Dark Watch

The weapon felt perfectly balanced in her hands as she squeezed the trigger for a fifth time. Her target had ducked behind the railing’s metal plating, but the shot would keep his head down for a few critical seconds. Another gore-spattered gunman raised himself suddenly, hosing the sea with his AK-47 before homing in on the fleeing boat. Tory aimed carefully, her body anticipating the wave action, and she pulled the trigger. The light bullet sparked off the railing just in front of the Indonesian and ricocheted into his chest just below the sternum, lifting him high off his feet.

“Hold on!” Trono shouted. “We’re going back in. Cease fire.”

He twisted the wheel once again and set the boat on a collision course with the squat tugboat. Because they weren’t being fired on, many of the pirates stood up to draw a bead on the craft.

“Showtime,” Murph said over Trono’s radio.

The Oregon’s weapons officer shifted the Gatling from the hill and sent a few seconds’ burst into the drifting trawler. The boat was ripped to pieces in a hail of wood splinters and shredded netting. The pilothouse disintegrated. Seabirds gorging themselves on offal left to slop on the deck took flight as their world came apart. Then the stream of bullets penetrated the engine room, tearing the big diesel from its mount before puncturing the fuel tank. The resulting explosion sent a greasy fireball climbing into the sky, and the seas were raked with shrapnel.

What little remained of the trawler sank instantly, snuffing out the flames in a gout of steam.

The destruction on the tug was less dramatic when Murph pivoted the Gatling gun and gave the trigger another squirt. As though caught by a broadside of grape shot, the pirates were scythed down by the fusillade. A hundred ragged holes appeared in the big shipping containers lashed to the deck, and glass from the aft-facing secondary bridge, used by the crew to check their charges under tow, fell in a glittering cascade that further mutilated the corpses. Murph hosed the deck with autofire, making certain that no one was left alive.

“That should hold ’em,” Murph whooped.

Mike Trono danced the assault boat up to the lowest section of railing and turned the controls over to Tory. “Just hold it here. We won’t be a minute.”

“Why are you doing this, anyway?” she asked, standing aside while Pulaski and Trono manhandled the heavy steel girder onto the tug’s low deck.

He handed her his tactical radio and gave her a wolfish smile. “Chairman thinks there’s booty aboard, and not the kind a Hollywood hottie’s packing.”

The men levered themselves onto the deck. Hard years of training forced them to visually check to make sure no one had survived. It was a gruesome task, something out of a horror movie, because the Gatling had minced the bodies into what Trono could only describe as a sort of chunky paste. Leaving the assault boat burbling along the tug’s flank, they hoisted the beam onto their shoulders and waded through the carnage toward one of the containers.

Trono pulled his Glock and shot the lock off one of them while Pulaski maneuvered the beam so they could drag it up to the top. The hinges screamed as Trono swung open one of the doors and just as quickly closed it again. Pulaski shot him a questioning look.

“Chairman’s right again.”

“Gold?”

“Gold.”

He hoisted himself up the container with a boost from his partner, and together they levered the two-hundred-pound beam to the top. Trono looked up as they began to thread the lengths of chain through the lifting hardpoints. A small runabout was racing out from shore, hidden from Murph’s vantage by the bulk of the tugboat. He counted a half dozen armed men bobbing in the craft as it crashed through the surf line and into smoother water.

“We got trouble.”

Pulaski looked over his shoulder. “Damn!”

The boat would reach them in seconds, not the minutes they needed to secure the beam to the container, but they weren’t about to abandon their prize. Mike shouted down to Tory, “We’ve got company. Bunch of goons in an open tender. Get the hell out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you behind.”

“We’re not being heroic. We need you to draw them out so Murph can hose ’em with the Gatling.”

Tory understood and slammed the throttles to their stops. The assault boat shot away from the tug, turning sharply so she passed behind the ship. She’d forgotten about the thick tow cables still securing the tug to the barge on shore. With no time to maneuver she shot under the first cable, ducking as the thick steel tore the standing cockpit from its mounts. Had her reactions been an instant slower, the hawser would have decapitated her.

The boat flashed under the second cable, angling to cut off the approaching tender. She was going so fast that the men on the boat could only stare as she bashed her boat into theirs. One of the men tumbled over the tender’s side, and by the time any of them thought to reach for their guns, Tory was twenty yards away and accelerating like a greyhound.