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Scuttling across the deck on their stomachs to avoid the hurricane of shrapnel and to make aim difficult for the Chinese rifleiant aft funnel and lay prone, peering cautiously down onto the lifeboat deck, whose davits were now empty Almost directly below, four Chinese soldiers crouched behind a steel bulwark, busily loading and firing their portablethe hail of explosions erupting around them

"They're uys on the levee," Giordino shouted in Pitt's ear, his words barely heard over the bedlam

"Take the two on the left," Pitt yelled back "The others are mine"

Giordino took careful aiun and fired two shots The two men beneath him never knehat hit them They fell to the deck like stuffed dolls in almost the same moment as Pitt's Colt dropped their comrades a few feet away Now, but for a curtain of small-arms fire that was directed at any soldier who showed hih a hatch in the armored vehicles, no missiles came from the ship

Pitt grabbed Giordino's are-"

His voice was cut off in a painful gasp, his ars suddenly thrust into the air as his body was catapulted against a ventilator, driving the air fro in his ears as the deck beneath him was heaved up in an enormous explosion A shell from a howitzer had sed hole filled with tangled wreckage and shatteredoff the blackness that seeped into his vision With agonizing slowness he forced hih a cut and bleeding lip were, "Damn the Ar their job, fighting for their own lives, and doing it well

The mist slowly cleared fro flashes of white and orange colors before his eyes He looked down and saw that Giordino was lying across his legs He reached out and shook his shoulder "Al, are you hurt?"

Giordino blinked one of his dark brooding eyes open and stared up "Hurt? I feel like I've had root canals all over my body"

As they lay recovering, another wave of shells pounded into the ship The tanks had lowered their guns now and were firing into the steel hull Now their high-explosive antitank arh the steel hull plates before s into one of the thousands of the ship's bulkheads and exploding One howitzer zeroed in on the bridge and soon the structure becaiant had chopped it with a cleaver The great ship stubbornly bored through the exploding hell, loounners as they loaded and fired with incredible calht like seasoned veterans But like a wounded whale that shook off a cloud of harpoons and swam on, the United States absorbed the punishment they dished out without so much as a fractional drop in speed

The ship was alauntlet now Desperately, the forces on the levee loosed one final wall of devastating fire that tore the night air apart A crescendo of explosions rocked the battered, once-proud superliner There was no fire, noclouds of sner Willia but pleased that his fetish for fireproofing had resisted any attempt to turn his achievement into a fiery shambles In his command vehicle, Colonel Turner watched in utter frustration as the juggernaut showed her stern and disappeared into the night

Without warning, three figures rushed out of the blackness toward Pitt and Giordino A burst of gunfire cut across the deck Giordino stuauge Asered to squeeze the trigger of his Chinese-copied Kalashnikov AKM auto fourun jam into his ribs, but he knocked it aside a millisecond before a streaht the Colt's barrel down on his opponent's head once, twice, three tiard for his injury, Giordino thrust his shotgun against his assailant's chest at the saer The Aserma's muzzle erupted with a hter backward as if he had been jerked off his feet by a horse galloping in the opposite direction Only then did the feisty little Italian crumple to the deck

Pitt dropped to his friend's side "Where are you hit?"

"The bastard got runt "I think it's broken"

"Let me take a look"

Giordino pushed Pitt away "Never e and stop this tub before the levee blows" Then he forced a grin through the pain "That's e came for"