Countdown: The Liberators-ARC (21 page)

A quick lift and push and that body, too, went over the side to splash into the North Atlantic.

"Hold . . . up . . . a . . . minute . . . or five," Antoniewicz gasped into his radio.

"You okay, Eeyore?"

"Long . . . story. I'll . . . be. . . . okay."

It feels a little dirty to shoot someone who was trying to help. Oh, well.

It was a full five minutes before Antoniewicz felt able to continue forward in top form. Since he hadn't heard or seen sign of the Bastard he had reason to believe they'd understood and complied with the request for delay. While straining to regain his breath, he listened as best he was able for sounds from the superstructure. There seemed to be something like a party going on at the very bottom of the thing, just where it joined the lowest container deck. At least, the sound seemed like nothing else but a party. And, also, as near as he could tell from sounds, there were twenty-five or so partygoers in attendance.

Mmm . . . too many for the submachine gun. Especially if they've got their weapons to hand. I think five frags-fragmentation grenades-ought to do for a room the size of the superstructure, especially given the metal walls and the ricochets.

He flicked his Makarov on safe, then stuffed the silencer into his trousers. Unthinkingly, and perhaps somewhat illogically, he made sure the muzzle would, in the event of an accident, drive the bullet into his leg rather than his testicles. Then he walked to a spot just around the corner from the open hatch from which the party sounds emanated. Eeyore took from one of the pouches he carried two of the Russian hand grenades-RGOs-provided by Victor's cache.

He straightened the pins of each then, holding one in each hand with his thumbs over the spoons, he took the rings in the index fingers of the opposite hands. He pulled his hands apart, taking the rings with them. Walking to stand next to the hatch, Antoniewicz released the spoon held down by his right thumb, hearing the snap of the striker and cap. He began to count-"one thousand. . . . two thousand"-as he bent over and bowled the grenade into the room. "Three thousand." He flipped the grenade in his left hand into his right, releasing the spoon in the process. He almost immediately hurled the grenade at the far wall. One of the RGO's nicer features was that it had an impact detonation ability, which was armed about a second after releasing the spoon.

Both grenades went off within less than a quarter second of each other, shaking the walls and setting the partiers to screaming with shock and the agony of jagged wounds. In that enclosed space even the fragments that missed were likely to bounce off the steel walls until they buried themselves in something soft. By the time those went off, he had two more armed. These, too, he donated to the party, even while people screamed from the first salvo. Then he gripped the last one he intended to use, pulled the pin, and sailed it in through the opening.

Eeyore pulled the submachine gun from its position across his back and pushed the muzzle through the open hatchway. He used the steel wall for as much cover as it would provide. Only a few men were standing, and those seemed stunned. For the rest, Hmmm . . . fewer of them than I expected. He fired at them, in turn-brrrp . . . brrrp . . . brrrp . . . brrrp-until all went down dead or wounded. Most of them seemed as much offended as surprised. Given the nature of the ammunition he was using, it was a fairly safe bet that even the wounded would soon be dead. Frangible was some nasty shit.

"Come quick! Come quick! Come quick!" Eeyore shouted into the radio. "I'm heading to the bridge."

The exterior steps on the port side of the superstructure led halfway up before terminating at a landing. From the landing, a hatchway led inward. Men, about a half dozen of them, were pouring from the doors into the central hallway that ran the breadth of the superstructure. They jabbered excitedly, some of them loading rifles in the process.

Time for another grenade, Antoniewicz thought. He reached into the pouch, then pulled one grenade out, pulled the pin, released the spoon, and counted one second before tossing the thing inward and downward. It exploded before he could quite withdraw his arm. Eeyore gasped with the pain as at least one piece of hot metal penetrating the skin of his forearm, lodging in the muscle below.

"Motherfucker!"

He turned into the hatchway and ran down the corridor, firing two to three round bursts into each of the people therein. Their arms tended to flop around as they lost muscle control, even as the frangible bullets broke up inside their bodies. Halfway across was an opening. Upwards from that ran another set of ladders. Next to the base of those steps was what had to be the radio room.

