Pirate Alley

CHAPTER TWO

Mustafa and his pirates had Sultan of the Seas in sight. He was on her beam. She was making at least twenty-five knots. He had to hold in eighty degrees of lead as he closed to keep her from moving to his front.

The men in the boat grasped their weapons. A few fired short bursts into the air in celebratory anticipation. The reports sounded flat.

Mustafa’s radio was alive in his hand. He could hear the other boats attacking Stella Maris talking to each other. He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the helicopter had left trailing smoke. One skiff sunk. If anyone who had been aboard was still alive, he was on his own; Mustafa needed all his boats if he hoped to capture a cruise ship. The men knew that, knew the risks, and had come anyway. At least there were two more skiffs to harass Stella Maris, which was only ten miles to the northeast.

“Mustafa, this is Ahmed.”

“Yes.”

“We are closing from the north on Sultan. Do you have us in sight?”

“No.”

They had the cruise ship in a classic trap. Pirates were closing from two sides, so whichever way Sultan of the Seas turned, she would be intercepted.

Yes! The plan was working!

Captain Arch Penney was facing his worst nightmare: a pirate attack on his ship. He had two boatloads of pirates to port and four to starboard. Ten miles ahead, two or three pirate boats were attacking another cruise ship.

Penney was on the radiotelephone to the Task Force 151 tactical action officer on duty this morning. The navy guy had a calm, baritone American voice.

“Nearest surface warship is an hour and a half away,” the American navy dude said, “but we will have a helo overhead in twenty minutes.”

“Send it.”

Penney handed the phone to Harry Zopp and consulted the computer screen that showed all the surface targets in the area, their course and speed, and the prediction of where they would be in a minute, or five or ten, if they didn’t change course or speed. The computer’s information was derived from the radar. The computer operator had to designate which targets were which.

Arch was not without a plan. He and the other captains of the cruise line, together with the senior captain, had worked out a contingency plan for just such an attack and presented it to management, which had insisted upon some changes designed to protect the company from lawsuits, then approved it.

The plan was The Plan. Unfortunately cruise ships did not carry weapons of any kind, not even a pistol to take down a raving, homicidal berserker. So The Plan relied upon speed and mild maneuvering to keep boatloads of armed, homicidal pirates at bay. However, the cruise line was not willing to have the pirates slaughter a great many of its customers, so if the pirates persisted in shooting into the cruise ship, the captain was supposed to surrender, on the theory that the pirates would then ransom ship, passengers and crew. It all sounded very logical in the boardroom of the cruise company in London.

“We have insured against the risk,” the chairman told Captain Penney. Ah, yes. Insurance. Even if the company had to refund fares and ransom ship, passengers and crew and pay a few families damages because they lost a family member, the cruise line wasn’t going to lose money. Comforting, that.

Sultan of the Seas carried 490 passengers and 370 officers and crew. Eight hundred sixty defenseless people. Still, the international task force, Task Force 151, was out there on patrol, just over the horizon, ready to intimidate those naughty pirates and protect honest people from violent, unwashed, starving Africans.

“Don’t worry, Captain,” the chairman had said. “You can outrun them. The allied navies can deal with them.”

Arch Penney looked again at the computer display. If he maintained this course and speed, the helo would arrive eight minutes after the pirates.

Eight minutes. How many people would the pirates maim and kill in eight minutes?

He picked up the mike for the ship’s public address system and flipped it on.

“This is the captain. As you may know if you are on the weather decks, we are being intercepted by at least six small boats, which may contain pirates. We will do all we can to protect you and this ship. I request everyone to clear the weather decks and move to the interior of the ship, away from the windows, balconies and portholes. If your stateroom has a balcony, please step out into the passageway and remain there. I will keep you updated.”

He switched off.

Harry looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Going to panic the old pussies, aren’t you?”

Arch Penney shrugged and used his handheld radio to call the bosun. “Are you ready?”

“Two minutes.”

“Use the LRAD whenever they get in range.” The Long Range Acoustic Device aimed a powerful sound blast in a narrow cone. At one hundred yards, the high-pitched wail was painful. At fifty yards, it was capable of rupturing eardrums. The ship had four LRADs installed, two on each side.

