“You’re not going to get away with this,” Cabrillo said.
The threat sounded as hollow to him as it did to Shere Singh, and the heavyset Pakistani laughed. “Of course I am, Captain Jeb Smith. But I must say you have lost a lot of weight compared to what my son, Abhay, described.”
“Jenny Craig.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Listen Singh, we know about the Maus, and we know about the Souri. As soon as either vessel tries to enter a legitimate port, they will be seized. You’re finished, so why not give up now and spare yourself a pair of murder charges.”
“So you would not charge me for the deaths of the Toyo Maru’s crew, eh?”
Juan hadn’t held much hope that the pirates were merely holding the tanker’s crew, and now he had his confirmation. “In about ten minutes a special forces team is going to rush this building and kill everyone inside.”
Singh laughed again. He was enjoying his complete dominance over his captives. “They will be five minutes too late for you and your nubile friend. There is nothing you can say to stop me and nothing you can do, either. I have men approaching your boat as we speak. At most you have a small mercenary force. They will be dealt with.”
Cabrillo knew that even if he didn’t make it out of this alive, his people would cut down Singh and all his men like so much wheat. But he wanted to keep Singh talking. Buy himself some time until he could think of a way out of this mess. “If we are going to die, at least tell me about the Chinese. How do they fit into your plan?”
Singh stepped close again. He possessed the piercing hazel eyes of a goat, and they never blinked. He smelled of cigarettes and at about six foot four stood half a head taller than Cabrillo. Using just the strength of his arm, he rammed a fist into Juan’s solar plexus, a blow that expelled every molecule of air from his lungs. Had the Sikh used the full force of his body, Juan’s ribs would have been stove in. It took several struggling breaths until his lungs felt at least partially inflated.
“You never knew I discovered you were following the Maus from the Sea of Japan. You didn’t know I offloaded this ship” — Singh stamped a foot onto the deck — “when I had the chance. I have been ahead of you every step of the way, so what makes you think I would be so stupid as to tell you anything now? Knowledge must be earned. I taught my sons that. Anything given to you is worth exactly what you put in to deserve it. Nothing. What we do with the Chinese we’ve captured is none of your concern.”
That at least verified for Cabrillo that Singh was connected to the snakeheads. “Aren’t you at least curious who we are and why we’ve come after you?”
A lupine look crossed Singh’s face. “You have me on that account, my friend. I indeed do want to know who you are, and if you came here a week ago I would have delighted in extracting that information. But now, today, it doesn’t matter. I will permit you to go to your grave with your secrets as I go about my business with mine.”
Singh made a spiraling gesture with his finger, and the powerful motors that drew the ship saw through its massive gears came to life. The chain soon became a blur as it whipped by just above the deck. The sound was staggering but nowhere near as bad as when it was chewing through a derelict hulk.
Juan looked around for something, anything, to forestall the inevitable. He’d come up with the germ of a plan, but at most he could hope to take out two, maybe three of the guards before he was gunned down. His only hope was that Tory would have the presence of mind to get herself over the side of the tanker and the hell away from the shed. He looked over to her. Their eyes met with such intensity that it was as if they could read each other’s minds. She knew he was going to try something crazy, and her gaze told him she would make the most of his attempt. That brief exchange told him that in another world he would have enjoyed knowing her better.
The guards maneuvered Juan closer to the whirring chain saw, and no matter how he tried to resist he couldn’t stop himself from taking halting tiptoe steps toward the industrial guillotine. Even from five feet away he could feel its power. Like the tingle of atmospheric electricity during a storm, it was a living force that split the air.
He tried to twist his shoulders, but that only made the guards shove him even closer.
Shere Singh moved up next to Juan, keeping enough distance that there was no way he could reach the Sikh. Singh held a length of wood in his hand. Making sure he had Juan’s attention, he lowered the piece of timber onto the spinning chain. There was a brief pop and an explosion of sawdust. It took a fraction of a second for the saw to pulp the heavy piece of mahogany. Singh grinned again and stepped back, shouting over the roar of the machine, “I think I will let my men enjoy the woman before they feed her to the saw.”
Juan gave no outward sign that he was about to act, but in his mind he planned out every move, choreographing the actions so when he went into motion there would be no hesitation. There was, however, a glaring variable to his plan. And that was if he survived the first instant.
