Dark Watch

5

THE op center crew had no time to digest her words before Mark Murphy at the weapons control announced, “I have a missile launch from the trawler. Time to impact forty-seven seconds. Gatlings are coming online.”

The tactical situation had spiraled out of control in only a few seconds, leaving Cabrillo little time to react. He relied on his mind and not the expensive equipment around him to visualize the battle and seek a solution. “Hold your fire for my signal. Conn, pump us dry and prepare for full power. Wepps, be ready to launch countermeasures and depth charges. Sonar, what’s the sub doing?”

“She seems dead in the water, no propulsion and no indication she’s going to fire.”

“Time to impact?”

“Thirty-one seconds.”

Cabrillo waited, feeling how the Oregon rode differently as the waist ballast tanks drained. At maximum speed the magnetohydrodynamic engines could move the ship her full length in just a couple of seconds. Even if his plan didn’t work, the freighter wouldn’t be where the missile thought it would.

“Sonar?”

“If anything, I’m getting the sound of escaping air, but the sub isn’t submerging.”

That cinched it for him. The sub wasn’t a threat, yet. Cabrillo wanted to blow the missile as close to the Oregon as possible to make the pirates think they’d scored a hit. “Okay, Wepps, when the missile is ten seconds out, smoke it with the Gatling. Conn, ballast us back down, but be ready on those throttles.”

Mark Murphy, also wearing dark fatigues but over a black T-shirt with the saying “Never Mind the Bollocks We Are the Sex Pistols,” brought up an external camera on the main screen. From out of the darkness a streaking corona of light raced for the Oregon a few dozen feet off the surface of the sea. The rate of closure was astronomical — at least a thousand miles per hour. The missile appeared to have been fired at an oblique angle so it would impact on the Oregon’s stern. The pirates’ intention was to take out their victim’s steering gear and propellers and leave them unable to run. Not a bad plan if they wanted to kidnap a hostage or plunder the ship’s safe.

With eleven seconds to go, Mark released the trigger safety on the Gatling gun. It was as though the weapon was eager to prove itself, like a police dog held back on its leash while its master was being mauled. The electronic brain, slaved to a dedicated radar system, found the missile in a microsecond, calculated trajectory, windage, humidity, and a hundred other factors.

The plate hiding the gun emplacement had automatically lowered when the master radar had first detected the missile launch. The autocannon adjusted its aim slightly as electric motors spooled up the six rotating barrels. The instant the computers and radar agreed it had a target, foot-long twenty-millimeter depleted uranium shells fed into the breach at three thousand rounds per minute.

The Gatling sounded like an industrial buzz saw as it cranked out a five-second burst. Forty yards from the ship the missile hit the wall of slugs. The explosion rained fire onto the sea, illuminating the side of the Oregon as though it had been caught in a miniature sunrise. Pieces of the rocket fell, carving trenches into the ocean, and a few smaller ones even rained against the ship’s hull.

“Conn, all stop, steer ninety-seven. Hali, give it a few seconds, then send a mayday on the emergency frequencies, but keep the power setting low so only our friends out there hear us.” Cabrillo dialed the engine room. “Max, lay a small smoke screen. Make us look like we took damage.”

“They’ll think they hit us and the ship’s dead in the water,” Eric Stone said with admiration. “You’re going to sucker them all the way in.”

“That’s the plan,” Juan agreed. “Sonar, anything on that sub?”

“Negative. We’ve now put her a mile astern. I can’t hear any machinery noises or anything else but a slow air leak.”

“Did you get her dimensions?”

“Yes, and they’re odd. She’s a hundred and thirty feet long and nearly thirty-five wide. Short and squat by conventional standards.”

Juan considered a possibility. “A North Korean minisub that somehow followed us here?”

“The computer couldn’t find a match, but it’s not likely. We’re four hundred miles from the Korean Peninsula, and I get the sense that sub’s been sitting here for a while. No way they could have beat us.”

Cabrillo didn’t doubt Linda’s assessment. “Okay, keep an eye on her. For now our priority is the pirates’ trawler. We’ll come back to investigate later.” Across the room Hali Kasim was calling out his mayday and giving an Academy Award–winning performance.

