Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

I just nodded. Grafton was a gambler with absolutely no nerves. He could clean out Las Vegas.

“We have to check out Ragnar’s hive,” he muttered.

I nodded.

Grafton keyed the transmit button on his belt and spoke into the headset mike. “Red Leader,” Jake Grafton said. “This is Team Leader. Light them up.”

“Aye aye, sir. Blue Leader, anytime you are ready.”

I heard the words in my headset. Then I saw more muzzle flashes from the Sultan . A heavy machine gun sprayed the side of the hotel. I could see the sparkles of glass cascading down, hear the smacks as.50 caliber bullets tore into the side of the building, hear the ripping bursts carrying over the water.

For a second I thought of Nora Neidlinger, who was in that building, but then I pushed her out of my mind. She elected to stay … that was her choice.

* * *

By some miracle, Ricardo’s cameraman had his camera running and the feed going to the satellite. He was standing in the door of the shack, Ricardo right beside him still on the satellite telephone, talking excitedly about what he could see.

The cameraman aimed his camera at Ragnar’s building, scanned the pickups. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was luck. Whichever, he caught everything that happened in the next thirty seconds.

* * *

As the.50 caliber machine gun opened up, Bullet Bob Quinn settled on a machine gunner in the back of one of the pickups. The lights of the hotel were behind him, limning him. He was a nice target. The ship’s movement brought the crosshairs onto him, and Quinn pulled the trigger. The recoil made him disappear.

“Got him,” the spotter said. “Try the gunner on the truck to the left.” Quinn shifted his aim.

Then an RPG round shot toward Sultan trailing a streak of fire, the rocket exhaust. Simultaneously the machine guns in one of the pickups opened up on the Sultan . It got off two bursts before the fifty chewed into it. Pieces flew, and the fuel tank exploded. Two other technicals got under way, only to be hit by automatic weapons fire that seemed to be coming from the beach. The last one started moving … and was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. It too exploded and began burning brightly. A man with his clothes on fire managed to bail out and run about ten feet before he collapsed. The barrel of the machine gun in the bed pointed at Mars, up there somewhere in the night. Flames and flashes lit up the plaza as machine-gun ammo and RPG warheads in the beds of the trucks cooked off. It looked as if a string of large firecrackers was popping.

All four pickups had been destroyed in about fifteen seconds.

“Hellfire inbound.” That was the voice of the controller aboard the flagship. The drones were shooting.

The first Hellfire missile exploded on the right front corner of the roof, a bull’s-eye on the machine-gun nest. Two seconds apart, three other missiles impacted.

Through his scope, Quinn could see that the guns were gone, the sandbags lying about haphazardly. No one moved. No doubt they were all dead.

His spotter called a target, a man in the door of a house to the right, aiming an RPG-7 launcher. Bullet Bob fired first, and the RPG went soaring into the night sky. The rocket exhaust must have ignited the house, because it burst into flame.

* * *

“Go,” Grafton said and slapped me on the back.

“Okay.” I started walking into the darkness toward Eyl. The Israelis were right behind me. I keyed my mike. “Red Leader, this is Carmellini. Coming down.”

“Roger that.”

We broke into a trot, which soon became a run. Down the hill in the darkness, running, breathing hard, the sounds of gunfire in our ears … I confess, I was getting into the combat zone where it didn’t matter if I lived or died. I had been there before, and it is addictive. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. Or the knowledge you are cheating the devil.

The pickup that had been on fire was now just a glowing mass of twisted metal. Some bodies lay scattered about as I ran across the open space, followed by my two Israelis, but I was following a crowd. Four SEALs in black were ahead of me. I slowed my pace as they charged into the building.

There was the stutter of a submachine gun, just a short burst. Taking my time, I walked into the entrance and paused. The electric lightbulbs were still illuminated, so the generator was still going. Somewhere. I didn’t hear it. A pirate’s corpse was arrayed on the floor against the far wall, still bleeding from multiple chest wounds. Maybe his heart was still pumping. I didn’t know or care. The SEALs were gone, up the stairwell.

The two Mossad agents had pistols in their hands. They looked around, then nodded at me. I could lead them or follow them. I was tempted to sit down in one of the old stuffed chairs and let them do their thing. However, if I did that and the trench bomb around the fort went off, destroying it and murdering everyone in the place …

That damn generator. Radio controls would probably be battery operated, but if there were a landline to the detonators, the generator was probably rigged to power it. It wouldn’t be high in the building since it used diesel fuel. The pirates wouldn’t want to carry cans up the stairs. The basement, then.

A burst of submachine-gun fire rattled down the staircase. Then a couple more. The SEALs were cleaning the place out.

I went around the stairs, found a door and opened it. There was an electric lightbulb on the ceiling, illuminating stairs going down. Now I could hear the low, steady throb of a diesel engine.

I found the Kimber.45 in my hand. When I drew it I don’t know. Suddenly I realized it was there. I cocked the hammer and put the safety on. Some people carry those things cocked and locked, but without a holster to put the thing in, I never had that kind of sangfroid. Sooner or later I would have managed to shoot myself. I laid the assault rifle on a chair and, with both hands on the pistol, started down.

* * *

Mike Rosen was in the e-com center aboard Sultan when he heard the.50 caliber machine gun the SEALs had brought aboard open up. There was no mistaking the trip-hammer rips of a heavy machine gun firing bursts for anything else.

One of the windows popped. Rosen could see a hole in the glass, small, with cracks radiating out from it. Although he didn’t know it, a bullet from the machine gun in one of the pickups in the Eyl square had found its way here. Just one. The only casualty was the glass.

He looked out the window and saw the burning pickups in the square in front of Ragnar’s lair, saw muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and the distant flashing on the hills, up toward Eyl West.

He got back on his computer and began typing. The words poured out as fast as he thought them. He was a good typist and he was good with words, which were his stock-in-trade. Every minute or so he hit the SEND button; the Internet could crash anytime, and even if it didn’t, he wanted to report as close to real time as he could.

At Rosen’s radio home, KOA Denver, the e-mails were put on the Net at the same time the announcer read them over the air. All up and down the front range of the Rockies, people pulled their vehicles to the berm of the highway or the edge of the street and turned the volume of their radios up. Rosen wrote for them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and he wrote word pictures just for them.

* * *

“Captain, we have all three pirate skiffs on radar.”

“Range?”

“Eight miles.”

USS Richard Ward, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, approached Eyl from a course slightly north of west. The commanding officer, Commander Millicent C. Fjestad, had her ship inbound at ten knots. Her crew referred to her as The Old Woman, just as male commanding officers were traditionally called The Old Man. Less reverently, she was called Big Mama behind her back. Still, every man and woman aboard Richard Ward respected the captain. She was a highly competent naval officer who cared about her crew.