physically and emotionally he was spent. He swayed wearily, the wind trying to beat him flat. Only a firm resolve to save everyone drove him on. Slowly, stiffly from a myriad of cuts and bruises, he slid his arms under Giordino and picked him up. The dead weight of Giordino's solid hundred and seventy-five pounds felt like a ton.
Gunn had come around and was huddled with Jessie. He looked up questioningly at Pitt, who was struggling across the windswept beach under Giordino's inert body.
"We've got to find shelter from the wind," Pitt yelled, his voice rasped by the intake of saltwater. "Can you walk?"
"I'll help him," Jessie yelled in reply. She circled both arms around Gunn's waist, braced her feet in the sand, and shoved him upright.
Panting under his load, Pitt made for a line of palm trees bordering the beach. Every twenty feet he glanced back. Jessie had somehow retained her dive mask, so she was the only one who could keep her eyes open and see straight ahead. She was supporting nearly half of Gunn's weight while he gamely hobbled beside her, eyes shut against the stinging sand, dragging his badly swollen foot.
They made it into the trees but received no mercy from the hurricane. The gale bent the tops of the palms almost to the ground, their fronds splitting like paper in a shredding machine. Coconuts were ripped from their clusters, striking the ground with the velocity of cannonballs and just as deadly. One grazed Pitt's shoulder, its husk tearing his exposed skin. It was as though they were running through the no-man's-land of a battlefield.
Pitt kept his head bent down and squinted sideways, watching the ground directly in front of him.
Before he knew it he had walked into a chain link fence. Jessie and Gunn drew up beside him and stopped. He stared to the right and then the left, but found no sign of a break. Trying to climb it was out of the question. The fence was at least ten feet high with a thick angle of barbed wire at the top. Pitt also spotted a small porcelain insulator and realized the chain links were wired for electricity.
"Which way?" Jessie cried.
"You lead," Pitt shouted in her ear. "I can hardly see."
She nodded to the left and set off with Gunn limping along at her side. They staggered onward, beaten every step by the unrelenting force of the wind.
Ten minutes later they had covered only fifty yards. Pitt couldn't push on much longer. His arms were going numb and he was losing his grip on Giordino. He closed his eyes and blindly began to count the steps, staying in a straight line by brushing his right shoulder against the fence, certain the hurricane must have cut off the power source.
He heard Jessie shouting something, and he opened one eye in a narrow slit. She was pointing vigorously ahead. Pitt sank to his knees, gently lowered Giordino to the ground, and looked past Jessie.
A palm tree had been uprooted by the insane wind and hurled through tire air like some monstrous javelin, landing on the fence and crushing it against the sand.
With appalling abruptness, night closed in and the sky went pitch black. Blindly, they stepped over the flattened fence like sightless drones, reeling and falling, driven on by instinct and some inner discipline that wouldn't allow them to lie down and give up. Jessie gamely kept the lead. Pitt had slung Giordino over a shoulder and held on to the waistband of Gunn's swim trunks, not so much for support as to prevent them from becoming separated.
A hundred yards, then another hundred yards, and suddenly Gunn and Jessie seemed to drop into the ground as if they were swallowed up. Pitt released his grip on Gunn and fell backward, grunting as Giordino's full weight fell across his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. He scrambled from under Giordino and stretched his hand gropingly forward into the dark until he felt nothing there.
Jessie and Gunn had fallen down a steep, eight-foot slope into a sunken road. He could just make out their vague outlines huddled in a heap below.
"Are you injured?" he called.
"We already hurt so much we can't tell." Gunn's voice was muffled by the gale, but not so muffled Pitt couldn't tell it came through clenched teeth.
"Jessie?"
"I'm all right. . . I think."
"Can you give me a hand with Giordino?"
"I'll try."
"Send him down," said Gunn. "We can manage it."
Pitt eased Giordino's limp figure over the edge of the slope and lowered him gently by the arms. The others held him by the legs until Pitt could scramble down beside them and take up the heavy bulk. Once Giordino was stretched comfortably on the ground, Pitt looked around and took stock.
