chance to begin its spread, punching into Brown’s security man almost as a solid slug.
Half the back of his shirt exploded outwards as his body ripped open, the centre of his torso disintegrating in a split-second. Debris splashed down beside the boat and then the man toppled backwards to join it. The last thing to hit the water, it seemed, was the Mossberg as it dropped from his fingers and sank like a brick.
Lonnie didn’t bother to watch him go over. As soon as he’d pulled the trigger he’d racked another fresh cartridge into the chamber and started to twist towards the stern.
Mason saw the move as it happened but he wasn’t foolish enough to believe he had the time to reach for his own gun. He just put the rudder hard over and stamped on the throttle, whipping the airboat into a vicious surging turn.
Everyone standing instantly lost their footing, including me. Trey thudded to his knees, almost bringing Whitmarsh down on top of him.
Haines skidded, grabbing at one of the engine supports to keep himself upright. His lips pulled back into a triumphant snarl as he began to bring the Smith & Wesson up to bear on the hampered Whitmarsh.
In the event, though, he never got a shot off.
One moment Sean was sprawled half on the floor beside me, and the next he’d put both hands on the back of the bench seat and vaulted over it, launching himself at Haines. As he leapt he pivoted his legs straight out to the side of him with the easy power of an Olympic gymnast.
One foot landed square in Haines’s ribcage, while the other connected with the side of his jaw. The man’s head snapped back. He staggered a second time and went down, dropping the semiautomatic into the bottom of the boat.
Like the rest of us, Lonnie had fallen when Mason made his violent manoeuvre but he’d landed badly. As he started to regain his feet I saw that he’d snapped his right forearm about halfway between wrist and elbow. The break was a nasty one and the lower part of his arm had taken on a rubbery, detached quality.
With a grunt of effort and pain he swapped the Remington into his left hand and pointed it at Mason, sitting exposed at the helm. Mason still hadn’t reached for his own gun, but he protected himself the best way he could. He wrenched at the controls again to send the airboat into a series of vicious turns like a gazelle jinking to outwit the pursuing lions.
Lonnie lost his balance again and started to go over backwards. He instinctively put his right hand out to catch himself but that action only served to compound the fracture. The arm collapsed under his own weight, sending him tumbling over the side of the boat and into the brackish opaque water of the swamp.
As he went over Lonnie’s finger tightened on the trigger and the Remington let go a second shot. Trey was down below seat level, still grappling with Whitmarsh, and Keith had yet to raise his head. Sean and I dived for cover and by some miracle the stinging spray of pellets missed both of us.
Mason wasn’t so lucky. He caught a peppering across the right-hand side of his body, little more than a glancing blow but bad enough, all the same.
But the bulk of the shot bypassed all the people on board and hit the mesh cage surrounding the propeller. It passed straight through like a magic trick, leaving the guard untouched but the prop inside shattered into fragments, sending shards of carbon fibre zinging across the back end of the airboat like deadly little flechettes.
With the throttle wide open, the prop must have been spinning at close to five thousand revs a minute when it blew. Mason lifted off immediately, but the resulting massive imbalance had already almost shaken the engine to pieces. He grappled with the rudder controls with both hands as it began to veer wildly. His arm and the side of his shirt were already wet with blood.
“Jump!” Sean shouted to me.
I didn’t have time to argue with him about the wisdom of that one. Lonnie was already in the water, half- swimming half-wading for the cover of the nearest clump of Cypress trees about sixty metres away to our left. If he could make it with only one arm working . . .
I reached over the back of the seat and grabbed Trey by the collar of his shirt. The adrenaline pumping through my system had the effect of making him weigh almost nothing as I heaved him away from Whitmarsh and all but threw him over the side of the boat. Sean kicked a squealing Keith into the water on the opposite side and jumped in after him.
Hitting flat water, even when you’re not travelling that fast is an unpleasant business, not unlike coming off a motorbike and bouncing along the road surface until you’ve scrubbed off some speed. The only difference was the lack of protective leathers and the fact that you’re unlikely to die by drowning at the end of your average bike crash.
Not that drowning was the biggest of my fears right now.
Even so, I was coughing like a consumptive as I surfaced, spitting out gouts of foul-tasting swamp water and scraping at the wet hair that was plastered across my eyes. Then I looked around me, frantic, but in the rapidly encroaching gloom I couldn’t spot Trey or Sean anywhere close by.
Just for a second I was assailed by all manner of terrors. Not least of which centred on the presence of the alligators. I splashed in another quick circle but there were no telltale lumps bearing down on me and eyeing me up with a view to dinner. Then I remembered about the poisonous water moccasin snakes.
The airboat thundered on past for a short distance after we’d bailed out of it, describing a big curving turn. Half the rudder system was shot away, too, and Mason wrestled for some semblance of control. The engine sounded raucous in the extreme, barely holding together under the incredible strain of trying to spin the lopsided propeller. It was protesting its mechanical agony loudly in the only way it knew.
I could just about see Whitmarsh up on his feet again now, struggling hand-to-hand with Haines as the airboat bucked and shuddered underneath them.
Whitmarsh had weight on his side but Haines was clearly the stronger party. As I watched he ducked and got a shoulder into Whitmarsh’s expansive stomach, ramming him backwards and toppling him over the side. He made considerably more of a splash when he hit the water than any of the rest of us had done.
And then, not far behind me I heard a strangled cry that could only be Trey. I spun round towards the sound and saw the kid thrashing in the water. I hoped those long shadows closing on him were just a product of the failing light but I knew I was wrong.
“Trey, for Christ’s sake keep still!” I yelled at him. He froze almost instantly, sinking until barely more than his nose and the top of his head was visible out of the water.
Without any clear idea of what the hell I was going to do when I got there I headed for him in a fast crawl. I arrived at just about the same time as an alligator that must have been twelve feet long, its body a dull greyish black like a slightly scaly nuclear submarine, only not so friendly.
Trey was terrified, incoherent with fright as the reptile approached in its sinuous way through the water. I put myself between it and the boy. My brain inconveniently fed me with an old nature programme snippet that an alligator’s jaws had the crushing power of 3000 pounds per square inch. I braced myself, still with no idea how to go about winning such an uneven fight.
But then, almost at the last moment, the ‘gator swerved around us, almost graceful in its evasion. I swear the end of its tail brushed past my bare arm in the water but it could have been one of those damned snakes. Another smaller alligator swam by on the other side, moving fast enough to leave a wake.
It was only when I looked at the water that I realised why they hadn’t bothered with us.
There was blood in it.
Not from Trey and certainly not from me. It was leaching out of the guy Lonnie had blown away in the front of the boat. His body now floated face down less than twenty feet away, leaving a greasy trail of blood in the water like oil from the wreck of a rusting Panamanian tanker.
The alligators converged on the man’s body with a purpose, squabbling over who got first bite of the prize. As I looked one of them seemed to rear up, its massive jaws wide open to show a mouth that was a surprisingly delicate shade of pink inside. A scrap of cloth had snagged on the beast’s teeth and flapped when it shook its head. I didn’t look too closely at what else might have been in there.
“Come on!” I grabbed Trey’s arm, tugged at him. “We’ve got to get away from here.”
Getting him to shift wasn’t easy, even though every ounce of logic should have told him that getting away from the vicinity of the corpse – or buffet as the alligators viewed it – was a good idea. Fortunately, Trey was easy
