Pirate Alley: A Novel (12 page)

If the
Sultan
’s engines were disabled, the pirates might think their position was tactically hopeless. Or they might not.

God damn Washington!

Toad left the flag bridge and hustled down the ladders to the tactical flag spaces.

*   *   *

Angel Cordova made his way upward toward the
Sultan
’s bridge. He heard two pirates in the stairwell above him talking, so he checked his silenced submachine gun and eased upward. He saw their legs before he saw their upper bodies. Took careful aim at the legs. Fired a six-shot burst and both men fell, screaming. As they hit the deck he fired a squirt into each head. Blood and brains flew everywhere.

Cordova continued to climb. He had reached the pool deck when he saw another man with a weapon lounging against a wall. Leaning on it.

A black-clad ghost, Cordova pulled his knife, glided a step forward, then another. Grabbed a handful of hair, pulled the head back and cut the man’s throat with one swipe. Blood spurted forward and the body collapsed. The weapon fell on the deck.

Amazingly, the butterflies in Cordova’s gut were gone. He reached, snaked the AK back into the shadows, then tossed it over the rail. It spun once and fell into the blackness.

“Bravo is trying to get into the engine room.”

He merely clicked his mike twice in reply.

From where he sat he could see the machine gun mounted across the pool on the deck above. Saw at least twenty people huddled in deck chairs. They looked cold. Well, the temp was in the fifties and they weren’t wearing coats. Some of them had deck towels wrapped around them.

There should be two machine-gun nests above him. Cordova faded back through the door and started up the staircase.

*   *   *

Mustafa al-Said left the bridge and walked aft. The bridge was on the pool deck. He stepped out of the swinging doors, glanced at the people huddled in the deck chairs and looked aft at the machine guns protruding from the corners of the deck above.

The ship’s lights were still on. He wondered about that. Should he turn them off? If the Americans came over, would darkness help or hurt them?

Mustafa decided to leave the lights on. They would help the machine-gun crews see helicopters, and give the Americans a good look at the hostages around the pool.

That decision made, he began a circuit of the pool, checking the men on the corners. Less than a minute later, he found the man with his throat cut, lying in an extraordinary pool of blood.

For a moment he thought perhaps a passenger had attacked the man, but when he saw the head had been almost severed from the body with one vicious swipe of a knife, saw the white of bone amid the red gore, he forgot about passengers. This was the work of a trained killer. Americans were aboard!

Mustafa fired a burst from his weapon over the rail. The sound was flat, but he saw his men on deck looking his way. He gestured and two men came running.

One look was enough.

A few tense words … then the command, “Find them. Quickly.”

*   *   *

Angel Cordova was behind the two-man machine-gun crew when he heard the burst. The crew moved forward, looked down, trying to see.

Cordova fired two quick silenced three-shot bursts. They weren’t exactly silent, just guttural coughs. One man slumped down where he was, and the other fell across the machine gun, which was on a tripod. The barrel of the gun moved upward at a crazy angle.

Almost instantly, a burst of slugs from somewhere smashed into the overhead. Someone on the pool deck below was shooting.

Cordova fell backward and crawled out of the area, headed across the foyer in front of the elevators for the second machine gun on the starboard side.

A man stepped out, saw him and swung his AK.

The SEAL was quicker. His burst hit the man in the stomach, and the man triggered his assault rifle. The long burst hammered at the floor, then the ceiling as he fell. The noise filled the stairwell.

*   *   *

Petty Officer First Class Buster Imboden was belowdecks, going for the hatch that led below for the engine rooms. His team of four men followed him, but not too close. They were spread out so a burst that felled one man wouldn’t get them all. The passageway was lined with doors, most of which were standing open. They led to four-man bunkrooms. These were crew quarters, and many of the off-duty crewmen and -women looked at the men wearing black wet suits and carrying weapons with open curiosity. Several stuck their heads through the door, but the SEALs motioned them back into their bunkrooms.

The hatch was open, with lights shining up the trunk. Buster took a look, signaled to the men behind him and took a deep breath. There was only one way down, and pirates would be waiting. He could hear them talking.

