The Detonators (22 page)

That put me standing on the spreaders forward of the mast, facing aft some twenty-five feet in the air, with the whole dark watery world open to my left and the curving Dacron of the mainsail and Genoa blocking most of the view to my right. The boat was heeling only moderately, and the motion, although amplified at this height, wasn’t too bad; but it was still a hell of a place to shoot a shotgun from. The mast and mainsail were in the way of a right-handed man expecting to do business to the left, since they would undoubtedly try to board from that side, the windward side, avoiding the sails and sheets and boom cluttering up the other side of the boat on this tack.

I was aware of a searchlight probing the sea aft of us now, as I freed the shotgun and unfastened the rope sling from the barrel. Leaving the rope still secured around the small of the stock, I tied it to the same mast step I’d used for my safety line. I worked the gun’s action once to feed a shell from the magazine into the empty chamber—I’m not brave enough to go mast climbing with a fully loaded gun. I let the shotgun hang from its line, using my body to keep it from swinging while I dug into my pocket for my little knife and, finding it among the spare ammunition, pried the larger blade open.

Ready at last, I let myself become aware of the world below.
Spindrift
was still gliding along on the starboard tack without lights. Mrs. Williston had risen to stand at the tiller, a shadowy figure down there, her attitude suitably puzzled and worried as she looked aft at the beam of light that was searching the ocean astern, but searching in the wrong place. Apparently they’d been goofing off, overconfident, when our lights went out so suddenly. Temporarily disoriented, they’d lost us in the darkness and slid off course a bit; but even as I watched, the white finger swung our way. I leaned back behind the mainsail, but I needn’t have worried about being seen; they weren’t interested in masts and rigging and attached foreign objects. Having located us by our sails, the searchlight instantly swung down to pin
Spindrift
’s hull, and Mrs. Williston, in its beam. I heard big motors roar into life out there.

“Matt! Matt, come up here, somebody’s coming at us very fast! What do I do?”

Still holding the tiller, she’d leaned forward to shout down into the cabin. Good girl. Even if the words weren’t heard at the distance, the action would speak for itself. Now the ghostly black hull with its gleaming white bow wave, hard to see through the glare of the searchlight, was approaching fast. Moments later, near enough, the oncoming boat squatted, the way they do, as the power went off and the noise of the engines subsided.

“Matt, for God’s sake, forget that damn fuse box and get the hell up here! It’s crazy, but I think we’re being attacked by a bunch of Bahamian pirates!”

Mrs. Williston didn’t lose her head in a crisis. She’d improved on my drunken-stupor story and loudly explained the failure of our lights, to keep the attackers unsuspicious. The overgrown speedboat was swinging alongside now, keeping its searchlight trained on
Spindrift
’s cockpit. I could make it out fairly well. No insignia on the hull. No red-flashing or blue-flashing lights. No loud hailer ordering us to heave to in official tones. No uniforms on the four men in the fancy, Naugahyde-padded cockpit. Okay. We hadn’t gotten ourselves involved with a mysterious government patrol boat of some kind. Open season.

The wake they’d kicked up during their brief burst of speed rolled under us belatedly, causing the mast to swing like an upside-down pendulum. After the motion had subsided I stabbed with the little knife and opened a horizontal slash in the taut mainsail. I was braced for just about anything. Sails aren’t my field of expertise, and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if the whole big triangle of Dacron had exploded when punctured, like a kid’s balloon. Maybe it would have, or at least split widely, in heavy weather; but in the light breeze we had, nothing happened beyond the simple slit in the sailcloth. I made a vertical cut downward from the inner end of the slit. Here I had to saw through a couple of tough seams before I’d opened an adequate triangular window in the sail, which would let me shoot from the right shoulder as I stood on the spreaders. I closed the knife and put it away. Below, a man was giving orders.

“You, lady! Keep both hands on the tiller in plain sight! Tell your boyfriend to get his ass topside, before I start shooting holes in his pretty helmsman.”

“Matt! Matt, for God’s sake don’t try anything crazy or they’ll kill me! Matt, come up here, please!”

