[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (43 page)

The man with the AK behind us was not among the admirers. He started haranguing the worker in Spanish, asking why he wasn’t in his quarters as all crewmen were supposed to be. When his words failed to have an effect, he switched to English. The worker still didn’t react.

“Do you hear me?” demanded AK.

“Oh, I hear you,” said the worker, raising his arm to reveal a Taser. “It’s just that I’m not listening.”

He fired. The dart sped across the space and hit the hijacker in the forehead. Fifty thousand volts shot through the thin wires between the dart and gun. AK shook like a leaf in a hurricane.

Tasers are great weapons for their intended purpose—incapacitating civilians in a dangerous but nonlethal situation. The problem with them, though, is that they tend to be single-use; most do not let you fire multiple times within a few seconds. That meant there was nothing to turn on the hijacker with the pistol as he raised his gun. But he couldn’t get the shot off—the floor-waxing machine whipped down the corridor, charging like a bull, its long handle slapping either side of the bulkhead. The thug jumped but he couldn’t get high enough; his leg hit the machine and he fell off-balance. The gun flew down the passage, but he was trapped as he fell, the waxer disk grabbing his pant leg and chewing it like a pit bull gone mad. He struggled, but instead of freeing himself, got his arm caught. As his shirt sleeve tightened around the whisk of the disk, his face was pulled in and the machine chewed at his skin.

I hopped over and pulled the waxer back while Doc retrieved the hijacker’s gun. The man made a weak effort to get up; a shove of the machine into his forehead put him down for good.

“You finally screwed enough nurses that you turned into one,” said the man who’d been waxing the deck.

“I’m a doctor,” I told him.

“A quack, maybe.” It was Larry “Bullet Head” Barret.
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Larry—no relation to Danny—is a Six plank holder and an expert in the various black arts of special operations. Like Doc, he’d slipped aboard to help me.

“Since when are you working maintenance?” Doc asked after the two men exchanged their usual terms of endearment.

“Somebody had to find a way to save your sorry ass,” Larry told him. He had spotted the machine in the corridor as he was being herded into his cabin. After slipping out a short time later, he grabbed the machine as cover. Another hijacker, also hit with the stun gun, had donated the uniform. Unfortunately the man hadn’t been armed.

“That was my last cartridge for the Taser,” he told me after we finished tying and gagging the hijackers. A pair of tranquilizer doses from my store of vials put them both down for the count, and we dragged them over to a nearby maintenance closet. It was a tight squeeze, but they didn’t seem to mind.

“You have the radios?” I asked. Larry had been tasked to sneak our com gear aboard.

“Lost it when they threw me into my cabin. Goon saw the gym bag, looked in, and took it away.” Larry glanced at Doc and saw how his moustache was twitching downward. “Sorry. It was kind of a Murphy event.”

Larry took a mop from the closet and soaked up enough blood so there wasn’t an obvious trail. We left the bucket and mop against the bulkhead at the far end of the corridor.

“You take the pistol,” I told Larry, handing Doc the rifle AK had been carrying. “Wait at the top of the passage while we go down to the engine room. You make sure no one comes down until we have the place secure.”

“Sounds good,” said Larry.

“Which way is the gym?”

“Up past the barber shop and Victoria’s Secret Lounge.”

“Damn. I must have missed that,” said Doc as we made our way forward. The cabins we passed were filled with passengers locked in by the electronic key system. Larry and Doc had broken out of their cabins thanks to a handy device concocted by Shunt.
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(I had one packed away in my bags as a backup.) We’d release them once we had control of the ship; for now, the cabins were the safest place for them.

The gym was a large room enclosed by glass on three sides, with a variety of exercise equipment that would rival any Gold’s Gym on the mainland. The upper walls were plastered with video screens, so you could sweat and watch your favorite reality show at the same time. We were just about to go in when Doc suddenly stopped and held up his hand.

“Someone’s coming,” he said. “Two guys at least.”

“Into the workout room,” I said.

The one wall that wasn’t glass was covered with a mirror. Hiding inside was impossible.

“Jockeys or boxers?” I asked Larry.

“Boxers, always.”

“Strip and work out.”

