Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sweetman stood close to me, and raised the Uzi in his right hand so that its short barrel was pointing at my belly. He stared into my eyes, and smiled. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead and smell the tobacco on his breath. I thought he was going to drive the Uzi into my solar plexus, then the look in his eyes suggested he would pull the trigger and empty the magazine into my stomach. Rickie, who was still on the cockpit’s decking, must have thought the same for he froze to watch the effect of the small bullets ripping into me, but instead, and with the force of a striking snake, Sweetman reached out his left hand and seized Ellen. He stepped back swiftly, dragging her off balance and putting her in front of himself like a shield.

  I had instinctively moved to help her, but Rickie was in my way and Sweetman’s Uzi still threatened me. Ellen was gasping with pain or shock, while Sweetman, pleased with his cleverness at thus surprising her, was smiling over her shoulder. He was keeping her body in front of him like a shield. She strained against his arm that was tight about her, but he merely backed another step away from me, and effortlessly took Ellen with him.

  “You don’t want to spend the night in a chain locker, do you, my sweet one?” Sweetman asked Ellen. “Wouldn’t you be happier in my arms?”

  “God damn you!” She struggled again, this time with enough force to make him use both hands to restrain her. He was forced to let the Uzi dangle from its sling as he put his right arm about her torso. He hugged her into stillness, then, with a malicious smile and to show how helpless she was, he ran his hand across her breasts.

  “Do you want to have her, Rickie?” Sweetman asked. Rickie grinned, but said nothing. Sweetman undid the top button of Ellen’s shirt. “If you’re very good to me, my darling”—he slid his right hand inside the shirt and I saw Ellen’s eyes widen either with fear or outrage—”then I’ll keep you to myself, instead of sharing you with my friends. Poor Miguel won’t like that, but he can be so vilely horrid with girls. He makes them bleed.”

  Ellen, enraged by the threat, moved with sudden and astonishing effect. She slammed her right elbow back into Sweetman’s ribs, then raked her heel down his left shin and on to his instep. Sweetman’s threat of rape had unleashed a demonic force in her. She was crying with frustration, but she was also hurting her captor. She rammed her elbow back again, and lunged forward to escape him, dragging him a step forward as he clung on to her. The gunman in front of us was moving to help Sweetman, while the one behind was laughing at the sight of the girl’s frantic struggles. Sweetman was snarling and swearing at Ellen, and still trying to pull her backwards.

  She screamed and wrenched at him once more, and this time she managed to unbalance and half turn Sweetman who shouted, not because she had hurt him, but because he had seen me moving forward. Jackson Chatterton was also moving, and he was doing the right thing by moving away from Ellen and me, thus dividing the enemy’s aim. Chatterton was also taking care of Thessy by dragging the boy away from the guard who was standing behind us.

  The gunman in front of us swung his Kalashnikov towards me, but Rickie blocked the man’s aim by reaching up to obstruct me. I slammed a knee into Rickie’s skull, driving him down, but his feeble lunge had tripped me and I fell on top of him, but not before I had succeeded in reaching out to snatch at the Uzi which still dangled from Sweetman’s shoulder.

  I caught the gun’s webbing sling and tugged. Rickie screamed as I fell on him. Chatterton was shouting. A gun fired. God knows I had not wanted to start a fight against such overpowering odds, but we were committed now. Sweetman tried to snatch the gun back, then bellowed because Ellen had kicked him in the groin, and suddenly the Uzi was free and in my hands and all my old training took over. I was terrified, my mind was cringing away from the expected bullets, but at the same time I was rolling and turning, my right hand was groping for the trigger, and I was seeking targets. I saw the gunman to my right, the one who had been moving to help Sweetman but who had not dared fire for fear of hitting Sweetman or Rickie and I rolled up to my knees, pulled the trigger and saw the pale muzzle flames and felt the stuttering and astonishingly light recoil of the small gun.

  The Uzi seemed to make very little noise, or perhaps its sound was drowned by Ellen’s screaming. Robin-Anne was gasping and sobbing with terror. Another gun fired from behind me and it seemed as though a sheet of blood whipped up over my head like a great wing of scarlet horror. The gunman I had shot was down and sliding across the deck, his feet kicking with involuntary spasms. I twisted towards the gunshot I had heard. Rickie, frozen by terror, lay curled beside me.

