Without warning

Pete worked the slide and fired again and again, until he’d emptied the entire load, then he dropped and rolled onto his back as Jules jumped up and loosed off a series of clattering bursts. The first burst went nowhere near the go-fast. She’d had to squint into a lowering sun and had simply hosed out some fire in the general direction of the boat. The second went a little closer as she adjusted her aim, but the shots flew over the heads of the men as Lee tacked again and she lost balance. The third blast, which emptied her clip, raked the foredeck of the boat, sending bright chips of metal and polished fibreglass flying and twinkling into the salt air and late afternoon sun. A muffled whoomp and a satisfying flash told her something vital had gone up, but before she could nail them with a round from the grenade launcher, Pete dragged her down – just as a line of automatic fire ripped along the bulkhead behind her with a heavy, industrial hammering sound. A hot steel chip grazed one cheek, burning her.

‘Shit,’ she gasped. ‘Thanks, Pete. Owe you a blowie for that one.’

‘Consider me blown,’ shouted Pete over the uproar. ‘Now, gimme the 16, and a couple of mags. You take my shotty and get back to Fifi at the loading dock – she’s got at least one of the pricks on her case. The crazy fucker jumped onto the diving platform on a fly-by’

‘Okay. Got it,’ she yelled back, fishing two full magazines out of her combat harness. From the rear of the yacht she heard the unmistakable pounding of Fifi’s favourite gun, a Russian PKM.

They quickly exchanged weapons and he stuffed the reloads into the pockets of his cargo pants as she spun around.

Pete headed forward.

* * * *

Jules found her shipmate crouched low at the bow of a SeaVee dive boat, which hung next to the big custom-built sport fisher on the lower deck at the rear of the yacht.

‘Sorry Julesy,’ said Fifi. ‘Asshole got on board when his buds had me pinned down. I put a lot of fire down there but don’t know whether I even winged him. A frag woulda been nice to roll down on him.’

It was hard to hear her words over the tumult of gunfire and snarling engine noise, but the meaning was clear enough. Jules patted her on the back, where she’d slung ‘the worm’ – a rocket launcher Pete had acquired on their last trip to the Maldives. It was stamped with Australian Army markings and serial numbers, and had probably been stolen from the garrison on Timor. They had only one warshot for it, and Pete forever had to remind Fifi that she couldn’t fire off a practice round. She’d been desperate to light that sucker up since he’d bought the thing.

‘You leave this guy to me, babe,’ said Jules. ‘We really need you to nail one of those fuckers out there. Pete’s working on Shoeless Dan’s ride, that leaves the other one for you. Think you can take him with that thing?’ She indicated the launcher on Fifi’s back.

Fifi suddenly hauled up her PKM and punched out a short, angry burst, chewing big, expensive chunks out of the yacht’s panelling down by the steps to the diving platform. A heavy Soviet-era design, the gun was powerful enough to be used as an anti-aircraft weapon. The uproar when she fired it was enormous. Jules’s ears were already ringing from the shotgun blasts a few minutes earlier and now they began to hum a single deep tone to let her know they’d suffered some real damage.

‘Sorry!’ shouted Fifi. ‘Saw him again. Asshole has only two ways up onto the deck – those two sets of stairs down there. You have to move across from one side to the other all the fucking time to check he hasn’t snuck up. Can’t keep an eye on both at once, you see, but then he can’t be in both places at once either. He’s packing some kinda light fully auto. Maybe an Uzi or an MP5. And yeah, I can put a hurtin’ on that other fucker out on the water, no problemo.’

‘Okay,’ said Jules. ‘You go.’ Her own voice sounded dull and very distant to her, as though her head had been packed in cotton wool.

She flicked the safety off her shotgun as Fifi moved away. The Rules was still weaving an erratic course, changing tack without warning as Mr Lee strived to prevent their attackers from boarding any more men. Bent low, Jules couldn’t see the go-fast boats, but the deep growling of their engines as they manoeuvred around the larger vessel was loud and constant. And although distance and the sheer mass of the super-yacht at times muted the pop and crackle of gunfire from Shoeless Dan’s men, the impact of their rounds hitting home was often deafening, as they crashed into metal or glass just overhead.