Dragon - Cussler Clive (книги хорошем качестве бесплатно без регистрации .TXT) 📗
Kamatori stared coldly. “They are seated in a small auditorium next door, where they will view the hunt on a video screen.”
“Like an audience watching a bad late-night movie.”
“Perhaps the last to run the hunt will profit by the mistakes of those who go before.”
“Or perhaps they’ll close their eyes and miss the show.”
Kamatori sat very still, the barest hint of a smile touching the corner of his taut lips. “This is not an experiment. The procedure has been refined through experience. The prey wait their turn tied to chairs, and if need be, with their eyes taped open. They have every opportunity to witness your demise.”
“I trust you’ll send my residuals from the reruns to my estate,” Pitt said, seemingly gazing at the heads adorning the walls, fighting to ignore the horrifying display while concentrating on a rack of swords.
“You put up a very good facade of courage,” Kamatori observed. “I’d have expected no less from a man of your reputation.”
“Who goes next?” Pitt asked abruptly.
The butcher shrugged. “Your friend Mr. Giordino, or maybe the female operative. Yes, I think hunting her down will raise the others to a furious pitch, inciting them to become more dangerous as prey.”
Pitt turned. “And if you cannot catch one of us?”
“The island is small. No one has eluded me for more than eight hours.”
“And you give no quarter.
“None,” said Kamatori, the evil smile widening. “This is not a child’s game of hide-and-seek with winners and losers. Your death will be quick and clean. That’s a promise.”
Pitt stared the samurai in the eye. “Not a game? Seems to me I’m to play Sanger Rainsford to your General Zaroff.”
Kamatori’s eyes squinted. “The names are not familiar to me.”
“You’ve never read The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell? It’s a classic story of a man who hunts his fellow man for sport.”
“I do not taint my mind by reading Western literature.”
“Glad to hear it,” Pitt said, mentally adding a slight edge to his chances of staying alive.
Kamatori pointed toward the door. “The time has come.”
Pitt held his mark. “You haven’t explained the ground rules.”
“There are no ground rules, Mr. Pitt. I generously give you an hour’s start. Then I begin to hunt you armed only with my sword, an ancestral weapon that has been in my family for several generations and has seen much enemy blood.”
“Your samurai ancestors must be real proud of a descendant who stains their honor by murdering unarmed and defenseless.”
Kamatori knew Pitt was deliberately provoking him, but he could not contain his growing rage with the American who showed no trace of fear. “There is the door,” he hissed. “I begin the pursuit in one hour.”
The act of uncaring indifference was shaken off the minute Pitt cleared the gate through the electrified fence. Ungoverned fury swept him as he ran past the line of trees surrounding the resort and into the shadows of the stark, barren rocks. He became a man outside himself, cold and cunning, his perceptions abnormally heightened, driven by one overpowering thought.
He had to save himself to save the others.
The gamble on running free in his stocking feet rather than the heavy boots he’d worn when flying off the deck of the Ralph R. Bennett was paying off. Thankfully the rocky ground was covered with several centimeters of damp soil eroded over the centuries from the lava rock.
He ran with deadly purpose, spurred on by anger and fear he might fail. His plan was simple enough, ridiculously simple, though the chance of pulling the wool over Kamatori’s eyes seemed slightly less than impossible. But he was dead certain the ploy had not been tried by the other hunted men. The unexpected was on his side. The others had only tried to put as much distance between them and the resort as possible before frantically finding a hiding place to stall off discovery. Desperation breeds genius, but they had all failed, and with gruesome finality. Pitt was about to attempt a new wrinkle in the escape game that was just crazy enough to work.
He also had another advantage over those who had gone before. Thanks to Penner’s detailed model of the island, Pitt was familiar with the general landscape. He recalled in his mind the dimensions and heights with exacting clarity, knowing precisely where he had to go, and it was not toward the highest point on the island.
People who run in terror during a chase inexplicably head upward, up stairs in a building, up a tree to hide, up to the rocks crowning the summit of a hill. All dead ends with no possibility of successful escape.
Pitt branched off and descended toward the eastern shoreline, executing a meandering trail as if he was undecided which way to turn, occasionally doubling back to make his pursuer think he was wandering lost in circles. The uneven moonlike ground and the dim light hindered any sharp sense of direction, but the stars had yet to fade, and he could still read north from Polaris. He stopped for a few minutes, resting to conserve his strength, and took stock.
He realized that Kamatori, tracking his victims in sandals, could never have brought them to bay in only eight hours. An amateur woodsman, with a small amount of luck, should have avoided capture for one or two days, even if tracked by dogs… unless his trail was followed by someone with the advantage of electronic body sensors. There was no question in Pitt’s mind that he was being hunted by a robot festooned with sensors. He moved off again, still cold but feeling no strain or exhaustion.
The end of the hour found Pitt skirting the cliffs above the sea. The scattered trees and underbrush grew to the very edge of the palisades. He had slowed to an easy jog as he searched for a break in the surf-pounded rocks nearly twenty meters below. At last he came to a small clearing sheltered by large rocks. A small pine with several of its roots exposed by erosion hung precariously over the restless water far below.
His eyes intently searched the nearby area for signs of a video camera or body heat sensors and came up empty.
Reasonably certain he was unobserved, he tested the trunk of the tree with his weight. It sagged, and the pine-needled top leaned another five centimeters outward and down. He calculated that if he climbed far enough into its branches, his added weight would pull the bare root system from the earth, sending both Pitt and the tree hurtling down the side of the cliff and into the sea.
Then he studied the dark and swirling water as do the divers atop the cliffs at Acapulco. He judged the depth of a narrow slot between the rocks at three meters in depth, four when a breaker roared in. No one in their right mind would consider the thought churning in Pitt’s brain as he examined the backwash and the directional sweep of the current. Without either a dry or a wet suit, a swimmer wouldn’t survive twenty minutes in the cold water before hypothermia set in, providing he survived the fall.
He sat down on a rock and removed the plastic blood bag from under the waistband of his shorts and laid it on the ground at his feet. He extended his left arm and squeezed his fist, probing with his right hand until he located the vein in the fiat opposite the elbow. He paused a few moments, fixing the vein in his mind, picturing it as a hose. Then he took the needle that was attached to the blood bag’s hose and pushed it into the vein on an angle.
He missed and had to try again. It finally slipped inside the vein on the third try. Now he sat there and relaxed as his blood flowed into the bag.
A dog’s faint howl in the distance caught his ear. What seemed an obvious truth at the moment struck him with numbing force. He couldn’t believe how he’d overestimated Kamatori. He didn’t speculate, didn’t guess he’d be tracked by a flesh and blood hound. He’d blindly accepted as fact his pursuer would use electronic or robotic means to discover his prey. He could only imagine the leering face of the cutthroat samurai as he found Pitt treed by a vicious dog.
