“Okay, good. Sound general quarters, surface action, and call away the boarding team. I’ll be right up.”
He leaned on the splinter shield, in life jacket, flash gear, and the gray helmet stenciled CO. The bridge team was buttoning up. Down on the main deck, the five-inch train warning bell began ringing.
“Chain guns, manned and ready.”
“Phalanx in surface mode.”
“Mount 51, manned and ready.”
“Mount 52, manned and ready.”
Pardees leaned out. “All stations manned and ready, Captain. Time: one minute, fifty-two seconds. Material condition Zebra set throughout the ship. Boarding team and boat crew manned and ready.”
“Very well.” Dan glanced aft, to a raised hand from the boatswain’s mate chief, back by the boat falls. The RHIB was swung out; the boarding team, in combat gear, helmets, carrying shotguns and M16s, stood with duffels at their boots, swaying in unison as Savo rolled. It was rough for boat ops, but within the margin of acceptability.
First, though, he’d check these guys out visually. If they showed hostile intent, he’d deal with them out of range of the Kalashnikovs and RPGs that typically formed pirate armament hereabouts. He leaned on the coaming again, binoculars searching through the heat shimmer, the red haze. The wind was behind them, and their exhaust added to the seethe of the atmosphere. He hadn’t caught sight of the pirates yet, though radar had two faint pips astern of their assumed quarry.
The tremendous squared-off blue-and-white box was slogging along at ten knots as the fog blew past it like a cavalcade of specters. Dan had talked to its bridge on channel 10, and had messaged MSCHOA, UKMTO Dubai, MIRLO, the NATO shipping center, and CTF 151 that he was going to the assistance of M/V Mons Neptune, a Japanese-owned, Caymans-flagged ro-ro. It was enormous, a supership at least a quarter mile long. Ro-ros — roll-on, roll-off — carried anything with wheels, though he guessed this one would be carrying gleaming new Toyotas and Hondas and Lexuses. The pirates would be more interested in what portables and cash they could steal from the crew or by breaking into the safe, as he’d observed off Ashaara, when he’d been deployed to help protect and rebuild that failing country.
“Small-boat contact. Two small boats,” a quartermaster shouted from the flying bridge, above him. He was on the Big Eyes, huge pedestal-mounted binocs with objectives the size of dinner plates.
“Where away?”
“About zero-two-zero relative.”
He refocused and caught one, then the other, as they rose on a swell. Just specks, through haze. But something odd… they were headed in different directions. “What’s CIC say about their course and speed?”
“Wait one… sir, they hold them essentially DIW.”
Dead in the water. Dan frowned. Not what you expected, if they were carrying out an attack. On the other hand, if they’d caught sight of Savo Island, they might be turning tail. “Bump her up to flank. Designate to guns, but weapons tight until I give the word.”
Over the next ten minutes they made up so swiftly on the tossing boats that it was clear neither had way on. They grew into dark craft with complexly curved, lofty prows, not a bit like the high unwieldy dhows of the Gulf. No masts, and apparently no deckhouses either. The housings of outboard motors gleamed at their sterns, but cocked up, propellers dipping into the water as the bows rose and fell violently, throwing spray. At Dan’s direction, Pardees made an upwind pass at five hundred yards, while the Big Eyes and Dan’s own binoculars studied them. Five souls in one craft, six in the other. Bare-chested, dark-skinned men, in white turbans or headdresses. They waved frantically.
“Sucking us into range?” the exec said, beside him. The issue helmet was far too big on her and looked faintly silly. Her holstered 9mm looked less jolly, though.
Dan had been wondering the same thing, and fighting apprehension. This was how Horn had died, sucked in close to a small ship that had then, inexplicably, detonated into light too hellish for the human eye. How to separate emotion from logic, experience from fear? “Maybe. Noah, let’s do another pass. No closer than two hundred yards.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
On the second pass Dan, on the flying bridge now, bent to peer through the mounted optics. He could see the crews now as well as if they were beside him. They looked emaciated and desperate. No weapons, but they could be lying in the ceiling boards, or otherwise concealed. The tanker had specifically mentioned an RPG being fired. According to his ROEs, he could take them under fire and sink them based solely on that.
He took a deep breath, aware he was asking men to run a risk. When he looked up, the clouds were fleeing across the sky, and a squall grayed the horizon to the southwest. “Cheryl, I want you in CIC. Maintain a three-sixty awareness while my head’s in this situation. And make sure we’re taping from the gun cameras. Noah, park us upwind, and put the boat in the water.”
Savo rolled two hundred yards off. As the gray rigid-hulled inflatable motored past, the first few heavy drops of cool rain spattered on the deck like thrown pebbles. Dan looked down. At young Max Mytsalo, the boat officer. SK3 Kaghazchi, their designated Farsi speaker, who’d admitted a few words of other local languages. Braced at the stern, Seaman Peeples. They were hanging on as the RHIB skipped across the waves, rising and falling on the swells, then altering course to circle the nearest boat. The whine of the engine dropped, and the RHIB fell from its plane and its bow wave rolled on without it. The hulls surged in off-rhythm, then, for the briefest moment, matched. At that moment the squall-line swept over Savo and they vanished in a downpour that cascaded all around Dan, cold as a mountain stream, wetting him to the skin.
The noise all but blotted out the next radio call. “Matador, this is Matador One.”
Dan retreated into the signal bridge, clicked his Hydra as the windshield wipers flailed and jerked. The rain was noisy in here, too, and he turned the volume up. “What’ve you got, Gene?”
“Five skinnies. Extremely agitated. Screaming and crying. No guns I can see.”
“Take up the floorboards. Conduct a thorough search. Look for ladders and grapnels, along with weapons. You got rain coming your way. We’re in a heavy downpour right now.”
“Not much to search, sir. Pretty bare bones. They might have dumped them overboard when they saw us coming.”
That was possible. Or they might not have been armed at all. Dan kept his eyes on the other boat, just in case. Too close for the five-inch, but below him on the main deck, and beside him on the wing, the 7.62s, 50-cals, and chain guns rose and fell as the crew kept the sights on their targets.
The ensign again. “One of these guys talks a little English. He says they had a rifle, to defend themselves, but they threw it overboard when they saw us. He says they’re out of water and gas. They’ve got a flare pistol. One of those plastic things.”
“Smell it,” Dan said. “Over.”
“Sorry, sir? Over.”
“The pistol. Smell it.”
“Got it, sir. Yessir, it’s been fired. Recently. The guy here is nodding like hell. Pointing to it, then the sky. Over.”
“All right. Good.” He clicked off, reconstructing the scene. The boats adrift, out of gas, out of water. The massive ro-ro shouldering up over the horizon, first a blue-and-white dot, then filling the sky. The pistol had been their last despairing chance. Unfortunately, the bridge team on the tanker had taken the lofting flare for the launch of an antitank grenade. He was a little in awe of these guys anyway. Two hundred and fifty miles out at sea, in a thirty-foot boat without even a deckhouse?