The Revengers

by Donald Hamilton

  I drew a long breath. I stepped over there, past Adam and Giulio or what was left of them, and slapped her hard.

  “For Christ’s sake!” I said contemptuously. “I thought you were the little girl who cut big guys’ balls off just for fun.” When she made no response, staring up at me with wide, wet eyes, I asked, “Can you shoot a shotgun?”

  “I. . . I’ve shot a little s-s-s . . ." She licked her Ups and tried again. “Skeet.”

  “Well, these aren’t light skeet loads in this cannon,” I said. “These are heavy buckshot loads and kick a lot harder. You’ve got to hold the gun tight to your shoulder and put your face tight against the stock. If you’re all locked together tightly in one piece, gun and you, it won’t hurt you; it’ll just shove you back a little way. But if you hold it loosely and give it a running start at you, you can get badly bumped. Got that?”

  When she nodded, I took the winch handle from her and put it back where it belonged. I took her by the arm, helped her out of the companionway, and led her forward, past Henry who didn’t look very good, having taken most of a load of buckshot in the face. A clump of pellets that had missed him had done some damage to the big, flapping sail beyond, the genoa jib, shooting the lower rear corner— clew, if you must be nautical—right off it. It occurred to me to look for the Zodiac, but it was nowhere to be seen; apparently they hadn’t taken time to secure it and it had drifted away into the night. Forward of the mast, I lay the shotgun down on the side deck, against the cabin trunk.

  “You’ll be lying sprawled on top of that,” I said. “You’ll be dead, understand? They’ll bring Ser-Jan alongside to starboard, the other side; they have to approach from windward because of the boom and sails blowing out the other way. Now remember this—whichever one of them is at your end of the boat, their boat, the sportfisherman, he’s yours. I’ll take the other one from aft. Say they lay her alongside bow to bow, Robert is on the foredeck to handle the lines, and Arturo is up on the flying bridge. You take Robert and I’ll take Arturo. On the other hand, if Robert works out of the cockpit, aft, he’s mine. You get Arturo up on the bridge. We can’t afford to waste time and ammo shooting at the same target, at least not until one of them is down. We’ve got to get them both and we’ve got to get them fast. You lie perfectly still until you hear somebody shoot; until then, you’re dead. When the firing starts, you get up, clear to your feet. It takes a lot of practice to mount a heavy shotgun properly from any other position, so don’t try. Get on your feet, brace a knee against the cabin if you like, get the gun shouldered right, get the muzzle on the target nearest to you, and pull the trigger. I’m shoving the safety to off so you won’t have to worry about that—forget the safety. Just get to your feet, shoulder the gun well, aim carefully, and shoot. Then pump the action—this sliding handle here—and keep shooting until there’s nothing left to shoot at.”

  There was a little silence. She licked her lips once more, watching me steadily. “I don’t. . .like men who go around slapping girls, Matt.”

  “I know,” I said. “But right now, you’re not supposed to like me. You’re just supposed to snap out of whatever wingding you were throwing and do what I tell you, for both our sakes. Okay? Now lie down and play dead.”

  She hesitated, small and stubborn. “All right, but I do think you . . . ought to apologize, really.”

  I said, “Yes, you’re perfectly right. I’m very sorry I slapped you, Elly. Will you please forgive me?”

  She looked at me gravely for a long moment. Then she nodded and lay down on the deck at the side of the low cabin, on top of the shotgun.

  “Like this?”

  I moved one of her legs a little. “That’s very good . . . Elly.”

  “Yes?”

  “I really am sorry. I’m glad you forgive me. Good luck.”

  “Good luck, Matt.”

  Returning to the cockpit, I looked around, but by now it was that funny dawn half-light in which you seem to have some visibility, but you can’t really see anything. But there was an uneasy murmur of sound out there that didn’t belong to Jamboree's splashing hull, or creaking gear or ever-flapping sails.

