couldn’t even be sure it was in Spanish. His command of that language came from memorizing an old college textbook he’d rescued from a bonfire in the Linas. He had mastered all the grammar and vocabulary, but he had no practical speaking or listening experience.
“Buenas noches,” Tom said, turning slightly to the side so the guard couldn’t see him drop his right hand under the poncho. The trader had a choice to make: to either pull out the little leather pouch full of gold teeth and pay the man whatever he wanted to go away, or to reach for the grip of his silenced submachine gun and make him go away forever.
The guard looked both puzzled and irritated, as though he hadn’t understood a word of what Tom had said. His scowl deepened as he took a step forward.
“Buenas no-ches,” Tom repeated carefully. When that still didn’t work, in desperation he tried a variation, “Buenass nah-ches.”
The whole language thing wasn’t going as smoothly as he’d expected.
Advancing on him with the double-barrel at waist height, his close-set, little black eyes narrowed to slits, the guard barked a command, “¡Manos al cielo!”
It took a full fifteen seconds for Tom’s brain to convert the Spanish into English. “Hands in the air!”
“Seguro,” Tom managed to say at last, but it was too late. The scattergun barrels were aiming up at his chin. It was do or die time.
With fluid, blinding speed, the trader back-foot pivoted to avoid the double barrel and simultaneously fired the stubby MP-5 SD-1 in a triburst out the open side of the poncho. The staccato thwacks of the jacketed slugs slapping into the middle of the guard’s chest were louder than the gunshot reports. The guard didn’t get off a shot. Eyes squeezed shut, teeth bared and clenched, he dropped as though his strings had been cut, first to his knees, the heavy flesh of his cheeks shuddering from the impact, then onto his face on the dock.
There were no exit holes out his back. The subsonic rounds lacked the power for through-and-through. Tom grabbed a lifeless arm and turned the man over. There were three small holes in the center of a smudge of burned gunpowder on the white shirtfront. A glistening crimson stain was rapidly spreading out from the entry wounds; before it reached the breast pocket, Tom rescued four of the little cigars.
Working quickly, he removed the shoulder sling from the dropped scattergun. He grabbed a couple of concrete blocks from the nearest pallet and looped the sling through them. He then used the strap to attach the blocks to the dead man’s ankles. Seconds later, he rolled the still-warm body off the pier. It splashed into the water between moored boats and immediately sank out of sight. Tom tossed the 12-gauge in, too. He sailed the guard’s straw cowboy hat into the darkness inside the wrecked warehouse.
So much for the welcoming committee.
He took one last look back at Tempest, then headed away from the water at a fast clip, in search of a road that would lead west to the power plant. He needed to get a close-up look at the defenses, if any, and at the site’s structural features so he could parcel out and position the stash of C-4 for maximum destruction.
When he reached the main road, he glanced in either direction. There was still no one in sight. If the parallel rows of tidal-wave-damaged warehouses in the port area were deserted, the festivities in Veracruz had shifted into high gear: horn-tooting, wild music, cheering. Tom turned left, heading toward the power station and the city. He’d traveled about a quarter mile down the middle of the road when he heard a horn honking from behind and the loud backfiring of an unmuffled engine. He half turned and saw a pair of dim yellow headlights bearing down on him fast. It was too late to break for cover. Bracing his feet to stand and fight, he reached under the poncho and took hold of the H&K.
The full-size, beat-to-shit Ford pickup screeched to a halt beside him. The left fender and door were different colors, and both were different colors than the body. The front bumper was held on with baling wire; the hood and sides dented; and the exhaust pipe belched clouds of black oil smoke. There were three well-fed, smiling men in the cab’s bench seat. They appeared to be unarmed, and they weren’t in uniform. They looked like ordinary guys, but they were more than a little drunk.
The driver leaned an arm out his open window, gestured toward the city and over the engine’s thunderous racket said, “¿Fiesta?”
Eyewatering joy juice fumes hit Tom in the face. Given what had happened the last time he tried his Spanish, holding his tongue and pretending to be a droolie seemed his best bet. He nodded enthusiastically.
“Entonces, vamos,” the driver said, slapping the outside of his door hard, then hooking a thumb toward the pickup bed for Tom to climb aboard.
The rusted-through bed was littered with salvaged lengths of iron pipe and other metal scrap. Before they moved on, the guy in the middle of the bench seat reached back through the cab’s missing rear window and handed the new passenger a bottle one-quarter full of a pale yellow liquid.
After sniffing at the contents, Tom didn’t hesitate. He took a long, gulping pull. The oily, powerful spirits burned like hellfire all the way down to his belly. Not to be outdone by this show of gracious hospitality, he immediately passed out the dead man’s cigars. As he did so he said, “Ehh? Ehh?”
His new friends accepted the smokes with delight and everybody lit up.
Language problem solved.
After a bit of gear-grinding protest, the pickup roared off down the road, squeaking and rattling like it was going to fly apart on the next pothole. Harmonica Tom sat with his back against a wheelwell, blowing sweet, pungent smoke at the night sky.
For the moment at least, the belly of the beast didn’t seem half bad.
Chapter Three
“It turns out you’re famous here, too, lover,” Krysty said to Ryan’s back. “They’ve got your head on a stick.”
“It’s not me,” the one-eyed warrior countered. “It’s ass backward.”
As the lead tug slipped in alongside the pier, with the other two tugs following close behind, raucous, rhythmic music blasted from speakers bolted to the light stanchions. When the crews hurried to tie off the mooring lines and extend the short gangways, the waiting crowd really came unglued; Ryan could hardly hear himself think for all the noise.
Up close, the size and frenzy of the mob gave even him pause. For the first time in three weeks of captivity, Ryan caught himself thinking that maybe they weren’t going to make it out of this alive, after all. It was a thought he couldn’t come to grips with, and instinctively smothered.
Then the pirates started laying on the lash to make the terrified slaves rise from their benches.
Whipped hard across the shoulders from behind, J.B. lurched to his feet, his face twisted in outrage. For a second, Ryan’s old battlemate lost all semblance of control. He jerked at his chains like an animal, trying desperately, futilely, to break free, to get his hands on his grinning, dreadlocked tormentor.
At least J.B. wasn’t pissing himself, which is more than Ryan could say for some of the other slaves around them. The Padre Islander kid, Garwood Reed, looked stunned, frozen like a jacklit rabbit. The companions had done their best to protect him during the torturous journey—though young the orphaned boy had proved himself in battle—but apart from their each giving up a bit of the scant rations to keep him
