Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) (26 page)

The pirates rushed to the stern, hauling out and shouldering their submachine guns, looking for a head to shoot at.

The commander called for the rowers to stop rowing, but the loser never surfaced. Not so much as a trail of bubbles. And the commander didn’t order the tug turned around to look for him. They were miles offshore.

Dead was dead, after all.

Evidently, the climax satisfied the Matachìn. Bets were paid off without complaint. J.B. had clearly won the contest. A pirate snatched the machete from him, then escorted him at blasterpoint to the awning.

J.B. was chained to the same oar as Mildred and Ryan, on the inside empty seat.

“Nice fight,” Ryan said. “Never a doubt, huh?”

“That guy messed me up,” J.B. said tightly. He was obviously in considerable pain. “I’m not going to be much good pulling on an oar for a while.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mildred said.

“We’ll pick up the slack for you,” Ryan said. “You can just coast until you feel better.”

From up on the pilothouse deck there was a flurry of back-and-forth Spanish. The commander was talking to someone inside the bridge.

“Did you get any of that?” Ryan asked Mildred.

“We’re headed south,” she said. “To Veracruz.”

“Down in Mex?” Ryan said.

“Uh-huh.”

“How far is it?” J.B. asked.

“You don’t really want to know,” she assured him.

“Yeah, I do. How far?”

“One hell of a long way to row,” Mildred said.

Harmonica Tom sat some seventy-five feet above the deck of
Tempest.
He was perched in a bosun’s chair he’d hauled up near the top of the main mast. For some, the high, suspended seat under full sail and on choppy seas would have been petrifying, but he was more than used to it. He enjoyed the expanded view and the exaggerated roll of the ship that the vantage point offered.

Though his binocs he was watching the Matachìn fleet at an extreme distance, paralleling their course to keep them in sight. Two of the sailboats were limping along; they hadn’t fared so well in the contest of skippers. The third was on the bottom of the Gulf by now.

A smile lifted his handlebar mustache.

He could see the light reflect off the tugs’ oar blades. They all flashed at once as the paddles turned and dipped in rhythm. Some of the folks chained to those oars were islanders. It was a safe bet all of them were Deathlanders. He had no way of telling whether Ryan Cawdor or any of his crew were captives. He hoped they weren’t dead, but he wouldn’t wish the fate of a galley slave on them, either.

Could’ve been him pulling on one of those oars, he knew, but for dumb luck and a hard, following wind.

Looking through the binocs he had to wonder if he had been saved for some greater purpose, him and all that C-4.

If he could have, he would’ve attacked the pirate ships then and there, run amok among them with his machine gun and explosives. If he could have, he would’ve chilled all the Matachìn, freed the slaves and scuttled their evil boats.

A man alone, even a man with a shitload of C-4, a man who was no stranger to excessive violence, had to be cautious when the odds were way-long against him. He had to think hard on his strategy, and pick his time and place to strike.

The skipper of
Tempest,
swaying high over its deck, flying under full sail, addressed the row of little boats bouncing in and out of his binocs’ field of view. “You bastards don’t know it, yet,” he said, “but Harmonica Tom is about to go legendary on your asses.”