Dark Resurrection (11 page)

“And that’s how they chill us?”

“Nah, to chill us they’ll burn us alive.”

The spider priest lowered the scroll, stepped to the edge of the dais and addressed the kneeling prisoners. The crowd went suddenly silent.

Ryan looked over at Chucho expectantly.

“He’s asking us if we have anything to say after the verdict and sentence,” Chucho told him. “You know, any final words for the world to remember us by. Confessions to other crimes we weren’t accused or convicted of. Pleas for mercy from the Lords of Death. Last-second conversions to their sickening, false religion. Itzamna’s told us how we’re going to die. Now he thinks we’re going to grovel and tremble in fear, and thereby amuse the audience even more.”

“When it gets dark I’ll let my fists and feet do the talking,” Ryan said.

“And guns, too, if we can grab some,” Chucho said, “but first I’ve got a few things I want to get off my chest.”

When Chucho tried to get up from his knees, his guards wouldn’t let him. Displaying amazing strength in his thighs, he slowly rose against the power of the noose poles. Unable to lever him back down, they tried to choke him out. His face turned dark with suffused blood. His remaining eye bulging from the pressure, he stared up at the spider priest and pointed at his mouth.

The priest impatiently waved for the guards to loosen the nooses so he could speak his final words.

When he regained his breath, Chucho addressed the priest, Fright Mask, and the assembled crowd of traitors in a loud, clear voice. Ryan had no idea what he was saying. He might have been giving some kind of defense for his actions; he might have been promising to return as a ghost to haunt them. Everything was calm and peaceful until his very last line, which he directed at all and sundry.

When the red sash audience heard it, they went absolutely crazy. Not just booing and screaming, either. Joy juice bottles rained down on them from the battlements, shattering on the grass and the edge of the dais. Then came the stones, like hail.

Fearing his prisoners would be killed before the officially sanctioned event, the leader of the guards ordered a quick, strategic retreat. Ryan and Chucho were rushed to cover under the red brick colonnade.

“What did you say at the end that made them so nukin’ mad?” Ryan said as they ducked into the shade.

Chucho shrugged. “I told them before the night’s over I’d be in hell, fucking their grandmothers.”

Harmonica Tom Wolf threw back his head and cheered himself hoarse, waving his arms, stamping his boots—he and the thousand other men in straw cowboy hats, white shirts and crimson shoulder sashes. Tom wanted no part of what was being celebrated, but he couldn’t risk calling attention to himself by standing sullen and silent while the crowd around him went wild. Not that anyone was looking in his direction at that moment. The militiamen who packed the edges of the fort’s ramparts were all staring down at the quadrangle and the two prisoners kneeling there.

Ryan Cawdor was noosed, front and rear, and held down with long poles by two red sashes in front of a low stage at the eastern end of the compound. The prisoner beside him was similarly pinioned and pinned. From a distance, the second man might have been Ryan’s twin brother. They had the same rangy, powerful build, the same long dark hair, the same noble bearing, the same black eye patch and scar—only the stranger’s battle wound was on the opposite side of his face. After a moment or two it had dawned on Tom that the giant sculpted heads he’d seen the night before hadn’t been meant to represent Ryan Cawdor after all; it was the other guy that they depicted, the guy with the missing right peeper. Ryan’s running buddies—Krysty, Mildred, J.B., Doc and Jak—were
nowhere in sight. There was no telling what had happened to them, or whether they had survived the night.

While the prisoners knelt, a dried-up little walnut of a man in red robes and a pointy red cone hat stood on the edge of the platform and read from a rolled-up piece of paper. His unamplified voice, though high-pitched and shrill, carried well; he was obviously accustomed to public speaking. Every time he paused in his singsong recitation, the seven other men in red hats and robes seated behind him on the stage beat on their tambourines with bone drumsticks, and the crowd cheered approval.

The excitement bordered on frenzy. It was fueled by a blazing sun that beat down on them and by the copious amounts of joy juice being passed from hand to hand. The man standing beside Tom suddenly thrust his shotgun in the air and touched off both barrels at once. The booming report echoed off the walls of the compound before it was lost amid the general clamor. The side of Tom’s face went momentarily numb from the blast; he gingerly rubbed his ear, which felt like it had been rammed full of cotton with a barge pole. Scowling at the drunken shooter, Tom fought down the urge to unsling the 12-gauge he had commandeered, and force-feed the idiot its metal-shod butt.

All around him the red sashes began putting in their two cents, chanting a word in Spanish that he translated without any difficulty at all. “Death! Death! Death!”