  “Nick!” Chatterton shouted. There was something frantic in his voice, but I could neither see nor help him.

  “Nick! Run!” That was Ellen, who was free again, and though she must have been shouting at me it was Sweetman who obeyed her and who zig-zagged away from me to take refuge in the companionway. He held one hand clasped to his groin and his face was contorted with pain.

  A Kalashnikov fired and I heard the bullet whiplash over my head. The second gunman had found cover at Wavebreaker’s stern and I suspected he was sheltering on the swimming platform and using the deck as a firing step. I guessed he could not see me because of the cockpit coaming, but he was probably just trying to keep my head down until Miguel or Sweetman finished me off.

  I saw Ellen off to my left. She had run to the ship’s rail. She looked briefly back, then jumped a split second before a burst of bullets splintered the rail where she had been standing.

  “Nick! Hurry!” That was Jackson Chatterton again. He was free and running, a shadow somewhere at Wavebreaker’s bows beyond the bright deck-lights. I saw him jump overboard and heard the splash as he hit the sea.

  I looked for Thessy, but could not see him, and I guessed he must have gone with Chatterton. Sweetman had disappeared below decks and I had not seen Miguel for minutes. Rickie was whimpering under me while Robin-Anne was cowering and screaming by the mainmast. The first gunman was taking a long time to die in the starboard scuppers; his blood was draining overboard and his feet were twitching. He was gasping and sometimes uttering small despairing cries, but it was his shoes that caught my attention for they were an incongruous pair of black leather brogues that looked as if they should have been worn with a pinstripe suit. The shoes were tapping the deck to mark the man’s death spasms. He was a long time dying, and he was the first man I had ever shot, and I was feeling sick. I was trained to this, I had even been reckoned a weapons specialist in the Marines, but to the best of my knowledge I had never shot anyone.

  I swallowed hard, then looked at the sight-holes in the Uzi’s magazine to see I had about thirty rounds left. Enough for three seconds of fire, and enough, I hoped, to get me safely off the ship. “Thessy!” I shouted. Before abandoning Wavebreaker I wanted to make sure I was not abandoning Thessy.

  The only answer was the tap tap of the dying man’s shoes. I heard a noise in the companionway and fired a half-second burst in its direction. The noise stopped. The shoes still tapped. I wished the man would die. In films men died so easily, but this man was jerking in his long death throes. I heard a swimmer splashing beside the boat, then the distinctive sound of an assault rifle being cocked below decks. “Thessy!” I shouted again, but the only answer was a single shot fired by the gunman at the stern. The bullet whipped overhead, struck the anchor stock at the bows and ricocheted up into the dusk.

  Rickie tried to jerk away from me, so I slammed an elbow down on his skull and told him to shut up unless he wanted half a magazine of bullets emptied down his gullet. He whimpered, but stayed still and silent. Moths flew thick about the bright yellow floodlamps that lit the deck so garishly and showed me that the cockpit floor was awash with cocaine and slick with blood. The blood was not mine, and I did not think it was Rickie’s. I heard voices below decks and knew I had to break the stalemate. I pulled off one of Rickie’s shoes and tossed it on deck, and sure enough the gunman aft took the bait and fired as he heard the sound.

  I
stood up, snarling, and saw the muzzle flashes sparking beside the life-raft container. The gunman was standing on the swimming platform so that only his head and shoulders were visible above the main deck. He was the man in black with the blue scarf. He saw me and began to swing the Kalashnikov towards me, but I was already firing, using my left hand to check the Uzi’s swing, and I forgot my nausea as I watched the Uzi’s bullets snatch across his chest to colour his blue scarf red, then my bullets splintered his gritted teeth, and suddenly the gunman was gone, hurled backwards, and all that I could see of him was a lightning pulse of blood that fountained high in the night sky to splatter Wavebreaker’s ensign with a new and redder dye, then I heard the stateroom skylight shatter behind me and I swivelled to see Miguel’s shotgun thrusting up from the broken panes and I squeezed the Uzi’s trigger one last time, but only to hear the bolt clatter on an empty chamber.