Now Penney asked the computer operator, “Where’s that chopper?”

“One-two-two degrees true at forty-eight miles.”

“Our speed?”

“Twenty-eight knots and increasing,” Harry Zopp said. “We are full ahead, sir.”

“Very well. Helmsman, use slow rate on the turn and come starboard to course one-two-zero degrees. Steady on it.” These new cruise liners had no rudder, but instead had engines in pods mounted below the hull. The helmsman was actually turning the pods. Maneuvering up to a pier, the pods allowed the ship to be turned in its own length and dispensed with the necessity of using tugboats.

“Slow rate on the turn,” echoed the helmsman. “Come starboard and steady up on one-two-zero degrees, sir.”

The slow rate of turn wouldn’t tilt the deck very much, although the ship would take a while to get through the turn. With luck, Arch Penney thought he could get the pirates into his rear quarter. At the very least, the last two boats, out of Yemen, would be behind him in a tail chase.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Buck Peterson was the pilot in command of the Sikorsky MH-60R on its way toward the two cruise ships under attack by pirates.

This had started out as just another day at sea, with coffee and eggs and reams of paperwork awaiting his attention. USS Richard Ward only carried one helo, three pilots, two enlisted crewmen and two aviation mechanics. As the senior aviator, he owned the flying machine and the officers and men—and was responsible for everything.

When the call came from the task force commander, he had mounted up with the senior copilot and senior crewman, a first class named Wilsey. The captain already had his ship on a rendezvous heading, and he turned into the wind just long enough to let the chopper lift off.

Now Buck Peterson was on the radio to the flagship. Pirates had fired on a French Panther over Stella Maris, and the Frenchie had sunk one boat, then retired. Still iffy whether he was going to make his base ship or go into the drink. Two boats were still shooting at Stella Maris; the captain was in a panic, but he said he thought he could outrun them. He was slowly pulling away, leaving them behind.

The flagship gave Peterson a heading to Sultan of the Seas. It was being intercepted by six boats, which had it boxed.

“Wilsey, you got that gun loaded?” Buck asked on the intercom.

“Yes, sir.” As crewman, Petty Officer Wilsey was in charge of the helicopter’s only defensive armament, an M-60 machine gun mounted in the door. It wasn’t a cannon, but it threw a nice stream of 7.62 mm NATO slugs that could slaughter a boatload of pirates in seconds. Peterson had never had to order the gunner to fire; the sight of the gun pointed their way was always enough to dissuade even the most ardent buccaneers. There was just nowhere to hide, nothing to get behind, in an open boat. Every single pirate thought that gun barrel was pointed precisely at him.

Peterson checked the mileage to the Sultan while he listened to her captain talking on the radio to the Task Force 151 duty officer aboard the flagship.

Peterson’s copilot was Crash Pizzino, a big rangy man with a wicked sense of humor. He wasn’t smiling now. He was tightening his straps, running through the checklist, securing loose objects in the cockpit. Crash was also listening to the Sultan’s captain describe the tactical scene, the pirate skiffs closing in …

“My God, Suzanne! Pirates!”

“We could be in Hawaii this very minute, sister of mine. I wanted to go to Hawaii. Remember?”

“We’ve been to Hawaii five times,” Irene said distractedly. They were crammed into a passageway just forward of the ninth deck aft dining room and the outside portico where they had eaten breakfast. Someone had spotted the open boats on the horizon, and people had idly turned to watch as the skiffs closed on a collision course. Then the captain had galvanized everyone into action.

Chairs were scooted back; people hurried to get inside the ship, away from the windows and open decks. Now Suzanne, Irene, Mike Rosen, Nora and Juliet were packed together in the passageway along with almost two dozen other people. A cook was also there—he looked like a Filipino—and he was obviously frightened. One of the crewmen spoke to him sharply in a language Suzanne and Irene didn’t understand, and the man calmed down somewhat.

Suzanne got tired of standing. She sat down on the deck and put her back against the passageway wall, or bulkhead, or whatever they called it. Irene joined her on the deck but kept her legs tucked under her. Suzanne was not limber enough and let hers stick out straight. Actually, she thought, for a woman of my age, they aren’t bad legs.

