It was their clothes that Megan found peculiar, mostly so far out of style that she remembered nothing like them from her twenty fashion-conscious years. No, that was wrong: a couple of the men were wearing faded Levi’s jeans, patched and tattered, but the rest wore pants that looked like something they had sewn at home, so baggy they were almost shapeless, one or two of them without apparent pockets. A couple of the hijackers were bare chested; the other three wore faded shirts that didn’t seem to fit them properly, as if they had been picked at random from Salvation Army bins, without regard to size or style. Three of the five wore bright bandannas tied around their heads, and one wore a black eye patch.

  My God, Megan thought, they think they’re pirates! It would be ludicrous if it hadn’t been so terrifying. The men were advancing on the wheelhouse where she stood, together with her friends. The leader stared at Tommy for a moment, finally nodded to a couple of his men—Eye Patch included—as he said, “Get rid of him.”

  The pirates didn’t argue. They stepped forward, hoisted Tommy by his arms, paid no attention to his moaning as they dragged him toward the nearest railing. Jon Fitzgivens made a move, as if to stop them, but he froze as the machine gun’s muzzle poked against his chest.

  “You’ll get your turn,” the raiding party’s leader said. “Don’t rush it, boy.”

  She didn’t watch as Tommy went over the side, but there was no way to escape his strangled cry, the splash he made on impact with the water. Megan knew that sharks would smell the blood—or did they taste it?—and she prayed that he would drown, or anyway lose consciousness, before that happened.

  “Tasty wenches,” said the man with the machine gun, eyeing each of them in turn. Megan felt naked in her swimsuit, even though it didn’t show as much of her as Robin’s or Felicia’s, with the bottoms that were barely there. Her fear of being murdered by these strangers instantly gave way to a sensation even more oppressive, dreading the fate worse than death.

  “Right tasty,” said the leader of the boarding party. “I believe we’ve got three winners here, and no mistake. But first, we need to get rid of the losers.”

  “Lemme do it,” said Eye Patch.

  “Not so fast,” their leader said. “We have rules, after all.”

  The comment struck her as absurd, and Megan swallowed laughter that could only be a symptom of hysteria. What kind of rules could anybody have for kidnapping and killing perfect strangers?

  Hell, nobody’s perfect, Megan thought, and choked on laughter that time, tried to make it sound as if she were simply coughing up some phlegm.

  The leader of the pirates spent a moment scowling at her, then turned back to Jon and Barry. “Either one of you a swimmer?” he inquired.

  The two law students glanced at each other, wide-eyed, certain they were in the presence of a madman. Barry raised his hand, like a third-grader yearning for the washroom, and replied, “I swim.”

  “Me, too,” Jon echoed.

  “Excellent!” The leader of the pirates beamed. “We’ll have a race, then. You’ll both dive off the gunwale—” he pointed to the stern “—and swim your damnedest for, oh, let’s say half a minute, shall we? If you’re out of range by then, we let you go. Sound fair enough?”

  “You’re crazy!” Barry blurted out, unthinking.

  “Please yourself.”

  The shotgun was already leveled at his face as Barry raised both hands and cried, “No, wait! We’ll swim!”

  “They’ll swim,” the leader said, and one of his companions giggled. “That’s the spirit, lads. You may get lucky, though I’m damned if I’ll bet on you. Did I mention that we need your vessel? And these sweet young things, of course, to cheer us on our lonesome journey home.”

  “You’ll never get away with this,” Jon said, but he was moving toward the taffrail, Barry trudging at his side.

  “Who really gets away with anything?” the pirate leader said. “Come Judgment Day, I reckon every man jack on the bloody planet will have much to answer for. This afternoon, though, you two are the ones who’ve got a long swim home ahead of you.”

  Megan was weeping softly, couldn’t watch as Jon and Barry went over the side. She heard the splashes, started counting seconds in her mind—one Mississippi, two—and guessed that it was only ten or fifteen seconds after they had jumped, before the firing squad cut loose.

