Mercer already had a good idea how they’d been found out.
“Will you look at that,” Rory Reyes shouted down from the bridge, delighted at seeing the ungainly old warbird with its high wings and engines like Dumbo’s ears. He didn’t understand the danger they were all in.
The PBY was considered a slow aircraft even back in its heyday, but the lumbering plane still ate the distance between itself and the fleeing boat in seconds. Booker was already in motion, dashing down into the cabin space. Mercer shouted for Rory to take cover an instant before the plane rocketed past, no more than fifty yards off their starboard rail and at a height of twenty feet.
A side hatch was open in the aircraft’s hull, and from the darkness came the continuous flash of a gun on full auto. Despite the speed and the instability of the shooting platform, half the bullets from the thirty-round clip raked the side of the Suva Surprise. Fiberglass exploded with each impact, wood splinters blew free, and aluminum and polished brass were holed by the blast. The plane immediately pulled up into a sharp turning bank, nearly as tight as an Immelmann, to come back for another pass.
Mercer knew Reyes had survived because the engines were suddenly throttled up to everything they had, and he started turning the wheel erratically.
Booker appeared with a bundle wrapped in a beach towel.
“Plan B,” Mercer told him. “Just like we talked about.”
“How’d the bastards find us?”
“Doesn’t matter right now.”
Booker left his mystery package on the fighting chair and helped Mercer with the Zodiac. The Surprise was running hard, so the wind across the deck was savage, but they managed to get down and tie the crystal-laden dive bag to the Zodiac’s integrated oarlock.
“They put a spotter on the island,” Mercer said as they worked. “As soon as he saw us heave a bag over the side and start celebrating like a bunch of idiots he called in the cavalry.”
“I always thought the cavalry were the good guys.”
“Willing to bet these guys see themselves on the side of the angels, same as us.” Mercer finished the triple knot. “Make sure Reyes stays out of it. This isn’t his fight.”
The Catalina finished its turn and started back for another strafing run. There wouldn’t be enough time to get clear, so Mercer and Sykes threw themselves flat as the plane came directly overhead. The gunman didn’t open fire this time, but he did hurl something out of the door. It hit the deck inches from Booker’s head and smashed, peppering him in glass.
Mercer looked up in time to see what had shattered. It was a Mason jar, which had contained a hand grenade whose spoon had now popped free. It was an old Vietnam-era trick used by chopper crews to keep their grenades from exploding before they hit the ground. Mercer lunged forward, grabbed the rounded incendiary, and flicked it over the side. It exploded in their wake two seconds later, throwing up a geyser of water as if they’d just released a miniature depth charge.
“You know what to do,” Mercer said and got ready.
Booker nodded, pressed something into Mercer’s hand, and climbed up to the bridge while the flying boat came around for yet another attack. Book laid his bundle onto the floor at his feet and shouldered Rory aside. “Sorry, Cap’n.”
He chopped the throttles and turned to see Mercer shove the Zodiac over the transom and leap in after it. He kicked the engines back up to speed, leaving the inflatable bobbing in his wake.
Then Sykes started swinging the boat around in a desperate bid to return to the islands and the illusory safety of the town of Kolotai on nearby Futuna.
“What the hell is going on?” Reyes bellowed.
“Apparently our ruse didn’t work.”
“And what’s in the bundle?”
Sykes bent to retrieve it. The towel fell away, revealing a wicked-looking contraption that was a cross between a carpenter’s nail gun and a science fiction laser blaster.
“Jesus,” Reyes gasped. “What the bloody hell is that thing?”
“It’s called a Vector, and it’s built by Kriss. It fires forty-five-caliber ACP. This is only a semiautomatic, but I can still lay down cover fire as effectively as a machine gunner.”
The weapon was a bullpup design with the magazine behind the trigger assembly to keep it compact but still give it some barrel length for accuracy. It was considered one of the best close support weapons ever built, though Sykes had chosen it for this mission because of its incredible compactness.
They had smuggled the gun into the country by putting it and extra ammo into a metallic pouch developed for American Special Forces troops who needed to smuggle weapons through civilian customs. The pouches were part of an antidetection system that could fool most modern X-ray machines. Book had access to the pouches but not the special carrying cases operators were also issued, so he’d improvised. He’d wrapped the pouch in coils of copper wire. The old scanner back at the Nadi airport’s customs house hadn’t stood a chance. That first day out of Suva, Book had sat in his cabin peeling back the wire to get at the weapon. The wire would then be repurposed as swaddling to shield the bag of gems once they’d found them.
The plane had straightened out for another run at them, and Reyes eyed it nervously. “Shoot that damned plane!” he yelled.
“Waste of ammo,” Sykes replied calmly. “I’d never hit it, let alone anything vital enough to slow their attack. Trust me on this. Mercer and I considered this and have a plan.”
Booker looked back and saw that Mercer was racing the Zodiac toward Alofi as fast as he could go. He was still less than a mile off their beam, but the distance was widening with each passing second.
Booker ordered Rory to go below, but the Aussie stubbornly refused. The PBY swooped by their starboard side, flying only a few miles per hour above the plane’s astonishingly slow stall speed. The gunner’s door was open and the machine gun spat again, a long raking barrage that tore up more of the boat. This time the shooter concentrated on the stern in hopes of knocking out the engines or starting a fire. The combination of engine noise and autofire was a hellish cacophony that filled the air, relenting only when the plane passed by. Book fought the urge to grab the Kriss and return fire. At that slow speed he could have laid in a few well-placed shots, but then the PBY would have just stayed out of range and picked them off from a distance.
The fourth pass was another bombing run, and this time there was nothing they could do about the glass jar that bounced off the windshield, shattering it. The grenade popped free and seemed about to fly over the rail when a wave tipped the boat just enough for the explosive device to catch the railing and drop back onto the aft deck.
Mercer was a mile and a half away, pushing the little one-cylinder for everything it had, when he heard the crump of an explosion over the dragonfly whine of the Evinrude. He turned in time to see greasy smoke and torrents of fire rising from the fishing boat’s stern. He swore. That hadn’t been part of the plan. The attackers should have figured out that the lone man in the Zodiac had the stones, not the big sportfisherman. He and Book had exaggerated their actions for the sake of the guy manning the observation post so that he would then pass on that information to the pilot.
Then he got it. His adversary was as ruthless as they came. He’d forgotten that Sherman Smithson hadn’t been spared out of any sense of kindness. He was alive because he was needed to pass on information. There was no way these people were going to leave any witness, innocent or otherwise.