Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) (10 page)

The snipers ran ahead down the dock, alongside the drowned buildings. Just before they vanished from sight, they slipped through broken-out, lower-story windows.

BoomT sent the rest of the men ahead. It irked him but he had no choice. If he went first, he’d slow down the advance. Not only would five hundred pounds of running weight overstress the dock’s salvaged planking, it would create a rocking motion so violent it would make standing difficult and aimed fire impossible.

When his crew was forty yards distant, BoomT set out after them, taking care where and how heavily he stepped, steadying himself with a hand against the buildings’ sides. Even so, the dock lurched sickeningly under him.

A string of single shots barked from the rooftop of the building to his left.

The fat man hurried, his arms extended like a tightrope walker, to catch up to his main force, which had already reached the start of the unprotected section of dock. The undulation became so extreme that to keep from falling in the water, he dropped to his hands and knees and madly crawled the last ten yards.

The dock’s violent motion continued, as did the sniper fire.

To the right, he could see four men in a small skiff, two rowing for all they were worth, two frantically pushing a folded, weighted net over the stern. They were halfway across the harbor mouth.

Two hundred yards away, One-Eye was scrambling aboard a moored sailing ship. The vessel lay broadside to BoomT, across the open stretch of water, a sitting target.

The fat man shouldered the RPG, but because of the dock’s movement he couldn’t keep the ship in his sights. He had to hold fire. He couldn’t waste the shot.

“Go get ’em!” he shouted at the huddled sec men and sailors, waving them onward, toward the unprotected section of dock. “Don’t let ’em cast off!”

Ryan broke into an all-out sprint as single-fire rifle shots rained down on the exposed dock. Bullets zinged over his head, splintering the thirty-foot stretch of planking that separated him from Jak. The companions knew better than to bunch up while crossing open space. Hitting an individual, moving target was much more difficult than lobbing rounds into a pack of bull’s-eyes. The up and down, wavelike movement of the dock both helped and hurt the companions’ cause: it messed up the snipers’ stationary leads, but the tricky footing meant it took longer to reach hard cover.

The one-eyed man counted at least two AKs steadily popping off behind him. He couldn’t stop, turn, locate the targets and return fire with the Steyr to put up cover for his battlemates. Headlong forward motion was all that was keeping them from being hit.

And even that wasn’t enough.

Directly in front of him, Jak’s C-4 backpack took a solid whack, jerking sideways on its backstraps. The slug drilled through and left to right into the water, missing the albino’s rib cage by a fraction of an inch. The impact caught him in midstride and knocked him off balance, driving him to a knee. Unhurt, unfazed, the albino teen bounced back up at once and ran on.

One hundred feet away, the far end of the dock was tied to the partially sunken base of the Big Arthur crane. Ryan saw Tom lead Krysty, Mildred, J.B. and Doc onto the crane deck then to the right, behind the cover of the moored sailboats. Five ships blocked the sniper fire.

Ryan and Jak raced to close ranks, bullets dogging their heels. As they jumped onto the crane and ran behind the stern of the first ship, a flurry of slugs slapped its fiberglass superstructure, plowing into the hull and ricocheting off the steel masts. All along the moorage the live-aboard crews of the trader vessels were shouting and cursing as they dived for cover.

The snipers were tracking and zeroing in on the companions’ movement between the ships. A tall, stringbean of a sailor stood at the precisely wrong moment. A shot intended for Ryan hit him squarely in the shoulder, twisting him, and he went over the port rail backward, screaming as he fell into the gap between the ship and the crane’s base. He entered the water headfirst.

Captain Tom bellowed through a cupped hand along the line of ships, “Keep the fuck down!” He had stopped beside an off-white sloop with an oil- and chem-stained hull and battered steel masts.

As Ryan and Jak ran low and fast toward him, Tom hurried Krysty, Mildred, Doc and J.B. aboard the amidships’ gangway, guiding them down into the cockpit and out of sight belowdecks.

Ryan couldn’t miss the ship’s name painted in peeling, cursive letters across the stern:
Tempest.
Bolted to the top of the stainless-steel stern rail was a canvas-shrouded longblaster on a swivel mount. It had a massive box magazine.

Shooting back wasn’t what was on Tom’s mind.

“Cast off the lines!” he shouted at Ryan and Jak, then he disappeared below the coaming.

Ryan did better than that, whipping out his panga he slashed through the two-inch braid on the crane cleat with three hacking blows. Beside him, the ship’s auxiliary diesel engine started up with a burbling rumble. Gray smoke puffed from exhaust ports just above the waterline.

