Kill Zone (24 page)

He gestured with the gun and Macklin walked ahead of him to the lighted rear of the deck. A large group of people were there, seated and lying on the deck and standing at the rail, their clothes wrinkled, their faces gray. Some of the women had on men's suitcoats and sportcoats over shoulders left bare by their evening gowns and summer dresses, the hems of which were universally soiled. Surprise and hope rose in their eyes at the sudden appearance of the barefoot stranger in the wet suit, then fell back as the man they knew as Sol came into view behind him carrying the M-16. Macklin smelled despair.

On Ackler's orders he turned his back to the stern and draped himself, stomach down painfully, over the heavy painted mechanism of the windlass blistering four feet above the deck. In that awkward position he was expertly frisked and relieved of the knife in the waterproof sheath. Ackler tucked the blade under his belt, and before his coattail swung forward to cover it Macklin saw out of the corner of his eye the square butt of a semiautomatic pistol showing above the waistband of Ackler's pants. Next came the plastic bag containing nearly fifty thousand dollars, which the young killer riffled, whistling low, and then transferred to an inside pocket. “I heard they paid you union boys good,” he said.

Macklin said nothing. He tried to keep most of his weight on his right side to keep from caving in his cracked ribs. He had lived with the pain so long now it seemed like a tiresome old friend.

“Okay, get up.”

The process was more uncomfortable than staying as he was. He rolled off slowly, placing his weight on one knee and his right arm. He exaggerated the difficulty a little and let out a grunt. That wasn't hard.

“You
sound
sixty,” Ackler said. He was standing with his back to the rail, the automatic rifle cradled comfortably in front of him. But ready.

“Swimming takes a lot out of me.”

“Yeah. I can see.”

He couldn't tell if Ackler believed him or not. “You were going to tell me what made you decide to play junior commando,” he said.

“Was I?”

Macklin grunted again, leaning his hips against the winch. “I'm too old to play statues. I should be a grease spot amidships where you caught me. You would be, if the positions were reversed. You know why it's harder for a professional to kill the President than it is for an amateur?”

“The professional has to have an escape route.”

“Any nut with a Saturday night buster can do the job if he isn't concerned with getting away afterwards, just like any bunch of nuts can get automatic weapons and explosives aboard an excursion boat and take it over, because they don't care if they're still around after the band goes home. So how come a paid gun with as good a future as any in this business lets himself get talked into committing suicide with music? I mean, Siegfried, for chrissake. It sounds like a commercial for breakfast cereal.”

Ackler looked at him a long time before speaking. His eyelids flickered. It was as much of his human side as he'd shown so far.

“I made a mistake when I was nineteen,” he said. “I was out to make a name for myself in this line. A guy I met in a bar in Scranton sent me a plane ticket from L.A. and I flew out there. I was to skag his wife and make it look like a burglary. Only I didn't think he might be getting drunk and whimpering the same thing in bars out there, and when I slipped the lock on the guy's house and went inside, two uniforms who were waiting there got me on the floor and stood on my back and read me my rights.”

“Christ.”

“I know. I was nineteen, what can I say? They tried to get me to make a statement but I kept my mouth shut, and the guy that hired me pressed charges because his lawyer told him it'd look bad if he didn't and the judge could have been good to me. I pled guilty to breaking and entering and it was my first offense, but I wouldn't talk about the other thing and I was from back East. He gave me a year.

“Well, I learned from that, and I don't work for husbands or wives or brothers-in-law that didn't get invited to Christmas dinner. But most of the people who might hire me on the straight are with the organization and only come to me when the available talent is low. So when a guy who said he met a guy I knew in Q sent me a thousand faith money and a plane ticket to Detroit I came. That guy's up on the second deck. It's his explosives we're sitting on.”

“A thousand isn't a lot to kill yourself over,” Macklin said.

