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“Practicality. I’m wearing body armor, and unless you dropped twenty pounds in two weeks, I know you’re not.”
She shot him a cheeky smirk. “Touché and lead on.”
Cabrillo checked the corridor outside the ballast control room and edged out. With no light to amplify, Tory’s goggles were useless, forcing him to rely on his flashlight and trust the guards would give themselves away before they saw it.
At the end of the hall they came to a set of steep stairs. Juan was halfway up when he heard voices and saw light from above. Without turning he stepped back again, feeling Tory right behind him. From the bottom of the stairs he caught a glimpse of two men armed with assault rifles passing by. He and Tory waited a full three minutes after the voices faded before making the climb again.
They had reached the level just below the main deck. Once they reached the outside, Juan planned to just jump over the side and find the rebreather. In the darkness Shere Singh’s men would never spot them.
From down the hallway came the unmistakable mechanical ratchet of a weapon being cocked. Cabrillo threw Tory to the deck as lights snapped on all over the place. His finger was working the trigger before he had a target, laying down suppression fire to maximize confusion. In the first seconds of the ambush he didn’t care about the danger of a ricochet. Getting out was all that mattered. Tory added her own pistol, an unsilenced 9mm that boomed like a cannon in the metal confines of the ship.
He wanted to get back down the stairs, but when he glanced over the landing, autofire ripped up from below so close he felt the heat of the bullets and the muzzle flash was like an explosion in his face.
He fired a blind shot at the downstairs gunman and crawled across the passageway, seeking cover where the hall turned ninety degrees. Once out of sight of the ambushers, he dragged Tory to safety. He hadn’t been hit, which was a miracle, and now wasn’t the time to worry about the Englishwoman.
He tossed his minicomputer out into the hallway. Immediately an automatic weapon opened up. Good. The guards were jumpy. He levered his pistol out into the hall and fired three shots, moving his body as he pulled the trigger so he was exposed by the time he pulled the trigger a fourth time. He spotted his target, a turbaned guard lying on the deck and cringing behind his AK-47. Cabrillo put a pair of bullets through the top of his head, then dashed for cover as another guard farther down the hallway unloaded his magazine in a wild sustained burst.
He grabbed Tory’s hand, and together they ran away from the ambush, all pretense of stealth forgotten.
Juan rounded a corner and saw the flicker of movement an instant before a rifle butt crashed into his skull. He fell flat, poleaxed, but didn’t lose consciousness as Tory came up behind him and double tapped the guard as he was recovering from the swing. The guard was blown back by the kinetic energy of her nine millimeter rounds and the wall behind him was painted in his blood.
His head feeling as fragile as glass, Juan let Tory help him to his feet. His vision was blurred, and blood oozed from where skin had been smeared from his forehead. It hung like a flap over his left eye. Juan ripped away the slice in a savage jerk that caused a fresh rush of blood but allowed him to see. Tory gasped.
“I know a good plastic surgeon,” was all he said, and the pair started running again.
That’s when a metallic scream unlike anything Juan had ever heard began. He knew immediately it was the ship saw. A moment later the thick band of the chain saw cut into the ship just ahead of the superstructure, no more than twenty feet in front of Cabrillo and Tory. Water from the lubricating jets turned to steam, spiking the humidity to a hundred percent, and slivers of metal filled the passageway like shrapnel. The saw changed directions and began to cut horizontally toward them, shredding metal bulkheads as though they were tissue. The thick chain burst through the wall next to them, its teeth cutting the ship as easily as a can opener. The chain came at them four feet off the deck, moving through the vessel almost as fast as they could run. The stench of scorched steel was overwhelming, and an occasional filing blew off the chain and landed on Cabrillo, melting holes in his wet suit.
They came to another staircase and raced up, their focus on staying away from the deadly saw. As if the machine knew where they were headed, it started to angle up after them, chewing apart the stairwell like some prehistoric predator. The railings ricocheted off the wall as the sawing action tore them from their mounts.
Juan could barely see. The combination of the blood and what he knew was a mild concussion slowed him. But Tory didn’t leave his side. Together they raced from the ravenous charge of the ship saw. They ran past crew cabins, and when they rounded another corner, both began to sprint for an exterior hatch. It was a race because they were running parallel to the thick cutting chain and could no longer see it as it sliced apart the Toyo Maru.
Ten feet from the open door, the wall to their right began to glow and vibrate as the chain’s teeth took their first taste of the bulkhead. Because the Japanese tanker wasn’t exactly square in the shed, the saw first ate through the corner they had just turned and, like a zipper being pulled, it started to split the wall.
Juan glanced over his shoulder. The chain had already cut through the first ten feet of the hallway and as he watched, another few feet were torn apart. Metal filings filled the hall like a nest of enraged wasps as the chain began to span the width of the corridor.
With five feet to go before they wer
e clear, Cabrillo pounded Tory between the shoulder blades. The blow made her tumble, but her inertia kept her rolling. Juan threw himself after her as the thick chain passed directly over them the instant they burst out onto the open deck.
And into another ambush.
Four turbaned men had been waiting for them, eyeing the duo’s fall over their AKs’ iron sights. Juan and Tory had landed in a tangle of limbs that parodied intimacy. Before either could get their gun hand free, the Sikhs had weapons to their heads. The ship saw rattled to silence.
“I was hoping the saw wouldn’t get you just yet,” an accented voice boomed from a catwalk suspended over the ship.
Juan and Tory had their weapons taken away and were allowed to their feet, their fingers laced at the back of their heads. Cabrillo studied the man above him. Judging age and his resemblance to Abhay, Juan guessed that the man was the leader of the pirate ring.
“Shere Singh,” Juan growled.
“I hope you found what you were looking for,” the Sikh said. “I would hate to think of you going to your graves still filled with curiosity.” He gave an order in a language Juan didn’t recognize, and he and Tory were shoved toward the ship’s bow.
Overhead an unseen operator was resetting the chain blade of the ship saw. Tracks built near the ceiling allowed it to be maneuvered almost anywhere within the shed. The segmented blade now spanned the deck about fifteen feet behind where the bow had been cut off, held so taut that despite its length of nearly two hundred feet, it didn’t sag. And in the glare of overhead lights the tips of its special alloy teeth glinted like so many hundreds of daggers.
A moment later, Shere Singh reached the Toya Maru’s deck and approached, flanked by two more guards. He carried an odd metal pipe with long, perpendicular handles. Juan and Tory were each held by a pair of men in such a way that their toes barely touched the deck. Cabrillo tried to shift his weight to find leverage to break free, but each movement caused his captors to lift him even higher. When Singh was close enough to smell, he passed the length of pipe under Juan’s arms and behind his back. The guards shifted their grip so they could hold him in place by grasping the handles.
Cabrillo now understood the device’s purpose. This had to be a favorite way for the pirate to dispatch his enemies. The handles allowed the guards to hold their victim so when they pressed his body against the ship saw they were in no danger of being caught in the whirring chain.
When she realized the full horror of what was about to happen, Tory Ballinger screamed like an enraged lioness and jerked her body to get away. The men holding her laughed and lifted her even higher, so her entire weight pulled awkwardly against the tendons in her shoulders. The agony quickly drained the fight out of her, and she seemed to deflate.
