Let’s see. Panel lights. Should be this one.
Click! Green glowed behind a few of the gauges.
Okay. So far, so good. Binnacle light.
Click! Amanda nodded to herself as the compass dome lit. This tug had seen some hard usage and short maintenance, but at least the compass had been kept aligned. That wasn’t much, but it was something. She lifted the battered interphone out of its cradle and squeezed the call button. It worked too. That was something else.
“Smith here.”
“Smith. This is the Captain. I’m checking out the wheel house. How does it look down there?”
“Like they’ve been using a pack of goddamn orangutans for an engine-room crew.” A good motor mac’s honest outrage at the abuse of machinery could be heard in his voice.
“We saw her up and running this afternoon. Are the plants still in one piece?”
“I think they’re pretty much all here, ma’am. It’s hard to tell with some of the jack-leg patch jobs done on this thing.”
A muscle jumped in Amanda’s jaw. “Can you get her going?”
“I think so, ma’am. The injectors seem to work, and we got a charge of air for the starter. Uh, I’m just hoping this engine instrumentation is trashed, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because according to what I’m seeing on these gauges, we got no bunkerage. The fuel tanks read empty.”
“Go!”
As the sudden curtain of total darkness swept over the southern side of the harbor basin, the primary boarding force made its move on the stern quarter of the Bajara. There were lookouts and sentries posted aboard the tanker, but they had been using white visible-spectrum light as their perimeter defense. Suddenly deprived of it, they went blind.
The five assault boats slid in under the curved side of the ship. Featherweight titanium and Fiberglas boarding ladders had been assembled aboard each craft. Now the ladders swayed upward, the rubber-sheathed hooks at their upper ends silently fitting over the lip of the deck edge.
Quillain was the first man on the ladder from his boat. The ladder’s structure, seemingly fragile, yet strong enough to bear several times his weight, quivered unnervingly as he clambered swiftly upward to the tanker’s deck.
Yet not quite fast enough. A bewildered Union soldier peered over the rail almost at the head of Quillain’s ladder, looking down full into Quillain’s face. Through his night vision visor, Quillain saw the African’s eyes widen and his mouth open to yell.
The shots from the boat below were so well silenced that Quillain didn’t hear their firing. He only felt the shock waves generated by the flight of the bullets brushing the back of his neck. The Union soldier attempted his yell, but only a faint sodden gasp emerged. No man can shout with a .45 hardball round driven through each lung.
Quillain lunged up the last rung of the ladder. Grabbing the cable railing with one hand, his other went for the front of the Union sentry’s shirt. With an explosive heave, he launched the man outboard and over the side with enough force to clear the raider boat below.
The Bajara’s deckhouse lights flickered and came on again. Someone had gotten the landline disconnected and an auxiliary generator started. But it came too late to be of any use to her defenders. Like the buccaneers of old, the Marines were pouring over her rail.
Each squad and each fire team of each squad of the boarding platoon had its own specific objective or string of objectives. Dispersing outward, they began to fulfill them. The Foxmen cleared the tanker’s decks with a deft and coolly professional ruthlessness, the only audible noise being the pad of foam-soled assault boots and the occasional cough or flutter of a sound-suppressed firearm.
Quillain personally led the force targeting the tanker’s bridge, serving as point man for the headlong rush up the exterior superstructure ladderways. There hadn’t been enough of the sound-suppressed Heckler and Koch SOC pistols and H&K-5 submachine guns available to issue a silenced firearm to every member of the boarding party, and Quillain had passed on the chance to carry one. He had a quiet killer of his own he preferred to rely on.
With the coming of the short, lightweight assault rifle, the bayonet had almost disappeared from the scheme of things on the battlefield. However, the Mossberg 590 combat shotgun was the last good bayonet mount in U.S. service, and Stone Quillain was one of the last true aficionados of this ancient martial art. Honed to a razor’s edge and a needle point, an issue M-7 gleamed from the mounting lugs of his personal weapon.
Storming around the ladder stage on the second level of the deckhouse, Quillain found himself confronting a figure clad in Union army camouflage. Gaping at the Marine, the Union officer clawed for the pistol holster at his belt. Countering, Quillain exploded into the long-practiced moves of the ancient pikeman’s drill. Lunge! Twist! Extract!
The Union officer folded over, clutching at his pierced belly and retching blood. Reversing his weapon, Quillain stepped in, driving the edge of the Mossberg’s composite stock downward upon the juncture of spine and skull with surgical precision, shattering the first vertebra with the lethal and merciful vertical butt stroke. The dead man’s body refused to fall fast enough. Quillain bulldozed it aside and continued the race upward.
On the Bajara’s bridge, Captain Moustapha Ahmed recalled nervously that he had not knelt to Mecca his five times that day. Truth be told, he had not done so even once, and should the absolute factuality be demanded, he rarely did when he was aboard ship and out of sight of the mullahs. However, this night, he deeply regretted not accommodating the demands of his faith.
The bridge windscreens faced to the south, and intermittently the flare of a powerful explosion outlined the horizon beyond the port. American cruise missiles. Something not good to think of when one was sitting atop thousands of tons of highly inflammable petroleum.
Ahmed wished fervently he’d been able to unload his cargo this day. He wished even more fervently that he might get himself and his ship out of here. Most fervently of all, he wished that he had prayed. This was not a time or place to have Allah displeased with you.
The Union Special Forces commanding officer of the ship’s guard must have read Ahmed’s expression. He grinned at the Algerian skipper’s discomfort, sharing the smile with his lieutenant and the two sentries who also occupied the Bajara’s wheelhouse.
“What’s the matter, Captain Ahmed?” the African officer said. “The U.N. is putting on a little fireworks show in your honor. Don’t you appreciate it?”
“It is an honor I would avoid if I could,” the Algerian grunted back. “What’s to prevent them from attacking the harbor itself, and us?”
“Half of the Union army, Captain. But only half.”
The Special Forces officer grinned again. Then his face collapsed inward into a bloody mush and the back of his head exploded, spraying brain matter across the port side of the bridge. Ahmed heard a series of soft coughing sounds behind him and felt silent deadly things hiss past. The three remaining Union soldiers also twisted and writhed in a few steps of a grotesque and ugly dance before crumpling to the deck, scarlet patches blossoming on their uniforms.
Ahmed did not want to see what was behind him. Yet he could not keep from turning around.
A second group of solders had burst in from the starboard bridge wing, tall and bulky men with pale eyes and artificially darkened skin, each bearing a far more lethal-looking accumulation of war tools than any of the Union troops had possessed. A literal giant of a man stood at their head, a massive and exotic-looking weapon held ready in his hands, blood sheening its bayonet.