“Motor vessel Oregon, this is the trawler Kra IV, what is the nature of your mayday?” The voice over the radio was scratchy, and the output was weak, as though the pirate was transmitting at low power. No one could place his accent.

“Kra IV, this is the Oregon, we appear to have had an explosion in our steering gear. Helm is not responding, and we’re adrift.”

“Oregon, Kra. We are six miles away and closing at maximum speed.”

“I bet you are,” Hali muttered under his breath before keying the mike. “Thanks be to Allah you are here. We will lower our boarding stairs on the starboard side. Please bring all the firefighting equipment you have.”

“Kra acknowledges. Out.”

Juan switched frequencies to the tactical radios carried by Seng and his handpicked team. “Eddie, can you hear me?”

“Five by five, Chairman.” Eddie waited with his five men in a passageway in the deserted superstructure. The soldiers wore Kevlar armor over black fatigues, and all had third-generation night vision visors. Each carried sound-suppressed MP-5 machine pistols and SIG Sauer automatics. Their ammo was short loaded in the armory, meaning it had a reduced powder charge. It was powerful enough to put down a man but wouldn’t overpenetrate and potentially cause a friendly fire incident in the confines of the ship. From combat harnesses hung flash-bang grenades and enough spare magazines for a ten-minute firefight.

Only Eddie Seng wore civilian clothes and sported a bulky rain slicker that disguised two bulletproof vests. He was the point man, charged with meeting the pirates as they came up the stairs now lowering to the sea. His was the most dangerous job. He had to lure as many pirates as possible onto the ship for his team, mostly SEAL veterans, to take out. He carried a single pistol in a slim rig at the small of his back. The vests were to buy him a few seconds if the pirates came up with guns blazing.

“What have we got?” Seng asked.

“Trawler calling itself the Kra IV coming up the starboard stairs to lend firefighting support,” Cabrillo answered. “If I were them, I’d send over at least nine men. Two for the bridge, two for the engine room, four for flexible duty, plus one leader.”

“We said the Oregon’s sailing with a complement of fifty something,” Eddie countered. “They’ll send at least a dozen.”

“Good point. Do you have enough men?”

“Roger, as long as the deck machine guns can take out the cannon fodder while we concentrate on capturing officers.”

“Sounds good,” Cabrillo responded. “Call me when you have visual.” The ops team watched the trawler approach the Oregon through low-light cameras mounted high atop a deck crane. The Kra IV matched the description given by the few survivors of pirate attacks. She was seventy-three-feet long and beamy, with a blunt bow and an open aft deck. She sported a tall A-frame derrick over her fantail, and they could see a single cargo container lashed just aft of her pilothouse. The distortion of the night optics couldn’t prevent the crew from seeing that the trawler was well-worn. Her machinery looked as dilapidated as that aboard the Oregon, and Juan decided the pirates used the same ruse the Corporation utilized to lull their adversaries.

“Target is twenty yards to starboard,” Eddie radioed. “I can see a dozen or so men on her deck. They’re dressed mostly in shorts or jeans. A few are wearing foul weather gear. They look like they’re carrying equipment, but I bet it’s cover for weapons.”

“Acknowledged.” Cabrillo called down to the engine room to tell Max to cut the smoke screen. With their forward speed down to almost zero, the thick smog blew across the decks and would make visual identification difficult for Seng, as well as the operators of the remote machine guns.

Eddie watched one of the “fishermen” raise a bullhorn to his mouth and hail the Oregon. He stepped from the shadows and took a position at the head of the gangway stairs. A bead of sweat trickled down his rib cage. “Are we glad to see you,” he called back with the right tinge of fear and relief. He noted that the curtain of smoke began to thin. “I think we have contained the fire but don’t know what damage we’ve sustained.”

“We will offer any assistance we can,” the pirate replied. Eddie could hear the mocking tone in his voice through his accent.

As the two boats came together, deckhands on the Kra IV secured their ship to the gangway, and two of the pirates started up the stairs. If the first shot was to come, now was the time. Eddie tensed, his pistol out of its holster but held out of view.

