by James, Glynn
Handon shouted forward over the wind and engine noise to Pred: “Get back here and take the wheel!”
Pred swiveled his head from over his gunsight. “What?”
Before Handon could shout again, he heard a voice behind him. “Oh, fuck’s sake, there’s no time…” And with that Henno brushed by him – and with two quick, powerful steps launched himself up onto the gunwale and off into the gap between the hurtling boats.
As Henno took off, Handon realized he had briefly forgotten that down was by no means the same as out. And that it generally took more than a little skewering to take one of his people out of the fight.
* * *
Ali failed to dodge the cowboy’s knife on her way out of their clinch. As she sprang away and back onto the bed, it flashed out and scored her deeply across the top of her hand.
Yeah, that one was gonna bleed.
And it had to be the same goddamned arm that had a big hole through the bicep from her near-fatal airborne insertion into Chicago… If this kept up, she was going to start to feel seriously dinged up here.
The cowboy smiled at her as she darted away, and as he began to climb to his feet. “Hey, don’t go so soon,” the smug son of a bitch said.
Ali actually wasn’t totally sure whether it was the knife wound, or the fucking comment, but something really pissed her off now.
Okay, enough of this bullshit, she thought.
Upon breaking contact, instead of resetting, defending, or circling around, she simply flew straight back in at him, all fury. As her feet hit the bed, she pushed off with her full leg strength, and drove her body back into the man as he lumbered to his feet from the floor. He wasn’t looking for this, and his eyes went wide as Ali slammed into him – knife first.
Her full weight followed behind it, driving the wicked, half-serrated blade deep into his sternum. He tried to wiggle away, but she had him pinned. His own knife waved around to the side, but she was in too close to him now, pressing against his body. Smelling his breath – most likely his last one – she looked emotionlessly into his cruel green eyes.
“Whatever you say – darling.” She gave the knife a mean twist before pulling it free.
The cowboy slumped to the deck, off now for that great Marlboro ad in the sky.
* * *
Henno’s arms didn’t windmill as he flew across the gap – they just swung from back to front, both to increase his momentum and to break his fall when he landed.
But somewhere between the leap and the landing, the Diablo bounced on the water, tilting and angling away. For an instant, Handon thought this was just the natural motion of the boat, and bad luck. But as he stole a look at the wheelhouse, he could see the pilot was cutting the wheel. Handon quick-drew his .45, but the angling motion instantly took the pilot out of view again.
Twisting the wheel to follow their target, he helplessly watched Henno’s legs kick at open air.
And Henno quickly found himself in the same position as the kid from a few seconds earlier: instead of clearing the railing, he landed on the outside of it, madly scrabbling at the rail to keep from going into the drink. The other news was also bad news – unlike earlier, when the bolt sticking out of him had cleared the gunwale of the smaller boat, now it slammed straight into the side of the bigger one, jamming it even further into the muscle just below his clavicle.
He bellowed in pain as his right hand let go of the railing and he swung out and down, his back to the hull, and his full weight hanging by the fingers of his left hand alone. The Diablo rocketed and bounced along, as if trying to shake him loose, and the churning water frothed around his dangling legs.
Seeing all this, Handon struggled to bring the boat back in beside him – and fast. As he did so, Pred took a step and leaned out to pull Henno back in. The two of them locked eyes, barely two feet away now, on different speeding boats.
“Gimme your hand!” Pred shouted.
“Fuck off!” Henno shouted back, gritting his teeth, as the two boats bounced on the water less than a meter apart. He then flexed his big left bicep, swung himself back around to face the Diablo, grabbed on with his right hand – and then did an overhand pull-up on the rail, high enough to lift his eyes over it.
Looking left and right for enemy and not seeing any, he hauled himself over the railing with one mighty heave, hit the deck in a crouch, and efficiently drew his SIG-Sauer P220 Combat, which was two-tone with a tan frame and black slide. Not hesitating, he brought the handgun up in front of him and padded forward to one of the bodies on the deck. It was the crossbow dude. Scarcely looking down, he unslotted one of the spare bolts from the crossbow with his free hand, then moved off into the companionway.
