Remo wasn’t worried that the blood might be Stacy’s. He knew she was a valuable prize and they wouldn’t sacrifice her. And he didn’t even consider it might be Chiun’s. If the pirates tried to slit Chiun’s throat, the sea would be scarlet with blood—pirate blood.

  The faint smell had the odor of slight decay. It was one or both of the deceased DEA agents, steeped in the ocean to serve as a kind of dinner bell. And it worked.

  He spotted a dorsal fin heading in his direction just as the boats were separated and the engines started. He didn’t know what kind it was, but from the rough dimensions of the dorsal fin, he guessed that it was ten or twelve feet long. Too far away for him to get a decent look by ducking underwater, but he knew that any fish that size could be a problem if it caught his scent and felt like having him for brunch. Maybe it would just swim on by.

  The dorsal fin became a thin knife in the water. The shark was coming directly at him. The trawler and the Melody started moving.

  Remo made a swim for it, heading for the trawler with a sudden burst of speed that sent him through the water like a torpedo. The shark didn’t know human beings well enough to understand that Remo was moving faster than humans were supposed to. Remo was just another fast-swimming, warmblooded creature to the shark. It ate them every day.

  It veered at Remo, who was coming more or less in its direction anyway. When Remo had his first clear view of the shark, he guessed it was a tiger. There were no stripes readily apparent, but the broad, flat nose sparked memories of something he had seen once, years ago, in an aquarium. The gaping mouth was sickle-shaped and bristling with curved, serrated teeth, located well behind the snout, so that he guessed the fish would have to roll sideways to execute a strike.

  The twelve-foot tiger shark changed directions in a heartbeat and did a good job of staying on an intercept course. Its muscular body convulsed to veer its trajectory to match Remo’s long-range dodges. He realized he had a choice to make. He could go around the tiger shark or through the tiger shark.

  The first option meant the boats would leave without him. Catching up would be iffy. Following their trail would be impossible, eventually, which meant he’d be swimming for the nearest land—not to mention depending on Chiun to handle the situation with Stacy.

  The second option meant, well, that he had to deal with a tiger shark.

  Remo had no choice at all, really. He hated that. Fate had a bad habit of spinning his life out of control without consulting him first. Fate was a bitch.

  Remo Williams swam at the shark.

  Streamlined and perfected by several million years of evolution, the eating machine aimed itself directly at Remo’s midsection, bearing down upon him like a gap-toothed juggernaut.

  Lots of people had wanted to kill Remo over the years, but they usually had motivations other than lunch. He would be damned if he was going to end up being digested by this or any other fish, mammal, bug, whatever. He was distantly aware of the engine noises from the trawler and the Melody, moving away from him.

  The tiger shark thrust its great body into Remo with a burst of speed and brought down its great jaws.

  This wasn’t Remo’s first encounter with a hungry, huge elasmobranch, and he knew just how to dampen its spirits. As he corkscrewed in the water and the shark found its maw unexpectedly empty, Remo jabbed his fist into the exposed dental work. It was a hard, fast strike that shattered several serrated teeth and sent the fragments flying into the thing’s mouth.

  The tiger shark gyrated away, momentarily frenzied by pain and confusion, but came back around a moment later, moving faster, spurred by its frenzy. It shot at Remo and snapped at him, but Remo was still too fast. He punched out another handful of shark teeth and when the shark whipped away he grabbed for the gills, digging his fingers like grappling hooks into the fleshy slits just forward of the big pectoral fin. The shark thrashed wildly, and Remo ripped out a handful of flesh along with a square foot of skin and gills. Blood clouded the water.

  Smart move, Remo Rubble, he told himself. Do just the right thing to attract a bunch of sharks. Over his self-recrimination came a wave of alarm as he realized that the rumble of the boats was now just a tiny vibration in the water as the distance increased. Dammit!

  The tiger shark was hurt but not slowed. It veered in a tight circle and came back fast. It was in pain and it was angry—but not as angry as the Reigning Master of Sinanju.

