Without Warning (17 page)

“Mr. Lee, John Woo doesn’t know shit about Chinese action heroes if he doesn’t know you … Now, let’s deal with this shoeless fuckwit, shall we? I won’t have his stinky fucking plates of meat oozing and peeling all over my new boat. Take her up to thirteen knots, if you will. We’ll leave a little bit of tiger in the tank for later, if needed.”

Lee fitted a set of headphones over his ears, plugged them into a digital radio clipped onto his sun-faded canvas pants, and opened the throttles on the big boat’s massive Caterpillar engines, unleashing a stampede from the fifteen hundred horsepower contained in each. Acceleration was smooth and instantaneous. Pete felt himself rocking back on his heels as they leapt forward, and Mr. Lee began a series of sharp tacking maneuvers to make any boarding operations as difficult as possible. The radio in Pete’s hand crackled to life. It was Jules.

“We’re in position, Pete.”

“Good work, Julesy. Keep your finger on the trigger. Big-boy rules today.”

He signed off and moved over to the port side of the bridge, where he could see one cigarette boat slowing down and looping in and out, attempting to match its course and speed to the yacht. There were six men crammed into the small cockpit, all of them toting weapons. Shoeless Dan was standing by the wheel, one hand on the windshield, the other waving madly at the bridge of the
Aussie Rules.
He’d know Pete was on board. The
Diamantina
was roped to the stern, bumping along in their wake.

Dan stood about six-two in his perennially bare feet, but he added another nine or ten inches to his height with the largest ‘fro Pete had ever seen on a white man. The fact that Dan was afflicted with red hair made him stand out even more dramatically from his brown-skinned crew. He was yelling, to no effect, grinning like a hyena on crystal meth.

Pete glanced at Lee, an unspoken question passing between them. Lee nodded brusquely that he had the helm under control. The Chinaman suddenly
spun the wheel hard aport in response to a radio call from one of the girls. Pete plucked a handset from the console a few feet down from Lee and powered up the yacht’s loudspeakers. He was going to tell Dan to back off or get blown away. Unfortunately he hit the wrong switch, punching through an audio feed from the media room, where BBC World was running an ad for an upcoming repeat
of Pride and Prejudice
on UKTV.

“… it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy,” boomed the giant luxury yacht. “May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?”

The effect upon the Mexicans was salutary. They began shooting.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” cursed Jules.

She didn’t know whether Pete had done that on purpose or not—he had a pretty inappropriate sense of humor—but the result was the same. Whatever small chance they had of talking Dan down suddenly disappeared, and they were now committed to a shoot-out in which they were outnumbered plenty to one. Hunkered down on the pool deck, where she’d been quietly watching the boat in which Shoeless Dan was traveling, she popped up from cover, and squeezed off a couple of bursts from the M16 as the go-fast made a sudden turn and ran in toward the docking bay. Both vessels were moving erratically at speed and most of her clip missed, but at least one of the men flew back in his seat as his head suddenly appeared to lose its structural integrity. A red mist painted the other passengers in the boat as it came around violently and laid on speed for the bow to get out of Jules’s line of fire.

She performed a quick and dirty bit of math, swung the 16 around, and angled the barrel upward at about sixty degrees. The grenade launcher triggered with a hollow thump, sending a single 40-mm high-explosive round downrange. Jules was running forward, crouched low and swapping out her spent mag, well before it hit. She tensed up, waiting for the detonation, but it never came. The round dropped into the sea without exploding.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Yes, she tended to repeat herself under pressure.

“Lee!” she yelled into the radio. “Target One is heading forward.”

“I see him, Miss Julianne,” Mr. Lee replied, his voice calm in her earphones, like that of a parent soothing a distressed child.

The yacht veered across the path of the smaller boat without warning, nearly throwing Jules over the safety rail. She’d just regained her footing when Pete crashed into her. He’d emerged unexpectedly from a doorway,
carrying a sawed-off shotgun he’d taken from Fifi. The cut-down stock slammed painfully into her unprotected arm, numbing it.

“Jesus, Pete. Watch out!”

“Sorry, darlin’, didn’t see you. Heads down!”

