CHAPTER 6
DARK WATER
The men closest to Dodge’s exposed flank made the first move. Hurricane’s sheer size alone was enough to give the remaining ruffians pause. Marten, confident that the smaller man posed no significant threat, kept his revolver trained on Hurley, but did not fire. Hurricane was truly a bear of a man, and Marten correctly recognized that a wounded and enraged Hurley might do a lot of damage before finally going down.
Dodge had no time to consider any of this. A length of chain came whipping toward his head and he barely had time to throw his duffel bag up to parry the assault. The chain thudded ineffectually against the cloth, but the man’s counterpart moved in from the other side, swinging a length of board adorned with rusty nails.
In the moments before the attack had commenced, Dodge had thought about the fighting techniques he had learned as a young man in Brooklyn. He had never been a brawler, but had been a better than average wrestler and as a budding sportswriter had spent a lot of time at boxing gyms. One lesson came back to him now; always follow a block with a counterattack.
He ignored the man with the club and instead threw all his weight behind the duffel bag. With luggage leading, he slammed into the torso of the chain-wielder and bowled him backward over the gunwale. The African stumbled over the edge and plunged into the river, while Dodge pitched forward onto the sodden deck planks and slid into the bulkhead.
The unexpected turn of events caused a momentary lull in the attack. No one had expected Dodge to offer any sort of resistance, and although the thugs still held three-to-one odds, they now viewed their foes with just a little more caution. A crewman holding a length of pipe moved to back up the other assailant and both men stalked toward Dodge as he scrambled to his feet, his back against the waist high gunwale and his luggage hefted as a shield.
Before the men could coordinate an attack however, a bloodcurdling scream erupted from behind Dodge. He risked a sidelong glance at the crewman he had knocked into the river, and saw the man thrashing in a panic. Then, just as abruptly, he vanished under the surface as if snatched by a submerged hand. Dodge caught a glimpse of something black and scaly swishing in the muddied water, and realized that jumping overboard to escape the attack would be a classic ‘frying pan to fire’ blunder. He didn’t have time to consider other alternatives because the two crewmen chose that moment to charge.
Hurricane’s situation remained a tense standoff. The two crewmen facing him had yet to make their move, despite a torrent of curses from Marten’s mate. The fury of his words was not enough to motivate them to risk the titanic fists of Hurricane Hurley. Despairing of the impasse, the mate charged forward and stabbed his pistol toward the big man’s chest. Hurley’s response caught everyone by surprise.
Hurricane did not unleash his thunderous physical power against his foes, but instead merely tossed his bag at the advancing first mate. The duffel slammed into the extended pistol and deflected the barrel down in the same instant that the man squeezed the trigger. The slug tore a ragged hole in the deck near Hurley’s left boot, but the giant’s stance never wavered. The mate wrestled the smoking firearm back up, but as the barrel came level with his target’s chest, he saw that Hurricane was no longer a defenseless mark.
Faster than the eye could follow, Hurley had unlimbered a pair of guns — to call them ‘pistols’ did not begin to express the size of Hurricane’s firearms of choice — from beneath his bush jacket. The guns were enormous. Although they appeared to be just right for his massive grip, it had to be remembered that, when held by Hurley, a Colt M1911 looked like a ladies pocketbook derringer.
Dodge had written extensively about Hurricane’s hand cannons. The customized semi-automatic pistols had been commissioned and designed by John Moses Browning specifically for Hurley. Patterned after the Howdah pistols — large bore handguns used in India to hunt tigers from the backs of elephants — the guns put the power of a big game rifle into a rapid-fire handheld package; handheld for Hurricane, that is. Most mere mortals had difficulty holding one of the seven-pound hunks of iron on target, and those who managed to pull the trigger were liable for a bone cracking recoil. Each gun held a magazine with six hand-loaded .50 caliber cartridges, likewise custom ordered for Hurley. Only two of the weapons had ever been made and until this moment, Dodge had believed the guns, like so many of the things in the Falcon chronicle, to be an elaborate tall tale.
Marten’s mate didn’t get a very good look at the guns. He saw only the gaping barrels pointed directly at his eyes, and even that was only a brief glance. The pistols thundered simultaneously and the hooligan’s eyes along with everything else above his nose, vanished in a crimson cloud.
One of the rounds continued unimpeded to blast apart one of the upright posts holding up the tin awning, peppering the stunned Marten in a shower of splinters. The sudden pain of wood spurs ripping into his flesh jolted the treacherous skipper into action, and as one corner of the overhang drooped down between himself and Hurley, he dove for cover behind the onboard engine.
Hurricane’s guns spoke again, blasting one of the crewmen dead center in the chest and punching him back under the misshapen awning. The other fellow was marginally luckier. His last minute attempt to remove himself from the line of fire had almost worked; the half-inch slug merely knocked a fist-sized chunk of flesh and bone from his shoulder.
Hurley did not curse the rare off-center shot, but instead brought his guns to bear on the pair of men assailing Dodge. Both thugs had done an abrupt about-face at the first pistol shot and now cowered in place in his sights. He checked his fire, not to mercifully spare their lives, but simply because Dodge was right behind them.
Marten chose that instant to snap off a blind shot that was partially deflected by the collapsed metal awning. The bullet caromed from the corrugated tin and caught one of the crewmen in the jaw, spinning the unfortunate fellow around to send him crashing into Dodge. Hurley answered with a shot that rang the engine cowling like a bell. With his attention diverted, he was a split-second too late to prevent Dodge and the wounded crewman from toppling over the gunwale.
“Dodge!” Hurley holstered his pistols as quickly as he had drawn them and rushed to the edge, but Marten seized the moment to unload his weapon at the big man. Hurricane caught a glimpse of his friend as the dark water swallowed him, but the fusillade forced him back behind the rudimentary cover afforded by the demolished tin shelter.
Dodge managed to suck in a breath before the river closed over his face. For just a moment, all he could think about were the horror stories he had heard of waterborne tropical illnesses, and he clamped his mouth shut to avoid ingesting the murky fluid. Then something brushed against his leg and all concerns about microscopic predators went out the window.
The bump he had felt was the wounded crewman, thrashing in a total panic because he, unlike Dodge, had caught a glimpse of the crocodiles lurking in the marsh at the river’s edge. His hysterics were the wilderness equivalent of a flashing neon sign, and a brace of fifteen-foot long reptiles eased smoothly from their lair and shot toward him like torpedoes.
Dodge willed himself motionless, trying more than anything else to imitate a drifting log. He didn’t know if crocs were that gullible, but he reckoned he stood a better chance by not drawing attention to himself. A moment later, the air in his lungs buoyed him back to the surface. The sight that greeted his mud-streaked eyes was something that would forever haunt his dreams.