The sunken road provided a shelter from the gale-force wind. The blowing sand had dropped off and Pitt could finally open his eyes. The road's surface was made up of crushed seashells and appeared hard packed and little used. No sign of light was visible in either direction, which wasn't too surprising when Pitt considered that any local inhabitants would have evacuated the shoreline before the full energy of the hurricane struck.
Both Jessie and Gunn were very nearly played out, their breath coming in short, tortured rasps. Pitt was aware his own breathing was fast and labored, and his heart pounding like a steam engine under full load. Exhausted and battered as they were, Pitt reflected, it still felt like paradise to lie behind a barrier that reduced by half the main drive of the gale.
Two minutes later Giordino began to groan. Then he slowly sat up and looked around, seeing nothing.
"Jesus, it's dark," he muttered to himself, his mind crawling from a woolly mist.
Pitt knelt beside him and said, "Welcome back to the land of the walking dead."
Giordino raised his hand and touched Pitt's face in the darkness. "Dirk?"
"In the flesh."
"Jessie and Rudi?"
"Both right here."
"Where is here?"
"About a mile from the beach." Pitt didn't bother to explain how they survived the landing or how they arrived at the road. That could come later. "Where are you hurt?"
"All over. My rib cage feels like it's on fire. I think my left shoulder is dislocated, one leg feels like it was twisted off at the knee, and the base of my skull where it meets the neck throbs like hell." He swore disgustedly. "Damn, I blew it. I thought I could bring us through the rocks. Forgive me for screwing up."
"Would you believe me if I told you we'd all be fish food if it wasn't for you?" Pitt smiled and then gently probed Giordino's knee, guessing that the injury was a torn tendon. Then he turned his attention to the shoulder. "I can't do anything about your ribs, knee, or thick skull, but your shoulder is out of place, and if you're in the mood I think I can manipulate it back where it belongs."
"Seems I recall you doing that to me when we played football in high school. The team doctor raised holy hell. Said you should have let him do it."
"That's because he was a sadist," Pitt said, grasping Giordino's arm. "Ready?"
"Go on, tear it off."
Pitt yanked and the joint snapped into place with an audible pop. Giordino let out a gasp that died into a relieved sigh. Pitt felt around in the dark beside the road until he found a stout branch that had been torn off a small scrub pine, and gave it to Gunn to use as a staff in place of a crutch. Jessie clutched one of Gunn's arms to steady him, while Pitt hoisted Giordino onto his sound leg and supported him with an arm around his waist.
This time Pitt led the way, mentally flipping a coin and heading up the road to their right, plodding close to the high embankment to shelter their progress from the unabating onslaught of the storm. Now the going was easier. No deep sand to wade through, no fallen trees to stumble over, not even the wind-propelled rain to torture them, for the edge of the slope caused it to
fly over their heads. Just the graded flat of the road leading off into the stricken darkness.
After an hour had passed, Pitt figured they had hobbled about a mile. He was about to call a rest stop when Giordino suddenly stiffened and stopped so unexpectantly that he lost Pitt's support and toppled to the road.
"Barbecue!" he yelled. "Smell it? Somebody's barbecuing beef."
Pitt sniffed the air. The aroma was faint, but it was there. He lifted Giordino and pushed ahead. The smell of steaks broiling over charcoal grew stronger with every step. In another fifty yards they met with a massive iron gate whose bars were welded in the shape of dolphins. A wall topped by broken glass stretched into the darkness on either side and stood astride a guardhouse. Not surprisingly, in light of the hurricane, it was vacant.
The gate, reaching a good twelve feet toward the ebony sky, was locked, but the outer and inner doors of the guardhouse were open, so they walked through. A short distance beyond, the road ended in a circular drive that passed in front of what seemed in the stormy dark to be a large mound. As they approached, it became a castlelike structure whose roof and three sides were covered over with sandy soil and planted with palmetto trees and native scrub brush. Only the front of the building lay exposed, starkly barren with no windows and only one huge, mahogany door artistically carved with lifelike fish.