  “I’ve had enough!” he shouted. It wasn’t the most intelligent behavior for a Master of Sinanju who was twenty feet below the surface with a big carnivore to contend with, but the shout would have shattered a man’s eardrums above water. The tiger shark’s head snapped as if it had been sucker-punched, and it fled from Remo Williams.

  Remo knew a good thing when he saw it. He made his way to the surface, gulped air and descended as the tiger shark came back at him. This time Remo had full lungs and he let the shark get close enough to touch, then he exploded “Back off!”

  Your average human being couldn’t have even come close to vocalizing so loud and so powerfully, and the wall of sound collided with the shark like a depth charge. It jerked away, stiffened momentarily and hung in the water. It made no motion for seconds, and its twelve-foot-long body began to descend in a lifeless twisting motion. Then it flicked its tail, righted itself and moved weakly away.

  Remo spotted another dorsal closing in when he reached the surface. Time to get the hell out of there. He began to knife through the water, chasing the boats, but keeping an eye out just in case. The sharks might come after him, but their burst of speed could not be sustained like Remo could sustain his speed.

  Remo could swim for hours without resting, and swim fast, but not fast enough to catch up to the boats. The Melody was immensely overpowered for a pleasure yacht, and for once her engines were actually being used beyond a fraction of their capacity. The trawler was clearly outfitted with a power plant that was faster than your typical fishing vessel might need.

  That maniac pirate captain, Teach, had obviously been spooked by his run-in with the DEA and the possibility that the Melody was a sting operation. He was getting out of the vicinity fast.

  Too fast for Remo.

  Well, shit.

  The boats shrank to specks that appeared only occasionally over the tops of the waves, and when they were almost gone from his sight they veered in opposite directions. Cap’n Teach was going to confuse any pursuit that might be coming.

  Remo kept swimming in the direction the boats had headed originally. He would keep going that way until he hit land. Any land. He wondered how long he would actually last.

  Hell, he was warm enough. He could rest when he needed to. He could go for days if necessary. But days might be too long for Stacy Armitage. By this time tomorrow, Remo was grimly aware, she would still be alive, but in all likelihood she would have been subjugated to the entertainment of the pirates.

  He had seen what that did to Stacy’s sister-in-law. He didn’t want it to happen to her, too. He kept swimming.

  Then he saw a new speck.

  It was a sailboat, gliding toward him, still something like half a mile away. If it held to its present course, he thought that it would pass within a hundred yards or so of his position.

  Remo swam to meet it.

  Chapter 12

  Despite the brave front she had managed to put on for her abductors, Stacy Armitage was terrified. Her brother’s death and the brutal torment suffered by his widow prior to her escape were still too fresh in Stacy’s mind for her to cling to any illusions of security. Then the more recent whirlwind events. Just hours ago she awoke on a small boat with a pair of DEA men, put there by that asshole Remo Rubble. They were taking her to safety, they said.

  That was twenty minutes before the pirates stopped them, shot them, slipped their bodies in the Caribbean, then sank their boat.

  She was even more shocked when she was pulled out of her cell on the pirate trawler to find herself looking at the Melody. She saw Pablo, with a gun held on that asshole Remo and the old chauvinist Chiun.

  She watched Remo jump to his death.

  Chiun was put on the trawler with her, along with the buccaneer named Teach, and half a dozen of his crewmen. The remainder had been left to pilot the Melody, which ran a hundred yards or so behind the pirate craft. The skull-and-crossbones flag no longer flew above the trawler, which for all intents and purposes appeared to be a normal, run-down fishing boat once more—except that it went like a bat out of hell. The hull vibrated, and she could feel the engines straining to maintain the pace.

  Stacy and Chiun were housed belowdecks, out of sight and under guard. They didn’t have a pirate with them in the tiny cabin they had been assigned—more like a storage closet, Stacy thought, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the squalid room—but Teach had left a man outside the door, and others passed by, talking to him, at sporadic intervals.

