28

The weather scans showed a new storm system spinning its deceptively slow way south of the Philippines out of the wide Pacific. Annja didn’t think it would reach them before morning. It would leave time. She hoped.

Waving goodbye to the worried-looking Philippine captain and crew whose dark faces lined the rail, she throttled up the outboard engine and putted away. Kind of sweet of them to worry about me, she thought, since there’s nothing to connect me to their vessel. Some activity in accounts under names other than the one on her birth certificate had led to a pure cash transaction to hire a fast-powered craft out of the fishing town of Tawi-Tawi, off toward the end of the Philippines’ long, narrow Sulu Archipelago near Rimba Perak’s neighbor Sabah.

She had looked for a vessel with captain and crew of the poor but honest class. Captain Delgado and his crew were a tough-looking bunch, to be sure. But nowhere on earth did the sea coddle weaklings. The ocean was big and powerful and heedless, and would swallow you without a trace for the slightest lapse in caution or judgment, or just on general principles.

The conclusion they’d come to was obvious from their whispered conversations. Who else but some kind of secret agent would hire them to transport her and an inflatable powerboat loaded with electronic gear to the middle of nowhere?

And that’s where she was. Squarely in nowhere’s midsection. In the dark, the little junk, whose captain was reluctant to display running lights, quickly vanished. Annja was left all alone with the warm thick air pressing against her face, the smell of the salt sea and the petroleum engine, the growl of the outboard and the gurgle of the wake, and an entire sky full of stars.

Before setting out she learned that the moon, in its half phase, wasn’t supposed to rise in this part of the world until around 2:00 a.m. She guessed that would be the outside limit of the envelope in which Wira, bless his reckless heart, would make his move. Heaven knew what kind of radar or night-vision equipment the obviously well-capitalized Eddie Cao Cao had to equip his pirate fleet, or at least his flagship, the Sea Scorpion. But there was no point in the Rimba Perak navy making things easy on the pirates by allowing the waning moon to illuminate them.

So Annja steered the boat, frequently checked her headings against her GPS navigator, and tried not to dwell on how completely foolhardy this whole thing was. She had brought an emergency kit, a shortwave radio and some flares, in case she just got utterly lost. She knew if the storm caught her out here in the open sea they’d do her no good.

She didn’t fear totally missing her objective. Much. Even though one thing she didn’t have out here on her ridiculously tiny and remarkably fragile seeming boat was a means to track the transmitter she’d snuck into the crate with the coffin. After all, unless events veered wildly off course, her target was going to make itself, or be made about as obvious as it was possible to be.

Still, it caught Annja by surprise when the night flamed up before her. Out of nowhere the sky a few points off her port bow lit with a gigantic yellow flash. It was followed by two more, in rapid succession. Then an orange fireball rolled into the sky, and all kinds of lights began flashing. Tracer rounds arced gracefully. The sound of the first blast rolled over her like a wave, overpressure so powerful she felt it on her face.

It was an impressive sound-and-light show. “Yes!” she exclaimed, pumping her fist. It had all come together as she planned.

Then it struck her hard she was heading into the midst of that floating inferno.

“That’s why I get paid the big bucks,” she muttered, and cranked up the engine.

She made no attempt at stealth—speed was the plan. With all the flashing going on, to accompany the banging, and the orange and yellow flames billowing up already from a pair of junks, a small boat on the water was going to be obvious for anyone who cared to look. The kicker was, why would anyone bother to look for a random small boat? There were plenty of big, well-armed boats to look at instead.

Much more likely was that accidental gunfire would wipe her out.

What she was witnessing was like the biggest, best fireworks show ever. It was so utterly unlike anything she had experienced that she actually felt little fear heading into it.

She had seen sea battles before, on television and in movie theaters. But there had always been that wall of separation. Even in old footage from World War II, when those were real guns shooting and the flashes when the shells hit were tearing apart and incinerating real human beings, it had always been something happening a long time ago and far, far away and in all events on the far side of that uncrossable glass wall. It may have been real once; it wasn’t real now. But the lights and noise and even smells that surrounded her, swallowed her, were so overwhelming they seemed a different kind of unreality.

A pair of banshee shadows screamed overhead, low enough to rock her boat with their air-wake. They had to be Rimba Perak jets. She passed within a few hundred yards of a seventy-foot junk afire to the waterline, with orange flames bursting up higher than it was long, underlighting an enormous coil of black smoke squeezing into the sky. She smelled burning fuel oil and barbecue. She knew way too well what that meant, and suddenly it was very real.

Panic rose inside her. She could barely breathe. The sudden massive adrenaline dump, combined with the smell of burning human flesh, overwhelmed her. She vomited over the side of the Zodiac.

Mostly.

When she finished Annja unscrewed the top of a water bottle, rinsed her mouth, spat. “Okay,” she said, “I’m officially in deep now.”

The only thing for it, clearly, was to plunge on even deeper. Because she was Annja Creed. And also because she’d feel like a total fool if she turned the Zodiac around and scuttled back into the middle of the ocean.