Dr. Death (19 page)

"Mon Dieu!"
gasped Duroche. "The volcano…"

I ignored him, pointing upward with my flashlight.

"That shaft there," I said. "What is it? Where does it lead?"

"Ventilator shaft," said Duroche. "It leads to the roof. If we could…"

"We're going to," I snapped. "Li Chin?"

"Acrobatics time again, hunh?" She was panting now, like the rest of us.

Wordlessly, I positioned myself beneath the ventilator shaft opening. An instant later Li Chin was standing on my shoulders, removing the grill to the shaft. I handed her my flashlight and could see her shine it upward. A few feet away, Sweets continued to fire blasts into the laboratory.

"It's not a bad level of incline," said Li Chin. "I think we can make it."

"Can you close the grill after we get inside?" I asked.

"Sure."

"Then let's go."

I gave her another boost with my hands, and Li Chin disappeared into the shaft.

"All right, Duroche," I said, struggling for breath, "now you."

With difficulty, Duroche climbed first onto my clasped hands, then onto my shoulders. Li Chin's arm reached down out of the shaft, and slowly, Duroche grunting with effort, was helped up inside.

"Sweets," I said, gulping for air, "you ready?"

"Why not?" he said.

He fired one final blast into the laboratory, rolled rapidly out of the doorway, and dashed toward me, flipping me the BAR as he came. I braced myself. He sprang onto my shoulders like a big cat, then swiftly up into the shaft. I leveled the BAR at the laboratory door and squeezed the trigger just as two men came through it. Their bodies were smashed back into the laboratory. I could hear one of them screaming. I glanced upward and flipped the BAR into Sweets' waiting hands just as a flashlight beam cut down the passageway from the room we had been in.

"Now!" Sweets urged. "Come on, man!"

I bent at the knees, gasping for air, my head beginning to reel, and sprang upward with all my strength. I felt Sweets' two hands clasp mine and pull, just as the flashlight beam lit on my legs. I hauled myself up, struggling, every muscle in my body screaming with effort. There was a deadly chatter of BAR fire, and I felt metal slice through my pants legs. Then I was up, inside the shaft.

"The grill," I gasped immediately. "Give it to me!"

Someone's hands put the grill into mine. I slid it down into its frame, leaving one side open, fumbling to unbuckle my belt.

"Start climbing!" I told the others.

"What's that you got there?" asked Sweets, as he turned.

I pulled Pierre out from his hiding place and triggered the five-second fuse.

"Just a little parting gift for our friends below," I said, and dropped Pierre down into the passageway, immediately slamming the grill down into place, and flipping its shutters closed tight. And let's hope they are tight, I thought grimly as I turned and began to scramble up the shaft after the others.

I had gotten about five feet when Pierre went off. The blast wasn't as powerful as Sweets' mini-grenades, but an instant later I could hear screams that were choked into strangled coughs, the gargled, horrible death-sounds of man after man being felled by Pierre's lethal gas.

The shutters on the grill must have been just as tight as I had hoped they would be, because the air in the shaft got ever better as we climbed upward, with none of the gasses from Hugo entering it.

Three minutes later we were all lying on the cement-block roof, sucking fresh, beautiful, clean night air into our lungs.

"Hey, look," Li Chin said suddenly. She was pointing downward. "The exits. Nobody's using them."

Duroche nodded.

"When the general sent out that alert to capture your friend here, the exits were electronically locked, to make sure he couldn't escape. After Mr. Carter's gas bomb went off…"

We looked at one another with grim understanding. The doors that had been electronically locked to prevent Sweets from escaping had prevented the OAS forces from escaping from Pierre. With the ventilators not working, Pierre's gas was now spreading with deadly efficiency throughout the entire complex of buildings.

The OAS headquarters had been turned into a charnel house, a nightmare deathtrap as efficient and escape-proof as the gas chambers the Nazi's had used in their concentration camps.

"They must have called just about everybody into the buildings to fight Sweets," said Li Chin. "I don't see anybody outside in the crater."

