“I may be off point here, but just who in the hell are you people, Colonel?” the first officer of Shiloh asked.
Collins chose to ignore the same question he had been asked by everyone, from the leaders of the free world to his own mother.
“Captain, what is the EMP damage?”
“Some good news, some horrible. We have nothing but close-in weapons support. Four .50-calibers and handheld weaponry from the armory. Good news is that we do have the Phalanx system, but no radar for her targeting. No offensive or defensive missiles. Fire control on those systems was totally disabled. Radios are now working along with radar. Sonar, as we discussed, is still spotty at best.”
“Are the Russians in the same predicament?” Jack asked with hope.
“Their pulse shielding is damn near the same design as our own,” Johnson answered.
“What are you talking about, sir? It is the same design. Just like their missile control, all stolen from us before their prototypes were even built.”
Johnson smiled at his XO as everyone on board ship knew how the Russians obtained most of their sophisticated systems.
The men inside the wardroom continued their duties on through the midnight hour, and they would work until they were comfortable with their strange situation.
Within an hour, they would never be comfortable again.
Four Russian sailors stood at the fantail of the giant warship, smoking and drinking tea during their off shift. They had been slaving below, trying in vain to get their missile systems operational. They had found themselves in the same shape as the Americans as far as replacement parts for those systems — they just had too much electrical damage to fix. Captain Kreshenko had ordered all crew not on duty to be armed from the arms locker. The night watch was tripled, and the radar shack was to be triple manned. The few British and American marines assigned to Peter the Great were mostly hanging out forward, as they didn’t mix well with their new Russian friends.
The sailors joked, but again, like the Americans, their laughter and joking was limited to their work and not their situation. All you had to do was look out at the strangely colored sea in the shattered moonlight to figure that one out.
The four men were just getting ready to head below and go to sleep when one of them heard a sound he didn’t recognize. He went to the railing and looked down. At first, all he saw was the lapping of sea against the hull of Peter the Great. Then his eyes widened when the broken moonlight showed something just beneath the violet-colored waters. The face looking up at the sailor burst through the froth and covered the seventeen feet to the fantail before the sailor could pull his head back. The other three men watched in stupefied wonder as their companion went over the side without uttering a word. They heard the splash and ran to where he vanished. Then before they could even look over the side, more figures burst from the sea and gained the main deck of the Russian warship.
The intruders were dressed in sharkskin pantaloons. Many had a form of vest, and all twelve of them had very sharp harpoon-like spears. They started to stab and decimate those at the fantail with what resembled ancient swords of a curved nature and the long spikelike spears. One man managed to pull his Makarov pistol and get a shot off as an ax came down on his hand. The man screamed and looked into the face of his attacker. His eyes widened beyond what he ever thought they were capable of.
The face was light green in color, the skin nearly transparent, as the sailor could see the muscle and veins just beneath. The tentacle-like appendages curled and uncurled at the corners of its mouth, and each was adorned with a brightly colored ribbon of material. For all the world, the creature looked as if it had stepped directly from a pirate novel. The eight tentacles swung with every motion from where they were attached just below the neck. The scales on the attacker’s chest were thick and darker green than its face. The thing hissed as it brought the ax down again. This time, the sailor’s scream was quickly silenced.
More shots rang out as the deck watch saw what was happening at the fantail. As spotlights started illuminating the chaotic scene below, alarms started sounding throughout the ship.
Peter the Great was being boarded.
Jack came near to spitting out the cold coffee he had just sipped when the alarms started sounding throughout the cruiser.
“Action stations, action stations surface. All hands, action stations surface.”
“Is that bastard moving on us already?” Everett asked as he followed Shiloh’s command team up and out of the wardroom.
As men scrambled out of their bunks or into their varying departments, Jack and Everett let Captain Johnson and his men go to the bridge while they went to the main deck just below. They were the only men above deck.
“Maybe this isn’t the best place to be,” Jack said.
“You heard the captain. We don’t have any missile control. They can’t let loose with anything, so the deck is as safe as anywhere at the moment. Look!” Carl said, pointing six hundred yards away.
Peter the Great was lit up like the Fourth of July to the Americans. Tracer fire and the loud thump, thump, thump of her heavy twenty-millimeter gun were going crazy. Spotlights crisscrossed the water, and that was when Jack saw the enemy. Hundreds of small boatlike vessels were streaming toward the giant Russian battle cruiser. Her deck guns were laying down a withering fire. Tracers reached out like a laser beam and cut several of the small boats to pieces. Through binoculars, they all saw the largest of the ships at the center of the attacking smaller boats. The flag waving at the topmost of the mast was the exact duplicate of the flag Henri had found: the skull and crossbones of a pirate vessel.
“What in the hell is going on?” Jenks said as he, Charlie, and Jason joined them at the railing.
“Look out!” Collins cried as a spear thrown from somewhere in the dark streaked by and struck the hatch that Henri Farbeaux had just stepped from. The spear struck the steel of the hatch, and the tip bent, and the shaft nearly took the Frenchman’s head off. Jack then reacted far faster than anyone realized as he quickly unholstered his nine millimeter and shot three times at the greenish figure reaching out for the railing. As he fired, several more hands were seen reaching over the cable. Some had long, curved iron swords. More gunfire erupted from the Shiloh’s .50-caliber machine guns on the bridge wings.
Just as Collins lowered his nine millimeter, a shattering scream filled the air as several of the strange attackers burst from the side of the ship. They were all armed with the same weaponry that had killed the little girl on the island that had been newly christened Compton’s Reef. Shiloh then added her own powerful searchlights to the already surreal scene before them. Ropes made of organic sea material were thrown over the railings, and grappling hooks made of fish bone entwined between rails and cables. Farbeaux reacted fast and went to the sides and started cutting the ropes before the creatures climbing them could get a full foothold on the main deck. As Henri cut through the seaweed-like material, Jason joined him and started firing over the side. His first round caught one of the horrid-smelling attackers in the face, and the beast screamed. It was high pitched, and if it weren’t for the heavy gunfire from Shiloh’s crewmen, the noise of the injured boarder would have been earsplitting. Just as the head recoiled, the rope was cut, and the creature fell backward into three more.