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"How are we fixed for weapons?" Giordino asked Gunn calmly.
"Two M4 carbines with attached forty-millimeter grenade launchers."
"Nothing heavier?"
"Easily hidden small arms is all the admiral would allow on board in case we were stopped and searched by a Nicaraguan patrol boat."
"Do we look like drug smugglers?" demanded Renee.
Dodge stared at her with a crooked smile. "What do drug smugglers look like?"
Pitt said, "I've got my old Colt forty-five. How about you, Al?"
"A fifty-caliber Desert Eagle automatic."
"We may not be able to sink them," said Pitt. "But at least we can repel boarders."
"If they don't blast us to smithereens first," grunted Giordino, as another missile landed in Poco Bonito's wake no more than fifty feet astern.
"So long as their rockets aren't equipped with homing devices, they can't hit what they can't see."
Automatic weapons fire began
to wink in the darkness behind them, as the modern pirates aimed by radar in their general direction. Tracers danced over the surface of the sea fifty yards to starboard in a spraying pattern. Gunn, playing the odds, turned the boat to port for a short distance before heading straight again. The tracers ever so slowly spiraled through the night, groping for their prey before falling away into the dark sea where Poco Bonito should have been but wasn't.
Two more rockets arced through the night. The pirates played the odds and fired them almost in parallel at the blip on their radar. They had the right idea, but they fired when Gunn was momentarily heading on a straight course before he feinted port before turning starboard. The rockets landed on opposite sides of the boat within fifty feet, showering the decks with twin cascades of water.
Then the firing stopped and it seemed as though a mantle of stillness had been drawn over the boat. Only the beat of the mighty engines straining in their mounts, the growl of the exhaust and the water sloshing past the bow broke the silence.
"Have they given up?" Renee murmured hopefully.
Staring at the radar, Gunn spoke happily through the pilothouse door, "They're turning away and reversing course."
"But who are they?"
"Local pirates don't use holograms or fire missiles from yachts," Giordino said flatly.
Pitt stared pensively out the back of the boat. "Our friends from Odyssey are the most likely suspects. No way they could have known our bodies weren't lying on the bottom of the sea. We simply walked into an ambush set for any boat or ship that wandered into this particular area."
"They won't be happy campers," said Dodge, "when they learn we're the ones who got away, not once but twice."
Renee felt even more lost. "But why us? What did we do to be murdered?"
"I suspect we're trespassing on their hunting grounds," Pitt said, taking a logical course. "There has to be something in this part of the Caribbean they don't want us or anyone else to see."
"A drug-smuggling operation, perhaps?" offered Dodge. "Could it be Specter is involved with the drug trade?"
"Maybe," said Pitt. "But from what little I know, his empire makes vast profits in excavation and construction projects. Drug running wouldn't be worth their time or effort, even as a side operation. No, what we have here goes far beyond drug smuggling or piracy."
Gunn set the helm on autopilot, stepped from the pilothouse and wearily dropped into the lounge chair. "So what heading do we program into the computer?"
There was a long silence.
Pitt was not happy about further endangering everyone's lives, but they were here and they had a mission. "Sandecker sent us to find the truth behind the brown blob. We'll continue searching for the highest concentration of its contamination in the hope it will lead us to the source."
"And if they chase after us again?" prompted Dodge.
Pitt grinned broadly. "We turn and run, now that we've gotten so good at it."
