December 10, 1948 Unknown Waters

Pitt grabbed Giordino's arm to get his attention. "We've got to get to the bridge—"

His voice was cut off in a painful gasp, his arms and legs suddenly thrust into the air as his body was catapulted against a ventilator, driving the air from his lungs. A tremendous blast rang in his ears as the deck beneath him was heaved up in an enormous explosion. A shell from a howitzer had smashed into the crew's cabins below and burst, leaving a jagged hole filled with tangled wreckage and shattered metal. Almost before the debris had settled, Pitt was fighting off the blackness that seeped into his vision. With agonizing slowness he forced himself to sit up. His first words muttered through a cut and bleeding lip were, "Damn the Army, damn their hides." But he knew they were just doing their job, fighting for their own lives, and doing it well.

The mist slowly cleared from his mind, but there were still blinding flashes of white and orange colors before his eyes. He looked down and saw that Giordino was lying across his legs. He reached out and shook his shoulder. "Al, are you hurt?"

Giordino blinked one of his dark brooding eyes open and stared up. "Hurt? I feel like I've had root canals all over my body."

As they lay recovering, another wave of shells pounded into the ship. The tanks had lowered their guns now and were firing into the steel hull. Now their high-explosive antitank armor began to score, burning through the steel hull plates before smashing into one of the thousands of the ship's bulkheads and exploding. One howitzer zeroed in on the bridge and soon the structure became a mass of jagged wreckage that looked as if a giant had chopped it with a cleaver. The great ship stubbornly bored through the exploding hell, looming huge in front of the gunners as they loaded and fired with incredible calm. The national guardsmen, often called weekend warriors, fought like seasoned veterans. But like a wounded whale that shook off a cloud of harpoons and swam on, the United States absorbed the punishment they dished out without so much as a fractional drop in speed.
The ship was almost past the gauntlet now. Desperately, the forces on the levee loosed one final wall of devastating fire that tore the night air apart. A crescendo of explosions rocked the battered, once-proud superliner. There was no fire, no mushrooming balls of flame or billowing clouds of smoke. Her designer William Francis Gibbs, would have been saddened by her mauling but pleased that his fetish for fireproofing had resisted any attempt to turn his achievement into a fiery shambles. In his command vehicle, Colonel Turner watched in utter frustration as the juggernaut showed her stern and disappeared into the night.
Without warning, three figures rushed out of the blackness toward Pitt and Giordino. A burst of gunfire cut across the deck. Giordino stumbled but regained his feet, firing off a blast from the 12-gauge Aserma that dropped the Chinese who had managed to squeeze the trigger of his Chinese-copied Kalash-nikov AKM automatic rifle. Then the remaining four men fell on each other in a thrashing melee of bodies. Pitt felt the muzzle of a gun jam into his ribs, but he knocked it aside a millisecond before a stream of bullets whipped past his hip. He brought the Colt's barrel down on his opponent's head once, twice, three times and clubbed him to the deck. In icy disregard for his injury, Giordino thrust his shotgun against his assailant's chest at the same time he pulled the trigger. The Aserma's muzzle erupted with a muffled roar that knocked the Chinese fighter backward as if he had been jerked off his feet by a horse galloping in the opposite direction. Only then did the feisty little Italian crumple to the deck.
Pitt dropped to his friend's side. "Where are you hit?"

"The bastard got me in the leg above the knee," Giordino answered in a hoarse grunt. "I think it's broken."

"Let me take a look."

Giordino pushed Pitt away. "Never mind me. Get to the bridge and stop this tub before the levee blows." Then he forced a grin through the pain. "That's what we came for."

