by Todd Borg
While I steered the jet boat back and forth to make a difficult target, I visualized how I was going to board. The most important thing would be to move very quickly so that Nick couldn’t easily take aim with another javelin. I went back and forth another two times, then made my move.
I swung back to the starboard, dropped back a bit, then gunned the jet boat. The dinghy pulled as if to rip my left arm out of its socket. I raced forward in the dark. As I cruised past the starboard side of the Dreamscape’s transom, I leaped off the jet boat and onto the yacht’s boarding platform, still holding the towline to the dinghy.
The drag from the dinghy was too great. It was about to pull me off the stern and into the water. I flailed my other arm, grasping at air. My fingertips brushed something. I bent, trying to gain an inch or two. I groped frantically in the night.
My fingers gripped the ladder rail at the front of the boarding platform.
With the lanyard pulled from the jet boat ignition, the engine went silent, and the boat immediately slowed to a standstill and disappeared into the dark, just missing the dinghy.
The yacht vibrated under my feet as it raced forward.
The boarding ladder was short and steep. It went up and over the edge of the transom and onto the tender deck. The handrail that I gripped was spaced out from the transom about a half a foot. I slid one of my knees in behind the railing for support, then reeled in the towline hand-over-hand. I tried to be fast to minimize the time that Spot and I were easy targets for Nick.
When the bow of the dingy touched the boarding platform, I jerked the towline around the handrail and made a fast slipknot. I reached out to the bow of the dinghy and jerked it halfway up onto the boarding platform.
“Spot! Come!”
He stood.
Another javelin crashed down into the boarding platform, just off the dinghy’s bow, midway between Spot and me. Its tip went into one of the narrow gaps between the spaced boards. It traveled half of its length before friction brought it to a stop. There was no light other than starlight, but the spear was so close that I saw the wild patterns of black on white. I’d seen them before, but I couldn’t remember where.
I grabbed Spot’s collar. He made a little jump as I tugged him out of the dinghy. I pulled him over and down, close enough to the transom that I hoped we were out of sight from the killer up on the deck above.
In a holder on the transom was a bar with a curved end used to aid swimmers climbing onto the boarding platform. I took off my windbreaker, draped it over the bar and held it out in view of the man above us. I moved it so that it could be mistaken as me coming up the ladder over the transom.
A third javelin crashed down directly through the jacket.
“Spot, hurry!” I jerked Spot up. Put his front paws up on the top of the ladder. Lifted his rear legs up onto the steps. With a push from me, Spot jumped over the transom. I leaped behind him, hoping that we weren’t taking enough time to allow Nick to grab another javelin and get into position.
I nearly tackled Spot as I grabbed his collar and dove forward. We hit the forward wall of the tender deck, which was underneath the trailing edge of the upper deck.
I breathed deep, realizing what I’d missed all along.
I remembered the pattern on the javelins. They were the rods that held up the lanterns on the deck of the Tahoe Dreamscape. Lift them out of their holders, slide off the lanterns, and you have a deadly weapon waiting for you. A bunch of them, all lined up on the upper rear deck of Ford and Teri Georges’ tour boat. Put there in advance for ready use as weapons. And it was on the boat where I saw the errant package that looked like a holder for contacts. Contacts that I now realized weren’t ordered for vision correction, but to make Nick’s eyes look intensely blue.
I shouted up toward Nick the Knife who was probably still on the deck above.
“It was an impressive strategy, Nick. Hijacking your own boat as Nick the Knife while your new identity as Ford Georges gave you a cover. The hijacking fooled me. It set in motion a plan that would get me to find Anna for you.”
“Yeah,” he shouted back. “Dying was the brilliant part, wasn’t it?” His voice was just audible over the roar of the engine and the wind. “That and the false identity out of Wichita, Kansas.”
“If I’d paid more attention, I would have figured you out a long time ago.”
“But you didn’t, McKenna. And you’ll be dead soon, just like this girl. I’ll have her ring, and your bodies will never be found. I’ve taken over the Patriots. I’m beginning to build my empire.”
