That’s when Cassy’s voice came from the open companionway. “Jonnie! Soup’s on!”
Back still against the bulkhead, Jon slid a half-step away from the darkened opening.
Thug One glanced instinctively toward the sound of the voice just in time to catch the contents of the soup pot right in the face. The liquid was boiling hot. The man screamed, and threw his hands up to cover his scalded flesh.
Jon launched himself off the bulkhead, slamming his left shoulder into the blinded man’s chest, driving him back into Thug Two.
The three of them went down, with Jon on top. He grabbed Thug One’s helmet, pulled it upward a few inches, and then slammed it downward with all of his might — trying like hell to jam the hard surface into the unprotected face of Thug Two.
He did it again, and again, with Thug One screaming and thrashing the entire time.
There was a flash and sound like an explosion close to Jon’s ear as Thug Two squeezed off a round from his sidearm. The man’s arm was flailing, struggling to reach around his convulsing partner and draw a bead on this crazy Yuma.
Half-deafened by the gunshot, Jon gave the helmet in his hands an abrupt and vicious twist, trying his best to snap Thug One’s neck. It looked easy when Jet Li did it in the movies. In real life it turned out to be not quite as simple.
Thug One was in pain, but he had not lost his physical strength. He managed to slam a fist into the side of Jon’s head, and Jon went rolling off of him.
Suddenly Roxy was in the middle of things, snapping, biting, growling with a ferocity that Jon had never heard from his sweetheart of a dog. Leaping into the tangle of convulsing limbs, the Staffordshire Terrier latched on to the inner thigh of Thug One and began trying to rip the man’s leg off.
Down in the inflatable boat, the coxswain (Thug Three) was yelling in Spanish.
Scrambling to his knees, Jon spotted the empty soup pot and grabbed it. A half-second later, he was hammering the hell out of Thug Two’s gun hand, trying to knock the weapon out of his grasp, or at least keep the man from putting it to effective use.
The pistol went off again, blasting a crater in the fiberglass near Jon’s left knee. Thug Three’s weapon was out now too. Jon caught sight of his form in the dark, standing unsteadily in the stern of the inflatable boat, trying to line up a shot that wouldn’t endanger his own people.
Jon hurled the soup pot toward the man’s head, and then seized Thug Two’s weapon hand, bending the wrist and rotating it inward.
If he had thought about it, Jon would have recognized the move as a pronating wristlock: one of the techniques he had learned in Marine Corps unarmed combat training. But he wasn’t thinking. He was reacting instinctively, and the split-second maneuver took his opponent by surprise.
A pronating rotational attack can be difficult to counter, because it forces motion in a direction that human musculature is not designed to oppose. Thug Two — still being crushed by his floundering partner, and all too aware of the furious beast snarling and tearing flesh just centimeters from his groin — did not instantly apply the counterforce necessary to prevent the rotation before it passed the point of no return.
The gun hand turned inward, and Jon increased the pressure, bringing the pistol back around toward its owner. With both hands, he squeezed the man’s fingers with all his might, forcing the finger inside the trigger guard to contract.
The weapon bucked in its three-handed grip as another gunshot rang out. Jon repeated the bone-crushing squeeze and the weapon fired again.
Thug Two stopped struggling. Like his black-clad partner, he was wearing a flak vest. If the shot had been from a few feet farther away, that might have saved him. But very few pieces of wearable ballistic protection can stop a large caliber slug at point blank range. This was not one of those rare exceptions.
Snatching the weapon from the limp hand, Jon popped off two shots in the general direction of Thug Three. The man dived for cover in the bottom of his boat.
Jon leapt to his feet, stepping up onto the transom bench to get a good angle down into the inflatable boat.
Before Thug Three could recover, Jon peppered him with five quick rounds. Unlike the two boarders, the coxswain wasn’t wearing a flak vest, and at least two of the shots caught him high in the back.
Then Jon turned his attention back to Thug One, who was trying to keep the slavering dog from eating his crotch.
For an instant Jon thought about putting a couple of bullets in the bastard’s chest, to take him out of the game permanently. But the fight was over now, and that no longer seemed necessary.
He brought the barrel of the automatic down hard on Thug One’s face. The man stopped struggling, despite the fact that Roxy had not paused in her attempt to tear his leg off.
Jon pulled the sidearm out of Thug One’s holster, and then checked to be sure that Thug Two and Thug Three were not moving. Only then did he start trying to calm Roxy down, and disengage her jaws from the unconscious man’s leg.
There was a moment when he didn’t think she was going to let go, and he wondered if the first taste of violence might have pushed her over some edge from which there was no coming back. But after a few seconds, the sound of his voice seemed to filter into her brain. She released her jaws, and backed away, almost tripping over her own paws as if she was completely disoriented.
Jon knelt and caught her, stroking the dog’s head and crooning to her in soothing tones. She was trembling, and she wasn’t the only one.
He turned to face the open companionway. “All clear, Cass. Bad guys are down.”
Cassy came out on deck, the boat’s flare gun in her right hand, and a boning knife in her left. Both improvised weapons clattered to the deck as she threw her arms around Jon’s neck and began to sob.
“I was going to help…” she sniffed. “I was ready to help… But—”
“You did help,” Jon said. “You were right on the ball when it counted. I’m pretty sure your soup trick saved my life.”
Cassy pulled back abruptly as she realized that her hands were wet and sticky. “You’ve got blood all over you! How bad are you hurt?”
“Steady there, Doc,” said Jon. “That’s not my blood. Or I don’t think so anyway.”
He gave Cassy a final hug and got painfully to his feet. “I’m gonna toss these two Bozos into the boat with their buddy, and set them adrift. Then we’re going to do some fast clean up, in case somebody else comes nosing around.”
Cassy sniffed. “And then what?”
“Then, I’m going to leave you with one of these weapons and Fearless Roxy while I go ashore to hunt for our lost Marines.”
“Jonnie, you can’t!”
“Those guys are in trouble,” he said. “They should have been back hours ago.”
“They’re Marines,” Cassy said, “and you’re not the U.S. Cavalry. It’s not your job to go charging to the rescue if their mission goes sour.”
Jon looked toward the beach. “Okay, you convinced me. I’ll wait here.”
“Wait… What? You can’t change your mind that fast. I think you just gave me whiplash!”
Jon pointed. “I don’t have to go after them. They’re coming back.”
Cassy got to her feet and looked for herself. Sure enough, the dinghy was inbound.
“Hang on,” she said. “There are only three of them. They’re missing somebody.”
“I can see that,” said Jon. “Get below and start the diesel.”
Officially, Sea Bat was an acronym, short for Submerged Extended Autonomy Biological Acoustic Tracker. Unofficially, the term was a backronym rather than a true acronym, meaning that the project team at Norton Deepwater Systems had decided upon the name first, and then cherry picked supporting terminology to fit the resulting letters.