Flood Tide

He had hoped for a radar installation, but Qin Shang, knowing the United States was on her final voyage saw no reason for the added expense. “Can you tell how many?”

“I count two coming straight down the river,” replied the crewman, staring through night-vision glasses.

No need for panic, thought Hung-chang. They were either state law-enforcement craft that could do little but issue warnings for the ship to stop, or those chartered by the news media.

He raised his night-vision glasses and peered upriver. Then the veins in his neck became taut as he recognized the helicopters as belonging to the military.

In the same moment a long row of floodlights blinked on, illuminating the river as brightly as daylight, and he saw a convoy of armored tanks rise from the opposite side of the east levee and tram their guns on the river channel where the ship was about to pass. Hung-chang was surprised to see no rocket launchers. Not trained in military weapons systems, he did not recognize the National Guard's older M1A1 tanks with their 105-millimeter guns. But he knew well the damage they were capable of against the unarmored superliner.

The two helicopters, Sikorsky H-76 Eagles, split apart and flew past the side of the ship on a height even with the upper deck. One slowed and hovered above the stern while the other circled, drew even with the wheelhouse and trained a bright spotlight on it.

A voice from a loudspeaker boomed above the thump of the rotor blades. “Bring your ship to a halt immediately!”

Hung-chang gave no orders to comply. The fates had suddenly turned against him. The Americans must have somehow been warned. They knew! Damn them! They knew that Qin Shang intended to destroy the levee and use the superliner as a diverting dam.

“Halt immediately!” the voice came again. “We are coming aboard to secure your ship!”

Hung-chang hesitated as he weighed his chances of running the gauntlet. He counted six tanks lined up on the levee ahead. Lacking missiles with powerful warheads, the enemy would find the great ship next to impossible to sink by tank gunfire alone. The big engines were well below the waterline and immune to destruction from the surface. He glanced at his watch. Bayou Goula and the Mystic Canal were only fifteen minutes away now. For a moment, he considered stopping the ship and surrendering to the American military. But he was committed. To quit now would mean a loss of face. He would do nothing to dishonor his family. He made the decision to keep going.

As if to bind his commitment, one of the Chinese special forces team fired an SA-7 Russian-made man-portable infrared homing antiaircraft missile at the helicopter hovering over the stern. At less than two hundred yards it was impossible to miss, even without the homing system. The missile struck the helicopter's boom behind the fuselage and blasted it off. Horizontal control was lost and the craft spun crazily in circles before falling into the river and sinking out of sight, but not before the two crewmen and ten troops inside managed to struggle clear.

The men in the second helicopter flying opposite the liner's bridge were not as lucky. The next missile blew it apart in an explosive burst of fire, sending flaming debris and bodies crashing into the dark current of the river, their grave swept clean by the seething wake from the ship's propellers.

During the death and destruction, Hung-chang and the Chinese fighting force were unaware of the low-pitched buzzing sound approaching from upriver. Nor did any of them see the two black parachutes that fleetingly hid the stars in the night sky. Every eye was turned toward the menacing guns of the tanks, every mind concentrating on running the gauntlet of devastating fire they knew was about to ravage them.

Captain Hung-chang spoke quietly into the ship's phone to the engine room. “Full ahead, all engines.”

TEN MINUTES EARLIER, FROM A SCHOOLYARD A BLOCK FROM the river, Pitt and Giordino lifted into the night sky. After donning helmets and harnesses, they strapped small motors that were mounted on backpacks across their shoulders. Next, they hooked into a thirty-foot-wide canopy with over fifty suspension lines spread on the turf and started their little three-horsepower engines that were about the same size as those used on power mowers and chainsaws. For stealth, the exhaust manifolds were specially muffled, emitting only a soft popping sound. The propellers, looking more like the wide blades on a fan and encased behind a wire cage so as not to entangle their lines, bit the air. After Pitt and Giordino ran a few steps, the thrust of the motors took over, the 230-square-foot canopies inflated and the two men lifted into the sky.

Except for wearing a steel helmet and a body-armor vest, the only weapon Giordino carried was Pitt's 12-gauge Aserma Bulldog, which was slung across his chest. Pitt elected his battle-scarred Colt automatic. Heavier weapons would have made it difficult to keep the paraplanes and their tiny engines in the air. There were other considerations as well. Their mission was not to engage in combat but to reach the wheelhouse and gain control of the ship. The Army assault team was relied on to handle any fighting.

