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CHAPTER TWO

Champagne flutes tumbled as multiple explosions jolted Aurora. The ship shuddered as her active stabilizers seemed momentarily confused by the irregular shockwaves and labored to compensate for the unanticipated disruption to her equilibrium.

"What was that?" asked Celeste.

Alex said nothing, but even with the din of the music from the deck below, she recognized the cracking resonance of military-grade high explosives. A gray-blue cloud of smoke rolled over the ship's gunwales, engulfing them in a pungent, slightly sweet odor that she tasted as much as smelled. It brought with it a long-ago memory of a grape hut on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan.

She caught a flash of light out of the corner of her eye. " Incoming!" she shouted. "RPG! Get down!"

A fiery streak of light illuminated the deck as it passed. The projectile's path ended in another cracking explosion somewhere on a deck above them, confirming her suspicions.

She ran to the side of the ship and saw the shadowy outlines of multiple rigid-hulled inflatable boats—RHIBs for short—not far from the megayacht.

"What's happening? Why are we under attack?" Celeste's questions weren't directed at anyone in particular.

The what was easy—multiple bogeys were assaulting Aurora. The why was less important for now. All that mattered was getting Madame Clicquot and Valtteri Lehtonen to safety.

"Do you have a panic room?"

Valtteri stared straight ahead, wide-eyed, mouth agape, but he didn't answer.

"Valtteri!" She raised her voice to punch through the fight-or-flight response his autonomic nervous system was eliciting.

Around them, lightning flashed, except it wasn't lightning. More explosions thundered from below. Panicked screams from the ship's guests, who until a few moments ago had been enjoying the percussive beat from the DJ's playlist, filled the night.

"A panic room," Alex demanded again, finally catching Valtteri's attention. "You must have a secure room on a ship like this. Where is it?"

They had to get moving. They were sitting ducks out here in the open. She grabbed Celeste by the hand and pushed Valtteri toward the ship's bow and the staircase they had ascended earlier. Another flash of light appeared off the side of the ship. She recognized it as the blowback of an RPG launch from one of the small boats encircling them.

"Get down!" she yelled.

They hit the deck as a rocket-propelled grenade shot past, impacting less than a hundred feet behind them before exploding in a blinding splash of fire and melted steel. The overpressure wave hit her in the chest like a Lennox Lewis punch. Her sinuses hurt. Her ears were ringing. She kept Celeste and Valtteri on the deck long enough for the debris to finish showering down around them.

"Anybody hurt?" she asked, checking them over for shrapnel injuries, seeing none. "Let's move," she said, calmly but with urgency.

"Not that way," said Valtteri. "Belowdecks, aft of the crew mess. There's a citadel room there."

He led them rearward along the vessel's port side, beyond where the RPG had impacted and detonated. They dodged burning debris on the way to the staircase, Alex tiptoeing to avoid having her bare feet shredded by fragments of jagged shrapnel. She felt a sharp stab in her right foot but pressed onward. Smoke billowed as Valtteri pulled open the door. A large man spilled out, hacking and coughing, a pistol extended. Alex grabbed his arm and deftly locked up his gun hand, then flipped him onto his stomach. Still in control of his wrist, she relieved him of his firearm. She was about to strike him in the back of the head with the butt of his SIG Sauer when Valtteri called out.

"Wait!" he shouted. Alex paused, her arm cocked in midair. "He's the head of my security team."

"You couldn't have mentioned that sooner?"

She climbed off him, straightening her dress. The man gave her a once-over as she covered her exposed thigh. He seemed perturbed that a woman in a tropical print halter dress could have bested him. 

Valtteri added the requisite introductions. "Alex, this is Iain Street. Street, Alex."