Doc had already started to do so, mounting a treadmill not far from the door. The assault rifle was on the deck nearby, out of immediate sight.

“Medicine ball,” I told Larry, moving over to the rack where they were kept.

“Man, I haven’t used one of these in years,” he said, examining the rack.

Medicine balls are an old-school exercise tool, about the size of the dodge balls you used to play with when you were a kid. Made of rubber, they come in different weights from two to twelve pounds. Larry picked up a ten-pounder and threw it at my abdomen.

The damn thing nearly took my breath away.

I threw it back. He must have really been hitting the crunches before joining us in France, because he stopped the ball without a problem.

The door swung open and two hijackers walked in. They were light-skinned Arabs wearing khakis, dressed like bona fide security personnel. They yelled at us in Arabic, telling us to get on the floor. We ignored them.

“You dogs will get to rooms!” yelled one of the men. He had a dimpled chin, kind of like Kirk Douglas.
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He didn’t look much like Kirk, though, and I’m sure the real Douglas would have kicked his sorry ass with one hand tied behind his back. “Dogs!” he yelled when none of us responded.

“Are you talking to us?” I asked innocently. “What language are you speaking?”

Dimple-chin understood enough English to realize that I wasn’t kissing up to him. He pointed the rifle at me and repeated something to the effect that we were ignorant dog infidels and should get on our knees and pray before we died.

“If you want to play catch, that’s fine,” I said, throwing the medicine ball at him.

His natural reflex was to raise the rifle and fire at the ball. He was a good shot—he hit it almost dead on, changing its trajectory so that it fell to the side. But he was so focused on it that he didn’t notice the ball Larry threw at his ear. Dimple-chin sped backward into a rack of dumbbells, poetic justice I guess.

Dimple-chin’s smooth-faced companion was caught flat-footed by the rapid flight of the balls across the room. He blinked a few times, not sure what was going on or what to do about it. By the time he finally raised his gun in our direction, Doc had retrieved his AK47 and put it to good and fast use.

He left a bit of a mess, though. Both men turned out to be quite the bleeders.

We pulled the bodies across the deck, hiding them behind the recumbent bikes. Anyone entering the gym would see them, not to mention the blood, but there was little we could do about that. Worried that the gunfire would bring unwanted attention, we hustled down the passage to the “crew only” door that led to the lower portions of the ship.

Unlike the main “public” sections, the architecture here was plain and functional; a lot of steel, exposed piping, and enough wires to keep Shunt happy for years. The shaft itself was well lit, and there was plenty of light to see as we descended. More than enough, as it turned out, to spot the man standing at the bottom of the stairwell with a light machine gun. He was extremely well illuminated. I could have counted the freckles on his forehead, if he’d had any.

“Sharkman, day late and a dollar short, as usual,” he bellowed. “Damn good thing Doc and Larry are with you, or you’d never have gotten here.”

It was Denny Chalker,
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a Six plank owner and the last of my compadres who had snuck aboard the ship to help.

There wasn’t time to conduct the usual greeting ceremony with its elaborate exchange of pleasantries, so I just gave him the finger and asked for a sitrep.

“Control room, two decks down,” he said. “Two tangos inside. One looks like he’s pretty well trained. Another. Eh. He wouldn’t be able to fix a straight rum in a bar.”

There was a passage one deck below that would take us aft to the engine room; Chalker had found three entrances.

“Door at the stern is our best bet. They have at least two tangos in the engine compartment, but I wasn’t able to get a good look. There may be more. They move around—tough to say exactly where they’ll be. Some discipline; I’m guessing they’ve been practicing for a while, but I don’t think they have lot of experience overall.”

I sent Doc with him to watch the control room while Larry and I went to the engine compartment.

Time hadn’t exactly stood still since the various gardens of delight we served in as young bucks, but what we lacked in youth we made up for in wisdom. Back then, we didn’t realize how idiotic and dumb some of the things we did were. Now we were wise: we knew what we were doing was dumb.

