Free Pirate by Ted Bell

left, a steep corrugated stairwell leading up, more of a ladder than a staircase. He raced up it, and another like it, and arrived on the starboard-side bridge wing. He paused and listened, feeling the faint shudder and thump of the engines beneath his feet. Inside the pilothouse, he could hear muffled voices and laughter. The door was slightly ajar. He shot out his left leg and slammed it inward, stepping inside the hot and stinking bridge with the Walther extended at the end of his right arm. The look on the faces of the two Chinamen told him his information from Brick was indeed hard fact. They were hiding something. And surprised.
    “Evening, gents,” Hawke said, kicking the steel door closed behind him. “Lovely night for it, what?”
    “Huh?” said a squat man in grimy coveralls who now moved in front of the fellow in a sheepskin coat who was levering noodles from a box to his hungry mouth. The boxlike man advanced toward Hawke, protecting his captain.
    “Bad idea,” Hawke said. Somehow, the gun was now in his left hand and a long blood-stained dagger had appeared in his right. The man kept coming and retreated only when Hawke flicked the blade before his eyes. He had little interest in killing these men, at least until he learned the location and condition of their prisoner. Then he would dispatch them without mercy.
    “I’m looking for a reluctant passenger of yours, Captain,” he said to a leather-jacketed man wearing an ancient captain’s cap cocked rakishly over his bushy black brows. “Chap who was shanghaied in Morocco yesterday. Where might I find him?”
    The Chinese captain stopped eating his noodles, and, placing the container and chopsticks carefully on a stool, stared at him. Hawke saw something in his eyes and instinctively dove for the floor as rounds from the captain’s silenced automatic pistol stitched a pattern in the bulkhead inches above his head. Hawke rolled left and fired the Walther, putting one slug in the captain’s thigh and sending him crashing back against the wheel.
    There was little time to celebrate. Five fingers that felt like steel bolts sank into the ganglia at the back of his neck. He relaxed, then sucked down a lungful of air at a new sensation: the cold press of steel at his temple. The pressure increased and he dropped his own gun.
    “I Tsing Ping,” an oddly musical voice whispered in his ear, “you dead.”
    “This is all a bit more complicated than I was led to believe,” Hawke said, twisting his body carefully and smiling up at the man. His eyes were like a pair of small coals. Tsing Ping racked the slide on his gun.
    “Easy, old fellow,” Hawke said calmly, getting one foot under him. “Easy does it, right? I’m going to get to my feet now and—” He never finished the sentence.
    There was a sudden screech of metal and then a terrific jolt as the ship’s entire superstructure shuddered under the violent impact of something slamming against it, just below the pilothouse. Hawke, trying to scramble to his feet, was slammed hard against the bulkhead. The impact was sufficient to send Tsing Ping and everyone on the bridge flying across the wheelhouse and tumbling to the floor. He heard shouts from the pier below and then shots rang out, bursts of automatic fire.
    Hawke crabbed his way across the chaos of the wheelhouse, managing to recover his Walther from under a sheath of loose documents and navigation charts and broken glass. Then he was up and out onto the bridge wing. Standing at the rail he saw that one of the two dockside cranes, the one directly abeam, was now coming under intense fire from crewmen standing on the starboard rail. Then he saw why. Some madman was at the controls of the crane. The cab had revolved away and now was spinning toward the Star ’s hull again, the cable taut, and the crazed operator was about to smash the heavily laden pallet against the ship for the second time.
    Hawke could see by its trajectory that, this time, the