I peered down, running my eyes around the inside of the crater, and along its rim. Nobody. Except at the entrance to the garage…

I saw her at the same moment Duroche did.

"Michelle!" he gasped. "Look! There! At the garage entrance!"

There were two trucks pulled up to the garage entrance. Its doors were firmly shut, but I had a hunch it wasn't
into
the garage that Michelle wanted to go. She was talking to the two armed guards from one of the trucks, who had accompanied it on its trip into the crater, gesturing furiously, almost hysterically.

"How could she have gotten out?" demanded Sweets.

"An emergency exit," said Duroche, staring at his daughter fixedly, his expression torn between obvious joy that she was alive, and the knowledge she had betrayed both him and her country. "A secret exit, known only to the general and a few top staff. She must have known also."

"She'll never get off the island," I said. "Even if she does, without the weapons you developed or the blueprints for them, the OAS is finished."

Duroche turned to me, grabbing my shoulder.

"You don't understand, Mr. Carter," he said excitedly. "That is what I was about to tell you when the general tried to shoot me. Not all the computers were destroyed."

"What?" I snapped. "What do you mean?"

"One of the weapons is already equipped with a computer, and ready to be launched. It was the emergency one. And it is now on a small boat in the harbor at St. Pierre. Not Lorrain or Marigot, where your planes keep watch. But St. Pierre."

As he said the last words, as if on cue, Michelle and the two armed guards climbed into the cab of the truck. It reversed, and then started to make a U-turn, to head out of the crater. I snatched the BAR from Sweets without a word, pointed it at the cab of the truck, and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing.

I yanked out the empty clip and looked at Sweets. He shook his head mournfully.

"No more, man. That's it."

I threw down the BAR and stood up as the truck with Michelle in it accelerated up the road out of the crater and disappeared over the rim. My mouth was tight.

"Sweets," I said, "I hope the
Lady Day
moves as fast as you say it can. Because if we can't beat Michelle to the mouth of the St. Pierre harbor, there's going to be one less oil refinery off Curaçao."

"Let's give it a try," said Sweets.

Then we were scrambling over the roof, toward the garage and the remaining truck in front of it, two startled guards looking up only in time to have their chests blown into bloody craters by the.45 blasting from my right hand.

The
Lady Day
rounded the mouth of the St. Pierre harbor, Sweets at the helm, at a speed which made me wonder whether it was a yacht or a hydroplane. Standing beside me in the bow, while I struggled into scuba gear, Li Chin swept the harbor with a pair of Sweets' high-powered binoculars.

"Look!" she said suddenly, pointing.

I took the binoculars and peered through them. Only one boat was moving in the harbor. A small sailboat, no more than fifteen feet, and apparently not equipped with an engine, it was tacking slowly in the light breeze toward the mouth of the harbor.

"They'll never make it," said Li Chin. "We'll be all over them in another minute."

"It's too easy," I muttered, keeping my eyes on the boat. "She must realize we'll overtake them. She must have some other idea."

Then we were near enough for me to make out figures moving on the deck of the boat. One of the figures was Michelle. She was in scuba gear, and I could see her gesturing furiously to the two guards. They were carrying a long, thin tube across the deck.

"What's going on?" Li Chin asked curiously.

I turned to the tense, anguished figure of Fernand Duroche.

"How heavy is your underwater weapon?"

"Approximately fifty pounds," he said. "But what does it matter? They cannot launch it from here. It would simply fall to the bottom and stay there. They would have to get outside the harbor, to drop it to at least a depth of one hundred feet before it would self-activate and propel itself."

"And we'll overtake them long before they get to the mouth of the harbor," said Li Chin.

"Michelle realizes it," I said. "That's why she's in scuba gear. She's going to try to swim the weapon out to a depth of a hundred feet."

Li Chin's jaw dropped.

"It's not as impossible as it sounds," I said, adjusting the only two remaining air tanks on my back. "She's good underwater, remember? And fifty pounds underwater is nothing like fifty pounds out of water. I had a hunch she might try something like this."

