billows of acrid smoke, saturating the deck area, making it hard to see and even harder to breath.
Nolan actually thought: Maybe I shouldn’t have lit that fire on board. It had been nothing but bad luck ever since.
It was inevitable, but the tide of this desperate battle finally turned in the pirates’ favor. Nolan could barely lift his arms. Gunner and the three Senegals were struggling just to stay on their feet. Out of the corner of his good eye, Nolan saw two pirates break off from the main group and disappear from sight. They were obviously sneaking around to attack the squad from the rear, but there was nothing Alpha could do to stop them.
Nolan summoned up one last burst of energy and slashed three pirates enough to push them back. Gunner joined in the thrust and the remaining dozen or so pirates were momentarily stopped from advancing.
But then Nolan heard cries from behind them. He looked over his shoulder to see that, sure enough, two pirates were coming at them from the other direction.
Two things went through his mind at that moment. He was sure the toxic fumes were making him delusional, because he found himself thinking back to when he’d brushed the tear from Emma’s cheek. It seemed like a million years ago. He could still smell her light perfume as well. And for some reason, these two things made him want to just lie down right there and go to sleep.
Then a voice in his head whispered: “You’ll sleep for a long time soon enough.”
So now he just waited for the blow. A knife to his back or to his chest. It didn’t make much of a difference. This was where it was all going to end—defending a bunch of dying refugees on the worst ship afloat, somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
But … that grim fate was not to be. Because, as it turned out, a guardian angel was watching over him.
Nolan turned to confront the pirates coming up in back of him—a last ditch attempt to simply face his killers—when he saw them stop in their tracks and look down at their chests. Bubbles of blood had appeared all over them.
The next thing Nolan knew, Gunner had slammed him to the deck. He hit hard, and the three Senegals fell on top of him; he felt like they were crushing every vertebra in his back. But in all the confusion, Nolan was still able to see the remaining pirates they’d been battling in front dropping to the deck as well. They, too, were bleeding. They’d all been shot dead. But who was doing the shooting?
Nolan’s head was spinning. His lungs were full of toxic smoke. His hands were splattered with blood and he felt half dead already.
But he somehow mustered the strength to turn his head and look behind him again.
That’s when he saw Emma Simms standing up on the bridge, a smoking AK-47 in her hands.
17
THERE WAS A bad part of town in Monte Carlo.
It was tucked into a corner near the east end of the city; a single block lost in the shadows of the tallest luxury buildings.
The block was comprised of a few elderly apartment buildings, a handful of open-air cafés and what passed for a variety store in this part of the world. An alley snaked through the small neighborhood and down this alley, after a few twists and turns, was a tiny hostel.
It had seven minuscule rooms, stacked one on top of another. Batman and Twitch were now occupying the top floor.
They had no money and they’d exhausted every way they knew of to get any. Their debit card simply did not work. Nor could they figure out how to successfully make a phone call.
They were able to rent the room in the formerly sold-out boarding house only because they convinced the owner they were expecting funds to be wired to them soon and would pay him twice the going rate once they arrived. Because the proprietor was missing three fingers on his left hand, Batman and Twitch purposely exposed their prostheses while spinning him this tale. He rented them the room for nothing up front.
So they had a roof, albeit leaky, over their heads. And they had a place to sleep, though it was basically two rollouts on a cracked tile floor with folded towels as pillows.
They’d also eaten a little by walking through the Sun Casino, again prostheses in full view, and openly stealing bits