“Not many people have. It’s just like your father’s charter only faster. Just keep the wheel straight and if you have to turn do it gently. I’ll be back in a second.”
He watched her for a moment to make certain she would be all right, then ducked through the entrance to the cabin. He strode down the central aisle to where he’d tossed his leather duffel. He rummaged through the clothes and came up with the mini-Uzi and spare magazines. After reloading the Glock he jammed it back into his waistband and slid the magazines into his rear pocket. He stepped over to another one of the benches and activated a hidden button under the cushion. A catch released and the seat pivoted forward. Most of the space under the seats was given over to food and other provisions, but this one was different. He threw aside rolls of toilet paper until the bin was empty then touched another hidden lever. The false bottom sprang open and Juan lifted the lid.
Inside the bilge space the snarl of the engines and the shriek of the foils through the water were deafening. Juan groped for a tube secured in the bilge with metal clips. He got it free and lifted it out. Made of tough plastic with a waterproof cap, the tube was nearly four feet long and ten inches around. He unscrewed the cap and slid an FN-FAL assault rifle onto an adjacent seat. The venerable Belgian weapon could trace its roots back to the Second World War but was still one of the best all-around guns in the world.
Juan quickly loaded a pair of magazines with the 7.62 mm ammunition stored in the tube, racked a round into the chamber, and double-checked that the weapon was safed. He recalled Max questioning the need for such a gun on a lifeboat; his reply had been, “Teach a man to fish and he eats for a day, give him an assault rifle and some sharks and he can feed his crew for a lifetime.”
He climbed back out onto the rear deck. Sloane had kept the boat dead center on the feebly glowing wake but Juan could tell they’d cut the distance to the fleeing bow runner. The microorganisms had had less time to settle down so the bioluminescence was brighter than it had been just moments before.
Juan set the FN onto the dash, tossed the thermos down into the cabin, and slipped the mini-Uzi into its place.
“Are you always prepared for World War Three or did I catch you at a particularly paranoid moment?”
Sloane was using humor to try to get him to relax and he was grateful. Cabrillo knew all too well that going into combat without first controlling your emotions was a deadly mistake. He grinned at her as he took her place behind the wheel. “Don’t knock it. It just so happens I was paranoid enough.”
Moments later they could make out the low-slung speedboat arrowing down the bay. And no sooner did they spot the bow runner then the men aboard saw them, too; the boat cut a nimble turn and started edging closer to the marshy shore.
Juan eased the wheel over to stay on their stern, leaning far over to keep his balance as the hydrofoil canted sharply in the water. In just a couple of minutes they had cut the gap to thirty yards. While the bow runner’s driver concentrated on their route, the second man laid himself over the rear bench seats to steady his automatic rifle.
“Get down,” Juan shouted.
Bullets pinged off the bow and whizzed by the cockpit. The hydrofoil was riding too high for him to hit them so the gunman shifted his aim to one of the struts supporting the foils. He managed to slam a few rounds into it but the struts were made of high-tensile steel and the rounds ricocheted harmlessly.
Juan pulled the mini-Uzi from the cup holder, juked the hydrofoil to give himself a clear firing lane around her bows, and greased the trigger. The little weapon bucked in his hand and a shining arc of spent brass rose into the hydrofoil’s slipstream and vanished over the stern. Juan couldn’t risk killing both men so he aimed a bit to the side of the fleeing ski boat. The water exploded along its port side as twenty rounds raked the sea.
He had hoped that would have ended the chase because the men had to realize their former prey was bigger, faster, and equally armed. However, the bow runner kept up its speed and curved even closer to the swampy shore.
Juan had no choice but to stay on them as they zipped by clots of reeds and spindly trees. He soon found himself dancing the hydrofoil around stands of grass and little islands that dotted the coastline. What the ski boat lacked in speed it made up for in maneuverability, and as they weaved around obstacles in the water it widened the distance to fifty yards, then sixty.
