She heard it hit, heard a few intakes of breath, but didn't hear it bounce before the deck beneath her slammed up, the skylight flipped back on a cloud of bright mist and smashed, and a noise like planets colliding boxed her ears like an angry school bully.
She lay waiting. Her ears were singing again, ringing with their own tired noise. She unholstered the Colt, heaved herself up, looked into the cabin beneath through the smoke, and couldn't see very much. She levered herself up further, stuck her head and gun, then her head and gun and upper torso in through the gap, took a look round, and decided they were all dead or very close to it. She let a little more of the smoke clear, listening as best she could, watching the bridge and the sides of the superstructure at main deck level.
Then she swung in through the skylight, on to the table. It had been blown almost in two; strips of brown laminate sticking up like obstreperous licks of hair. She had to swing her feet to make sure she landed close to the bulkhead so that what was left of the table would take her weight. She dropped down, through the stinging smoke. Her loosely booted feet grated on grenade shards and scattered playing cards. One of the men moved and groaned. She wanted to use the knife but somehow couldn't, so put the gun to his head and fired. She did the same with the other three, though only one other showed any signs of life. Blood was making the floor sticky, glueing the cards to the deck.
Incredibly, the joint was still alight and almost intact, burning a brown mark in a shrapnel-punctured plastic seat. She knocked the end of the tip off it where a little black bit of plastic hung, and took a toke. It still tasted bad so she ground it out under one heel. It sizzled.
She sauntered from the cabin, amazed nobody had come, and only then started to think that perhaps they were all dead.
Still she didn't believe it, and searched the entire ship. She found their SAMs and their plastique charges, in the chartroom off the bridge, looked again at Sucre, swathed in black and white, spike like a cupid's arrow in his unmoving chest, found the bloodstains on the bed in the cabin she'd been in briefly with Orrick (but could not find the body of the man Orrick had killed), found the three dead radio operators and the dead radio equipment (she tried to make it work, but couldn't even get the jamming signal; empty fuse cradles mocked her), looked again into the TV lounge where they'd raped her, and braved the shadowy depths of the main saloon, where the bodies still lay heaped and spread and she couldn't bear to turn on the light for fear of seeing one of them. She felt for the heavy machine-gun, needing both hands, and lifted a metal box full of ammunition. She left the gun lying in the corridor outside, then retraced her steps to the engineering workshop where the first one to die had spread his blood through his head over half the deck under the gleaming, businesslike benches.
An hour after she'd freed herself she was back on the bridge after a tour of the bows, where the soldier she'd poleaxed was making a fuss in the chain locker. She'd turned the bridge lights to red on her first visit, and strode through the blood-coloured gloom to the winch/anchor console. She tapped one finger against her lips as she inspected the controls, then reached out and flicked a switch. The starboard anchor dropped to the lake and splashed. Its chain rattled massively after it, links whipping through the chain locker where the soldier was.
The rasp of falling chain drowned the man's scream, though it must have been short anyway. If she'd waited till dawn, she thought, she'd have seen him exit through the eye of the anchor port in a red spray, but she shivered at the thought of his blood spreading over the surface of the lake. The anchor chain's thunder sounded through the ship, making the deck beneath her tremble. Unbraked, the chain kept on spilling out under its own weight. There was a boom as it stopped; she couldn't tell whether it parted or held. She rubbed one of her breasts absently, grimacing slightly when she touched one of the places where they'd burned her, and reflected that revenge could taste remarkably bland when you'd stopped feeling.
Hisako Onoda came to the conclusion there was almost certainly nobody left to kill on the Nadia. She decided to go and see Mr Dandridge, who deserved a visit like nobody else did.
It was all still hopeless, she knew, but this was better than doing nothing.
The crumpled black Gemini Orrick had knifed lay draped over one end of the pontoon. She looked at one of its bulky silenced engines, worked out how to take it off and dragged it over to where the Nadia's own inflatable lay moored. She stuck the military engine's prop in the water, pushed the starter. The engine trembled, rumbled; even idling, the prop tried to push itself under the pontoon. She switched the outboard off, unbolted the Evinrude from the sternplate of the Nadia's Gemini and let it slip into the black waters. She replaced it with the big military engine, working by the light from the ship above, and sweating with the effort, arms aching. The pontoon was on the near side of the ship to the other two vessels. She had the walkie-talkie switched on, and was vaguely surprised it had stayed silent; it seemed nobody had heard or seen anything on the other two ships. As she worked she waited for gunfire, or the radio to rattle off some incomprehensible Spanish at her, but — in that perverse sense — waited in vain.
It took her two trips to bring all the weaponry down to the boat. She topped up the outboard fuel tank with one of the jerry cans on the pontoon, then stowed that with the missile launchers and explosives in the bottom of the inflatable and restarted the engine.
She pushed the Gemini away from the pontoon. The inflatable purred off into the night, taking a curving course towards the bulky rectangular shape of the Nakodo.
Her mother kept a scrapbook. It glossed over the time she was in hospital. Sometimes when she was home she would look through the scrapbook when her mother wasn't there. The pages flipped through her fingers; the glued-in programmes with her name in them, the cuttings from papers mentioning her individually, a few cassette inserts, some magazine interviews and features, and as the pages slipped and sped and fell through her hands she thought that the times the heavy pages covered had themselves gone just as fast, just as suddenly and inevitably.
The years mounted up, like a sentence. She played, and her modest fame grew. She tried a few more times to board a plane, from single-engine Cessnas to 747 s, but could not ever suffer the doors to be closed. She got as far as Okinawa for a couple of holidays, and went to Korea for the Olympics and a few concerts, but pressure of work stopped her from making sea journeys that lasted any longer. There was talk once, by a Greek ship owner impressed with her playing, of her string quartet playing on board a luxury cruise ship for anything up to a year; state rooms, good money, and a world cruise… but she visited one of the cruise ships in Yokohama and decided she didn't much like the people, the decor or the idea of being expected to play the safe, predictable music that seemed to be expected of her. So it came to nothing.
She grew to know Japan well; the places she didn't go to with the orchestra she visited alone, on her frequent vacations. Mr Moriya fretted that she wasn't maximising her potential, which she took to mean making all the money she could, but then she scarcely knew what to do with what she did have. She paid off the loan on the Stradivarius, bought a house in the hills above Kamakura, which cost a fortune, and had long since paid the loan on her mother's little apartment, but she didn't know what else to do. Driving didn't interest her; she always had a small Ronda, but hated the crowded roads and was always relieved to get out of the machine. She felt awkward and conspicuous in very expensive clothes, and couldn't see the point of jewellery you worried about. She saved, for want of anything better to do, and thought vaguely about founding a school in her later years.