Deadly Coast (24 page)

Dugan bore down hard on the saw and his right arm ached with the effort, as the dull blade sank through the pipe with glacial slowness. The pipe finally parted with a snap, and Dugan lurched forward as the hacksaw slipped from his grasp and clattered in the bilge below.
Good riddance!
He moved to the nearest fire station.

He cut the fitting off the end of the hose with a knife from his backpack and dragged the hose to the severed diesel line. The hose slipped over the end of the pipe easily. It was a bit bigger than the pipe, and it might leak, but he prayed it would hold long enough. Five minutes later, the hose was clamped securely to the pipe with a half dozen stainless-steel hose clamps scavenged from the fishing boat.

Water dribbled from fire-system drain valve in a feeble stream, intermittently petering out then increasing with each roll of the ship. Close enough. Dugan shut the drain valve, lined up the other valves in his jury-rigged system, and started the diesel-oil transfer pump. The pump growled to life and the flat fire hose ballooned to a cylindrical shape as diesel gushed through it to fill the fire main.
So far, so good.
He rushed up a steep stairway to the engine control room.

The ballast control console was straightforward, and the mimic board allowed him to understand the system immediately. He started a single ballast pump, opened and closed several remotely operated valves, and then left the engine room to dash up the stairs and pick his way forward over the shifting silver carpet of the open deck. The ship took another bad roll, accompanied by the thunderous boom of the fishing boat against the side and a sound like a huge slot machine disgorging a jackpot, as coins spilled from the last intact pile to skitter across the deck.

He spotted the Russians on the starboard side, each with a cylinder on their shoulder, and worked his way across the pitching deck.

“Are the monitors—”

“Do not worry,
Dyed
,” Borgdanov said. “Ilya closed monitor valves.”

Dugan glanced at the sergeant and saw confirmation in the stain on his legs where diesel had splashed him.

“And I found cylinders,” Borgdanov said. “Thirty-seven in two cargo baskets near crane. These are the last two.”

Dugan nodded and fell in behind the Russians, just as the captive fishing boat banged against the hull again.

The Yemeni fishing boat Mukhtar had hijacked had seen better days when her previous—recently deceased—owner had acquired her a decade earlier. Maintenance since had been as needed, leaving her thinning hull a patchwork of steel of various thicknesses, held together by welds of indifferent quality. It was a miracle she had survived pounding against the stronger hull of the drillship as long as she had.

But even miracles have limits, and the repeated hammer blows took their toll. Steel bent and welds cracked, spreading through hull plating and frames as well. Water wept through the hull in a dozen places. Then the weeps became trickles; the trickles, streams; and the boat, heavy with water, moved more ponderously as it wallowed low in the water beside the drillship, straining on the lines that held it there.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Harardheere, Somalia

Ahmed squatted beside Diriyi’s lifeless body. The ripped throat, blood pool, and stench left no doubt the man was dead. He wasn’t surprised that he’d found Diriyi—Harardheere was spread out, but still easily covered on foot by a man fit enough to run at a steady pace. And Diriyi hadn’t been popular. The few people that had seen his tricked-out SUV pass were only too happy to share that information with Ahmed. That same SUV on the side of the road led Ahmed to the shed.

He was surprised, however, to find Diriyi dead and the woman missing, and that complicated things. Known now as a man of shifting loyalties, his alter ego, Gaal, was undoubtedly unpopular with the various pirate gangs that called Harardheere home. He’d no doubt that the same people so eager to point out Diriyi would be equally happy to point him out to anyone interested. His best option was to rescue the woman and call for extraction. There were two problems with that, of course—he couldn’t find the woman and he had no means to call anyone. Ahmed held the Glock in his right hand and began to search Diriyi’s pockets with his left. Diriyi’s cell phone would solve at least one of those problems.

The sound behind him was less than a whisper, but enough. He dived to the right as a bullet whistled past his ear. He landed on his shoulder and followed through in a tumbling roll, ending up with his Glock trained on—the woman!

“Don’t shoot!” Ahmed said. “I’m on your side. Sergeant Al Ahmed, US Army Special Forces.”

The woman’s own gun was trained on Ahmed’s forehead from less than five feet away, and it didn’t waver. “Pleased to meet you,” she said. “I’m Queen Elizabeth. Drop the gun! Now!”

Ahmed considered the situation. He couldn’t shoot the woman, so holding a gun on her was rather pointless. He bent, keeping both hands in sight, and laid the gun on the concrete floor.

“I’ve been undercover the whole time,” Ahmed said. “I helped the chief engineer and the others escape, and then I came after you.”

“Really?” the woman said. “Seems like the last thing I recall was you coming up to the captain’s quarters to help Toothless here stuff me in a duffel bag.”

“He zapped me with the stun gun too,” Ahmed said. “That’s why I couldn’t stop him from taking you.”

“I guess I missed that part, though I do remember you holding a gun to my head and pulling the trigger.”

“An empty gun,” Ahmed said.