I had no clue how to get to him. As soon as I appeared up the stairs to the upper deck, he would put a javelin through my chest. If I kept him talking…
“What was the point?” I shouted. “Find the treasure from Anna and Grace’s ancestor and sell it to pay off the boat mortgage?” I turned and ran my hands over the rear wall of the tender deck, feeling for something, anything, that I could use to try to disarm the man.
Nick didn’t immediately respond to my question. I worried that he had moved. If I didn’t know where he was, I’d be out of luck. When he spoke, his voice was wistful. I could barely hear him over the roar of the yacht.
“True, the tour business will never pay off a boat mortgage as big as this one. But that doesn’t matter. The point is that I deserve the Chinaman’s treasure. I’m the only heir to my maternal grandmother. She was Katherine Mulligan, granddaughter of Seamus Mulligan who lost his life because of the Chinaman. If the Chinaman had stayed in China where he belonged, my ancestors would have been rich. I would have been rich. The money is mine.”
There was no point in pointing out that Mulligan had tried to lynch his Chinese neighbor Gan Sun.
Over the roar of the yacht came a grunt. A javelin thudded into the deck a foot from my leg. I jerked and scrambled away, pulling on Spot’s collar. I realized that Nick had moved to the side of the upper deck and was leaning over the edge, throwing back in at me and Spot.
“Nice try, Nick,” I yelled. I wanted to make him doubt himself. “But you don’t even know your own boat if you think you can hit me from there. I’m out of your line of sight.”
I leaned toward Spot and whispered. “C’mon, Spot.” I pulled on his collar, and we scrambled up the few steps from the tender deck to the rear deck where the staircase that rose to the upper deck was broad and open and offered easy line-of-sight to us. I pulled Spot up the side passageway toward the bow of the boat.
The view across the lake showed that the shore lights in all directions were similarly far away, which suggested that we were approaching the middle of the lake. There was a distant cluster of lights that looked like Tahoe City. Those lights were at four o’clock on the Dreamscape dial. That put us traveling south, heading toward a point south of Emerald Bay. Baldwin Beach, maybe. Ten or twelve miles away. If no one got to the bridge in time to stop the Dreamscape, and if no other boat got in our way, we’d run aground in about 30 minutes.
I had to get Anna from Nick’s grasp and stop the boat before that happened.
But Nick understood the basic principle that makes hostages so attractive to psychopaths, which is that taking a hostage renders intervention moot. Any course of action that compromises the hostage taker also risks the life of the hostage. In broad daylight, and under perfect conditions, a sniper can sometimes take down the hostage taker without harming the hostage. But that situation was nothing like being on an unlit, unfamiliar yacht in the night. Maybe I could find a way to turn on some lights, but that would just make Spot and me an easier target. I needed to create a surprise action that would create more risk to Nick than to Anna.
The main stairway to the upper deck was back at the rear of the dining cabin. Spot and I were already well past that. We continued forward on the starboard aisle.
In the middle of the yacht were ladder stairways, one on each side. They went from the main level up to the upper deck just aft of the bridge. When we came to the starboard ladder stair, I sa
w in the darkness a life ring hanging on the outer wall of the lounge. It had a line that had been gathered in a neat coil and hung on a bracket. In my pocket was the knife I’d gotten from Manny at the Red Blood Patriots compound. I used it to cut off the line where it attached to the life ring.
Extending below the handrails were sections of metal gridwork. I cut off a section of the line and used it to tie a taut trip-line from the left grid panel across to the right grid. I positioned the cord about eight inches above the lowest step. Spot stuck his head next to me, wondering what I was doing. “See this, Spot?” I whispered. “Don’t trip on this.” He didn’t know the words, but maybe they’d help him remember the line was there. I put his nose on the line.
Next, I moved with Spot around the front of the lounge cabin, back down the port aisle, and tied a matching line across the ladder stair on the port side of the yacht. I put his nose on that cord as well.
