Which was probably why he was the one to stumble into the first man they’d seen since they boarded. He came around a corner the rest of the team had just passed, with Hugh bringing up the rear. He had earphones on and walkman in one hand, the other hand snapping to the beat.
He was also armed. When he saw Hugh, he drew and fired in one smooth motion. The shot went wide and he was smothered by a pile of furious, frightened Coasties before he could get off a second. When they got up, he was out cold, possibly for good.
The shot had been heard. They heard cries from the deck below and footsteps from above and quickened their pace, the stairs clanging beneath their feet. A shot ricocheted off the bulkhead near Hugh’s head, followed by the sound of another shot from the deck. A third shot, this one from above, made them all duck. Delgado, who seemed to have the instincts of a cat, didn’t flinch but trotted directly to another hatch, which led to an inside stairwell. He pointed up. “Bridge.”
“Weapons,” Ostlund said briskly. He looked as if he might not so secretly be enjoying himself. Hugh, still nauseous, wanted to shoot either Ostlund or himself. “Okay, Delgado, take Segal and Chernikoff and locate the engine room.” Segal and Chernikoff were the EO’s choice for this insertion. “Segal, Chernikoff, disable any secondary controls. If you find the hydraulics controlling the rudder, cut it or break it. Once we’re in command we can always take her in tow. What we want is control.”
“Aye aye, Ensign.” Delgado and the two engineer’s mates disappeared through a hatch.
“Okay,” Ostlund said, “let’s go,” and then a surprised look crossed his face. He looked down at the blood welling from his thigh and said, “Oh, shit.”
The crack of single bullets alternated with the explosion of shotgun rounds. It didn’t sound at all like it did in the movies. Hugh reached for his sidearm and then was hit in the back with a large club and felt himself falling forward, ever so slowly, ever so gently, onto a big black bed, oh, so soft.
Sara, he thought.
“Delgado!” Ostlund yelled into the handheld, right into Hugh’s ear from where he had fallen next to Hugh.
“Sir!” Delgado responded over the radio. “Segal and Chernikoff are both down! I am pinned down!”
“Understood, Delgado, I am sending assistance!” Ostlund pressed his hands against his thigh and looked at the men still standing. “Reese! Take two men and go get them!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
The next shot sounded like a cannon, like the last trump, like Armageddon. The ship, already trembling from the pounding it was taking from the seas and the violent change of command, shuddered.
Okay, not sounding at all good for our side, Hugh thought. As for himself, he was tired, and he thought he’d take a little nap.
A GREAT SPOUT OF water went up off their port bow.
“What the hell was that!”
Mark Edelen, looking through binoculars, said calmly, “A bunker buster.”
“A what?” Sara said.
He elaborated, sounding like a firearms manual. “A shoulder-launched assault weapon firing rounds with explosive loads.”
Another puff of smoke from the bridge of the Star of Bali, another trail of darker smoke, and this time the marksman didn’t miss. The shell impacted aft of the bridge. The deck shuddered and everyone turned to see that the starboard cannon was gone.
“Yes,” Sara said, speaking over the ringing in her ears, “I see. Let’s fall off a little, shall we, Chief?” She looked down at where Edelen was crouched against the console.
“Jesus,” the chief said. He straightened. “I mean, aye aye, XO. Helm, all ahead one quarter.”
“All ahead one quarter, aye,” Seaman Cornell responded with a sangfroid to match Sara’s own.
Sara looked at Ops. “What’s the word from Ostlund?”
“Ostlund’s down. Delgado got to the boat and is picking up the ones who went over the side.”
“Who didn’t?” Sara said sharply. “Who isn’t with them?”
“Lewis. Segal. Chernikoff.” He looked away. “Mr. Rincon.”
Sara’s face went gray. Ops seemed to recede into the distance. She brought him back into focus with great difficulty. He looked worried as he watched her. “Are they sure?” she said, the words coming from a great distance.
“Ostlund saw him go down, XO,” Ops said. “I’m-I’m sorry.”
There was a dreadful silence on the bridge that seemed to go on forever.
When Sara spoke again her voice was hoarse. “Did they find the missile?”
Ops swallowed. “No, XO. Delgado says the Star of Bali had too many men and they were too well armed. Our guys were driven back. Most of them went over the side. Like I said, Delgado is picking them up in the small boat.”
Another dreadful silence.
“Chief,” Sara said.
“XO?” Edelen said.
She said in a distant voice, “If you wanted to disable a ship, and you didn’t think your twenty-five-millimeter cannon would do the job, especially if the only working one had just been destroyed, what would you do next?”
He actually paled. “XO, I-”
“Where would we want to hit her, Chief? Where would it do the most good?”
He swallowed audibly, and said, calmly enough, “She’s probably a five-hatch ship. Somewhere between the second and third hatches.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Sara said.
“What?” Ops said.
“Hitting them at a ninety-degree angle would be best, XO, but we’ll still lose the bow.”
She nodded, almost dreamily. “I figured. The collision bulkhead should hold her, though.” She went to the plot station and looked at the Transas. “Pan in, Tommy, would you, please?”
Tommy, looking a little gray herself, zoomed in.
“Yeah,” Sara said, and pointed at the screen. She looked around and found everyone frozen in place. “Huddle up,” she said. “Now.”
There was a scramble of feet as everyone except Cornell on the helm stumbled across the heaving deck to peer over Tommy’s shoulder and follow Sara’s pointing finger.
“They’re headed straight up Resurrection Bay,” Sara said. “I’m guessing we decided to board them at just about the same time the terrorists took control of the ship. And why not?” she asked herself. “Why wouldn’t they just ride it in until they absolutely had to have the ship under their control? Makes perfect sense. It’s what I’d do myself.”
“XO?”
“Never mind. They’re going up the inside.” She traced the Star of Bali’s route up Resurrection Bay. “We’ll go up the outside.” She traced the Sojourner Truth’s route up Eldorado Narrows.
“That’s awful skinny, XO,” the chief said.
“We’ll never catch them, Captain,” Ops said.
“We’ve got six knots on them, and they think they’ve disabled us. Even if they were looking for us, they’ll be watching for us to come back at them from behind, not from the side. Hugh said-” Her breath caught, and she swallowed painfully and went on. “Mr. Rincon said that they probably wouldn’t fire the missile until they cleared Caine’s Head, and that it would take an hour for the firing sequence to be activated. The pilot boat will come out, and when they don’t take him on board, it will probably be the first time the people on shore know something’s wrong. By then it’ll be too late.”
She saw her second in command’s anguished expression and said with a thin smile, “Don’t worry, Ops. I don’t plan on sinking us. I don’t even have to sink them, although I admit it would be a nice bonus.”
There were nods all around. She looked at Mark Edelen. “Yes, Chief?”
He swallowed. “Permission to speak freely, XO.”
“Granted, Chief,” Sara said, almost pleasantly.
The chief squared his shoulders and spoke directly. “How personal is this?”
“It’s personal as hell, Chief,” she said, still in that eerily friendly tone of voice. “They killed my husband. I want them dead.” Another shot from the assault weapon whistled toward them and went long, poking entirely too large a hole in the wave about to crash over the stern. In some distant part of her mind Sara noticed that they now had a following sea. She wondered how much this would increase their speed. Of course, it would also increase the freighter’s speed. “However, the missile they’re getting ready to fire trumps my need for revenge. We have to stop them, people. I don’t want them getting any closer to the mainland. I don’t want to turn my back on them for an instant. There are two hundred and forty thousand people a hundred miles from here who don’t know they’re counting on us. I’d like to keep it that way.”