Several things happened in the space of the next few seconds. Unseen searchlights on the trawler snapped on, bathing the side of the Oregon in stark white light and overloading most of the crew’s night vision capabilities. Just short of the deck, the leading pirate raised an automatic and put two quick rounds into Eddie’s chest and motioned to his companions. They charged up the gangway, shouting incoherent challenges as another dozen men rushed from the Kra’s pilothouse.

Eddie felt as though he’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. He staggered back, his body numb. He heard more than felt his pistol fall from his deadened fingers.

Four of the pirates had gained the deck by the time Eddie’s men reacted. Two of them were cut down in the first burst of gunfire from their concealed positions, but five more reached the Oregon to take their place. That they were meeting resistance sent the boarding party into a frenzy. They came on like berserkers eager for battle. In another few seconds the odds were five to one against the Corporation fighters and lengthening with every tick of the clock. Red beams from laser sights crisscrossed in the smoke as the firefight turned into a frenzy.

As soon as the screens in the op center whited out under the luminous onslaught of the arc lamps, Cabrillo understood the pirates’ strategy. It had been called shock and awe during the second Gulf War — overwhelm your enemy in the first few moments of battle by creating the maximum confusion. An untrained crew on a merchant vessel would be so paralyzed by the lights, the screams, and the sheer number of men storming their ship that they wouldn’t even get off a mayday.

And while the tactic was designed to defeat an unarmed crew, it also happened to negate the Corporation’s advantage. The night vision gear was worthless, and there was still too much smoke blanketing the deck to use regular sights. The infrared system couldn’t discern friend from foe, so for the moment the remote gunners were useless.

Cabrillo launched himself from his chair, snatching a pair of night vision goggles and a machine pistol from the rack along the aft bulkhead. He was in the elevator before anyone knew he’d moved.

“Lock down the elevator when I reach the bridge,” he called as the hydraulic lift whisked him five stories to the bridge.

Even from high above the deck, the sound of the gun battle was ferocious. The former SEALs were making a good show for themselves, but it was only a matter of time. Cabrillo raced out along the wing bridge, taking a second to peer down. At least twenty pirates had taken defensive positions all around the forward deck and poured blistering fire into the superstructure. He spotted a figure slowly crawling away from the head of the gangway. He had his weapon up and his finger an ounce away from firing when he recognized Eddie’s rain jacket. His gaze swept the pirates again just as one popped up from behind a winch, taking aim at Seng with an AK-47.

Cabrillo swung his weapon and put a bullet through the pirate’s face, adjusted slightly, and dropped another with a double tap to the chest. He ducked behind the solid curtain rail as bullets whizzed by like angry hornets and sparked against the steel. He clicked the selector on the MP-5 to auto, raised it over the railing, and let loose with a long barrage, hosing the deck with fifteen rounds. In the seconds-long pause in counterfire, he got to his feet, flipped the selector back to single, and took aim at the searchlights aboard the trawler.

His heart was beating like a trip-hammer, so the first two rounds missed. He took a steadying breath, let half out, and fired twice more. The pair of lights exploded in a shower of glass, and darkness descended once again.

Almost immediately he heard the staccato bark of the hidden .30 calibers and the pinging rain of spent brass ejected onto the deck. The remote gunners were back online.

Cabrillo’s machine pistol had a spare magazine taped to the one in the receiver. He changed them over, settled the goggles over his head, and got to work. In the eerie green cast of the night vision device, muzzle flashes looked like fireflies while men appeared like radiant ghosts. He dedicated himself to being Eddie Seng’s guardian angel.

Eddie was still pinned in the open, and judging at how slowly he was moving, Juan knew he’d been hit. There was no trail of blood, so it was likely the vests had saved his life; however, Juan had taken a hit once through a vest and knew it would be hours before Eddie could even catch his breath. It took several agonizing minutes for Eddie to reach the hatchway into the superstructure, where a pair of hands hauled him to safety.

Through the cordite smoke drifting like a dense English fog, Cabrillo identified potential targets and fired with mechanical efficiency. Until the crew gained the upper hand in the battle, he couldn’t worry about taking prisoners.

