Giordino looked at Pitt, his eyebrows raised. “What's so novel about a linear road?”

“Was it a coincidence or a well-conceived plan to end the canal at the exact point where the river curls westward and nearly touches the highway?”

“What difference does it make? Shang's engineers could have ended the canal anywhere.”

“A big difference, as I'm beginning to see it, a very big difference indeed.”

Giordino's mind was not running on the same channel as Pitt's. Giordino checked the dial on his dive watch under the lights of an approaching car. “If we want to finish the job while it's still dark, I suggest we row our boat gently down the stream, and be quick about it.”

They still Had the entire eighteen miles of the canal to search using title autonomous underwater vehicle. After dropping back down the slope to the skiff, they removed the AUV from its case and slipped it over the side of the skiff and watched it slip out of sight beneath the dark surface. Then, while Giordino paddled, Pitt worked the remote control, engaging the AUV's motors, switching on its lights and leveling it off five feet from the bottom mud of the canal. Because of the high algae content of the brackish water, which limited visibility to no more than six feet, there was the danger of the AUV striking a submerged object before he could divert it.

Giordino paddled with long even strokes that never slowed as the precious hours passed, making it easy for Pitt to pace the AUV's progress with that of the skiff. Only when they reached the outer fringe of light around the old plantation headquarters of Qin Shang's security force did they move furtively along the opposite bank at a snail's speed.

This time of night most of the security force should have

been sleeping, but the plantation house had suddenly come alive with activity as guards began rushing across the lawn to the little dock where the hovercraft was moored. Pitt and Gior-dino pressed into the shadows and watched as the hovercraft was loaded with automatic weapons. Two men lifted a long, heavy, tubelike object into the boat.

“They're going for bear,” said Giordino softly. “Unless I'm mistaken that's a rocket launcher.”

“You're not mistaken,” Pitt murmured. “I do believe Shang's chief of security in Hong Kong has identified us and sent word that we're evildoers out to spy on another one of his nasty ventures.”

“The shantyboat. It's evident they plan to blow it and anyone in it to smithereens.”

“Not polite of us to allow them to destroy the Bayou Kid's property. And then we've got Romberg to consider. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would put us on their blacklist for life if we let poor old Romberg go to dog heaven in a blaze of rocket fire.”

“Two unarmed bon vivants against a horde of barbarians armed to the teeth,” muttered Giordino. “Not very healthy odds, wouldn't you say?”

Pitt slipped a dive mask over his head and picked up an air tank. “I've got to get across the canal before they cast off. You take the skiff and wait for me a hundred yards beyond the plantation.”

“Let me guess. You're going to take your little dive knife and slash the hell out of the hovercraft's inflatable skirt.” Pitt grinned. “If it leaks, it won't lift.” “What about the AUV?”

“Keep it submerged. It might be worth seeing what kind of trash they throw in the canal in front of their quarters.”

In ten seconds Pitt was gone. He eased into the water without making a sound or a splash, while at the same time strapping on the air tank and its backpack. He had already kicked twenty feet from the boat before he inserted the regulator in his mouth and began breathing underwater. After leveling out, he quickly got his bearings and swam across the canal toward the lights flickering on the water in front of the plantation. The mud on the bottom below looked dark and forbidding, and the water itself was tepid as a bathtub's. Pitt swam aggressively, his arms out in front forming a V to reduce water resistance, kicking his feet and fins as hard and fast as his leg muscles would allow.

A good diver can sense the water as an animal senses a change in weather or the presence of a predator. The brackish water of the canal had a warm and friendly feel to it, nothing like the sinister and malignant force he experienced in the deep cold of Orion Lake. His only fear now was that one of the security guards might glance out into the canal and see his air bubbles, a possibility he didn't think likely because they were wrapped up in preparing to attack the shantyboat and had no time to stare at the water surface above Pitt for even half a second.

The light became brighter underwater as he neared the source. Soon the shadow of the hovercraft loomed ahead. He was certain it was loaded and the crew was aboard to launch the search and attack. Only the lack of sound told him the engines had yet to start. He swam harder, determined to stop the hovercraft before it hurtled from the dock.

From his vantage point across the canal, Giordino began to have grave doubts that Pitt would reach the hovercraft in time. He cursed himself for not working harder on the return trip so they might have arrived earlier. But then, how could he have known the guards were preparing to assault the shantyboat before daylight? He kept in the shadows and paddled the skiff slowly, so no sudden movement would be caught by the men on the other side of the canal. “Do it!” he muttered under his breath as if Pitt was in earshot. “Do it!”

Pitt felt a growing numbness from overexertion in his arms and legs, his lungs gasping from fatigue. He gathered his waning strength for a final surge, a last effort before his exhausted body refused his demands. He couldn't believe he was killing himself to save a dog that he swore was bitten by a tsetse fly when a pup and suffered from chronic sleeping sickness.

Abruptly, the light from above faded and he swam into a dark hole. His head broke the surface just inside the flexible sleeve, called a skirt, that contains the cushion of air and suspends the hovercraft. He floated for several moments, his chest heaving, his arms too numb to move, while he regained his strength and studied the interior of the skirt. Of the three types fitted to hovercraft, this one was called a bag skirt, consisting of a rubber tube that encircled the hull and when inflated served to contain the air cushion while providing lift. He also recognized that this hovercraft used an aluminum propeller as a lift fan to inflate the bag tube and feed air into the cushion.

As Pitt reached down to pull his dive knife out of its sheath strapped to his leg to begin slicing holes in the rubberized fabric, his moment of victory was snatched away by the sound of the starter motors as they began to turn over the engines. Then the propeller's blades started to spin, their speed increasing with every revolution. The skirt began to flare, and the water inside was whipped into a maelstrom. Too late to slash the rubber cushion and prevent the craft from moving.

Out of irreversible despair, he unsnapped the buckle to his air tank's backpack, spit out the breathing regulator and pulled the tank up and over his head. Then, in one movement, he thrust it upward into the spinning lift propeller and ducked under the skirt as it was starting to inflate. The propeller blades struck the tank and shattered. It was an act born of desperation. Pitt knew he had gambled recklessly and pushed his luck too far.

The disintegration of the propeller as its blades struck a solid, ungiving object was followed by a hurricane of metal shards that ripped through the walls of the rubber skirt like shrapnel from a bomb. Then came a second, more massive explosion as the tank's walls were penetrated and it burst from the sudden release of eighty cubic feet of air pressurized at three thousand pounds. Not content to be left out, the fuel tanks added to the cataclysm by erupting in a blazing conflagration that sent a firestorm into the air and fiery particles of the hovercraft flying onto the roof of the plantation house and quickly setting the wooden structure ablaze.