“Hawaii,” Suzanne grumped. “Egypt is filthy, the Egyptians are filthy, Aqaba is a dump. No human in his right mind would pay money to ride that damn bus across the desert to Luxor. I still can’t believe we did it. See Aqaba was number nine thousand and twelve on my Before-I-Die Bucket List.”

“Scratch it off.”

“You won’t admit it, but this is the worst cruise we’ve ever been on. Pirates, no less!”

Irene sighed. “Next time, Kaanapali Beach.”

“You bet your ass,” Suzanne shot back.

Sultan’s turn seaward, into his little squadron of onrushing boats, gave Mustafa al-Said a bad moment. The ship kept turning, and he tried to turn away, then buttonhook back and come alongside, but the constantly changing course made that impossible. Now the ship was doing at least thirty knots. Mustafa’s engine was howling at the red line, and the skiff seemed to leap from swell to swell. Two of the boats couldn’t make this speed, but the turn into them had given them a chance.

Finally Sultan steadied up on a southeasterly course, directly away from the land. The captain instinctively went for sea room, Mustafa realized, although that would do him no good. The four pirate boats in front of him converged.

Mustafa S-turned once and then bore in for a rendezvous on the liner’s starboard side. He well knew if he fell astern he could never catch Sultan. He swept in, turning hard to parallel, keeping his boat closing. Another boat was ahead of him and went in fearlessly against the side of the ship.

Then he heard the noise. High-pitched, a scream, rising in volume. He put on his sound-supressor headset, a simple set of mufflers, one over each ear, as the other men in the boat hastily pulled theirs on, too.

Mustafa could hear the wail anyway. It was insanely loud.

The men began shooting at the LRAD installations. A sailor stood behind each unit, aiming it at the nearest pirate skiff.

“Kill them, kill them,” Mustafa screamed, but no one heard it.

Nuri was manning the machine gun, and he bent down and tried to aim, which was difficult in the bucking, heaving boat. He began firing bursts at the LRAD units.

The sailors manning the LRAD units disappeared. Probably down behind the railings. Two more long bursts, then the sound stopped.

The skiff nearest the ship was not under control. The helm wandered; the boat nosed in against the towering side of the Sultan, was caught in the wash and overturned instantly.

Mustafa ignored the pirates in the water. If they drowned, they drowned. They were in it for the money, just as he and his men were. If Mustafa didn’t press the attack, there would be no money for anyone.

“The bridge,” he shouted to his men and pointed. Three of them fired AK-47s at the bridge.

Radio talk-show host Mike Rosen was not huddled in a passageway inside the ship. He didn’t have it in him. He was on the eighth-deck gallery, and from his vantage point he could see the sailor manning the amidships LRAD transmitter. He heard the wail, of course, but it was focused on the pirate boats, so it was merely unpleasant.

Rosen saw the machine-gun bullets striking around the unit, saw the sparks, felt the impacts, and he saw the sailor, an officer apparently, fall heavily to the deck.

More bullets. The sound stopped.

The man on the deck wasn’t moving. Staying below the railing, Rosen hurried to him in the classic combat waddle. Bullet holes everywhere. He turned the officer over. He had been hit at least four times. Some blood, but not much. The officer’s eyes were frozen, focused on nothing at all.

At least one of the machine-gun bullets had hit the main transmitter.

Rosen abandoned it and waddled back toward his vantage point, a small gap in the railing that allowed him to watch the pirate boats. He saw the one turn in against the ship and be flipped over by the ship’s wash. Men spilled into the water, men without life preservers.

Below, on the fifth-deck gallery, between the lifeboats, Rosen caught glimpses of men connecting fire hoses to fixed, movable nozzles, nozzles aimed over the side. They tried to stay below the railing, out of sight of the pirates.

Oh, man.

Mustafa’s skiff was a couple of knots faster than the Sultan. It was just enough to allow it to get closer and closer. The men fired long bursts at the bridge; glass cascaded from the windows, a little shower of shimmering reflections.

Now the distance to the ship, less than a hundred yards, began to close quickly. The Sultan was turning into him! Faster than thought, Mustafa spun the wheel to bring his bow starboard … and the distance began to open.

