Riptide (41 page)

He heard the throb of a powerboat fast approaching. Nice if it were the cavalry, but he suspected not. The men above them had a quick discussion, and decided to move off, rather than wait to see if it was their own men, or more of Visconti’s. Nick took a breath as the sound of the engine was drowned out by the renewed, escalating gunfire. Added to the hard pounding of running feet and bullets was the cringe-worthy sound of splintering wood, fiberglass, and teak decking as his ship was shot to hell.

She was dying anyway, Nick reminded himself, but Jesus, the death rattle was made worse by the wholesale destruction wrought by two opposing factions who had nothing better to do than destroy a magnificent work of art.

Several loud shots were instantly followed by an almost musical avalanche of fragmenting, crashing plate glass. Bria sucked in a shallow breath to whisper, “Sorry,” in his ear. Filled with an unnamed warmth, Nick moved his head the fraction of an inch necessary to brush his mouth against hers.

“
You’re
safe. I can always build another ship.”

“Oh, God,” she whispered, dark eyes gleaming. “
Now
you tell me?”

Booted feet thudded on the deck six feet above them. So close, Nick heard the heavy breathing of the men standing there. Visconti’s men this time?

Did it matter?

Do
not
look down. Do
not
fucking look down.

A shot. A scuffle. The thud of fist hitting flesh and bone.

Go for it
, he thought savagely as the men resorted to fists.

A nearby splash.

The splash was what looked like an Uzi. Fuck it. So near and yet so far. And sinking perilously close to the edge of the platform out of reach.

Nick’s fingers curled around Bria’s rib cage. He couldn’t wait. “Grab the ladder.”

Obediently she reached up, fumbling for a grip on the rung beside his hand. “Where’re you going?” her whisper was low and harsh.

“Inflatable.” He measured the few feet between where they lay and the locker containing the raft. He’d have to belly-crawl out of the deep shadows through water sheened with lights from above.

He calculated the odds of being seen. High.

Calculated the chances of survival staying where they were. Low.

He shifted his fingers to make sure Bria had a good grip, just as there was a double thud and two men landed with noisy splashes a yard from where they lay, half submerged. Damn it to hell.

The black-garbed men staggered to their feet, locked in mortal combat. A Moroccan and one of Visconti’s men from the random speech clues.

Nick had one hand wrapped around the bottom rung of the ladder, the other tightly around Bria’s waist. She was staring intently at the area where the Uzi had vanished moments before, as if she could somehow summon it to the surface.

Their legs were entwined, anchoring them to each other like lovers. The movement of the water made it impossible to remain still. The sea surged violently over the dive platform, sucking and pulling at them. They were practically floating in the ebb and flow as the
Scorpion
sank.

Arms straining, Nick maintained his death grip on both Bria and the ladder with difficulty. Something slammed into his hip.

“Loosen your hold a little,” Bria whispered urgently against his throat. He eased his grip around her waist. Slightly. She wriggled a bit, twisted, leaned sideways bent double. While she wriggled in his hold, Nick kept his attention on the men nearby, praying they didn’t see the movement. “What the hell are you—”

She pressed hard and ridged against his side. “Uzi!” Bria mouthed triumphantly.

Hallelujah! The strap had caught on the raised handles that bookended the platform so that the divers could more easily climb aboard. “Can you—” She managed to slide the weapon between them so he could grab it barrel first. “Perfect.”

The men fighting were finding it impossible to remain on their feet as the deck tilted and water washed violently around their legs. A shot went wild, another ricocheted off the metal band securing the dive tanks to the wall.

Shit! If it had hit, the explosion would’ve taken them all out.

Grappling, holding on to each other for balance, the men staggered upright, let go, and started swinging. The blows rained hard and heavy, but they had to fight gravity as well as each other on the steeply angled deck. Their boots—dragged down by twelve inches of water—made their footing even more precarious.

Nick let go of Bria’s waist, locking his legs even more firmly around hers, and fumbled to get the Uzi in position to fire while he still had one hand tethering them to the ladder. Bria said, “Give it to me. You get the raft.”

