Without remorse - Tom Clancy [295]
Kelly waited a few minutes, letting his eyes gather a fuller picture in the darkness, selecting his route of approach. He'd come in fine on the bow so that the body of the ship would screen him from view. He could hear more than one voice now. A sudden rolling laugh from a joke, perhaps. He paused again, searching the ship's outline for a bump, something that didn't belong, a sentry. Nothing.
They'd been clever selecting this place. It was as unlikely a spot as one might imagine, ignored even by local fishermen, but you had to have a lookout because no place was ever quite that secure ... there was the boat. Okay. Kelly crept up at half a knot now, sticking close to the side of the old ship until he got to their boat. He tied his painter off to the nearest cleat. A rope ladder led up to the derelict's weather deck. Kelly took a deep breath and started climbing.
The work was every bit as menial and boring as Burt had told them it would be, Phil thought. Mixing the milk sugar in was the easy part, sifting it into large stainless-steel bowls like flour for a cake, making sure it was all evenly distributed. He remembered helping his mother with baking when he'd been a small child, watching her and learning things that a kid forgot as soon as he discovered baseball. They came back now, the rattling sound of the sitter, the way the powders came together. It was actually rather a pleasant excursion back to a time when he hadn't even had to wake up and go to school. But that was the easy part. Then came the tedious job of doling out precisely measured portions into the little plastic envelopes which had to be stapled shut, and piled, and counted, and bagged. He shared an exasperated look with Mike, who felt the same way he did. Burt probably felt the same way, but didn't let it show, and he had been nice enough to bring entertainment along. They had a radio playing, and for breaks they had this Xantha girl, half-blasted on pills, but... compliant, they'd all found out at their midnight break. They'd gotten her nice and tired, anyway. She was sleeping in the corner. There would be another break at four, allowing each of them enough time to recover. It was hard staying awake, and Phil was worried about all this powder, some of it dust in the air. Was he breathing it in? Might he get high on the stuff? If he had to do this again, he promised himself some sort of mask. He might like the idea of making money off selling the shit, but he had no desire at all to use it. Well, Tony and Henry were setting up a proper lab. Travel wouldn't be such a pain in the ass. That was something.
Another batch done. Phil was a little faster than the others, wanting to get it done. He walked over to the cooler and lifted the next one-kilo bag. He smelted it, as he had the others. Foul, chemical smell, like the chemicals used in the biology lab at his high school, formaldehyde, something like that. He slit open the bag with a penknife, dumping the contents into the first mixing bowl at arm's length, then adding a premeasured quantity of sugar and stirring with a spoon by the light of one of the Coleman lamps.
'Hello.'
There had been no warning at all. Suddenly there was someone else there at the door, holding a pistol. He was dressed in military clothes, striped fatigues, and his face was painted green and black.
There wasn't any need for silence. His prey had seen to that. Kelly had reconverted his Colt back to .45 caliber, and he knew that the hole in the front of the automatic would seem large enough to park a car to the others in the room. He pointed with his left hand. 'That way. On the deck, facedown, hands at the back of the neck, one at a time, you first,' he said to the one at