Zombie Killers: Ice & Fire (15 page)

Chapter 5

The closer we got to Scapa Flo, the tenser Adam got. Being focused on our own backyard for so long, I had no idea what was going on in the outside world. Russia was a mess. The southern breadbaskets were overrun, while large parts of the population and military had escaped to the inhospitable North. Now they were starving, and looking for a safe place.

England was the closest safe place left. The Royal Navy had been at an all time low, old ships were being decommissioned while new ships were delayed because of cost overruns. Then the dead rose. Now the Royal Navy was responsible for keeping the rest of the world out while the Royal Army was fighting in Europe.

Visibility was low; it was a typical foggy day in the North Sea. We were all on the bridge, watching a radar blip move closer to us. The captain had already called the Royal Navy, and we were close enough to the Flo that they might be able to help us.

“Let’s go get ready, in case something bad happens” Adam said.

We filed down the ladder a few decks to our compartment, and pulled our MOLLE vests over our heads.

I grabbed the SAW, since my 9mm carbine wouldn’t do nearly as much good against the living as it did against the dead. It was quite a bit heavier than I was used to. I went to grab the ammo for it, only to find that all but one belt was empty. I looked over at William and Ethan, who magically had full magazines.

“What? We were running low.” William said, in defense of my scowl.

Ethan reminded me, “Do you think it’s easy for us to get 5.56mm these days?”

“Besides, you didn’t tell us what to pack, just that you needed us immediately.” William said, to seal their defense.

Adam added “If we don’t scare them off with the first belt, chances are we will be in trouble anyway.”

Just then the ships announcing system crackled to life. “Counter piracy team report to the main deck. Crew report to your assigned positions. Suspected pirate vessel still on approach. They are not answering our hails. Royal Navy has been notified.”

We arrived on deck, and were joined by the members of the ship’s crew who had volunteered to be a part of the counter piracy detail. Adam had trained the half dozen or so sailors during his previous voyages on this ship, and they were ready to go, each with a vest and FAL rifle. Adam was similarly armed.

We set up around the superstructure at the aft end of the ship. Everything forward was just cargo. The living spaces, engineering, and bridge were all at the stern of the ship. William was a level higher than the rest of us, with his scoped rifle. We set up pre-positioned pallets and steel plates around us, to provide protection from small arms. I mounted the SAW on a post one of the crew had welded for this exact purpose. My carbine was beside me if I needed it.

A black shape started to resolve out of the fog on our port side. It was many times smaller than the cargo ship. Trooper appeared next to us. He pointed his body at the ship like a greyhound at the starting gate.

Up on the bridge, the captain was alternating between trying to hail the other ship and pleading with the Royal Navy for help. As the approaching ship grew closer some of its features became visible. It was an ocean-going trawler; old, beat up, and rusty. People were running around on its deck. It was heading directly for us.

The deck under my feet began to shift as the captain turned us away from the pirates. Adam sprinted for the bridge. If we continued to turn away from them they would land at our stern where we were.

A few seconds later, and the big ship started to come around the other way, as Adam directed the helmsman to point our bow towards the smaller vessel. They were too nimble to hit, but hopefully they would attempt to board at the bow, away from us rather than near us.

The trawler was less than a thousand yards away. I squeezed the trigger and put a line of tracers into the water across its bow. The crew of the trawler was running around like ants, but they hadn’t opened fire yet. I fired a second burst across their bow again, with no response. They just kept bearing towards us.

“They can’t damage us, or they’ll never be able to sneak into England. They want to take the ship unharmed, radio the navy that the pirates fled, then smuggle themselves into the Flo, ” said Adam, who was back at my side.

I pointed the weapon at their pilot house and held down the trigger. A long string of tracers leapt out over the water and collided with the trawler’s superstructure, sparking as it hit metal and shattering glass as it went through port holes.

At the first sound of gunfire, Trooper, normally aggressive, yelped and scampered below with his tail between his legs. What kind of hunting dog doesn’t like gunfire?

The rest of the group joined in. Some of the ant-like creatures on their deck fell over as aimed shots from Adam and William dropped them. Others returned fire with their ubiquitous AKs. One of the cargo ship crew was exposed, standing to fire. He took a round in the chest and slumped over. Ethan stopped shooting long enough to crawl over and pronounce him dead.

With a grinding sound, the trawler collided off our port bow, and slid down the side of the tanker. It was temporarily obscured from our view and protected from our fire. We all hoped that somehow the collision had sunk it, but then we saw grappling hooks fly up and lock onto our ship’s railing.

