And then there was the matter of Ryan Cawdor and his five companions.
No doubt about it, he had dragged those good folks into a world of trouble and hurt. They’d wanted to head east to off-load the 125-pound cache of C-4 they’d snatched, but he’d told them they’d get a better price if they sailed west and dealt with the Padre Islanders. When the shit hit the fan on Padre, things had broken badly for Cawdor and the others. They were still alive when Tom had hightailed it for Tempest, but the last he’d seen of them, they were pinned down by pirates who were closing in fast. If they had managed to live through the assault, they would have been taken as slaves for the galley ships. In the three weeks since Tom had made his solo escape, they could have all died at their oars.
Death en route was a definite possibility.
More than once he had come across big-ass sharks lazily schooling around a headless floating torso with flesh hanging from it in a pale, bloodless fringe. Every time he saw the rad-blasted black fins circling on the surface, he’d divert course to see if it was anyone he knew.
Harmonica Tom had a very straightforward rule for survival that had proved itself over the years: when the odds were good, hit; when the odds were shit, git.
No way could he fight the convoy at sea and hope to win. There were too many opposing vessels, and three of them had massive diesels and twice his speed. If he tried to engage them in open water with Tempest, he knew he’d be outmaneuvered in no time and once committed to the attack, he’d never escape.
In one sense, the farther south he sailed the longer the odds got; in another sense, they actually improved. Though he had penetrated deep into Matachìn territory, nobody in these parts had ever heard of Harmonica Tom. Off his ship he would be unrecognizable, even to the pirates he had outcaptained and outfought along the treacherous Texican shoals. And if the pirate cities were jam-packed with people like the fire talkers said, that gave him the advantage of invisibility. A man who was careful and quiet could get lost in a crowd.
From the angle of the ship lights relative to the shore, Tom figured the convoy was going to make its first landfall at Veracruz. He backed the throttle to idle but left the engine in gear, then lashed off the helm to maintain a steady course. He’d had three weeks to consider the best plan of action. What he’d come up with involved taking some big chances, but none of them were new.
It was called going for broke.
He opened and swung back the cockpit door, then turned to the box-fed, Soviet PKM pivot mounted on Tempest ’s stern rail. Unlocking the canvas-shrouded machine gun from its swivel, he carried it down the steep steps to the cabin. He removed the shroud, then fitted the weapon onto the sandbagged tripod already set up at the foot of the stairs. He opened the feed cover to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered. After angling the barrel up to cover the entryway above and cockpit beyond, he locked the elevation.
Tom scrambled up the stairs and attached the end of a steel trip wire to an eye-screw on the inside of the open door. Descending again, he fed the wire through other strategically placed eyes on the staircase, bulkhead wall and the back edge of the galley table on the far side of the tripod. He tested the run of the wire back and forth for smoothness, then inserted the free end of it through the weapon’s trigger guard. He depressed the trigger until the firing pin snapped on the empty chamber. Holding down the trigger, he looped the wire around it, pinning it as far back as it would go. Up the steps one more time, he pulled the cockpit door closed, which released the tension on the wire and allowed the trigger to snap back to ready position. Back beside the machine gun, he set the safety switch to “fire” and cocked the actuator, racking a live 7.62 mm round.
The next time the cockpit door was opened, the wire would draw tight; at the door’s full, outward arc, the pullback tension would break the trigger and hold it down. The PKM was a sweet blaster, low recoil, no muzzle climb to speak of. It would continue firing until it came up empty—one hundred rounds down the road. Or until someone shut the door. The chances of anyone doing that were slim, unless they were fucking bulletproof.
Tom buckled his holstered Model 625 revolver around his waist. From the galley table he picked up his pride and joy, a nine mill Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD-1 silenced machine pistol. The compact blaster had no rear stock. It weighed in at 7.5 pounds with a loaded, 32-round mag. He slipped the weapon’s quick-release lanyard over his neck; thus suspended, its plastic pistol grip hung even with his belly button. He had traded twenty gold-filled teeth for the mint H&K. Thanks to the widespread practice of dentistry before nukeday and the massive depopulation afterward, abandoned graveyards had become the new Klondike. Gold was slowly being accepted across Deathlands as a universal form of jack.
From a hook on the wall he grabbed a duct-tape-patched, olive-drab poncho and pulled it on over his head. The poncho left his arms free and draped low enough front and rear to keep both blasters out of sight. Though his skin was deeply tanned and weathered, he didn’t know if it was tanned enough to pass for native. To keep his face in shadow he donned a sweat-stained, frayed, olive-drab billcap. There wasn’t much he could do about hiding his sandy-colored, handlebar mustache, except to cut the damn thing off, and he wasn’t about to do that.
Shouldering a preloaded pack, he headed toward the bow, climbing the short flight of steps that led to the foredeck. Back out in the night air, he padlocked the forward companionway door behind him. Then he took a handpainted sign from the pack and wired it securely to the hasp.
Crude red letters on a white background read: Peligro. Danger. The middle of the sign was decorated with a childish skull and cross bones under which was another word: Plaga. Plague.
He made for the stern and jumped down into the cockpit. After padlocking the entry door, he hung a copy of the Danger sign on it. Even if the locals couldn’t read, he hoped the symbol of death would make them think twice before trying to break in. If not, anyone opening the door was going to get a big—and final—surprise.
The stash of C-4 was stowed in a secret compartment under the cabin’s deck. To find it, the surviving intruders would have to tear the ship apart, bulkhead by bulkhead. Tom figured to be back aboard long before that happened. Either that or chilled.
Off Tempest ’s starboard bow, the last ship in the pirate convoy was rounding the blinking green light marker and heading into the harbor. Tom untied the wheel and goosed the throttle, steering for the marker buoy. He throttled back again as he cleared the light, slowing to take in the harbor and the glowing city on the far side.
Amazing, he thought as he took in the panorama. Fucking amazing.
Distant horn blasts rolled over the water. They came from the pirate convoy, which was about a mile ahead, motoring along the inside curve of the peninsula at a sedate pace. As it passed in front of the battlements of a stone fort, a flurry of fireworks exploded over the harbor.
Tom took the engine out of gear and let Tempest coast forward. He looked beyond the bursting rockets, beyond the floodlit fort, beyond the tooting convoy, at a four-story industrial complex just north of the city. Nosebleed-high catwalks, huge, bottle-shaped holding tanks, smokestacks, cinder-block buildings—it was all lit up as bright as day.
The seagoing trader’s face lit up, too.
He realized it was a power-generating station, probably of predark manufacture and still going strong after more than a century in operation. Diesel-burning by the looks of the smoke, it had to be the source of the massive quantities of electricity in evidence around him. From his reading of twentieth-century books, Tom knew electricity in abundance was what drove the engine of social progress and material comfort, two things sorely absent in the Deathlands. He also knew that seventy or so pounds of properly placed C-4 could inflict massive damage on the power plant.
Maybe the locals had the technology and skills to fix it, maybe not. If not, it was going to be lights out on Veracruz, forever—every nightfall the murdering bastards would have cause to remember the name of Harmonica Tom.
Inside the harbor, it