Without warning

On the fourth occasion that the two ships lined up, she was ready. The battered, rusting trawler had pulled to within two hundred metres. The boarding party had stopped firing, possibly at the behest of a large bearded man who had just rushed down onto the deck. He was yelling and gesticulating, obviously warning them to move away. The eerie quiet of the Rules, the complete lack of any movement on deck, had apparently unnerved him. The poacher heaved itself over a line of black swell, shot through with streaks of dirty foam, just as the Rules began to climb a wall of water large enough to steady the yacht’s ceaseless tossing from side to side. For three precious seconds, while the trawler slid down the face of the wave behind, Fifi enjoyed a relatively stable platform and an exposed, slow-moving target as the shooters headed back inside with great difficulty.

She breathed out and squeezed the trigger.

The PKM began its harsh industrial jackhammering and lines of tracer arced out across the ocean to kiss the bow of the Viarsa 1. She had a 200-round box mag loaded with Russian-standard 7.62 rifled cartridge and tracer. The long, whipping line of light ribboned across the gap between the ships almost instantly and tore the men apart. She fired in three separate bursts, as hot spent casings bounced off the tented tarpaulin and stung her whenever they touched exposed flesh. Only two of her prey survived. The bearded man who had rushed onto the deck to warn his comrades of the danger they faced, and another who dived for cover as soon as her first target disintegrated in a shower of blood and body pieces.

She noticed a twinkling light on the roof of the wheelhouse and rolled off her perch a split second before the tarpaulin was chewed to pieces by the line of return fire.

… whump whump…

Two lines of grey smoke reached out for the Viarsa’s twinkling star, which disappeared inside twin explosions as the rocket-propelled grenades detonated, taking out the machine-gun. Fifi heard another snarling burst of automatic fire and wondered whether Shah or one of his men had also targeted the bridge, as she had intended to. Belly-crawling to her next firing station, where Dietmar waited with a fresh box of ammunition, she didn’t dare put her head up to look.

The Rules was now taking fire from the length of the trawler.

* * * *

Sergeant Narayan Shah, formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Gurkha Rifles, had disposed of his resources very well. Five independent fire teams, providing coverage for the length of the super-yacht, with the least experienced or reliable provided with the best cover.

Peering at the Viarsa 1, he had to wonder who was running things over there. As soon as Fifi had opened up on the fo’c’sle, more men had emerged from the rear of the wheelhouse and begun to spread out on the aft decks, taking cover here and there, and firing in an uncoordinated, indiscriminate fashion. Stupid fishermen, he thought again. His teams, all run by his own men or Pieraro, worked in concert and directed their fire onto specific targets.

‘Blue barrels, aft,’ he called out, and his shooters sent a torrent of gunfire into the rear of the ship, where two men had just popped up and started firing at the bridge of the Aussie Rules. One of the targets flipped over backwards as a dark fan of blood painted the white crane nearby. The other dropped straight down and didn’t reappear.

Puffs of smoke appeared and the occasional tracer zapped across, punching into the aluminium skin of the yacht with a terrible clang.

‘Smoke stack, aft,’ Shah called out again, sending a lethal stream of automatic-weapons fire across the gulf between the ships. A distance, he noted, that was narrowing rapidly.

* * * *

Armed with her trusted shotgun, Jules crouched in the entrance to the bridge, watching Mr Lee as he hunkered down and attempted to steer them away from the Viarsa 1 with only limited power. He was also handicapped by having to keep his head below the line of the windows lest he get shot. Dozens of rounds had already smashed through the glass and wounded the Rhino, who was bleeding heavily from one arm, cursing up a storm and puffing rapidly on a new Davidoff.

‘Apologies, Miss Julianne,’ Lee cried out, as the whole ship rang like an iron bell.

The other vessel had just struck them broadside.

In her headset, Fifi’s voice came through. ‘Here they come, Julesy. Lots of them.’

‘On my way.’

* * * *

‘Shoot them down!’ said Pieraro, without any urgency or, he hoped, trace of fear in his voice as he spoke the words in Spanish. It was difficult to contain his marauding emotions, however. He was not leading some band of old seadogs or hardened mercenaries. His little fire team was composed entirely of men and boys from the village, and now they were fighting for their lives.

‘As they climb across, shoot them down,’ he repeated. ‘Do not linger. Stand up, shoot and drop down again.’