The Orpheus Deception Read Online Free PDF Page B

inside the wheelhouse, perhaps three.

    Someone on the stairs above him stepped up to the forward rail of the bridge and called out to the three men still mutilating the corpse at the bow, raising his voice to a hoarse bellow, to carry through the wind howling out of the night and the boom of the swells crashing over the ship’s side, speaking Tagalog with a European accent. An answering shout came from the bow: the three men crouched over the spreading puddle of flesh got to their feet and began to make their way back toward the stern of the ship.

    Brendan Fitch climbed the last of the stairs and stepped softly out onto the bridge deck just as the man at the railing turned around, a large white man in a black watch cap, a blue jean jacket, and military-looking pants.

    The man had a small gray pistol in his right hand and he pointed it at Fitch as soon as he saw him. Fitch threw the parang straight at the man’s head, as he drew out his Colt, and missed him completely, but, as the man ducked, his own first shot went wide. Fitch fired the Colt, the revolver bucking in his wet hands—a wild shot that spanged off the steel wall of the bridge house, struck the staircase railing a glancing blow, and slammed right back into Brendan Fitch’s rib cage.

    The impact of the slug threw Fitch backward against the pilothouse wall, a cold numbness spreading out from his rib cage, but, by then, he had fired the big Colt twice more, the weapon kicking like a mule in his right hand. The man in the watch cap lurched toward the pilothouse door, firing as he stumbled across the wet decking, the little gun popping like a toy and tinny rounds ticking off the steel plate next to Fitch’s head and zipping away into the darkness. Fitch fired the Colt again—that was four rounds out and one to go—and the watch-cap man flattened against the wheelhouse door with a large black crater in his temple.

    Fitch pivoted as he heard the slice-and-dice unit clattering up the gangway stairs, looked back toward the wheelhouse again, saw another white man inside the wheelhouse—short, black-haired, pale-eyed, with a well-trimmed black goatee, his narrow, sharp-featured face vividly defined by the red cabin light. He was shouting something at Fitch, but it was muffled by the glass and then carried away by the wind.

    The man with the goatee raised a black weapon—in the heightened intensity of the moment Fitch recognized it as an MP5. The man aimed it at Fitch through the glass. Anson Wang was standing at the wheel behind the man, his face battered and bloody, his mouth slack. And on Anson’s far side, holding one of the ship’s .303s, its muzzle hard up against Anson’s temple, was the third mate, Vigo Majiic.

    Fitch, in rage and desperation, fired his fifth and last round at the sharp-faced little man at exactly same time that the muzzle of the man’s MP5 filled up with sparkling blue fire and the glass window between them shattered into a blizzard of shards. When the broken glass fell away, the little man was still standing, but Anson Wang and Vigo Majiic were gone. Wonderful.

    Six rounds out, and Fitch had managed to shoot both himself and Anson Wang with two of them. Brilliant. No rounds left in the Colt and caught between an MP5 and the salad chefs from Hell with only his hip flask to throw at them. Time to bail.

    Fitch stepped over the taffrail and launched himself outward into the storm just as the bearded man in the wheelhouse fired the MP5. Several rounds plucked at his billowing shirt as Fitch hurtled through the air, hoping he had enough arc to clear the main-deck rail and reach the open water sixty feet below him. The wind tore at him as he fell through the rain and the corrugated black wall of the ocean rose up before him. He sliced into the flank of a great sea roller as another spray of machine-gun rounds punched into the foamy chop all around him. Fitch sank rapidly, for a strangely silent time, dimly aware of the great wall of the