They had been speaking low, and some of the passengers present were straining to hear them. Ackler dropped his voice further. “It was a sweet deal. I was getting another thousand a week just for sitting around listening to this bunch of loonies talking about optimum maneuverability and the casualty factor and dreaming up cute names to call themselves. It was like you said, a cereal commercial. Cap'n Crunch and his Super Secret Assholes. This Blakeman that's in charge won't miss my cut out of what he pulls in dealing stolen guns and tape decks, you tell me why he has to go turn radical. Anyway, I did one job for him back on land—”

“Jack DeGrew,” put in Macklin. “Chester Crane's original bass player.”

The young killer blinked. “They know that? I thought I did a pretty good job throwing a blanket over that one.”

“You left a witness.”

“Shit. The guy that was with him when I picked him up?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured he'd be too stoned to remember.”

“If that could happen, no musician would remember how to make the notes.”

“Yeah. Shit. Anyway, I did that job for Blakeman and went on a couple of dry runs aboard the boat to get the lay and the rest was like retirement, only the pay was better. Right up until we took her I didn't think anything would come of it. I mean, hijack a steamboat? We got Beaver Cleaver and Gidget up top and Sergeant York and the Mad Professor in the middle and Farina down there at the other end.
Mission Impossible
, right? And Blakeman threw in a month's rent on a sweet cottage on Lake Huron. Then, wham! Here I am holding Sweet Mary in my hands and I get my cue to burn the powderhead we put in for DeGrew, and just like that I got a bee in a jar and you tell me how to unscrew the top without getting stung.

“I wouldn't have done it at all if I didn't like being on the water. I wouldn't mind coming back and fishing this lake sometime.”

Macklin said, “Well, there's plenty of bait aboard.”

Ackler looked at him closely. “You fish?”

“I have. But what we're talking about right now is hunting.”

“In tandem?”

“We're the only hunters here.”

“You didn't come aboard looking to recruit me, Macklin.”

“I didn't come aboard looking to get jumped. But I don't see that either of us has a lot of other choices. I can't speak for you, but I really don't think I was born to wind up feeding the carp off Sandusky.”

The young killer fiddled absently with the M-16's actuating lever. “Say we bag the limit. Then what?”

“Then I guess we take up where we left off when I boarded.”

After a moment Ackler straightened and, balancing the rifle along his right forearm, pulled the pistol out of his waistband and handed it to Macklin. The .45's deep blue finish looked black in the pale light.

CHAPTER 29

Charlie as the earliest grunts named the Viet Cong for their radio designation “Victor Charlie,” was fairly far down on the list of enemies to watch out for in the jungle. Clouds of mosquitoes carried diseases that the bacteriologists that sometimes accompanied David Blakeman's unit hadn't had a chance to find a name for, and the rust and mold that crept into the squishy actions of the early M-16s almost on the heels of the cleaning rag had left more than a few G.I.s with jammed weapons in the teeth of a Cong charge. That, together with the flower-child mentality of the later draftees who would rather stick a posy into their corroded muzzles than a bayonet into a blood-crazed guerilla's intestines, had made a lottery of the prospect of getting out of Southeast Asia alive. That one of every two combat soldiers that went in succeeded said something about the poor organization of the North Vietnamese and America's chances for victory, had a soldier and not a succession of bureaucrats been behind its involvement.

“Phil, no!”

Don, lulled into a waking sleep by the murmuring of the all-news station on the boat's radio and by the subtle motion of the deck beneath his feet, had no idea at what point he had stopped remembering Khe Sanh and started dreaming. In any case he came out of the tropical steam into the Erie cold just as Phil Holliday launched himself from the stool by the starboard entrance to the pilot house, hands grasping for the Luger under the hijacker's belt. Don drove his forearm across the bridge of the mate's nose, feeling the bone give, and they wrestled, but the blow had robbed Holliday of his momentum and when Don jammed a knee into the other's groin he gasped and started to fold. Don placed a hand against Holliday's chest and shoved. The mate sprawled to the deck. When he raised his mashed face with the blood running out of his nose into his moustache he was looking at the business end of the German automatic.