  I took a quick look around the cockpit, but Giulio’s Browning was nowhere to be seen and I had a growing feeling of urgency. I ducked down into the cabin instead of spending more time searching for it. Serena was lying sprawled on her back down there with considerable blood around both ends of her—the whole boat was lousy with blood—but she seemed to be breathing. I hoped she wouldn’t come to and cause trouble at the wrong moment, but I sensed that I didn’t have time to tie her. I yanked open the second drawer of the galley dresser and the .38 revolver was there as she’d promised; the gun that had once belonged to Peterson, defunct. There was, I reflected, getting to be quite an accumulation of defuncts in this operation.

  I grabbed the weapon, checked the loads, and returned to the deck. The sound of powerful engines was now quite distinct. I didn’t take time to locate the source; I merely draped myself untidily across the bridge deck just aft of the main hatch, face down, with my gun hand under me. Just another body, I hoped, added to the two already in the cockpit, and the two sprawled along the side deck to port. Just a ship of death with blood running from the drains or, if you must be nautical, scuppers.

  They came in cautiously. I heard the diesels stop some distance off. The voice I’d heard over the radio, Arturo’s voice, called out,

  “Hey, Miss Lorca! Giulio. Jamboree ahoy!” A pause. “Hand me those seven-by-fifties. . . . My God! Jesus Ever-loving Christ! Take a look at that, will you? That must have been the shooting we heard. It’s a fucking slaughterhouse!”

  “Tout mort?”

  “We’ll have to see if they’re all toot mort.”

  “I will go forward for the ropes—”

  “You’ll go aft for the ropes, Frenchy. I’m not bringing the bow in there. I want it clear, so I can blast off in a hurry, in case . . . I’ll swing the stern in. You be ready in the cockpit to take a line out; I’ll lay you right in close. You have your gun handy?”

  “Oui, I have the pistol. And the knife.”

  “Don’t make the jump until we’re sure; somebody could be playing cute over there.”

  “I will be prepared.”

  “Hang out some fenders first, port side. No sense beating up the damned boats.”

  Lying there, I reflected that it was a gamble; but then it usually is. But there was no possible way I could avoid exposing myself to enemy fire here; I’d simply have to hope it missed. In my favor was the fact that shooting from one heaving boat at a target on another heaving boat is quite an exercise in marksmanship, since the pistol—and I hoped they had nothing else—is a fairly inaccurate weapon at the best of times. There was more on my side. The modem theory has it that the one-hand gun is really a two-hand gun. They all learn it that way now, and they’re never really happy unless they can clap that second paw around a gunbutt that was originally designed only for single occupancy. Well, it’s been proven that somewhat better shooting can be done that way—when the shooter has his feet firmly planted on solid ground. When the whole world is heaving and pitching and rolling, however, the gent who learned how to master a pistol waving uncertainly at the end of an unsupported arm has a certain edge, since he never expects to deal with a steady target or a steady gun, anyway. At least I hoped so, since that was the way I’d learned. And an edged-weapons specialist like Robert very often scorns the use of noisier implements and is not very good with them. Anyway, it was a reassuring theory. . . .

  The soft, rubber-fendered bump of boat against boat came before I expected it. I wasn’t ready. You’re never really ready to be shot at. I reared up and a pistol blasted in my face and missed. I put two bullets into Robert’s chest at five yards’ range—hey, Fred, here’s your boy—and he collapsed into the sportfisherman’s cockpit. I swung the revolver left and up, toward Ser-Jan's high flying bridge. I saw Arturo up there, saw his gun jerk and heard the report; and somet
hing hit me hard in the left thigh, throwing my shot off. Then the shotgun thundered up forward. Arturo staggered. I fired and thought I had a solid hit. The heavy Winchester blasted again. The man up on the flying bridge stumbled toward the engine controls; he had his hands on them when he was struck simultaneously by my next bullet and the third blast of buckshot. He fell, still clinging to the black-knobbed levers up there. . . .

