Pirate Alley: A Novel (5 page)

Peterson checked the mileage to the
Sultan
while he listened to her captain talking on the radio to the Task Force 151 duty officer aboard the flagship.

Peterson’s copilot was Crash Pizzino, a big rangy man with a wicked sense of humor. He wasn’t smiling now. He was tightening his straps, running through the checklist, securing loose objects in the cockpit. Crash was also listening to the
Sultan
’s captain describe the tactical scene, the pirate skiffs closing in …

*   *   *

“My God, Suzanne! Pirates!”

“We could be in Hawaii this very minute, sister of mine. I wanted to go to Hawaii. Remember?”

“We’ve been to Hawaii five times,” Irene said distractedly. They were crammed into a passageway just forward of the ninth deck aft dining room and the outside portico where they had eaten breakfast. Someone had spotted the open boats on the horizon, and people had idly turned to watch as the skiffs closed on a collision course. Then the captain had galvanized everyone into action.

Chairs were scooted back; people hurried to get inside the ship, away from the windows and open decks. Now Suzanne, Irene, Mike Rosen, Nora and Juliet were packed together in the passageway along with almost two dozen other people. A cook was also there—he looked like a Filipino—and he was obviously frightened. One of the crewmen spoke to him sharply in a language Suzanne and Irene didn’t understand, and the man calmed down somewhat.

Suzanne got tired of standing. She sat down on the deck and put her back against the passageway wall, or bulkhead, or whatever they called it. Irene joined her on the deck but kept her legs tucked under her. Suzanne was not limber enough and let hers stick out straight.
Actually,
she thought,
for a woman of my age, they aren’t bad legs.

“Hawaii,” Suzanne grumped. “Egypt is filthy, the Egyptians are filthy, Aqaba is a dump. No human in his right mind would pay money to ride that damn bus across the desert to Luxor. I still can’t believe we did it. See Aqaba was number nine thousand and twelve on my Before-I-Die Bucket List.”

“Scratch it off.”

“You won’t admit it, but this is the worst cruise we’ve ever been on. Pirates, no less!”

Irene sighed. “Next time, Kaanapali Beach.”

“You bet your ass,” Suzanne shot back.

*   *   *

Sultan
’s turn seaward, into his little squadron of onrushing boats, gave Mustafa al-Said a bad moment. The ship kept turning, and he tried to turn away, then buttonhook back and come alongside, but the constantly changing course made that impossible. Now the ship was doing at least thirty knots. Mustafa’s engine was howling at the red line, and the skiff seemed to leap from swell to swell. Two of the boats couldn’t make this speed, but the turn into them had given them a chance.

Finally
Sultan
steadied up on a southeasterly course, directly away from the land. The captain instinctively went for sea room, Mustafa realized, although that would do him no good. The four pirate boats in front of him converged.

Mustafa S-turned once and then bore in for a rendezvous on the liner’s starboard side. He well knew if he fell astern he could never catch
Sultan.
He swept in, turning hard to parallel, keeping his boat closing. Another boat was ahead of him and went in fearlessly against the side of the ship.

Then he heard the noise. High-pitched, a scream, rising in volume. He put on his sound-supressor headset, a simple set of mufflers, one over each ear, as the other men in the boat hastily pulled theirs on, too.

Mustafa could hear the wail anyway. It was insanely loud.

The men began shooting at the LRAD installations. A sailor stood behind each unit, aiming it at the nearest pirate skiff.

“Kill them, kill them,” Mustafa screamed, but no one heard it.

Nuri was manning the machine gun, and he bent down and tried to aim, which was difficult in the bucking, heaving boat. He began firing bursts at the LRAD units.

The sailors manning the LRAD units disappeared. Probably down behind the railings. Two more long bursts, then the sound stopped.

The skiff nearest the ship was not under control. The helm wandered; the boat nosed in against the towering side of the Sultan, was caught in the wash and overturned instantly.

Mustafa ignored the pirates in the water. If they drowned, they drowned. They were in it for the money, just as he and his men were. If Mustafa didn’t press the attack, there would be no money for anyone.

“The bridge,” he shouted to his men and pointed. Three of them fired AK-47s at the bridge.