Too late, only after they were in the air, did they see the Array helicopters shot out of the sky.

Less than an hour after the United States bypassed New Orleans, Pitt and Giordino met with General Oskar Olson, General Montaigne's old army buddy and commander of the National Guard of Louisiana, at the Guard Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the state capital of Louisiana. He had strictly forbidden Pitt and Giordino to accompany his assault team, brushing aside their argument that they were the only marine engineers on the scene familiar with the deck plan of the United States, and knowledgeable enough to take control of the wheel-house and stop the ship before it reached Bayou Gouia.

“This is an Army show,” Olson declared, rapping the knuckles of one hand into the palm of the other. For a man in his late fifties, he was youthful-looking, confident and buoyant. He was about the same size as Pitt but with a slight paunch at the waist that comes to most all men as they age. “There may be bloodshed. I can't allow civilians to get hurt, and certainly not you, Mr. Pitt, not the son of a United States senator. I don't need the hassle. If my men can't stop the ship, I'll order them to run it ashore.”

“Is that your only plan after the ship is secured?” asked Pitt.

“How else do you stop a vessel the size of the Empire State Building?”

“The length of the United States is more than the width of the river below Baton Rouge. Unless someone stands at the helm who knows how to command the automated systems, the ship could easily go out of control and swing broadside across the channel before ramming both bow and stern into the riv-erbanks—a barrier that would effectively block all barge traffic for months.”

“Sorry, gentlemen, I'm committed,” said Olson, smiling, showing even but gapped white teeth. “Only after the ship has been secured will I allow you and Mr. Giordino to be airlifted aboard. Then you can do your thing and bring that monster to a quick halt and anchor her before she becomes a menace to river traffic.”

“If it's all the same to you, General,” said Pitt without warmth, “Al and I will make our own arrangements to come aboard.”

Olson did not immediately absorb Pitt's words; his olive-brown eyes were far away. They were the eyes of an old warhorse whose nose had not sniffed the smells of combat for two decades but sensed one more battle was coming his way. “I warn you, Mr. Pitt, I will not tolerate any foolishness or interference. You will obey my orders.”

“A question, General, if you please?” said Giordino.

“Shoot.”

“If your team fails to take the ship, what then?”

“As insurance, I have a squadron of six MlAl tanks, two self-propelled howitzers and a mobile one-hundred-six-millimeter mortar on their way to the levee a few miles downriver. More than enough firepower to blast the United States into scrap.”

Pitt gave General Olson a very skeptical look indeed, but made no effort to reply.

“If that's it, gentlemen, I have an attack to carry out.” Then, as if he was a school principal dismissing a pair of unruly boys, General Oskar Olson marched back to his office and closed the door.

The original plan of landing on the ship after it was seized by the Army assault team went down the toilet in less time than it takes to tell, Giordino mused ironically, as he flew less than fifty feet behind Pitt and slightly above. He didn't need a diagram on a blackboard to know their odds of being riddled with bullets or blasted into tiny molecules by heavy firearms were somewhere between ordained and a sure thing. And if those options weren't bad enough, there was still the onslaught from the Army to live through.

Dropping onto a rapidly moving ship in the dead of night without breaking several bones will not be a routine affair, thought Pitt. Faced with an inconceivable landing, their biggest difficulty would be the forty-mile-an-hour speed of the ship versus the barely twenty-five-mile crawl of the paraplanes. Only by coming in downwind of the ship could they increase their airspeed.

They could lower the odds slightly, he reasoned, by flying downriver, meeting the ship and circling in as it slowed while turning through the sharp bend at the old Evan Hall plantation.

Pitt wore yellow-lensed glasses to soften the darkness, and relied on the ambient illumination from the houses and cars traveling on the highways and roads on both sides of the river to guide his descent. Though he was in full control, he felt as if he was falling into a deep crevasse with some unspeakable minotaur rushing toward him out of the depths. He could see the giant ship now, more imagined than real, but materializing out of the night, the colossal funnels looming ominous and threatening.

There could be no error in judgment. He fought off an urge to pull a toggle and veer off to avoid crashing into the unyielding superstructure and smashing his body to pulp. Al, he knew with dead certainty, would follow him without an instant's hesitation whatever the consequence. He spoke into the radio attached inside his helmet.