Countdown: The Liberators-ARC (22 page)

The explosion came so soon after Biggus had tossed the grenade that, Yeah, quality control at the factory left something to be desired. No fucking way I should have held that thing long enough for the impact feature to arm. I could have been holding it, cooking it off and Kaboom.

Mary-Sue, scrunched low, wasn't fazed by the blast. Besides, he assumed his chief knew what he was doing. As soon as the thing went off, he was on his feet, hooking the ladder over the gunwales, pronounced "gunnels," like "tunnels," which were the hull's uppers.

The chief had been supposed to lead, as a matter of principle. When he delayed for a moment, caught up in the conflicting emotions of very nearly having his arm blown off and relief that this had not happened, Jalapeño charged up, balancing on the balls of his feet. He jumped over the gunwales and onto the deck. He was then caught in a moment of indecision. He'd been supposed to turn left, after Biggus Dickus had turned right. Since Biggus hadn't turned right, his back would be uncovered if he turned left, per the plan. While he was caught in this moment of indecision, one of the ship's company or their terrorist passengers-probably having come rearward to look for more grenades and just having missed being caught in Biggus Dickus' explosion-saw Bland and fired a long burst. Two bullets impacted on the protective plates in his Russian body armor. Twenty-seven went high to very high. One impacted onto Jalapeño's face, killing him instantly and knocking his body against the gunwales, from whence it slid to the deck.

That brought the chief from his reveries. In fact, it brought him to a killing rage. Swearing aloud, Thornton ascended two steps, lined up his laser aiming device on the firer, and fired his own short burst, three rounds, directly into the man's chest.

"Come on, Mary-Sue," the chief shouted as he scrambled up the ladder. The chief did turn right once he'd reached the deck, but there was nothing there to see. He took a step forward to make room for Rogers. Once he felt the SEAL touch down on the deck behind him, and satisfied that there was nothing of danger forward, he ordered, "Take point. Around the superstructure. Go! Go! Go!"

The two SEALs ran toward the bow and cut right, then right again. The terrorists Morales had missed were still lined up on the ladders. As soon as he rounded the superstructure, Mary-Sue opened fire, letting his muzzle climb up the row of enemies. His hose stream of frangible alloy bullets sent first one, then another, then a third and fourth into a Spandau Ballet, their bodies twitching and dancing under the impacts, some of them being hurled right over the railing to crash upon the deck.

It was at that point, caught between two fires, that ship's crew and passengers began dropping their weapons and raising their hands, crying out things in Arabic and Urdu that sounded submissive and plaintive.

The Bastard was properly tied off, in tow behind the Galloway. All of the enemy bodies had been weighted and dumped over the side. Only Bland's corpse had been salvaged, and his remains, scrunched up like a fetus, were freezing in the big meat locker on the Bastard. The prisoners, all nineteen of them, excepting only the ship's captain and first officer, were stripped and secured inside the container that had formerly served as Antoniewicz's hide, the televisions still remaining having been dropped over the side. Eeyore had been left to guard, about all he was good for at the moment, while Morales wired the ship for demolition. Simmons had even managed to tap Galloway's bunkers for fuel to top off his own boat. This was critical as the stop after next, St. John's, in Newfoundland, was quite close to the Bastard's maximum range anyway. That would be important if Narssarssuaq, Greenland, couldn't or wouldn't refuel them.

A search of the containers, such as could be accessed-and most couldn't be-revealed little of obvious consequence to the larger mission. In one they'd found a baker's dozen of teary-eyed, teenaged Romanian girls, living in rags and filth, and grateful to be freed. It had probably been intended to sell the girls somewhere as whores, and quite possibly somewhere in Europe, Canada, or even the United States. It was unlikely that sexual slavery was ever really going to go completely out of fashion, anywhere.

Another had a great deal of explosives, which set Morales to chortling, as he began carrying the crates to the main deck.

A search of the crew quarters turned up more al Qaeda propaganda than any of them had seen in one place, at one time, in a long time. This fit Thornton's rules of engagement for eliminating the entire crew.

