Clive Cussler - Cyclops

Pitt stepped back and lowered the bat. "Does the name Brian Shaw do anything for you?" he asked calmly.

The twisted look of hate slowly changed to puzzlement. "The British agent? You knew him?"

"Six months ago, I saved his life on a tugboat in the Saint Lawrence River. Remember? You were crushing him to death when I came up from behind and brained you with a wrench."

Pitt relished the savage glare in Gly's eyes.

"That was you?"

"A final thought to take with you," Pitt said, smiling fiendishly.

"The confession of a dead man." There was no contempt, no insolence in Gly's voice, just simple belief.

Without another word the two men began circling each other like a pair of wolves, Pitt with the bat raised, Gly dragging his injured leg. An eerie quiet settled over the room. Gunn struggled through a sea of pain to reach the fallen automatic pistol, but Gly caught the movement out of the corner of one eye and kicked the gun aside. Still tied to the chair, Giordino struggled weakly against his bonds in helpless frustration, while Jessie lay rigid, staring in morbid fascination.

Pitt took a step forward and was in the act of swinging when one foot slipped in the blood of a slain Russian. The bat should have caught Gly on the side of his head, but the arc was thrown off by six inches. On reflex Gly threw up his arm and absorbed the impact with king-size biceps.

The wooden shaft quivered in Pitt's hands as if he had struck it against a car bumper. Gly lashed out with his free hand, grabbed the end of the bat, and heaved like a weightlifter. Pitt gripped the handle for dear life as he was lifted into the air like a small child and slung halfway across the room against a wall of bookshelves, where he crashed to the floor amid an avalanche of leather-bound volumes.

Sadly, despairingly, Jessie and the others knew Pitt could never shake off the jarring collision with the wall. Even Gly relaxed and took his time about approaching the body on the floor, triumph fairly glowing on his gargoyle face, lips spread in sharkish anticipation of the extermination to come.

Then Gly stopped and stared incredulous as Pitt rose up from under a mountain of books like a quarterback who had been sacked, dazed, and slightly disoriented but ready for the next play. What Pitt knew, and no one else 'realized, was that the books had cushioned his impact. He hurt like hell but suffered no crippling damage to flesh and bone. Lifting the bat he moved to meet the advancing iron man, and rammed the blunt end with all his strength into the sneering face.

But he misjudged the giant's unholy strength. Gly side-stepped and met the bat with his fist, knocking it aside and taking advantage of Pitt's forward momentum to clench iron arms around his back. Pitt twisted violently and brought his knee up into Gly's groin, a savage blow that would have doubled over any other man. But not Gly. He gave a slight gasp, blinked, and then increased the pressure in a vicious bear hug that would crush the life out of Pitt.

Gly stared unblinking into Pitt's eyes from a distance of four inches. There wasn't the slightest display of physical exertion on his face. The only expression was the sneer that was locked in place. He lifted Pitt from his feet and kept squeezing, anticipating the contorted terror that would spread across his victim's face just before the end.

The air was choked off from Pitt's lungs and he gasped for breath. The room began to blur as the pain inside his chest ruptured into flaming agony. He could hear Jessie screaming, Giordino shouting something, but he couldn't distinguish the words. Through the pain his mind remained curiously sharp and clear. He refused to accept death and coldly devised a simple way to cheat it.

One arm was free, while the other, the one still clutching the baseball bat, was caught in Gly's relentless grip. The black curtain was beginning to drop over his eyes for the last time, and he realized death was only seconds away when he performed his last desperate act.

He brought up his hand until it was even with Gly's face and thrust the full length of the thumb into one eye, driving inward through the skull and twisting deeply into the brain.

Shock wiped the sneer off Gly's face, the shock of atrocious pain and unbelief. The dark features contorted in an anguished mask, and he instinctively released his arms from around Pitt and threw his hands up to his eye, filling the air with a horrible scream.

In spite of the terrible injury, Gly remained on his feet, thrashing around the room like a crazed animal. Pitt could not believe the monster was still alive, he almost believed Gly was indestructible until a deafening roar drowned the agonized cries.

Once, twice, three times, calmly and quite coldly, Jessie pulled the trigger on the fallen automatic pistol and shot Foss Gly in the groin. The shells thudded into him, and he staggered backward a few steps, then stood grotesquely for a few moments as if held by puppet strings. Finally he collapsed and crashed to the floor like a falling tree. The one eye was still open, black and as evil in death as it had been in life.

<<56>>

Major Gus Hollyman was flying scared. A career Air Force pilot with almost three hundred hours of flight time, he was suffering acute pangs of doubt, and doubt was one of a pilot's worst enemies. Lack of confidence in himself, his aircraft, or the men on the ground could prove deadly.

He couldn't bring himself to believe his mission to shoot down the space shuttle Gettysburg was anything more than a crazy exercise dreamed up by some egghead general with a fetish for far-out war games. A simulation, he told himself for the tenth time, it had to be a simulation that would terminate at the last minute.

Hollyman stared up at the stars through the canopy of the F-15E night attack fighter and wondered if he could actually obey an order to destroy the space shuttle and all those on board.

His eyes dropped to the instruments that glowed on the panel in front of him. His altitude was just over 50,000 feet. He would have less than three minutes to close on the rapidly descending space shuttle and lock in before firing a radar-guided Modoc missile. He automatically went through the procedure in his mind, hoping it would get no further than a mental event.

"Anything yet?" he asked his radar observer, a gum-chewing lieutenant named Regis Murphy.

"Still out of range," replied Murphy. "The last update from the space center in Colorado puts her altitude at twenty-six miles, speed approximately six thousand and slowing. She should reach our sector in five minutes, forty seconds, at a speed of twelve hundred."

Hollyman turned and scanned the black sky behind, spotting the faint exhaust glow of the two aircraft following his tail. "Do you copy, Fox Two?"

"Roger, Fox Leader."

"Fox Three?"

"We copy."

A cloud of oppression seemed to fill Hollyman's cockpit. None of this was right. He hadn't dedicated his life to defending his country, hadn't spent years in intensive training, simply to blast an unarmed aircraft carrying innocent scientists out of the air. Something was horribly wrong.

"Colorado Control, this is Fox Leader."

"Go ahead, Fox Leader."

"I request permission to terminate exercise, over."

There was a long pause. Then "Major Hollyman, this is General Allan Post. Do you read me?"

So this was the egghead general, Hollyman mused. "Yes, General, I read you."

"This is not an exercise. I repeat, this is not an exercise."

Hollyman did not mince words. "Do you realize what you're asking me to do, sir?"

"I'm not asking, Major. I'm giving you a direct order to bring down the Gettysburg before she lands in Cuba."

There had been no time for a full briefing when Hollyman was ordered to scramble his flight into the air. He was stunned and bewildered at Post's sudden revelation. "Forgive me for asking, General, but are you acting by higher command? Over."