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.
“Al?”
“Here.”
“Do you see the ship?”
“Like standing on railroad tracks inside a tunnel watching an express train come at you.”
“She's slowing down through the bend. We'll get one chance and one chance only before she picks up speed again.”
“Just in time for the buffet, I hope,” he said, still hungry after not eating since breakfast.
“I'm going to make a left turn and land on the open deck behind the aft runnel.”
“Right behind you,” Giordino said laconically. “Mind the ventilators and don't forget to step aside for me.”
Giordino's resolution conveyed the loyalty he felt toward his best friend. That he would have accompanied Pitt into the deepest reaches of hell went without saying. They acted as one, almost as if each read the other's mind. From now until they came down on the deck of the United States, no more conversation would pass between them. It wasn't necessary.
Not requiring power to land, Pitt and Giordino hit the kill switches to their little motors to cut off all sound of their final approach. Pitt set up for his circular course and firmly pulled on the left toggle in preparation for a sweeping hook turn. Under their canopies, like a pair of black flying reptiles out of the Mesozoic era about to attack a galloping Sphinx, they swung over the east levee and then made a tight corkscrew turn toward the approaching ship, timing their descent to come from astern for their landing, much like a hobo running from a field onto a railroad track to catch the last freight car of a train.
No gunfire erupted from the ship. No shells reached up and shredded their canopies. They were coming in unseen, undetected and unheard by the armed men defending the ship. With the helicopters down, the Chinese fighting force was no longer focusing on what it thought was an empty sky.
As the deck with its two rows of low ventilators came into view behind the huge funnel, Pitt expertly adjusted and buried both toggles, causing his canopy to stall as he gradually flared down in the clear space between the ventilators. His landing gear—his legs and feet—lightly touched down on the surface of the deck as his lifeless canopy collapsed with the barest of whispers behind him. Not waiting to congratulate himself for landing uninjured, he quickly pulled the canopy and caged motor off to one side. Three seconds later, Giordino dropped out of the sky and made a picture-perfect landing less than six feet away.
“Is this where one of us is supposed to say, 'So far, so good'?” said Giordino softly as he released his harness and engine pack.
“No gunshot holes and no broken bones,” Pitt whispered. “Who could ask for anything more?”
They moved into the shadow of the funnel and, while Giordino searched the darkness for signs of life, Pitt set a new frequency on his helmet radio and hailed Rudi Gunn, who was with the sheriff's deputies and a team of Army demolition experts on the highway above the Mystic Canal.