The machine gun kept burping short bursts. The men with the AKs hosed off whole magazines.

Now the Sultan veered left; Mustafa saw her heel. He heard a scream on the radio. Then silence.

One of the other boats gave him the news. Sultan had swamped another of the pirate skiffs, then had run over her.

Sultan was steadying again. Mustafa veered in fearlessly to give the machine gunner a better target.

“The masts. The antenna. Shoot them off,” he roared over the thunder of the engine and guns at Nuri on the machine gun. That was the plan, but in action men forgot things. The pirates with AKs never aimed them. They held them hip high and squirted. Even shooting from the hip in an open boat bucking the swells, the ship was too big to miss. The AKs merely scared people and broke windows, which was fine because scared people surrender quickly.

His boat was about ten yards from Sultan when streams of water under intense pressure shot forth. Hard, narrow rivers of water. One of the streams hit the boat, and Mustafa went down. He hung on to the wheel as the stream of water went forward in the boat, threatening to swamp it and sweeping two men over the side.

Mustafa veered away just in time.

The engine still ran fine. Men were bailing like mad.

One of the men had an RPG-7 launcher. He brought it to his shoulder, then waved at Mustafa, who cranked the wheel over and once again started in toward the ship.

The third grenade did the trick. It burst the last of the movable nozzles and let water merely pour over the ship’s side.

How much longer? Mustafa asked himself. The captain must be thinking of the passengers and crew—and, of course, his own life, the infidel dog.

Better scare them some more. Mustafa saw Ahmad looking at him, a silent question. He had the rocket-propelled grenade launcher reloaded. Mustafa gestured toward the bridge.

This RPG hit behind the bridge, went through a big window and made a nice bang. Glass and smoke blew out.

Buck Peterson kept the Sikorsky coming down. The pirates were shooting up the ship. They were not yet aboard. The ship was at flank speed.

Now Buck saw the pirate boat on Sultan’s starboard side. It was the closest, so he went for it. Began slowing his chopper, coming around so that he could fly between the boat and the ship. Fortunately that put his door-mounted gun on the side of the pirate boat.

“Get ready, Wilsey. Fire a burst into the water short of their boat.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Wilsey said, as if he had been asked to make coffee.

That Wilsey was a good man, cool under pressure. Buck wished he had Wilsey’s kind of calm.

He brought the Seahawk around and came up the wake, nearly over the ship. Heard the M-60 vomit out a burst, saw it turn the water to foam near a pirate boat.

That ought to sober up the bastards.

Buck Peterson was over the ship’s railing, amidships, with the pirate boat on his beam, when an RPG exploded inside the Seahawk. The explosion was unexpected, violent, and the chopper began to buck.

Right engine … losing power! Hydraulics going … warning lights flashing.

Buck Peterson turned away from Sultan, the only thing he could do, right across the pirate boat, and picked up his tail trying to gain speed.

He felt the thumps as bullets smashed into the Seahawk, then realized he couldn’t keep the machine in the air. He tried to lower the tail to cushion the impact with the sea.

It wasn’t even a controlled crash. The impact of the collision with seawater at speed collapsed the windshield and killed Peterson and Pizzino instantly. Petty Officer Wilsey was already dead, killed by the RPG.

The splash site soon subsided into a roiling mass of bubbles as the Sultan and Mustafa’s boats swept away at thirty knots.

Arch Penney’s hopes sank with the remains of the Sikorsky. The American duty officer said there were no more helicopters available and the destroyer Richard Ward was over an hour away. The safety of his passengers and crew weighed heavily upon the captain.

Just as his hopes reached low ebb, the radio squawked again. “Sultan, we have jets ten minute away.”

Harry Zopp replied, “The pirates are shooting machine guns into this ship and launching grenades. We are defenseless. Do you people understand that?”

“We are unable to contact the helicopter that was in your vicinity. Is it still there?”

“The pirates shot it down. It crashed into the ocean.”

“Roger.” The voice was tired, cold.

Penney grabbed the radiotelephone from his chief officer. “Are these jets going to just fly around, or will they do something to actually defend this ship and the nine hundred people aboard her?”

“We are assessing the situation.”

“Bloody Yanks,” Harry Zopp said.

