Colin Forbes - Year of the Golden Ape

^ It would take fifteen minutes to reach the seaplane waiting in Richardson Bay. But first, the rest of the crew had to be taken ^ ^ to the day cabin. That was where it would be done. He looked round the bridge. Mackay was standing by the window, hands clasped behind his back as he watched the fog rolling in. Bennett, the man who had shouted into the speaker, warning MacGowan that Wrigley had been shot, was lying near the wheel, still unconscious. LeCat checked his watch as Andre Dupont, the lookout on the foremast, came on to the bridge.

^ Betty Cordell was ready. She had opened her shirt down the front, exposing her breasts. Get on with it, she told herself, don't think about it or you'll never do it. She walked to the cabin door, started rattling the handle. 'Come quickly! Please! Do come quickly! For God's sake open the door…'

^ She was hysterical, terrified – so it sounded to the guard in the alleyway. He fumbled for the key, shouted back at her in French, words she didn't understand as she went on calling out, begging him to open the door. His first thought must have been that the cabin was on fire.

^ He pushed the door open, his pistol drooped in his hand. She was a woman, useful for cooking, for bed, so he had no fear of her at all. He came in and stopped, gaping at her open dress, then his mind churned. She threw the open pepper pot from her lunch tray full in his face and he took the powder in his eyes. He cried out, dropping his pistol, pressing both hands against his agonised, burning eyes, stumbling about. She grasped the wine bottle LeCat had left, the bottle she had never thought of opening, so it was a lethal weapon – she grasped it by the neck. Without even a hint of hesitation she smashed the bottle down with a terrible force on the back of the guard's head and the fury of her blow split his skull.

^ He collapsed on the cabin floor. There was wine like blood all over him, mingling with the blood of his smashed skull. She looked down at him coldly, watching only to make sure he didn't move. Then she dragged him further into the cabin like a sack of dirt, left him in the bathroom and ran back to close the cabin door. It was the fusillade of shots which had jerked her into action and she was in a hurry.

^ ^ ^ on the coat, to grab the assembled rifle from under the bedclothes. She kicked the shattered bottle out of her way and opened the door again. The alleyway was empty, the key still in the outside of the door. Without knowing it, she had chosen the perfect time for her killing run – LeCat had called many of the guards to the bridge. She closed the door, locked it, pocketed the key and went slowly down the passage, listening, the Armalite rifle held in both hands at waist level. She was heading for the bridge, LeCat, she felt sure, would be on the bridge.

^ Winter stood clear of the hatch cover as the other two men came up behind him. The fog was thick now, pressing down on them like a smothering blanket. They went down off the forecastle cautiously, one man behind the other as Winter had suggested; Cassidy behind Winter, Sullivan behind the Marine colonel. Their DeLisle carbines were at the ready, Winter had the smoke pistol tucked inside his belt, they went down on to the main deck.

^ Winter avoided the catwalk, kept to the port side of the huge tanker where the deck was less cluttered with piping and valves, moving along close to the port rail. It was very silent in the misty darkness, the fog drifted in their faces, the only sound was the slap of water against the hull where the two dolphins, Mac and Jo, had earlier pressed their snouts up against the steel plates. Winter kept moving, creeping forward on his rubber-soled boots, alert for the slightest sound which might tell him something about the situation sixty feet above him at bridge level. Then something loomed up in the fog.

^ It was the port-side derrick, which told him he was close to the island bridge, still lost inside the swirling grey vapour. He waited for Cassidy to draw level with him, then looped the carbine over his shoulder and pulled the smoke pistol out of his belt. The fog was thinner, ebbing for a moment, and by now their faces and hands were chilled with the touch of the clammy moisture. The island bridge loomed above them as an insubstantial shadow.

^ They were within twenty feet of the five-deck bridge and these twenty feet were a death-trap. With the thinning fog any terrorist above, leaning out of the bridge window, could pick them off as ^ ^ they moved across the exposed space. And there would be more than one terrorist waiting up there. Possibly even LeCat himself. Then Cassidy plucked at his arm, pointed. A huddled corpse lay only a few feet away at the base of the bridge. Foley's.

^ Winter took his time, raised his left arm, using it as a rest to steady the smoke pistol, took careful aim, sighting the muzzle of the pistol at the centre of the bridge, away from the smashed window. The bridge was a blur, very high above him, and the angle of the shot was steep. He remembered looking up at the roof of Cosgrove Manor from the steps below, so many thousands of miles away, so many years away, so it seemed. He steadied his aim. He fired…

^ The smoke shell spun upwards, out of sight, lost in a swirl of fog. He heard it strike the bridge. He took two steps forward. Black smoke billowed, spread a curtain of darkness masking the bridge windows. Cassidy had run into the open. He fired three times at the heads of two men which appeared over the edge of the port wing deck. One of them slumped forward, toppled, landed almost at the American's feet. He waited, carbine aimed upwards. The second man reappeared, as Cassidy knew he would, bloody idiot. Cassidy fired again and the man fell over backwards out of sight.

^ It was happening so quickly it was like a film being run at high speed. Blurred images. Sullivan flying up a ladder. The smoke obscuring three decks of the bridge. Cassidy going up a com-panionway, vanishing inside the smoke. Shots firing repeatedly, a steady drumfire of shooting, the ship coming horribly alive. Winter had long ago disappeared up another ladder. Entering an alleyway, Winter saw a guard who, seeing Winter, threw up his hands. Winter shot him twice through the chest. MacGowan's orders were explicit. 'No prisoners, no phoney trials with some gabby mouthpiece crying over them. Shoot the lot…' Winter ran down the alleyway, heading for a certain objective, the day cabin where so many seamen had been kept prisoner. He turned a corner, saw the entrance to the day cabin. A terrorist, Lomel he thought, had just kicked open the door and was standing back with his Skorpion aimed, ready to shoot the unarmed hostages inside. Winter shot him twice. When you are hit by a. 45 bullet the sensation is like collision with a charging rhino. Lomel was hit by two. 45's. He was carried over sideways, slammed against a bulkhead where he slid to the floor. Winter kept on running, trod over him, kept on running…

^ Betty Cordell moved very cautiously, like a hunter stalking a beast whose whereabouts are uncertain, straining her ears to catch the slightest sound as she moved up the companionway step by step. The ship seemed eerily silent, the alleyways oddly deserted, as though she were moving through an abandoned ship. She was going the long way round to get to the bridge, to approach it from the starboard wing deck.

^ The Armalite. 22 survival rifle she had assembled was equipped with a ten-shot magazine. The ammunition was high-speed hollowpoint. The rifle was single-shot, with two trigger pressures. And she was carrying two spare ten-shot magazines in her coat pocket.

^ She reached the top of the companionway and another empty passage stretched ahead of her. Where had all the guards gone? She would walk into someone when she least expected it. She took a firmer grip on the rifle. Then she heard rifle shots, an irregular fusillade. She began running…