by Alex Archer
Provided Hugo didn’t think of the same thing and end up waiting there for her.
She took a deep breath and dived beneath the surface.
She kept one hand on the hull of the ship above her head, using the other to help propel her along toward the rear of the vessel. It wasn’t far—twenty feet at most.
When she felt the dive platform above her head, she slowly surfaced, doing what she could to not make noise as she broke the plane of the water.
The platform was dimly lit but even in the low light she could see that it was empty.
She grabbed it with two hands, pulled her body up and then stood.
Hugo stepped out from behind the rack holding the scuba tanks and put the barrel of his rifle in the center of her forehead.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said.
Annja didn’t hesitate; she moved her head sharply to one side, getting out of the line of fire, and called her sword at the exact same moment, thrusting it forward even as it emerged from the otherwhere.
Hugo’s eyes bulged, his rifle went off and blood poured out of his mouth as three feet of hardened steel punctured his chest just beneath his rib cage, rose diagonally through the body cavity above that point, to emerge from his back just shy of his neckline.
He opened his mouth as if to say something and died.
One down, Annja thought.
She gave a tug, realized she was not going to be getting her sword out that way and simply let it vanish into the otherwhere so that she wouldn’t have to spend precious minutes trying to free it from Hugo’s corpse.
She brought it back immediately. Feeling as if she’d just been reunited with her better half, Annja moved to go in search of the others and then paused.
She looked back at Hugo’s body.
If someone stumbled upon his corpse, it would be immediately obvious that there was an intruder on board, Annja thought. But if he just happened to disappear, they couldn’t be sure.
What the enemy thought they knew was often more dangerous and more beneficial to their opponents than they sometimes realized. If she could get Claire and Marcos doubting what Hugo was up to, she would put them off their game and gain an advantage, even a slight one, when the time came.
To that end Annja opened up the dive locker where all the scuba gear was stored and removed two weight belts. One would probably be enough but no sense taking chances.
She slipped the belts around Hugo’s waist and secured them both. Satisfied, she dragged the corpse over to the diving pool that provided access to the ocean outside the ship through a narrow vertical tunnel kept at positive pressure, then dumped the corpse into it.
As expected, it sank like a stone and quickly disappeared from sight.
She found a bucket and used some water to sluice away the blood from the deck. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a whole sight better than it had been five minutes before. It would have to do.
Satisfied, she turned her attention to locating the other two.
She crept through the lower deck, barely able to hear anything thanks to the proximity of Hugo’s last gunshot. She knew her hearing would come back to her, but she didn’t know how long it would take and without it she felt like a sitting duck. She couldn’t afford to wait it out; she had little doubt that King Tupac would happily slaughter Knowles and any of his team Annja had left behind in retribution for the death of his son.
Annja moved quietly to the middle of the ship, where she found the stairs rising to the next deck. She stopped there, torn with indecision.
Should she continue forward and check the rest of the lower deck, be certain that they weren’t down there, or should she continue up to the next level and hunt there? If she did stay on this level, how would she know if they came down and went aft while she was in the forward compartments? And if that happened, what if...?
Don’t overthink it. Go forward; clear one deck at a time. Make sure you are not leaving the enemy in your wake with the potential to harm you.
She did so without finding anyone and then returned to the stairs. She stood at the base of the steps and listened, straining to hear anything from above, but she was hampered by the fact that her ears were still ringing from the gunshot.
Unable to make out anything beyond the norm, Annja started up the steps.
She reached the middeck and slowed to look forward and then aft. Most of the aft portion was given over to storage rooms and machinery, everything from the machine shop to the bilge-equipment room. Forward, however, were more of the living spaces for the crew and guests—staterooms, labs, the galley and general wardroom.
Marcos seemed the type who hated the trivialities of day-to-day work, so if he was on this deck he’d most likely be forward rather than aft.
So check the aft compartments, cross them off the list and then move forward. Let’s move; time’s wasting.
She did just that, moving through the compartments as quietly as possible so as to not give away her position. She kept waiting for someone to discover some evidence that pointed to her battle with Hugo, but so far no alarm had been raised. It helped that there had only been three of them on the ship to start with, now reduced to two.
When she had checked the aft section of the middeck without finding anyone, she returned to the stairs and headed forward. For all she knew both Claire and Marcos were holed up in the bridge high above the main deck, but she wasn’t going to take the chance of being wrong and allow them to strike at her from behind.
Annja was checking one of the staterooms when she thought she heard something coming from one of the rooms farther along the row. Cautiously, she moved closer.
As she stepped through the door, something came whistling toward her at eye level.
She didn’t wait to see what it was, just let her instincts take over, diving forward, underneath the blow, and somersaulted on landing so that she came back up facing the door she’d just left.
Marcos stood to one side, a thick piece of metal with a vicious-looking steel hook on one end, a kind of makeshift fishing gaffer, in his hand.
It had been the end of that hook that she’d heard whistling toward her head just seconds ago.
