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God, Pitt thought through the haze, why don't those nostic specialist, he carefully explored his bruised body-the areas of pain, the position of his ars in the fla inside his chest, the fire spreading into his back and shoulders Pulling hi, Pitt stood up unsteadily, swayed and only kept erect by using the cutlass as a cane, sohtly in his right hand

He crouched on one knee, fighting to catch his breath, waiting for his heart to slon to a reasonably no desperately to pierce the darkness beyond the flaone, and the boat was just disappearing around a curve into the next gallery He turned in the 97

opposite direction just in ti up the canal

All these things he noted nificance All he could think of was that a killer was souised as one of the pirates He felt helpless, the an to look alike, and the action on the bridge had happened with such speed that he hadn't been able to perceive any details of the man's costume

Almost frantically, he tried to plan the next step

There was no more chance in the world for surprise on his part-the human pirate knehat Pitt looked like, while he was helpless to detect the real from the fake and had now lost the opportunity to h Pitts mind, he knew he must act

A second later, he was half running, half stu at every step as waves of pain shot through every tendon of his body He burst through a black curtain and into the next stage set It had a huge dohttime scene

Built into the far wall, a scaleddown version of a pirate's corsair ship, co in a breeze urged on by a hidden electric fan, fired stimulated broadsides from replica cannon across fifty feet of water and over the heads of the people in the excursion boat at a ed cliff on the opposite side of the cavernous chamber

It was too dark to make out any details on the excursion boat Pitt could detect no movement at the stern and he felt certain that Kipp, that is, that ithin their reach As his eye, began to penetrate the heavy darkness, of the sihttime harbor between the ship and the fortress, he saw that the bodies in the boat were all huddled below the sides of the hull

He was about halfway up the maintenance ramp to the deck of the corsair ship when he knehen he heard a strange sound, the alun with a silencer And then suddenly he was standing in back of a for in his hand and pointing it at the little boat in the water

Pitt looked at him curiously, with only a detached sort of interest He raised the cutlass and brought the flat side of the blade down on the pirate's wrist

The gun dropped fro and into the water below The pirate swung around, the white hair falling from under a scarlet bandanna that was knotted around his head, the cold blue-gray eyes flashing with anger and frustration, the lines about the ure that had so coolly killed two of his comrades His voice was hard and metallic

"It seems I am your prisoner"

Pitt wasn't fooled for an instant The words were only a stall, a curtain to shield the lighg erous and he was playing for high stakes But Pitt had th that was suddenly coursing through his body like a gathering tidal wave He began to smile

"Ah-so it is you, Oskar"