She sat at the stone pier on the waterfront of Hammam Lekses like a scruffy, battle-scarred old tomcat, her long deck cluttered with old fishnets and crates, her narrow afterdeck piled with roped and rusty fifty-gallon drums to give her range. Even now her hull was painted in old- fashioned Italian dazzle paint, faded with salt and the passage of time. An old tomcat perhaps, but a tomcat nevertheless, her long sleek lines still showing the hidden speed and deadly power lurking just beneath the surface.
The boat had been left behind in 1943 when the Germans and the Italians withdrew from Tunisia, and Moustafa's father had managed to steal the craft from under the noses of the British and Americans, hiding her in a cave along the coast, using it to smuggle everything from olive oil to machine guns from Tunisia to Marseille after the war. Moustafa, it seemed, was following in his father's footsteps.
Moustafa himself was the exact opposite of his cousin Moukaden: rail thin and totally bald. According to Moustafa the seventy-five-year-old boat was good as new and still capable of a tooth-rattling thirty-five knots. By Moustafa's estimation the Khamsin would have made less than sixty miles headway by midafternoon, which meant that his boat, the Fantasma, the Ghost, would catch her in under two hours.
Even better, the Tunisian was also happy to throw in the use of a Russian RPG for an extra fee. As long as cousin Moukaden the harbor master authorized the high-seas boarding of the Khamsin, Moustafa had no compunction about getting them to their objective.
He did suggest that they wait for evening before setting out on their expedition. According to him, the Kirogi-class coastal patrols of the Tunisian navy, mostly based in Tunis, didn't like operating in the dark and usually headed home at sunset. Even more important, in Moustafa's experience the boarding of an enemy vessel was usually best accomplished at night. After some discussion and some urgent counterarguments by Rafi, they decided that it was best to follow Moustafa's advice.
The sun was no more than a memory on the western horizon as Moustafa engaged the proud old Isotta Fraschini engines, lovingly maintained first by Moustafa's father and now by Moustafa himself. The sea was utterly flat and the evening air was just beginning to cool as the lights of the houses and villas along the beach faded behind them. Tidyman stayed in the tiny deckhouse with Moustafa while Holliday and Rafi remained below in the big belowdecks wardroom.
Beneath their feet the engines roared loudly as Moustafa brought the boat up to speed, small waves rhythmically banging against the Fantasma's flanks. The entire hull began to vibrate as they accelerated, the bows lifting as the boat began to plane. Within five minutes the Fantasma was cutting through the ocean at close to forty miles an hour.
"Are you sure we can trust him?" Rafi asked, seated at the wardroom table.
"Tidyman or Moustafa, or his cousin the harbor master?" Holliday asked with a shrug. "Who knows? Moukaden, the fat one, could be on the radio right now, talking to the Khamsin, warning them that we're on the way. We don't have much choice, do we? This is our only lead, our only path to Peggy."
"Moustafa and his fat cousin are in it for the money-that's easy enough to understand. It's Tidyman I'm still not sure of."
"Alhazred had his wife killed. That's reason enough to trust him. Revenge is the best motive of all."
"And if Peggy's not on board the Khamsin?" Rafi asked. "What then?"
"We cross that bridge when we come to it," answered Holliday.
They plowed on through the night, the ocean a desert of rolling water as barren as the desert of sand they'd crossed the night before. Holliday went up on deck once or twice to survey the sea and the star-lit sky, but mostly he dozed on one of the narrow V-bunks once used by the ten-man crew of the old Italian torpedo boat. It was well past two in the morning when Tidyman shook him awake.
"Something's wrong," the Egyptian said without preamble. "We think we have the Khamsin on the radar but she's stationary, dead in the water."
"Maybe the other engine broke down," Holliday said, yawning as he stumbled after Tidyman. They reached the small forward wheelhouse. Moustafa stood at the wheel. Rafi was already there, staring at the sweep of the modern radar unit bolted onto the control panel. From the sound of the engines and the feel of the boat in the water Holliday could easily tell that the Fantasma had slowed considerably. He stared down at the radar screen. The sweep illuminated a small bright blip in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, their own marker an even brighter mark that pulsed kitty-corner to the one in the upper right. The distance between the two markers steadily closed as Holliday watched, but the upper one was stationary.
"What's the distance?" Holliday asked.
Moustafa leaned across the wheel and adjusted a knob on the radar set. The image jumped, then re-formed.
"One mile," he said. "Less. A thousand meters."
"Are we sure it's the Khamsin?" Holliday asked. "Maybe it's a rock or something."
"No rock. Boat," said Moustafa, staring out into the darkness, guiding the old gunboat through the smooth swells.
"It's where the Khamsin should be," said Tidyman.
"All right," murmured Holliday, thinking hard as they moved slowly forward toward the bright blip on the screen. They had a few weapons, some handguns they'd brought with them from the camp in Germa and Moustafa's RPG. Moustafa also had a World War II-vintage Breda bipodmounted light machine gun, but as Holliday recalled the weapon had been bad news during the war. He wasn't about to trust it more than sixty years later. Not only was it out of date, but the wooden buttstock was cracked and pale with salt stains after years at sea, and the barrel was thick with grime and spotted with rust. It would almost certainly blow up in your face if you tried to fire it.
"You're the soldier," said Rafi to Holliday. "What do we do now?"
Holliday shrugged. "There's two ways, fast and hard or slow and careful. Personally I favor slow and careful." He grinned. "But I'm getting a little old for this kind of thing."
"I am, too," said Tidyman.
"Well, I'm not," Rafi said with a scowl. "Peggy could be on that boat."
"Which is why slow and careful might be the best option," responded Tidyman. "We have no idea who is aboard the ship. We could easily be outnumbered. Your friend could well forfeit her life for a rash action."
"The Khamsin is old, with a wooden hull," said Holliday. "One shot from that RPG is easily capable of sinking her."
"What are you suggesting?" Tidyman asked quietly. On the radar screen the two blips were getting closer and closer.
"Five hundred meters," said Moustafa. "The moon is rising. You will see her at any moment now."
"We have to make a decision. Now," demanded Rafi.
"There's a spotlight up in the bow. We come in fast with a lot of light, blind them," said Holliday. "We hail them. Act like we're official. Customs or coast guard or something. Mr. Tidyman is in the bow with the RPG. We threaten them. Hand over Peggy or we sink her."
"Sounds good to me," said Tidyman. He smiled. "But please, in the future you must call me Emil."
"Let's go," said Rafi. "We're running out of time."
"Two hundred meters, dead ahead," said Moustafa.
They came in at flank speed, engines thundering, bow wave foaming up almost to the gunwales. Tidyman was braced against the forward winch, the RPG balanced on his shoulder, the weapon loaded and primed, his finger curled around the forward trigger mechanism.
Holliday and Rafi crouched behind the Egyptian, half hidden by a stinking pile of fishnet, handguns drawn and ready. Standing in the wheelhouse Moustafa waited until the very last second, then snapped on the floodlight in the bow, wrenching the wheel around at the same time, then hauling back the throttle, throwing the old torpedo boat into a sliding turn that left the Fantasma broadside to its quarry as it came to a roaring stop in a crashing welter of spray.