*   *   *

Radio talk-show host Mike Rosen was not huddled in a passageway inside the ship. He didn’t have it in him. He was on the eighth-deck gallery, and from his vantage point he could see the sailor manning the amidships LRAD transmitter. He heard the wail, of course, but it was focused on the pirate boats, so it was merely unpleasant.

Rosen saw the machine-gun bullets striking around the unit, saw the sparks, felt the impacts, and he saw the sailor, an officer apparently, fall heavily to the deck.

More bullets. The sound stopped.

The man on the deck wasn’t moving. Staying below the railing, Rosen hurried to him in the classic combat waddle. Bullet holes everywhere. He turned the officer over. He had been hit at least four times. Some blood, but not much. The officer’s eyes were frozen, focused on nothing at all.

At least one of the machine-gun bullets had hit the main transmitter.

Rosen abandoned it and waddled back toward his vantage point, a small gap in the railing that allowed him to watch the pirate boats. He saw the one turn in against the ship and be flipped over by the ship’s wash. Men spilled into the water, men without life preservers.

Below, on the fifth-deck gallery, between the lifeboats, Rosen caught glimpses of men connecting fire hoses to fixed, movable nozzles, nozzles aimed over the side. They tried to stay below the railing, out of sight of the pirates.

Oh, man.

*   *   *

Mustafa’s skiff was a couple of knots faster than the
Sultan.
It was just enough to allow it to get closer and closer. The men fired long bursts at the bridge; glass cascaded from the windows, a little shower of shimmering reflections.

Now the distance to the ship, less than a hundred yards, began to close quickly. The
Sultan
was turning into him! Faster than thought, Mustafa spun the wheel to bring his bow starboard … and the distance began to open.

The machine gun kept burping short bursts. The men with the AKs hosed off whole magazines.

Now the
Sultan
veered left; Mustafa saw her heel. He heard a scream on the radio. Then silence.

One of the other boats gave him the news.
Sultan
had swamped another of the pirate skiffs, then had run over her.

Sultan
was steadying again. Mustafa veered in fearlessly to give the machine gunner a better target.

“The masts. The antenna. Shoot them off,” he roared over the thunder of the engine and guns at Nuri on the machine gun. That was the plan, but in action men forgot things. The pirates with AKs never aimed them. They held them hip high and squirted. Even shooting from the hip in an open boat bucking the swells, the ship was too big to miss. The AKs merely scared people and broke windows, which was fine because scared people surrender quickly.

His boat was about ten yards from
Sultan
when streams of water under intense pressure shot forth. Hard, narrow rivers of water. One of the streams hit the boat, and Mustafa went down. He hung on to the wheel as the stream of water went forward in the boat, threatening to swamp it and sweeping two men over the side.

Mustafa veered away just in time.

The engine still ran fine. Men were bailing like mad.

One of the men had an RPG-7 launcher. He brought it to his shoulder, then waved at Mustafa, who cranked the wheel over and once again started in toward the ship.

The third grenade did the trick. It burst the last of the movable nozzles and let water merely pour over the ship’s side.

How much longer? Mustafa asked himself. The captain must be thinking of the passengers and crew—and, of course, his own life, the infidel dog.

Better scare them some more. Mustafa saw Ahmad looking at him, a silent question. He had the rocket-propelled grenade launcher reloaded. Mustafa gestured toward the bridge.

This RPG hit behind the bridge, went through a big window and made a nice bang. Glass and smoke blew out.

*   *   *

Buck Peterson kept the Sikorsky coming down. The pirates were shooting up the ship. They were not yet aboard. The ship was at flank speed.

Now Buck saw the pirate boat on
Sultan
’s starboard side. It was the closest, so he went for it. Began slowing his chopper, coming around so that he could fly between the boat and the ship. Fortunately that put his door-mounted gun on the side of the pirate boat.

“Get ready, Wilsey. Fire a burst into the water short of their boat.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Wilsey said, as if he had been asked to make coffee.

That Wilsey was a good man, cool under pressure. Buck wished he had Wilsey’s kind of calm.

He brought the Seahawk around and came up the wake, nearly over the ship. Heard the M-60 vomit out a burst, saw it turn the water to foam near a pirate boat.

That ought to sober up the bastards.

