Brute Force

64

It looked as if the sun had brought all the beautiful people of Europe out to play, bang in front of Lynn's apartment. It was not yet dark, but the restaurants and bars around the marina were already starting to fill up. We had passed the day stagging, on and off – never a drama for me, but Lynn's boredom threshold was clearly a lot lower than mine. When he wasn't watching the boat, he slept, until I told him to go out and check what time the marina's fuel station closed and, while he was about it, to buy what we needed for a twenty-hour boat trip – food, drink and a cheap GPS.

Lynn still puzzled me. He'd told me he'd spent years setting up the apartment, exactly for this kind of contingency – but I was sure he wasn't telling me the whole story. I knew he was getting a bit of a rush as we stayed one step ahead of the bad guys, but he still wore his defeated look the rest of the time. There was a wedding photograph on the dressing table in front of the balcony window, and yet he hadn't even mentioned Mrs Lynn in passing since we'd left the mushroom farm.

I was beginning to understand why Fatman had dropped anchor where he had. He and Candy Girl had stayed below deck the entire day. The good news was that nothing else had stirred on the Predator. According to the blurb, the 'Master Stateroom' boasted a double berth, a nineteen-inch flatscreen TV, CD/DVD/Radio surround-sound speaker system, air conditioning and a hand-held fire extinguisher. It looked as though the last two were going to come in very useful.

At five o'clock, Lynn came and sat down next to me. I handed him the binos and he passed me the laptop. 'It's not going to be a piece of cake, is it?'

He'd downloaded an article entitled 'Middle-Power Approaches to Maritime Security – Italy'. It told us that the Italians had a coast guard, a customs service, a maritime extension of the carabinieri and a navy, all charged with policing their national waters. The Guardia Costiera alone had 10,000 personnel and almost 400 ships stationed at 118 bases – most of which looked as big, sleek and impressive as the ocean-going Ferraris I'd clocked on millionaires' row in the marina, except with pop-guns on-deck. The coast guard, the customs service and the navy also operated a variety of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft equipped with radar and electro-optical sensors that could cut through the night.

Had we bitten off more than we could chew?

I didn't have time to think about it. Something was happening aboard the Predator.

Lynn handed me the binoculars.

They were standing on the back deck. She was wearing a dress that didn't leave much to the imagination. He was doing his best to keep up, with white jeans and a powder-yellow sweater draped over his shoulders. His stomach strained against a white Polo shirt.

He pressed a button and a thing like a car boot swung open – the Predator's 'hydraulic opening stern garage'. Inside was a smart-looking tender with a powerful outboard. With another press of a button, a winch lifted the tender a few feet into the air. Fatman gave it a quick once-over then swung it out and lowered it into the water. He was so smooth he didn't even get his shoes wet.

I'd seen enough. I handed Lynn the binos and told him to keep watching. I headed for the stairs.