Andy McDermott - The Midas Legacy

Nina started over the road towards the boats, Spencer behind her. Eddie briefly held back to cover them, then followed—

An engine roared — and a pickup truck skidded around the end of the road to his left, racing towards them.

Spencer froze. But Nina had already seen a man in the rear bed standing up. She shoved the young man forward as the guard fired at them, flames sputtering from his Spectre’s muzzle. ‘Move!’

They ducked between two of the boats. Bullet impacts kicked up mud and gravel, then splinters flew as the gunman tracked them behind the hull. Spencer shrieked. ‘Keep going!’ Nina yelled.

Eddie jumped out from cover and fired at the bounding pickup. The man in the rear unleashed another burst, but the vehicle’s wild ride over the uneven ground made accurate aiming all but impossible. The Yorkshireman was stable — and more skilled. He let off three rounds, the first striking the truck’s radiator grille. He instantly refined his aim. The second bullet shattered the windscreen — and the third hit the driver squarely in the head.

The pickup veered sharply as the dead man slumped over the wheel, flinging the gunman from the rear bed to hit a boat’s mast and fold around it with a horrific crunch of bone. Out of control, the truck skidded on before hitting a bump and being thrown into the air…

It smashed into the line of boats, ripping one in half before burying itself nose-first in a second. The force of the impact collapsed the stands supporting the hull. It toppled over — hitting the boat beside it.

Which hit the next in line.

One by one, the grounded ships fell like dominoes, masts snapping and lines flailing. The line of destruction marched towards Nina and Spencer. ‘Shit!’ Eddie cried. ‘Get out of there, run !’

Spencer hurried for the boats’ sterns, but stumbled over debris hidden in the darkness. Nina ran into him from behind. They both fell. The ship to their left lurched as another vessel collided with it, then toppled sideways.

Even in the shadows, there was still enough spill from the boatyard’s lights for Nina to see the ship’s bronze propeller slicing towards her—

It jolted to a stop barely a foot above her as the rolling boat smashed against its neighbour. ‘Go, go !’ she shrieked, scrambling forward. Spencer gasped in fear and followed, both flinging themselves clear as the other ship rolled from its stand to continue the chain reaction. The first boat’s abbreviated fall concluded, the propeller’s edge burying itself a foot deep in the wet ground where they had been lying.

‘Holy crap!’ Nina gasped, pulling herself clear as smashed wood rained around her. She checked the almost hyperventilating Spencer. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yeah, I–I think so.’ He tried to stand, but his shaking legs gave way. ‘Oh my God!’

She heard her husband shout her name. ‘Eddie, we’re here!’ she answered.

‘Thank fuck!’ Eddie said, staring at the wreckage. There was no longer any space between the overturned boats, and he didn’t fancy climbing over them either. Snapped spars jutted from the crushed hulls like the teeth of a Venus flytrap, lines from fallen masts entangling everything in a crazed spiderweb.

He looked to the right, seeing the nautical cascade finally end as the last boat in the line smashed against the ground at the edge of the nearest dry dock. ‘I can’t get to you! Head for the dock, I’ll catch up with you there.’ He waited for an acknowledgement, then ran along the roadway.

Nina stood. She and Spencer had emerged by one of the workshops at the top of the slipway, the dark shapes of boats lurking inside the open-sided shelters. Beyond them she saw the dry docks — and approaching the further of the two, the vessel on which she and De Klerx’s team had arrived.

Bursts of gunfire sounded from elsewhere in the boatyard as the truck made its way to the waterfront. ‘We’ve got to get to the ship,’ she said, pulling Spencer to his feet. ‘I don’t trust Anastasia not to leave without us as soon as she’s got the Crucible aboard.’

‘I never trusted her anyway,’ he replied. ‘She always was a sanctimonious bitch, doing whatever Daddy Dearest told her to do.’

‘Unlike you, blowing the family fortune.’

‘Hey, at least I wasn’t a hypocrite about it. But Jesus Christ, she killed Augustine!’ he went on, before she could ask him what he meant. ‘Right in front of everyone! It must run in the family; I knew Fenrir was stone cold, but fuck me!’

‘No thanks.’ She set off again. ‘Right now, though, we’re relying on her and her boyfriend to get out us of here.’

Spencer quickly caught up. ‘Rutger?’ he snorted. ‘Now he’s a cold-blooded asshole.’

‘No arguments here.’ They reached the first dry dock. ‘Shit,’ Nina muttered. There was no easy way to get around it to reach De Klerx’s ship in the second; the wreckage of the last grounded boat, its hull crushed like a dropped eggshell, had fallen right at its edge, the mast and superstructure jutting out over the concrete basin and blocking their way.

‘We could climb over it,’ suggested Spencer.

‘Only if you want to get shot.’ She hurriedly crouched behind some barrels, pulling him with her. A man with a rifle was climbing the ladder to the crane’s control cabin.

She looked towards the sea. The lock gates of the nearest dock were both closed, keeping out the water. There were no railings along their tops, but they still looked wide enough to traverse. ‘Across there.’

Spencer grimaced. ‘Are you crazy? We’ll either fall in the sea or thirty feet on to concrete — and we might still get shot!’

‘We can make it. And I don’t think the guy in the crane’ll be looking in our direction.’ A furious exchange of gunfire came from somewhere across the boatyard. Had the guards managed to regroup and intercept the truck?

A glance back at the crane. The man had reached its cabin. ‘Quick, before he gets his gun ready,’ she said, scurrying towards the lock. Spencer gave the guard a nervous look, then hurried after her.

The roadway turned sharply away from the waterfront. Eddie kept going in a straight line, picking his way between a clutch of containers and stacks of metal plates. He had also heard the barrage of gunfire, coming to a similar conclusion as Nina: Trakas’s men had probably set up a roadblock.

He reached the side of the first dry dock, pausing in the shelter of the containers. A ship was in the drained tank, the rear half of its superstructure suspended overhead from the crane. Where was De Klerx’s boat?

There — creeping into the second dock. It was running dark, a ghostly shape fading into view as it entered the wash of the boatyard’s floodlights. To reach it, he would have to either skirt around the inshore end of the dry dock past the crane, or cut across the gangways leading to the disassembled boat; the smashed remains of a yacht blocked the way to the lock gates bridging the seaward end.

The first route, he decided. It was longer, but seemed safer. The dry-docked craft was missing large sections of its deck, shadows making it hard to tell what was merely darkness and what was an open hole. He broke cover and ran—

The echoing boom of a rifle from above and the piercing crack of a bullet splintering concrete just behind him came as one.

Someone was in the crane, high up enough to have been obscured from Eddie’s hiding place. He cursed and changed direction. He was too far from the containers to retreat without giving the sniper a clear shot at his back. Instead he charged up one of the gangways. Another shot snapped past him, impacting against the ship’s hull. He reached the deck. There was a hatch not far away, but it was closed, and taking even a second to open it would leave him a sitting duck.