They went up hand over hand, stepping first on the inflatable’s nose as it rode up, then either jumping up to grab the deck edge and haul themselves up and over bodily or else walking up the line from the grapnel. The deck was only about ten feet above the water, but it took muscle to pull yourself straight up burdened with weapon and gear and ammunition and wet clothes and boots and, of course, the damn flotation vests they didn’t dare leave behind. He rolled into the shelter of a cathead, whipped the barrel around, and scanned the afterdeck. Through the missing windows a chromed wheel in the empty pilothouse rotated slowly.
Crack Man jumped out and fired a full clip down into it, from the hip. From the far side Cassidy, recovered, it seemed, was firing into the far window, both angling down, so they wouldn’t shoot each other.
Marchetti rolled over and lurched up, sprinting as hard as he could down the port side. One of the crew lay there, blood running into the scuppers, a smashed Kalashnikov beside him. Marty vaulted over him and fetched up beside the pilothouse. He and Cassidy looked down the glass-littered stairs.
The ensign started to move, but Marty had him by a quarter second and went down first, blasting blind ahead of him as he went, the shells chucking out as he worked the pump.
The wheelhouse smelled of paint and fish and diesel oil. There was nobody there. He was about to take another ladder down when a horn began. The RHIB’s horn. One, two, three stuttering blasts.
He glanced out to see the seawall looming.
They hit with a crashing crunching impact into solid concrete and stone. Every piece of glass still in the frames shattered and fell. Horrible sounds came from below, as if heavy machinery was rotating fast while winding steel cable around itself. Shrieking and complaining, tearing itself into pieces.
Heads came into view over the bow and he jerked the Mossy up, almost blasting them through the empty windows before he realized they wore black assault gear and black helmets and carried submachine guns.
As lines rattled across, he wanted to pull his head into his shoulders and his dick into his groin, waiting for the explosion. They’d run full tilt into the seawall and were probably going down. Any sane man would get off before whatever was down there sent them all to Cloud Nine.
Instead, he grabbed the overhead and swung down the steps, boots crunching glass and slipping on cartridges, most empty but some still bulleted, still live. But he just kept going, and as his eyes adapted he made out an opening leading down and forward. The engine-eating-itself sound was coming from there, and he followed it, but had to reverse himself first and back down a ladder. His hand went for his flashlight and grabbed air, a lanyard keeper dangling with nothing at the end of it. He didn’t know when he’d lost the Maglite, but he wished he hadn’t. The interior was black.
A shot sledgehammered steel by his head. He twisted and fired into the dark. Something hit his chest, hard, like an iron ram with a sharp point swung abruptly into his breastbone. He saw stars and flashes, but kept pumping and firing and someone was firing back and he pumped and fired till the striker clicked empty but the answering flashes stopped and he heard someone scrambling away on hands and knees, crying or praying in a foreign-sounding whine.
Someone came down the ladder with a light, and he reloaded, thumbing shells into the mag, keeping his eyes where the muttering whimper had disappeared. Then grabbed the Maglite out of whoever’s hands and went forward, feeling like it was blood or semen instant after instant of time itself being squeezed out of him.
The beam lit up a cavernous hold, bigger than he’d have thought, seeing the dhow from outside. One side was bagged solid with heavy-looking sacks. The air was thick with the lime smell of wet concrete and old fish and the sharp coppery tang of blood. On the other side, blue polyethylene drums like the ones chemicals came in. He reached out to thump one, then thought better of that. He was used to seeing holds loaded symmetrically, with careful dunnage between cargo.
There was none here, as if this voyage would only be a little distance in calm water.
He slid among them hastily but quietly, following the flash beam with his shotgun. Left hand clamped to the fore end, beam aligned with the bore. The flutter-roar of the helicopter from the far side of metal, the metallic tone of a bullhorn, the scrape and lurch and boom of a rock incisor gnawing along the outer hull.
The spotlight wavered on a square case with green wires coming out of it. He caught his breath. Each step took an age.
