being yanked out and upturned. Fastened by masking tape to the underside of the drawer was a pistol and two spare clips of ammunition. Boone ripped the tape away, fitted a magazine into the gun, drew back the slider and eased the first bullet into the chamber.
‘You get the hell out of here,’ Boone said. ‘I don’t have time for chapter and verse — just go, now. Michelle? Where the fuck are you? Come on, come on.’ Boone turned back to Flynn. ‘Go, please. I’ll catch up with you sometime. Just leg it, pal. Michelle!’ he bellowed. ‘Christ.’
‘Boone?’ Flynn said.
‘I fucked up. OK? I need to get to the boat and away from this stinking shithole. Run — now, Flynn. I can’t make it any plainer.’
Michelle emerged from the bedroom, hurriedly re-dressed, with a small holdall in hand, a concerned and puzzled expression on her face which morphed into something else — terror — when she saw the gun in Boone’s hand.
Boone grabbed her arm. ‘Do you want to be with me?’ He shook her.
‘Yes I do.’
‘Then we need to go now.’
‘OK,’ she said, her big eyes wide with fear. ‘Let’s go.’
‘To the boat, Flynn. Get going.’
Flynn wasn’t about to hang around any longer. He already had the feeling that too much time was being wasted. He recognized a hunted man when he saw one. He shimmied up the steps on to the deck, the two others behind him. He hurried towards the gangplank but he stopped as a black Mercedes skidded in the dust on the quayside, maybe a hundred metres away from the houseboat, as close as a vehicle could get, just behind Boone’s Land Cruiser that had been left at a skewed angle, abandoned by Boone, the driver’s door open.
Four men climbed out of the Mercedes, all dressed in summer shirts, shorts and sunglasses. The summer attire didn’t somehow seem to go with the weapons they were openly carrying. They were varied. An AK47, an H amp;K machine pistol and two similar weapons Flynn did not recognize. All did similar jobs. That of firing short deadly bursts of bullets designed to rip people to shreds. Each also had a pistol in a pancake holster at his hip.
Boone came on deck, Michelle in tow.
A shout went up from the men — a primeval roar, really, as when a human being locks on to his prey — and they fanned quickly out, bringing their guns across their hips into firing positions. The weapons burst into life.
Flynn dived, Boone dragged Michelle to her knees. She screamed. Bullets thudded into the deck, furniture and fittings, and the glass-topped cane table disintegrated spectacularly.
Boone fired off two shots from his pistol, wayward, unaimed panic shots.
Flynn raised his head cautiously to see the men now line abreast, walking towards them. They would be here within seconds. They halted as one unit and again raked the boat with gunfire. Flynn slammed himself to the deck, bullets whizzing dangerously above him, inches at most, smacking into the superstructure and furniture, spinning one of the chairs around.
Boone dragged Michelle behind Flynn. Just a glance over his shoulder and he saw her petrified eyes, but had no time for sympathy or words of reassurance. Now was the time to keep moving, to try to stay alive, although both aspirations were becoming less likely as ammunition continued to crash around them.
Boone rose, fired six shots double-handed at the oncoming men. He caught them by surprise this time, and with a bit more accuracy. One reeled away, dropping his weapon and clutching his arm. A hit. Boone loosed off the remainder of the seventeen shot magazine, forcing the men to keep their heads right down, until the hammer clicked on empty and the slide locked open. He flicked the magazine release and let the empty container clatter on to the deck.
‘Run to the front of the boat and jump,’ he said between his gritted teeth, fitting the spare magazine into the handle and yanking the slide back to reload the chamber.
Flynn grabbed Michelle and they scuttled along the deck like crabs. Boone rose again and emptied half the new magazine at the men. They were not so brave under fire, their line and cockiness had gone to pot and they were hiding behind any cover available. At the same time, the painful screams of the one who’d been winged could be heard as part of the general cacophony.
One of them ducked behind a barrel.
Boone swung his gun purposely at him and fired at the barrel. It had previously contained fuel for the boats and was now virtually empty — with the exception of fumes, ideal to be ignited by a spark to become a deadly bomb.
Within a microsecond of Boone’s bullet entering the barrel, it exploded with a huge, spectacular burst of red- hot flame and torn, jagged metal, and the man cowering behind it was thrown, alight, across the quayside, spinning like a grotesque Catherine wheel, his shape black against the blast, ten feet off the quayside into the creek, where he splashed down with a fizzle.
The heat whooshed across Flynn’s shoulders as he leapt across the gap from the prow of the houseboat on to the quay, landing with the agility of a big cat, stooping and turning to Michelle to encourage her to follow him.
She jumped the gap easily, dropping on to the quay. No need for Flynn to steady her. Boone was just behind.
The only problem they had in running away was that they were now completely exposed to the two remaining, active gunmen and there was at least another hundred metres to sprint before there was any kind of cover for them.
Flynn checked over his shoulder.
Michelle was a foot behind him, Boone twenty, both with terror on their faces. Boone’s arms were pumping, his face glowing from the exertion that must have been affecting his heart. He looked like he might explode with the same ferocity as the barrel and Flynn had a parallel thought about the weak heart beating within his friend’s chest.
‘Go,’ Boone screamed at him.
Flynn’s head jerked forwards. He vaulted what seemed to be an old railway sleeper left diagonally across the deck. Michelle followed easily.
There were more shots, Flynn ducking instinctively as he. felt them zing by just above his head.
Then a sudden bad feeling hit Flynn, making him stop and turn — only to see that Boone had been shot and was half-lying, half-kneeling across the railway sleeper. His left shoulder had been blown apart. Boone dragged himself up and looked at Flynn. Then there was more shooting as, sixty metres further back, the uninjured men came on relentlessly.
Boone’s head angled up, and a bullet struck the back of his skull. His face exploded from the inside out, as the bullet, having bounced around his cranium at a thousand feet per second, tumbled crazily and exited, removing Boone’s nose and mouth.
Michelle screamed. She too had stopped to look. She ran back to Boone, his body now prostrate across the sleeper, blood pooling under him, body twitching.
Michelle ran quicker than Flynn could reach out to stop her.
‘We can’t do anything,’ Flynn shouted, but to no effect.
She sank to her knees by Boone’s shattered head and a dreadful wailing sound erupted from her.
The gunmen had stopped running now, were approaching at an easy, confident stride, their shoulders rolling. Then they stopped twenty metres short of Boone and one of them raised his weapon. Flynn saw it was the H amp;K.
‘No!’ Flynn bawled, believing the gun was going to be fired at Michelle, who at that range would be torn apart. He moved towards her, then realized his mistake. The machine pistol was aimed at him, not her, and as this dawned on him, he reacted. Using his forward momentum, he curled away and launched himself off the quayside into the brown, brackish water of the creek which he knew was deep enough to dive into.
As his feet left the ground, a bullet impacted his left side and turned what would have been a graceful dive into an uncoordinated messy spin of arms and legs, like a gull being shot out of the sky. He hit the water hard, went under, inhaling and swallowing huge mouthfuls of the muddy concoction.
He writhed painfully as he sank. Unable to see a thing, he kicked out frenetically with arms and legs, feeling like he’d been hit by a baseball bat connected to an electricity supply.