Another burst of machine-gun bullets thudded into the bridge ceiling. Penney and his bridge team were huddled on the deck, out of the line of fire. The helmsman was sitting on the deck, reaching up to turn the steering controls. The RPG had exploded behind the bridge in the navigator’s office; now a small fire was emitting acrid smoke. Fortunately no one on the bridge had yet been killed, although one sailor had some shrapnel in a leg from the grenade blast. Penney wondered if any of the passengers had stopped a bullet. No, he thought, the question was, How many?

There would be more grenade blasts, Penney thought bitterly. This wasn’t a warship; his crewmen weren’t trained warfighters. Hell, they didn’t have any weapons to fight with. And the passengers: For Christ’s sake, they were mostly middle-aged and old men and women, from all over the world. The only thing they had in common was the fact they could afford the fare for the cruise.

Another hatful of machine-gun bullets arrived and took out more of the forward glass. There wasn’t much glass left. Little pieces of insulation rained down from the damaged ceiling. The sea wind swept the bridge.

Penney sneaked a peek over the railing. One of the skiffs, the one with the machine gun, was close on the starboard side, no more than fifty yards away. He scuttled across the bridge and looked on the port side. Two boats there, closing. With his naked eye he could see the men in the boat wrestling with a grenade launcher.

“Eight minutes,” Harry Zopp said, glancing at his watch.

Two more grenades slammed into the ship. Penney felt the thuds the explosions created.

Huddled under the rail on the port wing of the bridge, the captain thought he heard a woman screaming. It was high-pitched, and faint.

The Task Force 151 commander was U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington. He stood in the tactical flag spaces aboard his flagship staring at the flat-screen situation display. The French chopper had been shot up over Stella Maris but was still airborne, on its way back to its mother ship. The American Seahawk had ceased transmitting; Sultan said the pirates shot it down.

Tarkington took a deep breath. The pirates really wanted these ships and were betting everything they could get them. Fortunately Stella Maris looked as if she were outrunning the two skiffs that had attacked her.

Two F-18s patrolling from a carrier three hundred miles to the north, toward the Persian Gulf, were on their way. Fuel would be tight. They could stay over Sultan for no more than five minutes. The carrier was launching a tanker, but it was at least a half hour behind the fighters. If the fighters stayed over Sultan until the tanker arrived, they would be lost if they couldn’t take fuel from the tanker, for any reason. Should he risk two planes and the lives of two pilots by keeping them over Sultan? Should he order the pilots to shoot at the pirates?

Tarkington knew the Rules of Engagement cold, and he understood the political climate in which he operated. He would create an international incident if he ordered the jets to use their weapons, an incident that would probably have serious political repercussions in European capitals, perhaps jeopardizing the continued existence of the antipiracy task force. On the other hand, the pirates had shot at his helicopters, perhaps killed the crewmen. He had spent his career in the U.S. Navy; self-defense was instinctive, institutional, ingrained. Overaggressiveness in the face of a threat could be forgiven; excessive caution, never. Then there were all the people on that cruise ship …

Toad Tarkington made his decision. “Tell Sea Wolf flight to sink the pirate boats. Weapons free.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Lieutenant Commander Dieter Gerhart was leading Sea Wolf flight. Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Borosco was on his wing. Gerhart listened to the orders, then asked Borosco, “You get that, Tom?”

“Roger.”

“You take the boats on the land side, I’ll take the boats on the seaward side. Strafe and sink them.”

“Got it.”

Gerhart consulted the mil-setting table on his kneeboard, found the mil setting he wanted and dialed it into the gunsight. He adjusted the brightness of the reticle, trying to find a setting that would not overpower a hard-to-see target on a gray ocean on a hazy day. Finally he toggled his master armament switch on and selected GUN.

He pushed the nose over, left the power up. He had the cruise ship on radar … if indeed it was the right ship. She was twenty-five miles away. He wished visibility were better.

Waiting was difficult as the jets plunged deeper into the atmosphere and the range marched down. Gerhart set his radar altimeter to sound a warning at 1,100 feet above the sea. At 1,100 feet, he would open fire, and hold the trigger down for no more than a second. At 900 feet he should be off the gun and pulling out, right or left, to avoid any ricochets off the water.