Tom had no doubt what was going on. He was witnessing a show trial with a verdict that had already been decided. What, if anything, Ryan could have done to deserve this was a mystery to him. Had Cawdor committed some kind of crime against piracy while a prisoner on the Matachìn tug? Had he started a mutiny or a slave rebellion?

The seagoing trader accepted a half-full glass bottle that was shoved into his chest and pretended to take a deep swig from it—pretended because the backwash from a dozen strangers did not appeal to him in the least. Then he passed the joy juice on, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. In the uniform and carrying the standard red sash firearm, he was invisible. No one even thought to question his right to be there.

Harmonica Tom had no shortage of balls.

But it was balls coupled with brains that had brought him, easy as you please, over the narrow bridge and right through the ancient gates of the island fortress. He had already sized up his red sash opponents as complacent, smug in their power, because just like their Matachìn masters they hadn’t been challenged by their fellow citizens or any threat from outside for so long. Even for a homegrown militia, they seemed more than a little disorganized; that was another consequence of having faced no real adversaries in recent memory. Of course, it didn’t take much in the way of organization to dominate unarmed shopkeepers and dirt farmers. One thing was for sure, if the red sashes had officers and noncoms, they weren’t in charge here. There was no unit cohesion. It was every man for himself.

When the opportunity arose to do a little recce of the fort’s interior, knowing that’s where Cawdor and the others had been taken the previous night, Tom Wolf had seized it without a moment’s hesitation.

Just after daybreak, while he was sawing up kilo-size blocks of C-4 into smaller chunks on his galley table with a predark treasure, his SOG Seal Knife 2000, he had heard heavy footsteps on the deck above.
Tempest
was being boarded. A second later someone pounded on the cockpit
door so hard it rattled in its jamb, and the steel wire of the attached booby trap vibrated through its eye-screws all the way down to the PKM’s pistol grip.

“Sí, sí, momentito…”
he called out.

Putting the SOG’s blade between his teeth, razor edge out, Tom quickly spread his poncho over the tripod-mounted machine gun at the foot of the cabin’s aft stairs. The poncho didn’t fully cover the weapon, and it did nothing to hide its obvious contours and upward aimpoint.

Boom-boom-boom! The pounding resumed.

Tom pulled a paper navigation chart over the primer-rigged chunks of plastique he had stacked on the table, then palmed the fixed blade knife.

“¡La otra puerta!”
he yelled back.
“¡La proa!”

Overhead, he heard what sounded like two sets of boots tramping hard up the deck for the cabin’s forward entrance. Rushing past the staterooms amidship, he vaulted up the steep companionway and unlocked the door. Then he hopped back down to the deck, stepping back to block with his body the view down the corridor, the view of the shrouded machine gun.

The door above him swung outward, bright light spilled in, and a red sash charged down the steps without invitation.

No greeting.

No warning.

As the man descended, Tom noted the missing buttons on the front of his white shirt and a blubbery, hairless brown belly showing in the gap. The straw-hatted, red-sashed intruder held a double-barrel 12-gauge hard to his shoulder as he stepped onto the cabin’s deck; his expression seemed inordinately pissed off. The whites of his brown eyes were pink, like
he’d been caught out in a sandstorm. He brought with him the stink of joy juice, cheap perfume and recent sex.

The red sash braced his scattergun’s butt on his hip, the barrels pointed at Tom’s midsection.

As second pair of boots started down the stairs, Tom moved a little to the side to further block the first guy’s view into the aft cabin. But the man was looking around much closer to hand. Looking for something small and valuable to steal? Tom thought. For something worth killing him over?

The trader’s mind raced, putting together the pieces of his predicament. If there were more red sashes outside, he reasoned, they’d have come aboard, too. They wouldn’t be waiting around on the other boats or on the dock. Not while these guys pocketed all the good stuff. If there were others they’d at least be poking around on
Tempest
’s deck. This, Tom decided, was a two-man team.

Almost immediately, the first guy zeroed in on his big stainless-steel Model 625 Smith hanging in its holster from a wall hook.

Shiny.

A leer twisted the red sash’s mouth as he reached out to touch the grips. From his expression it was evident that he’d already picked out his prize. And from his body language, he figured Tom, like everyone else hereabouts, was going to be too cowed to try to stop him from taking it.

The second man was already a third of the way down the companionway, which was so steep he could see hardly anything of the cabin below him, just the foot of the stairs and the deck.

Tom darted past the first guy as the other man’s boot began to come down on the next tread; just before it touched, he
hooked it with the heel with his hand, sweeping the leg outward. The second red sash fell over backward and dropped; as he fell, the back of his head bounced hard off the edges of the steps behind him.

