Though his groin felt as if it were bursting in white-hot agony, Fawkes was wise enough not to try knocking away the hands that held him like a vise. Calmly, purposefully, like a man who knew exactly what he intended to do, he gripped Emma’s head and began pounding it into the metal deck landing with every ounce of strength in his tree-trunk arms. Mercifully, the pressure eased, but shrouded in his pain-lashed rage, he kept smashing away until the back of Emma’s skull turned to pulp. When his fury was finally spent, he rolled over and gently massaged his groin, cursing.

After a minute or two he rose stiffly to his feet, took the coat collars of the two inert men, and dragged them up the stairway. One more short flight, a few yards down a passageway, and he came to a cargo-loading door in the upper starboard side of iheIowa’s hull. He cracked the door enough to let in daylight and examined Pitt’s wound.

The bullet had scored Pitt’s left temple, causing, at worst, Fawkes figured, a nasty gash and a concussion. Then he checked Emma. What skin that was visible through the mask of blood on the assassin’s face was

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turning blue. Fawkes went through his pockets and found only a spare clip for the Hocker-Rodine pistol. Strapped around a heavy woolen sweater was an inflatable life vest.

“A nonswimmer, hey?” Fawkes said, smiling. “I don’t guess you’ll be needing this anymore.”

He removed the vest from Emma and tied it around Pitt. Reaching into his own coat pocket, Fawkes took out a small notebook and made several notations with the stub of a pencil. Next he took his eelskin tobacco pouch, emptied the contents, inserted the notebook, and tucked the packet snugly under Pitt’s shirt. The cord to the CO2 bottle was yanked and the vest hissed as it inflated.

Returning to Emma, Fawkes grabbed the corpse by the front of the sweater and pulled it toward the open hatch. The weight was too much for the angle of Fawkes’s grip and the sweater slipped over Emma’s head. Something around Emma’s upper torso caught Fawkes’s eye. It was a nylon binding that tightly circled the chest. Entranced, Fawkes undid a tiny clasp and the nylon fell away, releasing two small rosebud-tipped mounds.

For a moment Fawkes stood petrified.

“Holy Mother of Christ!” he murmured in awe.

Emma had indeed been a woman.

Dale Jarvis pointed at the viewing screen. “There, just below the second gun turret, on the side of the hull.”

“What do you make of it?” asked the President.

“Someone has opened the forward loading hatch,” answered Kemper. He turned to General Higgins. “Better alert your men to the possibility that the crew may attempt an escape.”