From there we went back to the lower rear deck and approached the main staircase from the side. I whispered in Spot’s ear, “Stay.” I didn’t want him moving across the stair opening because his white-with-black-spots pattern was the opposite of camouflage in the dark.
I cut another, longer, section of line and tied it across the wide stairs, moving fast to minimize the chance that I would get a javelin through my chest. When I was done, I had put a hazardous cord across the three main stairways from the main level to the upper level. If Nick encountered my cords going down one of the stairs, he’d fall a good distance. My hope was that if he still held Anna, the distance wouldn’t be so great that it would seriously wound her, but far enough that Nick would be stunned.
I pulled Spot up to the dark nook behind the main stairway. On a dark boat at night, the nook provided even more cover. We waited, Spot lying in the ready-to-jump position, elbows spread wide, rear legs knees-up. I squatted next to him.
I figured that Nick would tire of waiting for me, and he would soon take Anna into the bridge house and slow the boat before we raced too close toward shore. But the boat didn’t slow. No lights came on above me. There was no sound of human movement, only the steady roar of the yacht’s engine.
After a long minute of waiting while the yacht continued to charge across the lake, I began to think I’d made a mistake. It had taken me so long to put up my trip-lines that Nick could have easily taken Anna down the aft stairs while I was working on the mid-ships stairs. Or maybe there was another stair or ladder I didn’t know about. When Nick had given me the boat tour, acting as ex-insurance agent Ford Georges, he had bragged that there were over a dozen stairs and ladders and hatches that allowed for vertical movement among the boat’s four levels.
I watched the distant shore lights. The world had rotated a bit. Instead of going in a straight line toward the southwest corner of the lake, it appeared that the boat was tracing a gradual arc toward the west. It was too dark to see clearly, but it looked like we would eventually turn toward Emerald Bay. I hoped I was wrong. Otherwise, we’d crash ashore much sooner than I’d originally thought. And unlike running aground on a gentle sandy slope like Baldwin Beach, there was the possibility that we’d come ashore on a rock-strewn landscape. A collision with boulders would be much more abrupt than sand.
After another minute, I couldn’t wait any longer.
Bending down with one leg forward and one leg back, I was able to position my thigh in front of the trip line. When I tugged on Spot, he stepped over both thigh and cord. I let go of his collar and he continued up the stairs with me directly behind. We were halfway up when a terrible, muffled scream rose from somewhere below my feet.
“Spot, come!” I said as I turned and leaped down four steps, clearing the cord. I hit the deck and spun in a circle, trying to sense where the scream had come from. Spot came down behind me, also leaping over the trip cord.
There was no more sound, just the steady dull roar of the racing yacht.
I yanked on the doors to the lower staircase, but they were locked. The doors were made of steel. Breaking through would not be simple.
Then I remembered the multiple hatches that Nick O’Connell/Ford Georges had mentioned. I had tried the one on the foredeck. The only other ones I knew about were inside the locked salon.
I tried to breathe, tried to think. When Teri Georges talked about the person who came on the boat during her absence –which I now knew was a bogus story to direct me away from her husband – she mentioned the hatch and companionway from the bridge down into the salon.
I sprinted forward, stepped over the trip line on one of the mid-ships stairs and went up two steps at a time to the upper deck.
Spot followed and stayed next to me as I ran across the big deck and up the short stairs to the bridge.
The door was locked.
I went down to the deck and lifted on one of the javelin rods that held up the lanterns. It slid out of its holder tube. Rotating the javelin like a long baton, it was easy to kick the lantern off of its top end. I’d never thrown a javelin before, but it had a natural balance. I took aim and hurled it at the dark window in the bridge house door.
The javelin exploded the tempered glass into tiny fragments. I reached through and unlatched the door.
It was worth it to take the time to slow the boat.
I found some toggle switches on the wall and flipped them, hoping they would turn on lights, but they did nothing. I felt in the dark for the throttle handles. There were two levers that felt correct, but they were in the idle position. They flopped forward and back when I pushed them. Nick must have disconnected them when he sped up the boat. Squatting down, I reached under the control panel. I waved my arm in the dark, hoping to find loose throttle linkages. There were two cables, a rod, and some wires. Nothing changed when I pushed and pulled on them. I took a strong grip on the wires and tore them loose.