  There was a sharp, snarling sound from the big twin diesels. Ser-Jan seemed to hesitate; then she lunged astern, giving the sailboat a glancing blow, and slid away backward at steadily increasing speed—Arturo must have hauled the controls to full reverse as he fell. I watched the big yacht recede in that strange, backward fashion for longer than there was any sense in; so a boat was sailing backwards, so what? I looked down dully and found my left pantleg bloody, and a small hole to port and one to starboard—since we were being so goddamn nautical. A foot higher and he’d have got me in the ass. Well, at least it had gone clear through instead of sticking around inside to make trouble. And while it seemed too bad to be wounded at the very end of all the action, I didn’t dream of complaining. After all, it hadn’t perforated a lot of meat, it had hit no bones, and it seemed to have cut no major arteries. Hell, I was alive, wasn’t I? Maybe there’s nobody supervising, helping, maybe it’s all dumb luck, but if The Watchers should exist out there, somewhere, I’d be a fool to antagonize Them by displaying ingratitude.

  I took out a soggy handkerchief and tied it around my thigh to check the bleeding a little. I limped forward to find the little girl sitting on the cabin with the shotgun on her knees. I took it from her and shucked the remaining shell out of it—apparently they’d had it loaded with six—and dropped it into my pocket, noting that it was 00 Buck, as I’d guessed. When she looked up, I was shocked to see that her face was smeared with blood; although I didn’t know why a little more gore should shock me.

  “Elly, what?. . ."

  She sniffed and drew the back of her hand across her nose, streaking her face even worse. “Don’t get excited, it’s just a dumb nosebleed,” she said. “That stupid gun jumped so much I couldn’t hold it tight, and the recoil slammed my thumb right into my nose.” She looked down and said softly, “I never killed anybody before. It feels so strange.”

  I said, “I know. But remember what I told you once.

  There are people and there are enemies. That one wasn’t people. The way you could tell, he was shooting at us.”

  “That’s . . . just words, isn’t it?” After a moment, still not looking at me, she asked, “Did we have to do it?”

  “No, not really,” I said. “Not if we were willing to let Serena sink another ship. Not if we were willing to let them kill us.”

  She licked her lips. “It’s so very ugly, isn’t it?” She looked up at last, and drew a long breath. “And I think I’m being so very silly. Matt?”

  “What?”

  She was looking down at her knees again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know it doesn’t help much, but I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “For what, for God’s sake?”

  “Don’t be nice. You know what. I just did everything all wrong.... Oh, God, you’re hurt!”

  “Just a flesh wound, as we say in the trade.”

  “Please don’t try to pretend,” she said breathlessly. “I know what you’re thinking; what you’ve got to be thinking. First, I. . . I couldn’t hit her again, even though you’d given me explicit instructions. Then I went into hysterics so you had to slap some sense into me—my God, you’d think I was a silly kid instead of a grownup professional woman. It took me forever to get up and get that big gun lined up, so long that he had time to shoot you; and I couldn’t even hold it right and got a bloody nose and it served me right and . . . and . . . oh, yes, that ghastly business at the start.”

  “What ghastly business at the start?”

  “You know, that perfectly awful conversation. I’d been lying there all night just thinking what it would be like to die, be killed. I guess I was really pretty scared. Suddenly, I heard myself talking all that horrible, tasteless nonsense about. . . about how you mess yourself when you. . . . I’m sorry, Matt. I did try, I did my best, but I wasn’t very good, was I?”

  I stared at her helplessly. I knew there was absolutely nothing to be gained by telling her how very good she’d been—well, by the standards of the world in which I operated. There was, of course, another world that disapproved of young ladies who spiked people with high heels, clubbed them with winch handles, and blasted them with shotguns. I’d met young ladies from that world and I’d almost died for their fine humanitarian impulses. It was a revelation to encounter a female person bright enough to accept the face of violence, and brave enough to cope with it. But I couldn’t tell her that. There was only one thing about herself she liked: she was rather proud of her professional attainments. As for the rest, she was that crummy little Elly Brand, ugly and spoiled and useless; and nobody was going to persuade her otherwise.

  “Elly—”

  “It’s all right,” she said calmly, “I said you didn’t have to pretend. Now I think we’d better take a look at that hole in your leg, don’t you? And see about that . . . that girl downstairs, only you say below on a boat, don’t you?”

