“Er yeah…” Ryan said with a look of horror on his face. “That’s definitely the last thing we want.”
“Heads blown off?” Victoria said, going white. “You don’t mean that literally, do you, Mr Hawke?”
Scarlet sighed. “I will do literally anything if you let me go for Lea while you stay here with these two.”
“Sorry, Scarlet, but not this time.”
“Bastard, but go… just go!”
Hawke didn’t reply, but just started running.
He sprinted down the track Victoria had suggested and kept his eye on the progress of the yacht. His boots crunched on the gravel and he made his way along the backs of the luxury huts at speed, calling out an apology as he ran through the middle of someone’s garden picnic and getting snagged in their birthday bunting.
He saw the yacht was slowly drawing away from him, and the humidity of the Florida day was dragging on him like a weight as he sprinted. He leaped over a low wooden fence and sent a shower of startled Bahama mockingbirds flying from an orange tree up into the air. It was then he realized he was starting to lose the race.
He increased speed, but they were still too far away. He vaulted over another low fence and made his way toward the shore, noticing an Innespace Seabreacher X moored to a pier. It must have been the one Lea had seen earlier.
Now Smets was dragging Lea along the jetty and waving his gun in the air as he screamed at his underlings. He turned, saw Hawke and fired a series of casual shots in his vague direction to keep the Englishman from getting any closer, but Hawke slipped into parkour mode to dodge the bullets and executed a couple of high-speed shoulder rolls as he drew closer.
Now he felt like his lungs were about to burst as he finally got to the beach, only to see Smets hauling Lea roughly into the back of the large boat and shouting commands at the man in the wheelhouse.
Without thinking of his own safety, Hawke took a deep breath and started to sprint to the jetty. He’d let Lea slip through his fingers before and he was damned sure he wasn’t going to let a man like Smets get his hands on her.
But even running as fast as he could, he knew he wasn't going to get there in time, and as he hit the foreshore and vaulted up onto the jetty he watched in agony as the Maritimo’s powerful engines roared loudly and pushed the boat out into the ocean.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Maritimo raced away from the shore, its twin Volvo engines powering the sixty-foot motoryacht toward the eastern horizon with an impressive roar. Hawke raised his gun and shot one of the men at the rear of the boat. He tumbled toward the bright blue water clutching at his neck before hitting the surface with a loud splash and disappearing into the white foam in the boat’s wake.
Leon Smets was still holding a gun to Lea’s throat. A faint smirk was visible on his face as the boat moved further out to sea. As they accelerated away, he turned and dragged her below decks. The woman with the shaved head stopped to flip the bird at Hawke and then followed Smets and Lea into the cabin.
Hawke knew he had seconds to give chase, and scanned the area for a solution. He saw plenty of boats bobbing up and down in the marina, but that was a five minute sprint and by the time he got there a boat as powerful as the Maritimo would have built up too much of a lead.
Then he remembered the Innespace Seabreacher X he had seen earlier — the one Lea had told him about back at the beach house. That was less than half the distance and those things were fast enough to eat up any lead generated by the motoryacht.
He sprinted to the private jetty and climbed aboard the Seabreacher. It was a semi-submersible watercraft painted to look like a shark, and as watercraft went it was in a different league to just about anything else on the water. Thanks to the TV show he’d watched with Lea he knew they worked on a three dimensional axis with pitch, roll and yaw, the way aircraft moved. He also knew it had a top speed of almost fifty knots, which was nearly twice as fast as the Maritimo could manage.
He wasted no time in dexterously unscrewing the ignition and hotwiring the boat, and seconds later he felt the revs of the lightweight supercharged Rotax engine all around him. This was the fighter jet of the ocean.
Behind him he heard the sound of a man shouting and screaming. He turned in the seat and saw a man with a white hat running toward him. “Get out of my boat you god-damned thief!”
Time to go, he thought.
He closed the cockpit hatch and secured it before strapping himself in and squeezing on the joystick. Instantly he increased in speed and shot away from the jetty, leaving nothing behind him but a lengthy wake and a massive spray of seawater.
Looking ahead he saw the Maritimo, and squeezed down on the trigger once again to increase his speed. As the rapid acceleration pushed him back into his seat he felt like he was riding a bullet, but now he was getting close enough to the motoryacht to start making the gunmen suspicious. They assembled on deck with their weapons and watched with interest as he piloted the Seabreacher closer and closer to their boat.
After much pointing and arguing they decided he was a threat and started firing on him. Hawke reacted in a heartbeat, steering into the yacht’s wake and pushing down on the joystick. The Seabreacher pushed through the wake and descended beneath the waves for a few seconds — just long enough for Hawke to steer the high-velocity watercraft away from its original vector and bring himself across to the yacht’s portside.
He pulled back on the stick and the Seabreacher broke the sea’s surface at high speed, shooting up into the air like a dolphin racing alongside the prow of a cruise liner. Now he was on the portside of the Maritimo and the men raced from the rear of the yacht, lined up along the left side of the boat and began to pour fire on the compact watercraft with their submachine guns.
Hawke heard the familiar metallic pings as their bullets sprayed up the side of the Seabreacher’s reinforced glass-fibre hull. He cursed and steered sharply to the left and then pushed down on the stick sending the craft under the waves once more. Correcting his course to the right, he crossed in front of the Maritimo just as he emerged from the surface again and shot into the air barely avoiding a collision with the bow of the yacht. The Rotax engine revved wildly as he shot into the air and landed with a smack at ninety degrees to the boat.
Now on its starboard side, he decided playtime was over and hit the hatch release. The glass dome slid back like the cockpit on a fighter jet and allowed him to return fire. He slowed the craft until the boat pulled parallel with him and smiled warmly at the men who had now reassembled on the starboard side, giving them a cheery wave.
For a second his disarming smile seemed to confuse them, but then he raised his gun in his left hand and fired a series of shots at them while still controlling the boat with his right hand. The Seabreacher slipped around on the surface back and forth and the salty water sprayed up into the now open cockpit as Hawke struggled to control the craft while simultaneously aiming at the gunmen.
It paid off as he successfully picked off another of the men and sent him flying off the back of the yacht, but the men returned fire and this time they had more success. The Seabreacher’s incredible speed and versatility in the water was dependent on its amazing design, part of which was the inclusion of shark-like fins. The men’s second volley of fire had blasted one of these fins to pieces and raked a series of holes in the hull and now Hawke felt the craft slipping out of his control.
With the Seabreacher now veering all over the place, he knew there was only one move left to play, and that was the move he was here to make anyway, so he did his best to navigate the craft over to the yacht and then pulled back on the stick. The speeding watercraft launched into the air and flew towards the yacht’s rear deck.