As the boat captain cut power completely, the sound of the rumbling engine faded to lapping waves and the pirate vessel’s approach. Worthy felt the deck beneath him rolling in the current—not the best conditions for accuracy, but this would be a close-range engagement and he trusted his team’s reflexes were better than those of the pirates.
He readied the carbine in his grasp, a suppressed HK416 with all the bells and whistles for night fighting. With one hand on the pistol grip and another braced to activate his infrared laser, Worthy listened to the growling hum of the pirate boat closing the distance. He ducked as their spotlight swept the deck from front to rear, then hovered on the bridge where Worthy could make out the captain through the windshield, standing with his hands raised.
He felt the bump of the smaller boat knocking against his own, and heard David transmit between the pirates’ shouted orders at the captain.
“Racegun, they’re starting to come up right next to you.”
Worthy waited a half-second before rising from his crouch—and coming face-to-face with a man who wore a knit cap pulled over his face, two crude eyeholes cut in the fabric and a rosary around his neck as he tried to hoist himself over the rail.
Driving his suppressor into the man’s sternum, Worthy fired two subsonic rounds that sent the lead pirate falling back onto his boat. His body collided with a second man trying to board behind him, and Worthy exploited the confusion to swing his infrared laser to a third pirate standing at the bow, this one shirtless and fumbling to bring his shotgun up.
Three shots to center mass caused him to fall forward, almost dropping into the river as the spotlight extinguished from a bullet fired by one of his teammates. As the view through his night vision dimmed, Worthy steadied himself on the rocking deck and angled his rifle over the rail, aiming downward at the second pirate to board who’d been knocked down after the first kill.
He found the man trying to pull himself out from under his friend’s body, exposing the space between his shoulder blades to Worthy’s laser as he drilled a trio of rounds into him.
Then Worthy swept his aim to the aft section of the pirate boat, finding the next two men that his teammates had already dropped and firing a controlled pair into each as David and Reilly did the same with his own kills, their three lasers crisscrossing over the vessel until the five pirates were thoroughly seeded with jacketed hollow points.
Worthy reloaded, slamming a fresh magazine into his weapon and conducting a 180-degree sweep forward of the boat. He checked the near bank first, then the far one, peering into the labyrinth of mangrove inlets for any indication of onshore observation or, worse still, another pirate vessel.
“Racegun,” David transmitted, “pick up security to our front again and I’ll get the rear. Doc, I want you to search that boat—we need to make sure this was as random as it seemed.”
From his position at the back of the boat, Reilly emitted a loud groan.
He swam about as well as a bowling ball, and as the largest man on the team, he should have been the last one assigned to some parkour bullshit from one boat to another in the midst of this filthy river.
But his team leader had spoken and the Nigerian captain was already firing his engine, guiding his vessel alongside the idling pirate boat that had drifted away in the current. So the medic begrudgingly obeyed, meeting David at the center of the port side and asking, “Sure you don’t want to send Worthy?”
David was peering over the rail, hopefully second-guessing his decision to send a guy over the edge.
Instead the team leader replied, “Worthy’s the best marksman, so I need him on security. You can swim, right?”
“No, actually, I’m a terrible—”
“You’ll be fine,” David cut him off. “We need to get this thing searched and sunk. I want to know if they’ve got any long-range radios, planning materials with a timeline, anything that indicates they knew we were coming. If that’s the case, we’re in for one hell of a night.”
“Well,” Reilly remarked, “if I get eaten by a croc or a hippo, the blood will be on your hands.”
They arrived at the pirate boat, the hulls clacking against one another as Reilly examined the four-foot drop from one vessel to the next.
“Tick tock,” David said, ignoring Reilly’s comment. “Over the rail, before we run into any more pirates.”
Slinging his long-barreled HK417 rifle, Reilly hesitantly climbed the side rail and straddled it, then stepped down on the far side as he perched for the jump.
He waited until the hulls knocked together again to make his leap, noting with dismay that the pirate vessel bounced off and began drifting away as he was midair.
Reilly landed on the edge of the deck with a thud, the boat rocking under his considerable weight. One leg dipped into the tepid river water up to the knee, and he scrambled forward along a slick of blood between two pirate bodies as the craft rolled in the opposite direction, then righted itself and drifted away from his team’s boat.
“Son of a bitch,” Reilly muttered, kicking his left leg to shake off the excess water as a polluted stench soaked through his pants and boot. The outboard engine was still rattling at idle, and above the sound he vaguely registered David laughing from the opposite deck. Shaking his head, Reilly rose to a crouch and stood to begin his search.
Approaching the front of the pirate vessel, he flipped up his night vision and turned on the red lens headlamp around his neck. He was about to kneel before the first body when a noise caused him to spin around—gargled breathing from the back of the boat. Its source was revealed at the periphery of his headlamp beam as the rearmost body impossibly began to move, a single arm reaching up to claw at a handle on the outboard engine.
Reilly whipped his rifle into a firing position, but it was too late—the boat lurched forward at full throttle, sending him into a forward sprawl that ended when he crashed onto the deck. Why, he wondered as the boat sped up the river and away from his teammates, did the most ridiculous situations always happen to him and him alone?
Rolling to his side, Reilly recovered his rifle and tried to rise to a knee.
It wasn’t an easy process—the boat was leaping over waves and crashing on the far side, veering left and then right as a man who should have been dead somehow maintained his grip on the throttle.
By the time Reilly managed to kneel, desperately trying to steady himself well enough to put his rifle to use, he was shocked to see his boat’s running lights already fifty meters behind him, the distance increasing with each passing second.
At that moment he heard David transmit, “Doc, I think you’ve got a survivor on board.”