“We’ve been compromised. Let’s go!” Crocker shouted.
He and Davis followed the path Akil had taken forward. Halfway there, he heard an engine start up on the port side of the Contessa. Detouring left, away from the bulkhead to the port rail, he caught a glimpse of the launch.
It wasn’t a funky pirate vessel, but rather a clean, military-type fast attack boat painted gray. No markings, no name. Seventy to eighty feet long, armed with deck-mounted.50-caliber guns fore and aft.
“Watch out!” Davis shouted.
Seeing a bearded man on the deck aiming an AK-47 at him, Crocker jumped back and ducked behind a ventilator. He was joined by Davis, who reported seeing orange barrels stacked along the bow of the launch.
“How many?” Crocker asked.
“Half a dozen.”
“Pirates, my ass.”
An explosion went off near the top of the Contessa’s superstructure, where Ritchie, Cal, and Mancini had deployed. It pushed Crocker and Davis into a round metal ventilator and sent shards of glass and hot metal flying through the air, smacking the deck and mast. Crocker felt something embed itself into his left forearm, more painful than disabling.
I’ll deal with it later, he thought.
Men shouted at one another from the boat below while others continued to fire from near the bow of the Contessa toward where he and Davis hid on the deck. The shouting sounded more like Persian than Arabic.
Iranians? he asked himself.
It made sense. The Iranians needed parts and nuclear fuel for their atomic weapons development program. And they’d been hit by a series of UN embargoes that made it almost impossible for them to import uranium legally.
So they’d hired pirates to hijack a vessel transporting the things they needed.
Kind of clever.
“We’ve gotta stop that launch!” Crocker shouted as bullets smashed into the metal in front of them.
“What about Akil?”
A teammate in a firefight was always a priority. “We’re going to save his ass first.”
Not only was Akil pinned down near the Contessa’s foremast, but pirates firing automatic weapons had climbed out of the cargo bay and were attacking him from two sides.
On Crocker’s hand signal, he and Davis moved to the bulkhead at the center of the deck. From a position twenty feet forward, they fired their MP5s and caught two pirates by surprise-one in the chest, another raked from his knees to his sternum.
Akil took out a third with his 9-millimeter handgun. All those years of daily live-fire practice had paid off.
The foremost deck became quiet.
“Dammit to hell,” Akil groaned, holding up his right hand. “I got stung!”
“Where?”
“Back of my hand.”
Although it was a bitch to see in the minimal light, Crocker did the best he could, feeling through warm blood along the palm to the knuckles and fingers, ascertaining the extent of the damage.
Akil gritted his teeth. “What the fuck…”
Crocker said, “Appears to be a gash. Not serious. You’re one lucky motherfucker.”
“I don’t feel lucky.”
He turned to Davis. “Give him something to cry into while I wrap this baby up.”
Opening the emergency medical kit he wore on his back, Crocker first wiped away the blood, then sprayed the wound with disinfectant. Next he wrapped the whole hand in a bandage that he secured with tape.
All the time he was aware that the launch was getting away.
With the wounded man providing cover with his automatic pistol held in his left hand, Crocker and Davis took the grenades Akil was carrying and got into position to toss them at the target, which was approximately forty feet off the Contessa’s port side and slightly in front.
“Aim for the stern,” Crocker said. “We don’t want to damage the barrels up front. Might be yellowcake.”
“Okay, boss.”
On the count of three they stood together and threw. Once, twice, three times in succession.
Seeing the Americans, the guy manning the.50-cal on the launch’s deck opened up. Whack-a, whack-a, whack-a… Fortunately his aim sucked, and Crocker and Davis had time to crouch behind the foremast. Hot, angry rounds glanced off the metal around them. Then a series of six explosions ripped into the air and lit up the night sky.
The.50-cal paused for a few seconds, then started firing again.
A seventh blast stopped it altogether.
“What was that?” Davis asked.
Crocker hazarded a look. It appeared that one of the grenades had hit a barrel of extra fuel, because flames were rising from the attack boat’s stern. Seeing dark figures scurrying around the deck, he leveled his MP5 and started firing. Then another blast lit up the deck, throwing a burning man into the ocean.
The concussion was strong enough to kick Crocker and Davis back, too. By the time Crocker righted himself enough to steal another look, the launch’s stern was almost completely engulfed in flames. If they reached the dozen barrels of what could be yellowcake along the bow, it could set off an explosion that would be the equivalent of a dirty bomb, releasing dangerous radiation that, depending on the wind’s direction, could kill many thousands of people.
Crocker turned to Davis and shouted, “Cover me. I’m going down.”
“Where?”
“Into the water. After the launch.”
“But-”
Before Davis could get the rest of his words out, Crocker handed him his weapon, flung off his pack, and was diving off the Contessa’s port rail.
He sliced into the water, came up to take a quick breath and establish direction, then started swimming underwater using the combat swimmer stroke he’d been taught in Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) and had practiced with his team once a week when not deployed. He’d progressed thirty-five feet when his lungs felt like they were going to explode. Crocker knew that the carbon dioxide receptors in his brain were telling him it was time to exhale because he had too much CO2 in his system. So he breathed out a little, releasing some of the air in his lungs.
This enabled him to swim the last ten feet or so without too much discomfort. Coming up near the launch’s stern, he breathed in the smoke-filled air but held back a cough. Immediately he was confronted with another challenge-the fire made it too hot to board at the stern. So he dove under the boat’s hull and, following the stem, where the two planes of the hull had been welded together, surfaced near the bow.
The boat was moving slowly, at 1.5 knots, so boarding was relatively easy. He simply grabbed the anchor port and pulled himself up to the windlass and deck, where he crouched with the rain pelting his back and head.
On closer inspection the launch reminded him of an old navy PT boat or a British motor torpedo boat-light and simple, with a displacement-type hull and a small superstructure pitched toward the stern.
No one had spotted him so far. In fact he didn’t see anyone, except for a badly burned man he stepped over as he headed for the wheelhouse. Much of it had been destroyed-the windshield completely shattered and many of the gauges in the console cracked.
Crocker pulled back the throttle to idle, then looked for the switch to cut the engine.
The rain picked up, propelled by strong gusts of wind. He wasn’t sure if these conditions would extinguish the flames or fan them. It all depended on whether the fire was oil based, which was something he had no time to determine.
His immediate concern was the barrels along the bow. He had descended three steps into the cabin in search of a fire extinguisher when he ran into two men starting up, then saw a third, shorter man behind them. All three had soot-covered faces. One was holding his right arm, which appeared to be injured near the shoulder. A piece of bone protruded.