I adjusted the knife at my belt, picked up Sweets' speargun, and turned to give him instructions. But he had seen what was going on and was ahead of me. He cut back on the engines of the
Lady Day
and slid across her bow no more than fifty feet away.

I went over the side just as Michelle did, the Duroche torpedo cradled in her arms.

The water was black, murky. For a moment I couldn't see anything. Then, as I worked my fins steadily, slicing through the water, I caught sight of the shallow keel of the sailboat. I curved, turned, and looked for Michelle, hoping for a sign of the telltale bubbles from her mask. Nowhere.

Then, fifteen feet below me and slightly ahead, on the bottom, I caught sight of the Duroche torpedo. Alone. No Michelle.

I curved and turned frantically, suddenly realizing what would come next. And it came — the long, deadly spear slicing through the water inches from my face. Behind me, I caught a glimpse of Michelle slipping behind the sunken wreck of an ancient sailing ship.

She was going to dispose of me before swimming the torpedo out to deep water. Unless I disposed of her first.

I didn't have any choice. I went after her.

Speargun at the ready, I moved slowly around the sunken ship. Jagged wooden spars jutted out dangerously from its rotted sides. A school of small fish flittered across my path. I stopped, holding on to a broken mast, then rose a few feet and looked down.

She came from below this time, the knife in her hand slicing furiously at my belly, then, when I slid aside, at my face. I jack-knifed around a rotted hatch cover, leveled my speargun, and fired in one movement. The shaft shot forward and sliced through the skin of Michelle's shoulder. I saw, through her mask, the agonized twisting of her mouth. I also saw the thin stream of blood from her shoulder coloring the water.

It had to be finished quickly now. The sharks would be on us at any minute, drawn to the blood and ravenous.

I unsheathed my knife and swam slowly forward. Michelle jack-knifed around a spar of the sunken ship, then darted forward at me. Her knife sliced viciously in the direction of my head. She was trying to cut my oxygen line. I swam downward, then made a sudden turn and a corkscrewing back flip. I was suddenly on top of her, and my left hand grabbed her knife hand in an iron grip. She struggled to free herself, and for several moments we swayed back and forth, up and down, in a deadly underwater ballet. We were mask to mask, our faces only a foot apart. I could see her mouth twist with effort and tension.

And when my knife came to stab upward, through her belly and into her chest, I saw that face I had kissed so often distort in agony. And the body I had made love to so many times writhe convulsively, shudder, and then suddenly go limp with the passivity of death.

I sheathed my knife, grabbed her body under the arms, and started to swim slowly upward. When I broke the surface of the water,
the Lady Day
was only a few yards away, and I saw Li Chin lowering a rope ladder, gesturing frantically, shouting.

Then I heard what she was shouting: "Sharks, Carter! Sharks!"

I had no choice. I let go of Michelle's body, wrenched the oxygen tank harness off my back, and swam for the
Lady Day
like an Olympic star. I grabbed hold of the rope ladder and yanked myself out of the water bare seconds before a row of razor-sharp teeth took away half of one of my fins.

Then I was on deck, seeing the two guards from the sailboat sitting near Sweets, tied hand and foot, their faces sullen with defeat. And seeing Fernand Duroche staring over the rail, wide-eyed with horror, at the boiling red turmoil where the sharks were ripping apart Michelle's body.

Wearily, I pulled off my fins and walked over to him.

"I know it's small comfort," I said, "but she was dead before the sharks hit her."

Duroche slowly turned away. His shoulders slumped even further. He shook his head.

"Perhaps," he said brokenly, "it is best. She would have been proclaimed a traitor — tried — sent to prison…"

I nodded silently.

"Carter," said Li Chin softly, "do the authorities have to know about Michelle? I mean, what difference does it make now?"

I thought about it.

"All right, Duroche," I said finally, "that's one thing I can do for you. As far as the world is going to know, your daughter died a heroine, fighting for your freedom, and for her country, against the OAS."

Duroche looked up. The gratitude on his face was almost painful.

"Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you."

Slowly, wearily, but with a certain tired dignity, he walked away, to stand by himself in the stern.