Slaton threw himself against a wall as the weapon shattered the silence in full auto, rounds pinging into metal and ricocheting across the room. He felt a strike and a sting of pain in his left thigh. As soon as the burst ended, he curled his hand into the stairwell and fired three unsighted rounds down the path of the rising steps. He heard a thump and a clatter from below, one body and one gun hitting the deck in quick succession. If there was another threat, he knew where it would be.
He vaulted into the stairwell as shots came from above, reverberating like thunder between the gray-steel walls. Slaton returned fire upward this time, suppression to buy precious seconds. Reaching the main deck, he saw the man he’d just hit, unmoving and still. His machine pistol had tumbled toward the doorway that led outside. It would be a useful weapon in this kind of fight, but the idea was killed when a third figure appeared on the threshold. More rounds rained down from above.
Slaton lunged toward the only other way out of the room, firing four rounds as he leapt shoulder-first into the already-shattered window. The glass gave way and he tumbled onto the outer deck, landing in an awkward roll. He scanned for other attackers as he counted to three, then rose to the window frame, acquired the man just inside the doorway, and sent three rounds toward his head. He waited only long enough to see the man crumple as if his bones had disconnected.
He ducked back down, shouldered to the wall, and ran toward the starboard sidewall where his dinghy was tethered. The Beretta’s slide was back, confirming the count in his head—mag empty, no round in the chamber. He dug into his pocket for a spare, and had just reached the corner of the superstructure when two problems arose. A man appeared on the catwalk along the starboard side, his gun lifting toward Slaton. The greater problem was the magazine he pulled from his pocket—the frame was hopelessly bent and he felt the liquid warmth of his own blood.
The sting in my thigh.
Slaton registered a noise from behind, and he saw a man straddling through the window with his gun leveled—no doubt the one who’d been above. That put the count at four, with two down. Manageable, except for the fact that Slaton was looking at a pair of gun barrels from different directions. The man at the window said something. His partner responded. Slaton could discern only that they were speaking French—not one of his better languages.
He stood still, a spent weapon in his hand. With two targets so widely spaced, Slaton knew he could never pull and load his final mag in time. Even if he tried, that one might also be damaged. He had only one remaining advantage.
He had been here before.
In the next two seconds he learned a great deal about the men facing him. Most important, he realized they were not assassins. It had nothing to do with the fact that their shooting had been ineffectual, or that their tactical approach had been flawed. He knew because of what they weren’t doing right now. Assassins never hesitated.
Never.
The men stared at him with a certain satisfaction—thoughts of payback for their two downed comrades, but also a bit of victory. They were soldiers, in some sense of the word, and so Slaton played along. Completely exposed, and with an unloaded weapon in his hand, he did what any vanquished combatant would do.
He surrendered.
The three men stood together at the corner of Esperanza’s superstructure, Slaton at the vertex of a right angle. He was fifteen feet from both men, but most critically, neither of them could see the other. Somewhere over his right shoulder, fifteen feet down, the dinghy bobbed lazily on its line. The man near the door was big, over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds. Geometry and numbers that were vital.
“I am going to drop my weapon,” Slaton said slowly in English.
Neither man responded, but he suspected they understood. Suspected they’d seen enough Hollywood movies.
With the greatest of care he sent the empty Beretta skittering along the deck toward the man near the door. Slaton dropped the damaged magazine and stood with his empty hands held harmlessly outward. He edged one step back, an almost imperceptible and wholly unthreatening movement. As he did so, he slid his right foot along the outer railing. The Beretta had come to rest halfway toward the big man. It was just short of the two-by-six plank Slaton had crossed earlier. Directly on top of a section of rust the size of an oven door. The big man traversed the plank carefully, his weapon level on Slaton. When he was one step away from the Beretta, and bending down to pick it up, Slaton discreetly hooked the toe of his right boot into the base of an old stanchion.
The floor failed as soon as the big man’s knee touched the deck, the section of rusted metal cracking under his weight like ice that was too thin. The fracture spread in an instant and swallowed the man. Slaton was already moving. He launched himself over the Esperanza’s starboard rail, pivoting on his right foot while gravity did the rest.
Bullets flew to the spot where he’d been a fraction of a second earlier, carrying out over the sea. Slaton went over the side, disappearing from sight. When the second man reached the rail, he probably expected to find a wounded adversary floundering in the sea. What he saw was a man hanging nearly upside down, one foot hooked into solid metal, and a hand gripping a loop on a climbing rope. In the other hand, a mere eight feet away, was a compact Glock 26.
Slaton never hesitated.
* * *
Clearing Esperanza for remaining threats took a tense fifteen minutes—Slaton reasoned the risk involved in doing so was preferable to a retreat over open water in a rubber boat. He also hoped to find something to explain who these men were.
There had been no survivors. The big man had ended up thirty feet below deck in what was once a cargo hold. In the beam of his flashlight Slaton saw the body crumpled over a spar, facedown in water. The others had suffered his marksmanship. All four men were cut from a disturbingly similar mold—dark complexions, black hair, and three had beards that were more or less groomed. He searched the habitable areas of the ship but found nothing to explain why four men of Middle Eastern extraction, at least two of whom spoke French, had traveled to the remote reaches of the Pacific to attack him.
His final chore was to search the bodies, or at least the three within reach. On the last man he’d taken, Slaton found his only clue. In the front trouser pocket, amid sticks of gum and a handful of hollow-point bullets, he discovered a memory stick. Intriguing as it was, the significance didn’t sink home until he held it to the beam of his flashlight.
What he saw was stunning.
He had come to Esperanza in search of a stranded fisherman. Smugglers would have been his second choice. In his hand was precisely what he’d hoped not to find. Indeed, what he feared the most. One word had been printed neatly on the flash drive’s plastic case.
SLATON.