Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

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.

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.

No answer.

Toad tried one more time, got no answer and passed the instrument to Ops. “Call them once a minute.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

He used the Navy Red voice frequency to talk to Richard Ward ’s captain.

Five minutes later Ward crept up alongside Sultan, to about a hundred feet, making three knots, just enough to allow Ward to answer her helm. She stopped her engines and drifted to a halt alongside the cruise ship. Her deck was lined with armed marines. High in the superstructure, as high as they could get, snipers lying on their bellies focused their scopes on the pirates they could see. A quarter mile away on both sides Ospreys loaded with marines circled like vultures.

Richard Ward played her searchlights on the deck of Sultan and on her rows of balcony windows. Faces appeared, people came out. A few waved. Most just stood looking.

* * *

Mustafa al-Said left the three passengers on the bridge with four of his men. One of them put a rifle to the head of a passenger and led him out onto the wing of the bridge so the crew of Richard Ward could see him. He merely stood there with his hostage.

Mustafa marched Captain Arch Penney aft and down. “The engine room,” he ordered grimly.

In the forward engine room two pirates were watching two engineers assess the damage. A dead pirate lay on the deck. He had bled a good bit before he died, and the red puddle was turning brown. It was also getting sticky where people had stepped in it. Still, no one touched the body.

Ignoring the dead man as best he could, Penney inspected the electrical distribution bus that sent power to the four propeller pods. It was obliterated beyond repair. The diesels were idling, turning generators, but without electrical buses to distribute the power to the engine pods, Sultan was not going anywhere.

“How long will it take to wire around these smashed buses?” Penney asked the chief engineer as he surveyed the damage. “Put power directly to the two aft pods?”

“Five or six hours.” The man shrugged.

The engineer straightened and wiped his hands on a waste rag. He never even looked at Mustafa. “We can try, sir. But it’s damaged, as you can see.”

“Do your best, Derek,” Arch Penney said. He faced Mustafa. “Seen enough?”

“So the ship cannot move?”

“That is correct.”

“Perhaps I shoot someone. Will it be able to move then?”

“Not unless you can fix it yourself.”

Mustafa pointed his rifle at one of the engineers and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through the man’s neck; bloody tissue sprayed out his back. Down he went, probably dead, beside the body of a pirate. The body twitched, moving as muscles contracted involuntarily, and Arch Penney got a glimpse of the man’s eyes, full of fear. Then they relaxed and focused on infinity. He was dead.

“You have two hours, Captain. Then I start shooting more people. I shoot someone every five minutes until the ship moves.”

The fury welled up in Arch, rose like the tide. The dead man was Jerry Robinson, from New Zealand. He saw Jerry’s wife’s face in his mind’s eye, hysterical.

Arch closed his eyes, tried to control his breathing. When he opened them, he focused on the chief engineer, who was fixated upon Jerry’s corpse. Arch reached for the man and turned him by pulling on his shoulder until he was facing the captain.

“Wire the generators to one pod. Just one. We’ll move on that while you work on the second one.”

The man’s eyes flicked to Mustafa, then back. He nodded.

Arch Penney headed for the ladder leading out of the engineering spaces. Mustafa stood for a second, watching his back, then trailed after him.

* * *

Benny and Sarah Cohen stood at the door to their balcony looking at Richard Ward lying there in the gentle sea. Swells were negligible; there was essentially no wind. The gray warship seemed immobile, as if she were fixed to a pier.