“Aye aye, XO,” Cornell said. His hands moved on the small brass wheel. A minute passed, two, and then the Sojourner Truth hit a patch of what felt like relative calm.
“Launch,” Sara said.
On the monitor they saw the rotors increase to a blur and the body of the helo begin to lift. Sara made it to the port wing of the bridge in time to see them appear, and then Sams really goosed it. The helo shot past the bridge in a bright orange blur fifty feet off the deck.
Sara stared after them, until recalled to where she was by the wind and the cold and the snow and the fog and the ice and, oh, the hell with it. She went back inside.
“Will she do it, Sara?” Hugh said.
“Who? Oh. The Sunrise Warrior‘? Yes.”
He was silent. “What?” she said.
“I guess what I meant was, will the rest of them let, what’s her name, Kincaid, do it?”
“Yes,” Sara said firmly, “they will.” She couldn’t stand still. She paced back and forth in front of the controls console and around it several times, not an easy thing to do on a packed bridge in twenty-foot seas, until Chief Edelen said, in a very respectful voice, “Why don’t you have a seat, XO?”
She stared at him. He gestured at the captain’s chair. The back was ripped up but someone had cleaned off the blood and guts and bone.
“No,” she said, a little more strongly than she ought to have. Hugh, standing next to Tommy over the radar screen, looked up. She recovered, and managed a smile. “Thank you, Chief. But no.”
After that, she stood in front of one of the intact forward windows, staring through the fug on the other side of it, praying for the sun to rise.
HARRY SAMS HAD SEVENTEEN years on helos, first with the U.S. Navy and then with the U.S. Coast Guard. He was fond of quoting that old aviation aphorism, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” He didn’t hold with that other old aviation aphorism, “Any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” either. He not only wanted to bring home his people alive and well, he wanted his craft intact and ready to fly again.
Which was why he was wondering, with the very little portion of his brain allowed to do anything so entirely frivolous, why it was that he was speeding twenty-five feet above twenty-foot swells at a hundred fifty-seven knots with a cargo hold full of Coasties armed to the teeth toward a blip on a radar screen that had already proved itself to be rather better armed than the average Bering Sea catcher-processor.
And then the Agafias lights loomed up out of the driving snow and fog, and there was no time to think of anything but the job at hand.
The processor was pitching and rolling and yawing worse than the Sojourner Truth, which meant it would be noisy on board with the creak and groan of the ship, the slipping and sliding and rolling of everything not lashed down, and the whip and slap of the ocean.
“Target in sight,” he said into the mike, and heard Ryan reply, “Target in sight, aye.” Next to him Laird moved like an automaton, hands in constant motion, senses reaching out to listen to the bird, to what she was saying, how she was handling a tailwind of forty-five knots and gusts of over fifty.
“I’m not making any test runs,” Sams said. “We don’t have enough fuel for that. One shot is all we get. Everybody ready?”
“Ready, Lieutenant,” Ryan said.
“Ready, Lieutenant,” Airman Cho said.
“Okay,” Sams said. “It’s all going to happen very, very fast, so be ready.” He took another look as the Agafias stern came into view, and added, “And she’s making ice as fast as the Sojourner Truth, so watch your asses, Ryan.”
“Watching our asses, aye aye, sir.”
Sams banked rapidly to slide up her hull, slowing speed as they approached the bow. The only even reasonably empty space was a triangular section forward of the mast and boom, framed by the two massive anchors and the bow itself. He estimated a bare twenty square feet, if that. The good news was that the six containers stacked on the foredeck hid the helo from the windows on the Agafias bridge.
“Lieutenant?” Laird was looking at him.
Sams shook himself back into the present. “Are we good to go?”
Cho had the line hooked to the hoist. The helo came around the bow and Sams popped up on a rapid flare, virtually halting the helo in midair, letting it hang there like it was painted on the fog. Cho dropped the line and out of the corner of his eye Sams saw it hit the deck. A second later a man in a Mustang suit was sliding down it. He grabbed the end, belayed it around a stanchion, and five more men, bristling with weapons, hurtled down in rapid succession. Cho disconnected the line at the hoist and let it fall and Sams let the helo fall forward.
He stood off far enough to grab some fog for cover but not too far to be out of range of the boarding team’s radios. He made a wide circuit of the ship and was rewarded when Ryan’s voice came over the air. “All down safely, Lieutenant. See you back in Kodiak. You did say the beer was on you, right?”
“In your dreams, Ryan. Good hunting. And watch your back!”
Laird brought up Cape Navarin on the GPS and set a course, and as he did so the Sojourner Truth loomed up out of the mist looking like the wrath of God. She was even throwing a few thunderbolts by way of the portside 25-millimeter cannon.
The shells crossed the Agafia’s bow with inches to spare and were immediately followed by a voice on a loudspeaker turned up high enough to be heard on the moon, never mind over the storm. “Fishing vessel Agafia, this is the United States Coast Guard cutter Sojourner Truth. Heave to and prepare to be boarded. I say again, heave to and prepare to be boarded.”
And the guns on both sides opened up and Sams pointed the helo’s nose at three-five-zero and hit the gas.
THE MEN ON BOARD the Agafia were demoralized and panicking, especially the mercenaries. They had shot at the American ship and then proceeded to lead it farther south, as Jones had instructed. The storm was hitting them hard, tossing the ship around like a Ping-Pong ball in a bathtub full of Jell-O. It never stopped, everyone was getting slammed into bulkheads, hatch handles, and other crewmen.
Fang’s men were more disciplined and had the advantage of time served at sea, but they, too, were growing increasingly alarmed. Someone had come at them out of the snow and the sleet and the hail and had begun shooting. Windows had shattered; men had been hit and were screaming in fear and pain. At first Chen thought the ship’s crew must have broken loose and were trying to retake the ship, and then he remembered that Jones had put them all over the side.
And then a blue-hulled ship with a rainbow on the bow materialized on their starboard side on what looked like a course to ram them amidships. Even Jones yelled at that. Chen spun the wheel into a blur, only to find that way blocked by the Sojourner Truth. All three ships were pitching and tossing violently, adding to the feeling of an uncontrollable and imminent doom.
During those precious minutes when the bridge crew of the Agafia was preoccupied with finding some sea room in twenty-foot seas, Ryan’s men were working their way aft, picking off the enemy one at a time. Later, his report would state that most of these fell overboard into the Bering Sea. Hank Ryan had helped carry Captain Lowe’s body below. He still had the captain’s blood on his uniform and he was not inclined to show mercy, especially when he didn’t know what his team was facing in the way of opposition on board the Agafia. He knew that they had at least one big gun, and that was all he needed to know.