“Kathy?”
“Yes, Captain?”
Scott stopped himself. He’d been about to send the third mate down to the galley on an errand, and that sort of thing had been a source of friction more than once already on this voyage. Kathy Moskowiec was a bright, attractive woman five years out of Kings Point Maritime Academy. Sensitive about being the only woman aboard ship — women had been serving with tanker crews only for the past ten years or so, and never in great numbers — she took her professional image very seriously.
“Take the wheel, please,” he said, changing his order. “David?”
“Yes, Cap?”
The A/B — the able-bodied seaman — standing at the ship’s wheel was David Ramos, a stocky Filipino who’d been in the merchant marine, then in tankers, for almost as long as Moskowiec had been alive.
“Haul yourself down to the galley,” he told the man. “Tell the cook to make sure there’s plenty of tea and coffee laid on. I imagine that bunch is going to want to get warmed up.”
“Right you are, Cap.” Kathy took David’s place at the wheel, and the A/B hurried off the bridge. For several minutes, there was no sound save the warm hum of the bridge ventilators and electrical systems. The searchlights outside were switched off, and the Noramo Pride again plowed ahead through the sea in a blackness relieved only by her red, white, and green running lights.
Then one of the aft bridge doors opened, and five of the visitors entered, led by Mike Beatty, the ship’s chief mate. The silver-haired man was with them, looking particularly ominous in his black combat garb, and with a wicked-looking submachine gun strapped across his chest.
Scott frowned. He’d been in the U.S. Navy for four years before he’d gone into tankers, and he knew something about the military. While he’d never worked with SEALs or similar commando units, he’d had the impression that they didn’t haul loaded weapons around, especially aboard ship or on a helicopter, in order to reduce the risk of accidents. These men all had magazines plugged into the receivers of their weapons.
Well, maybe the Dutch did things differently. Or maybe those magazines were empty. Perhaps he could speak to the unit’s commander about it after the amenities were over. “Welcome aboard, sir,” Scott told them. “Do you speak English?”
“Ja, ” the leader replied, smiling. “A little, anyway. Some of my men, maybe not so good.”
“Well, we’ve laid on coffee and tea for you all down in the mess, and I imagine Cookie can rustle up some midrats, if you’re interested.”
“Midrats?”
“Midnight rations. Something for your boys to eat.”
“Ah! Thank you very much for your hospitality, Captain,” the man replied slowly. “It was… how you English say? A bit dicey out there.”
“Actually, sir, we’re Americans.” He extended a hand. “The Noramo Pride is an American vessel. Captain Scott, at your service. And you are?…”
“Delighted to meet you, Captain Scott. I have one rather urgent request, before we do anything else. Might you show me, please, your radio room? I need to report to base that we are okay.”
“Of course. This way, if you please.”
Scott had led the man — followed by two of his black-garbed soldiers — up to the door of the radio shack before a question occurred to him. “Uh… excuse me, sir,” Scott said as he opened the radio-room door and held it for the man, “but why do you need to use our radio? You could have used the one aboard the helicopter to call—”
The gunfire was shockingly loud contained within the narrow, steel-walled confines of the ship’s passageways, as the black-garbed commando opened up with his submachine gun from the open doorway, spraying the radio shack from bulkhead to bulkhead, from overhead to deck. Greg Pelso was just rising from his seat, his mouth gaping open in astonishment as half-a-dozen bullets slammed into his torso in a bloody, splattering tattoo that sent him crashing backward, arms flailing, into an electronics cabinet.
“What the hell? — ”
For a nightmare moment, Pelso seemed pinned upright by the bullets slashing into his body, as radio equipment around him exploded in a shower of sparks and the thunder of gunfire and the crash and ping of bullets smashing delicate equipment drowned out his gurgled shriek. When he collapsed onto the deck, the front of his shirt was sodden and stained bright red, his face was an unrecognizable pulp of blood and skin tatters and shockingly naked bone, and a very great deal of blood was pooling on the linoleum beneath his body.
Scott was still lunging for the gunman, a scream of protest in his throat, when the butt of an assault rifle slammed into the back of his head, tumbling him forward onto the deck across a clattering spill of brass casings from the commando leader’s submachine gun. In the distance, he could hear other sounds of nightmare chaos — shouts and wailing curses from the bridge and, farther off still, the rattle of automatic gunfire.
A heavy boot nudged him in the side, rolling him onto his back. Stunned, his head throbbing from the blow, he blinked up at the black, pain-blurred form of his captor, silhouetted against the lights in the passageway’s overhead.
“Captain Scott,” the man said, and his voice, while still accented, no longer carried the bumbling and somehow disarming clumsiness of someone who knew only a little English. “I am Heinrich Adler of the Army of the People’s Revolutionary Front. Your ship is mine, and you and your crew, what is left of them, are my prisoners.” He shifted position, so that the ugly black muzzle of his weapon was pointed directly at Scott’s face. “Most of your people are expendable, and I will not hesitate for an instant to shoot some of them in order to force the compliance of the rest. Do you understand me?”
Scott blinked, not sure whether a response was called for.
The man’s boot swung back, then shot forward, hard, cracking into Scott’s ribs and sending a blinding pain shooting through his body. “I said do you understand me?”
“Y-yes!” Scott gasped, trying to capture the breath driven from his lungs. “God… what… what is it you want?”
“For the moment, Captain, we have what we want, but I assure you that when I require more of you, you will be the first to know.” He looked up at the other two soldiers, snapped something that sounded German to Scott, and jerked his head. Rough hands reached down and grabbed Scott’s arms and shoulders, and started dragging him across the deck back onto the bridge.
“Captain!”
Kathy was standing at the wheel between two of the invaders, but she pushed past them as Scott was dropped onto the deck.
“Easy, Moskowiec,” Scott said, rising. His head hurt like hell, but he didn’t think there was any serious damage. “Just do what they say, okay?”
“But who are they?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, eyeing the commando leader, who was now talking rapidly and unintelligibly to someone on a small radio attached to the shoulder of his load-bearing vest. “But somehow I don’t think they’re really members of the Royal Dutch Marines.”
12
The Rosa was typical of the small independent trawlers that made their living off the shoals and fishing banks that ringed the North Sea, from the Frisian Banks off the Netherlands to the Viking Banks between Norway and the Shetland Islands. Originally part of the Norwegian trawler fleet, she’d been appropriated by the Germans early in World War II, ended up in Poland as part of the reshuffling of the German border at the end of the war, and finally been sold to a fishing cooperative back in East Germany. Thirty years later, aging, so rusty in spots that her owners insisted that only the rust was holding her together, the Rosa was ready for the breakers’ yard.