“That would carry a bit more weight with me if we hadn’t both found out it was empty at the same time,” the woman said.

Ahmed shrugged. “I suspected. The terrorists disarmed me when I came aboard. They were unlikely to hand me a loaded gun before I proved my loyalty. Then Mukhtar turned away from me when he racked the slide to fake chambering a round, and when he did hand me the gun, it felt light, like the magazine was empty. And besides, if they planned to test me, I didn’t think they’d waste a high-value hostage like you. So I was pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?” she asked, her face reddening. “Did you say
PRETTY SURE
?”

Ahmed shrugged again. “It was a calculated risk.”

Her hand twitched and the gun barked. Ahmed’s hand flew to where his left earlobe had been.

“You stupid bitch!” he screamed. “You could’ve killed me!”

She stared at him with ice-cold eyes as he clutched his bleeding ear. “A calculated risk,” she replied. “And if I wanted to kill you, there’d be a hole between your eyes. But as you’ve probably figured out, I don’t believe your little fairy tale. That is, I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s a lie. That one percent is keeping you alive, so here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re who you say you are, you must have a contact. Someone who can convince me you’re legit. So you’re going to call them now and let me talk to them. Got it?”

“My phone was trashed when I went in the water,” Ahmed said. “I was about to take Diriyi’s when you shot at me.”

“I already took his phone.” She grimaced in obvious pain as she worked her left arm out of a makeshift sling and free of tape wrappings to dig in her front pocket. She produced a phone and held it out with a shaky left hand, all the while keeping him covered with the Glock in her right.

“Call whoever you need to,” she said, “but don’t say a word. I don’t want you warning anyone or giving away our position. You hand it back to me as soon as it starts ringing, and so help me God, if I hear as much as a peep out of you, you’ll get a bullet in the head. Is that clear?”

“Very clear,” Ahmed said, as he dialed.

A moment later he held the phone out, and the woman took it with her left hand and held it to her ear.

Arnett glared at Traitor and listened to the phone ring, her finger on the Glock’s trigger. She was about to hang up when a man answered, his accent distinctly American.

“482-5555,” he said.

“Who is this?” asked Arnett.

There was a long silence, then the voice asked, “Who’re you calling?”

“I’m calling anyone who can verify there’s a guy in Somalia pretending to be a pirate when he’s actually a sergeant in the US Army Special Forces,” Arnett said. “And you better talk fast, because I’m about to put a bullet in his head.”

There was a long pause. “Captain Arnett?” asked the voice.

Arnett’s heart jumped, but she caught herself. It could still be a trick. “That’s me,” she said. “Who’s this?”

“Agent Jesse Ward, Central Intelligence Agency, ma’am. And I must ask you, are you having a storm there?”

Storm? What was he talking about? Then she remembered.

“No, Agent Ward. I believe
good weather
are the words you’re waiting for.”

“They are indeed, Captain,” Ward replied. “I take it you’ve met Sergeant Ahmed. Please don’t shoot him. He’s one of my most valuable assets.”

Arnett realized she was still pointing the Glock at Ahmed and lowered it as Ward continued. “Hold one, ma’am. There’s someone I know wants to talk to you.”

Arnett listened as she heard connection noises, then a phone ringing.

“
Marie Floyd
, Captain Blake speaking.”

Relief washed over Arnett in waves, and for the first time in days, she believed she was going home.

Drillship Ocean Goliath
Arabian Sea

Dugan stood on the open deck and braced himself against the roll of the ship as he nodded to Borgdanov.

“All of them,” he said. “We need to get as much oxygen to the fire as possible.”

Borgdanov nodded back and opened fire, rounds from his assault rifle stitching holes in the thick shatterproof glass of the crew-lounge windows. He worked his way down the row, stopping to pop in a fresh magazine, and Dugan followed behind him, beating the remnants of the shattered glass out with a fire extinguisher. When they’d finished, Dugan moved to the two fire hoses stretched out on deck, and bent to double-check the nozzles. He’d opened both to
fog
position, and wrapped the levers with wire from his backpack to prevent accidental closure. Satisfied, he nodded to Borgdanov, grabbed one of the hoses, and fed it through a glassless window, nozzle first, as the Russian did the same with the second hose farther down the row of windows.

“I don’t know how much they’re going to dance around when we pressurize them, and we don’t them want popping out,” Dugan said, “so feed in plenty.”

Borgdanov nodded, as Dugan finished and duct-taped his own hose to the storm rail just below the ruined window. He used half a roll, wrapping the hose and rail repeatedly. Ugly but strong, at least strong enough to help prevent the hose from backing out of the broken window. He moved to Borgdanov’s hose and repeated the procedure, then looked out at the building seas. The ship had a perceptible port list now, as Dugan’s ballast adjustment began to manifest itself—perhaps a little too soon. He gave the ocean a last worried look, and hurried into the deckhouse with Borgdanov at his heels, fighting their way uphill as the ship took a roll.