  She may have screamed but wasn’t sure. Felicia’s knees gave way, and she was cringing on the deck, hands covering her ears, Robin kneeling beside her, when the shooting stopped. Megan refused to face the gunmen, kept her eyes closed, but she heard them coming for her, felt a rough arm slide around her naked shoulders, foul breath in her face.

  “Now, then,” the pirate leader said, “why don’t the three of you get down below and have a little rest while we get under way? You’ll need your strength tonight, and no mistake.”

  Chapter 6

  The Melody was thirty-five feet long and she should have been called a cabin cruiser, but the term was too crude for a thing of beauty such as she.

  Someone with unlimited funds had commissioned her. Whoever that someone was had grown up with money. You had to be very accustomed to large amounts of money to use it in such an understated fashion.

  She was an odd combination. Extremely lightweight, high-tensile-strength aeronautic-grade composite alloys were inside. On the outside were handforged decorative rails and hand-laid teak planking. Her bridge had enough computer processing power to run a small nation, but the steering could also be performed on the two-hundred-year-old wheel from a British ship that had run the Indian trade routes. Inside, the carpets were handwoven rugs from Turkey, Iran, China and Peru. Entire walls featured original painted murals and contemporary tapestries.

  The DEA had removed whatever could be removed after they confiscated her from her third or fourth owner. It was the Lucky Lady then, and her owner was a yuppie smuggler based at Cocoa Beach who made his last run up from Cartagena in the spring of 1995. His load was worth an estimated fifteen million dollars on the street, but someone near and dear had ratted on him for a payoff in the low five figures. Agents of the DEA were waiting to collect the Lucky Lady, with her owner and his cargo, when he docked at Lauderdale. The boat was confiscated, the cocaine incinerated, and the skipper wound up doing seventeen to thirty-five at Leavenworth, when he refused to “help” himself by rolling over on his source.

  That way, at least, he stayed alive, while the Melody received a new name, several coats of paint and went to work for Uncle Sam. The DEA imagined she was theirs, but the Melody was moonlighting this weekend on behalf of CURE.

  “I’ve never been much good with boats,” said Remo when he saw the cabin cruiser for the first time, docked at Charleston.

  “Skills are learned. You do not fear the water.” It was not a question; Remo did not bother answering the old man.

  The man was indeed ancient. Chiun, Reigning Master Emeritus of Sinanju, was more than a century old, although Remo would have generously allowed that he didn’t appear a day over ninety-seven. He was short and slight, a collection of thin bones under pale parchment skin that seemed so thinned by the ages you could see the blood vessels beneath. The ancient little man was Korean, with a head that was nearly devoid of hair except for yellowing wisps over his ears and on his chin. The skin around his eyes was lined and wrinkled, but the eyes themselves were like glimmering emeralds. They might have been the eyes of a child.

  Though Remo Williams himself had the title of Reigning Master of Sinanju, the truth was that Chiun still did quite a bit of reigning.

  Chiun was right. Remo didn’t fear the water, salt or fresh. Nor did he fear the sea wolves they were hunting—if in fact they actually existed. Still, Remo would have preferred to do his manhunting on land, where he wasn’t confined to the cabin cruiser’s decks. And he wasn’t looking forward to spending several days confined in the boat with an occasionally disagreeable Chiun.

  “Be careful!” Chiun barked as Remo set the last of eight trunks on the floor in the vast stateroom Chiun had selected for himself.

  “I’m always careful. Besides, I think you forgot to pack anything in this one. It feels empty.”

  “Leave it alone!” Chiun snapped. “Get out! Go on!”

  “Chill, Chiun.” Remo left, but not before adding, “Why in the hell do you need eight trunkfuls of stuff?”

  By sundown they were ready to depart. Remo could probably have stalled until after the next morning’s breakfast of rice, but he saw no point. If they were going, they had best be on their way. He could see his way around Charleston harbor just about as well at night as he could during the day, so it was no more of a challenge in the semidarkness, even for a navigator of his minimal accomplishments. Chiun was standing several feet away on the aft end of the craft, but Remo still heard the old Korean rolling his eyes in disdain.

  When they were on the open water and the sun was gone, Chiun turned away from the black water. “I am amazed at your seamanship,” he said simply.

