‘Hold it!’ Leatherneck John demanded.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the ponytailed man, ‘I’m going outside.’
‘Not with my piece.’
The man swung the muzzle of the M-60 toward Leatherneck John.
‘I’m borrowing it,’ he said flatly as he walked out the door.
Leatherneck John said nothing. He stood watching with his mouth hanging open and his hands on his hips.
Billy Death ran past the door of the saloon and started down the riverbank, running with his back to the pony- tailed man.
On the boat, Hatcher had the C-4 plastique wrapped around the prow. He armed a small black contact fuse and, reaching over the front of the boat with his head down, twisted it into the soft p1astic explosive. Bullets stitched a line down the rail of the snakeboat, inches from Hatcher’s ear. The barge was coming up fast.
Hatcher turned and crawled back to the thatched cabin.
‘Let’s go!’ he said to Cohen.
‘Go where?’
‘We got to get out of here. This thing’s going to blow sky-high any second!’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to do something like this?’ Cohen yelled. Bullets tome into the rail near him. Cohen went berserk. He stood up let go of the tiller, and holding his gun hand straight out in front of him, started firing his .357 at Sam-Sam.
‘We’ve got to go now!’ Hatcher yelled and dived into Cohen’s stomach, driving the little man backward into the side of the thatched shed. The side collapsed. Hatcher and Cohen plunged through the flimsy cabin, out of the speeding boat and into the river. The snakeboat, driver- less, etched its crazy course toward the barge.
Hatcher and Cohen hit the water with such force that it momentarily knocked Hatcher’s wind out of him. He felt Cohen’s body wrench and then slip away from him. Hatcher tumbled once in the water, spread-eagled and stopped his motion. He lunged to the surface, took a deep breath and dived hard, his arms and hands sweeping the water around him.
Nothing.
He surfaced, took another deep gulp of air and dived again, taking powerful strokes and searching the dark water with his hands. Still nothing. Then as he surfaced he saw Cohen’s head bob up a few yards away. Cohen was half conscious, disoriented.
Hatcher took three hard strokes, reached out and grabbed Cohen’s arm by the sleeve. ‘I gotcha, pal, relax.’
Behind them, the snakeboat drove straight toward the barge. Batal looked at it and saw the gray cord of plastique around the bow. He screamed and dived overboard as the boat charged into the barge. Sam-Sam leaped to one side as the snakeboat hit and rose up out of the water, its prow several inches above the side of the barge. The hull of the snakeboat shattered and the prow tore into a stack of TV sets, smashing through tubes, scattering them like blocks. Tubes burst like firecrackers. The contact fuse smacked against the casing of one of the TV sets and the plastique exploded.
Sam-Sam was ten feet away when the barge erupted. He felt the sudden burst of hot air just before the concussion tossed him into the air like a broken twig. The force of the explosion ruptured his vitals and ripped his body apart. A moment later the explosion set off the gas tanks; the rear of the barge burst like a balloon. Fire and debris showered the air. Men and women on the barge were scattered like confetti.
The explosion lifted Batal out f the water, and blood spurted from ears, nose and mouth. He plopped back down into the river unconscious and sank slowly to the bottom as bits and pieces of the barge splashed into the water and sank with him.
‘Beautiful,’ said the ponytailed man with a smile.
‘Holy shit!’ was all Leatherneck John could muster.
A hundred yards away, the concussion of the explosion knocked both Hatcher and Cohen underwater. Hatcher lost his grip on the stunned Tsu Fi again. Cohen came up gasping, heard the chatter of submachine gun fire. Geysers of water sprouted from the river around him, shocked him into full consciousness. He splashed around like a hooked marlin, gulping air. The river erupted a few inches from Hatcher’s face as another burst ripped into the water. This time Hatcher saw where it was coming from. Billy Death stood near the river’s edge, fifty yards away, firing his AK-47.
Hatcher turned and zigzagged away from shore, yelling to Cohen to follow him. Another burst showered past him,
A half-mile downstream, behind the barge, the Cigarette boat hugged the shore. The men in the boat had seen Sam-Sam return and had followed the barge upstream, hugging the shore to keep out of sight. Now all hell was breaking loose in front of them.
‘We go see,’ the leader of the three Chinese backup men said, pointing toward the barge.
The barge was tilting rapidly and the Ts’e K’ams aboard were too busy scrambling for safety and hauling their wounded to the shore to worry about Hatcher. Another explosion rent the barge, a gorge of flame roared out of the stacks of ammo boxes, followed by a wrenching explosion as the boxes exploded.
The explosion distracted Billy Death, who lowered his gun and walked uncertainly toward the barge.
Then the
Billy Death hesitated, then turned his attention back to Hatcher and Cohen. He raised the AK-47 to his shoulder and aimed at the two figures struggling in the river.
