Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

This RPG hit behind the bridge, went through a big window and made a nice bang. Glass and smoke blew out.

* * *

Buck Peterson kept the Sikorsky coming down. The pirates were shooting up the ship. They were not yet aboard. The ship was at flank speed.

Now Buck saw the pirate boat on Sultan ’s starboard side. It was the closest, so he went for it. Began slowing his chopper, coming around so that he could fly between the boat and the ship. Fortunately that put his door-mounted gun on the side of the pirate boat.

“Get ready, Wilsey. Fire a burst into the water short of their boat.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Wilsey said, as if he had been asked to make coffee.

That Wilsey was a good man, cool under pressure. Buck wished he had Wilsey’s kind of calm.

He brought the Seahawk around and came up the wake, nearly over the ship. Heard the M-60 vomit out a burst, saw it turn the water to foam near a pirate boat.

That ought to sober up the bastards.

Buck Peterson was over the ship’s railing, amidships, with the pirate boat on his beam, when an RPG exploded inside the Seahawk. The explosion was unexpected, violent, and the chopper began to buck.

Right engine … losing power! Hydraulics going … warning lights flashing.

Buck Peterson turned away from Sultan, the only thing he could do, right across the pirate boat, and picked up his tail trying to gain speed.

He felt the thumps as bullets smashed into the Seahawk, then realized he couldn’t keep the machine in the air. He tried to lower the tail to cushion the impact with the sea.

It wasn’t even a controlled crash. The impact of the collision with seawater at speed collapsed the windshield and killed Peterson and Pizzino instantly. Petty Officer Wilsey was already dead, killed by the RPG.

The splash site soon subsided into a roiling mass of bubbles as the Sultan and Mustafa’s boats swept away at thirty knots.

* * *

Arch Penney’s hopes sank with the remains of the Sikorsky. The American duty officer said there were no more helicopters available and the destroyer Richard Ward was over an hour away. The safety of his passengers and crew weighed heavily upon the captain.

Just as his hopes reached low ebb, the radio squawked again. “ Sultan, we have jets ten minute away.”

Harry Zopp replied, “The pirates are shooting machine guns into this ship and launching grenades. We are defenseless. Do you people understand that?”

“We are unable to contact the helicopter that was in your vicinity. Is it still there?”

“The pirates shot it down. It crashed into the ocean.”

“Roger.” The voice was tired, cold.

Penney grabbed the radiotelephone from his chief officer. “Are these jets going to just fly around, or will they do something to actually defend this ship and the nine hundred people aboard her?”

“We are assessing the situation.”

“Bloody Yanks,” Harry Zopp said.

Another burst of machine-gun bullets thudded into the bridge ceiling. Penney and his bridge team were huddled on the deck, out of the line of fire. The helmsman was sitting on the deck, reaching up to turn the steering controls. The RPG had exploded behind the bridge in the navigator’s office; now a small fire was emitting acrid smoke. Fortunately no one on the bridge had yet been killed, although one sailor had some shrapnel in a leg from the grenade blast. Penney wondered if any of the passengers had stopped a bullet. No, he thought, the question was, How many?

There would be more grenade blasts, Penney thought bitterly. This wasn’t a warship; his crewmen weren’t trained warfighters. Hell, they didn’t have any weapons to fight with. And the passengers: For Christ’s sake, they were mostly middle-aged and old men and women, from all over the world. The only thing they had in common was the fact they could afford the fare for the cruise.

Another hatful of machine-gun bullets arrived and took out more of the forward glass. There wasn’t much glass left. Little pieces of insulation rained down from the damaged ceiling. The sea wind swept the bridge.

Penney sneaked a peek over the railing. One of the skiffs, the one with the machine gun, was close on the starboard side, no more than fifty yards away. He scuttled across the bridge and looked on the port side. Two boats there, closing. With his naked eye he could see the men in the boat wrestling with a grenade launcher.

“Eight minutes,” Harry Zopp said, glancing at his watch.

Two more grenades slammed into the ship. Penney felt the thuds the explosions created.

Huddled under the rail on the port wing of the bridge, the captain thought he heard a woman screaming. It was high-pitched, and faint.

* * *

The Task Force 151 commander was U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington. He stood in the tactical flag spaces aboard his flagship staring at the flat-screen situation display. The French chopper had been shot up over Stella Maris but was still airborne, on its way back to its mother ship. The American Seahawk had ceased transmitting; Sultan said the pirates shot it down.

Tarkington took a deep breath. The pirates really wanted these ships and were betting everything they could get them. Fortunately Stella Maris looked as if she were outrunning the two skiffs that had attacked her.

Two F-18s patrolling from a carrier three hundred miles to the north, toward the Persian Gulf, were on their way. Fuel would be tight. They could stay over Sultan for no more than five minutes. The carrier was launching a tanker, but it was at least a half hour behind the fighters. If the fighters stayed over Sultan until the tanker arrived, they would be lost if they couldn’t take fuel from the tanker, for any reason. Should he risk two planes and the lives of two pilots by keeping them over Sultan ? Should he order the pilots to shoot at the pirates?

Tarkington knew the Rules of Engagement cold, and he understood the political climate in which he operated. He would create an international incident if he ordered the jets to use their weapons, an incident that would probably have serious political repercussions in European capitals, perhaps jeopardizing the continued existence of the antipiracy task force. On the other hand, the pirates had shot at his helicopters, perhaps killed the crewmen. He had spent his career in the U.S. Navy; self-defense was instinctive, institutional, ingrained. Overaggressiveness in the face of a threat could be forgiven; excessive caution, never. Then there were all the people on that cruise ship …

Toad Tarkington made his decision. “Tell Sea Wolf flight to sink the pirate boats. Weapons free.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

* * *

Lieutenant Commander Dieter Gerhart was leading Sea Wolf flight. Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Borosco was on his wing. Gerhart listened to the orders, then asked Borosco, “You get that, Tom?”

“Roger.”

“You take the boats on the land side, I’ll take the boats on the seaward side. Strafe and sink them.”

“Got it.”

Gerhart consulted the mil-setting table on his kneeboard, found the mil setting he wanted and dialed it into the gunsight. He adjusted the brightness of the reticle, trying to find a setting that would not overpower a hard-to-see target on a gray ocean on a hazy day. Finally he toggled his master armament switch on and selected GUN.

He pushed the nose over, left the power up. He had the cruise ship on radar … if indeed it was the right ship. She was twenty-five miles away. He wished visibility were better.

Waiting was difficult as the jets plunged deeper into the atmosphere and the range marched down. Gerhart set his radar altimeter to sound a warning at 1,100 feet above the sea. At 1,100 feet, he would open fire, and hold the trigger down for no more than a second. At 900 feet he should be off the gun and pulling out, right or left, to avoid any ricochets off the water.