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enough to do more than just gawk over the rail into the small boat and had
offered to help. Captain Porter tactfully ordered them to stand by in case
they were needed, and proceeded to conduct the rescue effort with his crew.
There were only two bodies: a man in swimming trunks and a woman in a bikini.
The man was collapsed beside the controls of the small cabin cruiser, and the
woman was lying in the back of the boat. Santini supposed there could be more
people below.
"What do you think happened?" Santini asked the ship's doctor beside him.
"Hard to say, Father," the man answered with a deep Southern drawl. "Could
have been a freak storm. From this distance the bodies don't look badly
sunburned, so they can't have been out here like this for long. Maybe food
poisoning. That happens a lot with small boats that don't have adequate
refrigeration. And in these waters the temperatures get awfully high awfully
quick. Have to wait and see, I suspect."
Santini only nodded but then added, "I hope it's a job for you and not for me
if you know what I mean."
"Yeah, I know what you mean, Father." The doctor went on puffing his cigar.
Santini riveted his eyes back to the small boat. The motion of the cruise ship
was making him a little seasick now, the engines at dead stop. He decided that
the bigger the ship, the more you felt her rock in the water.
"Got her!" a seaman called. He was hanging off a small scaffolding immediately
below them, a boat hook at the end of his outstretched right arm.
"Bring her alongside, Peterson."
"Aye, Captain."
A second scaffolding appeared, and a second boat hook was whipped out from it
by another crewman. The small boat was being pulled forward and closer to the
cruise ship's hull. "The woman's breathin', Captain! She's alive!"
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Santini really felt better now, and from the passengers and crew lining the
rail there was a spontaneous cheer.
A third crewman hanging from a third scaffolding jumped and made it onto the
craft, landing less than gracefully. He caught up a line and tossed it upward
toward one of the men on the scaffolding. "Securing, Captain she's secure!"
"Get another line on her," Porter called down.
As the sailor started to turn to reach down for another coil of rope, the body
of the woman suddenly animated, rolling off the seat in a flash, and Santini
recognized what was in her hands. It was a MAC-11 submachine gun. "Nobody does
a damned thing or a lot of people get really dead real quick!"
Her male companion was throttling the seaman to the deck now, a pistol jammed
against the sailor's head. "And he dies."
Two more people, both clad in black clothes with ski masks, came from the
cabin of the cruiser, MAC-10s firing short bursts into the air. Then they
pointed them along the rail, causing screams from some of the female
passengers around Santini.
And then he heard the gunfire and the screams from behind him. Santini grabbed
as many people to him as he could and threw himself and them back from the
rail as the submachine guns opened up from below.
And there was gunfire everywhere now. The ship's doctor had a gaping hole at
the center of his forehead, the cigar still clamped between his teeth.
Santini heard Captain Porter shouting, "My God what's happening?"
Santini got up and ran. Palmer was a good man in a fight. Maybe between the
two of them they could do something. He skirted the lower-level pool, taking
the stairs up three at a time. Palmer and Amelina had stayed near the
upper-level pool with the rest of their guests after the captain had advised
everyone that watching at the rail represented more of a hindrance than a
help.
He saw Scott Palmer. And he saw armed men everywhere in orange wet suits,
their faces covered with black ski masks and diving masks with snorkel tubes
attached to them hanging from around their necks, MAC-10s and MAC-11s in their
hands, firing.
Palmer reached for one of the men, and a submachine gun slammed across his
face and put him down. Amelina screamed. Santini reached out, collaring one of
the armed invaders, dropping him to the deck with a double tae kwon-do kick to
the back of the knees. Santini's hands acted automatically, catching up the
MAC-10 and ripping the sling from the body, bracing the weapon against the
invader's larynx. His right knee hammered into the man's backbone between the
shoulder blades. Santini realized he was killing the man and he stepped back,
the submachine gun falling from his fingers and his shaking hands.
He looked at the thing that was called a squirt gun years ago. He could take
one apart and put it back together blindfolded. He'd used one of these more
than an M-16. How many men he had killed with one of these he didn't remember,
but he had counted their faces lots of times, lots of nights....
* * *
They were so far the hell north of the DMZ that sometimes he thought they were
going to China. He looked at Jeff Culhane. "Hey, Captain where the hell are
you and the lieutenant takin' us, anyways?"
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"To a ball game, Damascus. You like baseball, right?"
"Shit, Captain, best damned hitter you'll ever see."
"Yeah, my ass. Remember the time "
"I'm hit Jesus but I'm all right " Palmer shouted.
Santini wheeled toward the gunfire and started shooting, the MAC-10 in his
right fist, the .45 automatic in his left, ripped out of the leather tanker
rig across his chest.
They were coming with bayonets and he kept shooting and the bodies kept piling
up and up and Palmer cried out, "I'm bleedin' over here, guys!" But the bodies
wouldn't stop piling up and Santini opened his eyes and there were dead eyes
staring into his and he felt blood on his face and he knew he was alive and
there was a dead woman on top of his own body.
He pushed her off. The front of her frilly pink dress was covered with
splotches of red.
He sat up. His head throbbed with pain. This wasn't Vietnam. There weren't
women in pink party dresses in Vietnam....
He heard the scream again. It was Palmer. "Leave her alone, you
motherfuckers!"
Then came a woman's scream and a loud thudding sound.
Santini freed his legs of another corpse, this one a man.
He tried to stand up but pitched forward, his face inches from the pool. There
were three bodies floating in it.
The shouting was coming from the little deck below the sun deck where the
wedding ceremony had taken place.
Santini rolled back from the edge of the pool so if he fell he wouldn't fall
in.
His head was exploding, and he knew that the blood he felt on his face was his
own.
To his knees. A priest was good at that, he thought.
To his feet.
There were only dead men and dead women around him near the pool. He looked
toward the fantail. He didn't try to count the bodies.
He shook his head to clear it and staggered back, dropping to one knee. The
pain.
Gotta get up there, Santini thought. He started for the stairway, but then he
dropped into a crouch beside the steps and slid under them. A man with a ski
mask and a submachine gun was at the top of the steps. God didn't want him to
kill, he figured. But knocking a guy around a little with some karate or some
street fighting or some boxing in a good cause... ? He peered out from beneath
the steps. He could get up behind the guy if he turned around, then toss the
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gun to Palmer.
He waited, listening.
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