He was at six miles when he saw the ship embedded in the haze. There, one, two, three skiffs on the starboard side. He didn’t see the fourth, but he could only attack them one at a time, so he picked the closest and went for it.

Power back, down to 420, now 400 … speed bleeding off, angle steep because he was diving toward a point well ahead of his target, which was paralleling the ship, moving toward a point perhaps twenty degrees right of his six o’clock.

He raised the nose to establish a ten-degree dive angle, put the pipper short of the boat, slightly left … saw 1,500 feet on the radar altimeter, 1,500 on the pressure altimeter, airspeed down to 350. A touch fast for his taste, but okay.

He would be shooting in three seconds.

Captain Arch Penney felt the heavy thud of a nearby grenade blast. Idly, he wondered how many grenades the pirates had brought along. Probably enough to murder hundreds of people.

Three minutes.

“Here come the jets.”

Penney risked a look. He saw only one, coming in fast, slanting down. It was coming from about ten degrees left of the bow and crossing over the extended centerline of the ship toward the starboard boats.

Even as he saw the jet, Penney realized it wasn’t going for the skiff nearest the ship, but one half a mile away.

He watched, mesmerized. The fighter came plunging down like a hawk.

The F/A-18 Hornet dipped low, perhaps a thousand feet, and began its pullout. The pirate boat disappeared in a cloud of sea spray as the audible buzz from the jet’s cannon reached him, seconds late.

“There’s a fighter over here, too,” someone called. “Hammered a boat.”

What would the skiff right by the ship do?

“Stick it to those balmy bastards,” another man yelled.

Mustafa al-Said was so intent on getting more RPGs into the Sultan’s bridge that he didn’t see the jet fighters at first. One of his men pointed … then he saw them. Saw one of the boats disappear under a hail of cannon shells. The jet was pulling out, climbing and turning for another pass.

Mustafa spun the wheel. The fighter pilot might not take the chance of shooting so close to the ship. Mustafa expertly brought his skiff to within ten feet of the speeding cruise ship. The sea between ship and boat was a river of foam.

The RPG man fired another grenade right into the bridge wing.

The explosion of the grenade smashed into the officers and sailors huddled on the deck of the bridge. The concussion momentarily stunned Arch Penney. He found himself sprawled on the deck. Blood. Everything was covered with a fine spray of blood. He looked around. Smoke … carnage … a severed arm lay nearby on the deck. Bodies all over. Harry Zopp was coming around, bleeding from the head. He met his gaze.

“Bloody hell,” said Arch Penney. He crawled to the engine controls and moved the handles to ALL STOP.

“Strike, Sea Wolf One Oh Five. The cruise ship seems to be slowing. There is a pirate skiff alongside.”

“Can you attack it?”

“Too close to the ship.”

But one boat wasn’t. Gerhart steadied up, checked his dive angle and pulled the pipper onto the boat. Closing … now! The radar altimeter deedled, he squeezed the trigger, the gun vibrated, then he was pulling.

He glanced back. Spray obscured the skiff. As it exited the cloud of water, he could see that the boat was losing way, that people were jumping into the sea.

The screws of the Sultan were no longer churning the ocean into foam. She was obviously decelerating. A pirate boat was alongside.

Dieter Gerhart turned back for a closer look.

“Gear, the bastards are climbing aboard.” That was Tom.

Gerhart got a glimpse of men going up the ropes hand over hand, assault rifles on slings on their backs.

Shit!

They had lost. The pirates were aboard! Two more boats were closing from astern. By the time the fighters got into shooting position, those two boats would be too close to the ship.

There wasn’t a damn thing two fighter jocks could do about it.

“Join on me, Tom. We’ll make a low pass, then go home.”

That is what they did. The two jets went over the Sultan just above the top of the radar mast at three hundred knots. Dieter Gerhart got a good look at two men climbing a rope up the ship’s side. He turned to the northeast, began climbing, and keyed his radio.

As he listened to Sea Wolf lead’s report, Admiral Toad Tarkington smote his thigh.

“Send a Flash message to Washington,” he ordered curtly. “Pirates just captured a cruise ship.”