Deadly Coast (16 page)

Dugan watched the scene unfold on the bridge, and switched the second monitor to the pirate launch. The boat driver was staring toward the ship, aware something was wrong. The cat was out of the bag.

Erasto kept an eye on the ship and matched her movements expertly, as the vessel maintained her foolish evasive maneuvers. Didn’t they know his brothers were already aboard? He jerked at the sound of gunfire from the bridge. He saw two Somalis emerge and rush down the outside stairway. He couldn’t make out their features, but he recognized his cousin Korfa from his red shirt. The men were halfway down the ladder when a large soldier in a black uniform appeared above them, chasing them and loosing an occasional burst of gunfire as he came.

He maintained station, unsure what to do, and as he watched, the Somalis reached the main deck. He heard them scream his name just before they leaped over the starboard side, and he turned the Zodiac toward them, intent on rescue.

Dugan watched the pirates jump.
Idiots!

“Stop the engine!” he said, and the captain cranked furiously on the sound-powered phone to alert the chief engineer beside the engine.

But it wasn’t a finely tuned control system, and Dugan knew it was over before it started.
Pacific Endurance
was halfway through a hard turn to port when the pirates jumped, with her stern slewing to starboard. The pirates slipped under the stern and through the big propeller before the chief engineer even touched the engine control.

Erasto knew it was too late, even as his friends hit the water. Their heads surfaced less than a meter from the ship’s hull, and then it was moving over them and toward Erasto, a giant steel wall rushing forward with the combined speed of the ship’s swing added to the speed of his own boat. He shoved the outboard tiller hard to starboard, and the Zodiac veered to port, slamming the starboard side of the little craft hard against the advancing steel wall of the hull. For one terrible moment he thought the boat would turn over, but it was pushed along by the swinging hull, trapped by the force of the water, the bow of the little Zodiac pointing toward the stern of the ship.

The ship began to slow, loosening its hold on the Zodiac, and Erasto gave the outboard full throttle to shoot down the hull, under the ship’s stern and away from her. Astern of the ship, water stained red with his comrades blood still roiled from the slowing propeller. He circled far to starboard of the tanker, intent on getting back to the mother ship. He’d be back, and he wouldn’t be alone.

The steel deck was hot on the sergeant’s chest and stomach as he lay prone on the rear of the bridge wing, even through the body armor and uniform. He wished he’d had something to lie on. Denosovitch put his eye to the scope of the Dragunov sniper rifle and zeroed in on the passing pirate launch. It’d be easier now that the ship had stopped turning and was drifting through the calm water. The shooting platform grew more stable by the second.

He zeroed in on the outboard motor, leading a bit to compensate, and placed two shots into it in quick succession. He was rewarded by an almost-instant cessation of the noise drifting across the water and a thick smoke billowing out of the outboard, as the Zodiac drifted to a stop. Now to collect Mr. Pirate. He sighed as he saw the man dig in his pocket.

The sat-phone wasn’t quite to the pirate’s ear when the man’s head exploded.

The sergeant shrugged. Some
piraty
just had a death wish.

Chapter Sixteen

M/T Pacific Endurance
Arabian Sea

“We can outrun them,” Dugan said, as he peered into the radar.

“
Da
,” Borgdanov said. “The mother ship we can outrun. But her attack boats? How many does she have? This we do not know. And remember,
Dyed
, we just took out attack boat from this mother ship while she is in radar range.
This
mother ship will know we either have comrades aboard or that we killed them. She will trail us, I think, sending out attack boats to harass us, and call others to join the hunt. And if we, how you say … ziggy … ziggy …”

“Zigzag,” Dugan said.

“
Da
. Zigzag. If we zigzag to help hold off attack from chase boats, I think we cannot even outrun mother ship. To escape, we must first at least cripple them so we can break contact.”

“And just how do we do that?” Dugan asked.

“They will be cautious, but also confused. If we outrun her, she will send attack boats. But if we drift …” Borgdanov shrugged. “I think maybe she is curious and will come close enough for us to damage mother ship and attack boats. Then we run.”

“If that’s a mother ship, they’ve got a lot of men aboard. You’ve got six men.”

“Make that twelve,” said a voice behind him. Dugan turned to find Woody and his five-man crew just coming onto the bridge.

“Goddammit, Woody,” Dugan said. “What’re you doing here? I told you all to stay in the safe room.”

“Reckoned y’all could use a hand,” said Woody. “And if you think I’m gonna be stuck down in some hidey hole waiting for a bunch of friggin’ pirates to overrun the ship and capture my ass, you got another think coming, Dugan.”

“Look, Woody,” Dugan said, “you’re not trained—”

“Screw you, Dugan. I was in the Corps.” He nodded at the older man beside him. “And so was Dave here. He was in Hue while I was at Khe Sanh.” Woody glared at Dugan. “And Junior here was at Fallujah. Maybe you heard of ‘em all?” Woody kept his eyes on Dugan and spoke back over his shoulder. “How ‘bout you other boys?”

“Fallujah. Both times.”

“Nasiriyah.”

“Najaf.”