From the bow cleat Jak waved and shouted to Ryan. “Longblaster! Up here! Quick!”

Ryan dropped the end of the severed line. Sheathing his panga as he ran, he unslung the Steyr. Kneeling next to Jak, looking under and around the bowsprit, he saw a rowboat crossing the harbor mouth about one hundred yards away. The seated men at the oars were working in unison and stroking hard. Two others stood bent over the stern, dumping a barrier net over the side. From the floats bobbing on the surface, they had already blocked more than half the entrance.

Ryan tossed his backpacks onto the sailboat’s foredeck, then scrambled over the rail himself.

“Get aboard!” the captain hollered as he put the engine in gear and the ship started to slide away from the moorage.

As the gangway glided past, Jak jumped the widening gap, onto the port deck, and scrambled into the cockpit.

Bullets rattled the deck, shattering the fiberglass and skipping off the brightwork. There were definitely more than two sources of fire now. Shooting was coming from the dock, as well.

Ryan flipped up his scope’s lens covers as he moved behind the skimpy cover of the anchor chain locker.

Clear of the other trader ships, but still broadside to incoming fire, Tom redlined the diesel and the vessel surged forward.

Bullets whining overhead, Ryan lined up his shot on the closer rower. Holding the center post low, he tightened down on the trigger, taking up the slack. After a last second adjustment of his lead, he applied an ounce more pressure and the trigger crisply broke. The Steyr roared and bucked.

Downrange the rower was struck center body mass as he leaned into a backstroke. He kept on going backward, losing his grip on the oar.

Ryan cycled the action, chambering a fresh round. They were closing fast on the rowboat. Peering through the scope, he saw the other rower frozen on the thwart, staring down at his dying comrade.

The one-eyed man held the sight post lower still and fired again.

Struck high in the belly, the second rower twisted sideways and was thrown half over the far gunwale.

Two men in the stern stood stunned, net in hands, as their boat rapidly lost momentum.

Ryan glanced back when he felt the ship veer to the right. He saw Tom’s head poking over the ship’s wheel. The captain had altered course, intending to ram.

The men in the skiff dropped the net. Pushing their wounded comrades out of the way, they grabbed for the oars and tried to row back the way they’d come. By then the bow of the vessel was bearing down hard. Realizing that they couldn’t get away, they dumped the oars and reached for their AKs.

The much larger, much taller vessel was so close the rowers couldn’t do anything but fire straight through the hull. Before they could get in position to do that, Ryan abandoned his longblaster and rolled to the starboard rail. Drawing his SIG, he leaned over the side, aimed down and rapid-fired, shooting them to hell right where they sat.

As the stern scraped past the dead boat and dying crew, and the end of the net, Ryan gathered up his treasured rifle and hopped down into the cockpit, which was lined with steel plate.

Bullets were still coming at them, but the ship was back end first to the enemy blasters, and therefore a much smaller target. When Ryan raised up his head and looked back toward the dock, he saw a flash of ignition. He recognized at once what it was from the madly spiraling a smoke trail.

A rocket-propelled grenade.

He managed to yell out a warning to Tom, but before the captain could cut the wheel hard over, the grenade whooshed past them, wide to the right. The rocket skipped on the surface of the water once like a flat rock, crow-hopped another 150 feet in the air, then nosed in and blew up, spraying shrap in all directions.

Ryan climbed out of the rear of the cockpit and shouldered the Steyr, using the top of the stern rail as a shooting brace. Through the eyepiece, he saw the fat man in the middle of the dock, his tree trunk legs wide apart for balance, still holding the RPG launcher, waving and shouting for his men to keep firing.

“What in radblazes are you doing?” Tom said, turning toward him. “They can’t touch us. We’re home free.”

Ryan didn’t answer. He held his sights steady and tightened down, doing his best to time the trigger break with the rise and fall of the distant dock. The Steyr barked and its butt punched back hard.

Three seconds later, through the scope he saw BoomT’s head suddenly snap back, chins pointing skyward, arms flung wide. The gargantuan entrepreneur toppled over backward, spread-eagled, off the dock and into the water with a tremendous splash.

“Nukin’ hell!” Tom exclaimed, clapping the one-eyed warrior on the shoulder. “Now that’s what I call a shot!”

“Dumb luck,” Ryan said.

“Call it whatever you want, but I’d like to see the fat cheating bastard get up from that one.”

The big ship was rigged for solo sailing. In a matter of minutes, without any help from Ryan, Tom had the sheets up and full of wind, and they were skimming due south, away from Port A ville. When the captain ducked down to shut off the diesel, he called for the others to come up top.