It was a good plan. Except Nick didn’t want to let go of her. Didn’t want to risk getting separated. The surging water was incredibly strong. One wrong move, and she could be—

“Go!”

He double-checked that she was holding on, untangled their legs, then released his fingers. He was instantly swept several feet away. Close enough to the men that Nick was struck in the shoulder by a heavy boot. He looked up in time to see the man’s eyes gleam as he suddenly saw him there. His weapon swiveled from his Moroccan opponent to point at Nick instead.

Nick wrapped his hands around the guy’s ankle and yanked hard. Already staggering under the nonstop blows from his oblivious opponent, and surprised by an attack at foot-level, the man cursed in Italian as his arms windmilled. He fell back, crashing into the lashed scuba tanks nearby. Over the clatter and crash of the tanks, the sound of the accompanying shot was all but lost as the Moroccan put a bullet in his chest.

The man rolled off the sloped edge of the dive platform and disappeared into the churning water behind him.

Spreading his feet, the Moroccan bent his knees to balance on the tilted deck and swiveled to point the business end of his semiauto at Nick’s head. The man squinted against the sudden blinding glare of a light shining directly in his face from a boat that suddenly appeared against the dive platform. Ignoring the new arrivals, he yelled in Arabic, “Where—”

The distinct sound of a discharged bullet was instantly followed by the Moroccan’s head exploding like a ripe watermelon.

*   *   *

Bria had fired. But it wasn’t her bullet that hit him. Or at least she didn’t think so. Not that it mattered. Dead was dead. “Nick!”

The bright light, positioned on the deck of the small boat, shone directly in her face. She couldn’t see a damned thing. Not Nick. Not the boat, not who was
on
the boat.

Terrified she’d hit Nick instead of some unseen bad guy, Bria pulled herself upright, the Uzi cradled against her chest, one foot hooked around the bottom rung of the ladder as the water tried to suck her across the platform. “Nick, answer me, damn it!”

As he emerged from his prone position in the water, raising his hands over his head, he morphed into a blurred backlit shadow. “Stay put.” It was hard to hear what the hell he said; pandemonium was reigning all over the
Scorpion
. Bria figured most of the bad guys were suddenly realizing that they were on a sinking ship, and wanted off. Fast.

Since they were on a small square of rapidly submerging dive platform, with the stark white paintwork behind them, she thought Nick’s suggestion to stay put was pointless. Whoever was behind the light was in the catbird seat. She swiveled, aimed at the light, and fired. A man screamed like a girl.

One light went dark. “Turn off the other light before she hits someone! Namely me, you assholes!” Bria immediately recognized the furious voice—Draven! How had he gotten there so damned fast? She’d only spoken to him a few hours ago. Not enough time to fly all the way from Marrezo. Which meant he’d been close by when she’d claimed to be in possession of the diamonds. Oops.

The platform dipped, and Bria staggered. Nick grabbed her arm to steady her. But they both knew that it was just a matter of minutes before the
Scorpion
gave her last hurrah and sank. Then everyone and everything standing too close was going to be sucked down to a watery grave.

“Bria,” Draven said smoothly, “drop the weapon. I’m here to help you.”

“Let’s see you drop yours first,” she told her brother. She had no intention of letting go of the Uzi.

*   *   *

Five minutes eighteen seconds.

“I suppose,” Nick said mildly, moving his grip from her arm to her waist as she splashed over to join him in the middle of the platform, “it was a foolish dream to think you’d obey an order?”

“Oh? Was that an order?” she asked sweetly, losing none of her sass and fire no matter what the circumstances. “I thought it was a suggestion.”

The bright light was suddenly turned off, leaving them in relative darkness. Relative because his ship was lit up like Christmas with the fucking hovering chopper and half a dozen boats with spotlights surrounding the
Scorpion.
The noise had quieted down to just intermittent chatter of gunfire as small vessels converged beside the
Scorpion
and men bailed over the side. Pretty much everyone seemed to be determined to be the next ones off the sinking ship. It was a fucking three-ringed circus.

He’d heard the mechanism, followed by the splash, as the lifeboat was lowered into the water a few minutes earlier.

“Bria! Throw down your weapon, and put your hands where I can see them!”