Cabrillo could have turned to open water and closed in again, but he was afraid if he lost sight of his quarry they would escape into the towering sea grass where their shallower draft was the ultimate advantage. And to go in to find them invited walking into an ambush. He knew the best way to end this was to keep on their tail.
They slashed past stands of trees, sending birds shrieking for the sky, and their wakes sloshing through the marsh caused the mats of grass to undulate as though the bay were breathing.
Ever mindful that the foils were vulnerable to underwater obstructions, Juan had to make easier turns than the ski boat, allowing them to continue to widen the gap. Something ahead caught Cabrillo’s eye. He had just a second to realize it was a partially submerged log. Hitting it would tear the wings right off the boat, so with a deft hand on the throttle and wheel, he snaked the hydrofoil around the log. The quick move avoided the log but forced them into a gap between two low mud-covered islands.
Juan glanced at the depth gauge and saw it was pegged at zero. There was perhaps six inches of water between the wings and the bottom. He leaned against the throttle to eke out a bit more power and hopefully raise the boat a few more inches. If they grounded at this speed he and Sloane would be tossed from the hydrofoil like rag dolls; the impact with the water would be like hitting pavement after a fifty-foot fall.
The channel between the islands grew narrower. Juan turned to look astern. The normally white wake kicked up by the foils and propeller was a deep chocolate brown as their passage roiled silt from the seafloor. The boat staggered for an instant as a wing brushed bottom. He couldn’t slow down because the hydrofoil would drop off plane and she’d auger into the mud and he had the engine keening at well above red line.
The channel seemed to grow narrower still.
“Brace yourself,” he shouted over the engine because he knew he’d gambled and lost.
They raced through the narrowest spot on the channel, losing a bit of speed when the forward wings kissed the bottom a second time before the channel widened and the depth began to increase.
Juan blew out a long breath.
“Was that as close as I think it was?” Sloane asked.
“Closer.”
But the maneuver had halved the distance to the bow runner because it had been forced to slalom through a stand of mangroves. The gunman braced himself at the ski boat’s stern. Juan eased off the throttle and cut across the marsh to once again place the hydrofoil directly in their wake, using his craft’s superior size as a shield just as a fresh fusillade poured from the nimble little boat. The rounds peppered the sea and blew out two panes of safety glass that ran along the lifeboat’s cabin.
A straight section of marsh allowed Cabrillo to firewall the engine again. In just seconds the big hydrofoil loomed over the bow runner. In the turbulence of her wake the hydrofoil began to ventilate, to draw air under the water wings and lose lift. Her bow sawed up and down, which is what Juan had anticipated. The ski boat’s driver tried to dance out from under the crushing bow, but Juan matched him turn for turn. The bow slammed down on the bow runner’s stern but the blow wasn’t hard enough to slow it, and Cabrillo had to back off slightly to regain lift.
He glanced at the dash to check the RPMs and as soon as he did Sloane screamed.
He looked up. When the hydrofoil’s bow hit the rear of the ski boat the gunman had jumped for the railing. He now stood at the hydrofoil’s prow, clutching the railing with one hand while the other held an AK-47, its barrel aimed directly between Juan’s eyes. There wasn’t time to draw his own weapon so Juan did the only thing h
e could.
His hand lashed out and chopped the throttle an instant before the AK blazed. He and Sloane were slammed into the dashboard as the hydrofoil slowed from forty miles per hour to almost nothing in an instant, a wild burst from the assault rifle stitching a ragged line across the top of the cabin. The boat came off plane hard, and while the gunman managed to keep his grip on the railing his chest was crushed against the aluminum struts by the massive wall of water that exploded over the bow with the force to douse Juan and Sloane all the way at the vessel’s stern. The hydrofoil’s forward momentum was enough that he slid under the hull and when Cabrillo pressed on the throttle again her wake frothed pink.
“Are you okay?” Juan asked quickly.
Sloane was massaging her upper chest were it had impacted with the dash. “I think so,” she replied and raked wet hair from her forehead. She pointed to his arm. “You’re bleeding.”
Cabrillo made sure the boat was gaining on the bow runner before looking at the wound. A shard of fiberglass torn off the boat by the spray of bullets was partially embedded in his upper arm.
