Without warning

Pete headed forward.

* * * *

Jules found her shipmate crouched low at the bow of a SeaVee dive boat, which hung next to the big custom- built sport fisher on the lower deck at the rear of the yacht.

‘Sorry Julesy,’ said Fifi. ‘Asshole got on board when his buds had me pinned down. I put a lot of fire down there but don’t know whether I even winged him. A frag woulda been nice to roll down on him.’

It was hard to hear her words over the tumult of gunfire and snarling engine noise, but the meaning was clear enough. Jules patted her on the back, where she’d slung ‘the worm’ – a rocket launcher Pete had acquired on their last trip to the Maldives. It was stamped with Australian Army markings and serial numbers, and had probably been stolen from the garrison on Timor. They had only one warshot for it, and Pete forever had to remind Fifi that she couldn’t fire off a practice round. She’d been desperate to light that sucker up since he’d bought the thing.

‘You leave this guy to me, babe,’ said Jules. ‘We really need you to nail one of those fuckers out there. Pete’s working on Shoeless Dan’s ride, that leaves the other one for you. Think you can take him with that thing?’ She indicated the launcher on Fifi’s back.

Fifi suddenly hauled up her PKM and punched out a short, angry burst, chewing big, expensive chunks out of the yacht’s panelling down by the steps to the diving platform. A heavy Soviet-era design, the gun was powerful enough to be used as an anti-aircraft weapon. The uproar when she fired it was enormous. Jules’s ears were already ringing from the shotgun blasts a few minutes earlier and now they began to hum a single deep tone to let her know they’d suffered some real damage.

‘Sorry!’ shouted Fifi. ‘Saw him again. Asshole has only two ways up onto the deck – those two sets of stairs down there. You have to move across from one side to the other all the fucking time to check he hasn’t snuck up. Can’t keep an eye on both at once, you see, but then he can’t be in both places at once either. He’s packing some kinda light fully auto. Maybe an Uzi or an MP5. And yeah, I can put a hurtin’ on that other fucker out on the water, no problemo.’

‘Okay,’ said Jules. ‘You go.’ Her own voice sounded dull and very distant to her, as though her head had been packed in cotton wool.

She flicked the safety off her shotgun as Fifi moved away. The Rules was still weaving an erratic course, changing tack without warning as Mr Lee strived to prevent their attackers from boarding any more men. Bent low, Jules couldn’t see the go-fast boats, but the deep growling of their engines as they manoeuvred around the larger vessel was loud and constant. And although distance and the sheer mass of the super-yacht at times muted the pop and crackle of gunfire from Shoeless Dan’s men, the impact of their rounds hitting home was often deafening, as they crashed into metal or glass just overhead.

Jules shifted position, scowling furiously. The boat deck was crowded with three big vessels and at least half- a-dozen jet skis, all of which provided excellent cover, but also denied her a clear line of sight to her target. The whole area was a terrible fucking mess, totally ripped up by hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Her guy was trapped a level down, where he’d come aboard on the diving platform. Conceivably, if she was able to find a position that covered both sets of stairs up onto the boat deck, she could keep him pinned down until the others were free to help her. But then, she wasn’t familiar with the design of the yacht, and it was more than possible that he might be able to work his way up and behind her via an internal route directly from the docking bay. She didn’t see any way of avoiding a direct confrontation with the little prick.

Despite the late hour, the sun was still putting out a fierce heat that made all her clothes sticky with sweat. Her tongue felt dry and swollen, and she had trouble swallowing. The yacht swung hard a-starboard, almost throwing her to the deck, but Jules used the momentum to push forward a few more feet to where a couple of black jet skis lay under the keel of the biggest of the auxiliary vessels, the 42-footer. That gave her a better view – she could now see at least part of the other staircase – but it also left her a good deal more exposed.

She caught a flash of long matted hair and blasted away at it, to be rewarded with a strangled cry. Jules didn’t think the wound was mortal. A Remington made a horrible mess of a human head when it struck with full force, and she saw no evidence of that. Most likely a couple of pellets had hit home and raked out some skin and bone. But nothing fatal.

‘Time to double down, Lady Balwyn,’ she muttered to herself, summoning up her courage with a phrase her father had often used.

A whoosh followed by a sudden explosive roar told her that Fifi had launched her rocket. Without thinking, without waiting, Jules leapt up and ran forward, racking another shell into the breech and squeezing it off. The shotgun boomed in her hands. She racked the slide again.

Boom.

She’d made the head of the stairs and now fired down into the well…

Boom.

But the boarder was nowhere to be seen. Damn!

Blood tracks led away to the other side of the boat. There was one particularly large splatter, but it wasn’t flecked with bone chips or brain flecks, and so mostly likely wasn’t evidence of a killing stroke. Still moving as quickly as she could in the pitching, treacherous conditions, she attempted to rack another shell, but the Remington clicked empty. Oh, for fuck’s -

And then she was on top of him – a small wiry man, deeply tanned, his bare torso covered in dense, brightly coloured swirls of tattoo ink. He was waving a gun around, but apparently blinded. His face was bathed in blood, and the flesh from his nose up had been badly torn by a few pellets of buckshot.

He fired wildly at the sound of her approach, unloading the better part of an MP5 mag at her, but Jules was already diving before he pulled the trigger. Head tucked in, heart pounding, she crashed into his thighs and knocked him backwards into a set of air tanks on the diving platform. Awkwardly, but with all of her strength, she slammed the butt of the shotgun into the soft, fleshy part of his upper arm, paralysing it, and tried to lock the injured limb under her knee as they wrestled.

The rank, sour stink of his sweat mingled badly with the coppery smell of blood and something richer, nastier. He writhed about beneath her weight, much stronger and quicker than her, but badly wounded and handicapped by his lack of clear vision.

For her part, Jules was restricted by having to keep so much weight on his gun arm. Knowing she couldn’t win a battle of strength or endurance, she dragged the empty shotgun around and smashed the stock into his face. He screamed with rage and pain, and redoubled his efforts to get out from under her, but three more blows, the last