Angel's Ransom Read Online Free PDF Page B

than the Angel ’ s own deck-hands could have managed it, with the port anchor weighed first and the cruiser brought about on her starboard mooring until she lay with both anchors weighed and her bow pointed toward the harbor entrance. Jules dogged the chains efficiently, shut off the winch, and came swinging up the pilot-house ladder to the bridge wing.
    ‘All secure,’ he said to Holtz. ‘We’d better get under way. Those boobs need only about five minutes more to find out they’ve been taken in.’
    ‘Where ’s Roche?’
    ‘ S tanding by for trouble below. They’re all sleeping like babies, so far.’
    Jules squeezed by Holtz in the doorway. Without coming into the line of fire he pulled the plug of the radiophone handset and stuffed handset, connecting wire and plug into his pocket.
    ‘I’ll clean up the rest here when we’re out of the harbor ,’ he said tensely. ‘Let ’s go. I’m nervous.’
    ‘We are all nervous.’ Holt gestured with the Walther. ‘But careful. Take the wheel, Captain.’
    Blake was given little time to make a decision whether to comply or not to comply. As he hesitated, Jules emphasized Holtz ’s order with a shove. The big sailor was a powerful man, and the unexpected push slammed Blake against the wheel with enough force to hurt. Without animosity, Jules said, ‘Look sharp when you’re given an order, Captain, and you won’t get hurt. Now let ’s see how you work those controls. No tricks. I know a few myself.’
    Blake accepted the inescapable. He put both motors at slow ahead and swung the cruiser ’s bow toward the spire of Sainte- Devot é , at the farthest reach of the harbor . The Angel moved out into open water.
    The passage between the twin jetties that formed the harbor breakwater was a good hundred meter s wide, but the tumbled conc rete blocks that formed the jetties’ founda tions made navigation within 10 or 15 meter s of the end of either jetty hazardous for any craft larger than a rowboat. It was purely automatic with Blake to take the Angel well wide before coming about for the approach to the sea. He was not consciously thinking of submarine menaces to navigation.
    The trap in which he found himself was a tight one. Jules carried a pistol pushed into the waistband of his dungarees, but even without it, and Holtz ’s weapon to back him up, he would be formidable to handle. He stood now at Blake ’s shoulder, watching the operation of the controls with close interest. Holtz had come into the pilot-house to stand guard somewhere back of Jules, out of Blake ’s line of sight, and Marian had retreated into a corner from which she watched him with an intent, steady air of expectation that was as pressing as a demand.
    He thought bitterly, Don’t look to me for heroics, girl. I didn’t get us into this , but he could not bring himself to focus his anger against her. The surge of slow rage inside him was for Holtz; sneering, arrogant, contemptuous little Holtz, with his well-planned trap and the big gun that made him master. Blake ’s bitterness and frustration came to a boil when he brought the cruiser ’s bow around to put it at the passage between the jetties, and saw in that moment the Angel ’s way of escape.
    He opened both motors up to cruising speed, not hurrying, not thinking beyond the immediate movements of his hands, knowing that his nerve would fail if he thought ahead. They were running fair at the harbor mouth, well clear of its hidden teeth, heading for the open sea that sparkled beyond the breakwater. Marian still watched him from her corner, as intently expectant as before, waiting for the effort he supposed she had known he would have to make even before he knew it himself. He cried silently at her, It ’s all I c an do! and spun the wheel to starboard, putting the yacht squarely at the end of the south jetty and the man-made reef that would rip her bottom out.
    Jules ’s reactions were swift, for a big man. But he clubbed at Blake