“Ow,” he exclaimed when he felt the first flicker of pain.
“I thought tough guys could ignore a little thing like that.”
“Like hell. It hurts.” He gently worked the postcard-sized piece of fiberglass from his flesh. The shard had cut cleanly and there was little blood. Juan dug out the small medical kit from a bin next to the dash. He handed it to Sloane, who rummaged through it and found a roll of sterile gauze. He held still as she wrapped his arm with the bandage and tied it off tightly.
“That should hold you,” she pronounced. “When was your last tetanus?”
“February twentieth two years ago.”
“You remember the exact date?”
“There’s a fifteen-inch scar on my back. Days you get a gash that big tend to stick with you.”
In a minute they had regained all the ground they had lost to the ski boat. Juan noted that the marsh to their right was giving way to a boulder-strewn beach that would afford no protection to his quarry. It was time to end this. “Can you take the helm again?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Watch for my signal, then ease back on the throttle. Be prepared to turn. I’ll point which way.”
Unlike before he didn’t wait to see if she was comfortable at the controls. He hefted the FN assault rifle and spare magazine and clambered up the length of the boat.
The bow runner was no more than five yards in front of him. He steadied himself against the railing and brought the FN to his shoulder. He fired controlled three-round bursts. When the first bullets slammed into the bow runner’s engine cowling, the driver sheared away, trying to find shallow water close to shore. Juan raised his arm and pointed to port, and Sloane followed his lead. Her turn was a little steep, but she seemed to have a handle on the hydrofoil’s drive characteristics.
As soon as he regained the sight picture he wanted he loosened another three-round burst into the bow runner’s engine. And a third. The driver tried to throw off Cabrillo’s aim but the chairman anticipated every juke and twist and slammed another half dozen bullets into the boat.
The wisp of white smoke that suddenly appeared from under the engine cowling quickly turned into a black cloud. The engine would seize any second, and Juan readied his signal to Sloane for them to slow so they wouldn’t ram the bow runner.
Between the bow lights on the hydrofoil and the ski boat’s dash lights, Cabrillo could just discern the driver’s features when he turned to look back at him. They locked eyes for just an instant but Juan could feel the hatred across the distance like the heat from a fire. Rather than fear, he read defiance in the man’s expression.
The man cranked the wheel hard over. Juan raised his hand to stop Sloane from pursuing because the bow runner was heading directly for the rocky shore. Cabrillo had wanted to take one of the men prisoner from the very start of the chase, but he felt the chance slipping from his grasp. He fired again, raking the ski boat’s stern, not sure of what he was hitting because of the smoke, but desperate to prevent what he knew the driver intended.
The bow runner had picked up most of the speed it had lost in the turn when it was still twenty feet from the coast. The engine’s shriek stuttered for a moment, but it was too late. The boat hit the shoaling bottom at thirty-plus knots and shot out of the water like a javelin. It arced high through the night air before nosing into the ground and came apart as if a bomb had gone off inside its fiberglass shell. The hull splintered into hundreds of pieces and her engine was torn from its mount as the craft cartwheeled up the beach. The impact burst the fuel tank and the gasoline became an aerosol cloud. The body of the driver was flung twenty feet before the fuel/air mixture detonated into a mushrooming fireball that consumed what remained of the ski boat.
Sloane had had the presence of mind to ease the hydrofoil off plane then slow it to a crawl by the time Juan had scurried back to the cockpit. He double-checked that the FN-FAL was safe and set it back on the dash. After raising the retractable foils he eased the boat as close to the wreckage as he could, idled the engine, and dropped the small anchor.
“He killed himself, didn’t he?”
Cabrillo couldn’t take his eyes off the burning boat. “Yup.”
“What does that mean?”
He glanced at her as he processed her question and all the implications his answer meant. “He knew we weren’t the authorities, so he was willing to die rather than risk capture and interrogation. It means we’re dealing with fanatics.”
“Like Muslim fundamentalists?”
“I don’t think he was an Arab jihadi. This is something else.”
