Tarantula by Mark Dawson Page B

heat that shimmered the air, bubbled the paint and blackened the deck. Ernesto looked into the maelstrom as a silhouetted figure emerged from the middle of it. It was a man, dressed all in back. He was wearing a wetsuit, a sheen of water on the neoprene as it evaporated in the heat. The man had an MP5 held in both hands, the stock pressed into his shoulder as he stalked forwards. He had a spare magazine held between his left hand and the forestock. It was obvious, abundantly so, that the man was very familiar with the weapon.
    It was obvious that the man was a killer.
    One of Ernesto’s men burst out from below decks and the silhouette turned, lightning quick, and fired a rapid three shots into his guts, blasting him back inside again.
    Ernesto pushed backwards. One of his slippers fell off his foot. He slipped and scrambled on the smooth deck.
    The man followed, turning the MP5 and aiming down at him.
    The smoke and flames roiled around him.
    “No,” Ernesto pleaded. “Stop.”
    Ernesto saw that it was Smith.
    He stalked him, ejecting the dry magazine and slamming in the fresh one.
    Ernesto crabbed away from him until his back ran up against the rails at the prow of the yacht. He reached up, pulled himself to his feet, and raised his hands, fingers extended, palms out, in entreaty.
    “Please, signor,” he begged.
    It wasn’t supposed to end this way.
    “What do you want? Money? I have money. Inside. Take it all.”
    Smith aimed the MP5.
    “Please!”
    Smith fired, just once. The bullet found Ernesto in the forehead, the impact jerking his head and shoulders backwards and overbalancing him. The lifeless body pivoted across the rail, tumbled overboard and plummeted to the crystal waters below.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    MILTON RECLINED the chair as the Fasten Seatbelts light flicked off and the climb out of Naples levelled off. He looked out of the window and down at the dusky coastline below. They were twenty thousand feet up. The beaches that stretched away from the city were just narrow, flaxen ribbons against the deep blue of the ocean and the dark green of the interior. The city looked like a model in miniature, the tiny specks of the cars and lorries passing into and out of its curtilage, yachts and motorboats leaving scuds of white foam in their wake. Milton saw a big freighter slide with elaborate care into the harbour, the brown tinge from the pollution visible even from this height. Tugs nudged it towards its jetty and the big cranes hovered, ready to unload its cargo. What was it carrying, Milton wondered? How much of its freight would end up on the black market? How much of it was owned by the Camorra?
    He knew that Ernesto would already have been replaced. His line of work bore unavoidable risks and demanded a succession plan. Would it have been a smooth and seamless transition? Would there have been a conflict, more bloodshed?
    It didn’t matter. It wasn’t Milton’s concern. He had accounted for his target and met the goals of his assignment. He had done everything that Control had asked him to do.
    Milton straightened his legs. The steward had unlatched the drinks trolley from the bulkhead and was wheeling it towards him.
    Milton looked at his watch: seven in the evening.
    “Sir?”
    “Gin and tonic, please.”
    “Single or double?”
    Milton held up two fingers.
    He had already enjoyed three doubles in the airport. Losing himself in a bottle was his preferred way to decompress. He needed the alcohol to help him to unwind, to melt the tension that coalesced in his shoulders and metastasised in his gut.
    Milton put the glass to his lips, closed his eyes and took a mouthful.
    He thought about the men he had killed. Four of them. Tarantula. Ernesto and the men he had found on the yacht. He knew that they deserved it, that they had as much as invited his attentions. Four men, each of them eliminated with studied dispassion.
    It was more blood. His ledger was already dripping with it. The pages were