"Where'd they go?" Hiro says.

Everyone's already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at once that it was missing. Finally they see it, a quarter mile behind them, dead in the water. The bigwigs and the bodyguards are standing up now, all looking in the same direction.

The speedboat is circling around to retrieve it.

"They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable," Hiro says.

"Not likely," the man with the glass eye says. "It was attached to the bottom, under the water. And it's a steel cable, so there's no way they could cut it."

Hiro sees another small craft bobbing on the water, about halfway between the Russians and the speedboat that was towing them. It's not obvious, because it's tiny, close to the water, done up in dull natural colors. It's a one-man kayak. Carrying a longhaired man.

"Shit," Livio says. "Where the hell did he come from?"

The kayaker looks behind himself for a few moments, reading the waves, then suddenly turns back around and begins to paddle hard, accelerating, glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells up underneath the kayak, he's matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going twice as fast as anything else on the water.

Digging at the wave with one end of his paddle, the kayaker makes a few crude changes in his direction. Then he parks the paddle athwart the kayak, reaches down inside, and hauls out a small dark object, a tube about four feet long, which he hoists up to one shoulder.

He and the speedboat shoot past each other going in opposite directions, separated by a gap of only about twenty feet. Then the speedboat blows up. The Kowloon has overshot the site of all this action by a few thousand yards. It's pulling around into as tight a turn as a vessel of this size can handle, trying to throw a one-eighty so it can go back and deal with the Russians and, somewhat more problematically, with Raven.

Raven is paddling back toward his buddies.

"He's such an asshole," Livio says. "What's he going to do, tow them out to the Raft behind his fucking kayak?"

"This gives me the creeps," the man with the glass eye says. "Make sure we got some guys up there with Stingers. They must have a chopper coming or something."

"No other ships on the radar," says one of the other soldiers, coming in from the bridge. "Just us and them. And no choppers either............