“Which boat?”
It was a fair question; there were two white fifteen-foot tenders, positioned on winches next to each other, but Court figured the first door that opened and the first boat that popped out would be the right one to get into.
The starboard-side garage door began to rise, so Court pointed to the starboard-side tender.
“That one!”
A shotgun boomed from the open hatch above the ladderway, and Zoya fired her pistol back up at whoever was firing down from the lower deck. A body fell through the ladderway to the floor, and an HK submachine gun fell with it. Zoya stepped closer to the hatch in the ceiling to retrieve the weapon, holding her pistol on the opening, but as she reached for the HK a shotgun boomed again above and Zoya lurched back into the tender garage and dropped her pistol on the floor.
As Court spun away from the control panel, Zoya fell onto her back, just feet away from him.
He could see the blood splatter on the deck next to her body.
“Zoya!” Court sprinted the ten feet to her, sliding on his back past her body and firing his pistol straight up at the hatch above. A man leaned his twelve-gauge down into the ladderway and started to pull the trigger without looking.
Court could only see the weapon; he had no target to shoot at.
He also had no time. The shotgun blast straight down through the hatch was certain to hit him here, lying on the floor and looking up at the barrel of the weapon. Court adjusted his aim and squeezed off a single round.
His 9-millimeter bullet struck the steel hatch door, ricocheted at forty-five degrees, and nailed the hidden man holding the shotgun right in the forehead, knocking him back before he could pull the trigger.
The first Court saw of his target was when the man fell half through the hatch and dropped the shotgun from his dead hand, and his head and torso hung down across from the ladder.
Blood drained from a hole in his forehead at his scalp.
Court caught the pistol-grip pump shotgun as it fell, then rolled over and stood up. He grabbed Zoya by the collar of her black crewmember shirt and pulled her out of the line of fire, just as a pistol began firing blindly down the ladderway.
Blood smeared the deck below her.
He lifted her up, then rushed to put her into the tender with Fan, which was still on the winch and just now moving out of the garage and towards the black water.
“I’m okay,” she said, but Court took his hand away from behind her back and felt the blood there.
“Just hang on!” he said, but she immediately rolled over and started crawling for the helm.
He spun away from her when he sensed movement at the ladder. He got his gun up in time to see the dead Thai man with the shotgun fall the rest of the way down the ladderway into the tender garage.
The boat hung fully outside at the starboard-side waterline now; Court slammed his hand down on the winch release button, and it dropped into the water. Another weapon fired down into the tender garage through the ladderway; Court fired up as he ran past, then leapt off the yacht and over the gunwale of the tender just as Zoya fired up the boat’s engine and jammed the throttle all the way forward.
Court knew they weren’t out of danger by any stretch, because he was sure there would be armed men on the decks above, well aware that the tender was about to come into view. He pushed Fan down to the deck of the tender, lay on his back on top of the smaller man, shouldered the submachine gun, and looked through its ghost ring sight. Just as the bridge deck above came into view, he opened fire on a man there with a rifle in his arms.
Court shot the man with a burst of 9-millimeter rounds.
A second target showed itself when an Asian wearing a white silk shirt blasted off rounds from a handgun on the upper deck, and Court raked return fire in the man’s direction, sending him and the men around him diving to cover inside the salon.
Zoya was getting everything possible out of the engine of the tender; the boat was banging up and down on the gentle waves already, and Court found it hard to aim. He fired short bursts of suppressive fire at the upper decks now, doing all he could to keep heads down while they made their escape.
He knew he’d be out of ammunition in a few more rounds, but he kept it up until the HK went dry.
“Get off me!” Fan shouted from below.
The tender was far from the lights of the yacht, so Court threw the machine pistol over the side, crawled off Fan, and made his way up to the helm.
Zoya was bleeding heavily from her right shoulder; her black shirt was torn in two places there, but instantly a wave of relief washed over Court. He found entry and exit wounds of two big shotgun pellets, both above her collarbone, but they hadn’t hit any major blood vessels or arteries.
She called back to him, “Did I get shot?”
“You weren’t bleeding when we got here,” Court joked, and she smiled. “In and out, no big deal.”
“Damn,” she said. “More scars.” Then, “How’s Fan?”
Court turned around to check on the man he’d come all the way around the world and fought a half dozen different organizations to find. Fan had thrown up on the floor of the tender, but Court just patted him on the back. “You okay, brother?”
“I am okay,” he said, and then he looked up at Court. “Brother. Thank you.”
Zoya called back to Court now. “You know, we never talked about where we would go after we got him. I guess we didn’t really think we’d do it.”
Court made his way back to her. “The three of us need to find a place to put the boat in, someplace where we can get a taxi, a pharmacy, and a hotel. In that order, preferably.”
They landed at Patong Beach at one forty-five a.m., then walked away from the tender and up a beach road. They squeezed into a tuk-tuk returning from taking drunk vacationers from a bar back to their resort, and the driver took them to a pharmacy that was open all night. Court bought everything he needed to tend to a gunshot wound and was surprised to find that the pharmacist would also sell him narcotic pain medicine over-the-counter. Zoya insisted she didn’t need anything, but Court told her he’d been sutured up without anesthesia once himself, and he promised her that the pain from the wound itself paled in comparison to the procedure needed to close up the holes.
Finally she relented, Court bought the drugs, and he also picked up a six-pack of beer for himself and Fan to split while Zoya slept it off. He then grabbed a mobile phone, some packaged food, and several bottles of water.
After another twenty minutes in the tuk-tuk they were taken to a jungle guesthouse a couple of miles inland, and here they made their way through a few drunk or stoned young backpackers to the front desk, where the three of them got a room with two double beds and a bathroom.
By four a.m. Court had Zoya’s wound professionally bandaged; she slept on one of the beds in the dumpy little hostel while Court and Fan stepped outside, Fan still in the simple cotton T-shirt and cotton warm-up pants given to him by the Chamroon group, and Court still wearing the filthy blue coveralls he’d taken from the engineer on the Medusa.
For ten minutes or so Fan told Court everything that had happened to him since the moment Court dove backwards off the boat in the Cambodian river. Clearly Fan was still pissed about being left behind, but Court hadn’t second-guessed that move once in the past week.
When Fan finished relaying his story, filling in some answers Court knew he would need in the next few minutes, the young Asian man sat on a bench by the front door of the still and quiet guesthouse. Fan wasn’t particularly tired; he hadn’t been hanging off cliff faces and battling teams of trained killers like the two Westerners with him, but he’d rather be in bed inside than out here swatting bugs.