“Reload!” shouted Adam. “Here they come!”

Chapter 6

They started to appear over our forward railing. I held fire, because the SAW was running low. William, from his higher vantage, was landing hits nearly three football fields away as heads popped above the railing. Some others joined but were not as effective. Most of us held our fire.

The pirates put up inaccurate cover fire as they boarded. But soon, they had numbers on their side. Groups began to dart forward, taking cover behind deck fixtures, cranes, and the odd shipping containers stowed around the deck. From these positions, they were able to put up more accurate volleys.

Within a short period, they had closed the distance, and were trying to cross the last fifty yards to our position, one level up in the superstructure. Ethan was bandaging a sailor’s shoulder wound, where an AK round had made an ugly hole, and immobilized the arm.

I opened fire with the SAW again, as the pirates made a big push to cross the no man’s land between their cover and the superstructure. A few bursts, and the slide locked open, signifying my belt was empty. I switched to my Berretta Storm CX-4 9mm carbine, since the range was becoming quite close.

Adam dropped his FAL and moved to cover the port ladder with a Spas-12 shotgun. The deep boom of the 12-gauge told me that the pirates had made it that far.

A sailor got up to cover the starboard ladder, but was shot through the head as soon as he moved. I turned to cover that side, got up, started to run, and immediately lost my footing in a pool of blood. I hit the deck with a disorienting smack. If you’ve never fallen on a ship, let me just tell you: you will break before the ship will.

As I propped myself on my elbows a pirate rounded the corner on the
level we were on. He began to level his gun at us, huddled behind our
barricade. My carbine had been jolted out of my hands when I fell. All
I could do was call out a warning.
Ethan reacted immediately and dove over top of his patient to protect
the sailor. Only then did he start to draw a weapon. The remaining
sailors were slow to react.
I knew I was a goner. I always assumed it would end like this, shot to
death by a pirate while lying in a pool of someone else’s blood, just like the gypsy woman said. I’d
like to say that my life passed before my eyes in an instant, or that
I saw a flash of light, or an angel, or something.
Instead, what I saw was William, plummeting from the deck above, shouting “I’m Spiderman!” The
pirate looked up just in time, like a rodent reacting to seeing a hawk’s shadow
descending over him. Then with a bone shattering crunch William landed
on the pirate and both of them landed in a heap on the deck.
William was able to incapacitate the dazed pirate, but a second
pirate rounded the corner with my cousin in his sights. This time Ethan fired first. He didn’t have much accuracy, lying on top of a
wounded sailor, but he was able to draw his pistol and level it in the
right general direction without hitting William.
The second pirate ducked back around the superstructure to avoid his
shots. I was finally able to regain my footing and move closer to
William, who was backpedaling away from the corner.
When the pirate began to aim his gun around the edge of the
superstructure, I was already there, with William behind me, his hand
pressed against my back. I grabbed the barrel of his AK-47 and pushed
it away from me as I rushed the corner, with William pushing from
behind. I lowered my shoulder, slammed into the pirate, and drove him
over the edge of the ladder, onto another pirate who was coming up. The
two of them collapsed backwards in a tangled heap. William shouldered
his AR, and quickly fired several shots from the top of the ladder into
the writhing mass until it stopped moving.
Repulsed from both ladders and unable to assault the bridge, the
pirates’ offensive lost all of its momentum. After firing a few more
covering shots, the survivors began to abandon their wounded and
retreat towards their ship.
With the ladder secured, William and I returned to Ethan and the rest
of the sailors. I was shocked to see that Adam had run down the ladder
he had been protecting, and was now crossing the deck towards the
retreating pirates. We decided we had better do the same thing, and followed him, to make
sure all the pirates were repulsed from our ship. We slammed fresh mags into our guns along
the way.
At the bow, we stopped, and Ethan drew his chop stick, a Ka-Bar clever
he kept on hand for quick amputations, to cut their boarding lines.
 

Before Ethan could start hacking the boarding lines away, Adam slung
his Spas over his shoulder, threw his leg over the railing, and grabbed
one of the knotted ropes, like he intended to descend the two stories
or so from the unladen cargo ship to the trawler.
 

Chapter 7
“What are you doing?” I asked confused.
“We have to take this ship out, or they will use it to try this again.
Next time, the ship may not be protected by an armed guard. What if
these people got loose in England?”

