The ropes the pirates had used to secure the vessel lost their slack, then went as taut as bowstrings before the old hemp broke. Eric eased the ship back from the dock a good fifty feet and then engaged the dynamic positioning system to keep the Oregon at those exact GPS coordinates.
There was no way he would attempt to maneuver the ship out of the swamp without the Chairman on deck to lend a hand if he got into trouble.
But then his mind was changed for him.
Like a barrage from a group of archers, a flurry of rocket-propelled grenades came sizzling over the embankment. The smoke they trailed seemed to fill the sky from horizon to horizon.
SIX
Eric slammed his fist on the collision alarm button. The electronic cry would carry to every deck and compartment on the ship. It was a sound the crew knew well.
At this close range there wasn’t enough time to deploy the 20mm Gatling close-in defense system; however, Mark Murphy was getting it ready for the second salvo he was sure to follow.
A few of the rockets went radically off course, corkscrewing into the water or into the mangroves to detonate harmlessly. Even with the bow facing the attack, the Oregon was still a large enough target to make it difficult to miss. RPGs slammed into her prow, blowing off her fore railing and tearing a fluke off one of her anchors. Others skimmed over the bow and exploded against the superstructure below the closed-off bridge windows.
Had this been any other ship, the onslaught would have turned the vessel into scrap. But the Oregon’s armor held. A few craters had been cored into the steel, and paint had been burned off all over the superstructure, but none of the rocket grenades had penetrated. There remained vulnerable areas, however. The ship wasn’t entirely impervious to a rocket attack. The smokestack shielded the ship’s sophisticated radar dish, and a lucky shot could easily destroy it.
“Incoming,” Juan heard over the radio earbud an instant before the first RPG homed in on his ship.
The blasts at the bow gave him and his team enough warning to clamp their hands over their ears and leave their mouths open to prevent unequal pressure in their sinuses that would blow out their eardrums.
The superstructure rang as though it were a giant bell. Each explosion sent the men reeling back, though they were nowhere near the sections getting pummeled. In those compartments, the staggering concussions were lethal. One pirate, who had been leaning against a wall that took one of the rocket strikes, had his insides jellied by the blast, while the two men with him permanently lost their hearing.
“Tell Eric to get us the hell out of here,” Juan shouted into his microphone. He could barely hear his own voice, while Linda’s was an unintelligible squeal.
As soon as Eric had mashed the collision alarm, he disengaged the GPS and reconfigured the view on the main screen so half of it showed a camera shot over the Oregon’s fantail while the other monitored the pirate lair. There was neither time nor room to turn the five-hundred-foot ship.
He moved the throttles once again into reverse.
The channel looked so narrow he felt like he was going to thread a needle while wearing oven mitts. At least the first mile was straight, so he added more power, backing the big freighter as carefully as he possibly could. It didn’t help that a breeze had picked up, and the hull and superstructure were acting like a sail.
A pair of RPGs was launched from the dock. This time, Mark had the redoubt opened for the six-barreled Gatling gun, and it spooled up to nearly a thousand rpms.
The Vulcan shrieked and the Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades ran into the solid curtain of the 20mm rounds it had spewed. Both warheads detonated over the water, while the embankment beyond was chewed apart by the slugs that overshot. Mark saw that pirates were getting ready to follow the Oregon in their fishing boats. They wouldn’t be an issue once they reached the sea, but until Eric maneuvered them through the mangroves the fishing boats had the edge.
Mark aimed low along the hull of the first boat and unleashed a one-second burst. The shells ripped open the water immediately adjacent to the boat, dousing the rebels and, more important, warning them. They dove off the boat and were halfway down the dock when Murph unleashed the autocannon again.
The small trawler disintegrated in a mushrooming cloud of shredded wood, splintered glass, and torn metal. When the gas tank erupted, the blast knocked the pirates flat, as greasy smoke rose into the air.