Eeyore shot the crewman laying on the deck in the radio room once more, to make sure. The crewman was laying face down, feet toward the floor, as if he'd been racing for the radio room when the grenade went off.

The former SEAL changed magazines and fired enough rounds into the three radios as to be very certain they were dead. Then, with sounds of something like organization with a heavy admixture of anger growing below and outside, he raced up the central stairway to the bridge.

Antoniewicz reached the top just as one of the crew reached out in an attempt to close and dog the hatch. Eeyore fired at the crewman, a long burst of seven rounds, causing the man's chest to ripple and pulsate under the assault, even as the ammunition broke apart upon entering his chest cavity to expand outward and ruin all the organs inside. Eeyore stepped over the body and found another man inside, this one reaching for a rifle.

Antoniewicz aimed and pulled the trigger again, only to be rewarded with a very disappointing nothing. No time to reload, he threw the submachine gun at the crewman, causing the latter to duck behind the bridge's control station. As he was ducking, Eeyore launched himself across the deck, his right hand reaching for his knife. He found it, pulled it, and thrust it generally forward as the crewman re-emerged from his shelter, trying to line up his Kalashnikov.

Antoniewicz couldn't get the knife lined up in time. Instead, he collided with the crewman, knocking both of them to the deck and causing both to lose their grip on their weapons. They rolled over each other for a few turns, with the crewman emerging on top and reaching for Eeyore's throat. The former SEAL batted away that questing grip, and then drove his knee upward into the crewman's groin. The crewman's eyes widened, even as he gasped with the pain.

Putting both hands together to form a flesh and bone hammer, Eeyore batted the crewman on the side of his head, sending him flying off to the side. Eeyore caught a glimpse of his lost knife (he'd completely forgotten about the pistol for the moment) and lunged for it. His hand wrapped around the hilt just as the crewman decided that a little gonad agony was a small price to pay for retaining those gonads. The dripping wound on Antoniewicz's arm flared anew with pain when the crewman grasped his wrist and twisted.

Eeyore formed one hand into a fist and struck the crewman on the ear. Then he twisted his other wrist, pain be damned, and freed the knife. With one hand over his insulted ear and the other outthrust, the crewman begged, "La, min fadlak, la."

"I don't speak Arabic," Antoniewicz said as he feinted first for the crewman's face, then brought the knife down and around and, point first, stuck it into the crewman's stomach. Blood welled out and a scream escaped the crewman's throat. Eeyore ripped downward with the knife, then twisting inside the crewman's body, ripped upward again, effectively eviscerating the man. The scream tapered off into a moan. Then sound, except for that from some terminal thrashing, ceased.

Leaving the knife where it was, Eeyore stood and glanced around quickly. Now he remembered the pistol at his waist and drew it, but there was no one else to engage. He bent to pick up his submachine gun and reloaded it from one of the magazines in his vest. Taking a firing position to one side of the control panel, he placed his last grenade in front of him and called to the Bastard in a false southern accent, "Y'all come a-runnin', now, y'hear?"

If I could kill the lights the NVGs would give me a considerable advantage. He looked around the bridge for a main light switch or power switch for the entire ship. He found something, a button, and pushed it. The light duly went out on the bridge, except for some faintly glowing red emergency lights. A quick glance out the broad, side to side, windows that faced forward told him that only the running lights were showing on the ship, forward. Best I can do.

As Antoniewicz waited, as calmly as one could under the circumstances, for the enemy to make their move, he wondered, How the fuck did we get ourselves into this?.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Every normal man must be tempted

at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag,

and begin to slit throats.

-H. L. Mencken

D-106, 318 miles south of Reykjavik

The Bastard, skipping across the waves, showed no running lights whatsoever.

"I hear firing, skipper," announced Simmons at the helm.

"Fuck ‘hear,'" said Biggus. "You can see the motherfucking muzzle flashes." He lifted off his Russian NVGs. "Hell, you can see ‘em with bare eyes. Flank speed! Come alongside on the starboard. Morales!?"

"Chief!"

"Stand by on the port side gun."

"Aye, aye."

"Simmons," the chief said, "when we get in the Galloway's wake slow down to give Morales a reasonable chance to hit something. And us to hook the ladder to board."

