Free The Hunter From the Woods by Robert McCammon Page A

on the pointer and was about to ring the next lowest engine speed, Ahead One-Third .
    “Keep your speed up!” Michael commanded.
    The moment was frozen. Rain pattered against the window’s glass. Sofia moved over a wave and down, then began to rise again. She moaned somewhere amidships.
    “Seaman!” Kpanga had not shouted it, but nevertheless his voice carried absolute authority. “Get off the bridge!”
    Michael turned to face him. “I want to see the captain.”
    “Are you insane ?”
    “I said, I want to see the—”
    A pistol’s barrel was placed against the back of his skull.
    “Get out of here now ,” said the Spaniard, “or I will blow your fucking head off.”
    “My name is Michael Gallatin,” he said to Kpanga. “I’m an agent with the British Secret Service. Special Operations. Your German passenger is a weapons expert named Paul Wesshauser. He’s trying to get himself and his family to England and away from the Nazis. Obviously the Nazis don’t want that to happen. We believed a freighter was the safest way over. Their secret police were watching all the airports, civilian ship lines and train stations.” Loose ends, he thought grimly. Someone in the network had either been paid to talk or had his mouth loosened by the ugly end of a pair of pliers. “That ship is coming to take him, and I can tell you he doesn’t want to go. Neither do we want him to be taken.” He turned his head a fraction. “If you don’t put that gun down in three seconds, I’ll kill you.”
    The pistol wavered.
    “I’m counting,” Michael vowed, smelling fear.
    “Put it down, Monsieur Medina,” said another voice, heavy with a French accent.
    The pressure of the pistol against the back of Michael’s head went away.
    Michael turned to the left, toward the voice. A figure emerged from a shadowed corridor at the back of the wheelhouse. It was a man of stocky, broadchested build and Napoleonic height, standing five-feet-six at most. He came forward into the dim glow of the yellow-shaded lamps. He was dressed not as the captain of the Sofia , but as her lowliest and most decrepit ordinary seaman. The front of his grimy once-white shirt was a nasty mural of coffee stains, grease smears, food spatters and other less definable artwork. His belly bulged over his canvas trousers, which in turn bagged around his stubby legs and were held up by a pair of vomit-green suspenders. His shoes were so scuffed it was nearly impossible to tell if they’d been brown or black; they were the washed-out hue of careless despair.
    Captain Gustave Beauchene approached Michael and peered up into the other man’s face. Beauchene had a grizzled gray beard and heavy jowls, his cheeks pitted with the small round scars of smallpox. His eyes, sunken in wrinkles that made Michael think of cargo netting, were nearly the same gray as his beard. His hair, too, was gray and unkempt, ratty in front and hanging down over his ears and the back of his neck. Michael had already caught the noxious fumes of very strong body odor, and also…whiskey, of course. No, that was wrong. Brandy. After all, the captain was a Frenchman.
    Beauchene reached out and took the pistol from Medina’s hand. Without hesitation he put the barrel against the center of Michael Gallatin’s forehead.
    “I will give you three seconds,” he said, as a small red glow of fury burned deep in his eyes, “to convince me you’re not either a liar or a madman.”
    Michael saw no need to waste time. “I was placed here to protect the Wesshausers if necessary. But mostly to watch the crew, just in case a member of the secret police got aboard. I know the histories of everyone here. You, Mr. Kpanga, are a very intelligent and ambitious man who did extremely well with his studies at the University of London. Medina, you broke your wife’s right arm in a fight two years ago and your brother-in-law swore to kill you. You wound up putting him in the hospital in Seville with a knife to