Thud, thud, thud, thud.

Tom let the SOG’s no-slip Zytel grip drop into his palm, and driving with his legs as he pivoted, he sent a savage, sixty-degree upward thrust into the base of the other man’s skull. Bone yielded like so much cardboard, crunching as the knife’s razor point penetrated his brain pan. It was the kind of full-power strike that demanded a hand guard—without it Tom’s fingers would have slid down the blade’s edge, themselves cut to the bone.

For a moment Tom held the man by the left shoulder and by the steel rammed into the back of his head, then he shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet and rammed the guy face-first into the bulkhead, using his full body weight from behind to further drive in the blade. With a second, sickening crunch, it slipped in all the way to the hilt.

As the red sash’s bowels released, one more nasty fragrance was added to the man’s stench.

The elapsed time was no more than five seconds.

Tom let the man slip to the deck and turned toward the other guy, who was lying on his back at the foot of the stairs. Despite his own head injury, red sash Number Two was trying to pull it together. His eyes were only half focused, and his fingers fumbled weakly next to his hip as he tried to get hold of the pistol grip of his double barrel which had fallen to one side.

Perhaps he was a nice guy when he was off red sash duty.

Perhaps he had a wife and ten kids.

Perhaps he liked dogs.

It didn’t matter.

Tom knee-dropped all 185 pounds of himself onto the front of the man’s exposed throat, one blow that crushed the larynx like an eggshell.

The body under him jolted at the impact. After a momentary pause, there was a shrill whistling sound. With all his strength the red sash was trying to breathe, but despite the effort was only managing to suck a tiny, utterly insufficient wisp of air through the squashed passage and into his lungs.

As Tom stood, the guy clawed at his own ruined throat. His face rapidly went purple, then black, his eyes bulged, his mouth agape, tongue protruding, heels drumming frantically on the deck. After a minute or so he stopped moving. The extreme tension in his body just slipped away.

Tom ran up the steps, pulled the companionway door shut and locked it. He descended to the bottom stair and sat on it, gasping for breath.

Then he saw the first guy was bleeding around the hilt of the knife, and it was dripping onto the deck mat.

“Shit!” he said. He jumped up and grabbed the man by the back of his shirt collar and dragged him to the main stateroom’s head. He opened the shower stall door and shoved the man in, positioning his wound so it dripped into the floor drain.

Getting the seven inches of SOG out was a lot harder than sticking it in. Tom had to stand on the back of man’s neck and work the handle back and forth to widen the entry wound and dislodge the blade. When he pulled the knife free, blood spurted out in a gusher.

And continued to spurt.

The red sash’s heart was still beating.

Tom wiped off his knife on the tails of the white shirt. The
coppery odor of blood mixed with all the other smells in the enclosed space made him want to puke. Holding his breath, he turned on the shower bilge pump to send the gore over the side and into the bay. He knew he couldn’t risk dragging the bodies up on deck in broad daylight. He was going to have to wait until after dark to get rid of them. And there was room in the shower stall for two, if he piled the dead men on top of each other.

Back in the corridor, as he prepared to haul the second corpse out of sight, he heard sounds of activity outside. Not on his boat, not on the boats it was rafted to, but on the dock and street beyond. There were loud voices. There was laughing. Car horns honked.

It sounded like another parade.

When Tom popped up on deck for a quick look, he saw scads of red sashes trooping toward the fort. Hundreds and hundreds of them. They weren’t marching in orderly ranks; they were a raucous mob.

That’s when it had occurred to him that he could join the party with minimal risk to his central goal: payback for Padre Island. Based on his recce of the night before, blowing up the power plant looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. He figured if Ryan and his companions were still alive this morning and he could pinpoint the location where they were being held, there was a chance he could rescue them in the chaos that was sure to come after he turned off the lights.

At least he could try to rescue them. Considering who they were and what they had endured, considering he had been instrumental in getting them into this mess in the first place, he owed them that much.

Tom stripped off the dead man’s white shirt and red sash
before depositing his body in the shower. The other guy had bled out from his head wound by that time, so he shut off the bilge pump.

After putting on the shirt and sash, he uncovered the PKM and double-checked the selector switch to make sure he was leaving the booby trap set, the weapon ready to fire. With the dead man’s straw hat pulled low on his forehead, he gathered up the dropped scattergun and climbed the forward companionway onto the bow deck. He locked the door behind him, then joined the happy throng that was headed to the fort.

That had been almost two hours ago.