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.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. “Chief, fall off to starboard. Let them think they’ve chased us off.” They hunched over the Transas again. “Okay, Tommy, what’s your best guess for intercept?”
Tommy punched in some numbers. “If we want to surprise them, right here.”
“We do. How long?”
“About an hour.”
Sara looked over her shoulder at the receding stern of the freighter. “Man, that’s just cutting it too damn close.” She turned back. “Lay in a course. Chief, we slow down over long enough to pick up the crew.”
“What about the inflatable?”
“Leave it, we don’t have time. Ops, break out the machine guns. Order the gunners to lay down a covering fire to suppress the hell out of that bastard with the rocket launcher when we catch up to them.”
“Aye aye, XO.” Ops took the portside hatch at a run.
She slipped and slid across the deck and grabbed the microphone. “Attention all hands, attention all hands, this is XO Lange.” She paused. She really didn’t know what to say this time. She only hoped she didn’t start a mutiny. She struggled to sound as calm as possible, as if one heard this kind of order everyday on board a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. “You’ve got about an hour to prepare for collision, I say again, one hour to pre pare for collision. Batten everything down and keep one hand on those survival suits. I say again, all hands, prepare for collision.”
HUGH WOKE UP TO the feeling of someone pushing a red-hot poker through his lower left back. He groaned, partly in pain, partly in humiliation. He’d been shot in the ass. He could hear Kyle laughing. “Shut up, Kyle,” he muttered.
“Hello,” someone said in Korean.
With a tremendous effort, he turned his head and pried his eyes open to see a pair of combat boots in front of his face. He groaned again.
“Yes, you have been shot,” the voice said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Me, too,” Hugh said, surprised that he still had the ability to speak.
“I have noticed that there is no blood, so I assume you are wearing body armor.” One of the shoes nudged him. “Get up.”
Sweating, straining, Hugh pulled himself to his knees, where he threw up on the combat boots.
“Very amusing,” the voice said. “Stand up.”
He pulled himself the rest of the way to his feet, and stood, swaying, partly from the motion of the ship, partly because little stars were flying around his head and chirping. Or was that little birds twinkling?
He was on deck. They must have dragged him there. That would explain why every bone and muscle in his body ached.
The deck beneath his feet jarred and twisted and his hand slipped and let go of whatever it had been holding on to. Hands caught him and set him ungently back on his feet but not before he’d caught a face full of spray. He blinked around at the circle of hostile faces.
“Careful,” the voice said, revealing itself to be a young Asian man with sallow skin and expressionless dark eyes. Not Kyle, then. “We wouldn’t want you falling overboard.”
He held a pistol in his hand that Hugh recognized. He looked down and though his head swam at the movement he could see that his holster was empty.
“Who are you?” the man said.
Hugh licked his lips. “Could I have some water?”
The man nodded at someone behind Hugh. A bottle of Evian appeared. Hugh almost laughed but he was afraid it might hurt. He unscrewed the cap and drank thirstily.
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?” Hugh said.
The man gave a little bow. “Ja Yong-bae.” Almost as an afterthought he brought the pistol up and hit Hugh in the face with it.
Hugh went down again, and was caught again by the same rough hands and dumped back on his feet.
“Who are you?” the man repeated.
A head appeared over the side of the container and said something to Ja that Hugh didn’t catch over the sounds of wind and sea. “Don’t stop!” Ja shouted.