The Crisis (13 page)

So far, it didn't look as if whoever was on the bridge was impressed with the warship bellowing orders at it across the calm flat sea. Standard operating procedure was for
Shamal
's bridge team to radio them as soon as they were in sight, passing the order to identify by Channel 16. But obviously this guy hadn't gotten the word. Like so many others Teddy'd had to hold wakeup calls on over the last few years.

Looking inboard again, he caught a familiar face gazing from the catwalk. Teddy had about shit, recognizing Lenson the day they got under way. Wasn't that he didn't respect the guy. He had notches in his gun, the operational kind the team could recognize. But their last op had had its unpleasant moments. He'd mustered a grudging smile as Lenson slid down the ladder. “Commander. What you doing in the Red Sea, sir?”

He'd seemed glad to see them, pumped their hands, asked what brought them there. “We're deployed, sir. Do it a lot,” Kaulukukui had said, as if any fool should have known. Teddy had almost choked.

“I know you deploy—”

“Ah, what Main Meal means, sir . . . Team Eight deploys a platoon to each of the fleet commanders. Most of our guys are with the ARG in the NAG, but we're TAD'd to the TF for MIO.”

Translation: most of the platoon was with the amphibious ready group in the North Arabian Gulf, but they'd been temporarily assigned with this task force to do maritime interdiction operations. “Uh-huh.” Lenson had nodded, as if that was interesting but not what he cared about. “Still doing that mudhole driving?”

“Every chance, sir. Get dirty with us sometime?”

“First opportunity.” Lenson looked back to the bridge, where, Teddy noted, the black CO was watching them. Jelly Man, Kaulukukui had named him.

“So, what you doing aboard a PC, sir? Still at TAG?”

“Right.” He'd explained: some kind of study about where the Navy was going. Teddy nodded, letting it go by. Os always obsessed on big-picture stuff that had nothing to do with real life. “Well, good to see you, sir. Get together for cards later, okay?”

But whenever he saw Lenson after that the guy was huddled with the chief engineer or with the little analyst, Monty Henrickson. Teddy knew him too; he'd been aboard
K-79
when they'd stolen it from the Iranians.

“VESSEL ON MY PORT QUARTER, STOP ENGINES AND HEAVE TO IMMEDIATELY. . . .” The LRUS was blasting out again, more bullshit lawyerspeak no raghead could make sense of even if he understood English. Teddy craned again.

Their target was a black-hulled merchant twice the displacement of the patrol craft. Not one of the little cargo dhows you saw here and in the Gulf, packed tight with oil drums and camels and dusty wedges of pilgrims. Geller had mentioned pirate activity up here, but it didn't look like that. This was a trading dhow, long-hulled, steel—there weren't as many wooden dhows in the Red Sea as there were in the PG. A Yemeni flag. That could be tricky. They were supposed to make nice to the fucking Yemenis. But any craft transiting the central Red Sea was obligated to heave to on demand.

Which this guy wasn't. He was plowing up a big bow wave, smoke blasting out of his stack, hammering along. No one was visible on deck. Teddy watched as the CO and Lenson confabbed on the wing. Then the barrel of one of the bridge M60s swung out. The wing team covered their ears.

Spray leapt from the centers of eight circles, all in a line, from fifty yards ahead of
Shamal
's bow to a hundred yards in front of the trawler's.

“That'll get his attention,” said the boat handler.

But it didn't. Both ships plowed on, a hundred yards apart. Then eighty. Seventy-five.
Shamal
was slowly closing, but a second stutter of fire brought no more acknowledgment than the first.

“Time for the firecrackers,” the handler said.

On the catwalk, crewmen loaded shotguns. They waited, watching the captain.
Shamal
and the stranger rolled in sync, sixty yards apart. Geller
nodded. The Mossbergs recoiled. The firecracker rounds popped bursts of white smoke ahead and abeam of the other's bridge.

A crewman came running lickety-split from somewhere on the bow. A moment later the bridge wing door cracked and a startled face gaped out. “HEAVE TO NOW OR I WILL SHOOT TO DISABLE,” Geller boomed on the LRUS. He didn't sound happy.

A pause, as Teddy noted the other ship seemed to be growing shorter.

