Coincidence - Alan May [58]
Far better, Mac thought, to make the deaths look like an accident—but how would ye go about orchestrating a thing like that, with the number of people involved? Sink the boat, maybe … But how? No icebergs in these parts, that was for sure, and any structural damage to the hull would, eventually, be examined minutely; any suspicion of intentional damage would, once again, lead back to the Coincidence. Besides, boats took their own good time to go down. The Inspiration had a superfluity of equipment for any such unlikely emergency; there was no way in the world everyone onboard would go and drown in such an event.
Poison, then? But where would they be getting a poison lethal enough to kill everyone aboard? And, even supposing that they “just happened” to have come prepared with a supply of some such toxin on the Coincidence—and that itself would be too great a coincidence by half—how would they go about delivering the stuff? Offer to cook them all a lovely little dinner in honor of the host ship’s hospitality?
Scratch poison.
An explosion might work. It would have to be carefully rigged, though: big enough to blow the Inspiration to kingdom come, leaving not a single survivor; yet timed perfectly so that the hijackers’ own boat would be well enough along its way not to get blown to bits into the bargain. But, even assuming they could get hold of the necessary materials, they could hardly start rigging up massive explosive devices unobserved. And if they were observed to be doing something that would lead to the sure and certain demise of everyone aboard the Inspiration, then some of those aboard—and he’d be the first among them, too—would give up their own lives to save the rest.
The hijackers, Mac was beginning to believe, had very few viable options open to them. Chances were good, he thought, that they were as much in the dark about how to get out of this god-awful situation as anybody else.
Bloody fools! Why had they had to go getting their legs infected and endangering his kids in the first place?
22
It was an uneasy confrontation for both men, but they had no choice. There were decisions that had to be made, boundaries that had to be set. Neither the captain nor Phillip had ever expected to be in such a predicament. Neither wanted to precipitate any violence and neither wanted to lose control of the situation. Their conversation was like a game of chess, each man trying to think several steps ahead as they negotiated their course of action for the next few days.
Mac’s assessment had been exactly right. The hijackers had no good alternatives at their disposal. Juan had come up with the grisly idea of putting all of the adults on the Coincidence, tying them up, then opening the seacocks so the boat would go down. Then the hijackers, with the kids, would continue to Easter Island on the Inspiration.
And then? Stefano had asked him. The kids were not so young that they wouldn’t know full well what had become of the adults, and would be just as capable as the adults of picking the hijackers out of a lineup. Besides, the Coincidence and the Inspiration were inextricably linked by the radio messages.
Sometimes his brother didn’t have the sense of a pack mule, Stefano had thought. Great at the details once the plan was made, sí, but not exactly an idea man. Not that Stefano was coming up with any good ideas of his own. His head was clearer now, but no matter how he analyzed the situation, he couldn’t see a good way out.
“Okay,” he had said to Juan. “Here’s what we gonna do for now. We gonna tie the boats together—get Phillip to talk to the captain about this, see whether it’s better to tie them amidships or tow the Coincidence behind. Everybody