The men on the second boat had pulled away from the dock before they realized they were next. Mark almost chuckled at how comically they leapt from the doomed boat, giving little thought to their comrades. When it was clear of men, he fired. The pilothouse was blown away like a garden shed caught in a tornado. So much of the bow was destroyed that, with the throttles open, water poured into the hull until the boat vanished entirely. It reminded him of a submarine sinking beneath the waves, only this craft was never surfacing again.
Up in the superstructure, Juan and his two teammates took up the chase again. Still unable to hear Linda because his ears continued to ring, Cabrillo relied on his hunter’s instincts. They moved slowly and methodically, checking and clearing the area room by room. When they discovered the grisly chamber where one of the rockets had hit, they darted the two deafened pirates. The third man looked like a rag doll with half its stuffing removed.
The explosions, and the fact that they could feel the ship under way, sent the rebels into near panic. They screamed for one another in the blackness, and the ones who found a sealed door clawed at the metal with their bare hands. They had no idea they were being stalked until a dart shot out of nowhere.
Had these men not preyed on unsuspecting ships off the coast, Juan could almost dredge up some pity for them. But he had a mariner’s special loathing for pirates and piracy, so he felt nothing when he fired the final time and sent the last of them into dreamland.
“Okay, Linda, that’s it,” Juan reported. “Unseal the superstructure and get some support in here. Tell Hux to treat the wounded as best she can, but I want this scum off the ship in thirty minutes.”
Cabrillo stripped off the cumbersome night vision goggles when the plates over the exterior doors and ports lifted and the fluorescent lights flickered to life. His wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. It came away soaked, and he knew that the temperature was only partially responsible for the perspiration. His limbs trembled with the aftereffects of the adrenaline high.
A few moments later, the superstructure was crawling with personnel to deal with the unconscious gunmen. Giuseppe appeared at Juan’s side and handed him a water bottle glistening with dew. He walked with Juan as the Chairman headed for the op center. The Italian had to lengthen his stride to keep pace.
“I was thinking, amico, it might be wise to take a few of these men with us when we put Didi on the fishing boat we have.”
Cabrillo drank deeply, then said, “Better cover story than Didi out on his own sunset cruise?”
“Sí.”
“Did you have enough of that amnesia drug?”
“I have enough for two more, I should think.”
“Fine by me,” Juan said casually as they entered the ship’s nerve center.
With one sweep of his eyes, Cabrillo took in the operational situation. They were far enough from the rebel compound that they were no longer under threat of attack from the RPGs, and since he didn’t see any boats in pursuit he assumed Murph had taken care of them. Eric had backed up the Oregon until she was almost in the tight turn.
“How are you doing, Mr. Stone?” he asked.
“It’s like pushing string, sir. Between the incoming tide, rising wind, and shoaling bottom, I don’t see how you got us into this jam in the first place.”
“Want me to take over?”
“I’d like to give it a try myself first.”
“Incoming!” Murph suddenly shouted.
Unknown to the crew, there was a causeway running alongside the channel that the rebels had cleared to make a road. Wh
ile the ship was slowly backing out of the swamp, armed rebels had boarded several trucks and raced after the lumbering freighter. When it paused in the tight confines of the turn, they opened fire with more RPGs.
Murph still had the Gatling port opened, but he had let the gun barrels stop rotating. He spun it up with the press of a button and opened fire. He was too slow for the first two rockets, which hit the hull and detonated harmlessly, but he managed to swat two more out of the air.
“I have the conn,” Cabrillo said.
“Roger,” Eric replied instantly.
Where Eric was approaching the tricky turn slowly and methodically, Juan ramped up the engines and engaged the bow thruster, remembering that they were in reverse so he had to call on the opposite side.
The Vulcan sounded like an industrial saw when it screamed again. On the causeway, one of the technicals had its front axle torn off. The vehicle catapulted over its truncated front end, scattering men, weapons, and a cascade of broken glass. It landed on its roof and dug a deep furrow into the rocky soil, its rear wheels spinning.