Blood ran thick across the deck as bodies piled up, but fire from the SEALs had withered to an occasional desultory burst. They’d taken losses. Cabrillo spotted two pirates dashing forward, moving from a hatch cover where they’d hidden to the base of one of the cranes. One pulled something from the knapsack worn by his partner. Juan recognized the satchel charge and cut them down before they had time to arm the device. Another tried to race for the superstructure. As Cabrillo swung to fire, one of the remote machine guns turned on its gimble. The sustained burst cut the man nearly in half.

That seemed to break the back of the pirate horde. The ten or so survivors ran for the gangway just as the big diesel on the Kra bellowed out of idle. They ran into devastating fire from the superstructure. By holding back, Eddie’s men had fooled the pirates into thinking their avenue of escape was clear. Two dropped to the deck, their corpses skidding in their own blood.

The Kra began to pull away, abandoning their boarding party. Cabrillo stitched the trawler’s deck, but there were no targets. The lines securing the gangway to the fishing boat were still secure, so it was slowly torn from its mounts. Two pirates were halfway down it when the Kra began to move. The gangway stretched like a bridge from one ship to the other until the ropes on the Kra parted under the strain. The eighteen-hundred-pound set of stairs twisted, then pulled free from the Oregon, dumping the men into the sea, then crushing them when they surfaced.

The Kra changed angle slightly, narrowing the gap to give their men on the Oregon a chance to jump for it. Eric Stone at the helmsman’s station in the op center recognized the maneuver and turned the Oregon to port and gave her some speed just as the remaining pirates leapt for the rails. One landed on the Kra’s main winch. High above on the wing bridge, Cabrillo heard bones shatter and saw his body tumble to the trawler’s deck. A second gunman smashed into the Kra’s hull, fell into the water, and never resurfaced. The remaining six landed in the narrow space between the two ships.

Juan didn’t know if the helmsman on the fishing boat didn’t see what had happened or just didn’t care. He continued to turn into the Oregon. Eric Stone hit the bow thruster in an attempt to shove the Kra aside, but the prop’s athwartships tunnel was well forward of the trawler, and its powerful wash merely rippled the waves.

The two hulls came together in a grinding crash of steel, smearing the men struggling in the water, turning flesh and bone into a pink paste that washed away when the ships separated.

Juan fetched a walkie-talkie from a drawer at the back of the wheelhouse. “Wepps, Cabrillo. As soon as you have a sight picture, hole her at the waterline. Let the sons of bitches know they aren’t going anywhere.”

“Roger,” Mark Murphy replied.

As the distance between the two vessels grew, Cabrillo saw a deckhand aboard the Kra attach the cable from the A-frame derrick to lines already secured to the shipping container sitting aft of the wheelhouse. The chairman squeezed off a few rounds from his H&K, but hitting a target that’s bobbing with the swells from an unstable platform was next to impossible. The man didn’t even look up from his task as bullets ricocheted around him. An unseen winchman cranked up the derrick. Because the A-frame angled out over the trawler’s stern, the large container was dragged across the Kra’s deck, leaving deep scars in the wood planking. The bottom edge caught on a bollard, but the winch drum continued to revolve. The container teetered for a moment before flipping on its side with an echoing clang. When it was finally under the crane, it was hauled into the air and swung free over the transom. The winchman released the brake, and the container smashed into the sea, bobbed for a moment, then began to fill with water.

Cable stripped away from the freewheeling winch drum as the Kra continued to increase the distance. Whatever contraband the trawler was carrying was doubtlessly in the container, and Cabrillo felt if they were quick enough, they could disable the fishing boat and tie on to the unspooling line before it vanished forever.

As if reading his thoughts, Mark Murphy loosened a one-second burst from the Gatling gun hidden in the Oregon’s bow. Fifty depleted uranium slugs punched into the Kra at the waterline just fore of the pilothouse at a spot Murph assumed was clear of hitting her fuel tanks.

