Without remorse - Tom Clancy [342]
'It is my wish that they get home safely. They are not bad men.'
'Neither are you.' Ritter led him to the gate, where a large transfer vehicle waited to take him out to a brand-new Boeing 747. 'Come back sometime. I'll show you more of Washington.' Ritter watched him board and turned to Voloshin.
'A good man, Sergey. Will this injure his career?'
'With what he has in his head? I think not.'
'Fine with me,' Ritter said, walking away.
They were too closely matched. The other boat had a slight advantage, since it was in the lead, and able to choose, while the cutter needed her half-knot speed advantage to draw closer so painfully slowly. It was a question of skill, really, and that, too, was down to whiskers of difference from one to the other. Oreza watched the other man slide his boat across the wake of the freighter, surfing it, really, sliding her onto the front of the ship-generated wave and riding it to port, gaining perhaps half a knot's momentary advantage. Oreza had to admire it. He couldn't do anything else. The man really was sailing his boat downhill as though a joke against the laws of wind and wave. But there was nothing funny about this, was there? Not with his men standing around the wheelhouse carrying loaded guns. Not with what he had to do to a friend.
'For Christ's sake,' Oreza snarled, easing the wheel to starboard a little. 'Be careful with those goddamned guns!' The other crewmen in the wheelhouse snapped the covers down on their holsters and ceased fingering their weapons.
'He's a dangerous man,' the man behind Oreza said.
'No, he isn't, not to us!'
'What about all the people he -'
'Maybe the bastards had it comin'!' A little more throttle and Oreza slid back to port. He was at the point of scanning the waves for smooth spots, moving the forty-one-foot patrol boat a few feet left and right to make use of the surface chop and so gain a few precious yards in his pursuit, just as the other was doing. No America's Cup race off to Newport had ever been as exciting as this, and inwardly Oreza raged at the other man that the purpose of the race should be so perverse.
'Maybe you should let -'
Oreza didn't turn his head. 'Mr Tomlinson, you think anybody else can conn the boat better'n me?'
'No, Petty Officer Oreza,' the Ensign said formally. Oreza snorted at the windowglass. 'Maybe call a helicopter from the Navy?' Tomlinson asked lamely.
'What for, sir? Where you think he's goin', Cuba, maybe? I have double his bunkerage and half a knot more speed, and he's only three hundred yards ahead. Do the math, sir. We're alongside in twenty minutes any way you cut it, no matter how good he is.' Treat the man with respect, Oreza didn't say.
'But he's dangerous,' Ensign Tomlinson repeated.
'I'll take my chances. There...' Oreza started his slide to port now, riding through the freighter's wake, using the energy generated by the ship to gain speed. Interesting, this is how a dolphin does it... that got me a whole knot's worth and my hull's better at this than his is ... Contrary to everything he should have felt, Manuel Oreza smiled. He'd just learned something new about boat-handling, courtesy of a friend he was trying to arrest for murder. For murdering people who needed killing, he reminded himself, wondering what the lawyers would do about that.
No, he had to treat him with respect, let him run his race as best he could, take his shot at freedom, doomed though he might be. To do less would demean the man, and, Oreza admitted, demean himself. When all else failed there was still honor. It was perhaps the last law of the sea, and Oreza, like his quarry, was a man of the sea.
It was devilishly close. Portagee was just too damned good at driving his boat, and for that reason all the harder to risk what he'd planned. Kelly did everything he knew how. Planing Springer diagonally across the ship's wake was the cleverest