They did find one other interesting container, down on the lowest level, that had a chain and a leg iron welded to the container frame. They brought the captain and the executive officer down to it, stood them on chairs taken from the galley, put noosed ropes around their necks and secured the ropes high to a cross piece set up on the top levels of the containers.

"Don't try to bullshit me," Biggus Dickus said, mostly to the wog with more braid on his uniform. "If you're senior merchant fleet people, and you are, you will speak perfectly good English, and you do. I will ask this once of each of you. Who was in here?"

The captain of the boat barely got out, "Fuck you, you inf-" before Thornton had kicked the chair out from underneath him. The noose had been tied very tightly and the captain was a smallish man, and slight of build. The drop was no more than the rope would stretch. Thus the noose barely tightened, at first, not even enough to cut off blood to the brain and certainly not enough to seriously impede the flow of air. It did make talking difficult, what with the forced gagging the captain endured.

"Tsk," Biggus Dickus said, "such bad manners toward your guests."

The captain, naturally enough, panicked as soon as he felt the rope biting into his neck. Mindlessly, like an animal, his feet flailed about for purchase. He set himself to swinging, quite by accident, and three times managed to get his feet against the vertical walls of the containers. This, of course, was not something he could stand on. With each kick the rope tightened by a millimeter or two.

The ship's exec, captivated, watched his captain die slowly. He began to moan with fear and then to pray aloud. As the captain's struggles grew less frenzied, the front of the exec's trousers suddenly grew wet with urine as he lost control of his bladder.

Thornton also watched the captain slowly strangle, but with complete impassivity. He hadn't started out hating "wogs," but after seeing the crisped bodies of his people in Afghanistan, two years prior, he'd learned to. Once or twice he thought he heard the captain trying to speak through his gag reflex.

"Fuck you," he said. "I gave you your chance."

The captain's kicking, twisting, and twitching gradually subsided, though there were occasional interruptions as he somehow found the strength to give another major effort at getting his feet on something. In time, though, only the feet twitched, and the only sounds beyond those of the machinery of the ship and sea were the steady drip-drip-drip of piss and liquefied shit sliding off the late captain's toes.

Biggus turned toward the first officer. "As I told the captain, you get one chance. Who-"

"I never knew his name," the Galloway's exec blurted out. He could already feel his bowels loosening, too. "Only saw him twice, il hamdu l'illah. Some black we picked up in Boston Harbor. We dropped him off at Port Harcourt, in Nigeria, safe and sound. Yes, yes: Safe and sound."

"Do you know where they were taking him?"

"To the airport; that's all I know. All I know . . . all I know."

"You're sure now?" Thornton asked.

"Yes, yes. Sir, I am sure."

"Good. This is for Petty Officer Bland." Thornton then kicked the chair out from under the exec, and left to check on Morales' progress with the demolition preparation. Before he left the area completely he turned around to where the exec was kicking his life away, as the captain had. "So I lied," the chief said. "So sue me. Doesn't the Koran permit one to lie to an unbeliever? Well, you and I don't share a belief system. Infidel."

Thornton found Morales standing by the gunwales, amidships, connecting one of the radio detonators to a piece of wire. Morales was wearing a wet suit of a very odd design, with the letters CCCP emblazoned.

"You didn't wear that shit, did you, Morales?"

"Why not? You said you wouldn't risk your life but ours might be acceptable."

"You know I wasn't serious."

"Yeah, but I needed to use their shit to get down under the hull. I've got five hundred pounds of . . . well, I suppose it must be SEMTEX, or something just like it, based on the color. It was in one of the containers. Anyway, it's down there under the ship. When we set it off it's going to seem like a torpedo hit it, or maybe a drift mine . . . if anyone tries to reconstruct it, that is."

"How'd you get it under the hull?"

Morales pointed to either side. "Two floats connected by a line, with another line in the center of the first one connected to a stanchion at the bow, and a line from each float to the hull. I walked the floats down to where I wanted then, connected the lines, and then sort of keel hauled the stuff under. Course, once I had it roughly in position I had to go down myself-and let me tell you, that center line was mighty useful for that-to prep it all nice and proper." Morales laughed. "This is gonna be beautiful, Chief."

