Al threw the gun. It sailed through the air and plopped into the ocean behind the boat with a scarcely audible splash.
‘Come upstairs, real slow, hands on your head,’ Dave told him, and backed up to the pilot’s chair.
Al did what he was told. But at the very next minute, just as he reached the top of the stairs, the boat began to rock violently, as if the sea had been stirred by some sudden typhoon, or maelstrom. Dave collapsed back into the chair and, glancing down at Apelco, saw the outline of something large on the screen. He knew by the speed of its ascent that this was no shoal of fish or some marine leviathan. He recognized the electronic signature of a submarine when he saw one. But by then the sub was already surfacing, less than fifty yards from the Britannia’s bows. And Al was scrambling across the deck toward him, knife at the ready, a murderous expression swiped across his big ugly face.
Dave turned toward Al, the shotgun pointed squarely at his barrel-like body. He could have shot him. Could have blown his head clean off. Al knew that, but he was gambling on Dave’s lack of guts, as he saw it, for any more killing. He hardly expected that at the last second Dave would take hold of the gun barrel and swing the Mossberg round like a baseball bat against his head. The stock struck Al’s skull with a loud thwack, like someone knocking once and loudly on a wooden door, and Al collapsed onto the deck at Dave’s feet.
Most men would have been knocked insensible. Al merely lay there groaning for a minute, time enough for Dave to snatch away his knife and throw it over the side, backing further away as Al sat slowly up. He rubbed his head furiously, focusing on the shotgun and then on the conning tower now looming over them.
‘Well, there’s no need to take this so personally. Get us out of here for Chrissakes,’ he complained. ‘Whoever they are, they don’t mean to ask for directions. We can still make a run for it.’
‘Where do you suggest we go?’
‘Anywhere but here.’
Dave turned off the engines.
‘What are you, nuts?’ demanded Al. ‘This little misunderstanding you and I just had. It don’t mean that we have to go jail for it. Come on, will ya? They can’t chase a motor yacht like this.’
Dave shook his head and said, ‘You can’t outrun a submarine, Al. Quite apart from the two-inch gun on the conning tower, they have these things called torpedoes. We’d be a sitting duck.’
A figure now appeared on the submarine’s conning tower and, speaking English in a thick foreign accent, addressed them through a loud-hailer.
‘Britannia. Prepare to be boarded. Prepare to be boarded.’
Other figures appeared on the hull and, within a minute, an inflatable carrying several sailors was bobbing its way across the short stretch of water that separated the boat from the sub. Dave threw the shotgun into the sea, just in case Al was tempted to grab it and try something stupid.
It was then that he saw another boat racing toward them. Checking through the binoculars, he saw that it was a some kind of performance yacht. Right away he guessed it must have come from the Duke.
‘Kate,’ he said wearily. ‘That’s all I need.’
‘Now we’ve got him,’ she crowed.
‘It looks like Ross must have got into the radio room after all,’ yelled Jellicoe.
Kate said, ‘Either that, or the French decided to go after them on their own account.’
Calgary Stanford turned down the volume of the boat’s CD, and said, ‘I did a movie about a sub once. I was the intuitive sonarman, following a hunch. Course I was just a bit player back then.’
‘Or maybe they tried to radio us themselves and, when they got no answer, they figured something was wrong,’ Kate continued.
Stanford wasn’t listening. ‘And it wasn’t a real sub at all,’ he said. ‘Just something they mocked up on the lot at Paramount.’
‘The silent service, eh?’ remarked Jellicoe. ‘Never fancied being in subs, myself. Banged up for all that length of time. A bit like being in prison, I’d have thought.’
‘That’s exactly where those two shit-heads are headed,’ said Kate, and throttled back the Predator’s engines. ‘A sub will seem like the Plaza Hotel by comparison with where they’re going. With twenty million dollars’ worth of coke on board, they’ll be lucky to get away with twenty years. A million bucks a year.’
Jellicoe and Stanford exchanged a what-a-bitch kind of glance.
‘Don’t fuck with the FBI,’ whistled Stanford. ‘I’ll try and remember that, ma’am.’
‘Absolutely fucking right,’ snarled Kate. But even as she said it, she knew she was trying hard to convince herself that she wanted to see Dave locked away for the better part of his adult life. Whatever he had done she loved him and, what was more, she wanted to believe that he loved her. But all that was too late now. There was nothing she could do, except her duty. With Captain Jellicoe on the scene, not to mention the French Navy, she could hardly walk away from this. Her feelings in the matter were of little account here. Dave was going back to prison, and that was where her duty lay. Even so, she half hoped that the captain of the French boat, whose men were already boarding the Britannia, would dispute her jurisdiction and lock Dave and Al in his submarine’s brig — or whatever it was they called their lock-up. More work for the DA’s office when it came to getting them extradited, but a lot easier for her.
Kate steered Stanford’s boat alongside the Britannia and Jellicoe threw a line to one of the sub’s sailors, while Stanford put out fenders to protect his paintwork. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Dave standing beside Al on the aft deck watching her, but she did not look back at him.
‘You guys wait here,’ she told Jellicoe and Stanford, and trying not to look triumphant, she climbed aboard the Britannia, curtly declining the helping hand that was offered to her by one of the sailors.
Dave and Al were covered by a sailor with a machine pistol and, in the absence of her FBI identity card and badge, Kate had brought Stanford’s Glock automatic to help establish her authority. From what she had heard of Frenchmen they were notoriously sexist. She figured it would be a lot harder for them to patronize a woman with a gun in her hand. She looked around for someone who seemed like he was in charge. Then, in her halting French, and still avoiding Dave’s twinkling eye, she identified herself and requested to speak to the officer in charge.
To her surprise and annoyance, one of the sailors laughed. A swarthy, handsome man, with a thick mustache, and wearing a blue boilersuit, he said, ‘Please, there is no need for you to try to speak French. I speak excellent English. Agent Furey, did you say you were called?’
Kate nodded and tried to control her irritation. The French. Even when you tried to speak their language they treated you with contempt. It made you wonder why people bothered to learn it in the first place.
‘I lived in New York for many years,’ explained the man with the flourishing mustache. ‘A dirty city, but also interesting.’
‘And you are, sir?’
‘I am Captain Lieutenant Eugene Luzhin, the executive officer on board,’ he said smoothly, and took a packet of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his boilersuit. ‘Do you mind if I smoke? Only it is forbidden when we’re on board the missile boat, and most of us are now desperate to get some fresh nicotine into our lungs. It’s been a week or two since we last surfaced.’
He did not wait for an answer, and nodded to his men, who took out their own cigarettes and began to light up. Even the man with the machine pistol. Luzhin did not offer Kate a cigarette, for which she was glad. Diplomacy might have meant she would have had to take it, and French cigarettes were too strong for her. These were as pungent as any she had ever encountered. It was small wonder that Frenchmen sounded so gravelly and sexy.