Gale Force

78

“Court, get down!”

McKenna leaped at the stowaway as the gun roared, the explosion near deafening in the low cargo hold. Had just enough time to see Harrington go down, and then she was tackling the stowaway, football-style, wrapping both arms around the man’s waist and knocking him to the ground, McKenna close behind.

The pistol came out of the stowaway’s hands, jolted free from the impact. It immediately began to slide down the listing deck. The stowaway grabbed for it, missed, bucking McKenna off his back, but both of them were scrambling down, too, toward the distant portside, bilge water and darkness.

It was not a smooth ride. The deck was grooved steel, studded with anchor points. McKenna reached for a handhold, something to arrest her fall, her hands slick with engine oil and grasping at nothing, her body picking up speed as she tumbled down.

The fall took forever. Kicked the shit out of McKenna every inch of the way, tore up her knees, her legs, scraped open her palms and slashed at her arms. And then—SLAM—she collided with the hull on the portside of the ship, a foot and a half of oily water, her headlamp hanging off her head at a crazy angle, leaving her near blind and disoriented, the whole world a graveyard of ruined Nissans and steel.

McKenna struggled to her feet, feeling every fresh bruise. Fixed her headlamp and searched the gloom for the stowaway, found him three cars from the hull, bashed up against a front tire and reaching for the pistol.

The gun had become tangled in a web of tying straps just above the stowaway’s head, and somehow he’d had the presence of mind to stop his fall nearby. Now, as McKenna watched in horror, the man pulled himself to his feet, wiped his hands on his pants, and leaned down and picked up the pistol.

Shit.

McKenna ducked behind the closest Nissan as the stowaway fired again. Heard the bullet strike steel behind her, ricochet; she saw sparks. Another shot, and another, the stowaway coming closer, keeping her pinned as he closed the distance.

Gotta move.

Stealthily as she could, McKenna crept away from her makeshift cover, pulled off her headlamp and held it in her hand, tried to keep her head low and out of sight in the dim light.

Before she’d gone twenty feet, she knew she was made.

“Stop,” the stowaway said, his voice unreasonably calm. “Give me your flashlight, or I’ll shoot you right there.”

McKenna didn’t turn around. Exhaled a long breath. “Hell, you’re going to kill me anyway,” she said. Then she reached back and chucked the headlamp away, threw a strike down the length of the hull, and ducked away quickly, bracing for the shot.

But the shot didn’t come.

Instead, McKenna heard a wheeze, the air punched out of the stowaway’s lungs. Heard the clatter as the pistol fell to the deck, the splash as it slid into the bilge water. Then another splash, bigger, as the stowaway fell himself.

Slowly, McKenna stood. Stayed low, searched the darkness, caught the vague shape of a figure in the glow of the hold’s emergency lights. Court Harrington. He’d lost his own headlamp, she saw, but he’d brought his laptop with him. And he’d used it, she surmised, to neutralize the stowaway pretty damn hard.

“Captain Rhodes?” Harrington called out. “You okay?”

McKenna checked herself. No bullet holes. “You saved my life, Harrington,” she said. “I think at this point, you can call me McKenna again.”