Ray hadn’t seen any real action since the fiasco at the Democratic National Convention when that ugly hunchbacked bastard with the buzz-saw hands had gutted him like a fish. It had taken long months of rehabilitation for his fingers and jaw to grow back and the flesh, muscle, sinew, and bone that Mackie Messer had cut apart to knit together again. During his time in the hospital he’d played the battle over and over again in his mind, still losing every time.
Ray heard soft footsteps on the deck behind him, and put up the hood on his black fighting suit before turning to face the Coast Guard captain who commanded the cutter. The fight with Messer had done even less good to Ray’s face than it had to his psyche. Messer had cut off half of Ray’s lower jaw. It had grown back unevenly, giving him a lopsided look that would’ve been comical if it weren’t so damn ugly.
“We’ve spotted the freighter, sir,” the captain said with more disdain than respect. Ray, after all, was only a civilian who had special orders that made him part of this operation. He was an ace, which gave him a certain cachet, but he was an ace who had gotten his ass kicked on national television.
Ray nodded. “Is the boarding squad ready?”
“Yes, sir,” the captain said. He sketched an unenthusiastic salute.
Ray looked back over the Narrows. He didn’t know who had dropped him into the middle of this smuggler interception, but he was grateful for the opportunity. Ray needed action as badly as an addict needed rapture. He could feel his heart already starting to race, the adrenaline coursing through his system as he spotted the target ship in the predawn darkness.
It was a tramp freighter illuminated only by lines of multicolored running lights. Flying the flag of some third-world country whose waters it had never even seen, it lumbered through the choppy waters south of the Narrows like a pregnant fat lady, leaving a spreading slick of waste oil in its wake. It had to be the ship their informant in the Twisted Fists had told them about.
The Twisted Fists were radical joker terrorists whose main targets were anti-joker groups and governments in the Middle East. They were a studly bunch that Ray grudgingly admired. They took no shit from anyone, which was fine with Ray as long as they kept their asses out of America. Running guns to the rebellious jokers holed up on Ellis Island, however, was a definite breach of good sense.
Ray and the boarding crew climbed into the cutter’s launch and silently slipped away. They’d almost reached the freighter when, according to plan, the cutter, put on its full display of lights and Klaxons. The captain hailed the freighter, ordering it to heave to just as they reached its bow.
“Up hooks,” Ray said quietly as the launch bobbed up and down next to the freighter. Two men in the bow stood on wide-braced legs and tossed grappling hooks over the ship’s rail thirty feet above their heads. Both caught on the first try, and Ray went up one of the trailing ropes like a starving monkey up a banana tree. He didn’t wait for the rest of the squad. He couldn’t hold himself back anymore.
Fighting was all that Ray lived for. He didn’t formulate policy or make decisions. He was a weapon, always primed and ready to explode. When pointed in the direction of a foe he’d erupt like a heat-seeking missile aimed at the sun and nothing could deter him from his course.
He hadn’t seen any real action since Messer had cut him so badly. He’d taken part in a raid the Secret Service had conducted on Long Island, but that hadn’t amounted to anything. Supposedly on the trail of hot computer criminals, they’d targeted a small outfit called Jack Stevenson Games that published kids’ role-playing games. Ray was among the agents who’d busted in with guns drawn and warrants flapping to find themselves in a room full of goofballs who had nothing more lethal than twenty-sided dice. The Secret Service had still hauled everything away, computers, files, dice, and all, and then Ray had spent more than a month wading through piles of game manuals filled with crap about dungeons and hit points and saving rolls only to discover that you committed computer crime in these games by rolling dice real well.
But this was the real thing, the first step on the mad to redemption. Ray slipped silently over the rail and crouched on the deck in shadow. It was quiet, but huge pallets laden with tarp-covered bundles of freight blocked Ray’s vision in all directions. There could be an army of Fists lying in ambush among the twelve-foot-high freight bundles, though the only immediately visible men were aft, in the lighted bridgehouse.
So far the timing had been perfect. The Coast Guard had given the warning required by law and the assault team had gained the freighter’s deck without opposition. Now to see if the tub was carrying guns like their undercover man claimed, or just a shitload of cheap South Korean VCRs.
Ray gestured silently to the men who had clambered up the ropes after him. They dispersed, some heading aft to take control of the bridge, others following Ray among the freight toward the hatches leading down into the hold.
The central hatch swung open before they could reach it and a squat figure climbed out onto the deck and peered around in the darkness. A spotlight from the cutter speared him and he shrank back and threw up two pairs of arms to shield his eye.
It was a joker, Ray thought, and a damn ugly one, with half a dozen pairs of arms spouting from his rib cage and a huge central eye right smack over the bridge of his nose. But the fact that the freighter had a joker crewman meant nothing. It wasn’t illegal to be a joker. Not yet, anyway.
The joker squinted in the glare and screamed in a high-pitched whine that seemed inappropriate for his powerful-looking body. His lowest pair of arms brought up an assault rifle that had been dangling on a shoulder strap and he triggered a burst in the general direction of the Coast Guard cutter.
Ray’s uneven features split wide in a crazy grin. “Put down your weapon!” he shouted. “You’re under arrest!”
The joker whirled, his huge eye blinking blindly as he stared into the darkness where Ray stood. He fired at the sound of Ray’s voice, but Ray had already moved. The joker’s fusillade whined harmlessly over the freighter’s rail, and then the solitary gunman was cut down by a barrage of return fire that blew him out of the spotlight’s unmerciful glare.
“Told you to put the gun down,” Ray said. He glanced right and left at the others. Lets try to take the next alive, okay?”
The guardsmen were too disciplined to grumble, but Ray could almost feel their sarcastic glances. These men knew Ray’s reputation as a brutal brawler, and here he was chewing them out for taking out an armed and dangerous smuggler. They thought, maybe, that he’d gone soft. That Mackie Messer’s vibrating hands had cut something out of him. That the long, painful months in the hospital had leeched out his fire.
But they were wrong. Ray hadn’t gone soft. He just wanted all of the gunrunning bastards for himself.
All the freighter’s lights and alarms were blaring by now, though there was still plenty of shadow left on the deck. The tub’s captain wasn’t following the orders to heave to and kill all engines. He was trying to make a run for it.
That was insane, Ray told himself as he skulked in shadow, making his way silently toward the bridge. They couldn’t expect to hide or receive sanctuary even if by some miracle they eluded the Coast Guard and reached Ellis Island.
Ray heard a whisper of movement in the shadows to his right, and his conscious mind clicked off. He moved without thinking, pivoting on his right foot and ducking low. Something big, flat, and pancake-shaped swooped down from a tarp-covered pile of freight behind him. If it had been the size of a normal human being it would have missed Ray. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t.