He was about to kick Alex’s father again, but, suddenly, Sniper swooped down through the open hatch, screeching, with his claws out. The bird flew right at the man’s face, slashing his cheek and drawing bright red blood.

The man cried out and tried to bat Sniper away, but the bird kept up his attack. Alex’s father, rolling over, grabbed the intruder’s small brown foot and yanked him off balance. He went down hard. Alex heard the whoosh of air coming out of him; and then his father was upon him, going for the hand with the gun. They both grunted, rolling over twice before they slammed against the doorframe. His father pinned the man there, and slammed the hand with the gun hard on the floor.

“Either drop the gun, or I break your wrist, choose one, chica,” his old man said. It seemed his father wasn’t hurt nearly as badly as the boy had feared! One eye to the slit, Alex held his breath, praying as he never had before.

please let him be okay please let him be okay please let him be —

The gun went off then, not one shot but hundreds, it seemed, a deafening staccato filling the tiny compartment, splinters of wood and glass flying everywhere. And so much smoke Alex couldn’t even see who had the gun now, but then his father was backing toward him, pointing the gun down at the long-haired man who was slowly getting to his feet. He was holding his bare shoulder, and blood was streaming through his fingers, splashing on the floor. He hissed something at Alex’s father in Spanish, but stayed where he was.

His father, his old gray T-shirt soaked with blood, had his back pressed against Alex’s hiding place. Alex could hear him breathing heavily, strongly. Alex’s heart heaved in his chest, sheer joy filling him inside, as his father, his great hero, spoke.

“There is no goddamn map, seсor,” his father said, holding out his forearm so Sniper could perch there. “How many times did I tell you up on deck? No map, no treasure, no nothing. Just me, alone on this old boat, trying like hell to have a little fun. Then you showed up. Now you get the hell off my boat, comprende? Or I’ll spatter your brains on that wall right here and now.”

“Seсor, I beg you,” the man said, in good English now. “It’s all a big mistake. Listen. Was not your yacht last week down in Staniel Cay? My brother, Carlitos, he say a descendant of Blackhawke the famous pirate is down here in the Exumas, looking for the famous lost treasure of de Herreras and—”

“I got it. So you decided to smoke a little ganja and row out to a total stranger’s boat in the middle of the night, carrying a bloody machine gun, and hoping to find some nonexistent map, right?”

“Oh, no, seсor, I only—”

“Shut up, please!” Alex heard his father say, pulling back on the slide that cocked the machine gun. “You’re losing a lot of blood, old chap. You need to get yourself to a doctor. Put both hands on your head and turn around, got that? Right now!”

His father moved away from the door and Alex could see the compartment again. Pressing his eye to the slit once more, he felt something warm and sticky on his face. His father’s blood. He watched the ponytailed man moving toward the door with his hands on his head. Suddenly, he stopped, and turned to Alex’s father with a horrible grin on his face.

Sniper let out a blood-curdling screech and fluttered his big black wings wildly.

“Oh, God, Kitty,” he heard his father say in words that sounded broken and full of pain.

In the doorway, two more men stood on either side of Alex’s mother. One man, tall, whose bald head was glistening with sweat, held his mother roughly by one arm. Her long blond hair was matted and wild, her pale blue eyes red, brimming with unshed tears. She was clutching the remains of her torn nightgown with her other arm, terror plain on her beautiful face. The other man was fat and had a big gold cross hanging from his neck. He had a long flat knife at Alex’s mother’s throat, right under her chin.

Sniper squawked and flared his wings angrily.

“Sniper, no!” Alex heard his father say, and the bird calmed itself and remained perched on his arm.

In the fat man’s other hand, he clutched a handful of sparkling jewels. Diamond necklaces and bracelets and the pretty thing his mother had worn in her hair the night before. A tiara. The boy had told her it made her look like a fairy queen.

“Ah, la seсora, eh, the beauteous Lady Hawke, no?” the ponytailed pirate said, smiling now. He bowed from the waist. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am called Araсa, the spider, but my name it is simply Manso. And these are my two brothers, Juanito and Carlos. It was mi hermano, Carlitos, who served you, dear lady, all that rum at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club.”

“Sн, I am Carlitos,” the fat young Cuban said to Alex’s mother. “Remember me now, dear lady? We celebrated the New Year’s Eve together!”

“My brother, he is the bartender there, see?” Manso said. “He hears many things. And my brother, he tells me all about your great beauty. And how you dance up on the bar. And, of course, your husband’s search for the lost treasure of Blackhawke. A treasure, seсora, that the English pirate stole from my ancestor, Andrйs Manso de Herreras, the greatest Spanish privateer of them all! It is a story passed down through my family for endless generations.”

The man stepped closer to Alex’s mother and stroked her cheek. “So, please, Seсora Hawke, would you be so kind as to come in and join our little fiesta?”

A small sob escaped his mother’s trembling lips. Alex saw her angry blue eyes and pale cheeks in the moonlight that was still streaming down through the opened hatch. His eyes pressed against the narrow slit, he could see that his mother was fighting desperately to hold back her tears.

She reached out to her husband. “I’m so very sorry, Alexander. So very, very sorry.”

Now the boy had tears of his own, burning his eyes. He wanted to shrink back from this, away from the door. Crawl down under the chains. Disappear back into his dreams. A little red ball, riding the crest of a breaking wave.

But he couldn’t look away. He knew his father was locked in a desperate struggle to save his mother’s life and his own. He had to be there for his father, even if he could not help him.

The fat Cuban called Carlitos said something in Spanish that caused his mother to wrench her head around and spit in the man’s face.

Then the tattooed pirate called Araсa gripped the fat Cuban’s hand, the one holding the machete to his mother’s throat.

“No, Carlitos,” Araсa said. “Not until she shows us the map. He won’t do it. But I can make her do it, that I can promise.”

But the fat man, anger and spittle on his face, disobeyed and drew his blade slowly across his mother’s taut skin, leaving a thin red line that instantly became a torrent of blood.

“Carlitos! You stupid fool!” the ponytailed man screamed.

Alex shrank back from the vents, clawing his way across the chains, as far as he could go into the sharp V-shaped space of the bow. He squeezed his eyes shut and stuffed the blanket into his mouth to stifle the deep sobs welling up from his throat.

There was a murderous cry from his father and fast upon that furious shrieking from Sniper and screaming voices in Spanish and English; then his father’s terrible wails made him clamp both hands to his ears to shut it out, shut it all out.

The last thing he heard was something slamming hard against the little locker door, hard enough to splinter it inward.

Bahamian fishermen found Seahawke adrift nearly thirty miles off Nassau four days later. She was dismasted, her anchor ripped from the bow by a fierce tropical storm that had roared northward up the Exuma Sound just the day before. Finding the yacht abandoned, the owner of the fishing boat and two crew boarded her. Starting at the stern, Captain Burgess McKay and his two paid men worked their way forward, shocked at the amount of destruction that had been wreaked inside the beautiful yacht. Nothing aboard had escaped someone’s fury. Nothing and no one could have escaped such blind ferocity.