Tess heard the door to the pilothouse rattle as a crewman stepped in from the gangway. She noticed Vance break his concentration and tear his entranced eyes away from the screen to glance over at the commotion. Abruptly, Rassoulis lunged at Vance and began wrestling with him for the gun. Tess stepped backward, screaming, "No!" Attal and another engineer rose to their feet to help the captain when, deafeningly loud in the enclosed space, the gun went off.
For a moment, Vance and Rassoulis stood, locked together and immobile, before Vance pulled away and the captain slumped to the floor, blood spilling from his mouth as his eyes rolled upward and out of sight.
Horrified, Tess stared down at the captain's body, which convulsed slightly before going limp. She glared at Vance. "What have you done?" she yelled as she sank to her knees by Rassoulis, unsure of what to do, then listening for a breath, feeling for a pulse.
She found none.
"He's dead," she cried. "You've killed him."
Attal and the other crewmen were frozen in disbelief. Then the helmsman snapped into reflex action, hurling himself at Vance, clawing for the gun. With surprising speed, Vance clubbed him across the face with a blow from the butt of his handgun, sending him crashing to the floor. For a brief moment, Vance appeared to be in a daze, then his eyes focused and his expression hardened.
"Get me the falcon and we can all go home," he ordered. "Now."
Hesitantly, the first mate and Attal went about the recovery preparations, blurting orders out to the other crewmen, but the words blew by Tess in an indecipherable haze. She couldn't stop staring at Vance, whose eyes had taken on a life of their own. They didn't belong to the erudite professor she'd first met all those years ago, nor to the driven, broken man with whom she'd embarked on this misguided journey. She recognized the cold, detached harshness she saw in them. She'd first seen it at the Met, on the night of the raid. It had scared her then, and, right now, with a dead man on the floor beside her, it terrified her.
Looking again at Rassoulis's body, a sudden realization hit her: that she might very well die here.
And in that instant, she thought of her daughter, and wondered if she would ever see her again.
***
Reilly snapped backward as Rassoulis's voice disappeared and the radio's speaker erupted into a loud, static hiss. A shiver of dread raced down his spine. He thought he'd heard what sounded like a gunshot through the radio, but he couldn't be sure.
"Captain? Tess? Anyone?"
There was no answer.
He turned to the radioman beside him, who was already fiddling with the console's controls, shaking his head and reporting back to the skipper in Turkish.
"The signal's gone," Karakas confirmed. "It looks like they've heard all they warn to hear."
Reilly stared ahead angrily out through the whirling windscreen wipers that did nothing to improve 181
the visibility. The Karadeniz was straining hard, battling the increasingly ferocious waves. All of the chatter on the bridge was in Turkish, but Reilly picked up that the gunboat crew seemed to be more focused on the raging sea than on the other boat, which still appeared to be stationary.
Although the Savarona was now theoretically in visual range, the lashing rain and the high seas meant that it came into view only every now and again, as the surging swell beneath both boats peaked simultaneously. As Reilly caught a glimpse of it, all that he could make out was a blurred distant shape. He felt a fist swell in his throat as he thought of Tess being out there on the battered vessel.
Reilly saw Karakas and the first officer exchange a few clipped words, then the skipper turned to De Angelis, deep ridges of concern lining his leathery forehead. "This is getting out of hand. The wind's almost at fifty knots, and, in these conditions, there isn't much we can do about forcing them to follow us."
De Angelis seemed strangely unfazed. "As long as they're out there, we keep going."
The skipper breathed heavily. His eyes darted to Reilly, looking for some insight into De Angelis's state of mind but not finding any. "I don't think we should stay out here much longer," he stated flatly. "It isn't safe anymore."
De Angelis turned to face him. "What's the matter," he said indignantly, "can't you handle a few waves?" He jabbed an angry finger toward the Savarona. "I don't see them turning tail and running.
They're clearly not afraid to be out here." His mouth twisted oddly. "Are you?"
Reilly watched as Karakas stood there, his pulse visibly quickening at the taunt. The skipper glowered at the monsignor before barking some orders at his nervous first officer. De Angelis nodded, shot a quick glance at Plunkett, and turned to stare ahead, and, just from his profile, Reilly could tell that the monsignor was grimly pleased.
***
Tess stood next to Vance, staring out, the spray raking the windshield like buckshot as rainsqualls hurled themselves at the wheelhouse from all directions. Great patches of foam were blowing in dense white streaks all around them, and the Savarond's decks were awash with water.
And then they appeared.
Three orange lift bags, off to the boat's starboard side, thrusting out of the water like breaching whales.
Tess's eyes strained, trying to cut through the lashings of rain, and then she spotted it, a large, dark balk of rounded timber bobbing between the floaters. Despite the wear of centuries, it was unmistakably carved in the shape of a bird and strongly evocative of its former glory.
She glanced at Vance and saw his face light up. For the briefest of moments, she felt a sudden thrill, a surge of excitement that eclipsed all the dread and horror she'd been feeling.
And then it all came rushing back.
"Get the divers in," Vance yelled at the first mate, who was tending to the helmsman's bloodied cheek. Seeing the hesitation in the man's eyes, Vance extended his arm and thrust his handgun into the terrified man's face. "Do it. We're not leaving here without it."
Just then, a large wave slammed into the ship's stern. With the Savarona slewing heavily to one side, the helmsman staggered up to his feet and took over from the overwhelmed crewman, fighting the wheel to keep the ship from broaching and rolling over as he maneuvered it out of danger and closer to the floating lift bags. Expertly defying the waves, he maintained the battered vessel's position while two other crewmen got into gear and reluctantly dived off the deck, heavy recovery cables in their clutches.
Tess watched nervously as the divers struck their way to the rig, tense minutes ticking by agonizingly before a glimpse of a thumbs-up signaled their success. The first mate then hit a switch, and, out on deck, the winch cranked noisily to life, straining against the roll of the ship and the pounding of the waves. The figurehead, still harnessed to the lift bags, rose out of the foaming water and swung over, headed for the ship's waiting deck.
Vance suddenly frowned, his attention gripped by something beyond the suspended rig. Attal's face brightened as he gripped Tess's arm and nodded in the same direction, toward the west. She glanced beyond the bow and saw a ghostly shape in the distance. It was the Karadeniz, straining against the crushing waves and bearing down on them.
Vance spun angrily to the helmsman. "Get us out of here," he ordered, waving his handgun furiously.
Streaks of sweat tinged with blood streaked down the helmsman's face as he struggled to keep the ship from turning broadside to the waves. "We have to recover the divers first," he protested.