“My God, a slaughterhouse,” Jack Mahanani, hospital corpsman first class, said.
“Check them,” DeWitt ordered.
Mahanani moved from one body to the next quickly. The whole boat gave a lunge to the left as it listed farther to port. The corpsman touched the throat of the last woman victim and looked up. “All dead, Lieutenant.”
The boat slued to port again.
“Out of here, she’s going down,” DeWitt barked, and the three raced up the steps to the canted deck. All but one of the ties had been undone, and they worked up the deck to the edge of the Pegasus and stepped on board. The last tie was cut and the Pegasus drifted a dozen feet to the left.
Ten seconds later the craft with the name Marylue on the bow tipped the rest of the way on her side, slowly took on water, and sank below the light chop of the blue sea.
Then they heard the spotter plane race overhead.
“We have it, SEALs. Videotaped the sinking and your getaway. You have the name of the craft?”
“Affirmative. The Marylue. Eight dead. No time for ID on any of them. We’re going after the pirates. Can you give us a heading?”
The northwest heading came through, and the Pegasus gunned through the waters heading toward Puerto Rico.
Five minutes later the spotter plane came on the air again.
“We’ve reported the attack and the sinking. Also have a new heading for you on the pirate. We estimate his speed at about thirty-five knots. He’s twelve miles ahead of you and looks to be heading for the coast of Puerto Rico. He’s got a nest there that we can’t find. It’s an elaborate complex of shallow waterways and tangled growth and canals and all sorts of places to hide and set up camp. The locals have been chasing this guy for years. We know about where he heads, but we’ve never been able to watch him go ashore. There are a hundred spots along here he could slip in and we’d never spot him from the air.”
“Busting our asses to get to him, spotter. No way we can catch him even at our forty-five knots. Best we can do is get a firm radar fix on him where he vanishes into the maze.”
“Better than we’ve had from the air, Pegasus. Once when we had a shot at him, we were on a hundred-twenty-foot cutter and no chance to follow him up those narrow little ditches he used. When you get the radar fix on his entrance, tell us and we’ll get ground units in there as close as we can. Use your second radio to contact them on TAC Two. Good luck.”
The three SEALs who came back from the sunken sailboat were subdued. Miguel Fernandez, gunner’s mate first class, stared at his hands and shook his head. He closed his eyes and held his sniper rifle close to his chest. “Worst damn slaughter I’ve ever seen,” he said. “They just mowed the tourists down where they sat like they were targets in a shooting gallery.”
Mahanani wiped the victims’ blood off his hands. He washed them with alcohol from his medic kit and took a long deep breath. “Like a damn close-combat kill house in there, only these were real people who bled a lot. Most of them were in their fifties. Retired, I’d bet, out to see the world. Those fucking pirates are worse than animals. I’ll be damn glad to find them.”
DeWitt stared straight ahead at the sea and the radar. He wouldn’t let his emotions get control. He had beaten down nausea twice since he came out of the sailboat’s cabin. He had wanted to throw up and then cry and scream to the heavens. But he didn’t. Officers don’t cry. He had to maintain.
He scanned the water ahead. No sign of the pirate ship yet. They were on the right heading. The plane had moved forward and tracked the pirate ship, but they had only a general idea where the boat would hit land.
Ten minutes later the longer-range radar picked up the powerboat, and less than two minutes after that it vanished off the screen, to be replaced by the solid land mass of southern Puerto Rico.
“Save that heading,” DeWitt said, and the ship’s driver nodded. On this angle they could come within a hundred feet of the spot where the pirate ship vanished into the maze of trees and waterways.
Ten minutes later, the Pegasus nosed up to the uninviting Puerto Rican coastline. It was mostly uninhabited along here, covered with jungle. They probed along a hundred yards each direction, and found several half-clogged narrow waterways. Which was the right one? Canzoneri sat on the bow watching the vegetation. He held up his hand, and DeWitt had the coxswain stop the boat.
“Look over there,” De Witt said. Some vines and tree limbs had been stripped of their leaves, and a few branches hung almost touching the water.
“Could be it,” Lam said. “How about nosing into that same spot and see what we can see.”
DeWitt looked at young Ensign Swartz, who commanded the boat. Swartz scowled and planted both fists on his hips.
“I told you when we started that the open sea is fine, but this running up channels and dodging vines is something else,” Swartz said. He paused. “I know our mission. I also know that as skipper of this boat I’m responsible for her. If anything gets damaged or broken or if we get grounded, I’m the one on the hot seat.”
DeWitt stepped toward him. “Hey, Swartz, understood. I’ve got carte blanche on this mission. The CNO himself authorized it. If we scrape up this Pegasus or total it, you won’t be given a statement of charges. I guarantee you that. Let’s nose in there and take a gander.”
Ensign Swartz looked at his coxswain.
“Sir, looks deep enough, good quantity of water coming out, check that current. We can nudge those vines apart and if we don’t hit the bank, we should be home free. Let’s try it.”
“Ahead, slow,” Swartz said. The coxswain moved the throttle and wheel and headed for the spot with the sheared-off branches. DeWitt, Swartz, and Lam stood on the bow of the sleek boat and watched the vegetation come closer. When they touched it, Lam brushed it aside and the craft edged inward. A moment later they were past the curtain of green growth and in a channel thirty feet wide that extended forward into the gloom.
“Yeah, looks good to me,” DeWitt said. Swartz took a deep breath and signaled the coxswain to motor forward slowly.
Ensign Swartz scowled. “We move inland only to the point where it could endanger my boat. Then we back off.”
“Agreed,” DeWitt said. “Looks from here like we have a clear way a long way ahead.”
The driver nudged the long, thin boat through the channel, and the officers retreated into the cabin as the brush trailed almost to the water on both sides. It was a slow-moving stream that angled to the left, and they went with it. Trees and brush and vines grew on both sides, sometimes bridging over the top, turning the small waterway into a tunnel.
Ahead fifty yards the stream turned right. Inland, on the left, they saw an open space with a shack of a house, a rowboat tied to the small one-plank dock, and a half-dozen chickens scratching in the moist soil. No people showed.
“Hold it,” DeWitt said. The coxswain cut the motors. “Get us to that bank,” DeWitt said, pointing to the side where the shack stood. “Franklin, Victor. Go check out that place. Capture or waste anybody you see. Silenced weapons.”
The two men waited until the Pegasus nosed into the bank. Then they jumped off the bow to solid ground, parted, and came up on both sides of the shack. There was no window facing the water, only a door half open.
Franklin signaled to Victor he’d go first. He charged up to the cabin, pressed himself against the outer wall three feet from the door, and waited. No movement or noise from inside. He edged to the door and jolted through it, his MP-5 pointing the way. He swept the single room and grinned.
A few seconds later, Victor charged into the same room. They both snorted. The downriver lookout had slumped over a wreck of a table. One hand held a nearly empty bottle of rum, the other a sandwich with only one bite gone. A small two-way radio lay beside the sandwich. His Uzi submachine gun lay on the floor at his feet.