The bridge team must have realized what was happening at the same instant he did, because suddenly there was shouting, then the solid-sounding clunk deep underfoot as the PC's engines slammed to full astern. The trawler kept coming around, though, the river between the two hulls narrowing. Sumo grabbed for a handhold, missed, and toppled off the gunwale like a falling tupelo as everything in the RHIB got pulled forward and to port.
Shamal
leaned in a decelerating turn. “TURN PORT. PUT YOUR WHEEL TO PORT!” the LRUS boomed out, without the slightest response from opposite.

Just as Obie braced for the collision somebody did something that grabbed the whole ship and twisted its tail far enough to starboard so that, combined with the reversed engines, it let the trawler pass clear, missing them by yards. Then they were jamming ahead again, the engines snarling like charging Panzers. Volumes of choking white smoke sheeted up, setting everyone hacking. In the middle of all this came the
blam, blam, blam
of the .50 cal. The cases, big as ladyfinger bananas, arced and clattered down through the catwalk forward of the dog house. Teddy watched the bright tracers, like orange comets, burn past the trawler's pilothouse. No way anybody could miss
them.
And apparently he didn't, because the welter of wake lessened at last.

“Stand by, the RHIB,” shouted the petty officer. Teddy jumped back down, ducking as the crewman in the bow swung the long metal-tipped boat hook into position forward. He braced, gripping a line looped along the gunwale—an inflatable could catch a wave and flip, or nose under like a diving dolphin, converting its occupants into projectiles—and concentrated on what came next.

The PCs launched boats differently than any other ship, a legacy of their original mission. Instead of hanging on davits, the RHIB squatted on a ramp slanting downward and aft. The advantage was, you could launch and recover in much heavier seas, since the ship could roll as much as it liked and the boat could still make up on her in the smoothed patch of the wake and drive straight into the stern and up the ramp. Now the petty officer twitched a knob on a hand-held control box. Salt-eroded bearings squealed as large gates slowly unlocked, letting the foam-pale sea swirl in.
Beyond it the wake jetted and tumbled like a Jacuzzi as
Shamal
accelerated again after the trawler, which still had way on. Kaulukukui squatted in the stern, eyes on the port tending line. Vic Cooper and Mickey Dooley hunkered on the starboard side, and Petty Officer Lazaresky, the cox-swain, pumped the choke and hit the start button. Blue smoke burst out, joining the murk
Shamal
was still sucking along after herself, though she had enough speed on now that the underwater exhausts had cut in.

His Motorola beeped. “MIB Team, Alleycat.”

“Alleycat” was
Shamal
's in-the-clear call sign. “MIB, over.”

“Cast off and inspect. Carry out three-sixty eval before boarding. Do not board if hostile intent is manifested. Comm check every mike five.”

Teddy rogered, and flashed the petty officer a thumbs-up. “Deploy,” he shouted. The crewman in the bow yanked a line. The quick-release hook clacked, the cable snaked back into the massive block arrangement that would bring them back aboard later, and the inflatable began a heart-stopping backward toboggan slide that while it lasted fully satisfied what Teddy admitted was his addiction to risk. Out in a strengthening chop, weapons at the ready, to board a guy who obviously didn't want to stop. What could be better?

Going back to LA? Making more money, sure. Having all the pussy and drugs you wanted. But as they hit the water with a rocking splash, got a faceful of diesel exhaust and the sun shone down as if through whipped buttermilk and the coxswain swore horrible oaths while wrestling the wheel to keep the wake from sucking them into the stern, Teddy thought: You really ready to give this up?

“Enjoyin' yourself?” Cooper yelled, stubble shading his jaw. Even close up the guy could pass for Ira ni an, with that dark skin and heavy eyebrows. He spent his time listening to the team's Farsi tapes, and went around muttering in it.

“Havin' a great SEAL day, Crabmeat. How 'bout you?”

The coxswain finished lowering the motor—you'd break the blades if you tried that before you launched—and gunned it. The bowhook and four SEALs hung on as it porpoised over the wake, jerking and slamming, the M60 on its flexible mount nodding in agreement it was indeed a fine Navy day. The radar hummed atop the framework over the center console. The engine blatted each time they leapt clear of the sea, then resumed its powerful burble as they squatted deep. The coxswain looked to Teddy, who fingered a circle in the air. “Check her out first,” he yelled.

