Pitt was surprised at the look of hatred that flashed in Boudicca’s eyes. “Maeve is the outcast. She has never been close to the family.”
Pitt grinned, a natural grin, mischievous and challenging. “It’s easy to see why.”
Boudicca stood up, looking even taller due to the heels of her boots, and stared down at Pitt, enraged at the laughter she read in his opaline green eyes. “By the time we close the mine, Maeve and her bastard sons will be gone.” She spun around and glared at Merchant. “Get this scum off my boat,” she said. “I don’t want to see him again.”
“You won’t, Ms. Dorsett,” said Merchant, motioning for Crutcher to push Pitt from the salon. “I promise, this will be your last look at him.”
With Pitt between them and Elmo bringing up the rear, Merchant and Crutcher escorted their captive down the gangway and walked across the dock toward a waiting van. As they passed by the large containers of supplies and equipment that had been off loaded from the cargo ship, the loud exhaust from the diesel engines operating the cranes drowned out a dull thud. Only when Crutcher suddenly crumpled to the planking of the dock did Pitt spin around in a defensive crouch, just in time to see Merchant’s eyes roll up into his head before he dropped like a sack of sand. Several steps behind them, Elmo lay stretched out like a dead man, which he was.
The whole operation hadn’t taken ten seconds from the killing blow to the back of Elmo’s neck to the concussion of John Merchant’s skull.
Mason Broadmoor grabbed Pitt’s arm with his left hand, his right still gripping a massive steel wrench. “Quick, jump!”
Confused, Pitt hesitated. “Jump where?”
“Off the dock, you idiot.”
Pitt needed no further urging. Five running steps and they both flew through the air and landed in the water a few meters in front of the bow of the cargo ship. The ice-cold water shocked every nerve ending in Pitt’s body before his adrenaline took over and he found himself swimming beside Broadmoor.
“Now what?” he gasped, breathing steam over the icy water while shaking the water from his face and hair.
“The watercraft,” answered Broadmoor after snorting water from his nose. “We sneaked them off the fishing boat and hid them under the pier.”
“They were on the boat? I didn’t see them.”
“A hidden compartment I built myself,” Broadmoor said, grinning. “You never know when you’ll need to skip town ahead of the sheriff.” He reached one of the Duo 300 WetJets that were floating beside a concrete piling and climbed aboard. “You know how to ride a watercraft?”
“Like I was born on one,” said Pitt, pulling himself aboard and straddling the seat.
“If we keep the cargo ship between us and the dock, we should be blocked from their line of fire for a good half kilometer.”
They punched the starters, the modified engines roared to life, and with Broadmoor less than a meter in the lead, they burst from under the dock as if shot from a cannon. They stuck the noses of their watercraft in a hard turn and sliced around the bows of the cargo ship, using the hull as a shield. The engines accelerated with no hint of hesitation. Pitt never looked back. He hunched over the handlebars and pressed the trigger throttle to its stop, half expecting a hail of gunfire to pepper the water around him at any second. But their getaway was clean, they were far out of range before the rest of John Merchant’s security team was alerted.
For the second time in nearly as many days, Pitt was making a wild escape from the Dorsett mine for Moresby Island. The water sped past in a blue-green blur. The bright colors and the Haida designs on the watercraft glittered radiantly in the bright sun. Pitt’s senses sharpened at the danger, and his reactions quickened.
From the air the channel between the islands seemed little more than a wide river. But from the surface of the sea, the inviting safety of the trees and rocky hills of Moresby appeared like a speck on the far horizon.
Pitt was awed by the stability of the WetJet’s V-hull and the torque of its modified big-bore, long-stroke engine, which drove the craft with a ferocious low snarl through the low swells with hardly a bounce. Fast, agile, the variable-pitch impeller delivered incredible thrust. These were truly machines with muscle. Pitt couldn’t know with any certainty, but he estimated he was whipping over the sea at close to sixty knots. It was almost like riding a high-performance motorcycle over water.
He jumped Broadmoor’s wake, pulled even until they were hurtling across the water virtually side by side and shouted, “We’ll be dead meat if they come after us!”
“Not to worry!” Broadmoor yelled back. “We can outrun their patrol boats!”
Pitt turned and peered over his shoulder at the rapidly receding island. He cursed under his breath as he spotted the remaining Defender helicopter rising above the mound surrounding the mine. In less than a minute it was sweeping across the channel, taking up the chase and following their wakes.
“We can’t outrun their helicopter,” Pitt informed Broadmoor loudly.
In contrast to a grim-faced Pitt, Mason Broadmoor looked as enthusiastic and bright eyed as a boy warming up for his first track meet. His brown features were flushed with excitement. He stood on the footrests and glanced back at the pursuing aircraft. “The dumb bastards don’t stand a chance,” he said grinning. “Follow in my wake.”
They were rapidly overhauling the homeward-bound fishing fleet, but Broadmoor made a hard turn toward Moresby Island, giving the boats a wide berth. The shore was only a few hundred meters away, and the helicopter had pulled to within a kilometer. Pitt could see waves sluicing and heaving in constant motion as they hurled against the rocks below a shore of steep, jagged cliffs, and he wondered if Broadmoor had a death wish as he aimed his watercraft toward the swirling breakers. Pitt turned his attention from the approaching helicopter and put his faith in the Haida totem carver. He stuck the nose of his watercraft into the rooster tail shooting up behind the front-runner and hung in the foaming wake, as they ran flat out through a cauldron of waves thrashing against a fortress of offshore rocks.
To Pitt it looked as if they were on a direct course toward the wave-hammered cliffs. He gripped the handlebars, braced his feet in the padded footwells and hung on to keep from being pitched off. The rumble of the breakers came like thunderclaps, and all he could see was a gigantic curtain of spray and foam. The image of the Polar Queen, drifting helpless toward the barren rock island in the Antarctic flickered through his mind. But this time, he was aboard a speck in the sea instead of an ocean liner. He plunged on despite a growing certainty that Broadmoor was certifiably insane.
Broadmoor cut around a huge rock. Pitt followed, instantly setting up the turn, shifting his body back and outside to slightly weight the front inside of the hull, then hanging on, the hull biting into the water as he carved the turn in Broadmoor’s wake. They rocketed over the crest of a huge roller and smashed down in the trough before ascending on the back of the next one.
The helicopter was almost upon them, but the pilot stared in dumb fascination at the suicidal course set by the two men on the watercraft. Astonished, he failed to line up and fire his twin 7.62 guns. Wary of his own danger, he pulled the aircraft up in a steep vertical climb and swept over the palisades. He banked sharply to come around for another look but the watercraft had already been out of sight for a critical ten seconds. When he circled back over the water, his quarry had vanished.
Some inner instinct told Pitt that in another hundred meters he would be pulped against the unyielding wall rising out of the water and that would be the end of it. The choice was to veer off and take his chances with the firepower from the helicopter, but he remained inflexibly on course. His life was passing in front of him. Then he saw it.