  Remo didn’t reply. For a long time Chiun stood there.

  Finally Remo sighed. “Okay, why are you amazed at my seamanship?”

  “There are two large rocks in Charleston harbor. It took skillful sailing to bang us against both of them,” Chiun explained.

  “Stuff it, Little Father.”

  When they were well at sea, Remo picked out a southward course and kept the lighted coastline on his right, referring to the compass mounted on his console when he felt the need. The cockpit was above decks, situated on the cabin roof beneath an open canopy. Chiun was in the cabin, testing the reception on the Melody’s twelve-inch RCA television.

  From the sound of his muttering, it was none too promising. Remo would have thought he’d be able to find some sort of programming to suit his tastes, which of late had run to Spanish-language soap operas.

  It was four hundred miles from Charleston to Miami, as the seagull flew. Remo topped off the fuel tanks at Easy Eddie’s, on Miami Beach. Two hundred more to Nassau, and they put in for the night, Remo intent on following his orders to present a fair facsimile of wealthy tourists on vacation. Shiftless travelers wouldn’t be rushing on from one point to the next without a fair amount of shopping, lazing in the sun and soaking up the “local color.”

  That was pushing it with Chiun along. The Reigning Master Emeritus of Sinanju bore no more resemblance to an average upscale tourist than he did to Li’l Abner, and his patience for such joys as sightseeing or window-shopping was minute. Chiun could draw almost as much attention simply by walking through a basic gift shop as he would by demolishing the place by hand. On the other hand, if he wanted to, he could walk unnoticed into the office of Nassau’s prime minister.

  Chiun’s unique appearance might, in fact, serve their cause. Remo wanted to look helpless without putting on a Rob Me sign, and traveling with Chiun could be the next-best thing. A city boy alone, unarmed, was no real threat to anyone, but team him with an elderly Korean in expensive silk garb, who appeared to have one bony foot across the threshold of Death’s door, and the potential odds for easy pickings blasted through the roof.

  These so-called pirates didn’t operate from Nassau, but they might have spotters in the city, and Remo used the time to role-play as long as his patience allowed. He managed to pack a lot of ugly-American-type behavior into that twenty-minute stint. He bought and wore a loud shirt over his white T-shirt and made a point of spending too much cash on a few trinkets when he could have talked the vendors down to half the asking price. He bought a bottle of Corona and wobbled around with it for a while, pretending to chug some occasionally. He got noticed by the regular street trash, but as far as he could tell nobody showed special interest, and he made his trip back to the Melody without so much as a mugging.

  “Like the shirt?” he asked Chiun, who regarded him suspiciously from the deck.

  “It is better than the undergarment that is your typical attire,” the old Korean said. “If you must wear something brightly colored, why not wear a proper kimono instead of that garish thing? And why do you smell like a brewery?”

  “Relax,” Remo said. “I haven’t gone on a bender or anything. I just carried around a bottle for a while. I didn’t even spill any on my hands.”

  “You still reek of it,” Chiun pronounced, adding extra wrinkles to his nose to demonstrate how disagreeable the odor was.

  The run to Caicos took another day, twelve hours on the water, putting them in port by dusk. Along the way, Remo had kept a lookout for suspicious boats on the horizon, while Chiun remained below, inviting painful and humiliating death to visit all of those involved in manufacturing the yacht’s televisions and satellite receiver that vexed him endlessly.

  They weren’t attacked by pirates.

  On Caicos, Remo slipped into his tourist role again and played it to the hilt. He hoped. They would be closer to the pirates now, if there were any pirates to be found, and he hoped they had scouts in port looking for easy marks for future looting. If they had him marked, however, the sea raiders gave no sign.

  In the morning Remo dawdled on departure, wasting time to make it seem as if he had a hangover. Chiun came on deck briefly, eyeing his performance like an off-off-Broadway director.

  “Why have you not been attacked by the pirates yet?” Chiun demanded.

  “Hey, I’m trying,” Remo protested. “What do you want me to do? Rent a megaphone and start yelling for them to come and get me?”

