The Titanic Secret by 2018

Author:2018
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788631730
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2018-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

12 April 1912

RMS Titanic

For an instant, Tremayne simply wondered what had gone wrong. How had Voss realized why he was on the ship? Because this was clearly not some opportunistic attempted robbery being carried out by a thug on a lone and vulnerable passenger. He and Maria had obviously made some mistake, and had been identified for what they were. And this was Voss’s idea of a permanent solution.

Now he saw that Bauer’s departure from the smoking room was simply a clever ruse, something to entice him out onto the open deck, where the bodyguard would be waiting. Bauer was probably already back in the smoking room, sitting down at his table and acting as if nothing had happened.

Then he sensed movement over to his right, and saw a second figure approaching. Another powerfully built man, almost a clone of the first. Another of Voss’s bodyguards, he presumed. He, too, was carrying a knife.

Tremayne knew he had the Browning pistol in his pocket, but he also knew that the suppressor for the weapon was locked away in his portmanteau in the stateroom. If he fired the weapon without the silencer, it would alert everybody on the Promenade Deck of the ship, whether they were outside walking on the open deck or in one of the first-class public rooms. And if that happened, there would be no chance of completing the assignment.

Somehow, he had to finish this without firing a shot. He knew the odds were stacked against him: two men with knives should be more than a match for one man – for any man – whose only usable weapon was a cosh.

But Tremayne wasn’t just any man. He’d operated in some of the roughest and most dangerous cities in the world, and he was no stranger to street fighting. He’d learned his trade in the backstreets of London’s East End and the alleyways of Hamburg, and had suffered more than his fair share of unarmed combat courses since Mansfield Cumming had recruited him. And all those forms of brutal, no holds barred, hand-to-hand combat did have some rules, basic though they were. Or, to be exact, it had one very important rule: if you were going to fight, you hit first, you hit hard, and you kept on hitting.

The trouble was, Tremayne guessed that the two men, who were even then trying to crowd him toward the guard rail at the side of the ship, had probably been educated in the same way, and had learned the same hard lessons.

He slid his hand in his pocket, slipped his wrist through the loop of the cosh and eased it out, covering the end of it with his fingers so that it would remain out of sight for as long as possible.

The man on his right was bulkier, and a fraction closer than the first man he’d seen. That was another unwritten rule of street fighting – you always picked the biggest opponent and went for him first – so that was exactly what Tremayne did.

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