“You’ve got a few bullet holes through the hull,” Mildred told him as she took a seat on the cockpit’s builtin bench. “They’re all above the waterline.”

“Then there’s nothing to worry about,” Tom said. “I’ll check them after we get some distance from here.”

“Isn’t BoomT going to send ships to chase us?” Krysty asked.

“Mebbe in another life,” Tom said.

“You took him out?”

“Not me,” Tom said, then he nodded toward Ryan, who shrugged.

“It was either that or keep looking over our shoulders for the rest of our days. BoomT wasn’t the forgiving kind, and we did pretty much wipe out his livelihood.”

“‘Pretty much’?” Mildred repeated. “All we left him with was his bedspread!”

“Yeah, and they can fish it out of the bay and bury him in it,” Ryan said.

“All things considered, we didn’t come out of this too bad,” J.B. said, cradling his sore ribs with a forearm.

Ryan took a moment and introduced each of the companions to the captain. And when they were done shaking hands, he said, “What’s your last name, Tom?”

“Wolf.”

“And your ship’s called
Tempest?
” Ryan asked.

“Wait a radblasted minute!” J.B. said, grimacing as he sat up straight on the bench. “You’re
the
Harmonica Tom?”

Mildred said, “The who? The what?”

“Half the stuff you’ve heard is bull,” Tom assured J.B.

“Well, I heard you singlehandedly repelled a boarding party off the Linas,” the Armorer went on. “Then you trolled a wounded coldheart in your boat wake. Robber’s crew regrouped and tried to rescue him in their own ship. You kept their man just out of their reach for better than a mile. Until something triple big and triple nasty swam up from below and cut him clean in two. You played a jig on your mouth organ the whole time, that’s how you got the nickname.”

“Well, that one’s true,” Tom admitted.

Then he turned to Ryan and said, “I knew who you were the minute I set eyes on you. No mistaking that missing peeper and scar. Know some of what you’ve done, too. Funny how quick word gets around who’s chilled who. You took down Baron Willie Elijah and Baron Tourment. And you nailed that oversexed pile of pus, Captain Pyra Quadde, with a spear.”

“Harpoon,” Ryan said.

“If it was long and pointy,” Tom said, “ol’ Pyra probably died happy.”

“Not particularly.”

“You can bet the news about today’s little shindig will spread along the coast like wildfire,” the captain continued, clearly enthused at the prospect. “BoomT was widely known, but not widely admired. Trader might have set the benchmark for fucking with people’s shit at Virtue Lake, but what you just did to Port A ville runs a close second.”

“BoomT did it to himself,” Krysty said.

“And that’s what folks are going to be talking about for years to come,” Tom said, shooting a grin at Ryan. “How you all set him up for a royal hosing, and how deep he swallowed the stink bait.”

Ryan changed the subject. “How long is this trip to offload the C-4 gonna take?”

“The distance is 240 miles, plus or minus,” Tom said. “How long it actually takes us is up to the wind and the tide. We could do it in less than a day, if we’re lucky. That means sailing all night, of course. Which means round-the-clock watches. Got plenty of hands for that so we can all get some shut-eye. Round-the-clock watch is something we have to do anyway because of the competition.”

“Who’s the competition?” Cawdor asked.

“Pickings aren’t what they used to be,” the captain said. “Scroungers are having to dig deeper and deeper into the nuked-out places for spoils. The prime, top-quality goods are a hell of a lot harder to come by than they were even five years ago. But hey, you know all that. You saw the godawful garbage BoomT was selling. Got to figure that the decline in merchandise is something that’s only going to get worse as time goes on. After all, they aren’t making any new stockpiles. How many were there to start with, anyway? Who the fuck knows? How many haven’t been looted? Who the fuck knows? Long and short of it, some of my seafaring brothers and sisters are gathering their cargoes offshore, by bushwhacking and raiding other traders. Seems like there’s always a boat or two patrolling, looking for an easy highjack. The unlucky traders and crews just disappear, and their ships sail into port with fresh faces. Goes without saying that nobody asks where the goods came from, or where the previous owners went.”

“Robbers robbing robbers,” Krysty said.

“You mean, they’ve turned pirates?” Mildred said.

“Traders, pirates, it’s always been hard to tell the two apart,” Ryan said.

“And it’s gotten even harder of late,” Tom said. “Believe me, it’s not like it used to be in these parts when there was plenty of the good stuff to go around. I don’t suppose you’ve heard any tales about what’s happening well to the south of here? Down the Lantic coast?”