Juan scrambled to his feet as a drum arced high and began to fall straight at him like a meteor. It landed five yards from him and slightly higher on the hill, so when it split, a burning lake of gasoline roared over him. He fought the instinct to run down the hill. He ran at a diagonal instead, flames licking at his knees and the heat enough to sear his lungs, but in just moments he was through the conflagration with nothing more than singed hair.

“Out of the frying pan…” he wheezed as he continued after Eddie Seng.

A one-second burst from the Gatling was enough to shred the steel tow cables, and the timing couldn’t have been better, because the pirates on the tug had just bumped the engines to high idle, sending a thick plume of smoke from her funnel. The reaction on the beach was exactly as Juan had predicted.

The pirates almost instantly disengaged the Russian holdouts and began running for the shore. Some kept their weapons, but most dropped them as they plunged into the frigid water and began to swim out to the tug. Watching them reminded Linc of rats deserting a sinking ship. He and the rest of the shore party swept down from their position. There were a few gunmen so intent on the fight that they didn’t know their ride was about to leave.

Linc took out a pair of them with a grenade and had a bead on a third when what he thought was a corpse at his feet sprang to life. The pirate knocked away his M-4 and tried to ram a wickedly curved knife into his chest. Linc blocked the blade’s fatal thrust, but the knife sliced a long gash into his arm. He sank a fist into the pad of muscle under the fighter’s arm, paralyzing the limb for the second he needed to cross-draw his pistol and put a bullet between the man’s eyes. He ignored the torrent of blood streaming down his arm and continued his patrol.

Eddie realized he was never going to catch Jan Paulus. The burst of energy that had gripped him so tightly had now flickered to nothing. He was nauseated by hunger, and he couldn’t draw enough oxygen into his lungs, but still he pressed on, driven by raw emotion. Paulus and his hostage were a minute away from reaching the MI-8 helicopter, and no matter how Eddie willed his legs to move faster, he knew he was slowing. Then from out on the Oregon came the distinct pop from the 40mm autocannon. Five rounds went sailing high over the beach, passing directly over Eddie and blasting the area around the chopper. When the dust settled, Eddie could see that the cockpit had taken a direct hit. Flames licked from around the shattered Plexiglas, and the ground around the craft was littered with mangled electronics.