When Marcos’s attention shifted for a split second to pulling his hook free from the wall it had sunken into when it had missed her, Annja called her sword to hand and stood ready.
Marcos looked back at her and blinked. “Where you’d get that pigsticker?” he asked, perhaps even genuinely curious as he hadn’t seen her with it just seconds before.
Annja opened her mouth to reply, but Marcos was on her in an instant, trying to use his bigger size to overwhelm her with the sheer ferocity of his attack, his gaff lashing out again and again. Slash and parry, cut and jab. Back and forth they went, neither of them gaining any significant advantage, their weapons ringing every time they came into contact with each other.
They broke apart for a moment, both of them breathing heavily.
Annja tried circling to her right, watching Marcos closely to see if there might be some opening that she could exploit in the midst of their next exchange, but the big warrior had spent too many years in the military to give away a tell like that. He stood his ground, letting her use up her energy while he conserved his own.
Suddenly Marcos exploded toward her, the hook on the end of his gaff swinging in toward Annja’s midsection in a vicious strike.
Annja dropped the point of her sword and met the long, narrow arm of the gaff with the edge of her blade, letting the power behind Marcos’s strike dissipate elsewhere. Even as she did so, she twisted her own weapon around in an arc that was aimed to gut Marcos where he stood.
But the former soldier was already gone by the time the blow had landed, dancing back out of range on nimble feet.
Back and forth they went across the wardroom, blow after blow, twisting and turning, each of them striving to gain the upper hand and deliver the winning blow.
So far neither of them came close.
&n
bsp; Marcos came in again, swinging the gaff, but something about his tactics was different this time and Annja wouldn’t be drawn in so easily. She understood why a moment later when he made a surprise strike with his opposite hand that immediately followed a missed strike with the gaff and a wickedly curved knife narrowly missed her hip.
There was more to his abilities than first appeared, it seemed. She would do well to remember that.
Marcos broke away again, putting some space between them. Annja wasn’t completely surprised—she needed a break, too—but then Marcos turned and ran from the room, disappearing into the maze of rooms beyond.
It was going to take some time to flush him out, especially on her own, and time was something she really couldn’t spare.
Marcos had headed toward the galley and food storage areas, so there were plenty of hiding places up ahead that she was going to need to be watchful for.
At the door through which Marcos had disappeared, she paused to listen. She didn’t hear anything that might give his presence away, so she reached into the room, searching for the light switch.
“Looking for me?” came Marcos’s sarcastic voice in her ear just before he drove his ham-size fist right into the side of her head, concussed only two days before.
Blinding white light filled her senses. Annja’s world spun and she was vaguely aware of someone vomiting nearby. It took her several seconds to realize that someone was her and there wasn’t anything that she could do about it. Her hands were empty, her sword seeming to have vanished back to the otherwhere.
Marcos seized her by the shoulders, lifted her off the ground and smashed her against a wall.
Even through the pain she knew he was coming for her and she tried to push herself up, tried to get to her feet, but her head was screaming, the pain mesmerizing in its ruthlessness, and all she managed to do was a kind of stumbling half crouch. She tried to summon her sword again, tried to will it back into her hand like she’d done so many times before, but the pain was so intense that she couldn’t seem to connect.
This time he grabbed her by the back of her shirt and the waistband of her pants and hurled her across a crowded counter. The sound of metal clanging made her think of her sword again and she tried to call it to hand. She could feel it in the otherwhere, straining to answer her summons, but she was dizzy, and it was like trying to see through cloth, hazy and indistinct.
Had her head injury done something to her? Had it cut off her connection with the sword?
Panic swelled and her hands shuffled fearfully about the countertop, searching for something that she could use to defend herself with as Marcos stalked closer.
“I told you,” he mocked as he came toward her. “Told you that you’d get your own. Now it’s time for you to understand just who’s in charge of this expedition!”
He grabbed her and spun her to face him, which was precisely the kind of targeting she needed. With him directly in front of her, she couldn’t miss.
Her arm came up and the paring knife that she’d scooped up off the counter came thundering down into Marcos’s shoulder.
He howled and then backhanded her across the face, sending her stumbling across the room to the launch’s industrial-size oven.
His blow had either knocked something into place or else the effects of his original strike were finally wearing off, for the pain in her head began subsiding. The thick blanket that had wrapped itself about her senses was fading, and as she stood there, arms braced on the stove, head hanging down, she realized that she could see. Those scratched and bloody things attached to her arms? Those were her hands. And if she could see her hands...
Behind her, she heard a grunt and then a clatter as Marcos pulled the blade from his shoulder and tossed it aside.
“I’m going to make you suffer for that.” He let loose a roar of rage and she could hear him rush toward her.
Not this time....
She stayed where she was, letting him think that nothing had changed, that he was about to vent his fury on a helpless, wounded woman, and then, when he’d committed himself, when he’d generated too much forward momentum to be able to stop, she spun, calling her sword to hand as she did so.