“Take a minute to think about this. It’s the Navy’s problem, not ours. We don’t know what’s down there.”
“If they were threatening to sneak into your country, you’d try to stop
‘em, mate,” he said, with an air of finality, before he slid down the
rope.
“God dammit,” I muttered, as I swung myself over the side, and realized for
the first time just how much the ship was rocking.
As we were climbing down, I suddenly remembered the historic precedent
for this. “You know, during World War I, the Allies would charge a
German trench across no man’s land, and get chewed up by the artillery
and machine guns. Then they would take lots of casualties and retreat.
The Germans would think there was no one left defending the Allied
trench and they would get up and charge, and be chewed up by the
artillery and machine guns, and retreat. Then the Allies would think
there was no one left defending the German trench and they would get
up and charge again.”
“That’s ok, mate, we won World War I,” came the response from the
bottom of the rope, where Adam had already cleared the main deck and was covering our descent.
One of the sailors was detailed to wait up top and make sure our
escape route remained open. The rest of us were alone on the pitching
deck of the trawler. We were the only people on deck. We moved quickly
to the superstructure and breached the watertight door without opposition.
Carefully, with Adam on point, we swept the pilot house. The survivors in
side
surrendered without a fight, and we zip tied their hands and feet,
and left them lying there.
From there, we went below to secure the engine room, but first, we had to sweep through the crew spaces. We broke into two man teams to sweep the cabins. I kicked in the first door. Immediately a shotgun blast impacted near where I was standing. I jumped back against the bulkhead outside the room.

“I wish I had a grenade.” I said.

“Focus on what you have, not on what you don’t have,” Adam said. “It’s an old special forces mantra.”
He then grabbed an empty magazine from my drop pouch, yelled “Grenade!”, and threw it into the compartment.

The empty metal stick clanked around, and we heard the sound of a person diving for cover.

Adam immediately breached and fired multiple shots into the person, who hid behind an upturned bed. By the time I followed him into the room, he was already bent over, picking up the magazine-turned-faux grenade. He handed it back to me as I entered. I stared at it dumbfounded for a minute, before dropping back in my dump pouch. Twenty round 9mm mags are hard to come by these days.

On the other side of the passageway, Ethan and William were running into problems of their own. As I exited the compartment I was searching, I saw them stack up to breach a room. Before William could kick the door, a pirate jumped out.

Ethan fired instantaneously, and, even though he dropped the target, the spent casing bounced off the wall and ricocheted back into the ejection port. No bullshit; I saw this with my own eyes: the spent brass ejected normally, hit the bulkhead he was pressed up against inches from the gun, and bounced back into the gun, stove piping, and jamming the gun. As impossible as this may sound, I have seen it happen. Luckily there were no other surprises while he messed with the charging handle to extricate his “magic bullet”.

We secured the noncombatants who had surrendered, mostly the elderly, women, and children, in the anchor windlass room at the bow, and continued our sweep and clear.

The only other episode of note as we cleared the ship happened in the engine room.

“Let’s place bets on what weapon the greasy mechanic will jump out and attack us with,” I said.

“How do you know there will be a greasy mechanic down there?” Adam said, as we stood at the top of the ladder.

“There’s always a greasy mechanic that pops out in places like this,” said Ethan. “Let’s bet twenty nine-millimeter rounds. I’m thinking it’s more than one guy down there, but the one who jumps out will be using a fire ax.”

“One guy with a socket wrench.” William said.

“How imaginative. I bet its two guys; one with a rubber mallet, and one with a knife,” I said.

“Ok I’ll play along; one guy with a gun,” Adam said after careful contemplation.

“What type of gun?” William asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ethan said. “It’s never a gun. Why would a greasy mechanic need a gun?”

Sure enough, as we moved through the machinery spaces, the stereotypical big greasy mechanic ducked around a boiler, and came at us with a monkey wrench. Ethan effortlessly raised the chopstick he already had in hand, and, in a vicious downward arc, swung it into the bad guy’s forehead. It imbedded with a “crathunk”.

In his best catchphrase voice, Ethan said, “Knife to meet you.”

William and I were of no more good after that. It took us a while to pull ourselves back together. The rest of the pirates must have been seriously put off by our uncontrollable laughter echoing through the ship, because they put up no more resistance.

“Pay up!” said William.

“Sorry mate, you said socket wrench, not monkey wrench,” said Adam.

“I was still closer than you,” William retorted.

I don’t think anyone ever paid up. About two hours later, a Royal Navy frigate showed up and took custody of the trawler and prisoners. They also offloaded the wounded from the cargo ship. I have no idea what they did with the prisoners. Of course, by the time the Navy arrived, we had already absconded with as much of the ammunition, food, and weapons and we could find, along with other supplies.