And then, both his SIG and the bolt sticking out of him pointing the way, he made for the wheelhouse.
* * *
Ali reached to her vest, pulled out a flexicuff, and bound the wrists of the wheezing, throat-punched shitbird where he lay on the deck. Then she did the same to the stabbed and presumably dead cowboy, as well as the dead dude she’d shot in the bathroom. Seeing how much of her own blood she was spilling on the corpses, she pulled a long bandage from her aid kit, wound it around the deep slash on the top of her hand, then tied it off with her teeth. Finally, she scooped her handgun up from the bed and reloaded it, smoothly replacing the mag with one from the rig on her back. She trained the gun just to the side of the young girl as she rounded the bed on her.
“You okay?” she asked.
The girl, Emily, who was folded up into the corner in terror, knees by her chin, red eyes limned with tears, nodded twice.
Ali touched her left fingertips to her last flexicuff. Procedure in room-clearing – boat-clearing, any kind of structure-clearing – was that you didn’t leave unrestrained people behind you. Even if they were pretty obviously hostages or innocents, even if you’d already killed them, you cuffed everyone. Otherwise the area behind you wasn’t clear at all.
Screw it, Ali thought. An awful lot of previously ironclad procedures had fallen by the wayside when civilization fell. And this girl had been through enough already.
“Stay put,” she said, then darted out the door and down the hall, also making a beeline for the wheelhouse – and the controls of this stupid boat.
* * *
Henno kicked in the wheelhouse door. It wasn’t that sturdy.
As he flew in after it, gun first, he got a sight picture he hadn’t expected. The older girl was now driving the boat, and the pilot was kneeling with his gun pointing at the door – right at Henno. But the unexpected was no problem – he put a lightning double-tap into the man’s chest before he could react.
But what was a problem was the pointy projectile stuck into Henno’s flesh – even deeper now, after his collision with the gunwale. The recoil of his SIG, felt mostly through his right arm, produced a searing pain across the right side of his upper body, which nearly caused him to double up. And the shock of this ruined his follow-up shots.
The pilot slid backward on the floor on his ass from the force of the first two rounds. But, as Henno could already see, the guy was wearing body armor – something sufficient to stop a .45 round. And the guy was already triggering off his own weapon now, bullets snapping all around Henno’s head and plunking into the surfaces around him.
As electric pain rocketed across his torso, he withdrew and swung out of view of the door. More measured, but no less deadly, rounds continued to come through the open hatch. Henno counted a couple of beats as the crippling pain ebbed away.
* * *
Ali heard the gunfire from the direction of what, presumably, was the pilothouse.
When she saw Henno hunched outside of it, she knew he was on top of that situation – so she dynamically changed her sector to clear outside on the top deck.
But as she darted by the open hatch, she saw a gunman inside rising to his feet, so she squeezed off a double-tap into his chest as she flashed past. The guy went down again.
“Ch
eers,” Henno said.
“No worries,” Ali said over her shoulder as she kicked the outside hatch open and blasted out into open air.
* * *
Henno rolled straight around the corner and back into the wheelhouse – just as the pilot was hitting the deck again from the force of Ali’s two additional rounds into his vest.
In a flash Henno stood over him and kicked the guy’s gun away. It skittered across the wheelhouse into the wall – nearly hitting the feet of the older girl, who was retreating from the controls toward the corner. She screamed, pointlessly.
Standing over him, staring down, it occurred to Henno that this was the muppet who’d steered the boat away just as he was leaping across to it, and thus almost put him in the drink – not to mention caused that cursed bolt to get rammed that bit further into his tender hide. Henno holstered his pistol, and smiled down at the guy – basically daring him to have a go, if he thought he was hard enough.