“Alpha has run into problems. Alpha Two, get behind that forward machine gun and take them out.” While the transmission button was keyed, Imboden could hear bursts of AK-47 fire.

Imboden glanced at his men, then slung his weapon around his neck so it would be easily accessible, stepped on the ladder and started down quickly. At the bottom, a door led onto the engine room catwalk. He opened the door and a hatful of bullets stitched him across the abdomen, missing his backbone but puncturing both kidneys, his liver and his intestines. He fell face forward on the catwalk.

Bravo Two, Petty Officer Second Class Neil Irons, didn’t hesitate. He pulled a grenade from his vest and pulled the pin. Went down the ladder to the door, released the lever, counted one potato, two potato and shoved the door open with his left hand while he tossed the grenade aft as far as he could.

Bullets spanged off the door, which had automatically started to close. Then the grenade exploded.

Irons led Bravo Team through the door, guns burping out bullets.

Imboden was sprawled on his stomach. He had his head up and was firing his weapon.

The SEALs coming through the doorway ran by him shooting at everything they saw. That turned out to be two pirates, one of whom was already wounded by the grenade blast. The other went down under a burst of submachine-gun fire.

Leaving a man to watch the hatches, Irons ran on as he keyed his mike. “Bravo One’s hit.”

The attackers were in a large engine room that was two decks high. Running aft, Irons saw the control panel. Two of the ship’s engineers were huddled on the deck in front of the panel while another pirate attempted to hide behind it.

The Somali shouted something. Now he threw out his weapon as the SEALs ran at him. As he stepped out from behind the panel with his hands up, Irons shot him.

The other team members jerked the engineers off the deck and herded them toward the catwalk ladder and the door to the upper decks while Irons surveyed the panel and the engines. Then they ran for the watertight hatch that led to the aft engine room.

The engines were what Irons expected, medium-speed four-stroke diesels. There were two of them in this engine room and two in the aft engine room. The diesels turned generators that supplied the power to the four propeller pods under the ship. Any engine could be shut down for maintenance while the others powered the pods.

The propeller pods under the ship were controlled from the bridge, Irons knew, but all the control wires went through this panel. He removed a preprepared plastique explosive charge from his backpack, armed it and wedged it behind the panel. Another satchel charge went on the front of the panel.

Irons set the timers for ten seconds, hit the arming switches and ran to get behind one of the diesels. Two small explosions, almost simultaneous but not quite.

After a last look around, Irons led his two men back to the place they had left their team leader, Imboden. The man seemed to be still alive. Alive or dead, he was going with Irons and the other men.

They picked him up and opened the door to the ladder leading upward. Someone was trying to get into this space from the aft engine room. A burst of submachine gun fire dissuaded him.

Carrying and shoving Imboden, the men started up the forward ladderwell toward the fourth deck. They heard the explosions of the satchel charges. The lights went out. Seconds later low-wattage emergency lights illuminated.

Imboden was badly hit. The men paused in the fourth-deck passageway to bandage him up as well as they could to stop the bleeding, gave him a shot of morphine, then headed up the stairs toward the fifth deck and the sponson where they had boarded.

One pirate came running down the passageway and was taken out by bursts from two submachine guns, which hammered him to the deck. His weapon skittered along the linoleum to a stop.

“Bravo got the control panel and is egressing with one casualty.”

“Roger that,” Cordova replied.

As they exited to the sponson, two pirates opened fire from behind a davit. They had guessed how the intruders had boarded and were there waiting.

Two of Irons’ men threw grenades, and after they exploded, the SEALS went over the side, jumping toward the black ocean below. Two of them had Imboden firmly grasped between them as they went over.

*   *   *

Mustafa al-Said ran to the people huddled around the pool on deck chairs. The emergency lights were just enough to see with. He gestured to the first five he saw with the barrel of his assault rifle, shouting, “Get up. Get up. Go forward.”

When one man didn’t go quickly enough, Mustafa shot him. A woman screamed and he shot her. The other three ran ahead of him. He herded them forward toward the bridge.

