“They’ll have an automatic fire extinguisher in the engine bay,” Stone said.
“Then why aren’t they using it?” Dino asked.
“Maybe it went off, but it didn’t do the job.” Two men ran from cover and tried to open the engine cover but failed.
Dino drove them away from the engine cover with a couple of well-placed rounds. A man came out of the wheelhouse holding a sinister-looking rifle with a scope and a silencer and held it to his shoulder.
Dino racked his Winchester and shot him, knocking him backward onto the deck of the trawler.
“Good shot, Dino!” Stone yelled, firing a couple of rounds with his own weapon. “That ought to keep their heads down.”
The shooter aboard the trawler struggled to his feet and rested the barrel of his rifle on the wheelhouse. Dino put a round into the wooden railing next to him, and he ducked. “I think we have an advantage in height here,” Dino said.
Then, from the trawler, came the roar of the engine, and even more smoke poured out of the hatch, which the crew had finally torn off.
Dino and Stone emptied their weapons into the cockpit of the trawler.
Stone looked around. “Where’s the ammo?”
“Oh, shit, I left it on the upper deck when we climbed into the whaler.”
“Well, we’re both out,” Stone said. “Does that give you any ideas?”
Dino jumped over the side of the whaler, retrieved the bag holding the ammunition, and tossed it into the whaler, then jumped back in. He opened a box of cartridges, and they both started loading them into the Winchesters’ magazines. The windshield on the whaler exploded, showering them with glass fragments.
“I guess they forgot to make that bulletproof, huh?” Dino said.
Stone looked up again, and the trawler was on the move once more. “Stand by to repel boarders!” he said.
The trawler was twenty-five yards out and aiming to come alongside Breeze.
Stone and Dino fired more rounds into the trawler’s cockpit and into the wheelhouse windshield, which crazed but didn’t shatter.
The trawler, amazingly, hadn’t slowed and was making a good five knots toward the yacht.
“Shit,” Stone said, “they don’t have any control of the power. They’re going to ram us. Brace for it!” They held on to whatever they could find.
57
The trawler had stopped, but it was a good four or five feet from the yacht. Engine-starting noises were coming from the craft.
Dino was pouring rounds into the wheelhouse and the deck, and when he ran out, he grabbed Stone’s rifle and began firing his rounds, too.
Stone heard the trawler’s engine restart, and the boat began to move forward.
“He’s having steering problems!” Dino shouted.
In desperation, Stone grabbed the shopping bag, opened the flap on the bomb, and pressed the button. “Ten, nine, eight, seven...” he counted. Then he stood up, grabbed the handles of the shopping bag, swung his arm, and tossed the bag, underhand, at the boat. There was too much smoke coming out of the engine bay to see where the bomb had landed, or even if it had hit the boat.
“Let’s get out of here!” Stone shouted, vaulting over the whaler’s rail and onto Breeze’s upper deck. “Four seconds left.”
Dino was gathering both rifles and the ammo bag and tossing them at Stone.
“Get out of there, Dino!” Stone shouted. “Two seconds!”
Dino landed near Stone, and they both ran across the upper deck and threw themselves, facedown, onto the teak, covering their heads as best they could.
Nothing happened.
“What the hell?” Stone yelled at Dino. “It didn’t go off!”
“How should I know?” Dino yelled back. “Vanessa and you armed the thing!”
“I pressed the button, and it was supposed to give us ten seconds.”
“Maybe you threw long, and it went overboard.” Dino pointed. “Look!”
Stone sat up and saw the trawler’s stern as it passed Breeze’s bow. “It’s still underway, and with no steerage!”
The two of them struggled to their feet and looked down the channel.
“I don’t understand,” Stone said.
Then he understood. The trawler exploded, apparently from the inside.
“Thar she blows!” Stone shouted.
“She do,” Dino agreed.
Then she blew again.
“Fuel tank,” Stone said.
“Diesel doesn’t explode like that,” Dino said. “They must have a gasoline engine.”
“And they’re welcome to it,” Stone said.
They heard a siren and turned to look aft. A Coast Guard rigid rubber dinghy of about thirty feet was backing out of the sub base and into the channel. A moment later, they were passing Breeze, headed toward the remains of the trawler, which were partly afloat but surrounded by debris and what looked like bodies, or parts of them.
“What the hell was that?” Viv yelled.
Stone turned and saw her coming up the stairs to the top deck, followed closely by Vanessa.
“That was Vanessa’s bomb going off on the trawler, followed by a gasoline explosion.”
Vanessa gave Stone a big kiss. “Did you throw the bomb at them?”
“Yes, and I think it went down the open engine hatch,” Stone said.
“I’m glad I gave you the extra time,” she said.
“What extra time?”
“I reset it to give you thirty seconds, just in case.”
“Ah, that would explain why Stone and I are still alive!” Dino crowed.
“Excuse me, people,” Stone said, “but I think we’re going to have a visit from the Coast Guard very soon. So we should put the yacht in order.”
“What order?” Viv asked.
“Well, you could start by getting those handguns below,” he said, “and well-hidden. Vanessa, that evil bag of yours needs to disappear, too, along with anything inside it or outside it that might be bomb-related. When they come aboard, please let me do all the talking, so we won’t contradict ourselves. Just make positive noises now and then.”
“Okay, pal,” Dino said. “You can screw this up all by yourself.”
58
They were gathered around the dining table aboard Breeze, and as far as Stone could tell, there were present a crusty, fiftyish Coast Guard captain, a young woman who was skipper of the cutter, a couple of Key West police detectives, and two men and a woman in civilian clothes, who could be FBI or some other agency.
Ahead of them, in the channel that ran past the sub base, was a smoldering pile of floating debris that had once been a trawler. All this created a clog in the channel, and there were angry boaters lined up at both ends, waiting to get wherever they were going.
The Coast Guard captain took charge. “All right,” he said, “what the hell happened here?”
Stone raised a finger. “Perhaps I can help.”
“Are you the owner of this yacht?”
“I am one of three partners in her ownership.”
“Go on.”
“We were anchored out at the fort, and I received a call warning that there might be a vessel in the neighborhood that meant us harm, so at daylight we weighed anchor and sailed for, well, right here. Later in the morning we spotted a vessel far in our wake that seemed to be following us.”
“How far in your wake?”
Stone took him through the sequence of events, skipping the part about the bomb he had thrown.
“And you exchanged small-arms fire with the trawler as it approached you?”
“We returned small-arms fire, in fear of our lives. They seemed to have us outgunned.”