The guy actually did seem game, pulling a big hunting knife from his belt and thrusting upward with it. Basically ignoring this attack, Henno produced the second crossbow bolt in his left hand and mercilessly impaled the guy through his right shoulder, just outside the edge of his body armor.
The guy screamed, the hunting knife clattered to the deck, and Henno kicked that away, too. He leaned further over and looked the guy in the eye – in that special way that only a crazed, half-drunk Yorkshireman can, usually just before a bar brawl breaks out.
“You done?” he said.
Grimacing with pain, the guy nodded. “Yeah. I’m done.”
Henno nodded once himself, contentedly – and then brutally yanked the bolt free again, which resulted in the guy screaming even louder, writhing, and slapping his hand to the bleeding hole in his shoulder. Henno put his boot on him to hold him still. And then he checked the tip of the bolt.
Sure enough – no barbs. Came right out, smooth as silk.
He now flipped the guy over roughly and flexicuffed his wrists behind his back. Then, while warily eyeing the older girl in the corner, who didn’t budge, he stepped up to the controls and hastily killed the engine. He also scanned forward out the porthole glass, making sure they weren’t about to run aground on anything.
He’d had enough of that shit.
As the boat slowed and powered down, he pulled a pressure bandage from the blowout kit in his thigh pouch, placed it on the console, then steadied the bolt sticking out of him with one hand – and pulled it free with the other. As he did so, he gritted his teeth and breathed raggedly through flaring nostrils, but made no other sound. He then slapped the pressure bandage over the puncture wound, tamped it down around the edges, and nodded to himself contentedly.
Good to go.
But while he’d been stopping this runaway train, and patching himself up, his back had been to the girl. By the time he turned around again, stalked over, and roughly flexicuffed her as well… he didn’t notice that the pistol that had slid into the corner was now gone.
* * *
Swinging out onto the upper deck, the sea spray still blowing all the way up here as the boat blasted forward, Ali came across the following scene: the young pirate standing over the prone form of Juice on the deck, pointing Juice’s own gun down at him, and mouthing something to himself.
That’s not good, she thought.
Once again, Ali should have shot him, but something stopped her. She told herself it was the risk of the guy pulling his trigger as he died – she could see the hammer of the handgun was back, and had to presume the safety was off. Also it was only one long step from the door to the pair of them, so she took it in a flash, grabbed the weapon from the top by the slide, instantly twisting it to face in a safe direction, then relieved him of it.
The kid turned to face her in alarm – just in time to catch a brutal forearm shove, Heisman style, right in his shallow chest. His feet tangled up and he went over backward, banged into the gun carriage, and fell down around its wheels in a tangle of limbs.
Already turning and kneeling before Juice, she said: “Do yourself a favor – stay down.” Her voice also said she wasn’t fucking around.
The kid nodded vigorously, and stayed where he was, hands in plain view. Ali tossed her last flexicuffs over to him, where they landed in his lap.
And he put them on himself this time, tightening the loose end with his teeth.
Six Angry Men
Lake Michigan
“Dude, you’ve seriously gotta stop falling asleep.”
Juice levered his eyes open. They seemed to weigh a ton. Blocking out the watery sun overhead was a head so big it could only belong to one man. Predator was offering him an open pouch of chewing tobacco. Juice realized he’d either spit his out or, more likely, swallowed it. He took a pinch in three fingers and stuck it inside his left cheek.
Then he sat up.
“Yeah, man. No naps.” This was Ali, kneeling beside him, and wrapping their med kit back up. Juice put his hand to the top of his head. There was a thick gauze pad at the back, secured with a triangular bandage wrapped around like a bandana, or do-rag. He figured that probably looked cool. Though he guessed it was too late to ask her to use his Harley “Live to Ride” bandana from his ruck.
Juice rubbed his swaddled head, and wondered how long he’d been out. “Eh, not again,” he said, recalling how he’d been knocked cold on the mission immediately prior to this one – when half a pharmaceutical company had collapsed on his head.