Woody smiled at Dugan. “Ole Ray Hanley likes us vets,” he said. “And I expect we got enough training to take on a buncha raggedy-ass pirates.”

“Maybe so,” Dugan said. “But you’d have to use the captured guns, and there’s not much ammo for them.”

Woody’s smile broadened. “Nice thing about those private jets, the security ain’t quite so tight. You didn’t think all those crates we brought aboard were tools, did you?” Woody extended his arm toward Junior West, who produced an M-4 carbine from behind his back and handed it to Woody.

Dugan opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He turned to Borgdanov. “What do you say, Major?”

The Russian stared at the Americans, then nodded, looking straight at Woody. “I think is good thing, so long as you understand there can be but one leader. You agree to follow my orders?”

Woody nodded back. “I reckon I can live with that. Provided you’re open to a suggestion from an old sergeant now and again.”

Dugan stood on the starboard bridge wing of the drifting
Pacific Endurance
, clad in one of the captain’s extra uniform shirts with four-stripe epaulettes, with his hands raised in the universal sign of surrender, watching the approaching mother ship. Of course,
ship
was a bit of a misnomer. She looked to be a fishing boat, about eighty feet long, hard-used and rust-streaked. The name
Kyung Yang No. 173
on her battered bow confirmed her to be Korean—no doubt hijacked and pressed into service by the pirates. But the most prominent feature of the approaching vessel was not hardware but humans.

“Christ!” Dugan said under his breath. “She’s crawling with friggin’ pirates! There must be fifty of them.”

“Weapons?” asked Borgdanov from where he crouched out of sight behind the wind dodger.

“Assault rifles. Some RPGs. I count six—no, seven RPGs. Nothing heavier.”

“Boats?” asked the Russian.

“Three,” Dugan said. “All rigid inflatables. Two towed along their starboard side and one on the aft deck. So far, so good. No one in the boats. Looks like they’re going to check us out from the mother ship before they send anyone over.”

“That is good,” said Borgdanov. “How are they approaching?”

“They’re coming alongside with their starboard side to ours and their bow pointed at our stern,” Dugan said. “The boat on deck will be below you and to your left when you stand where I am now. You should have a clear shot at it, leaving the other two for your guys.”

“What about the others?”

Dugan looked down the length of the main deck. “They’re ready,” he said.

Borgdanov’s black-clad Russians were all hidden from sight in the pump room or behind machinery, but Woody’s men were hidden in plain sight. Four were sprawled on the deck from the stern to the midship manifold, apparent victims of the pirate attack. Woody and Junior were draped across the rail, as if they’d been killed trying to repel boarders. Liberal use of blood from the pirate slain in the stairwell completed the illusion. Each of the ‘victims’ was within a few steps of the cover of a mooring winch or tank hatch, where their M-4 assault rifles waited. The theory was that with the ship dead in the water, littered with bodies, and the captain on the bridge making an obvious gesture of surrender, the pirates would be less suspicious. Dugan looked back toward the approaching vessel. That was the theory. He sure as hell hoped it would work.

“Remember,
Dyed
,” said Borgdanov’s voice below him, “the closer they come, the better. They must be within fifty meters for me to have the best chance to take out the boat with the RPG. My shot will also be signal for others to open fire.”

“How could I forget?” Dugan said out of the side of his mouth. “That’s about the tenth time you’ve told me.”

Borgdanov said nothing, and Dugan watched the pirate approach at dead slow. The boat pulled even with him, a bit beyond Borgdanov’s specified fifty meters, and Dugan saw the water roil at the stern of the boat as she reversed engine to stop her forward motion.

“We got a couple of little problems,” said Dugan, trying to keep his mouth from moving.

“What problems?” asked the Russian.

“They’re a bit farther away than fifty meters, but I figure we have to take what we can get. The bigger problem is, about twenty of the assholes have me in their sights and look like they’d really like to pull their triggers.”

“Just drop straight to the deck very fast. You will be out of sight before they can react.”

“I’m not worried about
me
, genius. What happens when you pop up in the same exact spot seconds later? They’ll blow you away in a heartbeat. We should’ve thought this through a little more.”

“Where are my men?” yelled a pirate across the gap.

Oops!
Dugan hadn’t figured on a speaking part.

“Como?” he yelled back. “No hablo Ingles.”

Even over the distance, Dugan could read the confused body language of the head pirate as he conferred with the man next to him.

“Look,” Dugan said out of the side of his mouth. “I’m going to drop, then try to draw their fire away. Don’t pop up until you hear them shooting at me. Got it?”

Silence.

“God damn it, Borgdanov. Got it?”

“
Da
, but be careful,
Dyed
,” the Russian said.

Dugan dropped straight down to the deck, out of sight of the pirates in their lower position. He heard indignant shouts, and a hail of automatic fire filled the area where he’d previously stood, the bullets smashing into the thick glass of the side bridge windows behind him. He crawled across the deck on elbows and knees, the hot steel burning his unprotected forearms as the anti-skid surface scraped his elbows. He stopped fifteen feet from the rear of the wheelhouse and got into a runner’s starting stance, higher than he was before but still low enough to be out of the line of sight of the pirates in the lower vessel. He counted to three and then bolted upright, his upper body in full view of the pirates, covering the distance to the back of the wheelhouse in four long strides. He slipped out of sight around the corner of the wheelhouse as bullets slammed into the structure where he’d been, whining off into the distance. He leaned back against the wheelhouse bulkhead, his heart pounding, as the heard the explosion of the major’s RPG. Then all hell broke loose.

