The Orpheus Deception Read Online Free PDF

fumbled in the dark for the Maglite, found it but did not turn it on. He patted his waist belt to make sure of the Colt but did not draw it. If he was going to kill enough of these people to take the ship back, he was going to have to do it in silence.

    He kept the Maglite in his left hand, to parry with, and held the parang in his right as he walked barefoot along the deck and took a very cautious look around the corner. In the misty glow of the ship’s starboard running lights he saw a naked man dashing forward along the deck, closely pursued by three skinny figures, barefoot, in tan shorts and plaid shirts, wearing bright red head scarves. The glitter of their knives showed through the rain. The figures caught up with the naked man by the forward hatch plates and he fell to his knees, raising his hands in front of him—it was the hapless Hindu cook. The figures formed a tight circle around the cook as he knelt there. A brown arm went up and a silvery blade flashed down. Under the howl of the storm, Fitch heard a cry and the coconut crack of the man’s skull being split open.

    Fitch rounded the corner of the deck and went silently up the gangway as the figures on the foredeck set to work on what was left of the Hindu cook. At the turning of the third flight, he ran straight into a broad, squat, toadlike figure racketing down the stairs—the toad man bounced off Fitch with a breathy grunt, fell back against the steel stairs, and lifted a black pistol, which flew outward into the rain, along with ten inches of his forearm, as Fitch took the man’s lower arm off with the parang.

    He opened the man’s throat wide with the returning stroke, cutting off his hoarse cry, stepped over the man’s body, and went up the rest of the stairway in grim silence, his breath rasping in his chest, his lungs burning, his now-quite-sober mind filled with stone-cold murder. If these people got control of the ship, every man on board would die exactly like the Hindu cook. Brendan Fitch did not value his own life very highly anymore, but he had no intention of being butchered like a hog.

    He stopped just below the bridge deck and flattened against the steel wall as he heard voices—Malay? Dyak? No. It was English, but heavily accented—Serbian? Croatian? Two men at least, standing on the bridge deck just outside the cabin. A flare of red light as the wheelhouse door opened and closed again, and now only one man remained on the upper deck.

    The motion of the ship changed as the storm increased in force— Fitch felt the engines power up and the deck shifted under him—they were turning the ship out of the eye of the wind, turning her off course, veering her to port in a long, dangerous turn that would expose her entire starboard flank to the incoming seas. If the ship failed to come all the way about and take the storm on her stern, the seas would roll right over her exposed foredeck and drive her under in seconds. No real seaman would have put the old tanker through such a turn. Which meant Anson Wang was no longer at the wheel.

    But perhaps not dead. Not yet. They’d need Wang to tell them the ship’s private transponder codes and the location of her EPIRB emergency beacon. If they were taking the ship off course, they probably intended to do more than just off-load her cargo to another tanker. They’d dump the EPIRB in the sea, kill the transponder. The Singapore Coast Guard would think the ship had sunk. They’d stop looking when they located the EPIRB and come back for survivors when the storm subsided.

    But how many hijackers were on the ship?

    If they had all come from that single cigarette boat trailing her stern, not that many, and he had already killed three of them. Another three were down there on the forepeak four hundred feet away, still senselessly hacking the Hindu cook into curried chutney. Two more up here on the deck, one man outside, and another who had just stepped back into the wheelhouse. That meant two