There were only two more miles left to go and five minutes to get there. And then Pitt was charging like a demon, struggling through the shattered wreckage toward the remains of the wheelhouse. He fought his way through the maze of fallen wires left by the broken foremast and came to a shocked halt. The bridge structure hardly existed anymore. Nothing could be recognized of it. The walls of the wheelhouse looked to have collapsed outward. Miraculously, the interior console had survived with minor damage. The body of Captain Li Hung-chang lay on the floor covered with glass and debris. His fixed expression, his open, staring eyes and few spots of blood on his uniform almost made him seem as though he was looking up through the vanished roof, staring at the stars. Pitt instantly recognized that he had been killed by concussion.
The master helmsman still stood, his lifeless hands gripping the wheel. It seemed that a curse from the devil had refused to let him fall beside his captain. Pitt saw with blood-chilling horror that his head was gone, taken off cleanly at the shoulders.
Pitt glanced through the shattered remains of the bridge window. Mystic Canal was less than a mile away. Far below, the crew had abandoned the engine room and were rushing onto the outer decks in expectation of being evacuated by helicopter.
All gunfire had stopped now and the thunderous tumult became a hushed and unimaginable silence. Pitt's hands played over the levers and switches of the console, trying frantically to cut all power throughout the ship. But without a chief engineer to carry out the commands, the enormous turbines ignored any attempt to stop them. No power on earth could stop the United States now. Her massive bulk and incredible impetus drove her on. In his final moment of life Ming Lin had begun to rum the wheel and send the ship on an oblique angle, lining her up to be scuttled, as dictated by Qin Shang's master plan. Her bow was already coming around toward the east bank of the river.
Pitt knew the explosive charges far below in the ship's bilge were set and timed to go off and sink the ship at any second. He wasted no time in staring helplessly at the obscene apparition at the helm. He pushed the mutilated body off to one side and took the wheel at the exact instant the trucks on the highway, now only a few hundred yards away, exploded with a thunderous roar that shook the ground and churned the river. He felt the icy needles of disaster in his spine. Hopelessness swamped him in a fleeting rage. But his resolve, his infinite endurance, would never allow him to fail. He had developed a sixth sense after having survived death over the years. The fear of hopelessness came and went. He was oblivious to anything and everything, except for what he must do.
With unwavering concentration, he gripped the wheel and desperately spun it, turning the rudder to head the ship on a new course before her bottom was blown out.
Back on the deck beneath the colossal funnels where Pitt had left him, Al Giordino pulled himself up against the base of a ventilator. The pain in his leg had receded to little more than a dull ache. Running figures suddenly appeared, dressed head to toe in black night-fighting attire. Believing him to be among the dead scattered about the deck, they rushed past and ignored him. As he lay there a black helicopter abruptly shot out of the dark and darted over the east levee. The pilot did not waste moments hovering but dove right in, barely clearing the aft railing by less than two feet and dropping onto the same deck behind the rear funnel where Giordino and Pitt had landed their paraplanes. Almost before the helicopter's wheels slammed onto the deck, Qin Shang's men were diving inside through the open door in the fuselage.
Giordino checked the drum on his Aserma shotgun and counted seven 12-gauge rounds left. He leaned to one side, stretched out his hand and retrieved a Kalashnikov AKM rifle dropped by one of the dead ship defenders. He punched out the clip and noted that it was only a quarter empty before shoving it back in the magazine. Wincing from pain, he struggled to one knee and aimed the Aserma at the helicopter, keeping the AKM automatic rifle as a backup.
His eyes did not blink, his face was still. There was no sensation of coldness, no pitiless thoughts running through his mind, but more a perception of detachment. These men did not belong here. They came to kill and cause destruction. To Giordino's way of thinking, allowing them to escape unpunished was a crime in itself. He stared at the men inside the helicopter, who began to laugh with satisfaction in the belief they had won out over the stupid Americans. Giordino became mad, madder than he had ever been.

"How do I hate you," he muttered angrily. "Let me count the ways."

