Inca Gold (Dirk Pitt 12)

He pulled a 'small ring in the floor and raised a trapdoor he'd built into the trailer for additional storage space. He lifted out the storage box, set it aside and squirmed through the narrow opening left in the floor. Lying on the deck beneath the trailer, he peered into the darkness and listened. Not a sound. His unseen hunters were patient men.

Coldly and deliberately, like a methodical man with a decisive purpose, who was in no doubt as to the outcome of his intended actions, Pitt rolled from under the trailer and moved like a phantom through a nearby open hatch down a companion ladder into the engine room.

He moved cautiously, careful not to make sudden movements or undue sound.

Amaru would not cut him any slack.

With no one to tend them, the boilers that created heat to make the steam that powered the walking beam engines had cooled to such a degree that Pitt could lay the palm of his bare hand against their thick riveted sides without blistering his skin. He leveled the gun with his right hand and held the flashlight as far to his left as his outstretched arm could allow. Only the unwary aim a beam in front of them. If a cornered man is going to shoot at the person shining a light into his eyes, he unerringly points his weapon where the body is expected to be, directly behind the light.

The engine room looked deserted, but then he tensed. There was a soft mumbling sound like somebody trying to talk through a gag. Pitt swung the beam of the flashlight up into the giant A-frames that supported the walking beam. Someone was up there. Four of them were up there.

Gordo Padilla, his assistant engineer, a man whose name Pitt had not learned, and the two deckhands, Jesus and Gato, all hung upside down, tightly bound and gagged with duct tape, their eyes pleading. Pitt pried open the largest blade of the Swiss army knife and quickly cut them down, freeing their hands and allowing them to pull the tape from their mouths.

"Muchas gracias, amigo," Padilla gasped as the tape tore out a dozen hairs of his moustache. "Blessed be the Virgin Mary you came when you did. They were going to cut our throats like sheep."

"When did you see them last?" asked Pitt softly.

"No more than ten minutes ago. They could return at any second."

"You've got to get away from the boat."

"I can't remember when we dropped the lifeboats." Padilla shrugged with a manana display of indifference. "The davits and motors are probably rusted solid and the boats are rotted."

"Can't you swim?" Pitt asked desperately.

Padilla shook his head. "Not very well. Jesus can't swim at all. Sailors do not like to go in the water,"

Then his face lit up under the beam of the flashlight. "There is a small six-man raft tied to the railing near the galley."

"You'd better hope it still floats." He handed Padilla his knife. "Take this to cut away the raft."

"What about you? Aren't you coming with us?"

"Give me ten minutes to conduct a quick search of the ship for the others. If I've found no sign of them by then, you and your crew get free in the raft while I create a diversion."

Padilla embraced Pitt. "Luck be with you."

It was time to move on.

Before he traveled to the upper decks, Pitt dropped into the water that was rapidly filling the bilges and turned off the valves of the seacocks. He decided against climbing back up the companion ladder or using a stairway. He had the uneasy feeling that somehow Amaru was following his every move. He climbed up the engine to the top of the steam cylinder and then took a Jacob's ladder to the top of the A-frame before stepping off onto the top deck of the ferry just aft of its twin smokestacks.

Pitt felt no fear of Amaru. Pitt had won the first round in Peru because Amaru wrote him off as a dead man after dropping the safety line into the sacred pool. The South American killer was not infallible. He would err again because his mind was clouded with hate and revenge.

Pitt worked his way down after searching both pilothouses. He found no sign of Loren or Rudi in the vast passenger seating section, the galley, or the crew's quarters. The search went quickly.

Never knowing who or what he might encounter in the dark, or when, Pitt investigated most of the ship on his hands and knees, scurrying from nook to cranny like a crab, using whatever cover was available. The ship seemed as deserted as a cemetery, but by no stretch of his imagination did he believe for a moment the killers had abandoned the ship.

The rules had not changed. Loren and Rudi Gunn had been removed from the ferry alive because Sarason had a reasonably good hunch Pitt was still alive. The mistake was trusting the murder to a man fired with vengeance. Amaru was too sick with hate to take Pitt out cleanly. There was too much satisfaction in making the man who took away his manhood suffer the tortures of the damned. Loren and Rudi Gunn had a sword hanging over their heads, but it wouldn't fall until the word went out that Pitt was absolutely and convincingly terminated.

The ten minutes were up. There was nothing left for him but to cause a distraction so Padilla and his crew could paddle the raft into the darkness. Once he was certain they were away Pitt would try to swim to shore.

What saved him in the two seconds after he detected the soft sounds of bare feet padding across the deck was a lightning fall to his hands and knees. It was an obsolete football tackle that no longer worked with more sophisticated training techniques. The movement was pure reflex. If he had swung around, flicked on the flashlight and squeezed the trigger at the dark mass that burst out of the night, he would have lost both hands and his head under the blade of a machete that sliced the air like an aircraft propeller.

The man that tore out of the dark could not halt his forward momentum. His knees struck Pitt's crouching body and he flew forward out of control as if launched by a huge spring and crashed heavily onto the deck, the machete spinning over the side. Rolling to one side, Pitt beamed the light on his assailant and pulled the trigger of the Colt. The report was deafening, the bullet entering the killer's chest just under the armpit. It was a killing shot. A short gasp and the body on the deck shriveled and went still.

"A nice piece of work, gringo," Amaru's voice boomed through a loudspeaker. "Manuel was one of my best men."

Pitt did not waste his breath on a reply. His mind rapidly turned over the situation. It suddenly became clear to him that Amaru had followed his movements once he reached the open decks. The need for stealth was finished. They knew where he was, but he couldn't see them. The game was over. He could only hope Padilla and his men were going over the side unnoticed.