Текст книги "Dragon"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 31 страниц)

Pitt stared at the blank ceiling, his mind at ease. It wasn’t exactly what Jordan and Kern would call an earth-shattering master plan, but it was all he had, and he intended to play it to the hilt.

49

MORO KAMATORI DIDN’T merely look evil, he was evil. The pupils of his eyes never changed from the violent black poisonous stare, and when the tight lips parted in a smile, which was seldom, they revealed a set of teeth laced with more gold than the Comstock Lode.

Even at that early hour—at five o’clock the sky was still dark—he had a fastidious arrogance about him. He was immaculately dressed in a hakama, baggy trousers that were almost a divided skirt, and an Edo-period kataginu, a brocaded silk style of sleeveless hunting jacket. He wore only sandals on his feet.

Pitt, on the other hand, looked like a refugee from a rag picker’s bin. He was clad only in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts cut off from the bottoms of his flying suit. His feet were clad in a pair of white sweat socks.

After being awakened and escorted to Kamatori’s personal study, he stood shivering in the unheated room, taking in every detail of the walls that were filled with antique weapons of every historic era from around the world. Suits of armor, European and Japanese, stood like soldiers at attention in the middle of the room. Pitt felt a wave of revulsion in his stomach at the trophies neatly spaced between hundreds of swords, spears, bows, and guns.

He counted thirty mounted heads of Kamatori’s hapless human victims staring sightlessly into space from unblinking glass eyes. Most were Asian, but four had Caucasian features. His blood iced as he recognized Jim Hanamura’s head.

“Come in, Mr. Pitt, and have a cup of coffee,” invited Kamatori, motioning Pitt to a vacant cushion beside a low table. “We’ll talk a few minutes before—”

“Where are the others?” Pitt interrupted.

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. Bennettwas 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.

With incredible patience, Pitt sat and waited for his blood to fill the plastic bag as he listened to the yelping draw closer. The dog was hard on his trail and less than two hundred meters away when the blood volume reached 450 milliliters, and Pitt jerked the needle from his arm. He quickly stuffed the blood-filled bag under a pile of rock, covering all sight of it with loose dirt.

Most of the men decapitated by Kamatori, ravaged by terror and panic, had foolishly tried to outrun the hound until dropping from exhaustion and being run to ground. Only the braver ones had stopped and attempted to fight off the dog with whatever weapon they could lay a hand on, in most cases a heavy stick. Still unaware of the surprise about to pounce on him, Pitt went one step further. He found a long, thick tree limb but also collected two heavy rocks. As a final defense, he threw his meager weapons on top of a large rock and then climbed up.

His feet had only barely left the ground when the baying hound dashed through the trees and onto the cliff edge.

Pitt stared in dumb astonishment. The pursuit dog wasn’t the furry kind at all. It had to be the weirdest nightmare of a robot Pitt had laid eyes on.

The Japanese engineers at Hideki Suma’s robotic laboratories had outdone themselves on this one. The tail, standing straight into the air, was an antenna, and the legs rotated like spokes of a wheel with the ends bent on a ninety-degree angle to grip the ground. The body was a complex of electronics clustered around an ultrasonic ranging sensor. It was the ultimate in tracking machines, able to detect human scent, heat, and sweat, and able to navigate around or over obstacles at a rate of speed matching a Doberman pinscher.

The only similarity between a real dog and the robomutt, if Pitt stretched his imagination and ignored the recorded howls, was a nasty jaw system with teeth that circulated instead of gnashed. Pitt shoved one end of his tree limb at the metallic snout only to have it torn out of his hands and shredded in a cloud of splinters.

It was a wonder any bodily members of Kamatori’s victims were left to mount on a wall after this monstrosity got through with them, Pitt thought. But the artificial dog made no effort to move in for the kill. It partially climbed the rock Pitt stood on and kept its distance, the miniature video camera recording Pitt’s movements and location. Its purpose, Pitt recognized, was to corner and locate the quarry so Kamatori could home in and perform the ritual murder.

Pitt lifted one of the rocks over his head and threw it. The robomutt was too agile, it easily leaped to its right as the rock missed and struck the ground several centimeters away.

Pitt raised the other rock, the only weapon left to him, and made as if to hurl it, but he stopped in midlaunch and observed the dog again jump to his right. Then, as if he was a bombardier, he made an adjustment and let fly. The timing was good and his aim true. The dog, apparently programmed only to veer on a starboard tack during an assault, dodged directly beneath the falling rock.

There was no bark or whine, no sizzle of shorted electronics or sparks. The mechanical canine just sort of sagged sluggishly on its spoke legs without falling over, its computer and monitoring systems smashed. Pitt almost felt sorry for it as it slowly went inert like a mobile toy whose batteries faded and died—but not too sorry. He came down off his rock and kicked the thing in its electronic gut, knocking it over on its side. Pitt made certain the video camera was nonfunctioning, and then he retrieved the blood bag from under its cover of rotted wood and leaves.