He kicked both legs into the air, relying on the goons behind him to hold him steady as the limbs inexorably fell back toward the saw. His right calf made contact with the top of the serrated chain. He was dimly aware of Tory’s stunned scream as t
he fast-moving saw bit into something hard in his leg and ripped the pole handles out of the guard’s grip.
The shock and savagery nearly ripped Juan’s leg from its socket and the straps securing the prosthesis below his knee were stretched to their very limit. But it had worked. The men hadn’t fought the saw in a tug-of-war that would have allowed the blade to slice through the titanium struts of his artificial leg. The saw’s relentless momentum tossed Juan like a rag doll fifteen feet across the deck. He landed in a perfect shoulder roll, and as his body came to rest, he was reaching into the ruin of what he called his combat leg for the Kel-Tec pistol secured within the composite limb.
The Kel-Tec was one of the smallest handguns in the world, weighing just five ounces when empty. But unlike other small pistols that were limited in their caliber to .22 or .25, the Kel-Tec was designed to fire P-rated .380 cartridges. They were man stoppers, and the armorers on the Oregon had hot-loaded the rounds to within a few newtons of their maximum tolerance.
As much as Cabrillo wanted to put the first bullet through Singh’s head, the compact weapon only had room for seven rounds. He took aim at the startled guards who’d been holding him a second earlier and fired. The first round went wild. His breathing was coming too fast and his stump had begun to throb. The next two found their marks, and one of the guards had his throat blown open. He fell forward into the ship saw.
The chain severed his body in a fountain of blood. His head and torso fell to the deck with an obscene wet smack while his lower extremities were kicked into the air when a tooth snagged on his spinal column. They cartwheeled through the air and caught the second guard in the chest, knocking him flat and for the next few seconds out of the fight. Juan shifted his aim at the men holding Tory. They held her in such a way that he couldn’t get a clean kill, so he put a round into the kneecap of one of them. As he spun away shrieking, Tory managed to twist out of the other’s grasp. Juan dropped him with a double tap to the chest.
The two turbaned men that had boarded the Toyo Maru with Shere Singh were scrambling for cover and preparing to open up with their AK-47s. Juan emptied his three remaining rounds in slow succession to keep them down while screaming for Tory. She raced at him, and together they ran for the railing. Juan’s leg could barely support him so he and Tory moved with the lurching gait of a couple entered in a three-legged race.
They reached the railing at the same time the guards took aim. The jacketed 7.62mm bullets pinged and sparked as the men adjusted the hosing barrels of their weapons. Without pause and as ungainly as a pair of corpses being dumped from a bridge, Cabrillo and Tory allowed their speed to fold them over the railing, and headfirst they plummeted toward the water. There was nothing either could do to right their trajectory, and they slammed into the murky surface in a tremendous splash. They sank deep, and even though his lungs hadn’t recovered from Singh’s sucker punch, Juan made sure he and Tory stayed under as they swam away from the impact wave.
Juan could hear that someone had cut the power to the ship saw, for the building no longer echoed. He counted to ten in his head, promising his punished body that at the end of the count he would surface for air, but when he reached the magic number, he forced himself to count another slow ten and then another. It was Tory who first needed air, and they surfaced together as close to the hull as they could. Juan gulped a lungful and forced them under again, not knowing if they’d been spotted.
When they surfaced for the second time, he took a moment to get his bearings. They were less than twenty yards from the railing where he’d tied off the Draeger set. Bullets began to stitch the water around them, shooting little jets of white water into the air. The pair ducked back under without getting their breath but somehow managed to cover the distance.
Juan’s mind was too fogged with the pain radiating from his leg and head to attempt untying the simple knot he’d fastened. Instead, he reached into his shattered prosthesis for a flat throwing knife. The ship saw had shredded one side of the blade, but the other still retained its keen edge. He sliced through the lines and fed the regulator to Tory as he made them both sink deeper. Because the rebreather didn’t produce bubbles, the gunmen above couldn’t see where they lurked ten feet below the surface. The Sikh fighters fired indiscriminant volleys into the water, hoping to get lucky but mostly just venting their anger that two of their comrades were dead and a third would limp for the rest of his life. Juan held no sympathy for any of them.