Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (44 page)

***

Hughes was sleeping fully clothed and woke instantly at the clanging of the general alarm. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and was pulling on his boots when he answered the bedside phone to hear Howell’s voice.

“Captain—”

“On my way, Georgia,” he said as he hung up and finished lacing his boots.

Laura was beside him by the time he stood. She wrapped him in a tight hug.

“Is this it?” she asked into his chest.

“Probably,” Jordan said, and Laura turned her face up and kissed him.

“I love you,” Jordan said. “Be careful, and tell the girls I love them.”

Laura nodded and hugged him tighter.

“I have to go, love,” he said.

She released him and busied herself with her own boots as he dashed out the door and up the steps to the bridge. He joined Howell at the radar and heard hurried footsteps clang on the metal stairs to the flying bridge—Torres and Alvarez moving into position with sniper rifles.

“What ya got, Georgia?” he asked.

“Looks like a push boat and multiple barge tow,” Howell said. “We won’t have a visual until she makes the next bend; then we should be able to see her across the marsh with the binoculars. But something else bothers me.” She pointed at the screen. “What do you make of that?”

Following close behind the towboat was a large, amorphous, flickering ghost of a target. Hughes looked at it and shook his head. “I’d say it was a whole lot of fiberglass and wood pleasure boats running close together.”

Howell nodded. “That was my take.”

“How long before we have a visual?” Hughes asked.

“Five minutes, maybe ten. Then another ten before it gets here.”

Hughes nodded and walked over to kill the clanging general alarm. “We have a lot of nervous folks out there; I better give them an update.” He picked up the PA system mic, and his voice boomed through the deckhouse and across the open deck.

“We have a target on radar approaching from downriver, with an approximate ETA of twenty minutes. We are assuming it’s hostile until we know otherwise. We will have visual contact in five to ten minutes and I will update you at that time. Please stay vigilant and watch upstream as well as down. If you see anything suspicious, please pass the word to the bridge. Thank you.”

Hughes hung up the mic and gazed down at the main deck. He watched Laura move to her position on the port side near the center of the defensive line, with their twin daughters Jana and Julie in tow, and silently cursed them all for their stubbornness. Laura had seen through his plan to station her in the infirmary to await casualties and quietly but firmly informed him she would do more good on the firing line. Then she had to reap what she’d sown when their twins insisted on joining her.

In the end, it had been fifteen-year-old Julie’s logic that carried the argument. “So let me get this straight,” she’d asked innocently. “We’ll be LESS likely to get hurt if the convicts actually DO get aboard?” Even in the stress of the moment, the memory brought a smile. She was destined to be a lawyer, that one, except there weren’t any more lawyers.

There were fine folks falling in all along that defensive line as he looked down on the main deck. Two Coasties manned the machine gun aft while Jones, despite his injuries, had insisted on handling the gun on the bow. He was assisted by Pete Brown, who hadn’t recovered from finding the massacred families. Gone was Pete’s quick smile and easy laugh, replaced by the weight of perpetual sorrow and suppressed fury even the presence of his family failed to lift. He only seemed comfortable with Jimmy Gillespie, Jones, and the other members of the earlier rescue mission, as if the shared experience had bonded them more closely than family.

The rest of their new Coastie shipmates not otherwise assigned and those survivors and crewmen with military experience were spread along the firing line to support the inexperienced. Hughes sighed. They were as ready as they’d ever be. He turned back toward the radar, but Howell was gone. He found her on the port bridge wing, peering through binoculars across the flat marsh toward the distant river bend.

“A little early, aren’t you?”

She lowered the binoculars and turned to him with a sheepish grin. “Patience isn’t one of my virtues.”

Hughes laughed. “Believe me, after four years I’ve figured that out.”

Her smile faded. “Are you as scared as I am, Captain?” she asked quietly.

“Frigging terrified,” Hughes said. “And if I could move us all out of harm’s way, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but this isn’t exactly a speedboat we’re on.”

Howell nodded and raised her binoculars again to stare downstream.

“What do you make of that?” she asked.

Hughes raised his own glasses.