He quickly raised the weapon and fired, the blast making her ears ring. Pete worked the slide and fired again and again, until he’d emptied the entire load, then he dropped and rolled onto his back as Jules jumped up and loosed off a series of clattering bursts. The first went nowhere near the go-fast. She had had to squint into a lowering sun and had simply hosed out some fire in the general direction of the boat. The second went a little closer as she adjusted her aim, but the shots flew over the heads of the men as Lee tacked again and she lost balance. The third blast, which emptied her clip, raked the foredeck of the boat, sending bright chips of metal and polished fiberglass flying and twinkling into the salt air and late-afternoon sun. A muffled
whoomp
and a satisfying flash told her something vital had gone up, but before she could nail them with a round from the grenade launcher, Pete dragged her down, just as a line of automatic fire ripped along the bulkhead behind her with a heavy, industrial hammering sound. A hot steel chip grazed one cheek, burning her.

“Shit,” she gasped. “Thanks, Pete. Owe you a blowie for that one.”

“Consider me blown,” shouted Pete over the uproar. “Gimme the sixteen and a couple of mags, take my shottie and get back to Fifi at the loading dock. She’s got at least one of the pricks on her case. Crazy fucker jumped onto the diving platform on a flyby.”

“Okay. Got it,” she shouted, fishing two full magazines out of her combat harness.

From the rear of the yacht she heard the unmistakable hammering of Fifi’s favorite gun, a Russian PKM.

They quickly exchanged weapons, and he stuffed the reloads in his cargo pockets as she spun around.

Pete headed forward.

Jules found her shipmate crouched low at the bow of a SeaVee dive boat that hung next to the big custom-built sport fisher on the lower deck at the rear of the yacht.

“Sorry, Julesy,” said Fifi. “Asshole got on when his buds had me pinned down. I put a lot of fire down there but don’t know whether I even winged him. A frag woulda been nice to roll down on him.”

It was hard to hear her over the tumult of gunfire and snarling engine noise.

Jules patted her on the back, where she’d slung “the worm,” a rocket launcher Pete had acquired on their last trip to the Maldives. It was stamped with Australian army markings and serial numbers, and had probably been stolen from the garrison on Timor. They had only one warshot for it, and Pete forever had to remind Fifi that she couldn’t fire off a practice round. She’d been desperate to light that sucker up since he’d bought the thing.

“You leave this guy to me, babe,” said Jules. “We really need you to nail one of those fuckers out there. Pete’s working on Shoeless Dan’s ride. That leaves the other one for you. Think you can take him with that thing?”

She indicated the launcher on Fifi’s back.

Fifi suddenly hauled up her PKM and punched out a short, angry burst that chewed big, expensive chunks of paneling out of the yacht down by the steps to the diving platform. A heavy, Soviet-era design, the gun was powerful enough to be used as an antiaircraft weapon. The uproar when she fired it was enormous. Jules’s ears were already ringing from the shotgun blasts a few minutes earlier, and now they began to hum a single deep tone to let her know they’d suffered some real damage.

“Sorry!” shouted Fifi. “Saw him again. Asshole has only two ways up onto the deck. Those stairs down there. You have to move across from one side to the other all the fucking time to check that he hasn’t snuck up. Can’t keep an eye on both at once, you see. But then he can’t be in both places at once either. He’s packing some kinda light fully-auto. Maybe an Uzi or an MP5. And yeah, I can put a hurtin’ on that other fucker, no problemo.”

“Okay,” said Jules. “You go.”

Her own voice sounded dull and very distant to her, as though her head had been packed in cotton.

She flicked the safety off her shotgun as Fifi moved away. The yacht was still weaving an erratic course, changing tack without warning as Mr. Lee strived to prevent their attackers from boarding any more men. Bent low, Jules couldn’t see the go-fast boats, but the deep growling of their engines as they maneuvered around the larger vessel was loud and constant. Distance and the sheer mass of the superyacht often muted the pop and crackle of gunfire from Shoeless Dan’s men, but the impact of their rounds hitting home was often deafening, as they crashed into metal or glass just overhead.

Jules shifted position, scowling furiously. The boat deck was crowded with three big vessels, and at least half a dozen Jet Skis, all of which provided excellent cover, but also denied her a clear line of sight to her target. It was
also a terrible fucking mess, totally ripped up by hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Her guy was trapped a level down, where he’d come aboard on the diving platform. Conceivably, if she could find a position that covered both sets of stairs up onto the boat deck, she could keep him pinned down until the others were free to help her. But then, she wasn’t familiar with the design of the yacht, and it was more than possible that he might be able to work his way up and behind her via an internal route directly from the docking bay. She didn’t see any way of avoiding a direct confrontation with the little prick.