Their first surprise was a stocky bearded guy in a hunting orange knit cap pointing a rifle over the side. An old long-barreled bolt-action Mauser. Cooper and Teddy had him covered before he even got the barrel around.
Kaulukukui had the M60 on him too. Cooper yelled, “Drop your gun,” then repeated it in Farsi.

“Fuck you,” the guy yelled down. No interpreter needed, Teddy thought, tracking him over the sights of his HK. But the guy didn't shoot. Didn't drop the rifle, either. Just moved back, so they couldn't see him from where they continued to circle the trawler.

“Is this a hostile boarding?”

“I'd say so.”

“What about that?” Kaulukukui pointed to where the orange-hatted man and another, younger crewman in coveralls were kicking a boarding ladder over the side. It was too long and trailed in the water, but the rifle was gone. “Looks like an engraved invite to me.”

“Stassy, cover us with the sixty, okay?” Teddy asked the bowhook. “Anybody shoots, plaster 'em. But try not to hit us, okay? Let's get this over with.”

He kept a sharp eye on the whole length of the dhow as it loomed, in case somebody else leaned out for a potshot, but didn't see anyone. He slung the HK and pulled up his fastropers, getting ready to climb. Better than hooking aboard with a bamboo pole, that time in the South China Sea. The RHIB curled in. He crouched, ready to jump to the ladder.

Instead an unexpected wave peaked, maybe the chop and
Shamal
's wake—the ship had just passed and was putting her helm over to come back—and the inflatable lofted suddenly and slammed into the hull. The flash hider on the machine gun's muzzle caught between the doubled rungs of the boarding ladder, and as the inflatable dropped, the wave passing, the heavy long weapon levered itself up out of its pintles. Before anyone could do anything other than gape it executed a somersault, bounced off the steel hull, fitted itself like a key in a keyhole into the foot-wide slot that opened between the ship and the RHIB's gunwale, and vanished, despite the bowhook's instinctive plunging of his ash pole in after it.

“Oh, my
fuck
!” Sumo yelled. The other SEALs cursed too. Teddy clutched his head, staring down at an innocent ring of bubbles. His rage wasn't helped by the crewmen above, who were leaning over the lifeline and guffawing.

 

THE dhow's skipper looked more Peruvian than Middle Eastern. His huge-nosed, narrow face sported teeth so horrible Teddy avoided looking at them. He kept playing with a set of wooden beads, looking alternately pissed off and surrendered to fate. “Captain, sorry to have to pull you over,” Teddy said, abandoning the effort to remember who he reminded him of. “But why didn't you stop when we requested you to heave to?”

The guy mumbled that he didn't see them.

“Pretty hard to miss a ship right off your beam, Skipper. I see your radar head going around. Anybody up here ever look at the screen?”

The guy said he'd punish his officer, but there wasn't anyone else on the bridge, leaving Teddy to wonder who he was talking about. “Okay, second sticky, one of your boys pointed a weapon when we came up. The fat dude in the Halloween hat. That standard procedure?”

He said it wasn't, that man would be punished too, but there were pirates in these waters, that was why they had the rifle. Teddy let that pass. “So, where you registered, last port, where bound, Captain?”

The guy's gaze skated around the pilothouse and came to rest on his beads. “We are Yemeni register. Trade in parts, food, dates, and wheat. Bound to Al-Hudaydah.”

Down south. Not the direction he'd been heading when
Shamal
had picked him up, but Teddy let that pass too. “Last port?”

“Ashaara City.”

“Name of ship?”

“Al-Sambuk.”

“Owner?” He kept pitching the standard questions while thumbing through the paperwork. “ ‘Farm products.' What, exactly? Oilseed? Cowpeas? Sorghum?”

The guy took too long answering, and Teddy held up a glove. “I'm gonna talk to my ship now. Then we'll go down and see what you got.”

Outside the pilothouse, for better reception, he brought the bridge up to date. “What paperwork there is checks out, but I want to throw an eyeball in his hold and make sure. Oh, and we lost some gear overboard, coming alongside.”

Fortunately they didn't ask what, and Teddy didn't intend to be the first to bring it up. With any luck the coxswain would report it, and get blamed. Actually, hadn't Lazaresky been in charge, as long as they were still in the RHIB? It was the ship's 7.62 anyway, not the team's.

Yeah, he'd let them handle the loss report. He left Cooper on the bridge and headed down and forward with Sumo Man, collecting the two crewmen (maybe there were only two after all) and motioning for them to get the hatch cover off.