The boat roared undiminished across the lake.
I stood and ran my hands across the top of the panel, feeling in the dark for the ignition key. I found no key. I turned knobs and flipped switches. Nothing changed.
At least, I could avert disaster by putting the boat into a turn so we’d just keep tracing circles. I grabbed the wheel and rotated it. It spun freely, disconnected from the steering mechanism.
Nick had obviously made a plan for this kind of possibility and arranged things so the controls could be disconnected. There was probably a second, small cockpit on the main level, perhaps behind a closed door at the front of the salon or up on the bridge deck above my head. It could be that there was a way to enable just one cockpit at a time. But Nick hadn’t shown that to me when he put on the Ford Georges persona and gave me a tour of the boat.
On the port side of the bridge, just to the rear of the chief mate’s chair, was a vertical hatch-type door. It was unlocked and opened to reveal a ladder. I stepped onto the ladder and was halfway down into the salon when I realized that Spot was above.
I needed him.
I climbed back up, bent over him, and wrapped my arms around his abdomen.
“Okay, boy. This is no big deal. Rear first, just the way humans go down a ladder.” I reached out to the ladder, pulling him with me. I put his front paws on the rung. He couldn’t grip it, but he could support some of his weight so that I didn’t have to carry him.
I was in a panicked rush, but I needed to reassure him with a calm voice.
“Remember the ladder down into the mine during the forest fire?” I said. “Same thing. Only no smoke this time, no falling embers. Piece of cake.”
I lifted his rear up, got his rear legs over the hatch collar and guided them down onto the first ladder step.
“Attaboy.”
Spot resisted as I put a foot out and down onto a rung.
He was big and strong, and I couldn’t have dragged him against his will if we’d been outside in the dirt. But I had a good grip around him, and we were going down, which made gravity my ally. I managed to pulled him with me over the opening in the floor. His rear paws flaile
d. But he worked his front paws down the ladder like a trained circus dog. We were down in the pitch-dark salon in a moment.
We ran back through the dining room to the staircase. I went down it fast, feeling the steps with my feet, the walls with my hands. Spot came after me with no hesitation.
At the bottom of the stairs was the bordello-wannabe lounge. I thought of going into the engine room to see if I could find a way to stop the engines. But I would likely just lose more time turning valves and flipping switches with no result.
I went to the lounge’s forward doors, into the hallway with the staterooms and trotted forward to the sitting area.
Light showed at the bottom of the door to the forward cabin. I reached out and gently tried the latch.
Locked. Maybe that door was steel, too. I couldn’t tell in the dark.
I had no choice.
My best sidekick is powerful. But I decided instead that the long hallway offered a better approach. I went back down the hall twenty-some feet and maneuvered Spot behind me so I wouldn’t hit him when I ran. For direction in the dark, I took a careful look at the thin line of light under the stateroom door. Then I exploded forward like a sprinter out of the starting blocks.
I tucked my elbow in and hit the door with my upper arm and shoulder.
The door shattered, wooden pieces exploding inward. I tried to stay upright. But my feet couldn’t keep up with my momentum, and I fell in a sliding skid as if to tag home plate with my fingertips.
FIFTY-ONE
I slid, face first, into the big forward stateroom. I expected to see cats with Shakespearean names scattering, but there were none. Anna was on the bed, arms up above her head. She was trying to scream, but an outsized gag like a pillowcase was stuffed in her mouth and tied around the back of her head. Nick was at the side of the bed, his back to the woodstove. He had tape looped through the zip tie on her wrists and was running it to the left corner post of the bed. Teri had hold of Anna’s hands. She held a wire cutters and was working it on Anna’s ring finger. The gold ring sparkled through dark red blood. Behind Teri, in a huge ceramic pot to one side of the bed, was a grouping of the decorated rods that supported the lanterns on the upper deck.