Buck Peterson was over the ship’s railing, amidships, with the pirate boat on his beam, when an RPG exploded inside the Seahawk. The explosion was unexpected, violent, and the chopper began to buck.

Right engine … losing power! Hydraulics going … warning lights flashing.

Buck Peterson turned away from
Sultan,
the only thing he could do, right across the pirate boat, and picked up his tail trying to gain speed.

He felt the thumps as bullets smashed into the Seahawk, then realized he couldn’t keep the machine in the air. He tried to lower the tail to cushion the impact with the sea.

It wasn’t even a controlled crash. The impact of the collision with seawater at speed collapsed the windshield and killed Peterson and Pizzino instantly. Petty Officer Wilsey was already dead, killed by the RPG.

The splash site soon subsided into a roiling mass of bubbles as the
Sultan
and Mustafa’s boats swept away at thirty knots.

*   *   *

Arch Penney’s hopes sank with the remains of the Sikorsky. The American duty officer said there were no more helicopters available and the destroyer
Richard Ward
was over an hour away. The safety of his passengers and crew weighed heavily upon the captain.

Just as his hopes reached low ebb, the radio squawked again. “
Sultan,
we have jets ten minute away.”

Harry Zopp replied, “The pirates are shooting machine guns into this ship and launching grenades. We are defenseless. Do you people understand that?”

“We are unable to contact the helicopter that was in your vicinity. Is it still there?”

“The pirates shot it down. It crashed into the ocean.”

“Roger.” The voice was tired, cold.

Penney grabbed the radiotelephone from his chief officer. “Are these jets going to just fly around, or will they do something to actually defend this ship and the nine hundred people aboard her?”

“We are assessing the situation.”

“Bloody Yanks,” Harry Zopp said.

Another burst of machine-gun bullets thudded into the bridge ceiling. Penney and his bridge team were huddled on the deck, out of the line of fire. The helmsman was sitting on the deck, reaching up to turn the steering controls. The RPG had exploded behind the bridge in the navigator’s office; now a small fire was emitting acrid smoke. Fortunately no one on the bridge had yet been killed, although one sailor had some shrapnel in a leg from the grenade blast. Penney wondered if any of the passengers had stopped a bullet. No, he thought, the question was, How many?

There would be more grenade blasts, Penney thought bitterly. This wasn’t a warship; his crewmen weren’t trained warfighters. Hell, they didn’t have any weapons to fight with. And the passengers: For Christ’s sake, they were mostly middle-aged and old men and women, from all over the world. The only thing they had in common was the fact they could afford the fare for the cruise.

Another hatful of machine-gun bullets arrived and took out more of the forward glass. There wasn’t much glass left. Little pieces of insulation rained down from the damaged ceiling. The sea wind swept the bridge.

Penney sneaked a peek over the railing. One of the skiffs, the one with the machine gun, was close on the starboard side, no more than fifty yards away. He scuttled across the bridge and looked on the port side. Two boats there, closing. With his naked eye he could see the men in the boat wrestling with a grenade launcher.

“Eight minutes,” Harry Zopp said, glancing at his watch.

Two more grenades slammed into the ship. Penney felt the thuds the explosions created.

Huddled under the rail on the port wing of the bridge, the captain thought he heard a woman screaming. It was high-pitched, and faint.

*   *   *

The Task Force 151 commander was U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington. He stood in the tactical flag spaces aboard his flagship staring at the flat-screen situation display. The French chopper had been shot up over
Stella Maris
but was still airborne, on its way back to its mother ship. The American Seahawk had ceased transmitting;
Sultan
said the pirates shot it down.

Tarkington took a deep breath. The pirates really wanted these ships and were betting everything they could get them. Fortunately
Stella Maris
looked as if she were outrunning the two skiffs that had attacked her.

Two F-18s patrolling from a carrier three hundred miles to the north, toward the Persian Gulf, were on their way. Fuel would be tight. They could stay over
Sultan
for no more than five minutes. The carrier was launching a tanker, but it was at least a half hour behind the fighters. If the fighters stayed over
Sultan
until the tanker arrived, they would be lost if they couldn’t take fuel from the tanker, for any reason. Should he risk two planes and the lives of two pilots by keeping them over
Sultan
? Should he order the pilots to shoot at the pirates?