He fervently hoped the blood he’d drained from his vein had not weakened his system. He was going to need every bit of his strength for the job ahead.

Kamatori became apprehensive when the image on his tiny wrist TV monitor suddenly faded. His last reading from the robot-tracking dog’s sensor put Pitt approximately a hundred and seventy-five meters in a southeasterly direction toward the palisades along the shore. He was amazed that Pitt had allowed himself to be cornered so early in the hunt. He hurried in that direction, initially thinking the system had suffered an electronic malfunction. As he rushed toward the final contact position, it began to seep into his brain that possibly the quarry was the cause of the problem.

This had never happened with the earlier prey. None of them came close to defeating the robot or inflicting any damage. If Pitt had managed to do what the others couldn’t, Kamatori decided he must be very cautious in his approach. He slowed his pace, no longer concerned with speed. Time was a commodity he could easily afford.

He used nearly twenty minutes to close the gap and arrived at the small clearing above the cliffs. He vaguely saw the outline of the robodog through the underbrush. He feared the worst as he realized it was lying on its side.

Staying in the trees, he made a wide sweep around the open pile of rocks. Cautiously, Kamatori crept toward the dog that lay still and motionless. He drew his sword and lifted it high above his head, the hilt clutched in both hands.

A practiced user of kiai, with the motive power to raise himself to a fighting fury, and a fiery resolve to overwhelm his opponent, Kamatori deeply inhaled a breath, gave a bansheelike cry, and leaped, hoping to fall upon his hated foe at the exact moment Pitt exhaled his breath.

But there was no Pitt.

The small clearing looked like the aftermath of a massacre. Blood was splattered everywhere, on the robodog, the rocks, and tiny splotches ran down the cliff face. He studied the ground. Pitt’s footprints were deep and scattered in convulsive disorder, yet no drenched trail of blood led away from the clearing. He peered down at the sea and rocks below and saw a tree pulled out by the receding water only to be swept in again by an incoming wave and thrown onto the rocks. He also studied the ragged hole and torn root system on the edge of the drop.

For several minutes he regarded the scene, examining the chewed tree limb, the rock lying next to the tracking robot. The robodog was not designed to destroy, only to pursue and locate. Pitt must have turned and fought, damaging his pursuer and somehow altering its computer programming and turning it into a vicious killer.

The robodog had then gone on the attack and savagely slashed at Pitt’s flesh. With nowhere to run and no way to fight the horror, Pitt must have tried to escape by climbing out on the tree. But his weight was too much and together they fell onto the rocks below. There was no sign of Pitt’s body, but no man could have survived. He had either been swept away by an undertow or finished by sharks attracted to the bleeding body.

Kamatori exploded in blind rage. He picked up the mechanical dog and flung it over the cliff. Pitt had defeated him. The adventurer’s head would not be mounted on the walls with the other grisly trophies. The samurai butcher felt shame at being cheated. No one had ever escaped his sword.

He would take his revenge on the other American hostages. He decided Stacy was to be his next prey, imagining with great delight the horrified faces of Giordino, Weatherhill, and Mancuso as they viewed him hacking her to pieces in vivid color.

He held his sword blade up in front of his eyes, experiencing a feeling of euphoria as the new sun glinted on the blade. Then he flourished it over his head in a circle and slipped it into its scabbard in one smooth instantaneous motion.

Still angered and disappointed at losing the one man he desperately hoped to kill, he headed back into the craggy landscape toward the resort, his mind already relishing the next chase.

50

THE PRESIDENT STOOD on the green grass of the Congressional Country Club engaged in a late afternoon round of golf. “You’re sure about this? There is no mistake?”

Jordan nodded. He sat in a golf cart watching as the President studied a fairway from the fourteenth tee. “The bad news is confirmed by the fact the team is four hours behind their scheduled contact time.”

The President took an offered five iron from his caddie, who rude in another cart with a Secret Service agent. “Could they have been killed?”

“The only word we have from the British agent inside the Dragon Center is that they were captured soon after exiting the undersea tunnel into the command center installation.”

“What went wrong?”

“We didn’t take into consideration Suma’s army of robotic security forces. Without the budget to place intelligence operatives in Japan, we were ignorant of their advancement in robotics. Their technology in developing mechanical systems with human intelligence, vision, and superphysical movement came as a surprise.”

The President addressed the ball, swung, and stroked it to the edge of the green. Then he looked up at Jordan. He found it difficult if not impossible to comprehend a mechanical security force. “Actual robots that walk and talk?”

