The Hunter From the Woods by Robert McCammon

tapped a finger against his chin.
    The jamming was still at a lower volume. They were waiting.
    Michael was about to do something that would get him hanged in a naval trial a hundred times over. But as far as he was concerned, and with the lives of the Wesshausers in the balance, at this moment he was in charge.
    “Tell them to come ahead,” Michael directed.
    “I can’t do that,” the radioman said, still in Russian. “I know you’re a big man here, but you don’t have the authority.” He let his gaze pass over the revolver. “Unless you force the issue.”
    “All right.” Michael drew the weapon and held it between himself and the radioman. “Tell them to come ahead. I presume they’re still off our portside. Tell them we’ll treat Captain Konnig fairly. But tell them we’ve set up our own machine guns and if there’s any hint of trouble we’ll blow that launch to splinters. And tell them we’re not cutting our speed. Go on.”
    The radioman sent the message. His German was not excellent, but it was very good.
    There was a pause of maybe two minutes, during which the jamming noise increased. Then the clipped voice came back through the aural onslaught: “Agreed.”
    The static and pulsing noises swelled louder. The radioman again had to dial down the volume.
    “On their way,” he said, with the ironic fatalism of a true-born Russian.
     

Eight
    The Mellow Moment

     
    “You did what?”
    Michael faced Captain Beauchene in the hallway outside the radio room and told him again. It was about twenty minutes after the meeting had been accepted, and Beauchene had just come to the bridge from a variety of tasks designed to keep Sofia afloat and the men from casting their lives to the lifeboats.
    After the second telling, the captain stared at the floor. Rain dripped steadily from his yellow slicker. “We’re not reducing our speed,” he said.
    “I told them that.”
    “You had no right.”
    “I want to see what we’re dealing with.”
    “ Oui , and what do they get to see?” Beauchene glared into Michael’s eyes. “That we have a few rifles and pistols to use against their fucking cannons ? Well, they already know that, don’t they? Merde , what a mess!”
    “We might get some idea how to clean it up by meeting Konnig.”
    “ You say.”
    “Yes,” Michael answered calmly. “I do say.”
    Beauchene held Michael’s gaze a few seconds longer. Then he shook his head and ran a hand through his rain-soaked hair. With a weary sigh, he said, “Come in and get a drink.”
    Michael followed him through a door on the other side of the hallway. Beauchene’s cabin had a porthole and would have a nice view of the sea when the weather wasn’t so closed-in. That was the best that could be said for it. There was a bunk, a desk, two chairs in need of reupholstering, a tatty green throwrug, a floorlamp with a crooked shade that had a cartoon of marching tin soldiers upon it like something taken from a child’s playroom, and another lamp on the desk. Newspapers and magazines were piled around. There was a shelf of a few sad-looking books. It was obvious the captain ate alone and sometimes didn’t finish his meals, because the plates and leftovers were in plain sight. The cabin had the musty dirty-socks smell of a cheap hotel room, uncleaned for many a night. There were no pictures on the pine-panelled walls. No excuse was made. Beauchene closed the door and rested his Thompson gun in a corner. He sat behind the desk, opened a lower drawer and brought out a half-full bottle of brandy and a single glass. The glass, Michael noted, had a brown crust of dried brandy sticking to its bottom and was mottled with greasy fingerprints. Beauchene poured liquor into the nasty glass and offered it to Michael, who took it without hesitation because it was not the worst thing he’d ever drunk from.
    Beauchene swigged from the bottle. “Five men wounded and two dead,” he said as the fire descended. “We were lucky