The last thing Marcos saw was the smile on her battered face as her sword appeared, the blade practically humming with eagerness to avenge the wrongs done to her that night.
She had to give him credit—he tried to stop. His mind sent the command to his feet to slow down, turn aside, but his feet never actually received the order because Annja’s blade had already slashed through his neck.
Annja completed the turn, stepping out of the way as she did so, so that she could watch Marcos’s lifeless body slip to the ground.
The only sounds left in the room were the ticking of the clock on the stove and Annja’s breathing.
Annja wiped her blade clean and tossed the bloodied cloth aside when she was finished.
Oh, Claire, come out, come out, wherever you are.
All she could hear was the faint sound of a boat’s engine starting up.
The noise was probably louder than she realized, given the messed-up state of her hearing, but nonetheless it was recognizable to her.
Then it hit her—Claire had just fired the engine on the boat’s launch.
Her mind flashed with possible actions. There was no way she’d make it down three decks and across half the ship in order to stop Claire before they cast off. Nor did she have a long-range weapon—like Hugo’s rifle, which she’d carelessly left behind on the dive platform—that she could bring to bear from a distance. No, this was going to have to be up close and personal, and there was only one way she could think of doing that.
Hopefully it wasn’t too late.
She ran for the stairs to the deck above.
Her feet felt clumsy, infinitely too slow, as she threw herself up the stairs hoping that desire alone would make her get there faster. Fifteen steps in all and then she was out on the open deck, turning, turning, searching for the sound, trying to pinpoint its location....
There!
Starboard side, moving stern to bow.
She raced in that direction, cut across the boat to the other side just in time to see the launch headed forward with Claire at the helm.
Claire was too involved in piloting the boat, something she apparently wasn’t all that accustomed to, to look up to the deck above and see Annja racing along ahead of her, sword in hand.
You are only gonna get one shot at this....
Don’t think, she told herself, just do.
Annja raced forward, stepped up onto the gunwale of the ship and threw herself into space without a thought to the consequences.
39
Her fall lasted mere seconds at most, but to Annja it felt like an eternity as her mind tried to calculate trajectories and relative speeds and weight-mass ratios against landing surfaces.
The simple fact of the matter was that she was either going to hit the boat, which would be good, as that was the end result she was hoping for, or she was going to miss and go for a drink in the ocean blue, leaving herself vulnerable to any number of counterattacks—from getting shot by Claire to being run over by the motor launch.
As she dropped unexpectedly out of the sky, Annja really hoped it was the former.
The launch rushed forward, Claire intent at the helm, and Annja saw that she was going to miss her target. Instead of landing in the launch, she crashed down right in the middle of the forward bow, directly in front of the windshield.
And then she bounced.
The speed and forward motion of the boat sent her body soaring right over Claire, where she stood at the controls. Then like a stone skipping off the surface of a lake, she bounced again....
Her sword flashed out, her hands locked on the hilt and the blade buried itself into the deck of the launch, stopping her dead in her tracks the way an ice ax would stop a climber’s fall.
Annja had a second to breathe in a sigh of relief and then s
he released the sword and rolled away from the center of the boat. Just as she did so, Claire turned and put two shots into the very spot where Annja had been.
The muscles in Annja’s body ached from the abuse she’d put them through, but she didn’t let that stop her as she rolled in the other direction, spoiling Claire’s aim another time as she put three more shots into the teak decking.
When Annja discovered the edge of the boat by crashing against the starboard gunwale, she knew she couldn’t roll any farther. Claire would have her in her sights in seconds and would be anticipating the move to port. Rolling toward starboard would only put her into the sea, something she’d just worked pretty hard to avoid.
As Claire lined up a final shot, Annja grabbed a metal tool chest and flung it forward, smacking Claire hard enough that she let go of the gun. As the boat tipped and met a strong swell, the gun slid and then disappeared somewhere in the stern of the boat near the engine.
Claire threw herself after it.
Oh, no, you don’t, Annja thought and threw herself after Claire.
The two women collided roughly, each trying to gain the upper hand. Claire ended up on top, and she reared back and pummeled Annja with one fist after another.
Annja twisted away. After the beating she’d taken at Marcos’s hands, Annja wasn’t up for a repeat performance.
Now Claire was off balance and on all fours, trying to fight to get back to her feet. And Annja took advantage of the opportunity to land a massive front kick to the underside of Claire’s chin.
The move put Claire flat on her back.
Annja stood over her, hands bunched into fists, waiting for Claire to get up, but the other woman stayed down, unmoving.
Finally! Annja thought.
She stalked over to the stern of the boat, looking for the gun. A sound caught Annja’s attention and she turned, straightening up just in time to take a flying kick with both legs right to the chest.
The momentum of the blow carried Annja over the rear gunwale and she scrambled to grab hold of something, anything, as she toppled backward. Her fingers snatched at the edge of the engine cowling and stopped her slide.
