by James Axler
The trader’s mind raced, putting together the pieces of his predicament. If there were more red sashes outside, he reasoned, they’d have come aboard, too. They wouldn’t be waiting around on the other boats or on the dock. Not while these guys pocketed all the good stuff. If there were others they’d at least be poking around on Tempest’s deck. This, Tom decided, was a two-man team.
Almost immediately, the first guy zeroed in on his big stainless-steel Model 625 Smith hanging in its holster from a wall hook.
Shiny.
A leer twisted the red sash’s mouth as he reached out to touch the grips. From his expression it was evident that he’d already picked out his prize. And from his body language, he figured Tom, like everyone else hereabouts, was going to be too cowed to try to stop him from taking it.
The second man was already a third of the way down the companionway, which was so steep he could see hardly anything of the cabin below him, just the foot of the stairs and the deck.
Tom darted past the first guy as the other man’s boot began to come down on the next tread; just before it touched, he hooked it with the heel with his hand, sweeping the leg outward. The second red sash fell over backward and dropped; as he fell, the back of his head bounced hard off the edges of the steps behind him.
Thud, thud, thud, thud.
Tom let the SOG’s no-slip Zytel grip drop into his palm, and driving with his legs as he pivoted, he sent a savage, sixty-degree upward thrust into the base of the other man’s skull. Bone yielded like so much cardboard, crunching as the knife’s razor point penetrated his brain pan. It was the kind of full-power strike that demanded a hand guard—without it Tom’s fingers would have slid down the blade’s edge, themselves cut to the bone.
For a moment Tom held the man by the left shoulder and by the steel rammed into the back of his head, then he shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet and rammed the guy face-first into the bulkhead, using his full body weight from behind to further drive in the blade. With a second, sickening crunch, it slipped in all the way to the hilt.
As the red sash’s bowels released, one more nasty fragrance was added to the man’s stench.
The elapsed time was no more than five seconds.
Tom let the man slip to the deck and turned toward the other guy, who was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs. Despite his own head injury, red sash Number Two was trying to pull it together. His eyes were only half focused, and his fingers fumbled weakly next to his hip as he tried to get hold of the pistol grip of his double barrel which had fallen to one side.
Perhaps he was a nice guy when he was off red sash duty.
Perhaps he had a wife and ten kids.
Perhaps he liked dogs.
It didn’t matter.
Tom knee-dropped all 185 pounds of himself onto the front of the man’s exposed throat, one blow that crushed the larynx like an eggshell.
The body under him jolted at the impact. After a momentary pause, there was a shrill whistling sound. With all his strength the red sash was trying to breathe, but despite the effort was only managing to suck a tiny, utterly insufficient wisp of air through the squashed passage and into his lungs.
As Tom stood, the guy clawed at his own ruined throat. His face rapidly went purple, then black, his eyes bulged, his mouth agape, tongue protruding, heels drumming frantically on the deck. After a minute or so he stopped moving. The extreme tension in his body just slipped away.
Tom ran up the steps, pulled the companionway door shut and locked it. He descended to the bottom stair and sat on it, gasping for breath.
Then he saw the first guy was bleeding around the hilt of the knife, and it was dripping onto the deck mat.
“Shit!” he said. He jumped up and grabbed the man by the back of his shirt collar and dragged him to the main stateroom’s head. He opened the shower stall door and shoved the man in, positioning his wound so it dripped into the floor drain.
Getting the seven inches of SOG out was a lot harder than sticking it in. Tom had to stand on the back of man’s neck and work the handle back and forth to widen the entry wound and dislodge the blade. When he pulled the knife free, blood spurted out in a gusher.
And continued to spurt.
The red sash’s heart was still beating.
Tom wiped off his knife on the tails of the white shirt. The coppery odor of blood mixed with all the other smells in the enclosed space made him want to puke. Holding his breath, he turned on the shower bilge pump to send the gore over the side and into the bay. He knew he couldn’t risk dragging the bodies up on deck in broad daylight. He was going to have to wait until after dark to get rid of them. And there was room in the shower stall for two, if he piled the dead men on top of each other.
Back in the corridor, as he prepared to haul the second corpse out of sight, he heard sounds of activity outside. Not on his boat, not on the boats it was rafted to, but on the dock and street beyond. There were loud voices. There was laughing. Car horns honked.
It sounded like another parade.
When Tom popped up on deck for a quick look, he saw scads of red sashes trooping toward the fort. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They weren’t marching in orderly ranks; they were a raucous mob.
That’s when it had occurred to him that he could join the party with minimal risk to his central goal: payback for Padre Island. Based on his recce of the night before, blowing up the power plant looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. He figured if Ryan and his companions were still alive this morning and he could pinpoint the location where they were being held, there was a chance he could rescue them in the chaos that was sure to come after he turned off the lights.
At least he could try to rescue them. Considering who they were and what they had endured, considering he had been instrumental in getting them into this mess in the first place, he owed them that much.
Tom stripped off the dead man’s white shirt and red sash before depositing his body in the shower. The other guy had bled out from his head wound by that time, so he shut off the bilge pump.