"Reminds me of a buried Egyptian temple," said Gunn.
"If it wasn't for the ornate door," said Pitt, "I'd guess it was some kind of military supply depot."
Jessie set them straight. "A subinsulator house. Soil is an ideal insulation against temperatures and weather. Same principle as the sod houses on the early American prairie. I know an architect who specializes in designing them."
"Looks deserted," observed Giordino.
Pitt tried the doorknob. It turned. He eased the door open. The aroma of food wafted out from somewhere within the darkened interior.
"Doesn't smell deserted," said Pitt.
The foyer was paved in tile with a Spanish motif and was lit by several large candles set on a tall stand.
The walls were carved blocks of black lava rock and their only decoration was a gruesome painting of a man hanging from the fanged mouth of a snakelike sea monster. They entered and Pitt pulled the door closed behind them.
For some strange reason, the howl of the tempest outside and everyone's weary breathing seemed to add to the deathly stillness of the house.
"Anyone home?" Pitt called out.
He repeated the question twice more, but his only reply was a ghostly silence. A dim corridor beckoned, but Pitt hesitated. Another smell invaded his nostrils. Tobacco smoke. Stronger than the nearlethal gas emitted by Admiral Sandecker's cigars. Pitt was no expert, but he knew that expensive cigars smelled more rotten than the cheap ones. He guessed the smoke must be coming from prime Havanas.
He turned to the others. "What do you think?"
"Do we have a choice?" Giordino asked dumbly.
"Two," replied Pitt. "We can either get out of here while we can and take our chances in the hurricane.
Then, when it begins to die down, we can try to steal a boat and head back to Florida="
"Or throw ourselves on the mercy of the Cubans," Gunn interrupted.
"That's how it boils down."
Jessie shook her head and stared at him through soft, tender eyes. "We can't go back," she said quietly with no trace of fear. "The storm will take days to die, and none of us is in any condition to survive out there another four hours. I vote we take our chances with Castro's government. The very worst they can do is throw us in jail while the State Department negotiates our release."
Pitt looked at Gunn. "Rudi, how say you?"
"We're done in, Dirk. Logic is on Jessie's side."
"Al, how do you see it?"
Giordino shrugged. "Say the word, pal, and I'll swim back to the States." And Pitt knew he meant it too. "But the honest truth is we can't take much more. It pains me to say this, but I think we'd better throw in the towel."
Pitt looked at them and reflected that he couldn't have been blessed with a better team of people to face an unpleasant situation, and it didn't take a visionary to see things were going to become very unpleasant indeed.
"Okay," he said with a grim smile. "Let's crash the party."
They set off down the corridor and soon passed under an archway that opened onto a vast living room decorated in early Spanish antiques. Giant tapestries hung on the walls, depicting galleons sailing sunset seas or being driven helplessly onto reefs by thrashing storms. The furnishings seemed to have a nautical flair, the room was illuminated by ancient ship's lanterns of copper and colored glass. The fireplace was glowing with a crackling fire that warmed the room to hothouse temperatures.
There wasn't a soul to be seen anywhere.
"Ghastly," murmured Jessie. "Our host has simply dreadful taste in decor."
Pitt held up his hand for quiet. "Voices," he said softly. "Coming from that other archway between those two suits of armor."
They moved into another corridor that was dimly lit by candle holders every ten feet. The sounds of laughter and obscure words, from both male and female, became louder. A light loomed from under a curtain ahead. They paused for a second, and then swung it aside and passed through.
They had entered a long dining hall filled with nearly forty people, who stopped in midconversation and stared at Pitt and the others with the awed expression of a group of villagers meeting their first aliens from space.
The women were elegantly dressed in evening gowns, while half the men wore tuxedos and the other half were attired in military uniforms. Several servants waiting on the table stood stock-still like images on motion picture film that was suddenly freeze-framed. The stunned silence was as thick as a wool blanket.
