He kept an eye on it as he headed down the hawser to the line. The medium weight nylon was more or less negatively buoyant and hadn’t gotten far from the hawser. Steve got ahold of one end and moved away from the hawser. As soon as he was clear, he sped up, swimming away from the boat and the quick release as fast as possible, the line wrapped around his left hand.
He felt the shock of the line going taught and looked back. The quick release had surrendered, finally, and the boat shot into the depths as the hawser snapped upwards.
Pulling Steve along with it. Which had been part of the plan.
Unfortunately, the sharp movements excited the hammerhead, which headed for the only reasonable source of protein in view: Steve.
The shark came in at lightning speed but Steve had had a master’s course in drawing and firing fast at this point. He fended the charging hammerhead away by placing the barrel of the H &K against its port hammer and pressing the trigger as it rolled to take a bite of tasty human.
The gun did not explode and the hammerhead did not take well to being shot in the head by a polymer capped, expanding, 45 caliber ACP. It spasmed and dashed away in a corkscrew, its tail lashing furiously.
Unfortunately, it was now “a distressed fish, bird or mammal.” Sharks sense such movements and are attracted to them. And while there were tasty zombies at the aft of the boat, there were also a lot of sharks. So some of the ones on the edge of the pack banked away and headed towards the new source of potential protein.
Which meant right at Steve.
He wasn’t sticking around to watch or anything but the sharks were coming in from near the surface. The hammerhead was tracking down and forward on the megayacht and that meant that the sharks’ path led them right to Steve.
Who they passed without note. He was still being calm and regular in his movements and they didn’t see him as easy prey. Five, six, nine sharks darted right past him in pursuit of the massive hammer as he calmly made his way to the surface.
“I thought you were a goner, there,” Sherill called. “They were too deep to shoot.”
“If you’d shot one of them I would have been a goner,” Steve muttered. If one of the charging sharks had been shot as well, all the rest would have closed in with Steve as tasty snack in the middle.
“What?” Sherill asked, starting to climb down.
“Easy peasy,” Steve said, decocking the H &K and taking a series of deep breaths. “No worries, mate.”
* * *
“Okay,” Fredette said, shaking his head and listening to the take from the captains. The increasing number of boat captains in the “flotilla” gossiped like old women on various frequencies, which made keeping up with the goings on of the group easy. “This guy is flipping insane. Diving into a feeding frenzy to release a boat and then taking out a shark with a pistol?”
“If it’s crazy and it works, it ain’t crazy,” Bundy said, shrugging and making a note. “Note to sonar. That weird transient was the sound of a.45 being fired sixty feet underwater…”
“Don’t forget the whole ‘into a shark’ part,” Fredette said. “That probably changed the acoustics from just firing it.”
“Good point…”
* * *
Galloway raised an eyebrow and looked at Commander Freeman.
“His own subordinate skippers call him ‘Captain Insanity,’ sir,” Freeman said, defensively.
“Not to influence the discussion or anything,” Brice said, holding up her hands. “But I’m starting to like this guy.”
Freeman looked at his monitors and sighed.
“Sir, we may have a destabilizing element in the equation.”
“Which is?” Galloway asked.
“Passive sonar on the Dallas indicates an approaching Russian Typhoon.”
“They’re sending a boomer?” Brice said, blinking. “A boomer?”
“They’re fast attacks are not as well designed for long endurance as ours,” Freeman said. “It’s possible that they don’t have a fast attack to close the position. Acoustics indicate it is probably the Servestal.”
“Sounds like time to talk to Sergei again,” Galloway said, grimacing.
* * *
“Slippery,” Steve said as he jumped off the dinghy onto the boarding platform. The dinghy was going up and down in five foot regular seas whereas the boarding platform was hardly moving. He’d done it so many times it he really didn’t notice. “Watch your step.”
He’d actually landed on the chest of one of the dead infected. He also didn’t really notice that except one detail.
“Is it just me or is there a preponderance of women?” he asked, catching the line thrown to him.
“We’d noticed that,” Fontana said. “And for all they were zombies…kinda pretty ones.”
“Men,” Faith said, stepping easily onto the flushdeck. “Da, this is one of the easiest boardings we’ve ever done.”
“Noticed,” Steve said. “But if you slip overboard it will go quickly to one of the worst,” he added, pointing to the still circling sharks.
“So, you seriously shot a hammerhead with a.45?” Fontana said, taking point. There were stairs up to the promenade deck to either side of the landing. He took port just because. There also appeared to be some sort of pop-out door but there were no obvious external controls.
“Wasn’t my first option,” Steve said, as Faith took starboard. “And I’m not sure whether to trust the gun again. We need to be really careful on fire discipline on this one. I think it’s going to be as bad as the cutter.”
“Well, it’s got all the usual zombie mess,” Fontana said, looking over at Faith. “Ooo, look, there’s movement to my starboard!”
“Very effing funny, Falcon,” Faith said. She looked through the heavy glass doors at the interior and shrugged. “I dunno, a little paint, some carpet…”
“A lot of carpet,” Steve said. “I think we need to start clearing freighters to look for carpet.”
What appeared to be the main saloon was about sixty feet long, two stories high and had once been a vision in fine wood bars, tables and white carpet and equally white sofas and chairs. There were also plasma screens freaking everywhere. From the looks of it, some of the windows could double as smart-screens. The central bar was of cream, silver and blond wood with “SOCIAL ALPHA” emblazoned above along with what appeared to be the logo for Spacebook, the social networking site. Someone had defaced it, apparently tried to strip off the platinum and since it was above most of the damage that had probably been an uninfected human.
Half the plasmas were obviously trashed. The floor was covered in the usual mix of blood, decomposing flesh and feces. So were the sofas, chairs, tables and the fine wood bars. There were bullet holes in half the windows. There were at least nine chewed corpses in view.
“All of the booze is gone,” Fontana said, looking behind the central bars.
“Maybe they figured out how to break the top of a bottle,” Faith said, stepping gingerly around the central bar to starboard and sweeping from side to side. The room had no interior light but they were still getting good radiance from the tinted windows. She checked behind the bar on her side, leading with her Saiga. “Cleaning this up is going to be a bitch and a half. But I think it might be worth it.”
“The problem is, again, fuel,” Steve said.
“There’s that small tanker Sophia found,” Fontana said, sweeping to port again.
“Let’s say I’m a little uncomfortable clearing a tanker,” Steve said, hefting his Saiga. “Especially one that has been sitting without spaces being vented. All I can see is Faith shooting a zombie and the whole thing going boom. Then there’s the problem of getting it running and getting the fuel from it to the other boats. In mid ocean.”