After putting on the shirt and sash, he uncovered the PKM and double-checked the selector switch to make sure he was leaving the booby trap set, the weapon ready to fire. With the dead man’s straw hat pulled low on his forehead, he gathered up the dropped scattergun and climbed the forward companionway onto the bow deck. He locked the door behind him, then joined the happy throng that was headed to the fort.
That had been almost two hours ago.
Two hours in the broiling sun, pretending to be jubilant.
On the platform below him now, the priest read from the tail end of the scroll. Tom’s ear for Spanish was improving slightly, enough at least to gather that Ryan and his look-alike were both going to be executed after nightfall.
Something that pleased the crowd no end.
Their attitude changed when Ryan’s double rose up from his knees, overpowering the two men that held him tethered. The moment of triumph instantly deflated. The red sashes around Tom groaned, grumbled and shook their heads in dismay. They didn’t want an exhibition of strength and courage in the face of death, they wanted the prisoner to stay on his knees.
Ryan’s twin began to speak, rapidly and without a hint of fear in his voice. Because of the speed of the speech, and the way the man ran his phrases together, Tom could only pick out scattered words here and there. There was a delay while his brain recovered the meaning of the ones he recognized, but by then the double was fifty words ahead.
Instead of racking his brain trying to figure out what the guy was saying, Tom concentrated on the way he was saying it. The look-alike didn’t act like a prisoner, despite the chains. He held himself proudly erect and he turned from side to side, addressing the enemies that packed both sides of the battlements. He was defiant, unbroken, unrepentant even though he was helpless and, it would seem, doomed. Tom found the reaction of the militiamen milling around him very strange. It was obvious that they considered the condemned m
an a threat, larger than life, even under these circumstances.
The double’s last sentence was spoken very slowly and very painstakingly enunciated, word by word. So slowly and so plainly that even Tom could understand it.
A shudder of shock passed through the throng, as if they had been bitch-slapped in unison, this while Tom had to bite his lip to keep from laughing out loud.
Talk about big balls! The look-alike had them.
Meanwhile, Tom’s fellow red sashes went berserk. Screaming in outrage, they unleashed a wild fusillade of joy juice bottles. The rain of breaking glass came from the battlements on both sides of the central compound. The prisoners and their red sash guards immediately covered their heads with their arms. One of the guards was struck in the back of the neck. The bottle burst on impact, his straw hat went flying, and he dropped as though he’d been head-shot.
The red sashes around Tom who found themselves without bottles to throw scrambled to pick up rocks from the ground. They fought over the pebbles.
It was clear to Tom that the men guarding the prisoners were unprepared for this eventuality; for a full minute they stood frozen in place. It was lucky for them and for the prisoners that there weren’t that many loose stones lying around on the walkways. But Tom figured it was only matter of time before it was shotgun pellets instead of rocks and bottles flying down.
Finally the guards got themselves organized and hurried the prisoners through the red brick colonnade that Tom stood atop. All the red sashes, Tom included, rushed to the opposite side of the battlements. Ryan and his mirror image reappeared almost directly below them, collared, noosed, and hustled as fast as their ankle chains would allow onto the footbridge and toward a windowless, gray, stone block building that squatted on a shaved-flat atoll of coral.
The crowd yelled curses and taunts at the running men. Bottles shattered on the bridge’s stone rails and splashed into the water on either side. When shotguns started booming along the battlements Tom winced, but the discharges were aimed at the canal, not the condemned.
After the entourage disappeared safely through the arched portal of the prison, the crowd continued to yell and jump up and down, this in celebration of their sending helpless prisoners running for cover, running for their lives. The militiamen actually believed they had just won a victory for their side.
For his part, Harmonica Tom stifled the urge to yawn. At least now he knew where Ryan was being held, and he had a rough idea how many hours he had left to figure out a way to free him.
After fifteen minutes of celebration, the red sashes started filing out of the fort. Tom went with the flow, accepting countless back-slap congratulations, pretending to cheer with the others.
As he retraced his route over the narrow footbridge to the mainland, he had a momentary unflattering thought. He could just keep going. He could back Tempest from its mooring in broad daylight, sail out of the bay and dump the corpses at sea. He could let the legend of Ryan Cawdor die here.
Tom considered the idea for about three seconds, then discarded it. Aside from the responsibility he felt for Cawdor and the companions, aside from his hatred for the Matachìn and their minions, it occurred to him how much larger his own legend would grow if he swooped in and saved the one-eyed warrior from execution.
Being legendary was bad for the health, but good for business.
It made folks think twice about back-stabbing and doubledealing. Besides, Tom liked the idea of giving a man like Ryan his life back. And his twin, too. Another bred-in-the-bone ass-kicker. If he could, he would free them both, along with the other companions.
After he crossed the bridge, he stepped out of the flow of the mob, which was headed back toward Veracruz to prepare for the execution, and walked around the edge of the stone quay. The channel between the fort and the prison looked deep enough for Tempest’s keel, but because of the connecting footbridge and the height of his ship’s masts, it had to be a motor-in, back-out situation. And the necessary left turn was very tight for a forty-foot sloop. In the dark and in a hurry, there was a big risk, if not a likelihood, of grounding the ship in the attempt.