Alpha One, Lieutenant Angel Cordova, saw the murders by the pool. The pirates would kill everyone if this went on. He aimed his submachine gun at Mustafa, but he didn’t shoot. The hostages would probably also be hit. Oh, God! Still, if Mustafa fired again, Cordova intended to pull the trigger. He didn’t.

“Alpha
and
Bravo egress. Alpha and Bravo egress.”

Bullets were spanging around Cordova from the forward machine gun as he ran for the rail. Two of his men behind him opened fire, giving him cover. He rolled behind a stanchion and fired a burst at the machine gun. It fell silent.

“Over the side,” he roared into his mike.

Two men ran past and vaulted the rail.

He saw two men going over the rail on the far side of the deck, so he didn’t hesitate. Angel Cordova gathered himself, ran two steps and leaped for the rail. Machine-gun bullets followed him. One of them hit him in the leg as he went over.

*   *   *

“
Sultan
is slowing, sir,” one of the radar operators reported to Admiral Tarkington.

He could see that. The computer symbol was showing three knots.

“Her engines have stopped, sir.” That would be a sonar report.

“Let’s get in there and pick up those SEALs,” Toad snapped. Each of the SEALs wore saltwater-activated beacons. They were expert swimmers, but at least one man was wounded.

“Launch the alert Ospreys,” Toad ordered. He had three birds ready to go. Two were to pick up SEALs, and the third was to cover them as a gunship. The Osprey could hover like a chopper, and the marine versions carried a 20 mm cannon in the left sponson. Toad had the covering Osprey crew briefed. If the pirates started shooting hostages, they were to take them out with the cannon. Ditto if they shot at the Ospreys.

He watched on the flight deck monitor as the three Ospreys lifted off.

Just in case, Toad had a destroyer going after the SEALs, too. Airplanes could develop mechanical problems or be shot down. There wasn’t much pirates could do to hurt a destroyer.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

In the false half-light before dawn,
Sultan of the Seas
lay lifeless on the surface of the ocean, resembling nothing so much as a large dead whale. DIW, the sailors said, “dead in the water.” Her screws were still, and her dim emergency lighting barely outlined her superstructure amid the gloom.

Ospreys with searchlights ablaze picked up the SEALs in the ocean, strung out along the course the ship had traveled. The nearest was almost a thousand yards from where the ship had drifted to a halt. USS
Richard Ward,
a destroyer with searchlights brilliantly lit, crept among the men being drawn from the sea in horse collars.

“One casualty,” one of the Osprey pilots reported. “First Class Imboden. Dead when we pulled him out.”

A few minutes later another Osprey reported, “Got a Lieutenant Cordova with a gunshot wound in the left calf. It’s bleeding, but the corpsman thinks he’ll make it okay. We’re inbound to the ship now.”

“Roger. Switch to Tower.”

Two mike clicks.

On his monitor in Flag Ops, Admiral Tarkington watched the Osprey settle on the bow and four stretcher bearers run for it. In less than half a minute they were trotting toward the island carrying the stretcher with the man on it wrapped in a blanket.

Dawn began to arrive. Fifteen minutes after the Osprey delivered Lieutenant Cordova, the
Sultan
was visible on the monitor as a ship, not just a collection of dim lights. She wasn’t moving.

Colonel Max Zakhem delivered the news. “Mr. Cordova never got to the bridge. Bravo Team sabotaged the engine room control panel. One of the pirates started shooting passengers by the pool. Cordova thought any further attempt to gain the bridge would result in a bloodbath of the hostages.”

The admiral merely nodded. Cordova was the man on the spot, and he made the best decision he could when he decided to get off the ship after the engineering control panel was sabotaged. All in all, Cordova and his men accomplished a lot. More than Tarkington expected, actually.

“Draft a sitrep to everyone in the chain of command,” Toad said to his chief of staff, Flip Haducek. “Let me see it before you send it.”

Haducek disappeared to prepare the situation report.

Toad spoke to the flag ops officer, and a few minutes later was handed a radiotelephone. He put it to his ear and keyed the mike. “
Sultan of the Seas
, this is
Chosin Reservoir
on Guard, over.” Guard was the international emergency frequency, 121.5 megacycles.