Despite the late hour, the sun was still putting out a fierce heat that made all her clothes sticky with sweat. Her tongue felt dry and swollen, and she had trouble swallowing. The yacht swung hard astarboard, nearly throwing her to the deck, but she used the momentum to push forward a few more feet to where a couple of black Jet Skis lay under the keel of the biggest of the auxiliary vessels, the forty-two-footer. That gave her a better view. She could now see at least part of the other staircase, but it also left her a good deal more exposed.

She caught a flash of long matted hair, and blasted away at it, to be rewarded with a strangled cry. Jules didn’t think the wound was mortal. A Remington made a horrible mess of a human head when it struck with full force, and she saw no evidence of that. Most likely a couple of pellets hit home and raked out some skin and bone. But nothing fatal.

“Time to double down, Lady Balwyn,” she muttered to herself, summoning up her courage with a phrase her father had often used.

A whoosh and a sudden explosive roar told her that Fifi had launched her rocket. Without thinking, without waiting, Jules leapt up and ran forward, racking another shell into the breech and squeezing it off. The shotgun boomed in her hands. She racked the slide again.

Boom.

She’d made the head of the stairs and fired down into the well.

Boom.

But the boarder was nowhere to be seen.

Damn!

He must have moved over. Bloody tracks led away to the other side of the boat. There was one particularly large splatter, but it wasn’t flecked with bone chips or brain flecks, and so mostly likely wasn’t evidence of a killing stroke. Still moving as quickly as she could in the pitching, treacherous conditions, she attempted to rack another shell, but the Remington clicked empty.

Oh for fuck’s …

And then she was on top of him.

A small wiry man, deeply tanned, his bare torso covered in dense, brightly colored swirls of tattoo ink. He was waving a gun around, but was apparently blinded. His face was bathed in blood, and the flesh from his nose up had been badly torn by a few pellets of buckshot.

He fired wildly at the sound of her approach, unloading the better part of an MP5 mag at her, but Jules was already diving before he pulled the trigger. Head tucked in, heart pounding, she crashed into his thighs and knocked him backward into a set of air tanks on the diving platform. Awkwardly, but with all of her strength, she slammed the butt of the shotgun into the soft fleshy part of his upper arm, paralyzing it, and trying to lock the injured limb under her knee as they wrestled.

The rank, sour stink of his sweat mingled badly with the coppery smell of blood and something richer, nastier. He writhed about beneath her weight, much stronger and quicker than she, but badly wounded and handicapped by his lack of clear vision.

For her part, Jules was restricted by having to keep so much weight on his gun arm. Knowing she couldn’t win a battle of strength or endurance, she dragged the empty shotgun around and smashed the stock into his face. He screamed with rage and pain, and redoubled his efforts to get out from under her, but three more blows, the last one caving in his forehead, ended any resistance.

The body twitched and shuddered and then went limp as his bowels voided themselves all over her legs.

She gagged, but just managed to hold it together. Snatching the MP5 from his twitching fingers, she crawled to her feet with the muzzle trained on him the whole time. Her leg muscles were rubbery and weak, and her knees folded up beneath her as she backed away.

Sitting with her legs splayed out in front of her, covered in gore and worse, she took a minute or so to realize that she couldn’t hear any more gunfire. And then, after a few moments where all she could manage was to breathe and tremble uncontrollably, she realized that for the first time all day, she’d forgotten about the energy wave that had swept away most of America.

“Clubfoot dickhead,” Pete murmured through clenched teeth as he dived back inside the yacht to avoid getting his head shot off on his journey toward the bow. “We didn’t have to do it like this.” They were taking on a terrifying amount of fire now, in spite of the damage Jules had done to Dan’s boat. It spoke volumes for the benefit of simply having more fingers on triggers than the other guy. Dan was handing them some serious fucking grief, and it
pissed him off mightily. He hadn’t been allowed to enjoy a single day as the master of Greg Norman’s superyacht before some skanky barefoot shiteater in a Carrot Top fright wig came along and ruined everything by poking holes in his beautiful new boat with a ridiculous amount of automatic gunfire. He had no idea how Dan had come to be out here; probably he’d just loaded up and headed out looking for targets of opportunity as soon as his tiny peabrain had realized that
the federales
and the USN
were permanente desaparecidos.
Frankly, Pete couldn’t give a shit. He’d have happily had Dan along as a sidekick, had they been able to berth unmolested at Acapulco, and had Dan agreed to a rigid schedule of foot powder treatments. But this—he emerged onto a forward deck and immediately ducked beneath a couple of rounds from something heavy and unpleasant, a forty-five most likely
—this
was bullshit, and a total liberty and tantamount to taking the fucking piss.