Tom completely circled the ravelin on the peninsula side, confirming the fact that there was just one way in and one way out: through the arched portal on the far side of the footbridge.
A tough nut to crack.
Particularly if he wanted to get away with a whole skin.
When Tom returned to Tempest, he saw he had more visitors. Very short ones. Half a dozen children were sitting on the port deck with their legs hanging over the side. Ages about seven to ten, four boys and two girls, they were laughing, pushing at one another, and throwing rocks at something in the water below.
First thing Tom thought was the red sash he’d weighted down with concrete blocks had popped to the surface. A floater.
Not a good thing.
Tom boarded Tempest and walked up behind the kids, looking down over their heads into the water.
There was no floating corpse. Just three big-ass sharks swimming around in tight circles less than a yard from the bilge pump’s exit pipe. The twelve-foot-long hammerheads had been attracted by the blood he’d put in the water.
“¡Bastante!” he told the little rock chuckers. The kids looked surprised and very disappointed that their fun was at an end. They were even more disappointed when he gently but firmly shooed them off his boat.
Tom looked down at the hammerheads. He wondered if they’d already located the other guy’s body. If not yet, they would soon. And when they did, how long would it take for sharks of that size to tear his legs off? A minute? Two minutes? Or to chew through the leather shoulder-sling tether that kept him connected to the concrete blocks? Ten seconds? Would the corpse then stay trapped under the keels of the rafted boats? Or would it slip out into the bay? Like a drifting log, a place for seagulls to rest and preen. It was too late to do anything about it now. He certainly wasn’t going to go over the side to make sure the body was where he left it.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw the kids had wandered off down the road. Tom climbed across the rafted boats to the dock. He walked over to the ruined warehouse and picked up a pair of scavenged concrete blocks from a palette.
When it got dark enough to dump the other bodies over the side, he would use chain to fasten the ankle weights. Something sharks couldn’t bite through.
Chapter Twelve
Krysty’s body was simultaneously pressed into the bunk bed mattress and jolted by a muffled impact. The latter awakened her from her stupor for a half second; as she slipped back into a black pit of exhausted sleep, it happened again. The yawning lurch. The crushing weight of g-force. Punctuated by a bone-jarring thud.
In the back of her mind she knew something important had changed; something was wrong. Then she realized the constant rumble of the black ship’s diesel had disappeared; it had been replaced by the loud hiss of the hull knifing through the sea and the whistle of the wind gusting through the stays.
They were under sail.
As the schooner plowed through oncoming seas, Krysty forced her eyelids open, then with an effort, focused on her surroundings. There were no windows in the cabin she shared with Mildred. The walls were featureless sheet steel. The only light came from a caged bulb in the center of the ceiling.
Rising groggily to her feet, Krysty tried to rouse Mildred who was out cold on the upper bunk. The doctor didn’t wake at the sound of her name. There was a stripe of a white crystalline substance, like sugar grains, across her brown cheek. Mildred had been drooling in her sleep.
Putting a hand on her shoulder, Krysty gave a gentle shake.
Nothing.
Then a harder shake.
Mildred moaned and slowly opened her eyes.
As the ship climbed the back of a wave, Krysty’s legs suddenly went weak in the knees and her head started to spin. Very much alarmed, she steadied herself by gripping the edge of Mildred’s bunk.
What she was feeling made no
sense. Krysty had been stuck on board ship for many weeks, and had been exposed to the elements in a variety of unpleasant sea and wind states. She was accustomed to the rolling motion and the violent wave impacts. She knew whatever it was, it wasn’t seasickness. This sensation was entirely different. She wasn’t sick to her stomach. Her mind and her coordination were what was impaired: her thinking muddled, her limbs tangle-footed. It was all she could do not to creep back into her bunk and pull the covers over her head.
Clinging to the bed frame, Krysty realized with a shock that she had no idea how much time had passed since she and Mildred had crawled into their respective bunks. Time was the vital element; Ryan’s life depended on it.
The last thing she remembered was breakfast, although she couldn’t recall how long ago that had been. She and Mildred had been served tall, hot stacks of golden-brown pancakes, drizzled with melted butter and some kind of sweet brown syrup, with separate bowls heaped with crisp strips of bacon.
She remembered how good the food had smelled and tasted. She had been so hungry. Barely awake, she had gobbled it down, hand over fist. Mildred had attacked her food with the same enthusiasm. They had eaten like starving animals.
Now Krysty was hungry again. Her stomach’s rumbling and gurgling was her only gauge of the elapsed time.
Three hours to digest?
Mebbe four?
Could it be past noon already? she thought in growing despair.
Mildred pushed up to a wobbly sitting position on her bunk, bracing herself against the impacts with a hand pressed to the cabin wall. “The diesel has stopped,” she said thickly, her eyes still closed.
“Sounds and feels like we’ve picked up some real speed,” Krysty said. “They must have all the sheets up.”
Mildred opened her eyes. “How long have we been running with the wind?” she asked. “How long have we been asleep?”