  “This voyage is tiring.”

  “Huh. Tiring,” Remo said. “Seems to me that I’m the one doing all the work.”

  “I mean it is monotonous,” Chiun clarified condescendingly.

  “Yeah. I bet.” Remo didn’t buy that, either. In fact, he had a sneaking suspicion that Chiun was enjoying this little trip. He was a little too enthusiastic about the Melody. He hoped the little Korean didn’t get any ideas about moving out of their Connecticut duplex. He didn’t want to live on something that floated.

  Late morning found them heading south-southeast, for Puerta Plata. They were getting closer to their target zone. The pirate’s nest. Remo hoped the pirates came and got them quick before Chiun started thinking about yachting catalogs.

  “You like ’em, eh?” Billy Teach asked.

  “I would have liked them better if I’d had first pick,” said Thomas Kidd, making no effort to disguise the irritation in his tone.

  “Um, well, that is…”

  Kidd pinned his first lieutenant with a glare that had been known to make men soil themselves. It wasn’t that he snarled or threatened; rather, Kidd had learned through years of practice to project pure venom through his eyes, the grim set of his mouth, so that the object of his anger knew exactly what the stone-faced buccaneer was thinking. You could see death in those slate-gray eyes, and it wasn’t a quick death, never clean.

  When he had made his point, Kidd turned to face the three young wenches once again. His cold expression altered slightly, not quite softening. It was a matter of degree, and those unused to dealing with him may have missed the change entirely. That was quite all right with Kidd, since he wasn’t concerned about the nature of his first impression on three female hostages.

  The wenches had been naked when Teach brought them from the Ravager to Kidd’s land quarters—corrugated metal and a sheet of rotting plywood for the walls, a thatched roof overhead and dirt beneath his feet. Kidd had immediately ordered clothing for the three, and one of Teach’s raiding party had gone off to fetch the mismatched remnants they were wearing now: two pairs of cutoff jeans, one pair of gaudy boxer shorts, a paisley halter top and two men’s shirts. None of the garments fit, and none of them was clean, but dressing had allowed the three young prisoners to face him squarely, rather than with downcast eyes.

  There would be time enough to strip them once again, pass them around, when they had learned the rules. Kidd was a firm believer in the notion that you followed certain steps to see a job done properly the first time, deviating only at your peril.

  He wasn’t afraid of the three wenches. That would have been ridiculous. What troubled Thomas Kidd was that his second in command had not been able to restrain his crew from having at them on the journey back to Île de Mort. That lack of discipline was dangerous to all concerned. Suppose they had been short of lookouts on the trip back, for example, and patrol boats took them by surprise while three or four of them were busy with the women down below? More to the point, suppose the notion got around that Kidd’s strict orders could be flaunted with impunity? What then?

  Still looking at the women, Kidd addressed himself to Billy Teach. “Who gave the order for the sharing out?” he asked.

  Teach swallowed the obstruction that had suddenly appeared in his throat, half-choking him. “Th-there was no order, Captain,” he replied.

  “I see.” Worse yet. Teach had allowed his crew to run amok, when there was sailing and potential fighting to be done. “In that case, who was first to touch the wenches, in defiance of my rule?”

  A sidelong glance at Billy Teach showed Kidd that his lieutenant had begun to sweat. It was uncomfortably warm inside Kidd’s hut, but Teach had long since grown accustomed to the temperature on Île de Mort. This sweat sprang from his nerves, the knowledge that his captain was preparing an example, Billy praying to forgotten gods that he would not be chosen as a lesson to the brotherhood.

  “Answer!” Kidd snapped, and Billy jumped as if someone had poked a hot dirk in his arse.

  “It’s hard to say, Captain.” The words came out as if Teach had to squeeze them from between clenched teeth. Both hands were fisted at his sides, not reaching for the pistol in his belt. If it came down to that, Teach knew he wasn’t fast enough to win the draw.

  “In other words,” Kidd said, “you weren’t paying attention to your crew.”

  “It isn’t that,” Teach said defensively. “We had a second vessel to be manned, and we were heading back.”