“But what?”
Juan didn’t reply because he had no answer. His clothes were still drenched from his earlier swim, so he simply stepped off the back of the hydrofoil and into water that came up to his neck. He was almost to shore when he heard Sloane hit the water behind him. He waited for her at the surf line and together they approached the body. There was no sense checking out the boat since all that remained was melted fiberglass and scorched metal.
The damage done to the corpse by the impact and subsequent roll up the beach was horrifying. Like the vision of a demented artist, his neck and every limb were set at obtuse angles. Cabrillo checked there was no pulse before slipping the Glock into the waistband of his pants. There was nothing in the man’s rear pockets so Juan rolled the corpse, shaken by the boneless way the body moved. The man’s face was severely abraded.
Sloane gasped.
“Sorry,” Juan said. “You might want to stand back.”
“No, it’s not that. I know him. That’s the South African chopper pilot Tony and I hired. His name’s Pieter DeWitt. Damn, how could I be so stupid? He knew we were going to investigate Papa Heinrick’s snakes because I told him. He sent that boat to follow us yesterday and then came here to make sure no one ever questioned the old man again.”
The repercussions of her presence in Namibia hit Sloane fast and hard. She looked like she was about to be ill. “If I hadn’t come here looking for the Rove Papa Heinrick would still be alive.” Her eyes were wet when she looked at Juan. “Luka, our guide, I bet they’ve already killed him, too. Oh God, what about Tony?”
Cabrillo knew intuitively that she didn’t want to be hugged nor did she want him to speak. They stood in the night as the ski boat burned and Sloane cried.
“They were totally innocent,” she sobbed, “and now they’re all dead and it’s my fault.”
How many times had Juan felt the same way, taking responsibility for the actions of others just because he was involved? Sloane was no more at fault for Papa Heinrick’s death than the wife who asked her husband to run an errand was responsible if he’s killed en route. But God how that guilt was there, corroding the soul as surely as acid eats away steel.
The tears flowed for five minutes, maybe longer. Juan stood at her side with his head bowed and only looked at her when
she sniffled back the last of it.
“Thank you,” she muttered softly.
“For what?”
“Most men hate to see a woman crying and will do or say anything to make it stop.”
He gave her his warmest smile. “I hate it as much as the next guy, but I also knew if you didn’t do it now you’d just do it later and it would be a hell of a lot worse.”
“That’s why I thanked you. You understood.”
“I’ve been there a few times myself. Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“But you do know you’re not responsible, right?”
“I know. They would be alive if I hadn’t come but I didn’t kill them.”
“That’s right. You’re just one link in the chain of events that led to their murders. You’re probably right about your guide, but don’t worry about Tony. No one onshore knows that the attack against you failed. They already think you and Tony are dead. But to be on the safe side we’ll head for Walvis. The Pinguin didn’t look like she had the speed to reach her home port yet. If we hurry we can warn them off.”
Sloane wiped at her face with the sleeve of her Windbreaker. “Do you really think so?”
“Yeah, I do. Come on.”
Thirty seconds after clambering aboard the hydrofoil, Juan had them rocketing down the bay while Sloane changed into dry clothing from the craft’s stores. She took the wheel while Cabrillo changed and broke out some rations.
“Sorry, all I have are MREs,” he said, holding up two brown foil packets. “It’s either spaghetti with meatballs or chicken and biscuits.”
“I’ll take the spaghetti and give you the meatballs. I’m a vegetarian.”
“Really?”
“Why do you look so surprised?”
“I don’t know. I always picture vegetarians wearing Birkenstocks and living on organic farms.”
“Those are vegans. In my opinion they’re extremists.”
Her statement got Juan thinking about fanaticism and what drove people to it. Religion was the first thing that sprang to mind, but what else were people so passionate about they would mold their entire lives around it? The environmental and animal rights movements were the next groups he considered. Activists were willing to break into laboratories to release research animals or burn subdivisions at ski resorts to get their message across. Were some willing to kill for it, too?
Skeleton Coast Page 17