  I heard Sweetman shout to give himself courage, and I suspected he was charging up the companionway with the M16 and so, abandoning valour for safety, I ran as fast as I could for the rail, and the shotgun crashed at me and I felt the lash and sting of pellets hitting my arm and back, but then I was at the gunwale and I half fell and half folded myself over the varnished rail and let myself and the empty gun drop into the astonishingly warm water.

  In which, suddenly and blessedly, I found silence.

  Jackson Chatterton’s hand seized me and dragged me hard into the shelter of Wavebreaker’s steel hull. Ellen was already there. We were safe enough for the moment because neither Miguel nor Sweetman, leaning over Wavebreaker’s rail, could fire past the hull’s convexity, but nor could we swim away from the hull for, within seconds, we would become the easiest of targets. Yet I knew we had to swim away from the schooner for surely Miguel or Sweetman would soon come hunting us in Dream Baby.

  “Where’s Thessy?” I asked.

  Ellen was treading water beside me, and Chatterton, who had pulled me to safety, was staring up into the glare cast by the deck-lights.

  “Where’s Thessy?” I insisted.

  “He was with me,” Chatterton replied irritably, as though I annoyed him with an irrelevant question. “We’ve got to get out of here! Shit!” A burst of automatic rifle fire smacked water not twelve inches from Chatterton’s face. The sound of the gun was obscenely loud. I heard the magazine being ejected and a new one slapping into place, then the gun fired again and I saw a stream of cartridges tumbling towards us through the yellow light, and I knew that whoever fired the weapon must be holding it far out from the ship’s side and angling its barrel back in, thus making the bullets come perilously close to us.

  “Go forward!” I told Ellen and Chatterton. “Take a big breath, then dive for one of the anchor chains, understand? Use the chain to pull yourselves away from the ship. Get well out into the dark before you break the surface and you should be safe.”

  The automatic weapon fired again, spraying bullets at the sea in an indiscriminate pattern. Some struck the hull just above our heads and whined away to leave scars in the paint. The shotgun crashed as well, forming an instant and miniature maelstrom above which I could see the cartridge’s faint smoke residue drifting away in the bright cast of Wavebreaker’s deck-lights.

  “You’re coming as well?” Ellen wanted my reassurance.

  “I want to look for Thessy.”

  “I told you! He’s all right!” Chatterton spoke too loud and the rifle’s bullets swerved towards us. We all ducked under and I saw, astonishingly, the stitch of air bubbles where each bullet drove into the water to be immediately cushioned into impotence. The water had been turned yellow by the floodlamps.

  We swam forward, keeping close to the ship’s side, and once under the steep overhang of the bows we took turns to dive for the nearest anchor rode. Sweetman and Miguel seemed to have lost track of us, for they kept firing at the water amidships, and the noise of their guns covered the smaller sounds we made as we pushed hard away from Wavebreaker’s side.

  I dived last, kicking away from the ship and swimming deep so that the anchor chain was a silhouetted black streak against the shimmering yellow mirror-bright surface of the water. I panicked that I would miss the chain and that my head would break surface close to where the gunman stood on Wavebreaker’s deck, but then I clasped one of the slippery links and desperately hauled myself hand over hand away from Wavebreaker until my lungs were bursting, and only then did I let go of the chain and swim up to break the lagoon’s black surface. I gasped for breath and flinched against the bullets I expected, but then discovered that I had surfaced well beyond the pool of light thrown by the schooner’s deck-lamps, and that our enemies were still firing down by the ship’s side. I turned towards the closest shore and decided not to think about sharks. I saw Ellen’s gleaming head close by, and Chatterton’s further inshore.

  The lights on Wavebreaker were suddenly doused. Robin-Anne had begun screaming in a sustained shriek of terror that was abruptly cut short as though someone had slapped her face. I saw that the daylight had not entirely faded; and that it had only been the brightness of the deck-lights that had made it seem as though night had fallen.

