Winters’s right hand should be worthless and yet he managed to unsheathe a fighting knife he carried strapped inside his shirt. Cabrillo fought the natural urge to get away from the blade. Instead, he stepped closer, limiting Winters’s ability to swing the knife. Winters flipped the blade and started to plunge it into Juan’s shoulder. Juan grabbed at his wrist, but the former Marine had the better position and superior leverage, and the knife sliced into the meat of Cabrillo’s trapezius muscle. Winters was angling the blade so it would eventually find the major arteries feeding the brain.

Hot blood poured from the wound and down his chest. Cabrillo roared as he tried to keep the knife from digging deeper while Winters tried just as hard to ram the blade all the way home.

It went in an inch. The deeper it was driven, the less Juan could check its remorseless plunge. He could sense his opponent gathering himself for one last effort, one last thrust, that would kill him.

He felt the spray of blood on his face before he heard the shot. Winters collapsed, lifeless, the knife ripping savagely from Cabrillo’s body as he collapsed in a heap. Max stood in the doorway leading aft, a compact Glock in his hand still pointed at the ceiling, still smoking.

“The other four surrendered without a fight,” Hanley said.

“I had just about every advantage under the sun, and he still nearly killed me.” Juan peeled back his sodden shirt to look at his wound. It was a small slit, and little blood was seeping out.

“Better get Hux up here with her sewing kit,” Max remarked mildly.

“Your concern for my well-being is touching.”

“Ah, but I did just save your life.”

“A charge I can’t deny.” Juan looked down at Winters’s corpse. “Tough old bird.”

“What do they say, there’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.”

Within a few minutes, the bridge was crowded. Hux had Juan on a seat with his shirt off so that she could clean, stitch, and dress the wound. Max was overseeing the rescue of the passengers and crew of the oil field tender. The boat was sinking by the stern so steeply that her bow was already out of the water. She was going too fast for them to launch a lifeboat, so men jumped free, with life jackets if they could find them, and started swimming for the big freighter they had come out here to rob.

Linda, MacD, and Mike Trono, all armed, were near the lowered gangplank ready to welcome their new guests.

Cabrillo refused anything stronger than Tylenol and was back on his feet in time to see the crawler crane rip from its restraining chains and smash its way across the tilted deck and destroy the already-submerged helicopter.

“Someone’s not getting their toys back.”