The yacht had put on a burst of speed and autofire raked the Pinguin, tearing chunks of wood from her thick stern and shattering the glass panel on the door to her belowdecks cabin. Sloane was protected by the transom, but the captain and another man on the bridge were horribly exposed.

Trading speed for protection, the Namibian skipper began to weave his boat as they careened toward the oncoming freighter, slewing it from side to side as he tried to throw off the gunmen’s aim. Sloane added her own contribution by firing both barrels again. The shots were so off target that she never saw the little geysers where they hit the sea.

A fresh burst from the yacht forced her down. From her vantage on the rough plank flooring of the aft deck she couldn’t see the freighter, but the boat behaved differently as it encountered waves that had been disrupted by her massive hull. Her shoulder aching from firing the gun, she knew it was now up to the Pinguin’s captain and the mysterious master of the Oregon. She lay against the transom, panting with fear tinged with exhilaration — the same sense of defiance that had put her in the predicament in the first place.

Back aboard the Oregon Juan and Max watched the two small craft coming closer. The Pinguin’s skipper was keeping her on track to race down the starboard side with the yacht actually running a bit further to the right and fast approaching the range where the gunners would have their quarry dead to rights.

“Wait for it,” Max said to no one in particular. Had he been in charge of this situation he would have told Sloane to stand by the radio and given the order to turn himself. Then he realized Juan had been right to let the skipper make the call. He knew his boat’s capabilities and would know when to make the cut.

The Pinguin was thirty yards from the Oregon, so close that the mast camera could no longer track her. The weapons officer switched to the gun camera on the bow thirty caliber.

The little boat was raked with yet another burst of fire from the yacht and had they been further away Juan would have abandoned his plan and blown the luxury craft out of the water with either the thirty caliber or the Gatling gun that was still tracking the target even hidden behind her steel plating.

“Now,” he whispered.

Though Cabrillo hadn’t activated his microphone it was as if the Pinguin’s captain heard him. He cut the wheel hard to the left just fifteen yards from the knife-edge prow of the Oregon, riding up on the swell that curled away from her hull like a surfer catching a wave.