  She wondered how much time had passed since they were taken prisoner and Remo had gone overboard, but glancing at her wrist reminded Stacy that the pirates had already relieved her of her watch. It was a birthday gift, from Cartier, and while the watch itself was trivial, all things considered, staring at her bare wrist brought fresh tears to Stacy’s eyes. She felt so helpless, and it galled her to have come this far, only to have her quest end in failure.

  “Not to worry,” said Chiun. It was the first time he had spoken since they came aboard the trawler, and his words took Stacy by surprise. “We have them now.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Chiun edged closer so that he could speak without the guard outside their cell hearing his words. “These pirates have big trouble,” he declared.

  “Uh-huh. Just let me get this straight,” she said. “We’re trapped in here, but they’re in trouble?”

  “One man’s trap may be another’s opportunity,” said Chiun.

  “Confucius?”

  The old Korean scowled. “Chiun!” he answered.

  “Sorry.”

  “I could stop these vermin now, of course,” Chiun went on, “but that is not the plan.”

  “The plan?”

  “We must discover where they live and breed,” said Chiun. “When Remo joins us, we shall know the time is right.”

  “Remo? But he…I mean…he’s gone!”

  “Dawdling, probably,” Chiun corrected her. “There were sharks in the water when he jumped.”

  “What?” she gasped, terrified.

  “He doubtless deemed it more important to stop to eat one of them before he joined us,” Chiun sniffed. “The stink will make you less attracted to him.”

  Stacy already felt like Alice on the wrong side of the looking glass, but now she was convinced that she had lost her mind. She had heard so many astonishing and insulting statements at one time she didn’t know how to sort it all out.

  Chiun, she decided, had retreated into fantasy. Poor old man.

  “Chiun,” she said gently, “Remo is not coming. Remo is dead.”

  “Oh, no. Although he may try to use that as an excuse for his tardiness—I would not put it past him.” Chiun spoke without blinking, his timeless face impassive.

  She nodded solemnly. Clearly, the faithful old man had gone into some sort of state of extreme denial. That wasn’t going to help them.

  “But what if he is dead?” she pressed, but gently.

  “Then I will kill them all myself.” Chiun shrugged.

  Stacy tried to imagine the frail old man in combat, but she couldn’t manage it. With Remo, having watched him kill four men, it was a different matter. In Chiun’s case, though, it was impossible to picture him engaged in any exercise more strenuous than watching television or preparing rice and fish.

  “You let the pirates think that you’re Chinese,” she said.

  Chiun’s lips twitched. A grimace or a smile, Stacy could not have said exactly which it was. “Their first mistake,” he said.

  “Did you know Remo long?” she asked. The question came out of left field, surprising Stacy herself.

  “Since he was born again,” Chiun replied.

  Another riddle. Remo had never impressed her as a religious man, especially after that scene in the alley in Puerta Plata. Still, there were all kinds of true believers, she decided. Pressing her luck, she tried for a follow-up question.

  “Was he a fighter when you met him?”

  “He was dead before then,” the old Korean reminded her.

  Stacy tried to find a riddle in his words, but Chiun appeared to mean the statement literally. She didn’t pretend to understand what the old Korean meant, but rather tried to change the subject.

  “What exactly did he do?” she asked.

  Chiun considered that before replying. From a slight frown, Stacy watched his face relax into a calm expression of repose. “He is Reigning Master of Sinanju, more or less. Granted, he has much to learn still, but he makes minor progress, here and there.”

  “I meant to ask, what does he do for Uncle Sam? You know, the government?”

  “Ah,” Chiun replied, “the Emperor. Such things are not for woman’s ears.”

  Stacy gave up. She couldn’t tell the difference between when Chiun was playing games with her and when he was speaking from the wrong side of the dividing line between reality and delusion. Stacy had no idea as to who or what Sinanju might be, but she knew damn well there was no emperor in the United States. In fact, unless Remo had lied to her in Puerta Plata, her own father was instrumental, at least in part, for Remo’s being on the case. That told her that he served the Feds in some capacity, whether he was a regular or some kind of independent contractor.

  None of this was helping her get a handle on when to expect reinforcements from the U.S. to come barging in.

