He fired another long burst at the deckhouse, and Jack got up on his knees. Over the port railing he could see the island clearly now, no more than half a mile away. He held the Beretta ready with one hand, and pulled hard at the handle with the other. It suddenly gave way, and he pushed the hatch up, staying behind it for cover. A burst of fire came up from below, two rounds tearing through the wood only inches from his torso. He let the hatch drop open, in that instant seeing his assailant and firing half a dozen rounds into him, the impact throwing the man back down the ladder. Jack followed, Beretta at the ready, swinging it round as he peered into the gloom. “Costas,” he yelled. “Costas. Are you there?”
He listened hard, hearing only the throbbing of the engine and the slapping of the sea on the hull outside. He reached the bottom of the ladder and turned forward, slopping through fish entrails in the scuppers, trying to keep himself upright as the ship pitched and rolled. He called again, but there was still no response. Then he saw a body splayed backward between the hull frames, the head an unrecognizable pulp. Whoever it was had been killed some time earlier; the blood had dried and was swarming with flies. It looked like an execution. He suddenly felt sick. They could not be too late. He peered more closely, seeing the unfamiliar clothes, the brown skin. He heard a moaning from further forward and squatted down beside the body, pistol at the ready. As he crept slowly ahead, he saw the Hawaiian shirt, matted and bloody, and the battered face. “Costas. Can you hear me? It’s Jack. We’re here to rescue you.”
One eye opened; the other was black and sealed shut. “It’s about time,” he mumbled. “Got whacked on the head. Dude over there with the tattoo.”
“Okay. He’s gone. Anyone else down here?”
“Nobody alive.”
“We need to get out of here. Can you manage it?”
Costas blinked hard. Jack picked up a half-empty water bottle that had been beside him and put it to Costas’s lips, holding his head up. He drank noisily, shook his head, grimaced, and then pushed himself up on his elbows. “Okay, Jack. Get me out of this hellhole.”
Jack squatted beside him, heaved Costas’s arm up over his shoulder, and helped him to his feet. Costas lurched sideways, and Jack caught him again, holding him upright. “We’re going up the ladder through the hatch. Ahmed is there and most of the crew are gone. It looks as if the Boss has already gone ashore with some of his boys.”
“He’s the one I want,” Costas said, reeling. “Point me in his direction.”
“Time for that soon enough. Right now we’re going for a swim. Some friends of ours are about to light this boat up, and we need to be out of here.”
“You’re wearing a three-liter cylinder with an octopus rig,” Costas slurred, staggering sideways. “So I kind of guessed that. The tool belt I like. Anything in it for me?”
“All in good time. We need to get you out of here first.” Jack shouted up through the hatch. “Ahmed, I’ve got him. We’re coming out now.”
“Roger that,” Ahmed shouted back. “Suppressing fire now.”
Jack heard the familiar rip of the MP5 as he pushed Costas ahead of him up the ladder and then jumped round to finish pulling him out. He helped him to his feet and they staggered to the back railing. “A swim will do me good,” Costas murmured. “Clear the head. I need that if I’m going to take on that guy. Which I am.”
Ahmed backed off from his position until he was alongside them. The shoreline was now alarmingly close, only a couple of hundred meters away, and the engine was still going full blast. Ahmed took the second grenade from his pouch and pulled the pin. “Fragmentation this time. Fire in the hole.” As he tossed it, Jack pushed Costas behind the port-side derrick, holding his hands against his ears. A deafening blast blew a hole in the left side of the deckhouse, sending burning chunks of wood clattering onto the deck around them. “There might still be a couple of them left,” Ahmed said. “We need to get out of here now.”
Jack turned to Costas. “There’s a Somali navy patrol boat commanded by Captain Ibrahim closing in on us. As soon as they see this flare, a P-15 Termit missile will be launched at this trawler. Do you understand?”
Costas looked back at him, less groggy now, nodding. “Sounds like a plan.”
A burst of gunfire erupted from the remaining part of the deckhouse, one of the bullets grazing Costas in the left forearm and another knocking the flare pistol out of Jack’s hand. He lunged for it, catching it just in time as it spun across the deck toward the stern. Ahmed leveled his MP5 at the deckhouse, firing off the remainder of his magazine, then quickly loaded another, emptying that too in one long burst. He dropped the gun, grabbed Costas and yelled, “Now!” just as another burst erupted from the deckhouse. Jack fired the flare gun high in the air, and then hurled himself at the other two, all three of them going over the stern railing and hitting the sea together as rounds jetted into the water on all sides.
He pulled them underwater, swimming down as hard as he could. After a few meters he stopped and quickly unwound one regulator, passing the mouthpiece to Costas, who began breathing off it as he helped Jack with his; Ahmed did the same a few meters away. They equalized their ears as they sank deeper, and Jack struggled out of his backpack, opened it and passed Costas a mask and fins. He grabbed his own and let the pack drop, then put the mask on, blowing air into it to clear it and seeing that Costas had already done the same. Pulling on their fins, they powered away from the shadow of the hull, Ahmed close behind, knowing that every second counted.
A minute after they had hit the water, a shock wave threw them forward, and a flash of red lit up the surface. Looking back, Jack could just make out the shattered form of the trawler sinking to the seabed, the bodies of the gunmen pirouetting away from it, smudges of blood shrouding the ones who had just been killed in the missile strike.
Costas tapped Jack on the shoulder and pointed at the blood curling up into the water from the bullet wound on his arm, then made a biting motion with his hand. Jack peered at the injury, a nasty graze rather than a penetrating wound, and scanned the reef around them. Costas was right: blood in the water would act as a magnet for sharks, and they would go for the living before they went for the dead. They were only a hundred meters or so from the rocky shoreline of the island, but even that would consume most of the air in their tanks. He pointed emphatically up the slope, and Costas and Ahmed both gave okay signals. Without buoyancy compensators or weight belts, they were struggling to counter the natural tendencies of their bodies to sink or float — Jack the former, Costas with his greater bulk decidedly the latter, with only Ahmed having something close to neutral buoyancy.
About five minutes into the swim, Costas transferred from Jack’s to Ahmed’s octopus regulator, knowing that Jack’s tank would be close to depletion. They had been swimming at about eight meters’ depth, below the oscillation of the swell, but as the bottom shelved up, they were forced into shallower water where they began to be pushed around by the ocean’s movement. There were fewer coral heads in the shallows than in the deeper water but plenty of jagged limestone outcrops to scrape against, not to mention numerous spiny sea urchins that seemed to loom up toward Jack every time the swell dropped him close to the seabed.