“Are you okay?” Juan asked quickly.
Sloane was massaging her upper chest were it had impacted with the dash. “I think so,” she replied and raked wet hair from her forehead. She pointed to his arm. “You’re bleeding.”
Cabrillo made sure the boat was gaining on the bow runner before looking at the wound. A shard of fiberglass torn off the boat by the spray of bullets was partially embedded in his upper arm.
“Ow,” he exclaimed when he felt the first flicker of pain.
“I thought tough guys could ignore a little thing like that.”
“Like hell. It hurts.” He gently worked the postcard-sized piece of fiberglass from his flesh. The shard had cut cleanly and there was little blood. Juan dug out the small medical kit from a bin next to the dash.
He handed it to Sloane, who rummaged through it and found a roll of sterile gauze. He held still as she wrapped his arm with the bandage and tied it off tightly.
“That should hold you,” she pronounced. “When was your last tetanus?”
“February twentieth two years ago.”
“You remember the exact date?”
“There’s a fifteen-inch scar on my back. Days you get a gash that big tend to stick with you.”
In a minute they had regained all the ground they had lost to the ski boat. Juan noted that the marsh to their right was giving way to a boulder-strewn beach that would afford no protection to his quarry. It was time to end this. “Can you take the helm again?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Watch for my signal, then ease back on the throttle. Be prepared to turn. I’ll point which way.”
Unlike before he didn’t wait to see if she was comfortable at the controls. He hefted the FN assault rifle and spare magazine and clambered up the length of the boat.
The bow runner was no more than five yards in front of him. He steadied himself against the railing and brought the FN to his shoulder. He fired controlled three-round bursts. When the first bullets slammed into the bow runner’s engine cowling, the driver sheared away, trying to find shallow water close to shore. Juan raised his arm and pointed to port, and Sloane followed his lead. Her turn was a little steep, but she seemed to have a handle on the hydrofoil’s drive characteristics.
As soon as he regained the sight picture he wanted he loosened another three-round burst into the bow runner’s engine. And a third. The driver tried to throw off Cabrillo’s aim but the chairman anticipated every juke and twist and slammed another half dozen bullets into the boat.
The wisp of white smoke that suddenly appeared from under the engine cowling quickly turned into a black cloud. The engine would seize any second, and Juan readied his signal to Sloane for them to slow so they wouldn’t ram the bow runner.
Between the bow lights on the hydrofoil and the ski boat’s dash lights, Cabrillo could just discern the driver’s features when he turned to look back at him. They locked eyes for just an instant but Juan could feel the hatred across the distance like the heat from a fire. Rather than fear, he read defiance in the man’s expression.
The man cranked the wheel hard over. Juan raised his hand to stop Sloane from pursuing because the bow runner was heading directly for the rocky shore. Cabrillo had wanted to take one of the men prisoner from the very start of the chase, but he felt the chance slipping from his grasp. He fired again, raking the ski boat’s stern, not sure of what he was hitting because of the smoke, but desperate to prevent what he knew the driver intended.
The bow runner had picked up most of the speed it had lost in the turn when it was still twenty feet from the coast. The engine’s shriek stuttered for a moment, but it was too late. The boat hit the shoaling bottom at thirty-plus knots and shot out of the water like a javelin. It arced high through the night air before nosing into the ground and came apart as if a bomb had gone off inside its fiberglass shell. The hull splintered into hundreds of pieces and her engine was torn from its mount as the craft cartwheeled up the beach. The impact burst the fuel tank and the gasoline became an aerosol cloud. The body of the driver was flung twenty feet before the fuel/air mixture detonated into a mushrooming fireball that consumed what remained of the ski boat.
Sloane had had the presence of mind to ease the hydrofoil off plane then slow it to a crawl by the time Juan had scurried back to the cockpit. He double-checked that the FN-FAL was safe and set it back on the dash. After raising the retractable foils he eased the boat as close to the wreckage as he could, idled the engine, and dropped the small anchor.
“He killed himself, didn’t he?”
Cabrillo couldn’t take his eyes off the burning boat. “Yup.”
“What does that mean?”
He glanced at her as he processed her question and all the implications his answer meant. “He knew we weren’t the authorities, so he was willing to die rather than risk capture and interrogation. It means we’re dealing with fanatics.”
“Like Muslim fundamentalists?”
“I don’t think he was an Arab jihadi. This is something else.”
“But what?”
Juan didn’t reply because he had no answer. His clothes were still drenched from his earlier swim, so he simply stepped off the back of the hydrofoil and into water that came up to his neck. He was almost to shore when he heard Sloane hit the water behind him. He waited for her at the surf line and together they approached the body. There was no sense checking out the boat since all that remained was melted fiberglass and scorched metal.
The damage done to the corpse by the impact and subsequent roll up the beach was horrifying. Like the vision of a demented artist, his neck and every limb were set at obtuse angles. Cabrillo checked there was no pulse before slipping the Glock into the waistband of his pants. There was nothing in the man’s rear pockets so Juan rolled the corpse, shaken by the boneless way the body moved. The man’s face was severely abraded.
Sloane gasped.
“Sorry,” Juan said. “You might want to stand back.”
“No, it’s not that. I know him. That’s the South African chopper pilot Tony and I hired. His name’s Pieter DeWitt. Damn, how could I be so stupid? He knew we were going to investigate Papa Heinrick’s snakes because I told him. He sent that boat to follow us yesterday and then came here to make sure no one ever questioned the old man again.”
The repercussions of her presence in Namibia hit Sloane fast and hard. She looked like she was about to be ill. “If I hadn’t come here looking for theRove Papa Heinrick would still be alive.” Her eyes were wet when she looked at Juan. “Luka, our guide, I bet they’ve already killed him, too. Oh God, what about Tony?”
Cabrillo knew intuitively that she didn’t want to be hugged nor did she want him to speak. They stood in the night as the ski boat burned and Sloane cried.
“They were totally innocent,” she sobbed, “and now they’re all dead and it’s my fault.”
How many times had Juan felt the same way, taking responsibility for the actions of others just because he was involved? Sloane was no more at fault for Papa Heinrick’s death than the wife who asked her husband to run an errand was responsible if he’s killed en route. But God how that guilt was there, corroding the soul as surely as acid eats away steel.
The tears flowed for five minutes, maybe longer. Juan stood at her side with his head bowed and only looked at her when she sniffled back the last of it.
“Thank you,” she muttered softly.
“For what?”
“Most men hate to see a woman crying and will do or say anything to make it stop.”
He gave her his warmest smile. “I hate it as much as the next guy, but I also knew if you didn’t do it now you’d just do it later and it would be a hell of a lot worse.”