And still, no one aboard the yacht made any move to switch off the engines. Teach glanced back at his second mate and nodded toward their prize. The mate stepped forward, leveled his M-60 from the waist and hosed the sleek yacht's cabin with a burst of twenty-five or thirty rounds. The racket was hellacious, but he didn't envy those on the receiving end, where bullets shattered glass from portholes, chewed through wooden bulkheads, sent the Salome's survivors scrambling for a safe place on the deck.
"Enough!"
The mate stepped back, smoke wafting from his weapon's muzzle, and Teach resumed his place at the rail. "Again, I tell you, switch off the engines! We're boarding, one way or another! You decide how it will be, and do it now!"
One of the two men still unwounded crept into the yacht's wheelhouse, reached up for the ignition key and turned it off. The diesels grumbled and went silent, while the Salome began to drift. The Ravager would have continued on her way and left the yacht behind, except that Teach was barking orders to his men.
"Strike sails and give me half speed on that engine, damn your eyes! Close up to starboard, now! I need a boarding party." He jabbed an index finger at the mate with the machine gun. "You, Tom. Jess and Verlan. Patch makes five. That should be all we need. The rest of you, sit tight and keep an eye skinned for patrol craft. Deacon, don't neglect that radio!"
The Ravager swung close to the Salome, a deft hand on the tiller keeping them from a collision, while Billy Teach and his second mate covered the cringing survivors. Another moment, and the lines were fast, the two vessels secured.
"With me!" Teach shouted to his men, then threw himself across the starboard rail.
MEGAN RICHARDs TOLD herself it had to be some kind of nightmare-that she had to still be belowdecks, dozing after she and Barry finished making love-but still she could wake. She had already pinched her plump thigh hard enough to leave a bruise, and all she had to show for it was niggling pain, forgotten as she stood and stared at Tommy Gilpin, gasping in a pool of blood that spilled across the deck.
At least he wasn't dead, not yet, but Megan didn't need a medical degree to know that he was fading fast. The whole front of his muscle shirt was soaked with blood, torn where the bullets had ripped through his chest and stomach, with another bloody wound in his left thigh. He seemed to be unconscious, more or less, but he kept moaning as if he were struggling to regain awareness.
Barry was trembling when she took his hand, and while he almost flinched from her before he caught himself, she hung on for dear life. A part of Megan instantly despised him for the show of weakness, even though she couldn't really blame him, not with Tommy stretched out at their feet and men with guns lined up in front of them. Still, there was a part of Megan that was glad she had decided to break up with Barry after this vacation, once the all-expense-paid cruise was over.
Now, she had to wonder whether she would ever get the chance.
Five men with guns, and more back on the sailboat that had overtaken them. She didn't know much about weapons, but she recognized the big machine gun one of them was carrying, the shotgun that their leader held. The rest had pistols, one kind or another, most of them with sheathed knives on their belts.
It was their clothes that Megan found peculiar, mostly so far out of style that she remembered nothing like them from her twenty fashion-conscious years. No, that was wrong: a couple of the men were wearing faded Levi's jeans, patched and tattered, but the rest wore pants that looked like something they had sewn at home, so baggy they were almost shapeless, one or two of them without apparent pockets. A couple of the hijackers were bare chested; the other three wore faded shirts that didn't seem to fit them properly, as if they had been picked at random from Salvation Army bins, without regard to size or style. Three of the five wore bright bandannas tied around their heads, and one wore a black eye patch. My God, Megan thought, they think they're pirates! It would be ludicrous if it hadn't been so terrifying. The men were advancing on the wheelhouse where she stood, together with her friends. The leader stared at Tommy for a moment, finally nodded to a couple of his men-Eye Patch included-as he said, "Get rid of him."
The pirates didn't argue. They stepped forward, hoisted Tommy by his arms, paid no attention to his moaning as they dragged him toward the nearest railing. Jon Fitzgivens made a move, as if to stop them, but he froze as the machine gun's muzzle poked against his chest.
"You'll get your turn," the raiding party's leader said. "Don't rush it, boy."
She didn't watch as Tommy went over the side, but there was no way to escape his strangled cry, the splash he made on impact with the water. Megan knew that sharks would smell the blood-or did they taste it?-and she prayed that he would drown, or anyway lose consciousness, before that happened.
"Tasty wenches," said the man with the machine gun, eyeing each of them in turn. Megan felt naked in her swimsuit, even though it didn't show as much of her as Robin's or Felicia's, with the bottoms that were barely there. Her fear of being murdered by these strangers instantly gave way to a sensation even more oppressive, dreading the fate worse than death. "Right tasty," said the leader of the boarding party. "I believe we've got three winners here, and no mistake. But first, we need to get rid of the losers."
"Lemme do it," said Eye Patch.
"Not so fast," their leader said. "We have rules, after all."
The comment struck her as absurd, and Megan swallowed laughter that could only be a symptom of hysteria. What kind of rules could anybody have for kidnapping and killing perfect strangers?
Hell, nobody's perfect, Megan thought, and choked on laughter that time, tried to make it sound as if she were simply coughing up some phlegm.
The leader of the pirates spent a moment scowling at her, then turned back to Jon and Barry. "Either one of you a swimmer?" he inquired.
The two law students glanced at each other, wide-eyed, certain they were in the presence of a madman. Barry raised his hand, like a third-grader yearning for the washroom, and replied, "I swim."
"Me, too," Jon echoed.
"Excellent!" The leader of the pirates beamed. "We'll have a race, then. You'll both dive off the gunwale-" he pointed to the stern "-and swim your damnedest for, oh, let's say half a minute, shall we? If you're out of range by then, we let you go. Sound fair enough?"
"You're crazy!" Barry blurted out, unthinking.
"Please yourself."
The shotgun was already leveled at his face as Barry raised both hands and cried, "No, wait! We'll swim!"
"They'll swim," the leader said, and one of his companions giggled. "That's the spirit, lads. You may get lucky, though I'm damned if I'll bet on you. Did I mention that we need your vessel? And these sweet young things, of course, to cheer us on our lonesome journey home."
"You'll never get away with this," Jon said, but he was moving toward the taffrail, Barry trudging at his side.
"Who really gets away with anything?" the pirate leader said. "Come Judgment Day, I reckon every man jack on the bloody planet will have much to answer for. This afternoon, though, you two are the ones who've got a long swim home ahead of you."
Megan was weeping softly, couldn't watch as Jon and Barry went over the side. She heard the splashes, started counting seconds in her mind-one Mississippi, two-and guessed that it was only ten or fifteen seconds after they had jumped, before the firing squad cut loose.
She may have screamed but wasn't sure. Felicia's knees gave way, and she was cringing on the deck, hands covering her ears, Robin kneeling beside her, when the shooting stopped. Megan refused to face the gunmen, kept her eyes closed, but she heard them coming for her, felt a rough arm slide around her naked shoulders, foul breath in her face.