  We swam for the shore. Our heads must already have melded with the encroaching blackness of the dusk, for we were not seen. The Kalashnikov and the sharper-toned M16 fired a few random bursts and their bullets flicked wildly and uselessly across the lagoon, but none came close to us. It was only when the three of us crawled up on land and blundered noisily into the dark bushes that the bullets became threatening.

  Yet still none of us was hit, and after full dark the shooting became much wilder and more sporadic. Wavebreaker’s deck-lights came on again, doubtless as a precaution against our trying to recapture the ship, while Dream Baby, hitherto moored on the far side of Wavebreaker, briefly cruised the lagoon with its searchlight raking the bushes and palms, but whoever was on board did not see us, nor did they try and come ashore, and I realised that Sweetman and Miguel must be scared half to death of us. They, after all, had gone into the fight with an arsenal of weapons, while we had none, yet we had killed both their gunmen and then got clean away; and, so far as they knew, I still had the sub-machine-gun, and their imaginations must have been worried that I still had a bullet or two left in its magazine. In fact the empty Uzi lay on the lagoon bed beneath Wavebreaker, but our enemies would not know that we were unarmed. We were also blessedly uninjured except for the shotgun pellets in my back and arm, and the myriad of bites from the mosquitoes that began to plague us as soon as we crawled up on to the beach.

  We crossed the tail of Sea Rat Cay, pushing through spiny dark bushes until we reached a small beach on the ocean side of the island where a reassuring lump of limestone lay between us and the weapons still on board Wavebreaker. We crouched in the boulder’s comforting protection, catching our breath and listening to the surf’s monotonous grumble. A palm arched above us like a great sheltering arm, and it was there, beneath that tree and staring at the restless and shining sea, that I learned how grievous our injuries truly were; far more grievous than a few mosquito bites or shotgun pellets.

  For Thessy was dead.

  Ellen half gasped and half screamed when she heard the news. She was suddenly in shock; crying and shivering and I held her very tight while Jackson Chatterton told us what had happened.

  Thessy had died in the very first seconds of the fight. He had died quickly, with a Kalashnikov bullet in his skull. I closed my eyes, knowing that it must have been the blood of Thessy’s dying that had sheeted over me like a great red wing in the dusk.

  Jackson Chatterton had tried to save him. He had dragged Thessy away from the threat of the gunman at the back of the boat, running forward to join Robin-Anne in the belief that the gunman would not open fire for fear of hitting her, but the gunman had fired all the same, and his bullets had hit Thessy. Chatterton, wiser in the ways of man’s brutality, had twisted down to the scant cover of the scuppers, and had pulled Thessy down with him, but by then the bo
y was already dead.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “God, man, he was dead. He got two in the spine and one here.” Chatterton spread a huge hand on his own skull to demonstrate the size of Thessy’s wound. Ellen did not see the gesture. She was sobbing, while I, for all my horror and grief, was obstinately dry-eyed. Thessy had been my friend, and still I could not weep. “He felt nothing,” Chatterton said bleakly, and at least we could be grateful for that.

  Chatterton blamed himself for Thessy’s death, saying he should have thrown the boy overboard in the very first second of the violence, but Ellen, between sobs, said that it was her responsibility because she had begun the fight, but I told them that if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine, for I had encouraged Ellen’s fight by joining in, and it had been I who had taken the gun from Sweetman and escalated the horror. “I killed the bastard who killed Thessy,” I said softly, as if that was some consolation, but there could be no solace for such a death. Thessy had been so very innocent, and his passing had torn a great hole in my universe; a great damned stupid Godless waste of a hole.

  So I sat there, unable to shed a tear, yet unable to imagine Thessy dead. I kept thinking that every rustle of leaves or clatter of palm fronds was the sound of his coming to join us, and so I kept looking round, expecting to see his face or hear his anxious voice, but the movements were just the night shadows being wind-stirred among the leaves and the sounds were only the crash of the sea falling on the reefs and the sigh of the warm uncaring wind.

  I told myself that if I had fired the gun quicker, or moved faster, then Thessy would still be alive. And why Thessy, of all of us? Thessy, so earnest and so good, so unworthy of this death, and I closed my eyes and prayed that there truly was a heaven where an honest boy from Straker’s Cay would find eternal happiness.