Handon laughed. He remembered hefting the big man on his shoulder as the dead swarmed them and overran their lines. Seeing now that Juice was okay, he turned and headed back inside. His assault boots squished as he walked – he and Pred, not to mention Park, had been thigh-high in lake water at the end, as the Three Brothers had flooded and slowed to a crawl. Henno’d had to bring the bigger boat around, once they controlled it, to retrieve them. Happily, all these maneuvers had left them finally facing the right damned direction – north.
Now, Handon ducked into the wheelhouse to check on their heading and progress. He’d already had Henno kick it into overdrive, within seconds of climbing aboard. They seriously had to get moving toward their extraction point. Anything else that needed to be done could be done on the way.
Now, behind them, the Three Brothers slowly slipped beneath the waves in the Diablo’s wake, as Alpha sped away. It had been a pretty good boat. But it hadn’t quite gotten them where they needed to go.
* * *
“Do I even have to say I feckin’ told you so?”
It was an unemotional monotone which Henno directed at Handon. They had a moment there alone in the pilothouse. The older girl and the impaled, slightly shot, flexicuffed pilot had been herded outside – where they were being corralled with the other survivors of the pirate vessel, as well as with the younger girl.
Handon and Henno stood in silence for a second, both of them basically just catching their breath, as they watched the lake scroll out ahead of them. Handon exhaled and put his ass down on the second captain’s chair. He swiveled to face Henno, who was still staring ahead.
“No,” he said tiredly. “You don’t have to say it.” In his head, but not out loud, he added: What the hell WAS I thinking?
Henno snorted contentedly. “First sensible thing you’ve said all day.”
Handon wondered if he’d read his mind. He then looked over at the broad bloodstain around Henno’s wound – about which the stoic Brit pointedly wasn’t saying anything. It would sound like “whinging” as Henno termed it. He’d tell Handon in a second when he thought they were fucking up. But it would never be personal, and it would never be about his own safety or comfort.
Handon mentally cursed himself. Pulling over to help a stranded boat? On their way to extraction for their most important mission ever? What the hell was that? It was a bad enough idea in conception. But in execution, given how very badly it had gone…
And yet it could have gone much worse still.
/> He sighed. He’d thought his time with Sarah, his reawakening to the importance of safeguarding their humanity, had been a good thing. But maybe allowing himself to be touched by these human emotions was actually goddamned stupid. With all his responsibilities, with everything they had on the line… how did he think he could afford such luxuries as human compassion?
But he couldn’t bring himself to totally repudiate it, either. No matter the risk, no matter how badly things had gone, or might have gone, he couldn’t drive the idea totally out of his head. He knew he still had to get this right.
And he also remembered that they’d rescued the two girls, who Ali seemed to think were innocent victims in all this. That had to be worth something – it certainly seemed to be worth something to Ali.
Maybe that was enough.
“Landfall in twenty mikes,” Henno said. He didn’t say anything else. He figured he’d gotten the message across.
Handon stood, clapped Henno on the shoulder – the unperforated one – and went back outside. He still had to figure out what the hell to do with their new pirate collection.
* * *
“Where the hell did they get this beast? Benghazi? Paktia Province? Je-sus…”
Ali was walking a circle around the Russian ZSU anti-aircraft gun, admiring it, if that was the right word. She’d only first laid eyes on it when emerging on the top deck a few minutes earlier – and only really seen it now, as she had been occupied before making sure Juice was still breathing. Earlier, she’d only heard its bludgeoning report through two decks of yacht.
She straightened up when Handon emerged again, marching purposefully toward their prisoner pen – the back end of the upper deck. In one corner sat Henno’s pilot, with the puncture wound in his shoulder; the young kid with only bruised ego; another guy they’d found alive on the lower deck, with a pair of grievous gunshot wounds to his upper torso – Pred’s handiwork; plus two other guys they’d discovered cowering down in the storeroom. These last had carried weapons, but surrendered quickly enough to live. In the other corner were the two girls, cowering close to each other, the older smoothing the younger’s hair.