A scene straight out of an early thirties Hollywood melodrama.
Pitt realized he and the rest must have made a shocking picture. Soaking wet, their clothing torn and ragged, bruised and gashed skin, torn muscles, broken bones. Hair plastered down around their heads, they must have looked like drowned rats rejected from a polluted river.
Pitt looked at Gunn and said, "How do you say `Pardon the intrusion' in Spanish?"
"Haven't the vaguest idea. I took French in school."
Then it struck Pitt. Most of the uniformed men were high-ranking Soviet officers. Only one appeared to be from the Cuban military.
Jessie was in her element. To Pitt she couldn't have looked more regal, even if the designer safari suit hung on her body in tatters.
"Is there a gentleman among you who will offer a lady a chair?" she demanded.
Before she received an answer, ten men with Russian-type machine pistols burst into the room and surrounded them in a loose circle, sphinx-faced men whose weapons were aimed at all four stomachs.
Their eyes were icy and their lips set in tight lines. There was little doubt in Pitt's mind that they were highly trained to kill on command.
Giordino, with the appearance of a man run over by a garbage truck, painfully pulled himself to his full height and stared back. "Did you ever see so many smiling faces?" he asked conversationally.
"No," said Pitt with the beginning of a to-hell-with-you grin. "Not since Little Big Horn."
Jessie didn't hear them. As if in a trance she shouldered her way through the armed guards and stopped near the head of the table, staring down at a tall, gray-haired man attired in formal evening wear, who stared back at her in shocked disbelief.
She brushed back her wet, tangled hair and struck a sophisticated, feline pose. Then she spoke in a soft, commanding voice. "Be a dear, Raymond, and pour your wife a glass of wine."
<<25>>
Hagen drove nineteen miles east of downtown Colorado Springs on Highway 94 until he came to Enoch Road. Then he turned right and arrived at the main entrance of the Unified Space Operations Center.
The two-billion-dollar project, constructed on 640 acres of land and manned by 5,
000 uniformed and civilian personnel, controlled all military space vehicle and shuttle flights as well as satellite monitoring programs. An entire aerospace community mushroomed around the center, covering thousands of acres with residential developments, scientific and industrial parks, high-tech research and manufacturing plants, and Air Force test facilities. In ten short years, what had once been sparse grazing land inhabited by small herds of cattle had become the "Space Capital of the World."
Hagen flashed his security clearance, drove into the parking lot, and stopped opposite a side entrance to the massive building. He did not get out of the car but opened his briefcase and removed his worn legal pad. He turned to a page with three names and added a fourth.
Raymond LeBaron....Whereabouts unknown.
Leonard Hudson....Same.
Gunnar Eriksen....Same.
General Clark Fisher....Colorado Springs.
Hagen's call to the Drake Hotel from Pattenden Lab had alerted an old friend at the FBI, who traced the number of Anson Jones to a classified line at an officer's residence on Peterson Air Force Base outside of Colorado Springs. The house was occupied by four-star General Clark Fisher, head of the joint Military Space Command.
Posing as a pest control inspector, Hagen had been given the run of the house by the general's wife.
Fortunately for him, she considered his unexpected arrival as a heavensent opportunity to complain about an army of spiders that had invaded the premises. He listened attentively and promised to attack the insects with every weapon in his arsenal. Then, while she fussed around in the kitchen with the hired cook, experimenting with a new recipe for apricot sautéed prawns, Hagen tossed the general's study.
His search revealed only that Fisher was a stickler for security. Hagen found nothing in desk drawers, files, or hidden recesses that could prove beneficial to a Soviet agent or himself. He decided to wait it out until the general left for the evening and then search his office at the space center. As he left by the rear door Mrs. Fisher was talking on the telephone and simply waved goodbye. Hagen paused for a moment and overheard her telling the general to stop off on his way home and pick up a bottle of sherry.