Taking occasional time-outs to vomit, Eeyore took the trouble to drill about ninety more air holes in the container into which the prisoners were locked. The men inside the locked container were a tough lot. They didn't panic, not even for a moment, when the door was opened and the strangled, black-faced bodies of the captain and his exec tossed in. They were tough, yet each man there had to wonder, after the door was secured again and the smell of the bodies' loosed bowels assailed their noses, "Who's next?"

As it turned out, they all were. They couldn't see it. For that matter, they never really knew what happened to them in any detail, though given more time one of them might have figured it out.

They felt a sudden shock. The rearward portion of their container arose slightly, but only that. Then they heard the blast, and the sounds of tearing metal as the ship's back almost broke. Of course, that was a surprise and, of course, they panicked then. The men began clawing at the locked door and at each other. Thus, they never noticed when the previous motion reversed itself and the ship's center sank into the gaseous hole left by the explosion; they were far too busy fighting like rats amongst themselves. And then when the gas cooled and condensed, and the water came rushing in to meet the collapsing hull, they were mostly tossed from their feet as the ship's center raised up high out of the water, completing the sundering into two parts.

The bow section almost immediately began to capsize, spilling that container, along with many another, into the sea. The men who had been on their feet suddenly found themselves tossed to the side and then rolled over as their prison rolled over. Above their own screaming they heard a high pitched whistling sound as water rushed into the air holes drilled by Eeyore a couple of days prior, and supplemented more recently, forcing the air out. At that point, even drowning rats wouldn't have bit and clawed their mates quite so much for a mere few more minutes of breathing time.

"Set course two-seven-two for Narssarssuaq, Greenland," ordered the chief with warm smile. "And, since this isn't the US Navy, break out a bottle of the vodka Victor so thoughtfully put in the cache."

"Hey, Chief?"

"Yes, Mary-Sue?"

"How long to the base?"

"About three weeks."

"We have to stop for fuel, right?"

"Sure."

"Well . . . since we're not dry, can we get something besides vodka when we do stop? And what about the girls?" These latter were below, wrapped in blankets and badly needing new clothes. Only Antoniewicz's and Morales' uniforms came close to fitting, and they needed those.

"The booze we'll see about. I don't know about the girls, except to go shopping when we get the chance. We can't release them anywhere we're going and can't release them, period, until the operation's over."

"Can we-?"

"Lay a finger on them, Mary-Sue, and I'll cut your balls off."

PART II

CHAPTER TWENTY

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.

-Tennyson, "Ulysses"

D-106, Assembly Area Alpha-Base Camp,

Amazonia, Brazil,

The sergeant major hadn't put in fossa and agger, of course. He hadn't even set up the camp like a Roman legionary camp. "No straight lines in nature, sir." Instead, he'd established a central camp, for most of the headquarters, containing tents for Stauer and staff, plus the rest of the headquarters company, except for the mechanics who would be closer to the river, and a few guest tents for the naval company, should it have to send some people in. The rest of the groups were to be in clusters from there, A Company (Armored) to the northeast and B Company (Marine) to the southwest. The aviation company, such as would billet here, was about a kilometer to the northwest, near where about half of Nagy's engineers were clearing out jungle and rubber trees and putting in the airstrip. Eventually, once the rest of the detachment of engineers showed up, they'd be putting in a dock and linking the camps with corduroy roads.

They'd need the corduroy roads. Already, under the frequent heavy downpour, the trails linking camps and tents within camps were approaching the state of morass, and that was under very light foot and vehicle traffic, all of that having been generated by the original advanced party of twenty-two, plus the twenty-five later arrivals.

With a light rain that foretold of a soon-coming downpour tapping gently on the canvas roof, Stauer looked out into the jungle from the operations tent. It was already quite dark, and the netting that ran from the edge of the tent's roof to the dark soil below further reduced vision. Add in that the trees kept even most sunlight out and-

"Darker than three feet up a well-digger's ass at midnight."

"Except for the few tents we allow to be fully lit, of course," Boxer said. "Did you expect different, Wes?"