He muttered a curse, then called to the Coasties on top of the wheelhouse. “HEY TORRES! DOES THAT DEFENSIVE PLAN OF YOURS HAVE AN OPTION B?”

***

Torres stood on the bridge wing and lowered the binoculars. “They’re shields all right,” he said. “But I doubt they’re armor plate, and I don’t know how thick they are. We might be able to punch through them, but the problem is we don’t know what the target is on the other side. That’s an awful big area just to shoot and hope. We might do better with the wheelhouse on the tugboat. It’s armored too, but I’d say that’s our best shot to keep ’em away.”

Hughes nodded and looked downstream at the approaching tow. The boat was made fast to the opposite side of the barges, using the bulk of the barges themselves plus the shields atop them to screen the boat. Only the top of the towboat’s wheelhouse peeked over the bulk of the barges, and it was shielded as well. He rubbed his chin, wondering how they intended to push the barges up to the ship without seeing it, then realized they didn’t have to.
Pecos Trader
was a stationary target; all they had to do was move into position using landmarks on the opposite riverbank, then push the barges straight across the river and up against the ship.

“Well, we have to try something,” Hughes said. “Can you hit the wheelhouse from here?”

Torres looked at Hughes as if he found the question insulting and yelled up to the flying bridge. “ALVAREZ! PUT THREE ROUNDS INTO THE WHEELHOUSE ON THAT BOAT.”

Alvarez responded by firing three shots at short intervals. All produced loud clangs which echoed across the water, but nothing more. The barges continued toward them as if nothing had happened.

“Well, that sucked,” Georgia Howell said.

There were nods from the small group on the bridge wing, which now included Dan Gowan.

“How about the RPG?” Hughes asked.

Torres shook his head. “Maybe if we could hit the boat, but she’s way out of effective range for an RPG, and nothing else we have will work. We might have a shot with concentrated rifle fire if we could see the rest of the boat, but it’s hidden behind the barges. We need a friggin’ mortar.”

Gowan nodded and started toward the wheelhouse door. “Be right back,” he said.

M/V
Tilly

Neches River

Approaching
Pecos Trader

Same Day, 5:19 a.m.

Snag almost lost control of his bladder when the first round slammed into the wheelhouse shield. He was cowering on the deck with the ashen-faced towboat captain when the next two rounds impacted scant seconds later. He pulled his Glock and shoved the muzzle against the captain’s head.

“Get back up there and drive this boat,” Snag said. “Or it ain’t bullets from outside you’ll need to worry about.”

Trembling, the man did as ordered, and Snag scrambled to his feet as well, thankful none of his underlings had witnessed his momentary weakness. He looked at the shielding and smiled. He’d had a feeling Spike was gonna send him on the boat, and he’d tripled protection here just to be on the safe side. He hadn’t survived as long as he had by being dumb.

***

Hughes watched Dan Gowan rush across the bridge wing to the steps up to the flying bridge, carrying a cardboard box. First Engineer Rich Martin was close behind with another. Hughes and the others fell in behind the engineers as they raced up the steps to their improvised air cannon.

“Dan,” Hughes said, “I don’t think throwing chunks of concrete at them is gonna do much good.”

Gowan was shaking his head as he swung the muzzle around toward Rich, out of breath from his recent run down the stairs and back. “Not … concrete,” he said. “Homemade … napalm.”

Hughes was confused. “What the hell are you talking about—”

Rich Martin, a little less winded, filled in the blanks as he and Gowan worked. “It was the chief’s idea, Captain. He had Polak go through all the stores and equipment and gather up all the Styrofoam packing material he could find. Then we dissolved it in gasoline, ’cause that’s really all napalm is, jellied gasoline. Anyway, it worked. You set this crap on fire and it’s hard to put out, and what’s more, it sticks pretty good to whatever it touches. We filled up a bunch of aluminum soda cans. If it works like we hope, they’ll split open on impact and spread this stuff all over the place.”

Gowan was nodding emphatically as they worked and Rich talked.

Hughes looked downriver. “Can you reach them?”

“I don’t know,” Gowan said. “But this stuff is a lot lighter than concrete, so we should be able to shoot farther with the same air pressure.” He looked back toward Rich Martin. “You ready, Rich?”

