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The steward's lips tightened and the smooth yellow features bore no readable expression Only his eyes shone with evil "Thank you for being so cooperative, Mr Pitt Thank you for so thoughtfully co to me"

"Get screwed!" Pitt snapped in defiance

The steward raised an oar over his head "Bo

n voyage, Dirk Pitt"

The oar swung doard and clipped Pitt on the right side of his chest, driving his and a stabbing pain swept over his rib cage He resurfaced and lifted his left arm above his head to ward off the next inevitable blow His move came too late The oar in the hands of the steward mashed Pitts extended arm down and struck the top of his head, The blue sky turned to black as consciousness left him, and slowly Pitt drifted under the lifeboat and sank out of sight

THE President's WIFE ENTERED his second-floor study, kissed hihback embroinered chair and studied a pile of statistics on the latest econoal pad, he scribbled a prodigious amount of notes Some he saved, some he tore up and discarded before they were colasses and closed his tired eyes for a few moments

When he opened theer in his White House study, but in a s and no s

He rubbed his eyes and looked once ht

He was still in the gray room, only now he found himself seated in a hard wooden chair, his ankles strapped to square carved legs and his hands to the armrests

A violent fear coursed through hiuards, but the voice was not his It had a different tonal quality, deeper, more coarse

Soon a door that was recessed into one wall swung inward and a sent face entered His eyes had a dark, bee in one hand

"How are we today, Mr President?" he asked politely

Strangely, the words were foreign, but the President understood the repeatedly, "I am Oskar Belkaya, I am not the President of the United States, I aed the needle into his arm

The beht have been glued there He nodded toward the doorway and anothera drab prison uniform came in and set a cassette recorder on a Spartan metal table that was bolted to the floor He wired the recorder to four small eyelets on the table's surface and left

"So you won't knock our new lesson on the floor, Mr President," said the thin " Then he switched on the recorder and left the room