Rolland pinched his lip between thumb and forefinger, a gesture she had already recognised as his giveaway. He was thinking of betting the pot.
47
MV AUSSIE RULES, SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’
‘I am sorry, Captain, but the storm, it put much stress on the engines, yes, much stress on everything, and this can be repaired but it will take time.’
Julianne examined the length of black steel-mesh tubing that was going to kill them all. It was less than an inch thick and just a foot long and it carried coolant to one of the Aussie Rules’s twin 1492-horsepower Caterpillar engines. Or rather, it would have were it not disconnected and dangling uselessly, having blown as a result of running at maximum pressure for way too long. Her Sri Lankan chief engineer shook his head sadly, as though betrayed by his wife.
‘How much time do you need to fix this, Pankesh?’ asked Jules. ‘The truth. Don’t underestimate the difficulty’
‘It is a very specialised fitting, ma’am,’ he said as his two Dutch offsiders crowded in behind him, both of them looking equally despondent. ‘Three hours, minimum. Possibly up to five. You can run the other engine at half power, but that is all.’
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Her temples were throbbing. They had a break of twenty nautical miles on the Viarsa 1, but their pursuers would eat that distance up in two hours. They were going to have to fight.
‘Okay,’ she said, standing up and turning away from the mess of spilled coolant. The engine room gleamed as white as ever, but it was eerily still with the power plant shut down. ‘All three of you will work on this as fast as you have ever worked on anything in your fucking lives. Got me? Maybe you’ll perform miracles. First, though, each of you get to the armoury and draw yourself a weapon. If they board us, we’ll need every hand we have – except for you, Pankesh. You keep working here. You don’t stop until one of them comes through that door, understood?’
The Sri Lankan’s frightened eyes were comically wide as he bobbed his head up and down.
‘Rohan, Urvan,’ she went on, ‘when I give the call to repel boarders, you’ll have to down tools here and come help out on deck? You understand that?’
The Dutchmen were both in their thirties, veterans of North Sea oil-rig tenders, who’d been stranded in Ecuador by the collapse of the airline carrying them home from a sex tour of Bangkok. They nodded and tried to look resolute, but she could tell neither of them wanted to leave the relative security of the engine room.
‘All right, everyone. Get your weapons, then get back to work. If you can pull a miracle out of your arses we won’t have to fight.’
She moved from one handhold to the next, negotiating an exit with the engineers on her tail. They’d left the storm behind twelve hours ago, but the sea was still a vista of churning, mountainous waves. At least it would make any boarding difficult. When the Dutchmen headed aft to the gym-turned-armoury, she hurried as best she could up to the main lounge, where she found Shah and Birendra engaged in the interminable process of teaching her passengers how to kill. She held on to the doorway to steady herself and beckoned Shah over when she caught his eye. He moved with fluid grace across the pitching deck, barely needing to check himself against the movement of the ship.
‘Yes, Miss Julianne? The engines, they are down?’
‘Yeah, and I don’t think we’re getting them back any time soon. How’re your pupils going, Mr Shah?’
‘They do well, miss,’ the Gurkha replied. ‘Some of the Americans have guns at home. Moorhouse the banker hunts with a shotgun – I think we should arm him with one. The others should take the M16s. They are A2 models, quite reliable. We have seventeen of them and three thousand rounds of ammunition. I would suggest creating three fire teams. Pieraro can watch over one, two of my men will take the others. Volume of fire, Miss Julianne, that will be crucial.’
Jules had to agree. Even the Yanks, who may have had pistol club or hunting experience, would never have shot at another human being – and crucially, would never have been shot at. The decks were still heaving all over the place, and she knew from personal experience that firing from one unstable platform at another usually meant missing your target. Sergeant Shah was right: best to just throw up a wall of lead.
‘Okay,’ she agreed. ‘Your guys and Miguel will need to run those teams, otherwise we’ll fire off all of our ammo and hit nothing but waves and sky. What about the crew and your chaps? What’s happening with them?’
Shah looked behind him to where Corporal Birendra was instructing the Mexican children in how to reload an M16 magazine. He was making a game of it, laughing and clapping along as they pushed the rounds in. Jules shook her head sadly. What a sight.
‘We have spent much time on this, Miss Julianne,’ the sergeant assured her. ‘I will lead the reaction force. We will have the heavy weapons, including the rocket launchers. Three RPG7s and eight warheads, deployed from the upper decks. Depending on how the enemy attempts to effect their boarding, we shall use them to interrupt the assault or interdict any heavy-weapon crews on the Viarsa 1.’
‘Fifi’s gonna be pissed off,’ replied Jules with a smile. ‘She loves rocket launchers.’
‘Miss Fifi will lead the fire team composed of crew members. She will also suppress any heavy-weapons fire from the Viarsa with her machine-gun. The crew I have divided up according to their levels of competence. She will take the best of them as a reserve, holding the pool deck and providing cover over the aft sections. If needed, they have been trained to split into two sections, one to hold the pool level and the other to be deployed as needed.’
‘Okay. Sounds like a plan,’ agreed Jules, slightly encouraged.
‘What about those kids, though? I’m really not comfortable having children in the thick of it.’
Shah shook his head, frowning gravely. ‘It is a bad business, Miss Julianne. But unavoidable. They cannot run away, not in this sea state, and they are very useful. Birendra has trained them well to load and to clear blockages. They know to keep their heads down. And Miss, remember too, they are not spoilt little brats – they are village children, from the edge of the desert. They have all worked from their earliest days, and their lives have been hard, sometimes violent. They will be scared, but I think they will endure the battle more calmly than some of the others.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I know what you’re talking about, Sergeant. I’m really worried about some of my bigger dilettantes just going to pieces.’
The deck dipped sharply as they slid over another crest. One of the kids that Birendra was teaching rolled himself into a ball and tumbled across the thick woollen carpet in the empty lounge, squealing with laughter.