“Take off your shirt,” I said.
He struggled beneath me, removing his navy blue long-sleeved shirt. It took him a moment, but he got it.
“Good. You like to bite things, right?”
He nodded.
“Bite your shirt.”
I saw the look of confusion in his face, but he did it. He balled the shirt up and put it in his mouth.
“Chew,” I said.
I think he thought I was kidding, so I put a little more pressure behind the gun. He chewed it. In point of fact, I didn’t want him to eat his shirt, but I wanted him to have something to think about other than getting away from me. I held the barrel of the Heckler and Koch firmly to the back of his head.
“Now take the keys out of your pocket. Slowly.”
He reached into his right pocket with his good hand.
“Let me see it.”
The guard dangled the key.
“Open the hatch,” I said.
He inserted the key into the stainless-steel lock on the deck floor and lifted the hatch.
“Now get in.”
The guard climbed inside. I could see Meryem on the far side of the locker. She was a couple feet away from where the guard had crouched.
“Meryem, you come with me.” I peered down into the locker. “If I hear your voice, I will shoot you,” I said to the guard. “That’s a promise.”
Meryem pulled herself out of the storage locker and I locked the hatch behind her. We were still alone, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I was taking a risk by not killing the guard. He could start screaming and there would be nothing I could do about it. Regardless, I had decided at some point that there were two ways I could conduct a mission. Brutally or ethically. When circumstance allowed, I had decided to choose the latter. The job was difficult enough without worrying about my karma too.
“What took you so long?” Meryem asked.
“She made me a sandwich.” I said. “Stay here.”
I jogged up the steps two at a time, quickly reaching the aft second-floor deck. The launch was suspended over the stern by two davit cranes positioned to drop it right behind the swim platform. Of course it was designed to do so when the yacht was stationary, but we would have to make do. There were two cables clipped to the rear stays to prevent the launch from swinging around. I unclipped each of them and eased myself into the launch, pulling the fat controller wire attached to the davit crane with me. Then I hit the green down button on the controller, feeling a jerk as the cables slowly unspooled.
It was still dark but, looking up, I could see the enclosed tail rotor of the helicopter and its battened-down top rotor on the deck above. I could also see the guard. Unfortunately, I was fairly certain that he saw me, too.
Chapter 41
The guard immediately drew his weapon. He was two decks above me at that point, but it was an easy shot, even in the dark. He seemed to reconsider what he was doing because I saw him speaking into his collar mike. Then there was some kind of response and he ran down the stairwell. I knew it wouldn’t take him long to reach the davit cranes. And if he got there, he could stop my descent. But the launch was descending quickly. I was almost in the water. One of the cables must have unspooled more quickly than the other because the stern now hung much lower than the bow.
Meryem waited under the cover of the lowest deck. I didn’t need to say anything to encourage her. She hopped into the launch as it lowered past, climbing up and over the gunnel. Tactically, it was debatable how much further use Meryem would be. She had led me to the Arm, but whether she had any more useful information was unclear. Ethically, however, it was a no-brainer. There was no way I was going to surrender her to the Green Dragons.
By this point, the guard had reached the deck with the cranes. He grabbed the fat swinging control wire, but not before I felt the launch’s bow hit the water, skipping and jumping sideways in the wake of the yacht. The stern, however, still hung high out of the water. We weren’t going to get away like that.
“Michael? What kind of plan is this?”
“The only one I’ve got. Stay where you are.”
I scrabbled up the deck toward the long mahogany-enclosed stern of the boat, the launch skipping and shuddering below me. The cable was connected to a harness that fed through two round eyes on either side of the stern. The key was the hook on the cable that attached the harness. Detach the harness from the hook and the stern was free.
I climbed toward the rear harness, sea mist spraying in the white water of the propeller wash. Glancing up, I saw that the guard was speaking into his collar mike. Probably awaiting instructions. I made a grab for the cable, trying to loosen the hook. No dice. There was too much tension in the line and the launch was jumping around like a frog in a frying pan. I pulled the strap of the machine gun off my shoulder and shoved the barrel into the open mouth of the hook, levering it up and away from the harness cable. Then I heard the davit cranes start up again, winding up the cable.
“Michael!” Meryem screamed. “Shoot them!”
Not a bad idea, but the barrel of the gun was still caught in the hook. The winches wound quickly this time. The bow of the launch jerked up first. Way up. Meryem tumbled backward and I almost went overboard, but the sudden movement gave me the slack I needed to ease the hook out from under the harness. I levered the hook right out with the barrel of the gun and the cable went flying up.
The problem was that the hook had hung up on the sight of the gun, yanking me upward with it. I let go of the gun and dropped straight back down as the stern of the launch swung around in the yacht’s wake. It was all I could do to hold on. We were now being pulled by the bow. The yacht was our tow truck and we were the broken-down car, our stern bouncing along in its wake.
I climbed toward the bow, but the cable was still wound tighter than a Gibson guitar. There was no way I would be able to loosen it, so I did the next best thing and choked the launch’s engine. Then I turned the key. The launch roared to life and I pulled the throttle all the way back. Full reverse. Not a lot of competition between a twenty-two-foot runabout and a hundred-and-sixty-five-foot yacht. There was, however, a lot of strain on the cable. The launch’s prop bit in, pulling the slack out of the crane’s winch. The cable sung as we unspooled it backward, reversing from the mothership, blue water pouring over the stern of the boat.
And that’s when the first bullet flew.
It whizzed by, three feet to my right, taking a chunk out of the mahogany. Kate stood on the upper deck of the yacht beside two guards, guns drawn, but my overall plan was working. We were getting farther away from the yacht. Waves of water sloshed over the transom soaking us as we fled backward.
Another bullet flew.
“Keep your head down,” I shouted over the rev of the engine.
Then we stopped. The cable from the crane had unspooled completely. We were a hundred feet from the boat. I gunned the engine backward. The big yacht kept going forward. At least two submachine guns tracked us from above. Things were not looking promising. Then we got lucky. The yacht hit a big roller head on. I knew because we had drifted far enough out into the wake for me to see the Fox’s bow. She dipped low into the big roller’s trough and, as a result, the stern went up, pulling us with it.
“Hang on!”
And that’s when the Fox’s stern slapped back down again. The cable slackened and we slapped down with it, but the wave kept rolling through. It swamped us, breaking right over our bow. Both Meryem and I held on to the steering wheel as the launch’s entire cockpit filled with water. Which was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Because, suddenly, we weren’t a boat. We were a bucket being dragged through the sea.