“You're going to get what every real sailor wants, Wyatt,” said Don, cocking the complicated mechanism. “Burial at sea.”

Captain Fielding, standing at the other end of the chart table, took a step forward. Don backed up to cover them both. “You've seen this thing spray,” he warned.

Cap'n Eddie stopped. “There's no need to kill him.”

“Leave him alone,” said Holliday. His voice was thin coming through his smashed nose. “You kept your mouth shut before, I'd be standing there with that gun now.”

“Then what? You were going to kill the rest of them with that one gun? What happens to the passengers meanwhile?”

“It'd be a better chance than we've got now.”

“We're better off riding it out.”

The mate snickered, or maybe he was crying. A fat red drop splatted to a deck still stained with the wheel man's blood. “You old fart, we're on the rocks now.”

“Listen!”

All eyes turned to the lookout. He turned up the volume on the radio.

“… to release the prisoners. A list of the names of the inmates whose sentences the Governor has agreed to commute in response to the terrorists' demands will follow this.” A commercial for a Cincinnati restaurant replaced the announcer's stern voice.

“Find another news station,” Don barked.

The lookout manipulated the dial. Music came out of the speaker, a litany of baseball scores, more music. He stopped on an expressionless female voice. “Repeating that bulletin, the Office of the Governor of Michigan states that it has agreed to commute the sentences of ten Southern Michigan Penitentiary prisoners as demanded by the revolutionary group holding eight hundred passengers hostage aboard the hijacked Boblo boat. Efforts to locate the captured vessel.…”

“Well, well.” Don took the Luger off cock. “Well, well.”

He was reaching behind his back for the portable transceiver on the chart table when a burst of gunfire sounded below. He cursed and depressed the speaker button. “Fay, what now?”

There was no answer.

It wasn't Fay.

For all the speeches she had made during automatic weapons training about taking as many of the bastards with them as possible if something went wrong, eliminating her had proved absurdly easy. Ackler called her over to the port railing across from where Macklin had boarded, and as she approached from her post in the bow she turned her back protectively to the water. And to Macklin, invisible in his black wet suit in the darkness, standing at the rail holding the knife Ackler had returned to him behind his hip to avoid reflecting light off the shiny blade.

“This better be damn good,” she snarled. “We both got hoojies need keeping an eye on.”

Ackler said, “I just wanted to say good-bye.”

The whites of her eyes showed in an uncomprehending glare. Then she must have heard something behind her, because she started to turn with the M-16 just as Macklin pinioned her with his left arm and drew his right fist across her throat. The razor-edged steel sheared through her vocal cords along with her jugular, silencing her screams just as a fountain of bright orange splattered the wall of the concession stand four feet away. Ackler had stepped out of the way just in time to avoid being doused and wrenched the rifle out of her convulsing grip before she could trip the trigger, breaking three of her fingers in the process. When Macklin let go she sank to her knees and then sagged sideways, twitched and lay still.

“You're good,” Ackler said, then indicated the stairs at the rear of the boat.

“What about the passengers?”

“Yeah, right.”

Macklin wiped off both sides of the knife carefully on the dead woman's skirt. There was a splash and he glanced up quickly to see the young killer holding only one M-16. The one he had taken from Fay was missing.

“I can't carry two and it's no good arming just anyone that happens to come along,” Ackler explained. “I heard you don't like squirt guns.”

Macklin nodded. His companion unstrung the portable radio from Fay's arm and sent it after the gun. Together they went to the bow, where the passengers, musicians, and a gray-haired security guard in uniform were sitting on folding chairs and squatting cross-legged on the deck. An old man with a discolored lump on his bald head exclaimed at the sight of the stranger with the man who had killed the bass player. The others stirred, then settled down as Macklin spoke.

“We're the cavalry. Stay where you are and don't move, no matter what you hear. You'll only get in the way.”

“Are you a policeman?” someone asked.

“I'm as close to one as you'll see on this boat.”

“There's a wounded man on the bridge.”