Borgdanov was up as soon as Dugan disappeared from sight around the corner of the wheelhouse. He found his target exactly where Dugan had said it would be, and fired the RPG as he heard cries of alarm from the
piraty
that spotted him. Even without looking, he saw them in his mind’s eye turning their weapons toward him, and he dropped out of sight just before a tsunami of automatic fire engulfed the bridge of
Pacific Endurance
, the din magnified as the hail of fire smashed the side windows of the bridge or ricocheted off steel bulkheads. He heard two more explosions, distinct even in the cacophony of noise, and crawled on his stomach to peek down over the edge of the deck. There was nothing but smoking debris where the two launches had previously floated alongside the pirate vessel, proof his men’s RPGs had been successful as well.

There was bedlam on the pirate ship as the surprised
piraty
fell from covering fire laid down by his remaining men and the Americans. The
piraty
dived for cover and responded with wild, undisciplined fire at the ship itself, as if they thought they could sink the huge vessel with small-arms fire. Then he saw a man rise with an RPG, and turned and crawled for all he was worth away from his former firing position. He had no doubt where that RPG would be aimed.

Woody hung over the rail, playing possum with one eye open. As soon as Borgdanov’s RPG took out the boat on the aft deck of the pirate vessel, he bolted from the rail.

“Cover,” he yelled to Junior. “Pass it on!”

On the pirate ship all eyes were on
Pacific Endurance
’s bridge, and the Americans were under cover and armed in seconds, well before any of the pirates noticed. Woody yelled for his men to lay down covering fire as two more Russians leaped from their hiding places with RPGs to take out the boats tied to the mother ship.

He watched as the raggedy-ass pirates scrambled for cover, some dropping along the way. Their return fire, when it came, was furious but inaccurate. Their AKs weren’t much in the accuracy department to begin with, and the dumbasses were keeping them on full automatic, pretty much making hitting anything a matter of luck. But even dumbasses can get lucky, Woody reminded himself, and glanced along the deck to make sure all his boys were staying under cover.

When he glanced back, he saw a pirate rising with an RPG hit by at least two rounds, but not before he fired his weapon. Woody flinched as the starboard bridge wing was enveloped in an explosion, and hoped no one was on the receiving end.

“Take out the RPGs!” Woody shouted, and the order was relayed from man to man.

The next pirate that tried to fire was hit before he could aim, but the rocket leaped across the distance between the two vessels and slammed into the hull of
Pacific Endurance
to explode in a fireball, well above the waterline. Another pirate died before he even raised the tube of the weapon, and taking note, the four remaining RPG men fired from cover without aiming, in the general direction of
Pacific Endurance
. Two rockets flew over the ship, missing her completely, as one obliterated the starboard lifeboat. But in keeping with Woody’s observation that even dumbasses get lucky, the fourth slammed into the hull at the waterline, in way of the aft-peak tank.

The captain sat at the makeshift control console in the safe room jury-rigged in the aft-peak tank, feeling neither in control or safe as he’d watched the pirate vessel approach via the feed from the starboard-bridge-wing camera. His functions were to be ready to pass engine orders to the chief engineer at the local controls of the main engine and to steer the ship away from the pirate vessel when the time came.

Well, at least he could see what was going on. The pirate vessel moved alongside and stopped. He saw the pirates pointing and shooting and the boat on the deck of the pirate ship disappear in a fire ball just before a rocket leaped from the pirate vessel and seemed, for an instant, to be coming straight at him in the camera. The monitor flashed black at the same time he felt, rather than heard, a terrific explosion high above him. He cycled the feed through all the rest of the cameras and confirmed them operable. He was blind on the starboard side, which, of course, was where he needed to see.

There was another terrific concussion forward of him—how far forward he couldn’t tell—and then something struck the ship’s side below him to starboard. The hull rang with the impact, and it was like being inside a giant bell. The concussion lifted him from his chair and unseated the rest of the noncombatants from their benches, throwing them all to the deck in a jumble of tangled bodies and limbs. The temporary lights blinked out and the space filled with smoke and steam.

The captain struggled to his feet in the darkness, shaking his head in an attempt to clear the ringing in his ears. As his hearing returned, he heard the sound of rushing water in the tank below him.

“Anybody hurt?” he called into the darkness, as here and there a flashlight winked on. Scattered voices responded, confirming no serious injuries.

“I have to stay at the console,” he said to the chief mate. “Count heads and get everyone into the engine room, then come back and go down to see how much water we’re taking on.”

The light blinked on the sound-powered phone.

“Everybody OK?” Dugan asked before the captain could speak.

“No one’s hurt,” the captain said, attempting to cycle through the camera feeds as he talked. “But we got no lights and they blew a hole in the hull at or below the waterline. I can hear water coming in. I don’t know how bad. We’ll check it.”