Kill Zone (26 page)

Amid the white steam still leaking from the whistle mounted in front of the stack and the fading phosphorescence of Blakeman's wasted shots, Macklin watched the stricken figure drop out of sight between the two sheltered sections on the crown deck, the device he had been holding in his left hand falling over the side. There was no mistaking, and no faking, that loose rag-doll tumble.

Siegfried was done.

“You all right, mister? You're bleeding.”

Macklin started at the sound of the voice at his ear. In the sudden silence after the whistle blast it sounded loud. He turned and saw moonlight on a craggy, weather-roughened face with steel-rimmed glasses on its nose. The tall old man was staring at the glistening leg of his wet suit.

“It's just flesh,” Macklin said. It hurt again, too much to be anything else. “You blew the whistle?”

The old man smiled loosely, showing just his lower teeth. “This old girl practically runs herself. It's just about the only thing the captain gets to do these days.”

“It sounded pretty good.”

“Are you the police?”

The man who asked the question, about Macklin's age with a nose that was all over his face and dried blood in his handlebar moustache, tripped a switch, flooding the pilot house with yellow light. Macklin barked at him to turn it off. The man raised his brows at the captain, who nodded curtly. The command was obeyed and moonlight took over again. In the dark, the captain said, “Didn't you get them all?”

“No, there's one more.”

CHAPTER 31

Ackler? Macklin's voice over the public address system rang through the boat and echoed away over the water. There was no response.

He tried again. He got the first syllable out when something that sounded like a handful of pebbles rattled against the windscreen in front of him and he dropped down, shouting to the other men in the pilot house to do the same. They obeyed instantly. Even the captain hurled down his brittle old bones faster than the killer would have believed him capable of moving, just as the windscreen collapsed before the chattering of the M-16 in the bow of the crown deck. The burst ended. A triangle of swaying glass dropped with a clank.

“How'd you know?” whispered the young man in the uniform of a Boblo security guard.

“Heard the first slugs ricocheting off the glass. Those M-16s only carry a 55-grain load. They'll glance off hard surfaces at some angles. Keep down.”

Huddling close to the wall, Macklin crabwalked past the port entrance to the chart table at the back of the pilot house, where he reached up and grasped a rustling handful of charts and cast them out through the opening. They fluttered for an instant, then the automatic rifle rattled again and they jerked this way and that in the air and then vanished into the darkness beyond the bridge. Ackler couldn't have many rounds left. But he still had the .45 he had won from Larry.

“Stay here,” Macklin told the others. “No matter what happens, don't leave the bridge.” He made his way down the short flight of steps to the captain's quarters.

A man lay groaning in the bunk. Macklin went past him without pausing and through the connecting door into the first mate's quarters. Another door led out onto the crown deck and he used that. From there he went forward.

The bow was deserted.

He heard movement below, as of the hostages on the top passenger deck stirring restlessly, and started down the forward steps. His right leg was throbbing from hip to knee, but from the dry crackling of his caked rubber pants, he determined that the bleeding had stopped, or at least slowed.

A woman below him and to his right shrieked when he was halfway down and he spun that way and drew down on a figure standing by the starboard rail, tilting something long and wicked-looking up at him. Even as he pressed the trigger he knew he was a half-second too late. His insides coiled, bracing themselves for a rain of lead.

The M-16 clicked.

Ackler cursed in a high-pitched voice and clawed the pistol out of his belt. Macklin fired. Then part of the crowd of panicking passengers shifted in front of his target. Something flashed and tumbled in the light and hit the water with a crash. The M-16, empty now and useless. Macklin glimpsed a running figure hurtling through the crowd and grasped the staircase railing and vaulted over it, landing on his feet on the deck with an impact that jarred him from wounded leg to injured ribs. Spreading his legs and double-fisting the gun police fashion, he took aim on the back of a head bobbing among the passengers amidships, then swung the muzzle skyward and took his finger off the trigger. There were too many innocents too close.

