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heaved herself up, looked into the cabin beneath through the smoke, and couldn't see very much. She
levered herself up further, stuck her head and gun, then her head and gun and upper torso in through the
gap, took a look round, and decided they were all dead or very close to it. She let a little more of the
smoke clear, listening as best she could, watching the bridge and the sides of the superstructure at main
deck level.
Then she swung in through the skylight, on to the table. It had been blown almost in two; strips of brown
laminate sticking up like obstreperous licks of hair. She had to swing her feet to make sure she landed
close to the bulkhead so that what was left of the table would take her weight. She dropped down,
through the stinging smoke. Her loosely booted feet grated on grenade shards and scattered playing
cards. One of the men moved and groaned. She wanted to use the knife but somehow couldn't, so put
the gun to his head and fired. She did the same with the other three, though only one other showed any
signs of life. Blood was making the floor sticky, glueing the cards to the deck.
Incredibly, the joint was still alight and almost intact, burning a brown mark in a shrapnel-punctured
plastic seat. She knocked the end of the tip off it where a little black bit of plastic hung, and took a toke.
It still tasted bad so she ground it out under one heel. It sizzled.
She sauntered from the cabin, amazed nobody had come, and only then started to think that perhaps
they were all dead.
Still she didn't believe it, and searched the entire ship. She found their SAMs and their plastique charges,
in the chartroom off the bridge, looked again at Sucre, swathed in black and white, spike like a cupid's
arrow in his unmoving chest, found the bloodstains on the bed in the cabin she'd been in briefly with
Orrick (but could not find the body of the man Orrick had killed), found the three dead radio operators
and the dead radio equipment (she tried to make it work, but couldn't even get the jamming signal; empty
fuse cradles mocked her), looked again into the TV lounge where they'd raped her, and braved the
shadowy depths of the main saloon, where the bodies still lay heaped and spread and she couldn't bear
to turn on the light for fear of seeing one of them. She felt for the heavy machine-gun, needing both hands,
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and lifted a metal box full of ammunition. She left the gun lying in the corridor outside, then retraced her
steps to the engineering workshop where the first one to die had spread his blood through his head over
half the deck under the gleaming, businesslike benches.
An hour after she'd freed herself she was back on the bridge after a tour of the bows, where the soldier
she'd poleaxed was making a fuss in the chain locker. She'd turned the bridge lights to red on her first
visit, and strode through the blood-coloured gloom to the winch/anchor console. She tapped one finger
against her lips as she inspected the controls, then reached out and flicked a switch. The starboard
anchor dropped to the lake and splashed. Its chain rattled massively after it, links whipping through the
chain locker where the soldier was.
The rasp of falling chain drowned the man's scream, though it must have been short anyway. If she'd
waited till dawn, she thought, she'd have seen him exit through the eye of the anchor port in a red spray,
but she shivered at the thought of his blood spreading over the surface of the lake. The anchor chain's
thunder sounded through the ship, making the deck beneath her tremble. Unbraked, the chain kept on
spilling out under its own weight. There was a boom as it stopped; she couldn't tell whether it parted or
held. She rubbed one of her breasts absently, grimacing slightly when she touched one of the places
where they'd burned her, and reflected that revenge could taste remarkably bland when you'd stopped
feeling.
Hisako Onoda came to the conclusion there was almost certainly nobody left to kill on theNadia . She
decided to go and see Mr Dandridge, who deserved a visit like nobody else did.
It was all still hopeless, she knew, but this was better than doing nothing.
The crumpled black Gemini Orrick had knifed lay draped over one end of the pontoon. She looked at
one of its bulky silenced engines, worked out how to take it off and dragged it over to where theNadia 's
own inflatable lay moored. She stuck the military engine's prop in the water, pushed the starter. The
engine trembled, rumbled; even idling, the prop tried to push itself under the pontoon. She switched the
outboard off, unbolted the Evinrude from the sternplate of theNadia 's Gemini and let it slip into the black
waters. She replaced it with the big military engine, working by the light from the ship above, and
sweating with the effort, arms aching. The pontoon was on the near side of the ship to the other two
vessels. She had the walkie-talkie switched on, and was vaguely surprised it had stayed silent; it seemed
nobody had heard or seen anything on the other two ships. As she worked she waited for gunfire, or the
radio to rattle off some incomprehensible Spanish at her, but -- in that perverse sense -- waited in vain.
It took her two trips to bring all the weaponry down to the boat. She topped up the outboard fuel tank
with one of the jerry cans on the pontoon, then stowed that with the missile launchers and explosives in
the bottom of the inflatable and restarted the engine.
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