Ocean Prey (A Prey Novel #31) - John Sandford Page 0,3
boat engines.
The PO2 had killed the boat’s speed for the boarding and when he saw the rifle come up he reached forward to hit the accelerator, but a bullet took him in the throat and then another in the chest, and the slugs turned him away and he fell into the bottom of the boat, dying, blood spreading around him on the wet floor, a purple flood. The Coast Guard boat turned into a slow circle across the wide port and the Mako accelerated away.
* * *
As the Mako left, Hall, Sue, and the baby nosed through the cut in their rehabbed Whaler and saw the Coast Guard boat turning away from it.
Hall watched for a moment, then said, “There’s something wrong, Sue.”
“Get over there,” Sue said. “That Mako’s running like a thief in the night. I’ll get the gun.” They kept a .38 Special in a waterproof can down an equipment hatch.
Hall pushed the boat as hard as he could, but they were a full minute away from the Coast Guard RIB. He couldn’t see anybody aboard as he approached. He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, but when he got alongside, he saw the three bodies in the bottom of the boat and he dropped the cell phone and grabbed the VHF and screamed, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Port Everglades, three Coast Guards shot in boat chasing black-and-white Mako . . .”
The Coast Guard came back instantly: “Mayday caller, identify yourself!”
“This is Coast Guard Petty Officer Two Barney Hall. We have three men shot inside the Port Everglades entrance. They look bad, man, they look really bad.”
Then the watch officer: “Hall, can you help them? We’re on the way, but you gotta do what you can . . .”
“My wife’s a nurse, I’m putting her on board, sir. Should I go with her or go after the Mako?”
There were several seconds of silence—Sue had handed him the .38, and was already clambering into the Coast Guard boat with the baby and their first aid kit—and then the officer came back: “Your call, Hall. Chopper’s coming, but it’ll be a few minutes.”
Hall looked down at his wife, who had checked one man quickly and then moved to the bow. She’d done two years in emergency rooms and she knew what she was seeing. She looked back at him and shook her head and Hall shouted into the radio, “I’m going after the sonsofbitches, sir.”
He dropped the hammer on the Whaler. The Mako was most of a half mile ahead of him, moving fast down the Intracoastal Waterway, and there was no way Hall would have caught the other boat if the Mako hadn’t swerved to a pier, where three men jumped off. One ran to a parked SUV, opened it, and backed it to the edge of the pier. Two others ran what looked like black buckets to the white SUV. A fourth man was still on the boat, carrying more black buckets to the bow. They were in a frantic hurry: radios automatically monitored channel 16, so they’d heard Hall’s Mayday and the Coast Guard’s response.
After moving more buckets to the bow of the boat, the fourth man hoisted a five-gallon gas can out of a hatch on the Mako’s stern and began spraying the boat with gasoline and then, as Hall roared toward them, stepped off the boat, lit what looked like a piece of newspaper, and threw it toward the Mako. The boat exploded in flame.
The three men who’d been loading the black buckets into the SUV jumped into the car and the fourth man ran up to the back door and yanked it open. Hall had the .38 in his hand—he was close enough to feel the heat from the flames—and fired three wild shots at the car, no hope of hitting anything because the careening Whaler was pounding the deck against his feet, making any kind of an accurate shot almost impossible.
Impossibly, one of his shots hit the fourth man in the head.
The man dropped flat on the concrete pier, stone-cold dead. The driver of the car jumped out, grabbed the man by his shirt, looked at him, dropped him, looked for a moment at Hall, his face unreadable behind dark glasses, then leaped back into the car and spun it out of sight.
The Mako was burning like a torch.
The watch officer was shouting, “Hall, Hall, where are you?”
“Look for the fire, sir; I’m south of the cut where the fire’s at.”