were thick, but he figured the fastest way across the island would be a straight line, the whole thing wasn't even a mile across. It felt good in the shade but after fifteen feet of clomping through the bushes, he realized that he didn't know if there were poison snakes in all that ground cover, so he backed out to walk along the beach. At least the snakes where'd he'd grown up had the common decency of having a rattle on them.
Either the island wasn't as sparsely populated as the General had remembered or somebody had seen the Silverado and come to check it out. Within ten minutes he could hear the kids in the jungle watching him. He waved, and tried to smile, real friendly like. He hadn't shaved in days so his face was dark with scratchy new beard, and he wasn't exactly the nicest to look at to begin with, but he didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with these folks. They were his key to finding Southunder. That's why his shirt was untucked to conceal his.45.
'Hey, you guys speak English?' The kids were little and brown, or at least the ones he saw were before they squealed and ran away. There was no way he could have kept up with them on their own turf. A minute later he found a narrow footpath and turned inland. Weird colorful birds shrieked at him.
The village was bigger than Pershing remembered. Where there had been a handful of tiny huts on stilts with big leaves on top, there were now several wood buildings with tin roofs. The missionary's shack had turned into a white house with a little steeple. He could smell meat cooking on the smoke coming from the largest building and his stomach rumbled involuntarily. An unseen dog started barking.
The kids had raised the alarm. There were several adults watching suspiciously from the steps and doorways. The men were dark-skinned, with curly black hair, and contrary to the radio, nobody was wearing a grass skirt. He noted that half of them happened to be armed. The guns were old, but looked to be in good working order. The only woman he saw was busy herding kids inside and he took that as a bad sign.
Sullivan waved slowly. 'Hello.' Nobody answered. One of the men spit on the ground. Another one had been interrupted in the act of butchering a hanging pig. He wiped his machete clean on the grass. 'Nice place ya got here.' There was a rustle in the underbrush to his side.
'What do you want?'
Sullivan turned slowly, glad to hear somebody speaking his language, but not liking that he'd walked right past somebody who'd probably been waiting in ambush. The man was young, surprisingly white, with reddish-brown hair and a goatee.
'You sound like an American…'
'Yeah, I'm American,' he answered, coming out of the jungle, and calmly pointing a pistol at Sullivan's chest. 'The gun's Belgian.'
He nodded. 'Yep, I can see that… Saive GP32 9mm machine pistol. Nice piece.'
The young man smiled a little, but the gun didn't move. 'Yeah… It was based on Browning's last design.'
Sullivan would have loved to whip the machine gun out of his bag and show the kid that he was wrong, but he had no doubt he'd catch a bullet if he tried that. 'I'm looking for somebody.'
'Strange place to be looking.' The kid stepped onto the volcanic rock, still covering him. Sullivan knew that little buzz gun had a cyclic rate that could rip an entire magazine into him before he could even move, so he was a very obliging guest. 'I'm guessing you came in on that PBY Silverado.'
'You know your planes.'
He nodded. 'You know your guns. Who're you looking for?'
Might as well cut to the chase. 'Bob Southunder.'
'Never heard of him,' he answered. 'So you best go away.'
He was obviously lying. 'You sure?' Sullivan put his hand out at about shoulder height. 'About yea tall. He was losing his hair. Probably in his fifties now. Controls the weather. Hates the Japanese.'
There was a click as a hammer was cocked behind him. Sullivan felt the steel of a barrel press against the back of his head. 'My friend said he don't know nobody by that name.'
The second had come up from the jungle on the other side of the path. These boys were good and quiet. 'Two Americans… Boy, I must have landed at the embassy by mistake.'
'Naw, that's five hundred miles thataway.' The kid jerked his head.
'Best start swimming,' the other one said.
Sullivan wasn't in the mood. 'Listen, assholes, I didn't fly around the whole damn world to get turned away. Take me to Southunder before I get mad.'
'Can you believe the nerve of this chump?' the one behind him said in a deep voice. 'Pirate Bob Southunder ain't real. He's a story that Jap sailors tell to explain whenever one of their ships don't come back. He's like a… a…'
'Sea monster,' the first one finished.
'Yeah.'
'So you two ain't pirates?'
'Of course not. We're… legitimate businessmen.'
Sullivan snorted. 'Oh good, for a minute I thought you were going to try and convince me that that was your church.' He turned and waved nonchalantly toward the little white building just enough to remove the gun from the base of his neck. 'But y'all didn't look like priests, either.'
He could feel the gunsel at his back automatically follow his pointing finger, and then Sullivan Spiked outward. The Power left him in a circular wave, bending gravity away violently. The kid went into the jungle, almost like he was flying. The other dropped straight back, hit the end of Sullivan's range and tumbled, off balance, into the sand.
Sullivan followed him. Gravity returned to normal and the pirate struggled to his knees. The thing that had been pressed against his neck turned out to be a British Webley.455 revolver and Sullivan kicked it right out of the man's hands. The kid had bounced off a rubbery tree, and was coming back up with that Belgian buzz saw, so Sullivan concentrated, reversed gravity, and dropped him into the air in a cloud of white sand.
The villagers were interested now, and several were heading his way. The one with the machete was in front, looking pissed. Behind him was a man with a rifle that had been ancient before the Great War and Sullivan got ready to Spike the whole damn village into the ocean. 'I need to talk to Southunder. Don't make me hurt you.'
The native with the old rifle said something fierce and Sullivan didn't need to speak the language to know that he'd just been told to go screw himself.
'That'll be enough,' a calm voice called from the largest building. Immediately the villagers stopped and lowered their weapons. A man walked out onto the porch, shielding his eyes from the sun. 'What do you want, Heavy?'
Sullivan recognized the Grimnoir from Pershing's memories, though he was more than twenty years older now. He was a little thinner, had lost the rest of his hair, but the main difference was that he'd gotten a better tan. 'Pershing sent me.'
For a legendary buccaneer, he wasn't much to look at. No big hat, no beard, no parrot or even a wooden leg. He was a completely average-looking man, small of stature and wearing simple work clothes stained with engine grease. Southunder paused to take a drink from a cup made from half a coconut. His manner was deceivingly mild. 'I figured that from the way you were beating on my men… You hurt, Barns?'
The younger one came out of the jungle, glaring at Sullivan. 'I didn't know he was a Mover,' he said, shoving his machine pistol into a shoulder holster. It was a dual rig, and he had a matching gun under his other arm as well.
'Gravity Spiker,' Sullivan corrected.
'Mr. Parker?'
'I'm good,' the other pirate answered as he picked his Webley off the ground and blew the sand from the cylinder. He was dark-skinned, probably a mulatto, and was a big man, not fat but bulky through the chest and arms, though not nearly as large as Sullivan. 'Only thing hurt's my feelings.'
Southunder sighed. 'Sad day for pirates everywhere. So Pershing sent you, huh? How is the old coot?'
'Dead,' Sullivan answered. 'Killed by a Pale Horse.'
Southunder didn't seem surprised. 'And the others?'
'The Portagee was murdered by an Iron Guard, same with Jones. Christiansen got torn apart by a demon. The Chairman got their pieces.'
'So ends the knights of New York…' Southunder thought about it for a long time. He tossed the coconut off