“Oh, for—” Bria threw up her hands, one of which held the fully loaded Uzi. A quick glance at her face showed Nick she knew exactly what she was doing. Any male with a pulse seeing her right then would be eyeing her with nervous anticipation. They’d be keeping a wary eye on an unpredictable, bra-less woman in a wet T-shirt with a loaded gun.

She got top marks for misdirection.

The platform dipped a few more inches to port. Water sloshed up his legs. He tightened his grip around Bria’s waist.

“Draven, you idiot!” Bria shouted over the noise. “What if I’d hit you? Although God only knows you deserve it!”

“Where are the diamonds, you stupid bitch?”

She swept her arm wide to encompass the water surrounding them, the helicopter swooping overhead, the men shouting, the boats converging. “Trading insults with you while standing on a sinking ship isn’t what I’d imagined for my final hour,” she told the man sarcastically. “Look around, Draven.
No one
is going to win here!”

Nick had a bigger problem than sunspots burned into his retina. Because the man standing on the deck of the smaller boat
wasn’t
Draven Visconti. Wasn’t Bria’s brother. Couldn’t be.

His accent, his tone, his inflections. All
wrong
.

She made a sound of pure female anger. Nick could practically hear her temper sizzle. “Damn you! Look around you, Draven!
You’re
responsible for all of this!”

The man standing on the deck of a fast luxury boat was in his mid-thirties, morbidly obese, and appeared to be unarmed. Unlike the
very well-armed
men with him, he wore a shiny dark business suit, and a white shirt and red power tie. He was as out of place in the middle of the ocean as a hooker at a church social.

The four thugs with him carried semiautomatic weapons just in case someone got the crazy idea of trying to push past them and lay claim to their boat. A fifty-foot Sessa. Low, sleek, and fast.

Nick wanted the craft, and he wanted it
now
. Five minutes four seconds.

“If you hadn’t meddled and put your nose where it didn’t belong, I wouldn’t have had to come all the way out here to deal with the situation.” The man dabbed his sweating face with a white handkerchief, then waved it to indicate to his men to secure the boat to the platform.

Great idea, pal; you might notice she’s sinking.

One of the men threw a line to another who’d jumped down onto the platform and was splashing around looking for somewhere to tie the boat. Nick didn’t bother telling them.

Nick figured the two on the platform would be relatively simple to eliminate. But the two on board were hardened professionals. Bria, Nick saw, got that memo too.

Five minutes. They were trapped. “What in God’s name is the
matter
with you?” Bria looked like she was going to go and haul the guy over the railing of his boat down onto the dive platform with them. Nick tightened his fingers like a vise around her waist, holding her back. Hell, trying to maneuver her behind his body. He ground out her name in warning as she strained against his hold.

Bria wasn’t going to hide behind anyone, and she shifted aggressively, giving the guy the evil eye. “Stop this before people get hurt.”

Nick almost laughed out loud. Get hurt?

The man-who-wasn’t-her-brother, his florid skin greasy with sweat, didn’t even acknowledge, let alone
look
at her; all his attention was fixed on Nick. “Where’s my merchandise, Cutter?”

Two launches put on speed, the sound of their engines retreating, twin white wakes showing their progress. Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw several men floundering in the water, having jumped overboard.

The
Scorpion
was dead. He had actually felt a physical reaction surge through his own body as his ship’s heartbeat stopped with the last hurrah of the auxiliary engines shorting out minutes before. The millions of gallons of seawater inside would finish the job. The cherry on top would be the explosion below decks as the fuel in the full tanks of the helicopter blew.

Four minutes forty-nine seconds.

“Najeeb Qassem and Kadar Gamali Tamiz are both here,” Nick told him coolly, fighting the slope of the platform and the wash of water around his lower legs. “Why don’t we discuss just how the three of you want to split your diamonds?”

The weapons lifted.

“Fine,” Nick said smoothly, his heart beating fast, his nerves stretched to the limit. There were things he’d be willing to risk if he were alone. But nothing he’d risk Bria for. “Let Bria get off the
Scorpion
safely. I’ll take you to your diamonds.”