Lee fitted a set of headphones over his ears, plugged them into a digital radio clipped onto his sun-faded canvas pants, and then opened the throttles on the big boat’s massive Caterpillar engines, unleashing a stampede from the 1492 horsepower contained in each one. 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 manoeuvres, to make any boarding operations as difficult as possible.
The radio in Pete’s hand crackled into life. It was Jules. ‘We’re in position, Pete.’
‘Good work, Julesy. Keep your finger on the trigger. Big boys’ 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 windscreen, the other waving madly at the bridge of the Aussie Rules. He’d have known Pete was on board. The Diamantina was roped to the stern, bumping along in their wake.
Dan stood about six foot two in his perennially bare feet, but he added another nine or ten inches to his height with the largest afro 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, and grinning like a hyena on crystal meth.
Pete glanced at Mr Lee, an unspoken question passing between them. Lee nodded brusquely to say that, yes, he had the helm under control. The Chinaman suddenly spun the wheel hard a-port 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, instead punching through an audio feed from the media room, where BBC World was running a trailer 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 humour-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 travelling, she popped up from cover, and squeezed off a couple of bursts from the M16 as the go-fast made an abrupt turn and ran in towards 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 maths, swung the 16 around and angled the barrel upwards at about sixty degrees. The grenade launcher triggered with a hollow thump, sending a single 40 mm high-explosive round down-range. 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 had 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 headphones, like 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 had emerged without warning from a doorway, carrying a sawn-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 burst went nowhere near the go-fast. She’d 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 fibreglass 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. ‘Now, gimme the 16, and a couple of mags. You take my shotty and get back to Fifi at the loading dock – she’s got at least one of the pricks on her case. The crazy fucker jumped onto the diving platform on a fly-by’
‘Okay. Got it,’ she yelled back, fishing two full magazines out of her combat harness. From the rear of the yacht she heard the unmistakable pounding of Fifi’s favourite gun, a Russian PKM.
They quickly exchanged weapons and he stuffed the reloads into the pockets of his cargo pants as she spun around.
Pete headed forward.
Jules found her shipmate crouched low at the bow of a SeaVee dive boat, which 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 board 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 words over the tumult of gunfire and snarling engine noise, but the meaning was clear enough. 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.