Embracing the mast with my left arm, I grasped the dangling shotgun right-handed and shoved it through the hole in the sail. Safety off. It occurred to me that twenty-five feet would be a long way to fall, backward, to a very hard fiberglass deck, if the recoil kicked me off my precarious perch on the crosstrees in spite of my arm around the mast. Well, that was what the safety line was for, wasn’t it? I had a picture of myself dangling helplessly in my rope sling while four men used me for target practice…

“Matt, what are you
doing
down there in that lousy cabin, do you want them to shoot me? Oh,
please
come up here and do what they want!
Please!
”

Steadying the gun, I could see her leaning forward to make her desperate plea to the empty cabin. One man was at the near side of the powerboat’s cockpit, aft, with a pistol aimed at her. Two others, just ahead of him, were getting ready to board us, one with a gun, the other with a rope; the speedboat’s bowline. As I watched, the second man flung the rope across
Spindrift
’s
cabin for later retrieval and pulled out a pistol of his own.

The fourth man was at the wheel on the far side of the attacking boat, holding the vessel steady alongside. It took a considerable amount of steering since those fast-powered craft don’t handle well at low sailboat speeds. Once in a while he’d reach out to adjust the throttles a bit, or to adjust the searchlight, which he kept trained on our main hatch where I was supposed to appear. The glare was considerable; they probably couldn’t have seen me even if they’d looked to where I was perched above them in relative darkness, but none of them did look up.

I reminded myself that I’d equipped myself with a pump-action shotgun since it was less likely that an automatic would be disabled by the rugged conditions on a boat. However, while a pumpgun can be operated as fast as an autoloader by expert hands, it must be pumped; it won’t cycle itself. I centered the barrel on the man covering Mrs. Williston and waited until a sharp roll of his boat caused him to steady himself by the cockpit coaming and let his weapon wander off target. I pulled the trigger.

A foot-long flame licked out from the short barrel of the Winchester. The noise was shattering in the night, and the recoil of the twelve-gauge, as always, was murderous. I was driven back against my safety line, but I kept my footing on the spreaders.
Pump, you stupid bastard!
I swung on the two would-be boarders who were looking up now, startled but still close together, fine; but I didn’t know how much shot spread I’d get at that close range, so I concentrated on the near one and fired again, practically taking his head off.
Pump, you jerk!
Something slapped through the sail beside me, and I saw that the helmsman had released the steering wheel and pulled a gun. We shot simultaneously, and I saw the full charge of buckshot, twenty pellets to the load, hit him in the chest, tearing him open. I had no idea where his second bullet had gone, except that it hadn’t hit me.
Pump, you slow-motion moron!

Then I clung there, embracing the mast and breathing hard, because there was nothing left to shoot at. There were three bodies sprawled in the speedboat’s plushy cockpit, now blood-splashed and ripped by flying lead. I had a vague mental image of something scuttling into the cabin in a crippled way while I was concentrating on the helmsman—presumably the second would-be boarder, fringed by my shot at his companion. I knew that Mrs. Williston had obeyed orders and found shelter in the bottom of
Spindrift
’s cockpit at my first shot, but she was up now, clinging to the rope that had been thrown aboard.

“Matt,” she called. “Matt, do you want me to secure their bowline or cast them adrift?”

“Secure it.”

I had a lot of adrenaline running around inside me with no place to go; and I had a hard time concentrating. Unload shotgun; pocket shells. Untie shotgun, fasten to belt, let hang there. Unfasten safety line and thread through belt; and why are you being so careful to preserve a lousy little piece of rope that’s served its purpose? Come down mast very cautiously; you’d look pretty ridiculous falling and breaking your back now that it’s all over…

“Are you all right?” Mrs. Williston asked when I reached her. “That other man was shooting at you, wasn’t he? Oh, God, my knees are still shaking!”

“I’m okay. How about you?” I asked.

“I’m okay. I didn’t even wet my pants. God, there I go again, scatological Williston!” She looked up quickly as the sails started flapping and lunged for the tiller. “Christ, we’re in irons… No, she’s paying off. What are you doing?”

I was hauling in the overgrown speedboat, which was now towing astern. I studied it as I did so. The forward part was decked over; but the resulting cabin was undoubtedly rather low and dark, although there were a couple of ports in the side, closed, and a hatch in the deck, open.