A second pickup was hit broadside. The kinetic energy of the tungsten shells flipped the two-ton truck onto its side and the gas tank exploded. It erupted in a blooming rose of flame and smoke. Mark had a bead on the third when it vanished behind a thick tangle of vegetation. He waited for it to reemerge on the other side of the copse of trees, but seconds trickled by with no firm sighting.
Watching the undergrowth through the zoom camera lens, he thought he saw movement yet still held his fire. With the ship accelerating down the channel, the angle continued to shift. In a moment, he would have to switch from the Vulcan mounted along the Oregon’s flank near the bow to the second gun located at the stern. Mark activated the hydraulics that would open the fantail doors. The plates slid aside to reveal the multibarrel weapon, but it would take a moment for it to be run out and the camera switched on his monitor. The jungle he’d been watching erupted in blinding flashes that came in a continuous blur. A second later, 20mm rounds from a truck-mounted antiaircraft cannon raked the Oregon. Unlike the RPGs, the cannon’s hardened rounds tore into the ship’s armor, gouging divots into the steel, and when two hit the same spot they bored through and began to wreak havoc on the interior spaces.
The only saving grace was that the ship’s ballast tanks were full to make her look heavily laden, so only one of her secret decks was exposed. One round penetrated the executive boardroom and blew through a pair of leather-backed chairs before embedding itself in the far wall. Another entered the pantry and tore apart a pallet of flour so the air became a solid-white curtain of dust. A third exploded into the cabin of an off-duty engineer. He’d been sitting at his desk, watching the battle on the ship’s closed-circuit television system, which saved his legs from the blast of shrapnel, but his back and neck were shredded as though he’d been mauled.
This all happened in the blink of an eye. Mark watched helplessly. He was impotent until the computer told him the second gun was ready.
“Wepps, what the hell?” Juan growled without taking his attention off the delicate maneuver of turning the big ship.
“One more sec . . .”
Murphy’s board turned green, and he unleashed the weapon. The jungle where the technical lay hidden was swept away by the onslaught. Trees up to a foot thick were mowed down like wheat before a combine. One trunk plummeted to the earth, a halo of wood chips choking the area. It smashed into the technical’s bed, silencing its twin cannons, but Mark kept up the remorseless torrent of rounds until the trees were gone and all that remained of the truck and crew was a smoldering ruin of torn metal and rended flesh.
The Oregon was halfway through the turn. Cabrillo had judged it precisely. He backed his ship with the expertise of a truck driver parallel-parking a big rig. The stern came mere inches from the muddy bank. They were so close that someone standing near the jack staff could have plucked leaves from the trees. Then she swung around, almost pivoting on a dime, so her fantail was pointed eastward toward the open ocean.
Eric gave Cabrillo a look of respect bordering on hero worship. He never would have dared maneuver the ship so fast through such a tight channel.
“Think you can take it from here?” the Chairman asked his helmsman.
“I got her, boss man.” The ship automatically recorded its position using the constellation of GPS satellites. All Stone had to do now that the trickiest corner had been negotiated was run a reverse course through the nava-computer and the ship would steer herself around the tricky swamps and shifting shoals. He already had the coordinates where the derelict fishing boat awaiting Mohammad Didi had been pre-positioned.
Juan got up from his command chair and turned to Giuseppe Farina. “Let’s figure out who you want to keep and who’s going over the side. I want the pirates off the ship before we clear the mangroves.”
He led the Italian observer down several decks to the Oregon’s boat garage. Here, near the waterline, was a large door that could be opened to the sea. There was a ramp built into the ship, covered in Teflon to make it slick. From it, the crew could launch Zodiacs, Jet Skis, or her RHIB—rigid-hull inflatable boat. That particular craft was built for the Navy SEALs, with a bladder of air around its hull to give it buoyancy in any conditions and a pair of powerful outboards that could shoot it across the waves at better than fifty knots. The lighting was white fluorescents, but red battle lamps could be lit for night operations.