"Aye, Chief. You still going in first?"

"Natch."

The sailor sighed. "Aye, Chief."

Eeyore felt something striking the steel deck upon which he lay, followed by muffled screams coming from below.

"Stupid bastards! Don't you realize that your own bullets will ricochet off the steel? And not stop until they hit something soft? Like you?"

There were more bodies now littering the bridge. From his prone position, it was hard to tell how many. But he thought he remembered at least six men going down. Antoniewicz still had one last grenade; he'd used the rest. He figured he'd have to use it, too, for the next rush.

And a bloody good thing you fucks don't have any, or haven't dug them out of storage if you do. Or . . . ah, shit.

In the grainy, greenish glow of his NVGs, Eeyore saw two sparking objects, approximately egg-shaped, he thought, sail up to bounce off the ceiling and then fall to the floor. He opened his mouth wide as he rolled left, back behind the control console. Then they went off in a great burst of light that immediately disappeared to be replaced by thick, dark smoke.

The console saved him from most of the shrapnel, barring what ricocheted off the other metal and found him on the rebound, but not from the concussion, which was bad enough to blow some of the windows out, pummel his eardrums, and to make him feel like he'd had every square inch of his body simultaneously pummeled with an infinity of Louisville Sluggers. To say he was stunned would have been an understatement.

But even stunned men can operate off of long-trained and conditioned autopilot. He rolled out to the right again, felt something dig into his chest, and fired a very badly aimed burst in the general direction of the ladders. He didn't know if he'd hit anything. And he couldn't hear if he had either. He rather doubted it, to the extent he was cognizant enough to doubt.

His hand released the submachine gun's grip and sought under his chest to clear it of the object pressing into him. The hand came to rest upon his last grenade.

"What the fuck? Why not?" he said, and didn't even really hear himself.

Antoniewicz grasped the grenade and rolled back behind the console. He tried sitting up to get his back against the thing but found that what that did to his head just wasn't worth it. Unsteadily he pulled the pin out and rolled back to his semi-exposed position. Quite certain that he wasn't up to throwing the thing, he slid it across the deck with as much force as he could muster. The spoon flipped off as he did.

The grenade slid for point two seconds until hitting a body from which it careened at a low angle. It then hit a dropped Kalashnikov at about the point five second mark. From the rifle it bounced, returning to approximately its previous course. After the passage of point seven seconds it hit the back wall behind the ladders leading to the bridge and bounced forward and down. It hit three steps and a couple of ankles, each about a tenth of a second apart. On the sixth step, which was about as far as the center of the assault party had reached, it had been over one point two seconds since spoon release.

Boom!

Morales began pressing the trigger of the Russian .51 caliber machine gun they'd mounted to the port side at exactly the same time Eeyore's grenade exploded. The grenade flash had the effects of illuminating a row of people ascending the ladders on the port side of the superstructure, and then causing Morales' NVGs to overload, which then left him completely in the dark even as the .51 began spitting out bullets. At the same time, the Bastard passed through the ship's wake and rocked violently. This threw off his aim so that, while he fired, he hit absolutely nothing smaller than the ship. And then the Bastard was past the point where the corner of the superstructure blocked off any possible target. He heard the shout, "Grenade!" Almost instantly, there was another explosion aboard the Galloway and Chief Thornton and two men were hooking a ladder over the Galloway's side and scrambling up.

No sense in sticking with the machine gun anymore. Morales let it go, took off his defunct NVGs, and picked up a night vision scoped Dragunov sniper's rifle. He leaned against the Bastard's port gun tub and, putting his eye to the scope, began to scan. It was a fairly useless activity, even at this short range, as the Bastard's rocking made the chance of a hit a matter of flukes.

***

Biggus Dickus liked the Russki grenades, in principle. It's quality control at the factory that gives me the willies. Thus, he didn't even contemplate trying to cook one off. With two of his men, Rogers-known as "Mary-Sue"-holding the bent ladder and Bland-called "Jalapeño," though he had not a trace of Mexican in his background-overwatching with his Russian SMG, the chief pulled the pin, kissed the grenade, released the spoon and tossed the thing onto Galloway's rear deck.