“There’s a live one in there, somewhere,” I said. “At least he was live enough to crawl into his burrow. I’d better go dig him out. Keep your head down; there could be more shooting.”

“Can’t we just turn the boat loose and leave it?”

“And have a shot-torn vessel found drifting with a lot of dead bodies on board; and a lot of international questions asked about the bloody Battle of the Northwest Providence Channel? Anyway, if the guy in there pulls himself together, he’s still got several hundred horsepower against our fifteen, and several guns; he could make more trouble for us. And I would like to know who the hell sent him and why, unless you’ve got some answers.”

She shook her head. “No. No, I have no idea what it’s all about.”

I sighed wearily. It was anticlimax alley. The great sea engagement was over and victorious Captain Hornblower was entitled to relax a bit, wasn’t he? I shook my head in a meaningless way, trying to shake off the reaction, I guess. I got the rope off the shotgun and shoved a round into the chamber and four into the magazine, using the slug loads this time. Mrs. Williston,
Spindrift
’s tiller between her knees, was holding the powerboat’s bowline snug for me.

“Be careful,” she said.

“Sure.”

It occurred to me that this was quite a woman. She hadn’t panicked during the shooting, and she wasn’t puking at the sight of blood in large quantities. Whatever she’d been in the booby hatch for, they seemed to have done a good job of curing her. But it was no time to be admiring handsome ladies. I hauled myself onto the foredeck of the rakish pirate vessel, watching the open forward hatch, but nothing showed there. I moved down the deck a little way, keeping to one side where he’d have trouble getting a bead on me without revealing himself. As I’d told Amy Barnett, we don’t think much of that moldy old come-out-with-your-hands-up routine. I was in no mood to play cop. I simply stopped, and aimed at the cabin top well ahead, of my feet; and pulled the trigger. The twelve-gauge shotgun slug his a blunt one-ounce hunk of lead. I was using it because it has more penetration than buckshot—anything has more penetration than those little round pellets—but it hardly qualifies as an armor-piercing projectile and I wasn’t quite sure it was up to the job. But apparently fiberglass isn’t very bulletproof. The slug didn’t splatter or ricochet as I’d half expected. It smashed right through, leaving a good-sized hole. I shot again, at a different angle, and again, and still again, probing the cabin under my feet…

“No more, no more, I’m coming out! Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!”

The voice was shrill with panic. Waiting, I stuffed four more shells into the magazine. The searchlight was still pointing its glaring beam stubbornly to port, the way a dead man had left it. It put a halo around the head of the figure that appeared in the main hatch nearby, probably the only one he’d ever get.

“Aft into the cockpit,” I ordered the man. “On your knees with your elbows on the seat. Oh, and there could be some guns lying around, friend. Help yourself. Anytime. I’m just looking for an excuse.”

“Take it easy, take it easy!”

I waited for him to get settled, then made my way aft and dropped into the cockpit, cautiously. There was no way of avoiding the blood, it was everywhere, a seagoing slaughterhouse. The three dead ones were quite dead; buckshot is for keeps if you center it only reasonably well. The only reason my captive was still alive was that I’d been aiming at his partner, and he’d only gotten the fringe of the shot pattern.

I’d been wondering vaguely why the boat’s engines had quit; now I noticed a cord attached to the belt of the dead helmsman, with a metal gadget on the end. I remembered that some of those racy boats are equipped with automatic cutoffs so that if the guy at the wheel is thrown overboard in a violent maneuver, the cord is pulled, the kill switch is actuated, and the empty boat doesn’t come roaring around to chew up the man in the water with its props, which has happened.

The thug kneeling on the cockpit floor, sole, or whatever the nautical name of it may be, was rather short and plump, with thinning dark hair. He was dressed in blue linen shorts and a gaudy short-sleeved shirt. Maybe he was pretending to be a sportsman of sorts. I patted him down and told him to get up and sit facing me, which he did painfully. He was bleeding in several places. One buckshot had ripped his right ear and he had a couple in the right arm and shoulder. I thought there was a bloodstain over on the left side indicating a pellet straying widely from the main shot pattern, but the light wasn’t good and the figured shirt made it hard to tell.

I said, “Would you like to die now, or would you prefer to put it off by talking a little first?”