Deadspeak

Trask shrugged. 'In a diplomatic bag. We may be silent partners, but we're still part of British Intelligence after all.'

There's a rock up ahead,' Zek shouted from where she now sat on a rubber mat on the narrow deck on top of the cabin and in front of the windshield. She pointed. 'Manolis, is that it?'

He nodded. 'That's it. Darcy, can you take the wheel?'

Darcy took control of the boat and throttled back a little. Manolis and Jazz stripped down to swimsuits, and went into the tiny cabin out of sight. In there, they tested aqualungs and checked their swimfins. Ben Trask took off his jacket and put on sunglasses and a straw hat. In his Hawaiian shirt he was just some rich tourist fool out for a day's pleasure-boating. Darcy might easily be his brother.

The island had swum up larger and Zek was seen to be right: it was little more than a big rock. There were a few shrubs, patches of thyme and coarse grass, and lots of rocks... and situated centrally, above coastal cliffs, a weathered yellow stack going up sheer for maybe one hundred and eighty feet.

Zek looked at it and put her hand to her brow. 'That's a pigmy of an aerie,' she said, 'but it gives me the shudders just the same. And there are men - no, vampires - on it. Two of them at least.'

The boat rounded the point of a promontory and Darcy saw what lay ahead. But even if he hadn't seen it, his talent had already forewarned him. 'Stay down,' he called out to Manolis and Jazz in the cabin. 'Draw those curtains. You two aren't here. There are just the three of us.'

They did as he told them.

Zek stretched herself out luxuriously on the cabin's roof and put on sunglasses; Trask lay back and hooked one leg idly over the boat's rail; Darcy headed the boat directly across the mouth of a small bay. And there, anchored in the bay ... the white ship, the Lazarus.

Trask knocked the cap off a bottle of beer and tilted his head back, merely wetting his lips but studying what he could see of the island intently. That was part of his job, while Darcy and Zek, in their various ways, studied the Lazarus.

The island consisted of a tiny beach inside a pair of bare spurs of rock extending oceanward, and an almost barren slope of rock climbing to the central stack. From this side, the top of the stack was seen to be a ruined fortification or pharos of some sort, with the remains of badly eroded steps still showing where they zig-zagged up to it. But half-way up the stack, a false, flat, extensive plateau seemed carved, as if in ages past the upper section had split down the centre and half had toppled over. With massive walls built around the plateau's perimeter from one side of the needle rock to the other, the place had obviously been a Crusader stronghold. The old walls had long since fallen away in places, but it was seen that new walls were now under construction, and scaffolding was plainly visible clinging to both the stump and the surviving upper section of the stack.

Darcy meanwhile considered the Lazarus. The white ship stood off from the beach in deep water central in the small bay. Her anchor-chain went down shimmering into the blue of the sea. On the deck under the black, scalloped awning, a man sat in one of several chairs. But as the motorboat came powering into view he stood up and took binoculars from around his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed floppy hat and sunglasses, and he kept fairly well to the shade as he put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the motorboat.

Zek propped herself up on one elbow and waved excitedly, but the watcher on the deck ignored her - at first.

Darcy throttled back and turned the boat in a wide circle about the white ship, and joined Zek in her waving. 'Ahoy, there!' he put on an upper-class English accent. 'Ahoy aboard the Lazarus!'

The man went to the door of the lounge and leaned half-inside, then came back out. He now aimed his binoculars at Zek where she continued to wave; this was scarcely necessary for the circling boat was no more than forty or fifty feet away. She felt his gaze on her and shivered, despite the blazing heat of the sun. A second man, who might have been the twin of the first, joined him and they silently observed the circling boat - but mainly they observed Zek.

Darcy throttled back more yet, and a third man came out of the white ship's lounge. Ben Trask stood up and held up his bottle to them. 'Care for a drink?' he shouted, imitating Darcy's faked accent. 'Maybe we can come aboard?'

Like fuck! thought Darcy.

Zek sca

... One of the sleepers stirred, woke up. His mind was alert; it was more completely vampire than the others; before Zek could cover her telepathic spying, he had 'seen' her!

She stopped waving and told Darcy: 'Let's go. One of them read me. He didn't see anything much, only that I'm more than I appear to be. But if they run off now we'll lose them.'

'We'll see you later,' Ben Trask called out as Darcy turned the boat away and sped for the tip of the far promontory.

Passing from the view of the watchers on the Lazarus, he throttled right down and allowed the boat to cruise close up to a flat-topped, weed-grown rock barely sticking up out of the sea. Jazz and Manolis came out of the cabin, put on their masks and adjusted their demand valves, and as Darcy cut the engine they stepped from the boat to the rock and so into the sea.

'Jazz,' Zek called down, 'be careful!'

He might have heard her and he might not; his head went down and a stream of bubbles came up; the swimmers submerged to fifteen feet and headed back towards the Lazarus.

'More distraction,' said Darcy, grimly, as he throttled up and turned back out to sea.

'Darcy,' Zek called to him, 'keep just a little more distant this time. They'll be wary, I'm sure.'

As Darcy headed straight out to sea and the Lazarus came back into view, so Ben Trask got down on his knees and took a sterling sub-machine gun out of its bag under the seat. He extended the butt and slapped a curved magazine of 9 mm rounds into the housing, then lay the gun between his feet and covered it with the bag.

Half a mile out, Darcy turned to port and came speeding back towards the white ship. There was activity aboard now, where the three on the deck hurried round the rail, pausing every few paces to look over into the water. Jazz and Manolis would be there any time now. Darcy piled on the speed and Zek commenced waving as before. The men on the deck came together at one point at the rail and again Zek felt binoculars trained on her almost naked body. But this time the interest was other than sexual.

Then, as Darcy leaned the boat over on her side and recommenced his circling, they heard the rattle of the Lazarus's anchor-chain as it was drawn up, and the throbbing cough of her engines starting into life. And now a fourth man came ducking out of the lounge onto the deck... cradling a stubby, squat-bodied machine-gun in his arms!

'Jesus!' Ben Trask yelled. And it might have been that his shout of warning was a signal to let the battle commence.

The man with the machine-gun opened up, standing there on the deck of the Lazarus with his legs braced, hosing the smaller craft with lead. Zek had scrambled down off the cabin roof; as she ducked into the tiny cabin the windshield flew into shards and Darcy felt the whip of hot lead flying all around. Then Trask stood up and returned fire, and the gu