They found the sergeant outside the crew lounge using the safety line to lash oxygen and acetylene cylinders to the passageway storm rail. Dugan looked into the open door of the crew lounge and nodded. Dead crewmen and pirates covered the deck, and trapped between the bodies were the gas cylinders. Scattered about the large room were cans of various shapes and sizes—paint thinner, alcohol, cooking oil, anything and everything flammable. Zigzagging across the room was a fire hose leading through the open door and arranged over the bodies. The nozzle at the end of the hose was wired shut and firmly secured to a table pedestal. Visible along the length of the hose were punctures Dugan had made with his knife. Not bad for a jury-rigged crematorium.

“I do not see why we need torch,
Dyed
,” Borgdanov said. “I think alcohol and other things are enough.”

Dugan shook his head. “All that stuff will burn fast. We need the diesel to keep feeding the fire, and diesel’s not like gasoline—it’s damned hard to get going. The torch is our insurance.” Dugan glanced over at the sergeant. “Looks like Ilya’s finished. Let’s get it done.”

Borgdanov nodded and spoke to the sergeant in Russian, as Dugan opened the valves on the oxygen and acetylene cylinders and plucked a friction striker from where it hung on a loop over one of the valves. The Russians moved up the passageway to the fire station that served the perforated fire hose.

Dugan stepped through the door and followed the oxygen and acetylene hoses down a narrow path through the bodies to the center of the room. The hoses terminated at a cutting torch taped to the leg of a coffee table inches away from a five-gallon can of cooking oil. Dugan squatted, opened the valves, and then struck a spark at the head of the torch. A flame flared to life against the silver side of the oil can. Dugan adjusted the valves on the torch to maximize the heat, dropped the striker, and raced from the room. He nodded down the passageway to Borgdanov, who opened the valve on the fire station a single turn, just enough to send diesel coursing through the hose to leak through the perforations over the pile of bodies. They fled the deckhouse.

“I think something is wrong,
Dyed
,” said Borgdanov five minutes later, as Dugan and the two Russians balanced on the pitching deck some distance from the broken windows of the lounge.

“Give it a minute more,” Dugan said. “When the cooking oil ignites, flames will spread to the rest of the more volatile stuff fast, then we’ll see result—”

They all flinched at a loud explosion, and a ball of flame rolled out the farthest of the broken windows of the crew lounge. In seconds, flames were licking out of all the windows.

“There we go,” Dugan said. “Time to add a little more fuel to the fire. Remember, open the valve wide.”

Borgdanov nodded and rushed to the far fire station, while Dugan manned the nearer one. He twisted the valve open and diesel rushed into the flat hose, inflating it like a thick white snake, and Dugan watched the bulge at the leading edge travel down the hose and through the broken window into the lounge. In moments, there was a loud
whomp
, as diesel misted from the fog nozzle and ignited in a violent burst, followed by another as the spray from the second nozzle ignited. Flames boiled from the windows, topped by smoke that rose in a thick black cloud, caught and ripped away by the increasingly violent wind.

The fire was roaring now, and Dugan had to once again shout to make himself heard through the suits and masks. “That should do it. Let’s get the hell off this thing.”

Dugan started aft along the pitching main deck, starting down the port side, then changing course to traverse to starboard. There was a definite port list now, with the vessel rolling more to port than starboard, and the layer of silver coins had started to shift across the open deck, leaving surer footing to starboard. Even as Dugan rushed aft, he knew something was wrong. When he reached the stern, he moved across the ship and looked down the port side.

He cursed as the two Russians joined him.

“What is wrong?” Borgdanov asked.

“I wanted to give the fire plenty of time to burn,” Dugan said. “So I set the ballast system up to slowly give her a port list. I figured that, being top-heavy, she’d capsize in an hour or so.”

Dugan pointed to the Yemeni fishing boat, awash to its main deck and tight against the side of the larger vessel, hanging off half a dozen thick mooring hawsers. “I didn’t figure on this. That friggin’ boat’s sinking, and she’s heavy enough to increase the list, at least until those mooring lines part. Now it’s a crapshoot.”

The Russian looked confused. “What means ‘crapshoot’?”

“It means we got to get the hell out of here. Now!” Dugan said, turning to look out at the increasingly violent sea. “Where the hell is Kwok?”

He swiveled his head, and a moment later, spotted the
Kyung Yang No. 173
in the distance, listing to starboard and headed away from the drillship. Dugan looked at Borgdanov and started to speak, but the Russian was already digging the radio from his backpack. His hands in the thick gloves were clumsy, but he pressed the radio to his hood near his ear and shouted through the facemask. After several attempts, he lowered the radio.

“Anisimov does not answer,” Borgdanov said. “I think is big problem.”

Dugan stared at the distant boat in disbelief. “Wonderful. The son of a bitch is abandoning us. Can it get any worse?”

The sergeant pointed into the distance, in the opposite direction from the
Kyung Yang No. 173
. Dugan saw a flash of white on the crest of a wave, and recognized it as a small craft headed their way, fast. As he watched, there were more flashes, until he’d counted eight, all undoubtedly loaded with pirates.