With the last man aboard, the pilot lifted the craft vertically into the air. Buffeted by its own downdraft, it hung for a few moments before slipping sideways and aiming its bow toward the east. At that instant, Giordino opened up, pumping round after round into the turbine engines mounted below the rotor. He could see the twelve-gauge magnum-charged pellets tearing holes in the cowlings but without seeming effect.
He pumped out his last casing, dropped the Aserma and snatched up the AKM. There was a thin wisp of smoke coming from the port turbine now, but the helicopter showed no other signs of vital damage. There was no infrared laser pointer on the rifle, and Giordino disregarded the night scope mounted on the barrel. A large target at this distance was hard to miss. He peered over the iron sights at the great bird about to disappear and pulled the trigger evenly on semiautomatic. After pounding the final shot home, Giordino could do no more that hope that he had at least wounded the bird to a condition where it could not reach its destination. The helicopter seemed to hang before falling backward in a tail-low attitude. It was clearly out of control now as flames shot out of both turbines. Then it was falling like a rock, crashing onto the stern deck before exploding in a solid wall of flame that shot straight up in the air. Within seconds, the stem became a raging inferno, radiating heat and fire with the energy of a blast furnace.
Giordino threw the gun aside as the shooting pain in his broken leg returned with a vengeance. He gazed approvingly at the blazing, twisted tongue of fire shooting into the sky. "Damn," he murmured softly. "I forgot the marshmallows."
THE EXPLOSION THUNDERED IN THE EARS OF THE SOLDIERS and sheriff's deputies who had stopped just half a mile from the two semitrucks and trailers. The sky tore apart in a violent, demented convulsion of compressed air as the horrendous detonation tore the heart out of the levee. Seconds later, the eruption of the pressure wave stunned them, followed by a blast of dirt from the levee and concrete from the highway. Then flaming metal from the shattered trucks rained down from a world in chaos. As if given a universal order, everyone ducked behind or under his vehicle to shield himself from the storm of debris.
Sandecker threw up an arm to protect his eyes from the blinding flash and flying fragments. The air felt thick and charged with electricity as a great roar pounded his ears. A huge ball of fire rose and mushroomed, spreading into the sky, transforming into a swirling black cloud that blotted out the stars.
And then all eyes turned back to where a hundred yards of highway, the levee and the two big trucks once stood. All had disintegrated. None of those standing there in shock were prepared for the horrific spectacle that avalanched through the vanished remains of the levee. To a man they stood numbed by the rumbling reverberation in their ears that slowly faded, only to be replaced with a far more ominous sound, an unbelievably loud hissing and sucking sound as a seething wall of water gushed catastrophically into the waiting arms of the Mystic Canal, dredged by Qin Shang for this very event.
For one long, terrible minute they stared bleakly through disbelieving eyes, hypnotically drawn to a cataract so violent that it could not be conceived unless witnessed. They watched impotently as millions of gallons of water poured through the breach in the highway and levee, dragged by the natural laws of gravity and impelled by the force of the river's mass and current. It exploded into a wall of boiling water with nothing to stop its great momentum as it began draining off the main flow of the Mississippi.
The great destroying flood tide was on its way, oblivion in the making.
Unlike ocean tidal waves, there was no trough. Behind the crest, the fluid mass moved without the slightest suggestion of distortion, its texture smooth and rolling, surging with immeasurable energy.
What was left of the abandoned town of Calzas was inundated and swept away. Nearly thirty feet high, the irresistible, seething mass engulfed the marshlands as it hurled toward the waiting arms of the Atchafalaya River. A small cabin cruiser, with its four occupants in the wrong part of the river, at the wrong time, was sucked into the breach, where it plunged dizzily through the wild maelstrom and vanished. No act of man could halt the raging wall of uncontrollable water as it rushed across the valley before advancing toward the Gulf, where its muddy flow would be absorbed by the sea.
Sandecker, Olson and the other men on the highway could do nothing but watch the nightmarish disaster like eyewitnesses at a train derailment, unable to fathom the unrelenting cataclysm that could penetrate and crush concrete, wood, steel and flesh. They watched silently in the face of what appeared to promise inevitable calamity, their faces tightened in expressionless masks. Gunn shivered and looked away toward the Mississippi.
"The ship!" he shouted above the rush of the flood. He pointed excitedly. "The ship!"
In almost the same terror-bred moment in time, the United States came rushing past. Mesmerized by the awesome spectacle of the unleashed flood tide, they had forgotten about her. Their eyes followed Gunn's outstretched hand and finger, seeing an unending black silhouette emerge from the night, a tangible monster from the darkness. Her superstructure, fore and aft, was blasted into a shell-torn, jagged mass of indescribable shambles. Her foremast was gone, her funnels raked and holed, great gaps of twisted steel ripped into the sides of her hull.
But still she came, propelled by her great engines, bent on adding her weight to the devastation. There was no stopping her. She passed them by at a tremendous rate of speed, her bows throwing up a great sheet of water as she drove against the current under full power. Despite the fact she had been used to cause death and destruction, she looked magnificent. No man who saw her that night would ever forget that they were seeing a legend die. No drama was ever played to a more climactic ending.
They stared enthralled, expecting to see her hull turn and slant across the river in preparation of her role of becoming a dam to cast the Mississippi away from her established channel forever. Their convictions seemed verified as waterspouts burst alongside her hull.

