Julia did what any sane woman would do under the same circumstances. She screamed and then cried out, “You can't drive down the middle of the Mall!”
“I damned well can and will so long as we live to tell about it!” Pitt shot back.
His seemingly crazy and totally unexpected maneuver had the desired results. The driver of the lead van tenaciously chased the Duesenberg over the curb onto the grassy Mall, and Wew all four tires in the attempt. They struck the concrete barrier with such force that they exploded in a rapid series of loud pops. The much smaller, more modern tires on the vans could not jump over the curb with the ease of the Duesenberg's big doughnuts.
The second van's driver elected for discretion, checked his speed in time, braked and slowly drove over the curb without damaging his tires. The men in the first van—there were two —frantically abandoned their vehicle and flung themselves through the open side door of the second one. Then they all stubbornly took up the chase again, pursuing the Duesenberg across the middle of the Mall to the astonishment of hundreds of onlookers who were heading for home after an open-air Marine Corps band conceit at the Navy Memorial. The shocked expression on their faces ranged from frozen incomprehension to stunned astonishment at seeing the huge car with the artistically flowing lines tearing across the Mall between the National Ak & Space Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Groups of people strolling or jogging along the Mall's paths were suddenly galvanized into chasing the speeding vehicles on foot, certain they were about to witness an accident.
The Duesenberg was still accelerating with Pitt's foot flat on the gas pedal. The long car flared as it tore across Seventh Street, skidding around passing cars, Pitt righting the wheel with grim tenacity. The mammoth car was incredibly responsive. The faster the speed, the more solid the feeling of stability. All he had to do was point the car where he wanted to go, and she went. He breathed a brief sigh of relief at seeing no cross-traffic on Fourteenth Street, the next thoroughfare across the Mall. The sidemount mirror and the rearview mirror on the windshield had both been blown to pieces by the earlier burst of gunfire, and he could not spare a brief glance to see if the pursuing van was closing within accurate firing range again.
“Take a peek over the seat and see how close they are,” he yelled to Julia.
She had thumbed off the side safety on the Colt and had it aimed over the backrest of the seat. “They slowed when bouncing over the curbs on the last two cross streets,” she answered, “but they're gaining. I can almost see the whites of the driver's eyes.”
“Then you can begin shooting back.”
“This isn't the wilderness around Orion River. There are pedestrians all over the Mall. I can't risk striking anyone with a stray shot.”
“Then wait until you can't miss.”
The men firing out the sides of the van were not as considerate. They unleashed another burst at the Duesenberg, drilling the big trunk mounted on the rear of the body, the thuds of the bullets mingling with the pulsing bursts erupting from the guns' muzzles. Pitt wrenched desperately on the wheel, dodging the fusillade that whistled past the right side of the car.
“Those guys don't have your sensitivity toward others,” he said, thankful that he had managed to swerve around any car that crossed his path without accident.
Wishing he had a magic wand to stop the traffic, he hurtled across Fifteenth Street, narrowly missing a newspaper truck and throwing the Duesenberg into a four-wheel slide to avoid a black Ford Crown Victoria sedan, which had replaced most of the government limousines. Fleetingly, he wondered what government VIP was riding inside. He felt a small surge of comfort at knowing the van had to drop back to negotiate the curbs.
The towering Washington Monument rose in front of the car's path. Pitt guided the car around the floodlit obelisk and sped down the slight slope on the opposite side. Julia was still unable to get a clear shot as Pitt concentrated on getting the Duesenberg past the Monument without losing control on the slippery grass. And then they were heading toward the Lincoln Memorial at the end of the Mall.
Seconds later he came to Seventeenth Street. Thankfully, there was a slot in the middle of the traffic and he shot toward the other side without endangering passing cars. Despite the violent chase through the avenues of Washington and across the Mall, he saw no flashing red lights nor heard sirens from pursuing police cars. If he had attempted the mad ride across the Mall on any other occasion, he'd have been stopped and arrested for reckless driving within the first hundred yards.
Pitt had a short breathing spell as they roared between the Reflecting Pool and Constitution Gardens. Almost directly ahead loomed the brilliantly illuminated Lincoln Memorial and the Potomac River beyond. He turned and looked over his shoulder at the van, which was corning up fast on the Duesen-berg again. The van's twin headlights were so close he could have read a newspaper under them. The contest was too uneven. Despite the Duesenberg being a magnificent automobile by which all others were measured, it was a case of a big-game hunter in a bush vehicle chasing an elephant. He knew that they knew he was running out of space. If he cut and swung right toward Constitution Avenue, they could easily cut him off. To his left the long Reflecting Pool stretched almost to the great white marble Memorial. The water barrier looked impassable. Or was it?
He roughly pushed Julia off the seat onto the floor. “Keep down and hold on tight!”
“What are you going to do?”
“We're going boating.”
“You're not only deranged, you've gone berserk.”
“A rare combination,” Pitt said calmly. His features were fixed in concentration, his eyes glistening like those of a hawk circling over a hare. There was a look of unfathomable detachment about him. To Julia, who stared up from her position on the floorboards under the dashboard, he looked as relentlessly determined as a comber surging toward a beach. Then she saw him snap the wheel to the left, sending the Duesenberg sliding sideways in the grass at nearly seventy miles an hour, the big rear wheels spinning crazily, ripping up the turf like giant meat grinders and just missing the large trees spaced twenty-two feet apart along the pool.
After what seemed like ages, the tires dug in and gripped the soft ground, sending the car beyond the point of no return, her immense bulk lunging forward into the Reflecting Pool.
The heavy steel chassis and aluminum body, driven by the full force of the powerful engine, smacked into the water with an enormous white explosion that leaped from her front and sides like Niagara Falls turned upside down. The sickening thump jarred the Duesenberg from bumper to bumper as her great weight sank, pushing her balloon tires onto the concrete bottom where their rubber treads bit and hurled the car forward like a bull whale charging through the sea after a female in heat.
The water gushed over the hood and flooded through the shattered windshield into the front compartment, drenching Pitt and nearly inundating Julia. Unaware exactly of Pitt's intentions, she was petrified at finding herself suddenly submerged under a deluge. To Pitt, taking the full brunt of the torrent, it seemed as if he was driving into raging breakers only a surfer could love.
There was no growth on the bottom of the Reflecting Pool. It was drained and cleaned by the Park Service on a regular basis. The distance between the surface of the water and the top of the edge along the sides measured only eight inches. The bottom of the pool was not flat but sloped from a depth of one foot around the walls to a maximum depth of two and a half feet in the middle. The distance from the pool floor to the top edge of the wall measured twenty inches.
Pitt prayed the engine wouldn't flood and die. The distributor, he knew, was a good four feet from the ground. No problem there. Nor with the carburetors, as they sat well over three feet high. But his main concern was the spark plugs. They rested between the twin overhead cam shafts at three feet on the nose.