would go where the group went, I knew that, seeking safety in numbers. And Soren, I supposed, would follow Kelis. But that was something else I shouldn't be taking advantage of.
'Shit!' Soren said. 'You're right.'
'Right about what, exactly?' Haru asked. Kelis' hand was still over mine on the wheel but she wasn't moving it and I kept on steering a straight course towards whatever was waiting for us on the shore. We were close enough now that I could make out little figures, flashes of red and brighter colours on their clothing. I felt the first stirrings of unease.
'Are those..?' I said.
'Yeah,' Kelis said. 'I recognise the formation. Standard when facing a sea attack. All the island garrisons practised it.'
'Those are Queen M's men?' Haru said, finally cottoning on.
'I think so,' I said.
'I know so,' Kelis said impatiently.
'This is no surprise,' Ingo said calmly. 'The tracking devices were never removed from Soren and Kelis.'
Of course he was right. Haru turned an unloving look on the two of them and I remembered that he'd been all for leaving them behind. 'OK,' I said, 'it's not a problem. I'll just turn and we'll make landfall somewhere else.' I tried to shift my grip on the wheel to do just that, but Kelis held my hand firm.
'No point,' she said. 'While the trackers are in us she can just follow us along the shore. We'll run out of fuel before she runs out of patience. Besides – she's almost certainly got boats of her own. Faster than this, probably.'
'There are only two options,' Soren said. 'Fight or surrender.'
'There's a third option,' Haru said sourly. I knew he meant to throw Soren and Kelis overboard and they knew it too. Soren half turned to him and Haru instantly backed away, demonstrating exactly why it was an entirely empty threat.
'Then I guess we fight,' I said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I took out my gun again. The weight of it had begun to feel very comfortable in my hand. I wondered if this was how it had been for my husband: first a burden, then a useful tool and finally an end in itself. The adrenaline was already surging through my body and that was addictive too, the rush of it, even the bitter taste it brought to the back of my throat.
Haru had taken the wheel from me. I could see the white of his knuckles as he gripped it and I knew that he was forcing himself not to turn aside. I guess he knew that Queen M's men might kill him, but Kelis would shoot him for sure if he didn't do as she'd ordered.
The coastline ahead of us looked like a cleaned-up version of Havana: white sand and smart resort hotels. Like in one of those old make-over shows, Havana was the before and Miami the after. The people had been made-over too: not shambling wrecks but whole and tooled-up, and lethal.
The front of the boat didn't offer much protection, not if there was any heavy artillery facing us. We were gambling that Queen M wanted to ask questions first and shoot later. There must be a reason she'd followed Kelis and Soren specifically – to find me, I was guessing – and she wasn't the type to waste resources on petty revenge. She wanted something from us other than our corpses.
On the other hand, if our corpses were all she could get, I was sure she'd settle for that. Fifty feet from the coast now and I could recognise some of the faces. The hardcore loyalists who hadn't fled the flagship when everyone had their chance. It was no kind of surprise to see Curtis among them, Queen M's top recruitment agent.
'Hold your fire,' Soren said.
Kelis shot him a look and I think for a moment she suspected he was changing his mind. But he was right. The longer we could delay the moment when the cold war turned hot, the better our chances. If they wanted us alive, they wouldn't shoot first.
Twenty feet from the shore and we weren't slowing down. Kelis had clasped her hands over Haru's, forcing him to stay his course. His face was sweating and desperate. The boat began to judder and shake, jarring over the rocks in the sand, rising higher and higher above the water line. I clung on hard, knowing that if I fell that would be the end. The boat was the only protection we had.
There was a heart-stopping moment as the boat's keel scraped against a sand shelf beneath us and I thought we'd be grounded, still too far from dry land. But then the boat jerked itself over the ridge and suddenly I could see that we weren't going to stop at all.
The people on the shore could see it too. Their tight little formation began to fragment and then it was a free for all. Half a dozen ran off to the left, another five to the right. Two morons tried to outrun the boat straight back, sprinting towards the regimented line of hotels. The boat shot onto the sand, bumping twice as it went over their bodies. I didn't hear their screams because by then the first shot had been fired.
I staggered to my knees as the boat finally ground to a halt. Haru was flung forward against the hard wood of the cabin. I saw a spray of blood and a shard of something white that might have been his tooth. His howl of pain was lost in the din of gunfire.
The boat splintered beneath the hail of bullets. The wood chips were as lethal as shrapnel, a threat to flesh and eyes. All I could think about was escape. I'd run twenty paces before I'd even thought about firing my gun.
The fighting was too close, too intense, for any kind of game plan. The only thing that saved us was the numbers game. The boat has scattered Queen M's troops in a wide circle and they couldn't fire at us without firing through their own. Instead they pulled out knives and I knew that the fighting would be brutal, bloody and personal. It was better that way. I wanted to see the faces of the people I was killing – punish myself with reality rather than abstraction.
Another five paces away from the sea and the first of Queen M's men was on me. It was Curtis, as stony- faced as ever, even as he swung the machete that was aimed straight for my throat. I didn't feel a moment's remorse as I put a bullet through his chest. His eyes glared all the way into dark. The last thing he saw was me smiling. I thought about the ghosts of Ireland and was glad.
I could hear a fierce whooping somewhere to my left and something told me it was Kelis, filled with the berserker rage of battle. There was a whimpering too, and that had to be Haru. I think maybe I was laughing but I didn't know why, except that there's a certain exhilaration in facing death. Another face and another bullet, but this one got his own blow in. I saw a thin line of red bloom and then widen on my forearm, the flesh beneath the cut parted with surgical precision.
The agony followed a second later. I gritted my teeth against it and kept on fighting. I knew where I was heading now, towards the hotels that lined the beach and the grid of roads behind that offered the only possibility of escape. Not fucking much of one, but any hope will do.
Two more bullets, then a pause to reload. It left time for one of Queen M's men to duck right in and shove something bright and sharp into my chest. But the blade glanced off a rib, tearing through skin and flying away to the left. There was no time for a bullet before the next killing blow. I jammed the handle of the Magnum brutally hard into his nose. A crack and then a fountain of blood. I knew that I'd managed to drive the shards of bone right up into the brain. I grinned, feral like, at those long-ago anatomy lessons paying off.
All I initially saw of the grizzled, grey woman now attacking me was a flash of silver as her knife headed straight for the wide target of my back. But Kelis was there, sliding a blade between the woman's vertebrae as hers had been meant to slide through mine. Kelis took down another one after that as did I. But there were always more, and how could we possibly kill them all?
I looked at Kelis and her brown eyes stared back at me and we both knew that there was no chance.
Except we weren't the only people coming in from the sea. I didn't realise what they were at first, the ragged, blackened figures falling on Queen M's men from their rear flank. For a crazy second I thought it must be some kind of mutiny, an uprising that we'd somehow sparked.