Ackler felt no such compunction. He spun, clearing a hasty space around him, and his pistol barked and something
spang
ed off the deck behind Macklin and to his left and went whistling into the night. Then Macklin lost him in the press of bodies along the rail.

Macklin kept absolutely still, straining to hear over the screams and babble. But the old boat was creaking and rumbling with the agitated movement of its charges and there was no separating whatever noises Ackler might be making.

“He's going down!” someone shouted.

Equidistant from the bow and stern, a steel ladder for the crew's use led from the crown to the lower decks outside the railings. Macklin mounted it, gripping the water-beaded side-rails, and climbed down to the next level, the rungs icy under the soles of his bare feet. He alighted silently and moved just in time to clamp a hand over the open mouth of a startled woman standing near the ladder. He placed the end of the .45 against his lips warningly before letting go. She kept silent.

Repeating the gesture from time to time for the other passengers, he strode swiftly aft and reached the stern just as Ackler was leaving the stairs. Macklin fired twice, the two shots coming so close together they sounded like one long report. Ackler grunted and fell back against the staircase railing and raised his pistol. Macklin squeezed the trigger again. Nothing happened.

He ducked back behind a beam supporting the overhead deck as lead from Ackler's pistol cracked past his left ear. Then he heard shoe leather on metal running away.

Cautiously he peered around the beam. The small cluster of passengers gathered around the foot of the stairs had opened a path that was now empty. Either Ackler was unaware of Macklin's predicament or he had been hit and panicked.

Presently Macklin spotted the dark drops spattering the deck and decided that it was the latter.

He examined his pistol. He couldn't be out of ammunition unless the gun hadn't been fully loaded to begin with. He ran back the action. The brass casing of his last cartridge had swelled, failing to eject and jamming the mechanism. He used the point of his knife to pry out the troublesome shell and racked a fresh cartridge into the chamber. He hoped the action was undamaged.

It took him ten minutes to reach the dance deck on the next level, moving cautiously and following the blood trail on the steps. From there it led meanderingly between the starboard rail and the enclosed concession stand, the wall of which at one point bore a scarlet handprint where the wounded killer had stopped to rest, and ended at an opening in the deck with steep steel steps leading down and a loose chain hammocked across it with a suspended sign reading ENGINE ROOM—KEEP OUT. There was a large patch of blood with a heelprint in it where Ackler had stooped to clear the chain. Macklin did the same and started down.

As he descended, gripping the pipe rail and crouching on each step to scan the area around and below the stairs, the temperature rose and sweat built up under his rubber wet suit and prickled along his hairline. Before him the ship's intestines opened like the gray steel belly of a mechanical whale, slabs of raw riveted metal and ducts and pipes and thick-glassed gauges describing a naturalist's concept of mechanized hell. He had been aware of the lazy throbbing of the ship's huge pistons maintaining steam since coming aboard, and now he felt as if he were entering the beating heart of a sleeping organism.

A group of men in wilted work suits, some of them bare-chested, stood near the foot of the stairs. Macklin stopped four steps from the bottom and met and held the gaze of a youngish big man with a lank moustache and dark hair plastered to his forehead. After a moment the man's eyes wandered to Macklin's left. Macklin glanced down and saw a thin arc of blood staining a flooring of steel plates in that direction. He descended the rest of the way. The floor was warm beneath his feet.

To his left, a ribbed aisle scarcely broad enough for a man to pass through led past a bank of gauges through a portal into the engine itself. Before continuing he changed hands on the gun and mopped his palm down his rubber-encased thigh, then changed hands again. The checked grip grew slippery again almost immediately. He stepped toward the portal, breathing air that was mostly water.

A bullet struck the edge of the opening to Macklin's right with a resounding clang,
boing
ing around inside the steel walls seconds after the echo of the first impact had faded. He spotted a moving shadow and returned fire. His bullet did some caroming of its own and buzzed across the portal at least twice in opposite directions. The shadow vanished.

“Ackler, you're trapped.”

He had to shout to make himself heard over the champing of the engine at parade rest, and to strain his ears for the answer. There was none.

“There's no way out of here except the way we came in.”