"Mother of God!" muttered Olson in shock. "They've blown the charges! She's going down!"

Any shred of misplaced hope any of them had of the Corps stemming the flow was gone now as the glorious superliner began to settle in the water.
But the United States was not headed on a course to bury her bows in the east bank with her stern slanted across the river toward the west. She was running straight up the center of the main channel, ever so slowly curving toward the Niagara-like falls roaring through the breach.
Pitt stood and clutched the wheel, now jammed against its stop. He had turned the rudder as far as it could go. His calculated determination could do no more. He felt the ship shudder as the explosive charges blew great holes in her bottom, and he cursed himself for not being able to control the speed or somehow reverse the port propellers and twist the ship in a tighter turn. But the automated control system had been shut down by damage from the Army's gunfire, making it impossible without a crew down in the engine room to carry out his course change. Then, with torturous slowness, almost miraculously, he watched as the bow began easing toward port.
Pitt felt his heart jump. Imperceptibly at first, but as the angle slowly increased, the river's current began nudging her starboard bow sideways. It was as though the United States refused to give up and was not about to pass from the ages with a black mark against her remarkable history. She had survived forty-eight long years of sailing the seas and being laid up, and unlike many of her sister ships who went quietly to the scrap yard, she was not going willingly to her death, but with her heart and soul resisting to the end.
Unerringly, as if Pitt had ordained it, the ship's bow stem cut into the steep slope on the edge of the channel and forged through the bottom mud on an oblique angle to the levee two hundred feet beyond the breach. On a sharper angle she might have driven straight through.
The power of the river's flow through the gash blown out by the explosion came into play and helped slew her massive hull laterally against the breach. And then as suddenly as the vast surge had burst into the marshlands, it was dying, falling off to a small torrent that curled around the liner's still-flailing propellers at the stern.
At last she came to a complete stop, her four great bronze screws beating against the riverbed, embedding their blades in the mud until they could turn no more. The United States, the once-grand superliner of America's shipping fleet, had finished her final voyage.
Pitt stood like a man who had run a triathlon, his head dropped over the wheel, his hands still locked on the rim. He was dead-tired, his body, never fully recovered from the injuries received on an island off the coast of Australia only a few weeks before, shrieking for a rest. He was so brain-weary he could not distinguish any separation of the bruises and abrasions suffered from the explosions or the fight with the Chinese defenders of the ship. They all blended into a growing sea of torment.
It took nearly a full minute before he became dimly aware that the ship was no longer moving. His legs could hardly keep him upright as he released the helm and turned to go search for Giordino. But his friend was already standing in the shattered doorway, leaning on the Kalashnikov AKM that he used to shoot down the helicopter, using it as a cane.
"I have to tell you," Giordino said with a slight grin, "your docking technique leaves much to be desired."

"Give me another hour of practice and I'll get the hang of it," Pitt replied in a tone barely above a whisper.