The tanks were well aft of the gaping hole, but the rounds impacted the pirates’ weapons cache. The first explosion was relatively small and contained. Only a lashing tongue of fire belched from the gash cut into the hull by the Gatling. The second blast punched through to the deck and blew out an eight-by-eight section of hull. Fire and smoke rolled from the trawler as she heeled over like she’d just fired a broadside of cannons. Cabrillo watched helplessly as more explosions ripped apart the fishing boat. It looked as though she’d been rigged to blow by Hollywood effects masters. The pilothouse vanished in a splintering pall of flame, and then her aft deck erupted when her main tanks detonated, slamming her stern so deeply into the water that her bow lifted clear. Shrapnel and debris peppered the side of the Oregon, forcing Cabrillo to duck behind the rail. The trawler’s stern winch flew right over the freighter’s rear deck, trailing cable that looked like gossamer in the moonlight. The Kra’s keel split where the explosions had weakened it. The smoking bow settled back on the water as the stern sank from view, and then the fore section lifted free again before it, too, was dragged under the waves.

The entire sequence of events, from the first impact of 20mm rounds to the final hissing plunge, took nineteen seconds.

Juan got back to his feet, wiping a smear of blood from where a piece of hot steel had nicked the back of his hand. A wide circle of smoking flotsam coated the sea, no piece larger than a garbage can lid. The quiet roar of oily fires burning on the swells was the only sound once the concussion waves dissipated across the uncaring waters. There were no moans from the injured, no cries from the stranded. No one had survived the conflagration.

He remained rooted for ten seconds, perhaps for as long as thirty, before he realized there was hope of salvaging what had turned into a debacle. The cable securing the pirate’s container lay across the Oregon’s deck, slowly slipping into the ocean as the weight of the container pulled it down.

“Deck party to the aft deck for cargo detail,” he barked into the radio. “Security to the foredeck. Check for survivors.”

He raced through the deserted superstructure, taking stairs four at a time in a race to the aft deck. He burst from a hatchway just as a team of deckhands reached the slithering cable. Because the winch spool had unwound as it sank on the far side of the ship, there was little counterweight to the rapidly sinking container. The cable rasped across the deck, and smoke from blistering paint coiled into the air.

Juan grabbed a length of chain from a pile left haphazardly at the base of a derrick. He looped it several times around the cable where it rose over the rail, then snapped the links into the hook of a small cargo winch. While the winch looked as though it hadn’t worked in years, its two-cylinder engine fired at the press of a button. He threw the lever to draw on the hook, and the chain tightened around the cable. The friction of steel against steel created an acrid stench as the links clenched further. The cable slowed enough for the deckhands to create a loop long enough for them to wrestle over a capstan. The cable came taut, vibrating with the strain, but it held.

It took several more minutes for them to rig a more secure system to hold the cable steady and attach it to the one operational crane on the Oregon’s aft deck. Eddie Seng and Linda Ross joined him just as they started to haul up the container. Seng was pale and walked with a slight stoop, a hand pressed to his chest where he’d taken the two shots.

“How’re you doing?” Cabrillo asked.

“It only hurts when I laugh,” Eddie said gamely.

“Then let me tell you the one about the hooker who walks into a bar with a parrot and a roll of quarters.”

Eddie held out a hand and groaned. “Please don’t.”

Juan turned serious. “How bad was it back there?”

“Believe it or not, I’m the worst of the injured. My boys suffered a grand total of one concussion and a single flesh wound among them.”

“And the pirates?”

“Thirteen dead and two injured,” Linda answered. “Julia doesn’t think either’s gonna last an hour.”

“Damn.” They might get something from forensic autopsies, the ages and ethnicities of the pirates for example, but nothing to lead them to who was behind the attack.

“Clear the rail,” a deckhand shouted.

The trio stepped away from the ship’s side as the container was lifted from the sea. Water poured from its top and jetted from holes drilled along its sides. The twenty-foot container swung over the rail, and the crane operator settled it onto the deck as though it was as fragile as an egg. Juan was handed a pair of bolt cutters, which he used to shear the padlock securing the doors. Everyone crowded around, each with their own private thoughts about what they’d find inside. It was inevitable that some believed the pirates’ trove would contain gold and precious gems, as though this was the eighteenth century.

Cabrillo held no such illusions, but he wasn’t prepared for what spilled from the container when he unlatched the doors. A crewman retched when he realized what he was seeing, and even Juan had to clench his jaws as acid surged up his throat. Borne by several tons of water still trapped inside the steel box, a tangle of thirty naked bodies tumbled onto the deck of the Oregon.