He brought walking-stick fingers to the bullet hole. He pressed the fingertips against it. Blood squirted out to the sides, down his T-shirt and up into his beard, to the decreasing rhythm of his heart. He toppled from the mesh sling seat. Wildly Ryan looked around. The smoke screens had turned into a few random brown wisps twisting in the wind. Ahead of the convoy’s lead ship, the Snowy Egret, he could see a break in the waving green wall of the mangrove swamp that made up the shoreline. It was sanctuary of a sort, offered by a bayou mouth: tantalizingly close, yet perhaps an infinity away—because the bigger pirate ships were fast approaching, and the survivors of their swarm of smaller boats, sensing opportunity now that the terrible Gatling had quit ripping at them, were closing in like a pod of killer whales on the Egret and the New Hope. Meanwhile the Hope was no longer sending out a volley of its terrible rockets. Ryan didn’t know whether they were out, or the launcher was out of service, or whether the rocket crew was dead or injured.
