"What, no confetti and streamers?" muttered Giordino.
Pitt stepped to the edge of the deck and stared down at the water. A small semi-inflatable boat bobbed in the water beside the yacht. Three meters in length by two meters wide, it had a fiberglass V-hull that appeared sturdy. The center compartment, however, would barely hold four people, the neoprene outer flotation tube taking up half the boat. The craft had mounted an outboard engine at one time, but that had been removed. The control cables still dangled from a center console. The interior was empty except for a figure in Pitt's leather jacket huddled in one end.
Cold rage swept Pitt. He took Merchant by the collar of his yachting jacket and cast him aside as easily as if he'd been a straw scarecrow. He stormed back to the dining table before he could be stopped. "Not Maeve too," he said sharply.
Dorsett smiled, but it was an expression completely lacking in humor. "She took her ancestor's name, she can suffer as her ancestor did."
"You bastard!" Pitt snarled with animal hate. "You fornicating scab-!" That was as far as he got. One of Merchant's guards rammed the butt of his automatic rifle viciously in Pitt's side, just above the kidney.
A tidal wave of agony consumed Pitt, but sheer wrath kept him on his feet. He lurched forward, grabbed the tablecloth in both hands, gave a mighty jerk and wrenched it into the air. Glasses, knives, forks, spoons, serving dishes and plates filled with gourmet treats exploded over the deck with a great clatter. Pitt then threw himself across the table at Dorsett, not with the mere intent to strike him or choke him to death. He knew he'd have one, and only one, chance at maiming the man. He extended his index fingers and jabbed just as he was smothered in guards. A maddened Boudicca slung her hand down in a ferocious chop to Pitt's neck, but she missed and caught him on the shoulder. One of Pitt's fingers missed its target and scraped over Dorsett's forehead. The other struck home, and he heard an agonized primeval scream. Then he felt the blows raining on him in every bone of his body, then nothing as the crazy melee snapped into blackness.
Pitt woke and thought he was in some bottomless pet or a cave deep in the earth. Or at least in the depths of some underground cavern where there was only eternal darkness. Desperately, he tried to feel his way out, but it was like stumbling through a labyrinth. Lost in the throes of a nightmare, doomed to wander forever in a black maze, he thought vaguely. Then suddenly, for no more than the blink of an eye, he saw a dim light far ahead. He reached out for it and watched it grow into dark clouds scudding across the sky.
"Praise be, Lazarus is back from the dead." Giordino's voice seemed to come from a city block away, partially drowned out by the rumble of traffic. "And just in time to die again, by the look of the weather."
As he became fully conscious, Pitt wished he could return to the forbidding labyrinth. Every square centimeter of his body throbbed with pain. From his skull to his knees, it seemed every bone was broken. He tried to sit up, but stopped in mid-motion and groaned in agony. Maeve touched his cheek and. cradled his shoulders with one arm. "It will hurt less if you don't try to move."
He looked up into her face. The sky-blue eyes were wide with caring and affection. As if she were weaving a spell, he could feel her love falling over him like gossamer, and the agony slipped away as if drawn from his veins.
"Well, I certainly made a mess of things, didn't I?" he murmured.
She slowly shook her head, the long blond hair trailing across his cheeks. "No, no, don't think that.
You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me."
"Merchant's boys worked you over pretty good before throwing you off the yacht. You look like you were used for batting practice by the Los Angeles Dodgers."
Pitt struggled to a sitting position. "Dorsett?"
"I suspect you may have fixed one of his eyes so he'll look like a real pirate when he slips on his eye patch. Now all he needs is a dueling scar and a hook."
"Boudicca and Deirdre carried him inside the salon during the brawl," said Maeve. "If Merchant had realized the full extent of Father's injury, there is no telling what he might have done to you."
Pitt's gaze swept an empty and ominous sea through eyes that were swollen and half closed "They're gone?"
"Tried to run us over before they cut and ran to beat the storm," said Giordino. "Lucky for us the neoprene floats on our raft, and without an engine that's all you can call it, rebounded off the yacht's bows. As it was, we came within a hair of capsizing."
Pitt refocused his eyes on Maeve. "So they left us to drift like your great-great-great-grandmother, Betsy Fletcher."
She stared at him oddly. "How did you know about her? I never told you."
"I always investigate the women I want to spend the rest of my life with."
"And a short life it'll be," said Giordino, pointing grimly to the northwest. "Unless my night-school class in meteorology steered me wrong, we're sitting in the path of what they call in these parts a typhoon, or maybe a cyclone, depending how close we are to the Indian Ocean."
The sight of the dark clouds and the streaks of lightning followed by the threatening rumble of thunder was enough to make Pitt lose heart as he peered across the sea and listened to the increasing wind. The margin between life and death had narrowed to a paper's, thickness. Already the sun was blotted out
and the sea turned gray. The tiny boat was minutes away from being swallowed by the maelstrom.
Pitt hesitated no longer. "The first order of the day is to rig a sea anchor." He turned to Maeve. "We'll need my leather jacket and some line and anything that will help create a drag to keep us from capsizing in heavy seas."
Without a word, she slipped out of the coat and handed it to him while Giordino rummaged in a small storage locker under a seat. He came up with a rusty grappling hook attached to two sections of nylon line, one five meters, the other, three meters. Pitt laid open the jacket and filled it with everyone's shoes and the grappling hook, along with some old engine parts and several corroded tools Giordino had scrounged from the storage locker.
Then he zipped it up, knotted the sleeves around the open waistband and collar and tied the makeshift bundle to the shorter nylon line. He cast it over the side and watched it sink before tying the other end of the line solidly to the walk-around console mounted with the useless controls for the missing outboard engine.
"Lie on the floor of the boat," ordered Pitt, tying the remaining line around the center console. "We're in for a wild ride. Loop the line around your waists and tie off the end so we won't lose the boat if we capsize and are thrown in the sea."
He took one last look over the neoprene buoyancy tubes at the menacing swells that swept in from a horizon that lifted and dropped. The sea was ugly and beautiful of the same time. Lightning streaked through the purple-black clouds, and the thunder came like the roll from a thousand drums. The tumult fell on them without pity. The full force of the gale, accompanied by a torrential rain, a drenching downpour that blocked out the sky ant turned the sea into a boiling broth of foam, struck them less then ten minutes later. The drops, whipped by a wind that howled like a thousand banshees, pelted them so hard it stung their skin.