  Chiun’s lack of doubt in Remo’s survival made her doubt what she knew had to be true. How long could a man survive at sea, without a raft, food, water? If there were sharks—although that may have been a part of Chiun’s mental instability—they would have finished him off in minutes. She needed something, some hope to sustain her in her present situation, other than Chiun’s assurance that he would eliminate the pirates by himself if called upon to do so. Stacy didn’t doubt the old man’s good intentions, but she didn’t trust him as the last line of her personal defense.

  If only she could believe that Remo was alive. If only there was some chance for him to appear and save her, save them both, from her private waking nightmare.

  She shook it off. The fantasy was too seductive. She couldn’t let herself slip into a fantasy world, too, if she wanted to have any hope of escape.

  An audience was waiting on the beach for the Melody when she entered the shaded cove on Île de Mort. Kidd had refrained from going down himself, with the excuse that he had other business pending, but he really meant to take a smidge of pride away from Teach, before the youngster’s britches got too small and Billy Boy got tempted to go shopping for a larger size. Something in captain’s colors, for example.

  It was trivial, as insults went, but Kidd was hoping he would get his point across. He valued Billy Teach, but not enough to jeopardize his own position as the leader of the pirate clan. Before he would allow a full-scale challenge—one that Kidd wasn’t absolutely certain he could win—he would arrange an accident for Billy, maybe have him lost at sea, and choose another second in command while they were mourning the incalculable loss.

  The “work” Kidd had to do while Billy brought his prize in was in fact another session with the slender brunette from their last raid, when the boarding party had come back with three girls. Kidd had already tested each of them in turn, as was a captain’s right, but there was something in the sultry brunette’s attitude, defiance simmering behind a mask of bland submission, that excited him almost as much as spilling blood. She was his favorite, and Kidd regretted that she probably would last a few more weeks at most.

  He let the brunette please him, told her what to do, keeping a knife and riding crop within arm’s reach, in case she tried to take advantage of her placement, kneeling in the space between his thighs. A captive woman had gone off on Wink, one time, and nearly ruined him. The twitching of his eye had been dramatically exaggerated after that, and there were some in the community who said that eyelid was the only part of Wink that twitched anymore.

  Not this one, though. Kidd was too cautious for her, even in the final moments, when he felt himself begin to reach his peak. Kidd was particularly watchful then, when she would think him helpless. Curiously, vigilance enhanced the moment for him, rather than detracting from it, since his eyes saw every detail of her sweaty face, himself, the place where they were joined.

  The wench was finished, slumped back on all fours, when Captain Kidd heard footsteps drawing closer to his quarters. Rising stiffly from his throne chair, one leg half-asleep, he pulled up his baggy trousers and buckled them in place. The cross belt that he wore across his chest was sweat-stained, like his clothing, but the cutlass it supported had been polished till the blade shone like a mirror. It was razor-sharp, that blade, and Kidd would gladly demonstrate on visitors if anyone provoked his wrath.

  The kneeling woman scuttled off to one side, crablike, when rough knuckles rapped on Kidd’s front door. She found a shady corner, huddled there, as if she somehow hoped to make herself invisible.

  “Enter!” Kidd said, his tone imperious, but no more than his rank deserved. The door swung open on its badly rusted hinges. Billy Teach was the first man across the threshold, leading two fresh captives, who immediately seized Kidd’s full attention.

  The red-haired woman was striking in her own right, slightly older and vastly more attractive than the three young women Teach had found last time, aboard the star-crossed Salomé. She was a full-fledged woman, rather than a pretty girl, and Kidd was drawn to her immediately, craving her, despite his just-finished tussle with the slim brunette.

  The second prisoner was something else entirely. He was old, for one thing, and an Asian at that, and dressed in a robe that made Kidd’s best pirate garb look subdued. Kidd would have been surprised to learn that he weighed ninety pounds. Almost completely bald on top, with yellowing fringes of white hair that hung delicately over his ears. There was something in his eyes that almost bordered on amusement, but he kept the main brunt of his feeling tucked away. At least he wasn’t stupid, Kidd decided, or a coward begging for his life.