Sue jabbed me with her elbow at me and pointed to the man with the rocket launcher. “Why isn’t he firing again?”
I turned to Major Dundee and asked, “What’s happening?”
“He only had two rockets.”
Another man leaped to his feet and raced to the end of the pier, lugging what looked like a six-foot-long green tube. Another followed behind a green canvas sack over his shoulder. The first shouldered the bazooka, a weapon I recognized from the war games on my game console in the basement.
The second man inserted a shell and the first fired at the cluster of three ships behind the smoke and flames of the first two. The shell fell far short. He tried again, this time after his partner pounded his shoulder to tell him to fire at will, the bazooka was tilted much higher. The second shell fell short by a hundred yards or more.
They turned and ran, in our direction. A few bullets struck uncomfortably close, which caused them to zig and zag. They made it safely.
I asked, “Do you have more shells?”
“About a dozen,” the second man said.
“Good try, but no sense in wasting them. Maybe we can get you closer.”
They both nodded eagerly.
The second ship, the one that had taken a rocket where the water rushed in, listed so far to one side, it looked ready to roll over. The number of men leaping from the first ship increased. The water was dotted with them. Firing from the beach at the edge of the pier was almost continuous.
I turned to look. The gunboat crews were pinned down at the beach. All the shooting had brought more people from Everett to find out what was happening. Many had chosen to join in. We now had hundreds perched on the hillside, all waiting for any of them to expose themselves.
The white-haired SEAL carried a green kayak balanced on his head as he jogged our way. Behind him, others tried to keep up. I estimated darkness would fall in a few hours. The kayaks would head out then.
The SEAL put his kayak down and motioned for the others to do the same in a semi-circle around him. He started a lecture, probably teaching them how to attach the magnets with the C4 to the hulls, the best places to do it, and how to approach the ships. He didn’t need my input.
More gunboats from the other seventeen ships appeared and raced for the shore to support those pinned down there. I motioned to the man with the bazooka. He jogged to me. “Listen, those gunboats are going to land and they will give us hell. Can you and your buddy go blow up the gunboats that are already here?”
He cracked a crooked smile. “If they blow up, those others will think twice about landing there, right?”
“Can you do it?” It became a rhetorical question and the pair of them quickly covered the few hundred yards to where the fighting was, and where five gunboats and their crews were attempting to gain a foothold on the beach.
Our men ducked behind a cinderblock shed and loaded the bazooka. With the tube raised, the first stepped out, took quick aim, and fired. He leaped back under cover. The shell struck the gunboat in the midst of the other four. The explosion threw flames twenty feet into the air. A secondary explosion that I took to be a second shot fired by the bazooka, but was not, came within seconds. Then another. It was not a video game.
Two of the gunboats no longer existed. Another was burning. Soldiers were scattered, some looked dead. Others cried for help in a language I didn’t understand. I puked and splashed vomit on my feet and still bare ankles. Those people nearest me moved a step or two away.
The bazooka holder stepped into the open again and fired another shell at the two boats least damaged. More explosions and fires. He and the man carrying more shells turned and raced back to where I stood wiping my chin with the back of my sleeve.
A man I hadn’t seen before approached and saluted stiffly. I could get used to the respect they showed. I returned it, hitting my forehead too hard with my fingers and flinching.
He said, “The Commodore of that enemy fleet is on the radio. He wants to speak with you.”
“Where’s the radio?”
“Follow me, sir.”
I followed. There were five men, all with radios in front of them under a brown tent set up well back from the action. The firing of rifles was still almost constant. I accepted the preferred microphone and squeezed the transmit button. I paused.
“Captain Bill,” Sue prompted. “Tell them who you are.”
“Captain Bill here,” I said in a pompous voice. “To whom am I speaking?”
An echoey voice replied in perfectly enunciated English. “Surrender now and you may live.”
When I didn’t respond, Sue reached out, squeezed the button on the mic again and said in a husky voice that she pretended to be mine, “Surrender, and your ship may still be floating in an hour, ass hole.” The exact words he’d used, all but the two at the end.
“I have ten thousand trained soldiers in this harbor. You have no chance.”
Sue still held my hand with the mic. She transmitted again, “Maybe you had that many a while ago, but a lot of them are swimming right now, so you can’t count them.”
“I order you to surrender or we will storm your shores and take no prisoners.”
Sue puffed out her chest and said gruffly, “Have you looked up in the sky lately? If not, Captain Bill says you should. He’s called in an airstrike on your ships. Their ETA is about ten minutes.”
She let go of my hand. All eyes were on her. I said it first, “What good will that do? We don’t have any way to call in an airstrike.”
She grinned and shrugged in the way fourteen-year-olds do when dismissing others. She said, “We know that. He doesn’t. I hope he has a real bad ten minutes wait. I’d love to see a plane, any plane, flying this way.”
The laughter around me caught me by surprise. The men in the radio area were repeating the conversation to anyone listening. A boom sounded, another explosion, but it was different.
We ran outside and found a cloud of smoke near the edge of the pier. A cannon mounted on wheels sat there. Exposed, it looked like it was leftover from the Civil War over a hundred and fifty years earlier. The thing may have been sitting beside the steps of the city hall or VFW building earlier today. It had been covered with tarps and hidden from the ships, but it was at the edge of the concrete pier and pointed at the gunboats. The cloud of smoke slowly dissipated as the cannon was rolled back nearer us and three men leaped to reload.
The word came to us that it had fired ball bearings and steel nuts, like a giant shotgun. It was being reloaded and pointed to where the soldiers on the gunboats would come to take the pier from us. When I looked, the second ship was in the last stages of sinking, the stern high in the air, while the first was completely engulfed in flames. Only seventeen more to deal with.
Gunboats from those seventeen started massing together. Probably forty of them, each with twenty or more men, all heavily armed. They were determined to get a foothold so they could land more and more troops, enough to overwhelm our pathetically small force by sheer numbers and superior weapons.
I turned to look up at Everett sitting on the hill above and saw hundreds of people arriving. From where didn’t matter. They must have been hiding in the city or living with gangs, but wherever they’d been, they were now settling down in on the hillside with their rifles. More were working their way to the bottom, to join with us. At a guess, there were five hundred of our people protecting the hillside from the invaders.
While that seemed an impossible and formidable force to overcome, there were ten thousand trained and better-armed troops on the ships waiting in the harbor. Major Dundee must have had the same reaction and realization. He’d come into the tent a few moments earlier and waited for my attention.