John Birmingham - Without warning

Fifi took her time, adjusting to the relative rise and fall of the two vessels. With the Viarsa 1 coming up astern, she had a clear view of the vessel’s foredeck and bridge. She had intended to unload a magazine into the wheelhouse, hopefully cutting down some of the more important crew members, but as the distance between hunter and prey collapsed, an infinitely more tempting target presented itself. At least a dozen men, all armed, began to gather near the bow of the Viarsa, pointing at the super-yacht and occasionally firing the odd random shot.

Fifi waited in her little tent, patiently tracking the closely grouped cluster of men with her sights. Three times she imagined squeezing off a burst – but she held her fire, waiting to see what the arrhythmic dance of the two ships did to her aim. Once, as the Rules fell hard a-port into a boiling black trench, she would’ve missed completely. The second and third times, however, were fine.

On the fourth occasion that the two ships lined up, she was ready. The battered, rusting trawler had pulled to within two hundred metres. The boarding party had stopped firing, possibly at the behest of a large bearded man who had just rushed down onto the deck. He was yelling and gesticulating, obviously warning them to move away. The eerie quiet of the Rules, the complete lack of any movement on deck, had apparently unnerved him. The poacher heaved itself over a line of black swell, shot through with streaks of dirty foam, just as the Rules began to climb a wall of water large enough to steady the yacht’s ceaseless tossing from side to side. For three precious seconds, while the trawler slid down the face of the wave behind, Fifi enjoyed a relatively stable platform and an exposed, slow-moving target as the shooters headed back inside with great difficulty.

She breathed out and squeezed the trigger.

The PKM began its harsh industrial jackhammering and lines of tracer arced out across the ocean to kiss the bow of the Viarsa 1 . She had a 200-round box mag loaded with Russian-standard 7.62 rifled cartridge and tracer. The long, whipping line of light ribboned across the gap between the ships almost instantly and tore the men apart. She fired in three separate bursts, as hot spent casings bounced off the tented tarpaulin and stung her whenever they touched exposed flesh. Only two of her prey survived. The bearded man who had rushed onto the deck to warn his comrades of the danger they faced, and another who dived for cover as soon as her first target disintegrated in a shower of blood and body pieces.

She noticed a twinkling light on the roof of the wheelhouse and rolled off her perch a split second before the tarpaulin was chewed to pieces by the line of return fire.

… whump whump…

Two lines of grey smoke reached out for the Viarsa’s twinkling star, which disappeared inside twin explosions as the rocket-propelled grenades detonated, taking out the machine-gun. Fifi heard another snarling burst of automatic fire and wondered whether Shah or one of his men had also targeted the bridge, as she had intended to. Belly-crawling to her next firing station, where Dietmar waited with a fresh box of ammunition, she didn’t dare put her head up to look.

The Rules was now taking fire from the length of the trawler.

Sergeant Narayan Shah, formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Rifles, had disposed of his resources very well. Five independent fire teams, providing coverage for the length of the super-yacht, with the least experienced or reliable provided with the best cover.

Peering at the Viarsa 1, he had to wonder who was running things over there. As soon as Fifi had opened up on the fo’c’sle, more men had emerged from the rear of the wheelhouse and begun to spread out on the aft decks, taking cover here and there, and firing in an uncoordinated, indiscriminate fashion. Stupid fishermen, he thought again. His teams, all run by his own men or Pieraro, worked in concert and directed their fire onto specific targets.

‘Blue barrels, aft,’ he called out, and his shooters sent a torrent of gunfire into the rear of the ship, where two men had just popped up and started firing at the bridge of the Aussie Rules. One of the targets flipped over backwards as a dark fan of blood painted the white crane nearby. The other dropped straight down and didn’t reappear.

Puffs of smoke appeared and the occasional tracer zapped across, punching into the aluminium skin of the yacht with a terrible clang.

‘Smoke stack, aft,’ Shah called out again, sending a lethal stream of automatic-weapons fire across the gulf between the ships. A distance, he noted, that was narrowing rapidly.

Armed with her trusted shotgun, Jules crouched in the entrance to the bridge, watching Mr Lee as he hunkered down and attempted to steer them away from the Viarsa 1 with only limited power. He was also handicapped by having to keep his head below the line of the windows lest he get shot. Dozens of rounds had already smashed through the glass and wounded the Rhino, who was bleeding heavily from one arm, cursing up a storm and puffing rapidly on a new Davidoff.

‘Apologies, Miss Julianne,’ Lee cried out, as the whole ship rang like an iron bell.

The other vessel had just struck them broadside.

In her headset, Fifi’s voice came through. ‘Here they come, Julesy. Lots of them.’

‘On my way.’

‘Shoot them down!’ said Pieraro, without any urgency or, he hoped, trace of fear in his voice as he spoke the words in Spanish. It was difficult to contain his marauding emotions, however. He was not leading some band of old seadogs or hardened mercenaries. His little fire team was composed entirely of men and boys from the village, and now they were fighting for their lives.

‘As they climb across, shoot them down,’ he repeated. ‘Do not linger. Stand up, shoot and drop down again.’

His small group of fighters, six in all, did as they were told and had been taught, popping up and firing short bursts at the Peruvians, before scuttling like bugs to another hiding place. Miguel himself snapped up his M16 and squeezed off short bursts whenever a slow-moving Peruvian exposed himself. Well, he assumed they were peruanos … It was possible they might have been from anywhere.

All that mattered now, however, was that a small army of them appeared to be boiling up from the innards of their ship and attempting to board the ship where his family sheltered. Some threw grappling hooks and thick lines across. Others darted from cover as the two vessels banged together and they attempted to leap from one to the other. He flinched as one man missed his jump and fell between the converging vessels. The crunch of steel plate on aluminium was slightly muffled as his body was pulped by the collision. Pieraro could not help but see the flattened remains peel away from the flanks of the trawler and fall into the sea.

‘They are getting on board!’ cried Adolfo, one of the older men.

‘Stay where you are. Keep firing. The others will take care of them,’ yelled Miguel.

‘The boat deck!’

Jules hurried up behind the racing forms of two Gurkhas as they headed aft to repel the first of the intruders. Doubled over to remain below the line of the gunwale, she moved as quickly as she could but had trouble keeping up with them. The uproar of the battle was enormous, much worse than anything she’d experienced before. Bullets whined and pinged around her, chewing huge pieces out of the yacht’s superstructure. She kept her head down. And all the time, the vessel lurched up and down, dancing drunkenly on the huge waves.