Maybe not dumb, but definitely risky. The door to the compartment was open. Chalker peeked around the hatchway, then ducked inside, tiptoeing to the platform where the ship’s five diesel engines sat. These weren’t the engines you’d find in an oversized pickup or even that tri-axle dump truck you’ve had your eyes on. The power plants were about the size of a compact car, and were dressed politely in painted aluminum risers and well-ordered steel headers that made them look like the freezer section of a fancy ice-cream place. The compartment was neat and clean, gleaming from the light, and tidier than the lunch counter at an old-fashioned five-and-dime at closing time. The usual odors of bilge and fuel were overwhelmed by a perfume of fresh paint. The motors weren’t even that loud, for ship’s engines, though if we’d wanted to talk, Larry and I would have had to yell into each other’s ears.

We communicated the old-fashioned way, pointing and using hand signals we’d honed back in Six—
advance, halt, cut this bastard’s balls off.

I didn’t have a knife, so I settled for locking my arms around the hijacker’s neck and choking him into unconsciousness. He had wandered around from the far side of the engine, oblivious to us as we crept forward in the direction of the control room.

The engines were arranged two by two, with the middle engine paired with a turbine rather than a conventional diesel motor. This was used to cut emissions in port and could also be tapped to give extra power. I was just drawing near its rocket-ship-like housing when I heard someone yelling a few feet away. I dropped to my knees. A goon in blue coveralls was coming down the platform ahead, looking for the man we’d just knocked out.

I retreated around the rear of the turbine cowling, then moved up to a large twist of pipes, which hid me from view. The goon walked toward the stern, passing me on the other side. But he stopped after a step or two, sensing something was wrong. He yelled again—I assume it was Arabic, though I couldn’t make it out over the engine noise—then turned to his left and started coming around the front of the turbine. I could just see the top of his helmet as he approached.

I readied the AK. I preferred not using the gun, since even with the engine noise there was a chance it could be heard in the nearby control space. But I wasn’t going to let him grab me either. I took a breath, finger steady on the trigger. His helmet bobbed and weaved as he came toward me. I got ready to fire, planning to hit him as his head came over the top of the cowling.

Double-tap only. As much as I loved tattooing an enemy, the less sound the better.

Suddenly the helmet pivoted. A loud hiss rose over the heavy drum of the motors, and steam erupted over the deck. I leapt up, thinking the engine had broken somehow—a suitable trick for Murphy.

But it wasn’t Murphy, it was Larry. He’d broken off one of the hoses and was applying its pressurized hot water and steam to the exterior of our helmeted hijacker.

I imagine he was screaming. I couldn’t hear over the rush of the steam and the engine sounds. I circled back around the engine and grabbed the hijacker’s rifle off the deck where it had fallen. The metal was so hot I nearly burned my fingers off my hand.

The hijacker had stopped screaming and progressed to shuddering in thermal-induced shock. The spray had been strong enough to tear the top of his coveralls, exposing his back to the stream. His flesh was bright purple.

“You can turn it off,” I told Larry.

“I can’t,” he said. “I pulled it out of the connection.”

“It’s going to burn your hands.”

“This handle piece is insulated,” said Larry. “The whole pipe is insulated pretty well. Look how narrow the inside is. That’s why the spray’s so strong.”

He managed to secure the hose between a quartet of pipes that ran along the nearby engine, but not before spraying water over much of the compartment. A thick cloud of steam hissed above as the hose continued to vent. The air thickened and within seconds it seemed as if we were in the middle of a cloud.

“Up to the control room. Quick,” I yelled through the fog.

Larry was already ahead of me, scrambling up the ladder to the platform that rose over the last set of engines at the forward area of the compartment. I could barely see the large windows of the control room.

Larry cursed, then dropped to his knees.

“What?” I started to ask. Then bullets began raining from the forward area of the compartment.

Chalker’s estimate of how many men were in the control room was off by a factor of three, at least—alerted by the steam, a half-dozen goons had come out of the space at the end of the engine compartment and were standing along the pipe-railing of the scaffold-like walkways flanking the forward sides of the engine room.

“A real goat-fuck,” muttered Larry as I ducked in behind him. “Just like old times.”

(VI)

While we were out of the direct line of fire, we couldn’t see our attackers. Besides the pipe-flanked and mesh-covered catwalk they were standing on, the goons were protected by a small forest of heavy hooks and chains, part of the crane mechanism used to move heavy parts for repairs.