Still nothing. He put a foot through the opening, braced to withdraw it in a hurry. When no bullets greeted him he entered the rest of the way. The engine clanged and wheezed and threw waves of moist heat into his face. His body slithered and squelched inside the watertight suit.

“It's over, Ackler. There's a doctor on board. We can get you back to port alive.”

“That's a point against you, Macklin. I've had all I need of prison.”

There were long spaces between the words, which were barely audible over the great racket and impossible to trace. Macklin guessed from the minimal amount of blood the young killer had spilled that he was gutshot, bleeding internally. Turning his head he caught a blur of movement in the corner of his eye and whirled and squeezed off a shot. His bullet clipped a steel lever arm seesawing at the end of a plunging piston rod.

Ackler laughed shrilly, madman's laughter. Something tapped Macklin's left shoulder and he looked down at a gash of white skin showing through black rubber. The report was swallowed by the noise of the machinery. He dragged his right forearm across his eyes, clearing them of sweat, glimpsed movement behind the pistons, and fired. Then a blossom of flame opened in the shadows just as the lever arm came up and sparks and bits of metal flew into Macklin's face. He shrieked, dropping his gun and clapping his hands over his eyes.

More laughter. The engine seemed to join in. Keeping his burning eyes shut tight—he was afraid to open them and still not see—Macklin felt around the floor for the gun. He found only floor. Still on all fours, he groped his way behind a shield of boiler plate just as something struck it and made it hum against his hand. He let go, his palm stinging from the vibration. Ackler laughed.

“Ever been hunted, Macklin?”

Hot lights soared and burst behind Macklin's lids, like the optical memory of fireworks after one's eyes have closed. Tentatively he opened them. At first he saw nothing and his heart turned over. Then the rough gray surface of a sheet of dull steel bloomed out of the darkness two inches in front of his face and he would have kissed it had he not known it would burn his lips. He ran a hand over his face and felt the uneven spots where the sparks had burned the skin.

There was enough left of his panic to make his voice quaver convincingly when he called out. “I can't see! Ackler, I'm blind. Help me out of here.”

“Gladly.”

And then it came flashing at him between the pumping rods and around the leprous support posts and under the tentacles of galvanized pipe, a platinum head atop a slim body in flannel trousers and a checked coat stained dark on the left side and a huge blue muzzle in a tight right hand pointed at him. Seated on the ribbed floor, Macklin braced his shoulders against the boiler and brought the hand he had cocked behind his head forward in a long smooth stroke that ended in a snap.

He hated throwing knives. Three out of ten that were designed for the maneuver were balanced wrong, and the skin diver's weapon, with its heavy handle and curved blade, was designed for anything but. It required compensation.

But the knife executed a credible somersault in the air and righted itself just as Ackler ran into it. Upon impact, the young killer's finger clenched reflexively on the trigger. The muzzle flamed and a light exploded in Macklin's skull with darkness hard on its heels.

CHAPTER 32

He was an assassin for the king and he had to make his way back to the palace to report the success of his mission before his master affixed the royal seal to the surrender pact. But his return route lay across a field of the men he had slain and every step he gained he bought by hacking with his broadsword at the half-rotted limbs that rose from the putrefying earth to snatch at his boots and drag him down among them. He swung and swung, his blade slashing through loose gray flesh and sagging sinew until the edge was thick with gore and would no longer cut, and then he used it as a bludgeon to cave in the slick skulls with gaping mouths while the bent green fingers scrabbled and grasped and pulled and his knees gave and he felt himself sinking into the bubbling decay while the corpses moaned and clawed blindly at his arms and chest and face.…

He shot upright with a tongueless shout, slinging pain from the top of his head down his left side and around to his right hip and looked about, blinking. He was on a bed in a room with a low rounded ceiling paneled in wood like a barrel lying on its side, naked under a thin quilt that had slid down to his lap. An overhead lamp coaxed a rosy glow out of the varnished oak and he knew in the instant of awakening that he was still on the water. A blind drawn over a window across from the bed stirred with a rhythmic swaying motion. The boat was under power.