  “Elly,” I said, and looked at her streaked, small, stubborn face, and gave up. “Oh, hell,” I said irritably. “No, let’s get the sails down first, before a storm comes up or something. Anyway, I’m getting tired of listening to them flapping. But you’d better take a quick look at Serena and wrap some tape around her if she looks about to come to, while I’m trying to figure out all these ropes and cleats. . . .

  What is it?”

  She was staring at something beyond me. “Look, it’s coming back! It’s going to run us down!”

  I turned quickly. There was the sportfisherman, still in reverse gear, diesels still cranking out somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand horsepower. She’d made a wide circle and now, as Eleanor had said, she was rushing straight at us, backward, rolling up a great wall of water with her blunt stem. I glanced around hastily. The sheet that controlled the big genoa jib had been blown away by buckshot, but the mainsail was still operative if things hadn’t gotten too tangled; and there was a possibility of starting the auxiliary motor if I could figure out the controls. . . .

  “Matt, look!”

  I turned back to Ser-Jan and realized belatedly that there was something wrong with her attitude. The bow seemed higher than I remembered; the stem lower. Suddenly, I realized that the big yacht was sinking. There may be high-sterned powerboats that can survive backing at full throttle in the open ocean, but sportfishermen have low cockpits aft for fighting the fish and reaching over with the gaff. There were scuppers back there to drain the water out, of course, but even if they functioned with the boat crashing backward—and they might even operate in reverse at this speed, to let the water in—they could not possibly cope with the whole sea pouring over the transom, filling the cockpit and rushing forward into the deckhouse and cabin.

  I felt Eleanor find my hand and grip it tightly. It was obvious now that we were in no danger; Ser-Jan was not going to reach us. Even as we watched, the stem sank lower and became totally submerged. Then the weight of the flying bridge and tuna tower took charge of the now unstable, half-filled hull, and the big yacht rolled over on her side and sank.

  We saw Arturo’s body float free of the bridge momentarily, before the suction pulled it down. We never did see what happened to Robert.

  Chapter 35

  I hadn’t really let myself think beyond the actual break. I guess I’d vaguely imagined that once everything was under control, if it worked out that way, I’d simply push some kind of Mission-Completed button and watch the cleanup troops arrive within the hour to patch up the wounded, bury the dead, and take over all decisions and responsibilities; but, of course, it didn’t work that way. For one thing, there wasn’t any button. The only radio on board was th
e short-range VHF that Serena had used for ship-to-ship communication, good for about thirty miles. The last marked position on her chart showed the Bahamas, the nearest land, to be almost two hundred miles to the west.

  For another thing, when the troops arrived—if they did arrive—I wanted to be sure they’d been briefed to keep their mouths shut about what they found; not an easy thing to arrange over the air, even if I could make contact with the U.S. It occurred to me that we weren’t sinking, or even seriously incapacitated. Hell, Columbus had found America. Leif Ericson had found America. An Irish monk named Brendan was supposed to have found America. Why couldn’t I? Once ashore I could drop the whole tricky problem in Mac’s lap and wash my hands of it.

  “What about the EPIRB?” Eleanor asked.

  “What’s an EPIRB?”

  “That rescue beacon mounted next to the life raft, topside,” she said. “I told you about it, remember? Giulio said it was called an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, EPIRB for short. It’s kind of like those little homers they were using, only bigger and more powerful. When your boat sinks, you just turn it on and it makes a noise on a couple of aircraft emergency frequencies and a jet flying over reports you to the Coast Guard.”

  I said, “First you need a jet flying over.”

  “It’s good for a couple of hundred miles, Giulio said. The plane doesn’t have to be right overhead. A lot of planes fly across the ocean.”

  “And then you’ve got to want the Coast Guard,” I said. “I’m not sure I do. At least, not until I’ve alerted somebody at home to lean on them a little first. Otherwise, we’re going to have too much publicity about the blood-stained murder yacht they picked up at sea loaded with corpses and explosives.”

  Eleanor hesitated. She spoke without looking at me. “You’re not going to be able to keep it quiet, Matt. Not now. Not as long as she’s alive.” I didn’t say anything, and Eleanor went on, speaking carefully, “You wanted me to kill her, didn’t you?”