“Yes, sir, fully automated and highly mobile and armed to the teeth.”

“You said your people could walk through walls.”

“There are none better at what they do. Until now there was no such thing as a foolproof security system. But Suma’s vast technology created one. Our people met a computerized intelligence they weren’t trained to bypass, that no operative in the world is trained to overcome.”

The President slipped behind the wheel of the cart and pressed the accelerator pedal. “Any hope of a rescue mission to save your people?”

There was a moment’s silence as Jordan hesitated before continuing. “Doubtful. We have reason to believe Suma intends to execute them.”

The President felt a wave of pity for Jordan. It had to be a bitter pill for him to swallow, losing almost an entire MAIT team. No operation in national security history had suffered from such incredibly rotten luck.

“There’ll be hell to pay when Jim Sandecker hears that Pitt and Giordino are going down.”

“I don’t look forward to briefing him.”

“Then we must blow that damn island under the sea, and the Dragon Center with it.”

“We both know, Mr. President, the American public and world opinion would come down on you like a ton of bricks despite your attempt to stop a nuclear disaster in the making.”

“Then we send in our Delta Forces, and quick.”

“Delta Force teams are already standing by their aircraft at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam. But I advise we wait. We still have time for my people to accomplish their planned mission.”

“How, if they have no hope of escape?”

“They’re still the best, Mr. President. I don’t think we should write them off just yet.”

The President stopped his cart beside the ball that sat only a few centimeters from the green. The caddie ran up with a nine iron. The President looked at him and shook his head. “I can putt better than I can chip. You better let me have a putter.”

Two putts later the ball dropped in the cup. “I wish I had the patience for golf,” said Jordan as the President returned to the cart. “But I keep thinking there are more important things to devote my time to.”

“No man can go continuously without recharging his batteries,” said the President. He glanced at Jordan as he drove to the next tee. “What do you want from me, Ray?”

“Another eight hours, Mr. President, before you order in the Delta Forces.”

“You really think your people can still pull it off.”

“I think they should be given the chance.” Jordan paused. “And then there are two other considerations.”

“Such as?”

“The possibility Suma’s robots might cut our Delta Forces team to pieces before they could reach the command center.”

The President grinned dryly. “A robot may not go down under the assault of a martial arts expert, but they’re hardly immune to heavy weapons fire.”

“I give you that, sir, but they can lose an arm and still come at you, and they don’t bleed either.”

“And the other consideration?”

“We have been unable to uncover the whereabouts of Congresswoman Smith and Senator Diaz. We suspect there is a strong case to be made for them being held at Suma’s retreat on Soseki Island.”

“You’re stroking me, Ray. Brogan over at Langley is certain Smith and Diaz are under guard in Edo City. They were seen and identified at Suma’s guest quarters.” There was a long pause. “You know damned well I can’t afford to give you eight hours. If your team hasn’t resurfaced and completed their operation in four, I’m sending in the Delta Forces.”

“Suma’s island is bristling with defense missile systems. Any submarine attempting to land men within twenty kilometers of the shore would be blown out of the water and any aircraft dropping parachutists shot out of the sky. And should the Delta Forces somehow gain a foothold on Soseki, they’d be slaughtered before they could get inside the Dragon Center.”

The President gazed out on the course as the sun was settling into the treetops. “If your team has failed,” he said pensively, “then I’ll have to doom my political career and launch a nuclear bomb. I see no other way to stop the Kaiten Project before Suma has a chance to use it against us.”

In a room deep in Building C of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Clyde Ingram, the Director of Science and Technical Data Interpretation, sat in a comfortable chair and studied a giant television screen. The imagery detail from the latest advance in reconnaissance satellites was unbelievable.

Thrown into space on a secret shuttle mission, the Pyramider satellite was far more versatile than its predecessor, the Sky King. Instead of providing only detailed photos and video of the land and sea surface, its three systems also revealed subterranean and suboceanic detail.

By merely pushing buttons on a console, Ingram could maneuver the big bird into position above any target on earth and aim its powerful cameras and sensors to read anything from the fine print of a newspaper lying on a park bench and the layout of an underground missile complex to what the crew of a submarine lurking under an ice floe was having for dinner.

This evening he was analyzing the images showing the sea around Soseki Island. After picking out the missile systems hidden in the forested land around the retreat, he began to concentrate on finding and positioning underwater sensors placed by Suma’s security force to detect any submarine activity and guard against a clandestine landing.

After close to an hour, his eyes spotted a small object resting on the seafloor thirty-six kilometers to the northeast and three hundred and twenty meters deep. He sent a message to the computer mainframe to enlarge the area around the object. The computer in turn gave the coordinates and instructed the satellite’s sensors to zero in.