The crew had already inflated a large black raft, and the unconscious forms of the pirates had been loosely bound to it. Once they awoke, they would be able to free one another and paddle the raft back to shore. Hux still had the wounded in the medical bay, while the dead would be given burials at sea.
“We’ll take this one and this one and that guy on the far side,” Farina said, pointing to Malik and Aziz. “When they took the ship, they appeared to have some leadership role. Who knows, they might prove to be an intelligence asset.”
“The younger one probably isn’t worth it. Guy smokes more dope than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert.”
“They no longer tour, you know,” ’Seppe teased.
“You know what I mean.”
“We’ll use him anyway. A little forced detoxification might do him some good.”
Thirty minutes later, Hux arrived in the boat garage with a couple of crewmen acting as orderlies. They wheeled down several gurneys for the injured pirates.
“How are they?” Juan asked.
“We have a casualty,” Hux told him.
“What? Why wasn’t I told?”
“No sense informing you until I had him stable.”
“Who is it? What happened?”
“One of those triple-A rounds penetrated Sam Pryor’s cabin. He took some shrapnel to his back. I pulled out about twenty small fragments. He lost a good amount of blood, and there’s some torn muscle, but he’s going to be fine.”
“Thank God,” Juan breathed, thinking about the reprimand Mark Murphy had coming. He should have had the stern Gatling online much sooner. “So what about these guys?”
“Two have hearing loss,” Dr. Huxley replied in a no-nonsense tone. “I don’t know if it’s permanent, and there isn’t much I could do either way. Couple more have superficial wounds. I dug out the shrapnel, cleaned and dressed them, and pumped them with as much antibiotic as I dared. If they get infected, they’re in for a rough time of it, considering the conditions they live in.”
The two Somalis who’d been shot had been given a nylon satchel. Cabrillo guessed they contained additional medication and written instructions on how to use it. He also guessed the men wouldn’t take the drugs and they would end up on Somalia’s booming black market.
The wounded were set on the raft and the outer door was cranked open. Juan called up to the op center for Eric to bring the ship to a stop. At the leisurely speed they were doing, it took only a few minutes for the pump jets to slow the ship until she was wallowing in the gentle w
aves like an old sow. Water lapped just below the bottom edge of the ramp. Beyond, Cabrillo could see they were just about to break out of the mangroves. With the tide coming in, the raft would drift westward until it became entangled in the swamp. The men would wake in about an hour, so other than mild dehydration they would be fine.
He helped push the raft until it was sliding down the ramp. It hit the water without a splash, and its momentum carried it a few yards from the ship.
Juan tapped the intercom button again. “Okay, Eric, take us away nice and easy, and when they’re a quarter mile astern open her up and get us to the fishing boat.”
“Roger that.”
A half hour later, Juan and ’Seppe Farina were outside, standing on the wing bridge. Crewmen were at work repairing the cosmetic damage caused by the RPG attacks. Railings were being replaced and scorch marks covered in thick marine paint. Men were slung over the side on bosun’s chairs welding patches to the hull where the antiaircraft rounds had pierced the armor. Other men were inside, restoring the cabins with mattresses and furniture from the ship’s stores. Max Hanley was compiling a list of everything they would need to buy in order to put the old freighter back to her former “glory.”
The Oregon plowed through the calm waves at better than thirty knots, far from her maximum speed, when Linda Ross’s already high-pitched voice squeaked from the tinny speaker. “Chairman, we have a radar contact four miles dead ahead.”
Juan swung a pair of binoculars to his eyes and a moment later saw a speck on the otherwise deserted ocean. It took a few more minutes for it to resolve itself into a fishing boat much like the one that had initially attacked.
“When is the American destroyer going to be in this area?” Juan asked his friend.
“Dawn tomorrow. More than enough time for us to steal off into the night. Didi and the others probably won’t be awake yet, and, if they are, they will be so nauseated by the drug they’ll be as docile as lambs. And do not worry, the boat has no radio or fuel, and the chance someone will happen across it before your Navy is absolutely zero.”