Rich nodded. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said, with a napalm round started into the muzzle of their makeshift cannon and his broomstick ramrod close at hand.

“All right,” Gowan said. “Light her up and shove her home, but make sure not to let any of it get on you, because it’s not coming off.”

Rich finished and Gowan swung the muzzle downstream toward the approaching target. “I got no idea if I can even hit them,” he said. “I’m just going to try to get one somewhere on target; then we’ll fine-tune it from there. Man the firing valve, Rich. I wish we’d had time to work on these sights some more,” Gowan muttered as he looked down the barrel. “Okay, Rich. Ready. Set. Fire!”

Rich cycled the quick closing valve open and closed, and there was a loud pop as four hundred and fifty pounds of air pressure flung the improvised round into the air, and the group watched it arc toward the target.

“I think it went out, Chief,” Rich said.

“And I overshot them,” Gowan said, disappointment in his voice as the round sailed over his target by a wide margin. “I figured it would drop more, and I was trying to compensate.”

He barely finished speaking when the round impacted a paved road running along the river’s edge. Flame bloomed across the width of the road, a broad circle of fire burning brightly.

Rich grinned. “I guess it didn’t go out after all.”

Gowan was already swinging the muzzle down. “Load another. I think I’ve got it now. These are light enough not to drop much at all.”

The next round impacted one of the shields on the barge, leaving a large circle of flame burning on its surface. Gowan turned his attention to the towboat shield and managed to hit it with the third round, the other two rounds leaving more burning spots on the barge shields.

“See if you can drop one on the towboat itself,” Torres said.

Gowan shook his head. “The aimed trajectory is too flat. To hit the boat, I’d have to aim up in the air and try to drop it straight down. And since we can’t see most of the boat, I wouldn’t really know if we were hitting it or not. But if I keep hitting the wheelhouse shields, maybe the burning stuff will drip down on the boat and set it on fire.”

“Do it,” Hughes said. “It’s not like we have anything else to hit them with.”

***

Snag saw something sail overhead to hit the riverbank and burst into flame.

“What the hell was that?” he asked aloud, but the terrified towboat captain only shook his head.

The fire ashore was followed a minute later by dull thuds from the barge, followed by excited shouts. As Snag was trying to work out what was happening, something struck the wheelhouse shield with a resounding THUD, followed seconds later by shouts of ‘FIRE ON DECK!’

Snag felt panic rising. He pulled his gun again and shoved it in the captain’s face. “What the hell is going on?”

“How would I know? I’ve been right here with you,” the terrified man replied.

Snag jammed the muzzle of the gun hard into the captain’s cheek. “DO SOMETHING!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll … I’ll try. But you only left me one man—”

THUD! Another round hit the shield, and the terrified deckhand burst into the wheelhouse.

“Whatever that stuff is, it’s burning all over the bow. I used up a fire extinguisher, and that knocked it down, but it came right back,” he said.

“Start the fire pump and get a hose on it,” the captain yelled, and the man nodded and rushed out of the wheelhouse just as another round impacted the shield.

***

Hughes glanced at his watch and studied the flaming vessels continuing toward
Pecos Trader
undeterred. “They might be burning, but they’re not stopping,” he said aloud to no one in particular. He turned, his eyebrows raised in a question, as Georgia Howell came out of the wheelhouse.

“From the radar plot, it looks like they’ll be directly across from us in five minutes, and it won’t take them more than five more to cross the river and jam those barges against our side,” she said.

Hughes turned at another shout of exultation.

“I think we’re getting the hang of this,” Gowan yelled as he swiveled the muzzle back toward Rich to load another round. Hughes nodded; by his timing, they were getting off four or five rounds a minute.

The wheelhouse shield was engulfed in flames now, and Torres pointed to one of the scattered places where the napalm burned on the barge shields. “Look at that white smoke pouring out around the edges of those shields. Something is burning behind them. I bet they got wood reinforcement.”

Gowan shrugged. “The wheelhouse shields are burning pretty good. We may as well give the others a little attention.”