"Personally speaking," Giordino muttered, for the first time since the ride from the ruins, "I prefer the accommodations at the Hotel San Quentin." His gaze focused on Darius. "At least the roaches weren't king size."

Pitt grinned at Giordino's insulting comment to Darius and scanned the room, taking in every detail of its construction. It was small, no larger than nine by ten feet. The walls consisted of warped boards nailed crudely to warped support posts that stood facing inward at irregular intervals, in rotted and barren starkness. The room was void of any furniture and windowless; the only available light came through large horizontal cracks in the walls and a jagged hole in the roof.

"If I was to guess," said Pitt, "I'd say this place was a deserted warehouse."

"You're close," Darius volunteered. "The Germans used this building for an ordnance depot when they occupied the island in forty-two."

Pitt pulled out a cigarette and casually lit it. To offer Darius a cigarette would have immediately put the brute on his guard. Instead, Pitt took a step backward and began tossing the lighter in the air, each time tossing it a little higher till he noticed Darius following it out of the corner of one eye. Once, twice, four times the lighter sailed into the air. On the fifth toss it fell through Pitt's fingers and clattered on the floor. He shrugged stupidly and bent down, picking it up.

Pitt charged Darius harder than he had ever charged any halfback, any quarterback, in his Air Force academy days. Lunging forward from a football crouch, his feet dug firmly into the coarse-grained wood of the floor, he thrust his head and shoulder like a battering ram, backed with every driving ounce of power his muscular legs and one hundred and ninety pounds could muster. At the instant before impact, he drove upward, catching Darius in the unprotected stomach just above the beltline. It was like running at full speed into a brick wall, and Pitt gasped at the shock: it felt as if his neck was broken.

In football terminology it was called a running block, a vicious, maiming block, and it would have put most unprepared men in a hospital bed: all others it would have left on the ground in momentary stunned helplessness—all others, that is, except Darius. The giant merely grunted, doubled over slightly from the force of the blow and grabbed Pitt by the biceps, lifting him off the floor.