On shore, the sickening moment of panic had passed. They no longer looked out across a broken levee and saw a roaring, unstoppable flood. The flow had fallen off to that of a rushing stream. Every man on the highway cheered and shouted exultantly, all except Sandecker. He gazed at the United States through saddened eyes. His face was weary and haggard. "No seaman likes to see a ship die," he said somberly. "But what a noble death," said Gunn. "I suppose there is nothing left for her but to be scrapped." "It would cost too many millions to restore her." "Dirk and Al, bless their hides, prevented a major disaster." "A lot of people will never know how much they owe those two characters," Gunn agreed.
Already, a long convoy of trucks and equipment was descending on both ends of the break. Towboats pushing barges loaded with huge stones were arriving from up and down the river. Directed by General Montaigne, the Army Corps of Engineers, seasoned veterans at making emergency repairs along the river, rapidly deployed. Every available man and piece of equipment from New Orleans to Vicksburg had been marshaled to restore the levee and put the highway back in serviceable order for auto and truck traffic.
Thanks to the massive hull of the United States acting as a barrier, the flood tide that hurtled toward the Atchafalaya was robbed of the immense power of the Mississippi. After spreading across the marshlands, the wild waters diminished to a wave less than three feet high when it reached Morgan City.
Not for the first time had the mighty Mississippi been prevented from forging her way into a new channel. The battle between men and nature would go on, and eventually there could be but one outcome.
April 30, 2000 Washington, D.C.
CHINA'S AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES, QIAN MIANG, was a portly man. Short, hair styled in a crewcut, face fixed in a constant little grin that almost never revealed teeth, he reminded those who first met him of a sculpture of a contented Buddha with its hands supporting a round stomach. Never behaving like a dogmatic Communist, Qian Miang was a very gracious man. Supremely confident, he cultivated many powerful friends in Washington and moved through the halls of the Capitol and White House with the ease of a Cheshire cat.
Preferring to do business capitalist-style, he met with Qin Shang in the private dining room of Washington's finest Chinese restaurant, where he often entertained the city's power elite. He greeted the shipping magnate with a warm two handed shake. "Qin Shang, my dear friend." The voice was jolly and congenial. Instead of Mandarin, he spoke perfect English with a trace of a British accent absorbed during three years of schooling at Cambridge. "You have neglected me during your stay in town."
"My humble apologies, Qian Miang," said Qin Shang. "I have experienced pressing problems. I was informed earlier this morning that my project to divert the Mississippi River past my port of Sungari has failed."

"I am quite aware of your problems," replied Qian Miang without loosening his smile. "I cannot suggest otherwise, but President Lin Loyang is not happy. Your smuggling ventures, it seems, have become a substantial embarrassment to our government. Our long-standing strategy to infiltrate high level government offices and influence American policy toward China is threatened."

Qin Shang was shown to a high-backed chair carved out of ebony before a large circular table and offered a choice of Chinese wines the ambassador kept stocked in the basement of the restaurant. Only after a waiter pulled the cord to a chime to announce his entrance, poured the wine and exited the room, did Qin Shang speak. "My carefully laid plans were somehow thwarted by the INS and NUMA."

"NUMA is not an investigative agency," Qian Miang reminded him.

"No, but their people were a direct cause of the raid on Orion Lake and the disaster at the Mystic Canal. Two men in particular."

Qian Miang nodded. "I have studied the reports. Your attempt to kill NUMA's special projects director and the female INS agent was not a wise judgment, certainly one not condoned by me. This is not our homeland, where such things can be carried out in secret. You cannot run—what do they call it in the West—roughshod over citizens within their own borders. I am instructed to tell you that any attempt to murder NUMA officials is strictly forbidden."

"Whatever I have done, old friend," said Qin Shang bluntly, "I have done for the People's Republic of China."

"And Qin Shang Maritime," added Qian Miang quietly. "We go back too far to delude one another. Until now, as you have profited, so has our country. But you have gone, not one but several steps too far. Like a bear that has knocked a nest of bees from a tree, you have maddened a swarm of Americans."

Qin Shang stared at the ambassador. "Am I to assume you have instructions from President Lin Loyang?"

"He wished me to convey his regret§, but I am to tell that from this moment, all operations by Qin Shang Maritime will cease within North America, and all your personal ties to the American government are to be terminated."