After the signal was received and locked in the satellite sent an enlarged image to a receiver on a Pacific island that was relayed to Ingram’s computer at Fort Meade, where it was then enhanced and thrown on the screen.

Ingram rose and walked closer to the screen, peering through his reading glasses. Then he returned to his chair and pressed a number on a telephone and called his Deputy Director of Operations, who was in his car stuck in the horrendous homeward traffic crush of Washington.

“Meeker,” came a weary voice from a cellular phone.

“This is Ingram, boss.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of peeking at the world’s darkest secrets all night? Why don’t you go home and make love to your wife?”

“I admit sex is best, but staring at these incredible pictures is a close second.”

Curtis Meeker sighed with relief as the traffic opened up and he made it through the last intersection light signal before turning down his street. “You see something?” he asked.

“I have an airplane in the sea off Soseki Island.”

“What model?”

“Looks like a World War Two B-Twenty-nine, or what’s left of it. Appears heavily damaged but otherwise in pretty good shape after sitting on the seabed for fifty years.”

“Any details?”

“A clear picture of numbers and letters on the side of the fuselage and the tail. I can also make out a small figure on the bow beneath the cockpit.”

“Describe it.”

“Not a perfect image, mind you, when you consider that we’re looking through four hundred meters of water. But I’d say it looks like a devil with a pitchfork.”

“Make out any wording?”

“Pretty vague,” answered Ingram. “The first word is covered by undersea growth.” He paused and gave the command to the computer for further enhancement. “The second word looks like ‘ Demons.’ “

“A little off the beaten path for the Twentieth Air Force during the war,” said Meeker.

“Think there’s any importance attached to it?”

Meeker shook his head to himself as he turned into his driveway. “Probably just an aircraft that went missing after it flew off course and crashed like the Lady Be Good in the Sahara Desert. Better have it checked out, though, so any living relatives of the crew can be notified of their final resting place.”

Ingram set down the receiver and stared at the shattered picture of the old aircraft buried under the sea, and found himself wondering how it came to be there.

51

THERE HAD BEEN no need to tape their eyes open. Stacy, Mancuso, and Weatherhill had watched the viewing screen in horrified fascination just before the picture went black during Pitt’s fight with the robodog. Then sadness and shock flooded their emotions as Kamatori fiendishly aimed another camera at the blood-drenched ground.

The four of them sat chained to metal chairs grouped in a small semicircle around a huge high-resolution video screen set into the wall. The two robots Giordino called McGoon and McGurk stood guard with the latest in Japanese automatic rifles aimed at the back of their prisoners’ heads.

The unexpected defeat of their plans and total helplessness had stunned them worse than the virtual sentence of death. A hundred plans to salvage their predicament rushed through their minds. None had the slightest hope of getting off the ground. They were conscious now of little but approaching death.

Stacy turned and looked across at Giordino to see how he was taking the crushing blow of his friend’s loss. But his face was completely composed and thoughtful, with no trace of sorrow or rage. Giordino sat there in icy calm, his eyes curiously staring at the action on the screen as if it was an adventure serial at a Saturday matinee.

A short time later, Kamatori entered the room, sat down crosslegged on a mat, and poured a cup of saki. “I trust you watched the results of the hunt,” he said between sips. “Mr. Pitt did not play by the rules. He attacked the robot, altered its programming, and died through his own stupidity.”

“He would have died by your hand anyway!” spat Mancuso. “At least he cheated you of that piece of butchery.”

Kamatori’s lips curled downward briefly and then up in a sinister smile. “I assure you, there will be no repeat of your friend’s performance. A new robodog is presently being reprogrammed so that any unexpected damage to his system will not result in an attack on his quarry.”

“That’s a break,” grunted Giordino.

“You scumbag,” hissed Mancuso, red-faced and straining against his chains. “I’ve seen the brutalities men like you did to Allied prisoners of war. You delight in the torture of others, but can’t stand the thought of suffering yourself.”

Kamatori observed Mancuso with the same expression of haughty distaste he might have displayed at observing a rat baring its teeth from a sewer. “You shall be the last I run to ground, Mr. Mancuso. You will suffer at watching the agony of the others until your turn.”

“I volunteer to be next,” said Weatherhill calmly. His mind skipped over escape schemes and began concentrating on one act. He figured if he did nothing else, killing Kamatori would be worth dying for.

Kamatori slowly shook his head. “Miss Stacy Fox has that honor. A professional female operative will make an interesting challenge. Far better than Dirk Pitt, I hope’ He was a shocking disappointment.”

For the first time Weatherhill felt a trace of nausea run through him. He had never been afraid of death. Half his life had been spent on the brink between living or being killed. But sitting helplessly while a woman was brutally murdered, a woman he knew and respected, made him sick.